GblaRCS Chpt 31

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 31 -==
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
"It was towards the end of his final term as High Associator that Giles Olson introduced tax breaks for any family on Niops that had more than four children, which in conjunction with increasing use of Iron Wombs finally solved the SLDF's ongoing manpower problems, albeit twenty years later. It was just as well because, as the Second Succession War started to draw to a close, the Free Worlds League wasn't quite as preoccupied with their borders with the Lyran Commonwealth and Capellan Confederation as they had been, and it dawned on them that the ever-explanding Niops Association Hegemony on their periphery border were the only people who still knew how all the old Star League technology worked."Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
----
===Sluggish Growing Pains===
Robert H Goddard Spaceport (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2836
"Doughnuts?" General Franklin Hallis queried as he sat down with the others at the conference table, finding a large box of them open in front of him.
"Since you're all coming to me for once I thought I should be a good host." Admiral Bremman replied. Being situated out-of-town it was usually easier for him to travel into the capital than for everyone else to come to him at Fleet Headquarters, but since at least part of the meeting would concern the deployment of a much heftier chunk of fleet assets away from Niops than was typical these days it the navy was getting center-stage for once.
"Meaning that when we hold the meeting of the Joint Chiefs at Army HQ we're not good hosts." General Romanov responded drily.
"I would never say that, Jenna." Bremman replied sweetly.
"I would, I've tasted the coffee served at SLDF Army HQ." Brigadier-General Nellis stated for himself, reaching for a doughnut.
"Yeah well, you don't report to her, Craig." Bremman pointed out.
"God bless the chain-of-command and the Militia being in a separate one." Nellis joked, taking a bite out of his doughnut. "You know, instead of slumming it we could always meet more often at NAM HQ" he suggested. Unlike the SLDF offices the various buildings belonging to the Niops Association Militia weren't put up in a rush and it showed, he had by far the nicest headquarters of any of them and the largest office. 
Romanov chuckled. "Don't push your luck, Craig." she warned Nellis. "Whoever takes over from Olson in a few years could decide they want NAM fully integrated with the real military and I might seek revenge for the snark you direct my way and requisition your desk."
"I'll take my chances with that," Nellis replied, letting the 'real military' crack slide, "just not with that lousy coffee you keep giving me." he joked. "Nice doughnuts by the way" he added, Bremman must have gotten them from one of the better bakeries in town.
"You'll find the coffee's pretty good too," Bremman told them all, "there's a place on Stafford where they grow some top-quality beans and they're looking to expand and start exporting. I got one of my JumpShip crews to bring me back some to see if it deserved the hype and it does."
"They're already selling tea from Stafford in town." Hallis remarked. "Barbara prefers it to coffee, but personally I need my caffeine fix or I get tetchy" he said. "and sleepy." he added.
"Seems like you can grow most anything there, good soil, great climate." Bremman noted, within five years it would be the breadbasket of the Hegemony, maybe sooner if they could get enough agromechs and the workers to operate them. "Incidentally, how's your boy doing, Franklin? I've been meaning to ask since they all got back from SLDoME's dark secret and I heard about their wild safari adventures."
"He's fine." Hallis replied, reaching for a doughnut. "I don't think he'll ever look at birds the same way again though." he added with a grimace.
"Yeah, nearly being eaten by a giant chicken seems like something that'll stick with a man." Nellis observed thoughtfully, and all too accurately. "I'll bet he'll have to put up with people making jokes about it for the best of his life too."
"Maybe, maybe not." Hallis replied. "This might be one of those things where people worrying that you could snap without warning and maim them could be of some benefit to the kid."
Bremman laughed. "They always say 'don't poke the bear' but poking the angry wolverine is a lot more hazardous." he joked. "Bears back off if it's just not worth the hassle."
Hallis grinned. "Rory Fallstaff said the Thunderbird was just lucky that Fred wasn't drunk because if he had been then Jennifer would have had to save the bird from him because he would have opened the cockpit and taken it on with his combat knife."
Romanov chuckled. "Jokes aside I can't believe the damage that ****** monster did to that Wasp." she said, shaking her head in amazement having seen the photographs taken after the encounter. "What kind of madman thinks it's a good idea to create something like that anyway?" she asked rhetorically.
"Forget Frankenstein's Monster, or anything cooked up by Doctor Moreau, it seems like Alpheus McEvedy's real-life career puts all the fictional mad scientists in the shade." Hallis stated without hyperbole. "Who knew that Frobisher was where the Star League sent the sane and reasonable genetic engineers?" he asked rhetorically. 
"Until now I thought those lunatics that bred the Hell's Horses were as bad as it gets in terms of splicing together an animal," Bremman chipped in, "but boy was I wrong about that." he freely admitted his failure of imagination.
"Hell's Horses? Isn't that one of the clans?" Nellis queried, confused.
"Yep, but they're named for a species that was created in a lab and some whackadoodle set free on Circe." Bremman told him. "Extremely aggressive carnivorous horses designed with greater lung capacity and endurance. They can't even be domesticated because some jerk added in some compatible zebra DNA because… reasons."
"Meat eating horses?" Nellis responded in disbelief. "Don't they teach ethics to people going into the field of genetic-engineering, or, you know, common sense?" he asked rhetorically, rolling his eyes.
Hallis nodded. "Damn things were a nightmare for livestock farmers because they're so fast" he recalled. "We used to shoot them on sight. John Fletcher, the Khan of the Hell's Horses loved them though, released them into the wild on Nellis too, their capital world, so not all the blame can be put on the scientists." he said. "Remember that it was Sarah and Dwight that prompted our old chief geneticist to start working on the extra genes that went into Fred and the other kids though, so not everything is the fault of the people wearing the lab-coats. Our own chief geek guy was supposedly one of top men in the field, a no-bullshit genius, though I only actually met him a couple of times myself. Once when they were taking DNA samples to create Fred, the other time after a Trial of Possession on Strana Mechty when he shook my hand for winning and keeping his research notes out of other people's hands."
"Was that the time when you put your foot up the ass of that Wolf who was trying to get hold of our genetics research data?" Bremman asked curiously.
"Yeah, Star Colonel Ferris Ward, one of their ristars supposedly." Hallis confirmed. "They wanted access to the data in the new Genetics facility we built in Bearcat not long after Klondike, they had the idea we were pulling ahead of the other clans in genetic engineering as well as in introducing new weaponry and they didn't want to fall behind. I bid a lance, he started his bidding at a star and two points because we had heavier machines and then he bid away two mechs to show that he was honourable, and confident of winning" he told the story with a broad smile. "We took out four of their mechs for the loss of two of ours and then finding himself in a Thug up against my Pulverizer and Trish in an Exterminator he brought up the two extra mechs he had originally bid away."
"And that was allowed?" Romanov queried. "I thought Clan Trials were supposed to be fair?"
"It's allowed, but there's no honor in winning if you have to bring in your reserves so it's not done very often" Hallis explained. "Trish and I whupped them all anyway" he noted, grinning. "We knew the ground and having an Enhanced ER PPC let me shoot up his Thug at a range he couldn't shoot back nearly as effectively" he explained then smiled. "He called me a ristar too, which I thought was pretty funny because I was already in my forties."
"Probably didn't know you were Terran born, thought you were a normal person like me that actually looks their age." the Niops born Craig Nellis complained. "Not that I'm bitter about it or anything?" he added, pretending to scowl at the three SLDF officers. Romanov herself was well into her late nineties now but sure-as-hell didn't look or move like it. "So, do you want to kick this off Jenna before I depress myself further thinking about my bad back and stuff knees? You mentioned some news we'd all want to hear?" he prompted Romanov to start the meeting. She liked a certain amount of informality and friendly banter in the way she ran things, off the battlefield at least, and preferred to have everyone relaxed. Serving through the bloodbath of the Amaris War had stripped her of any tendencies towards being a martinet with a stick up her ass that she might have started out with out of the academy, and in some ways Nellis was actually the most strict and formal of any of them because he wanted the NAM to always look and act like a real army not some periphery rabble.
Both Romanov and Hallis had always considered the NAM to be a unknown quantity until they saw some of them in action against the Blood Rain on Algenib, after that the knew they weren't just parade ground soldiers even if only their aerospace forces had ever seen action, taking out the occasional pirate raid into Niops before they got anywhere near a planet.
Romanov nodded. "Okay. To start with I've got some good news and some bad news;" she said. "Good news for all of us, but bad news for you I'm afraid, Jacob."
"Someone found out about my coffee smuggling operation and I'm being court-martialed?" Bremman joked. "That was going to pay for my early retirement and a big ranch on Francas."
"Nah, and if the coffee's good enough I'll sideline any investigation JAG conducts into it." Romanov replied, smiling. "The R&D people think they've figured out how to make the double-heat-sinks Hallis's people put in the Bull Shark economically" she announced.
"The ones that are only two-thirds the size of Star League DHS?" Nellis queried, surprised. Like a lot of the bleeding-edge technology mounted on the Bull Shark prototype they were a prime example of 'blank-cheque-tech' in that they showed what you could achieve if you just threw money at a problem. Unfortunately reproducing those systems at the affordable price needed for mass production without bankrupting the economy had proven tricky to say the least. 
"Those are the ones." Romanov confirmed. "I'll not claim to really understand the science, but supposedly the problem was while the Boron-Arsenide crystals they use are better than graphite used in regular heat sinks, or the polymer crystals from our current DHS, growing the flawless B-A crystals needed to make them work was really problematic." she said, understating just how difficult it was to solve. "The failure rate during manufacture was so high that the unit cost for every working boron-arsinide DHS was enormous, but like I said they think they've figured out the process now."
"So, what's the catch, from your expression I'm guessing there's a catch?" Bremman rightly assumed.
"We'll have to grow the crystals for the new double-heat-sinks in freefall, and within an extremely powerful and finely-tuned magnetic field." Romanov told him. "It's a good thing we've got access to plenty of niobium from Alphard because I'm told we'll need it to make the superconductive magnets required, but we're also going to need a whole new orbital manufacturing facility to make these things."
"Which means everything already queued up for our zero-gee construction teams to do after they're finished at AJC is going to get bumped again." Bremman groaned, quickly putting two and two together. "I'm never going to get my ****** shipyard am I?" he said in exasperation, throwing up his hands. "Most of Camelot Command has been sitting in crates waiting to be unpacked and put back together for years. All we need is a pressurized dock and a frame to put it inside and we could start cranking our warships, hell we've actually got the blueprints for anything the size of a Black Lion class battlecruiser or smaller programmed into the auto-fac already."
"Not for a while yet, Jacob, sorry." Romanov confirmed. "I know the latest plan was to start putting the thing together once the recharge station at AJC was complete enough to be at least partially operational, and we had an Alliance class station built for DropShip repair and manufacture, but if we can get those new heat sinks into production within the next decade or so it'll make another wave of upgrades to our machines viable. ER PPC's and our new Extended-Range lasers run hot, if we can deal with that then we can hang them off a lot more machines."
"What about our existing DHS manufacture?" Nellis queried, the older model of double-heat-sinks were already being cranked out in quantity.
"We'll still be making them for the Blackjack and any other machine we'll be handing over to planetary militias, probably for aerospace fighters and DropShips too because volume isn't at a premium with them" Romanov told him. "We'll likely also export any excess production to the Magistracy because it'll make good money and without DHS they'll be less interested in buying ER PPC's from us they can't use."
"Only the original Star League ER PPC designs of course, and we'll definitely be overcharging because nobody else is selling those to the Canopans" Hallis added. "Not as much as we could because the government wants to stay on good terms with the Magistracy" he said. The Magistracy was one of the few powers that weren't monumental ****** with a military that considered it 'War Crime O'clock' twenty-four seven, moreover they had a lot more to offer in terms of trade than the Illyrians for example. It certainly said something positive about them that, despite knowing about Frobisher for years, they didn't invade to try and seize any Star League tech there. Chances were any of the five Great Houses would have done so in their place, the Taurians too most likely although in their particular case the opportunity to stick it to the Star League one more time would have been part of the motivation.
Romanov frowned. "I should probably warn you now that if our materials science people come up with a better endo-steel in the next few years we'll probably want to put that into the production as well before we start building a shipyard" she told Bremman. "I mean we've already got a better endo-steel than the Star League ever did but, as you know, we just can't afford to make it."
"Too much beryllium." Hallis observed glumly. That was another advance incorporated into the Bull Shark that was too damn expensive to put into mass production. Generally the cost of the raw materials wasn't a major expense when building battlemechs, not compared to the fusion engine, the weapons and the electronics anyway, but when the endo-skeleton was mostly made of a metal that was twice as expensive by weight as some precious metals, including the silver Niops made some of its various dollar denomination coins out of, things were a little different.
"You're not planning on bumping my Alliance too I hope?" Bremman checked. "Ignoring the fact we've been putting a lot of mileage on some of our DropShips, and they'd all benefit from regular maintenance, we've been dangling a lot of money in front of Federated-Boeing Interstellar to get the licenses and blueprints for the CargoKing and CargoMaster and if we can start getting those into service it'll help with our manpower issues."
"No, I've talked to Olson and he still wants to prioritize DropShip maintenance and production over the new heat sinks." Romanov replied. "He's got a point. Our existing battlemechs are already well beyond anything anyone has except the clans, and we're already looking to replace any older model Extended-Range and Pulse Lasers mounted on our current 'mechs with the new models over the next few years anyway, so I couldn't exactly argue that the army was being starved of resources" she said honestly. "Increasing internal and external interstellar trade in particular is going to need more transport DropShips, and I think we'd all prefer not to have to convert any of our Overlords or Unions to cargo haulers."
"How did Fed-Boeing respond to that incidentally, the CargoKing offer I mean?" Nellis asked Bremman. "Some pissant periphery nation wanting to build high-tech DropShips that the Federated Suns wouldn't stump up the money for."
"Surprise mostly, and at first I think they thought we were just pulling their leg." Bremman told him, smiling. "It was only when ComStar confirmed that we had a serious line-of-credit with them that Fed-Boeing took us at all seriously, although they still doubt our ability to make them even if we get the technical package." he continued. "Our last HPG to them said that if we couldn't then it was our problem not theirs and they'd still have the money in the bank so what did it matter?"
"Think the government of the Federated Suns will block the deal?" Hallis asked out of interest.
"They might nix us getting the CargoMaster blueprints on principle, it's a military DropShip after all even if a cargo hauler not a mech carrier, but maybe not because we're a long way from them and it'll mean money going into Federated-Boeing that they don't have to stump up themselves." Bremman replied. "Budgets are tight in wartime and while the Davions want to keep them turning out the JumpShips and DropShips they need for the war they'll not want to subsidize them more than they have to" he continued. "The Fed-Boeing shipyards were hit hard during the First Succession War, the Dracs crippled their orbital facility at Galax and it would have cost them a lot to get them running again, so a few extra bucks coming in to make the company's bottom line look better, and them paying a little more in taxes as a result, might outweigh other considerations."
"If they were closer we could pay them in germanium instead of C-Bills, if you're making JumpShips you can never get enough germanium." Nellis rightly observed.
Bremman sighed. "Meanwhile we've got the stuff coming out of our ears and no shipyard to turn it into JumpShips." he said glumly.
"Don't whine, Jacob, it's beneath you." Romanov responded, trying not to chuckle at the dejected expression on his face.
Bremman looked at her askance. "Do you have any idea how much we could sell an Invader for these days?" he asked rhetorically, "let alone a Star Lord. It's not like I was planning on putting warships into production" he stated flatly. At least not anytime soon, he thought to himself. He had some people quietly working on a design for a modified Black Lion that swapped out some of the naval autocannon for lasers that would make more effective against fighters, albeit at the expense of making it a little less punchy in a fight against another warship.
"Less than what we'll be able to in a few more years if those idiots in charge of the Great Houses keep blowing each other up." Romanov pointed out. "Anyhow, I thought the High Associator wanted the yard to start off building some kind of mining stations at first to go chew up the asteroids at AJC, and anywhere else that there's plenty of floating rocks."
"I've got a team designing them, we'll probably just go with a scaled-up Taurian Snowden mining station with more firepower and twice as many mining robots, assuming that we can get the robots that is." Bremman replied. "Getting engineering students to make them for academic credits and a few bucks in their pockets isn't exactly mass production and Earthwerks isn't making and selling very many new ones these days."
"They might be making even fewer soon, I heard they did what we did and brought the license to make the Thug from Maltex" Romanov told him. "Those'll sell better than robots most people can't maintain themselves."
Bremman pursed his lips. "If they're not going to be making the robots maybe we should offer to buy the tooling from Earthwerks FWL and make them ourselves" he suggested. "It's not military equipment so Atreus is less likely to interfere and we could sweeten the deal by offering them a percentage on any robot we export back to the Inner Sphere, maybe even having Earthwerks as our licensed dealer, they've got the showrooms already."
Hallis thought about that. "I can't imagine they'd go for it" he replied eventually. "Sell us a production license maybe but not hand over the whole production line. They might still be hoping that the war will end eventually and be planning to switch back to peacetime production as soon as it does" he added, Romanov looking like she agreed. 
"We could always give it a try at least." Bremman suggested. "We're certainly in no position to build another factory from scratch ourselves anytime soon, probably not until we've got all the mines, ore processing plants and the rest built on Alphard, not to mention the Blackjack manufacturing facility." he continued. "Heck, we'd need a Project Workshop or two to make the tooling and they're booked up even further ahead than the zero-gee construction crews are" he reminded everyone. "If we only had to put up a building around tooling that we imported from elsewhere we could do it though, like we have with heavy industrial machinery we bought from the Magistracy."
"I'll pass on the suggestion to the Department of Trade and Industry," Romanov told him, "But even if Earthwerks is willing our side might be wary of making another big foreign purchase because we don't want people to know just how large our financial reserves really are. It might make us look worth invading." she suggested. "We've all read the latest intelligence reports on the First and Second Battles of Tikonov in '32 and '33, Davion and Liao both deployed several warships to the campaign which to me says that they've still got plenty of naval assets in reserve."
Bremman sighed. "You're probably right." he agreed. "If I was the Federated Suns I wouldn't send warships at the Capellans unless I could afford to lose them and still repel another major attack by Luthien who are an existential threat to New Avalon in a way that Sian just isn't" he reasoned. "We've got to assume the other Successor States have naval reserves too, including our 'friendly' neighbor the Free Worlds League, so keeping our heads down until we're certain we can beat them in a stand-up naval fight before they get close enough to Niops VII to launch nuclear strikes is certainly prudent."
----
===Deployment Planning===
"I still think if they ever jump in we should just give them a look at Zughoffer Weir, Bismark, and Thunderer and offer to accept their surrender, it's not like they'll know they're all mothballed" Nellis suggested, grinning.
"Can you imagine the expressions on their faces, especially if we had Michigan and Buccaneer bearing down on them from the other direction" Bremman concurred. "I'd still keep Yukon and Saratoga hidden though, no need to give anyone the opportunity to find out that we're the Canada Tribe, Comstar and the Combine would both go apeshit" he said light-heartedly before adopted a more serious tone. "Don't go thinking that the Marik's don't have anything in their fleet we have to worry about though" he warned. "While everyone thinks they lost all their Atreus class battleships during the First Succession War that can't be taken as gospel because we're not entirely certain how many they built in the first place, or if they had enough spare parts stockpiled to put any of the ones reported as crippled and beyond repair back into service."
Bremman leaned forward in his chair. "I wouldn't want to be in an Atreus if I was up against a McKenna, a Texas or even a Lyran Tharkad but she's a step up on most cruisers, or even a Monsoon, and she'll utterly stomp most frigates and destroyers." he said. "My nightmare scenario would be an Atreus jumping in alongside one of the old Aegis class heavy cruisers they got from the Terran Hegemony as surplus, the Samarkand II carrier they bought from the Dracs to provide fighter support, plus one of those big ******Soyal class with the mass driver and the heavy naval gauss rifles. The Soyal isn't too hard to take on if it doesn't have any support, but if it does, and it can stand back and put those big guns to work, it's an actual threat to anything we have."
Romanov nodded, she had read the reports from Bremman and ran through the wargames and simulations he had been running as to how an attempted invasion of Niops by the Free Worlds League might go. "The Mariks have certainly gotten their kicks using them to bombard planets into submission, and without leaving behind any nasty radioactive fallout" she observed with distaste. 
"We know they started upgrading their old League class destroyers with naval gauss rifles just before the Amaris War too, and continued the program while we were busy taking back the Hegemony, so those things are punchier than I'd like as well" Bremman noted. "We're mostly going off open-source intelligence, media reports and the like, but there are reports of an upgraded League class destroyer taking on a Capellan Du Shi Wang nearly twice her tonnage and winning. I mean, the Du Shi Wang class are absolute pieces of crap by battleship standards, but they are still battleships."
"Since we're already talking warships are you sure you don't want to send both Potemkins to McEvedy's Folly to collect the salvage there instead of making several trips with Rawhide alone?" Romanov asked.
Bremman nodded. "I know it got her here from Buffalo Meadows but what we did to K-F drive on Ulithi to get her running was only supposed to be a temporary fix, and I'd soon as not push our luck by sending her off on another long journey down to McEvedy's Folly and back." he replied. "The James Sever has a decent cargo capacity so she can help with the haulage as well as provide an escort to Rawhide and the transport jumpship going with them."
"Sending a Monolith along?" Hallis queried.
"Yes, probably the Maverick." Bremman confirmed. "Sorry I should call her the El Capitan now" he corrected himself. Much like the Congress Class Frigate Rickenbacker had been renamed James Sever for security reasons the three Monolith class transport Jumpships in the fleet had been recently renamed El Capitan, Uluru and Kalamos."
It was supposed to be bad luck to rename a ship of course, but if the somehow clans ever found out that Niops was operating a bunch of vessels with the same names as ones that had belonged to Clan Wolverine then that would be even less fortuitous.
"Remember to tell them to take a detour on the way back to fly the flag at Frobisher" Romanov instructed. "Let them know we're not kidding about having a hell of a navy."
"Will do" Bremman replied.
The odd thing was they weren't actually retrieving all the old SLDoME equipment from McEvedy's Folly because they needed it anytime soon, other than for some of the genetic engineering equipment that Frobisher might want for spare parts anyway, it was all just going to be put in storage once it all got back to Niops. They just wanted to grab it all before anyone else did, assuming that at some point they would find a use for it and of course it was worth an absolute fortune.
"Who are you putting in command of the naval squadron?" Hallis asked.
"Commodore Mbeki, she knows a Potemkin inside and out and she's been itching for a detached command." Bremman replied. "I assume you're sending Rory Fallstaff back as the ranking army officer since he's already familiar with the ground?"
"Apart from a extra detachment of engineers, and some academics that insist on going to look at the place themselves, it'll be the same team as before, only with more heavy and assault mechs and fewer lights now we know that the local wildlife looks at a twenty or thirty tonner like Craig is looking at those doughnuts." Hallis confirmed, chuckling. "Only machines with hands so they can help load cargo as well as slug the occasional Thunderbird that gets uppity."
"Where are you scraping up the crew for Rawhide and all those dropships from anyway? Nellis asked curiously. "I know she's been in mothballs too since she returned from Camelot Command."
"Most of them are retired spacers that were too old to get work in the zero-gee construction crews, some are volunteers from Saratoga and Yukon who are bored sitting around waiting for something to do while we keep them in active reserve, the rest are people with Potemkin experience that we can't do without to actually make her run, so I had to pull them from whatever else they were doing." Bremman explained. "I'm going to have to pull Captain Petroni off of commanding the recharge station because he's the expert on Potemkin jumpdrives and I need him."
"Who are you putting in charge of the station while he's gone?" Hallis asked.
"Actually I was wondering if Craig might have someone in the NAM aerospace contingent that might want the job as station commander until Petroni gets back? One of your dropship captains maybe?" Bremman suggested. "He's coming up on retirement anyway, so someone younger getting up to speed on how the station operates is probably a good thing, Petroni's staff will still be there to help out of course. Naturally we'd have to clear it with both the High Associator and yourself Jenna."
Romanov shrugged. "It's been suggested to me more than once by government officials that NAM should be the one running the place anyway, at least once its finished, so I'd be fine with that" she replied. "The only reason the SLDF took over the running of the place to start with was because it was our people building it, but it's not like it's ever going to leave the Niops system so it being a NAM asset makes sense. It's already tied into traffic control and the sensor grid your people still operate and maintain because what you had already was better than anything we knew how to put together."
"Going to be lots of SLDF people coming up on retirement in the next ten years, good thing that we've got a large tranche of sibko kits that'll reach eighteen soon to help plug the gaps." Hallis remarked. "You'll not hear me say this too often but thank God for Nicky K ordering us to go all-out on the clan breeding program in 2819. Zeta sibling company will be old enough to join up before the end of next year and Theta and Iota two and three years after that." he said. "****** him for us not having Eta sibko too though." he added venomously, none of the ironborn kits from 2820 had made it out of clan territory.
"It's not all good demographically after that though, is it?" Romanov pointed out. "You Wolverines weren't having many children at all over the five years from '23 to '28, natural and Ironborn both, and that'll come back and bite us on the ass in the early to mid '40s."
"Depends how successful we are in recruiting people born on Niops, plenty of third generation Capellan immigrants starting to come of age around then, I guess we just need to work on our recruiting strategy." Hallis replied.
"Just remember that I'm planning on signing up plenty of them for the NAM too." Nellis interjected. "One more full-strength regiment and I'll actually be a Brigadier-General with a full brigade to command and without having to fudge things by including my aerospace assets."
"Where are you planning to find the Battlemechs for that?" Hallis asked him. "Those Jackrabbit mechs you got from the Blood Rain been breeding?" he joked.
"Well for a start if you're going to keep turning out those new Hussar lights you're not going to need all the ones you're using now are you?" Nellis asked rhetorically. "Your people can't stand using the Mongoose anyway, and there's not many of Jenna's bunch still driving lights."
Romanov sighed. "I do miss my old reaction times," she said wistfully. "Heavies and Assaults are definitely more our speed these days. The Mongoose is primarily a recon mech like the Hussar though, so it shouldn't cause a major capability gap if we replace one with the other and I'm open to the idea of gifting them to the NAM eventually."
"Great." Nellis responded, smiling. "So… about those Awesome assaults you put in mothballs…"
"Don't push your luck, Craig" Romanov told him flatly. They might not have had enough of the AWS-8Q in inventory to choose to keep it in general service, but they were too good not to keep for a rainy day, or rather a day enemy mechs were raining from the skies.
"Had to ask." Nellis replied with a shrug.
They were about to start discussing the next item on the agenda when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"This had better be good." Bremman muttered before loudly calling out 'Enter'.
A young woman wearing the uniform of a naval lieutenant opened the door clutching a piece of paper. "I'm very sorry to interrupt," she began, trying not to sound too nervous facing three generals and an admiral, "but we've just received an HPG communication addressed to General Romanov that I thought you might want to hear."
Romanov frowned. "Who is it from?" she asked.
"A Major Samuel Tyson who claims to be the commanding officer of what's left of the mercenary regiment Tyson's Troublemakers, formerly commanded by his mother, Ma'am." the lieutenant replied.
Romanov looked around the room blankly. "Never heard of them." she said looking to see if anyone else had.
"Apparently 'Tyson's Troublemakers' were originally the SLDF's 23rd Heavy Assault, being attached to XXVII Corps, Eleventh Army. He said his mother knew you, or at least her regiment served alongside the 295th on Apollo, and he's wondering if Niops might be looking to hire a small mercenary command for garrison duties."
"How small?" Romanov asked.
"I get the impression from the HPG that they're down to a handful of lances, the regiment effectively ceased to exist as an effective command working for the Federated Suns during the First Succession War and the survivors have been taking whatever jobs they could ever since, but you can read it yourself Ma'am" the lieutenant replied, approaching her and handing it over.
"Thank you, lieutenant. You're dismissed." Bremman told her, the junior officer saluting and heading out the door, closing it behind her.
"An old XXVII Corps unit? That's a blast from the past" Romanov said, reading through the communication. "Got to wonder if it's a trick to try and get someone onto Niops by claiming to be the son of somebody I might have known."
"It's possible." Hallis replied, scratching his chin. "Of course, if they're genuine we could take it as a sign that the Eleventh Army was destined to reform" he said, smiling to let the others know he wasn't being exactly serious.
"Looks like they found out about us from some propaganda that's been spreading across the Inner Sphere." Romanov explained, still reading. "My announcement that Raymond's Redcoats aren't the 295th, and that as the division's commanding officer I'm pissed that they pretended to be, caught some traction among people that don't like the Lyrans and are enjoying the opportunity to give them shit for hiring a bunch of former pirates and war criminals."
"All we need now is to find someone from LI Corps as well and we'll be on our way to getting the whole band back together." Bremman said, laughing.
"I think that every unit from LI Corps was either destroyed fighting Amaris or left with Kerensky so not much chance of that." Hallis replied. "Seemed like half the people running clans were from the 146th Royals, they were an LI Corps unit."
"Clearly the 146th were the Black Sheep of the Eleventh Army family then." Nellis observed, reaching for yet another doughnut.
"You know, if we did hire a small merc outfit that might be useful misdirection, make people think that we're not strong enough to garrison all our worlds." Romanov suggested, pursing her lips. "I mean I wouldn't want them on Niops for security reasons, but we could stick them on Galileo to help secure the place from anyone looking to make a score stealing from the diamond and fire opal mines Olson wants to start digging there."
"Assuming we can trust them not to steal the gems themselves." Nellis warned.
"If they think they do that and get a dropship off the planet without it getting shot down then they're in for a nasty shock, but I'd prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt." Romanov replied. "If they still think of themselves as being the 23rd Heavy Assaul in some way then they're still Star League and putting the Star League back together is what we're about isn't it?" she asked rhetorically.
For some reason Franklin Hallis felt like he should say 'Seyla' at this point, which bothered him a little because he thought he had shaken off that sort of ritualistic clanner crap by now. 
==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Alpheus McEvedy wasn't the only genetic engineer with some strange ideas, whoever made the Hell's Horses species (and whoever went on to release them into the wild) clearly had a screw loose. Hell's Horses cannot be domesticated, this makes them more like the Zebra than the regular horse but this being due in part to them having some Zebra DNA is just my personal guess (the zebra can't be domesticated either).When Clan Wolf challenged for access to the data being stored at their new Genetics Facility in Bearcat on Strana Mechty in 2822 it was Franklin Hallis that defeated them in the Trial of Possession (this was while he was still only just a Star Colonel). In the original canon timeline Star Colonel Ferris Ward, who he defeated that day, was later the man that ended up killing him at the Battle of Barbados in 2824.Double Heat Sinks (DHS), either the Star League type or the more advanced Clan model don't have to be made in freefall. A technological divergeance here is that the new Niops version of the DHS, which uses Boron-Arsinide crystals because of their excellent thermal conductvity, does. Growing semi-conductor crystals in a strong magnetic field within a microgravity environment really does effect how they turn out (it's not just random treknobabble on my part). The metal Niobium which is canonically mined on Alphard is really used to make superconductive magnets too.Being strapped for manpower, resources and production capability ever time Niops finds itself with another high-priority project the only projects get postponed. In the case of them needing a new orbital factory for the next generation of DHS it means that the plans for a shipyard get delayed again (although they're still going ahead with an Alliance Space Station where they eventually hope to build the CargoMaster and CargoKing under license. If they ever do get a shipyard as well as jumpships and warships they'll be constructing portable mining platforms much like the Snowden (although larger).Warships were still very much a thing in the first half of the Succession War, although some types like the Atreus Class Battleship were all gone by then (not that Bremman will know that for absolute certain). While they no longer had any battleships by this point the Free Worlds League did still have the Aegis and Soyal classes of heavy cruisers in service in the 2830's (the Soyal being favoured for orbital bombardment missions) the League class destroyer and possibly a Samarkand II carrier.The mercenary company Tyson's Troublemakers, formerly the 23rd Heavy Assault Regiment of the SLDF, was destroyed fighting for the Federated Suns in the First Succession War. Having a handful of them survive is just my way of getting a unit from XXVII Corps of the Eleventh Army along for the ride. Originally three battalions they're down to not much more than three lances by 2836 and really looking to work for someone that they hope won't get the rest of them killed too.When you look at who had connections to the 146th Royal Battlemech Division at some point, and how many of them ended up in senior roles in clan society (including Nicholas Kerensky himself), it starts to look like some kind of secret society. You heard it here first, the clans were just a front for the 146th and their nefarious plans for galactic domination!
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
Chapter 31