TTWTWT Chpt 1

==Tell The World That We Tried - Chapter 1==
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WON’T YOU LEND YOUR LUNGS TO ME...
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===The Wake Up Call===
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So this was a hangover.
In the liminal space between sleeping and waking, it was easy to check the streams of memory, laid out in separate elements for consideration for the first and perhaps the last time. The older me had never drunk more than a glass or so of champagne in a given year. The younger had four years of hardened party experience and was capable of rating this hangover as a 4.6, plus-or-minus 0.2, on a 1-to-10 scale of ‘Are you sure you didn’t just oversleep?’ to ‘Allow the doctor to explain just how close you came to dying of alcohol poisoning’.
The once-younger would be living a comfortable-ish, quiet life with a loving family in twentieth century Earth, able to make both a critical technological revolution and a massive fortune with an engineering degree a thousand years in advance of the times… And of doing a perfectly good job taking care of, loving, my-our family there.
The now-younger me, me-me, had been unwillingly dragged to enough wakefulness for the memories to merge together into a vaguer and probably more competent gestalt ‘me’, and incidentally to recognize that infernal breebling as the phone rather than the alarm clock.
 
Landlines, my god. Future of the eighties, go fuck yourself.
I sat up, tossed the traffic cone at the hotel room’s door, and stood carefully to shamble over to the nearer wall, and the phone hanging from it. “Euuh?” I mumbled. Actual verbalization wasn’t going to come online for another thirty seconds or so.
 
“...Hello, this is Raleigh Wallace, with the Law Office of Pierre, Watson, Wallace and Watson,” the voice on the other end of the line said, after a moment’s nonplussed pause. “Have I reached the number of Asha Blackwing?”
“Mmmm,” I affirmed, and let myself slump down the wall to the floor. The chill of the fake wood paneling against my completely bare bottom woke me up enough to add, “S’rry…” A yawn interrupted me before I could finish, “...was asleep.”
 
“Ah, I apologize for waking you, then, Miss… Blackwing?”
 
I ‘mmm’d a confirmation, and he went on. “My firm has been retained as executors of the will and estate of the late Sieg Rostig, Count Guanahani.”
 
A moment’s mental check turned up where I’d heard that name before - my, younger-me-that-was-from-this-universe, mother had mentioned the name once as being her best guess of who my father was. “My mother mentioned the name…” I said.
 
“Your Alpheratz Sports Association medical evaluation confirmed the genetic relation,” Wallace - I wondered if he was one of the senior partners in the firm’s name, or a relative - said.
 
Despite myself, I winced. My encounter with the ASA bureaucracy hadn’t worked out well for anyone involved, even if the changes in my life had done wonders to reinforce that I’d made the right choice in the end. ...In the end. Add that to this additional bit of bad news, and my mother’s death a few months ago… Younger-me wouldn’t’ve dealt well, at all.
“Most of Count Guanahani’s estate is tied up in the title and associated properties, but you were named as a secondary beneficiary. We’d appreciate it if you’d be willing to visit us to discuss matters in more detail.”
I yawned again. “Yeah,” I said. “Um… When’d be convenient for you? I’m, uh, between obligations right now.” Unemployed and blacklisted, to be blunt and depressing about it.
 
“The Guanahani estate is the highest priority on Mr. Watson’s docket. We are at your disposal,”
 
A senior partner of the firm would clear his schedule to accommodate mine. ...Okay then. I glanced at the clock, then hauled myself to my feet. “All right,” I said, “about where are your offices?”
While he explained the directions, I headed to my desk, the cord stretching away from the handset over my bare shoulder, and grabbed a post-it - apparently, they were eternal - and a pen to write the address down. “All right,” I said again. “Including travel time… If I have the train schedule right, I can be there about twelve.”
 
Alpheratz had a twenty-six-and-a-bit hour day, so that would be an hour before local noon.
 
“Certainly,” Wallace said. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up, and I went to the little studio apartment’s closet to assemble a formal-ish outfit out of the collection of club and casual wear there.
 
The streams split again as I caught a look at myself in the mirror. The younger half said that the girl with the rippling six-pack and rippling other things needed to get back on her workout schedule, I was starting to lose tone. The older half was mostly bowled over by the hormone surge, and a little tempted to start looking into Dead or Alive cosplay.
 
I shook both off and went to take a shower; I needed to hustle if I was going to make my train.
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===Legal Details===
The lightest sweater I owned, a wonderfully comfortable and almost shapeless gray thing, concealed the hilariously daring neckline of the little black dress; the low-riding leggings combined with the not-actually-scandalous hemline to seem almost modest, and make a nice contrast with the sweater. Scrunchy for the hair, let it dry on the train, and grab an overpriced scone from the stall in the station then eat it en route, along with coffee - one of the things the two mes disagreed about. The day was a little warm for the sweater, but what could you do?
 
Even if I hadn’t been kind of suspicious at how eager a smooth senior lawyer was to hustle me into signing before I’d read all the papers they waved in front of me, I’d’ve gone over things on principle. What I found doing that reading made me absolutely sure to make that an ironclad rule going forwards.
 
Dear Old Dad’s assets fell, it turned out, into three categories. The first, and biggest, was tied up in the title of Count Guanahani - noble title to an entire continent on one of the Outworlds Alliance’s richer and more industrialized worlds, and with it hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land, much of it wilderness but no small amount quite valuable indeed. The second was in a great honking pile of cash from the liquidating and consolidating he’d done of his investments from his deathbed - eight hundred thirty-two million c-bills worth, all told.
 
The third was the skeleton of a mercenary regiment, fully equipped and existing on paper if only someone would take on the work of it, but almost completely lacking in personnel. It had had people, not so long ago, but only the training cohort had survived the radiological weapon that had killed the rest of the people my dad had put together to fill it… along with him.
 
I looked at the elderly and esteemed Mister Watson after I found the three signatures of my fellow bastards accepting shares of the cash and signing away any interest in taking command of the latter, and was quietly pleased when he squirmed, ever so slightly.
 
Then I flipped to the next page and picked up the pen.
 
“There is,” the lawyer said before I could sign, “something not present in the contract that you should be aware of.”
 
“Oh?” I asked, saccharine-sweet and not hiding that I was already annoyed and suspicious.
He bowed slightly. “The Alliance Military Corps is… aware of the assets entailed in the unit holding company, and determined to acquire them. The formal proofing period for a newly established mercenary unit is three months from the date of transfer of ownership, and in such a case as this… The verdict is not in doubt.”
 
I looked down at the paper. Three months to put together enough of a company to get the heck out of dodge, with a one-fifth share of the cash to work with. And probably dirty tricks thrown my way at the same time, before the final kangaroo court.
 
A hundred and sixty eight million C-Bills was more than enough for a comfortable life anywhere in the Inner Sphere or out of it, but…
 
“Give me a lever and a place to stand,” I whispered, and signed on the line.
 
----
===Working out the Logistics===
Of course, there were a fuckton of logistical problems to work through to get everything out of the Alliance inside my three-month deadline, but I had at least the start of a plan.
Step one was meeting the people I already had.
 
As usual, the retina scan and magstrip and everything else sophisticated declined to work. I’d’ve thought it was just their being as decrepit as the rest of the shabby commercial block by the spaceport, but the last time a sensor like that had worked properly I’d been, like, twelve. It had driven the doctors mad the last time I’d gone to the hospital.
Fortunately, the keypad access involved physical buttons, and did work.
 
“Look,” a voice ahead of me was saying, “I get wanting to hang onto the Regiment. I get that. But even the OWA isn’t gonna let a pile of brand new loot walk free, and then where are we? The Colonel was a straight shooter. He wouldn’t’ve wanted us to just end up Dispossessed - and if we wanna avoid that, we’ve gotta take our share before the local yokels get their hands on it.”
 
“Sure, but the yokels aren’t the only thing we’ve got to think about,” answered another voice, in a Draconis accent. “There’s our Lord’s heirs, as well. The Outworlds can go to hell, but I’m not comfortable just… stealing from them.”
 
“Fortunately, that won’t be necessary,” I said, stepping out of the back hallway and into the impromptu conference area. It was stuffed full of young, fit bodies, about twice as many as older-me remembered from school classes and three times as many as younger-me did - which’d put the total at about sixty.
 
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.
 
The bald guy who’d been sitting on the floor at the front of the denser cluster of hardbodies on the right hauled himself to his feet. “The fuck are you?”
 
“And how’d you get in here?” asked the first voice, attached to an extra-sparkly pretty-boy wearing actual jingly spurs on his boots. No points for guessing his service branch.
 
The other of the two who’d already been standing up was a - well, being blunt, she looked like a Standard Issue Japanese Schoolgirl, dressed up in fatigues three sizes too big for her.
 
I gave them all a grin. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Asha Blackwing, nice to meet you. And I got in here because as of about noon yesterday, my name’s on the lease, so the lawyers handed over the master key.” I realized after the fact that I was posing a little, and nevermind that jeans and a t-shirt wasn’t much to show off. Not that my body needed the help, admittedly…
 
Now that Bald Guy was standing full height, I realized that he was shorter than I’d expected. Still taller than me, because frankly I was tiny, but shorter than the bishonen.
“You are our Lord’s daughter?” Schoolgirl asked, sounding a little dubious, while her two fellow leaders were busy looking me up and down.
 
Guess she was straight; pity.
 
“Apparently one of four,” I said, and hopped up on one of the cheap folding tables in the absence of a spare chair. It creaked but didn’t go down. “In order of age, some kind of accountant or something, a religious whackadoodle, a medical doctor, and me. They already had lives, and the old man’s will dictated that all the mercenary stuff go together as a unit if possible, so…”
 
I trailed off and spread my hands. “I’m gonna at least make a try at it,” I said.
 
“You call the Colonel ‘the old man’?” Baldy said, sounding like he was looking for an excuse to be offended.
I shrugged. “My life up ‘til now’s been notably short on paternal presence and child support,” I said, “And as much as the latter’s been made up for, ‘Dad’ is for people you know, and ‘my father’ seems…” I paused, hunted for the right word, then wrinkled my nose and finished, “Stilted.”
 
Baldy seemed about to fart more testosterone in my face, and/or take a swing, making younger-me’s competitive instincts perk up to process his stance and the most likely angles, but Bishonen interrupted him. “What do you know about being a mercenary?” he asked.
 
“That there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know?” I asked sweetly; it got a laugh out of enough of the room to count the joke as a success. “More seriously, I do know that it’s a hell of a lot different from being a sports team captain, or an engineering intern. The will talks about the formed unit, and I’ve gotten what you’d call under-the-table warnings that if we can’t get a working regiment inside three months, all our hardware goes to the Outworlds Alliance Military Corps… And they get to decide what ‘working’ is.”
 
Several people in the crowd swore, and everyone got more sober - aside from the ones who’d obviously already figured as much.
 
“So,” I went on, “obviously we need to be gone by the time they can serve their predetermined verdict. I figure that I can handle hiring enough jumpship and DropShip crew to get by and get us to Galatea or someplace else we can, umm, consolidate? And there, we’ll have good odds hiring officers, too.”
 
Not many heads were nodding yet, figuratively or otherwise, but the kids - I was pretty sure I was the oldest person in the room, and younger-me had only been twenty - were listening. “You are certain about the crews, My Lady?” the Schoolgirl asked.
 
“Mondai arimasen,” I said, ‘not a problem’. “I have a plan…”
 
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===Chit Chat with Spacers over Drinks===
Rare is the profession that does not have its own favored watering holes, its own drinking establishments claimed and hallowed by local tradition. This is even more true when there’s a geographic element in play.
 
Thus, it was a given that there were Spacer Bars; and younger-me had, among her various sins, acquired a long list of acquaintances and drinking buddies some of whom would, inevitably, know where around the spaceport they were to be found. Really, the hardest part had been deflecting the various passes and other invitations sent my way while I was going down the list.
 
Convincing hard-up twenty-something crewmen to tell me anything and everything I wanted to hear was a skill younger-me had long since mastered, so in short order I was on the way to the hard part, and starting with bringing the small table of older crewmen a refill.
 
The married couple were in middle age, seventies maybe - grey haired and a little shopworn, but unbowed for decades yet. They had been paying attention pretty-much only to each other; when they caught sight of me their hands practically teleported from interlacing over the table to casually laying nearly a foot apart. Their friend was a little younger, perhaps fiftyish, with only hints of silver and the subtly different facial tan of a man who spent a lot of time in vacuum sunlight.
 
He looked me up and down and said, while his friends concentrated on not looking guilty, “So, let me guess. You’ve got a great lead on a bunch of LosTech prospectors who just need a pickup to carry their loot away.”
 
I set the new drinks down in front of them, then sat down at the round table’s free seat with my beer. “If I did, I wouldn’t be sharing it with you,” I said, while my brain once more turned over the question of whether to go to Helm or New Dallas first. “Actually, I was wondering how jumpship crews got hired.”
 
One of the married couple gave me a suspicious look, but it was his husband that said, “Is that why you tied my poor reactor watch in a knot?”
 
I shrugged. “I wanted to make sure this was the table I needed… And it’s not like they’re complaining.”
The little pervs.
 
“You could have just asked,” the spacewalker pointed out.
 
I shrugged uncomfortably. There were lots of good sides to being the melange that was me, but some of the weak points from one side or the other had survived. “Flirting guys I know how to deal with. Serious conversations out of the blue are harder.”
 
“You’re the kid that inherited Hasenpfeffer and Rockall.” the suspicious one said, like he’d just figured something out, and I smiled.
 
“Asha Blackwing, nice to meet you.” Hasenpfeffer was an Invader class JumpShip, a hundred and fifty-two thousands tons of mostly liquid helium, germanium, and imitation germanium products. Like all JumpShips, there was only one thing she was good for aside from floating helplessly in microgravity like the expensive lump of nigh-uselessness she was - but that one thing was the key to interstellar travel, because the supercooled, finely-managed mass of physics-breaking intricacy that made up all but a tiny fraction of her mass was capable of translocating both her, and any more capable spacecraft - known as DropShips - that was docked to her three carry collars up to thirty lightyears in seconds.
 
Or she would have, if one of her docking collars hadn’t been broken.
 
Rockall was a Merchant class JumpShip, much the same but about four-fifths the size, with only two collars. Though both of hers worked, at least.
“Why not just go through a hiring service?”, the other husband asked.
 
I held up a finger. “Because the hiring service needs to stay in good with the Alliance government.” Finger number two. “Also the Alliance would really like to have a free combined arms regiment with transport.” Finger number three. “If we’re still in Alliance territory in eighty-seven days, a judge gets to decide if we’re a ‘real’ merc unit with a right to keep our gear.” Finger number four. “And, obviously, the judge also works for the Alliance.”
 
I lowered my hand. “Granted that judges are rarely amused by somebody playing silly buggers with the law like that, I still figure trying to hire under the table is a smaller risk. Thus the need to find someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.”
 
EVA guy gave me a look. Took a pull of his (new) drink. Decided, in the end: “You’re paranoid, kid.”
 
I thought about that. “...Yeah, probably. Question is, am I being paranoid about the right things.”
The married couple looked at each other, having a quick, wordless conversation, then the suspicious one sighed and his husband told me, “Well, for starters, I think you’re gonna need to go to the hiring services, anyway, particularly Comstar.”
 
I couldn’t keep myself from making a face. Comstar, the sixth and most secretive faction of the Inner Sphere, was the one of the lot least affected by the way the Succession Wars had ripped infrastructure and institutional memory to shreds. For the good and simple reason that they’d secretly arranged the murder and destruction of anyone and anything who might stop it while they busily flew under the radar.
 
“Yeah, they’re kind of creepy.” the helpful one agreed.
 
Yeah, let’s go with that.
 
“But,” he continued, “because they’re everybody’s phone company, they’re not tied to any local interest like that. They’ll play straight with you. This far out, there aren’t gonna be more than a handful of jump crews around, but you can probably get ahold of enough officers to train up a raw crew. DropShips’ll be easier, though if you want to poach any of ours-”
 
I raised my hands in innocent surrender. “I wouldn’t expect to.” I said, more or less honestly.
 
The suspicious one snorted. His husband thwapped him on the wrist and said, “In the end, forget the Alliance - your big trouble’s gonna be getting the locking gear on Hasepfeffer’s collar fixed, and making sure you get all the pirates weeded out of your intakes.”
 
“...I hadn’t thought of that angle,” I admitted. “Too focused on my time limit.” I thought for a few seconds, then huffed quietly. “Have to be Comstar for those parts, unless they’re simple enough to be fabricated on-site. Ugh.”
 
“Well, you’ve got something to work with,” the EVA guy said. “Right?”
I huffed and nodded. “A bit of startup cash,” I understated, “and the hardware, and the ships - collateral for a loan if I really have to. A handful of people, maybe a company’s worth.”
“And whoever you know.”
 
“Like who?” I asked. “A pack of drunken college students?”
 
“I gather most soldiers at least start off young and stupid,” he deadpanned, and I had to laugh.
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===Meeting the MechWarriors===
The song throbbing through the floor and the thin warehouse walls from the depot where our first few techs were getting introduced to the handful of ‘mechs we had on-planet wasn’t anything older-me would have recognized from living in the turn of the twenty-first century, but that didn’t keep it from reminding me irresistibly of the Glitch Mob version of Seven Nation Army - deep, relentless, and thoroughly electronic.
“Sorry about the noise,” I said to the appointment that had been waiting for me. He was ambiguously adult, which in the thirty-first century could have meant anywhere between a mature mid-twenties or a baby-faced sixty-something, tall and handsome and powerfully muscled.
Pity about the Snake Plissken mullet. Ugh, future of the eighties, go fuck yourself.
“I’ve heard lots worse,” he assured me, in an accent that I had to fight for a moment to place as ‘Somewhere in the Free Worlds League, Maybe?’ “I remember a planet where the local beats were literally that, all percussion and no melody to speak of… Anyway.”
He smiled and held out a hand to shake. “Major Jules Rakis, late of the Syrian Lancers by way of Reuban’s Roughriders. I gather that you’re hiring cadre?”
I accepted the handshake, didn’t fight when he turned it into a kiss to the air a half-inch or so over my knuckles, and walked around behind the desk. “Have a seat,” I invited him. “Coffee?”
 
“Black, please,” he said.
 
I poured him one of the mismatched mugs I’d salvaged from my shitty apartment and slid it over. Sitting down while I watched to see how he’d react to the well-aged Student Fuel.
 
He hid the flicker of a grimace well.
“Tell me about the Roughriders.” I asked.
Summarizing the story he gave me, the Roughriders had been formed from a group of League troops who’d gotten sick of their nation’s ‘curse’ - the endless bucket-of-crabs civil strife between the League’s component provinces and noblemen - and decided to strike out on their own as a community of comrades.
To hear him tell it, they’d been fairly good at the fighting part of the mercenary business, but had trouble making it work as a business. Successive contracts for the Capellan Confederation, the Draconis Combine, and the Federated Suns had taken a slow toll on the Roughriders’ equipment and hiring lists, slowly bleeding their strength out until a short company had loaded aboard their last DropShip and battered JumpShip to take up a planetary defense contract here in the Outworlds.
 
When the raid their employers in the local government had feared and expected came, they’d fought it off and more - annihilated it, in one of the knock-down drag-out fights to the death that had become vanishingly rare as production rates for advanced hardware like BattleMechs fell and fell and fell…
And run afoul of the reason for that rarity, as Rakis and a handful of other survivors trickled back to civilization and Alpheratz, Dispossessed to a man, their DropShip wrecked and their Jumpship taken by small craft while they could do nothing but watch helplessly from the ground.
I let him hang for a moment, skimming over the (Comstar-verified) references he’d brought with him, but, honestly, I couldn’t afford not to take the opportunity. I needed a field commander who knew his business too badly if I wanted to make things work.
I stood up and reached over the desk as I admitted it. “Welcome to the Blackwings, Major,” I said.
This time he shook properly. “Glad to be here,” he said, and stood too. “Where do you see me?”
“Come on and I’ll show you around.” I said, and led him out of the shabby little office and into the Wubs.
The four Goblins - forty-five ton medium tanks with capacitor-fed laser main guns and built-in infantry compartments that made them… decent… infantry fighting vehicles - had been the only combat units rolled out of the Triumph-class DropShip that my people had taken to get here. The few survivors of the incarnation of the regiment that my father had led had taken their old dropper, and everything aboard it, as part of their severance pay, with his blessings.
Inconvenient for me, of course, but still, best of luck to them.
But anyway. Four Goblins was enough to mount all of the infantry and tank crews we actually had; our MechWarriors and fighter jocks were harder off, but-
“We have the equipment to mount all of them. A wing of Corsairs, eight Battlemasters, twice that each of Marauders and Centurions.” I went on.
Rakis shook his head disbelievingly. “Did you raid a Davion armory?”
“In a manner of speaking.” I waved a hand at the tanks, the couple of utility trucks parked with them, and, behind the wall, the massive DropShip parked on the pad our warehouse backed up against. “Marik lost a delivery shipment in the Second War, while they were still building all those designs. Short-lived radiological weapon killed the crews, left things just drifting. This is the salvage, just found.
“DropShips, three Unions, the Triumph, and a Condor.” I said. “Jumpships, Invader and Merchant. There’s repairs needed, but Comstar is swearing they can have the parts fabricated and installed inside a month and a half. But… There’d been a dud radioweapon, back when. The old incarnation of the unit set it off by accident; The casualties were heavy, and most of what was left got out of the business.”
He winced. “I can see what you need cadre for.”
I laughed blackly over the bass drop. “Yeah,” I agreed. “But anyway, without ship crews, it’s all packed up waiting, we can’t get at it. And that makes me itchy, for a lot of different reasons.”
“I know a couple of different people I can call,” Rakis said. “Nobody that’s captained a ship before, but men that’ve been in the business long enough to know it.”
I beamed up at him. “That’ll be a lifesaver,” I said, blissfully ignorant, and waved him towards the crowd working on overhauling one of the Goblins. “Come on, meet the crew.”
----
===Dinning with future Employee===
Keeping in mind the advice I’d gotten, I kept reaching out to my own ‘contacts’, by which I meant the various reckless college kids younger-me had gotten fucking wasted with. All of younger-me’s proper friends had stopped talking to me after that ASA disaster, pretending they were horrified at what she’d done rather than just afraid they’d be called out for doing the same, but fuck ‘em. The frat boys were happy enough to answer questions if it meant they got to stare at my tits, so mutual use and abuse was the order of the day.
So, knowing one of the loslytz-chugging testosterone poisoned beer-can-headbutters worked at an accounting firm - and lets be honest, as many of the fuckwits as I knew, statistically, at least one had to - I called him up and asked if he had any coworkers in the grim gray depths of a mid-life crisis.
He did me one better. He found a divorcee.
“Can I offer you a drink?” I said, smiling up at the man as he arrived at the table in the little cafe not far from his office. “The coffee’s more than decent, but the loslytz looks right at home with the rest of the drink menu, fair warning.”
‘Loslytz’ was a staple of Alpheratzi alcoholic… anything. Brandy made from the native losaplum, cheap loslytz tasted like somebody ran an old lawnmower over a patch of menthol and then used the scraped off green mat from its underside as a flavoring agent, and expensive loslytz didn’t taste like much of anything. Losaplums, nasty as they were flavorwise, were a weed-tree, so doing something with the fruit had been a tradition since the planet was settled.
“...Coffee’s fine.” he said, looking uncomfortable.
Also uncomfortably like Danny DeVito, which made him actually shorter than me.
I waved the waiter over, then, once he had his cup, asked, “So, what did Joe say?”
“That he’d heard a job offer that might work out for me,” he said, and scrubbed a hand across his scalp from one fringe of hair to the other. “But… I mean, it’s… You’ve gotta know, something first.”
“That you’ve been having a rough time, lately?” I filled in. “I asked him if he knew somebody that was.”
He looked down at his coffee, then back up at me. “Why?” he asked.
“I’m putting together a business startup, obviously. We need a financial director; someone that knows money, contracts, investment, inventories.” I said. “Which, leaving aside temporary troubles, we both know you are.”
He made an uncomfortable gesture, but didn’t deny it.
“The kicker is, though, that the startup is a mercenary regiment. Which means that not only do we need someone with all of that experience and training, we need one that’s willing to pick up stakes and leave home, certainly for years and possibly permanently. Most financial professionals don’t match that mold - but…”
“A guy that got taken to the cleaners in a shitty divorce hasn’t got so many ties,” he finished darkly. He hesitated for a moment, then admitted, “I don’t know how big a business a regiment is.”
“About twelve hundred people, in our case, once we’ve filled all the positions called for. Which we’re a ways from; we’ve got maybe seventy now. Lots of professionals, lots of money tied up in equipment that’ll be getting shot at… But also a lot of cash coming in, if we can do it right.”
“Loans?” he asked, and I knew that I had him. His eyes were lit up with interest, his round face starting to smile.
“None outstanding,” I said. “Most of the setup is accounted for in a windfall. The catch for us is… I’ve been told by a couple different people that there’s elements in the government, the Outworlds government, that have decided it’d be… easier… to just legal away our validity as a regiment and confiscate that hardware than to hire us. So, we have a deadline of about a month and a half to have at least our ship crews hired and ready to go, so we can be over the border before the judgement day’s on us.”
“Ship crews,” he repeated, his eyes getting a little wider as he did the math for what I was talking about with ‘lots of money in equipment’.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, both confirming the detail and agreeing with the feeling behind it. The silence sat there for a moment, more or less comfortably, before I said, “So, sounds like you’re interested, Mister Poisson?”
He smiled. “Call me Phil.” he said.
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===Training in Simulators===
Tracking down a set of simulator pods was an expense I fully expected to pay for itself fairly quickly. There were limits to the skills they could impart, of course - some amount of ‘field’ time would be absolutely necessary - but practicing against the computer could at least get a newbie up to some kind of not-tripping-or-crashing competence, and slow down the acquisition of rust for people who knew what they were doing. All while costing a lot less per hour than putting operational time on the real units.
And if it let me learn some of the business earlier, well, it benefited the rest of the unit, too.
To younger-me’s intense disappointment, I’d turned out to have nowhere near the kind of three-dimensional thinking needed to make a good aerospace fighter pilot. I did a bit better than standard at orbital mechanics, thank you Kerbal Space Program, and no worse than any other rookie at tracking my opponents, but as far as situational awareness of ground and altitude went, I was garbage.
Naturally, I’d found that out in the most embarrassing possible way.
My stab at Battlemechs, though, was going better. Not well, but better.
When I finished the drill, I climbed out to let the next person in line take their turn, scrubbing at my face and hair with a towel off the stack next to the door. The simulators were designed to be as realistic as possible, within the technical limits of LosTech, including dumping literal oven-heat over their current victim, and even stripped to nothing but workout spandex, cooling jacket, and diving-er-neurohelmet, that was enough to have me ‘glowing’ like the proverbial sun.
“Exercise complete,” Rakis said, giving me the same appreciative look-over as about two-thirds of the rest of the room, but less subtly. “Kowalczyk, Peron, good teamwork. Blackwing, situational awareness is better, but still your weak point. Mochida, the zigzag was a good tactic but don’t get used to counting on it; better gunners would have punished you hard for getting out in the open like that.”
I nodded along with the others while the Major moved on to the other bank of pods and the lance we’d been practicing against. It was more or less what I’d expected.
“Sorry about that last shot,” Peron lied blatantly to me, grinning. “Just not quite enough to catch up with superior talent.”
“Sure I’m not,” I replied, as sugary as the sweetest cake, except that the cake was a lie. “Which is why you’re saying that here rather than on the mats. We could make a contest, maybe? Here, there, maybe a race for tiebreaker?”
He shuddered and backed away, hands raised defensively. “OK, I’m not that dumb.”
I laughed, and he joined in.
As the little crowd started to disperse, a wave from the edge of the room caught my eye - deliberately.
I took another scrub through my hair with the towel - already damp - and strolled over to the secretary we’d hired from a temp agency for our time still on Alpheratz. “Hey, Maxwell,” I said. “Who’ve you got for me?”
 
The woman standing next to him was - well, a soccer mom. Middle-aged-ish, carrying a bit of extra solidity, not unattractive but not a standout either, brown hair, about three inches taller than I was. She extended a hand to shake. “Io Sasagawa,” she said, in a Lushann accent. “Late of the Flying Nightmares.”
 
The First Alliance Air Wing, to give them their proper name, was the elite unit of the Alliance Military Corps - which was to say, probably the very best aerospace formation anywhere. “Nice to meet you,” I said, accepting the handshake. “Asha Blackwing.”
“You’re… the Colonel? Of the merc regiment?” she asked, disbelievingly.
“I inherited the hardware and I sign the payroll.” I said with a smile. “And...I have an excellent lieutenant-colonel to make sure I don’t make any irretrievable mistakes. Anyway, what can I do for you?”
Sasagawa shook her head disbelievingly. “Well… Long story short, I’m looking for something better for my daughter to do with her life than fighting a losing battle against pirates for fifty years. She’s old enough to fly, and I’ve taught her the basics… And I understand you’re hiring pilots.”
“We are, yeah.” I agreed. “We’ve got seven so far, and ships for thirteen more. Though, we would need to see what she can do, not just...” I trailed off, without a graceful way to finish the sentence, and made a vague ‘you can guess’ wave of my hand.
A hint of a smile crossed her face. “Doing a favor for her mom? Don’t worry. My wingman and I both come along as part of the deal… As long as us having our own fighters isn’t a problem.”
She was definitely teasing me. “It isn’t,” I said. “Worst case, we break out a shoehorn.”
Squadron leader from the First Wing? Oh yes, I wanted her.
Not like that, mostly.
...Stop judging me.
I took another scrub at my hair with the now-damp towel. “Lemme jump in a shower real quick,” I said, “Let Maxwell get you some of the good coffee or something, and then we can talk over what we can do for each other. ‘Kay?”
And Maxwell’d better have her resume to check. Getting taken by too-good-to-be-true’d be embarrassing.
----
===Unit Briefing===
The conference room wasn’t really big enough for seven people; it was an afterthought tucked into the semi-habitable corners of our warehouse, and even with arrangements made so that everyone could, barely, fit, the ventilation was iffy enough to leave the door propped open with a fan going.
Down the back side of the table, Sasagawa seemed indecently comfortable in her old working uniform. Now with suspiciously darker patches where most of the insignia had been carefully unsewn. The three empty circles I’d used for a Major seemed lonely.
Singh’s bodysuit had him sweating visibly even though he was directly in the path of the fan; he’d hung his leather jacket over the back of his seat and looked tired. He’d probably have done better to change into downside clothes rather than the spacesuit undergarment, but hell, what did I know? He’d clipped his two-full-circle bar to the jacket, under the nametag.
Rosenkreutz, the infantryman, had hung his captain’s insignia with his dog tags, there not being much place on a muscle shirt for it. He’d gotten much easier to deal with after the first time I’d visited one of the infantry sparring sessions - in other words, once he knew that I could stand up to him.
Itangre was on the opposite side of the table from him; it hadn’t been a deliberate decision to sit the military side across from the business side of things, but sometimes people didn’t need that to organize themselves. We’d picked her up from a company that made refrigerators; she’d decided that running her own Human Resources department was worth traveling. She hadn’t managed to take her eyes off Rosenkreutz since she arrived, but at least she wasn’t literally drooling.
Poisson was opposite Sasagawa. He was wearing Business Standard Button-Up Shirt And Tie just like Itangre, but managed to make it seem rumpled and sloppy rather than neat and Professional. He had a sheaf of papers in front of them and was shuffling them repeatedly with quick motions of his stubby fingers.
Rakis had a broad-lapelled coat on over a MechWarrior’s thin undershirt, and a bandana over his hair, at the other end of the table from me. He knocked on the table once with his artificial hand and looked at Singh. “So, how are the JumpShips?” he asked.
Singh swiped a hand across his forehead and said, “Comstar’s repair work on Hasenpfeffer checks out. We docked and undocked four times and had no problem. Power watches have both JumpShips up and running… They’re still warming things back up, but they’ll be ready to go before the rest of us are. The other crews are still moving into their DropShips, but they should be good to go by the same time.”
Two gold teeth gleamed in Rakis’s grin. “Excellent,” he said. “How are we doing for cash?”
“Nothing coming in, of course,” Poisson answered, fingers going still on the table. “But the repair bills are paid, we’ve got stocks now, and reserves are still good. Call it one-thirty-four or so, and we’ve got all the big-ticket stuff for before we leave paid so it’s basically just payroll and rent.”
I leaned forward a little to ask for a couple more details, since one of the reasons our medical head wasn’t preset was that he was out looking for supplementary medical equipment, but Rakis rolled right over me. “Speaking of payroll, hiring?”
I nudged Itangre under the table with my toe, and she shot me a quick, grateful glance before she ably covered her embarrassment and confusion, and while she carried on about our efforts to find the last few experienced pilots Sasagawa needed, and fill out the tech and support echelons, I made a note to talk to Poisson and see if he had an estimate on what Doctor Tiber wanted and how much they expected it to run.
Rosenkreutz shot Itangre a wink while she talked, and didn’t get any less smug when she ignored him.
Rakis cut Itangre off mid-detail. “So, long and short is we’re set for support echelon. We’ve got one or two trickling in for pilots, and no news on the rest?”
“I… understand that that’s what was expected, yes.” she confirmed, showing a flutter of nervousness.
He started to frown, but since it was completely true, I interrupted, “Yeah, that’s more or less what we figured, especially since we had you concentrate on pilots.”
His expression got crosser, but he didn’t say anything about it, just moved on. “How are the pilots we do have shaking down?” he asked Sasagawa.
 
She looked at him, then down the table at me; I nodded, ignoring the ratcheting glare. “We’ve got a good idea where our people are at. For now, I’ve settled on organizing as one active flight squadron and two reserve ones, just because of the limits we have on launch bays. In a lot of ways, I’d rather match our experienced people as leads to rookie wingmen, but that’d make us more vulnerable while we’re on the move. So for now, we’ve got one experienced squadron that we’ll set up to fly out of the Unions, and hold the others to unpack when we’re on-planet.
“Until then, I’d like to get more flight time in for my people, but the simulators are helping a lot.”
“Good,” Rakis said, though he’d thought buying that equipment would be a waste of time and effort, and scooted his chair back, getting ready to stand.
“How’s Chi Tau working out?” I asked Rosenkreutz. Chi Tau had been an athletic fraternity at the University of Alpheratz that had had their charter revoked at a time convenient for us. So we’d had about twenty of them decide that soldiering sounded good, as a block.
“They’re drunken idiots,” he said, which was unquestionably true. “but they’re used to working as a team and they’re used to training hard. They’re getting there.”
“All we can ask for,” I said, and, since experience had shown that Rakis wouldn’t, looked around the room. “Anything anybody wants to bring up while we’re all here?”
Sasagawa straightened. “Are we expecting to get more techs before we move?” she asked Itangre.
“I’ve been keeping my eyes out for someone experienced enough to run technical and vet new recruits,” was the reply. “But… no takers. What I’ve been told is that most high-end techs tend to semi-retire, get a job doing maintenance on an urban reactor or something. I also keep getting told that Alpheratz isn’t really the place for that, that the kind of people we need tend to concentrate at mercenary hiring centers. Either because that’s where they left their last job, or because they bought a ticket there.”
Sasagawa frowned but nodded. “I understand. It’d be good to be able to do more check flights, but not good enough to run down our maintenance margins.”
Nobody else had anything, so I nodded. “Okay, then. One thing from me - Phil, did Doctor Tiber give you an estimate on the med gear he was looking for, to factor in?”
Round eyes blinked in a round face, and Poisson shook his head. “No, I hadn’t known he was buying. What will he be…?”
I frowned slightly, and made a mental note to make sure to get them both secretaries to make sure stuff like that got shared in future. “He said it’d depend on what he could find a hospital willing to part with, but the rough estimate he gave me was three to ten million C-Bills.”
Rakis choked, eyes wide, and Rosenkreutz whistled. “What are we buying for that much?” the latter asked.
“The Doctor had a whole shopping list,” I said, “and most of it is stuff major hospitals get bespoke if at all. Soft tissue imaging scans, so he’ll be able to diagnose things like cancer without opening somebody up to look in person, chemical labs, and, the big one, and the thing that made me so happy to hire him in the first place because he can do it, nerve-input grafts.”
Singh sat straight up, eyes wide.
“With him, and that,” I explained to the others, “If one of our people, say, loses a foot, we’ll be able to do the prep work to fit a working prosthetic ourselves, rather than having to let it heal ‘dumb’ and at best need to cut all the skin off the stump months later to do the fitting then. That's if they can at all with the nerves healed, too.
“Now, odds are we’ll get damaged equipment, and need to do our own repair work, but what gave the Doctor the idea is that a lot of the testing kits he’d seen medical technicians using are pretty much the same as we have for working on BattleMech. Once we’ve done that, not only will we be able to keep our people alive better, but we’ll have something we can trade with the locals whenever we’re stationed on a Lostech world.”
Poisson nodded. “A traveling doctor show probably won’t make much money, relatively speaking,” he said, “but it’d save us on our health plans, and have good dividends in the favor trade.”
“That was my thinking,” I said. “Anyway, I gave him the go-ahead to get, um, agreements in principle? And then bring the details to you.”
He nodded again. “Woulda been better to know at the start, but I oughta been keeping track, too. I’ll track him down and see what he’s got.”
“Thanks, you’re a prince.” I said, and gave the table a look over, ignoring Rakis, then smiled and said, “OK, I think that’s everything. See you all in a week; that’ll be the last meeting before we lift, so have your last chance lists ready.”
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===Whispering Goodbye===
Alpheratz, of course, had a local year, about ninety local days. According to that standard, it was mid-fall. The native deciduous trees were in the process of withdrawing all water from their long, frond-like leaves, leaving them desiccated until revived by the coming of spring. Terran transplants were all conifers, still dark and green - the rapid seasons killed Terran deciduous dead - but for now, the grass was still alive.
The day itself was chill, about seven degrees - forty-five Fahrenheit, older-me would have said - and raining just hard enough to be an actual rain rather than an irritating mist. Perfect mood-weather for grave visitation, but bitter and miserable in a physical sense. The nearest other person was a hundred meters away, standing under a black umbrella.
I’d chosen a raincoat. It seemed more fitting, somehow. The raindrops pattering on the hood filled my ears.
“Hi, Mom.” I whispered to the small, plain gravestone. It was all I - all younger-me - had been able to afford for her.
Really, more than I could have afforded. The need to pay that off had been part of what drove me into a position where that asshole from the ASA could convince himself I was prey.
“If you hadn’t heard on your side, already… My father’s passed on too, a couple months ago now. He left me… Well, a hell of a lot. About a quarter billion c-bills, and… and his merc unit. What’s left of it.”
I took a deep breath around the knot in my throat, then let it out again. My eyes were burning.
“If I’m really me. That… Maybe it’s another thing you’d know better than me, now, looking from outside. The night before I got the news… I met a man. White suit, white beard, black eyes, like, all of them, black. He… had a deal he wanted to make. A chance to be somebody I’d like better, somebody whose life I’d like better. A chance to make a better future, to change every world the way you told me you wanted me to, back before… Before.
“Maybe a deal with the Devil, whether or not I’d been listening to his enemies.”
I took another breath, chuckled through the incipient tears. “Or maybe I took too much Dream Dust that night. The leadup’s kinda vague. But… in the end, I think it did happen. Have to think it happened. That I’m… not me. That I traded with me, that I’m… that other soul, in your real daughter’s body.
“I’m sorry about that. I was… a bit older, and people didn’t live as long there. So… she’s probably lost some time. But she’s got my life, my family, and they’ll be good to her.
 
“But, I… I think I remember this, this world, this history. Remember… not just now, not just the past, but… things written that haven’t happened yet. What, and where. Things that… could have gone so much better.
“I have to think I’m not crazy. Check it, sure, not just… charge ahead, but… I have to try. Use the unit, use what I know… as a lever to make things better. Save the worlds. End the wars… as much as humans ever can. A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, ‘else what’s a heaven for… But.”
I tried to sniffle; it turned into an inelegant ratcheting sluuuurp from inside my sinuses. “But that means I have to go out, away, into the Inner Sphere. I… don’t think I’ll have a chance to be back. Not for… not for a long time, and maybe not ever. So…
“I guess… in the end, I just wanted you to know… that your daughter’s all right, and she loves you still.”
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