GblaRCS Chpt 50

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 50 -==
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"If you wanted to know when the Niops Association reached the public consciousness, well you could certainly guess worse than when the newspaper cartoon, 'Saint George and the Dragoon', depicting a crusader knight with a Red Cameron Star on his shield fighting a dragon, the dragon sporting a long mustache to resemble Stefan Amaris, was printed in newspapers from one side of the Inner Sphere to the other."Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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===Shadows of Amaris's Legacy===
Pisa, Galileo System – 2841
Major Samuel Tyson wondered if Pisa might be the smallest city in the Inner Sphere to have its own HPG station as he settled down in his quarters after a long day to relax and watch the holovid. The NHCOMNET building in the center of town didn't just send and receive hyperpulse transmissions, it also transmitted a UHF signal for the colonies bare-bones television station, one that broadcast local and interstellar news along with a few kids shows, some old Terran soap operas and a lot of documentaries.
Tyson would have preferred more action movies and police procedurals on TV, although the documentary about the Byzantine Empire yesterday had helpfully filled in a few blanks in his historical knowledge, but you had to admit that living in the boonies in Niops territory was definitely a cut above what it was like in most of the periphery. Hell, the medical clinic in town was better funded and equipped than it would have been in much of the Inner Sphere, while the school actually had noteputers for all the kids, holoprojectors and a science lab.
That schoolteacher from Francas who taught his niece was pretty hot too in Tyson's opinion, hence his habit of offering to walk his sister's kid to school when he wasn't on duty.
Most of the buildings in Pisa were mostly just drab concrete put up in a hurry, including the school, but they kept the rain out, the heat in, had mains water and power not to mention a connection to a proper sewerage system. If you were averse to catching cholera properly constructed sewers were an underappreciated must, not that everyone in the periphery seemed to have gotten the memo on that one unfortunately.
Despite the amenities describing the largest settlement on Galileo as a city was still a hell of a stretch though, even if the place had grown dramatically in size in the couple of years since Tyson's Troublemakers had taken up their contract with the Niops. On arrival the mercenaries had been granted their own district on what was then the edge of town, one large enough for hangers to hold their mechs plus a barracks and a few other prefabricated buildings around a parade ground, but if the town kept expanding in size and population at the current rate the Troublemakers would soon find themselves completely surrounded on all sides by urban sprawl.
It was already getting to the stage where simply shipping in enough food, mostly from Stafford although good quality meat made it all the way from Francas, was starting to become a problem and more and more farms were starting to spring up. There were miners with money to invest and a dream of owning some land, land on Galileo was still pretty cheap anyway, and although the local soil wasn't ideal for arable farming, there were various genetically-engineered crops which could cope with it well enough.
The Troublemakers owned and operated a pair of dropships which were usually were parked up at the spaceport several klicks outside of town but were occasionally hired out to move people and cargo. Their employer had even managed to scrounge up some spare parts for the Troublemakers old Dictator which was getting on in years, and handed them over for a song. Of course, Niops had considerably more modern military dropships than the Dictator practically coming out of their ears, thanks to having a full division's worth of starlift capacity, so it wasn't like they were being super generous. The parts were probably just taking up space in a warehouse gathering dust.
According to the news Niops was even about to start producing a super-fancy new military cargo dropship soon, the CargoMaster, alongside its civilian version the CargoKing, and Tyson was hoping he might get the chance to bid on a soon-to-be-surplus SLDF-owned Mule when they did. Effective mercenary regiments didn't ignore logistics and adding a cargo carrier to the Troublemaker's TO&E would make them look a little less ragged. Also a Mule would potentially bring in a lot more money when offered out for short-term hire, it could easily carry four times as much cargo as the Troublemaker's Intruder and Dictator could combined, and there was usually someone trying to get something heavy and/or bulky from A to B in boom times like now.
Getting used to the idea of living in a place where the economy was surging ahead, and people weren't loathe to invest in building new factories and other infrastructure for fear of some ****** turning up and nuking them, had taken Tyson a while. The weird sense of optimism that everything wasn't spiraling towards total collapse, and that your children and grandchildren would be better off than you are, was just so far removed from the reality of life for most people since the Star League collapsed that it took some serious mental adjustment.
Astonishingly the tiny Niops Association had managed to found more new colonies in the last few years than all the Successor States combined, and the only thing that seemed to be restricting their territorial growth was a lack of people to actually come live on them.
The mines on Galileo itself were being successful enough in attracting labor though, doing better at that than the new colony on Baccalieu was certainly, hence Pisa's sharply rising population. The mining company paid high wages and offered good employee benefits, including the option to buy shares in the business, and the taxes they paid funded infrastructure projects and covered the wages of sufficient law enforcement officers to stop Pisa degenerating into your typical frontier mining town.
Unlike on Alphard, the men and women working in the mines on Galileo weren't digging for germanium, or coltan and the rare earth metals usually found with it like niobium and tantalum, they were digging for diamonds and fire opals.
The large majority of the diamonds being pulled out of the ground were industrial, the hardest-known naturally occurring substance had plenty of uses including in mining equipment, though there were plenty of gemstone quality examples being found as well. The fire opals meanwhile were mostly heading for the hedonistic Magistracy of Canopus where both men and women were very fond of their bling and the demand for the stones seemed insatiable. They were pretty, Tyson had to admit, he had been given a cut and polished example of a fire-opal mounted on a tie pin by one of the mine-owners as a gift, and there was a fairly large one cut into the shape of a Cameron Star in a presentation cabinet in the Town Hall.
It might have been in danger of being stolen if not for the fact that everyone knew that if you tried to pull off that kind of heist on Galileo you would have to deal with the mercenaries hired to stop anyone stealing the gemstones that were the planets primary export. Tyson's Troublemakers weren't toy soldiers, or part-time militia, they were professionals who took their job very seriously.
At first most of the miners on Galileo had been men and women from Comstock and Francas, old Star League colonies that had signed up to join the new 'Niops Association Hegemony' being put together out here in the periphery, but increasing numbers of contract workers from the Illyrian Palatinate had been turning up recently and you were almost just as likely to hear Scandinavian accents around town as Hegemony English ones these days.
Niops wasn't running Galileo as a loss by any means, but they clearly didn't treat their colonies as a cash-cow and were ploughing a lot of the money they made from mining back into local infrastructure such as roads, and wages in the mines were high. In the long term they wanted the economy on the planet to diversify away from just resource extraction, as was already happening on Alphard, but for now pulling precious stones out the ground was bringing in more than enough C-Bills to keep the bean-counters content.
As long as Galileo was turning a profit Niops was happy to keep the Troublemakers on the payroll too, which was just great as far as Sam Tyson was concerned. He had buried enough of his friends and comrades already, all of them lost fighting in the seemingly endless Succession Wars with many of the battles they had fallen in being fought for objectively no good reason whatsoever. Sometimes it seemed like the Great Houses were just comparing dick sizes with each other, or even worse destroying something just to stop the other guy getting it, which only screwed everyone in the long term.
Sam Tyson's mother, the original commander of the Troublemakers, had chosen not to follow Kerensky into the void, the SLDF's Twenty-third Heavy Assault Regiment under her command signing as mercenaries for the Federated Suns instead. You couldn't really accuse House Davion of being particularly malevolent, compared to the Draconis Combine and the Capellan Confederation they were usually fighting the Federated Suns was objectively the lesser evil by a long, long way, but they still treated their mercenaries as being more expendable than their own troops which had led to the Troublemakers being effectively rendered hors de combat by the end of the First Succession War.
Now lacking their own Jumpship, and a far cry from the Twenty-Third Heavy Assault of old which had stomped Amaris's lackeys into the dirt and could throw three full-strength battalions of heavy and assault mechs at the enemy, the remnants of the Troublemakers had been scrabbling desperately for work that wouldn't get what few of them remained killed when they heard about Niops. Sending General Romanov that HPG offering their services had been a Hail Mary play that worked out, there wasn't much demand for mercenaries that weren't happy to throw themselves headlong into the meatgrinder for a few bucks anymore.
If you didn't know about the wealth of precious stones to be found on Galileo you might wonder why anyone would want an admittedly understrength but still formidable mercenary unit to garrison it. The fact was all those shiny rocks would attract pirate raiders like horseshit attracts flies if word reached them about it, and the unusually heavy average tonnage of the Troublemakers battlemechs made for good bug repellent.
A couple of lances of Wasp, Locust or Stinger light mechs might make your average pirate band out in the periphery the ****** of the walk, able to raid most whoever they liked with impunity, but Major Sam Tyson had a stable of heavy and assault mechs some of which massed as much than a whole lance of lights on their own. Moreover, he had mechwarriors inside his machines that had cut their teeth against Sword of Light Regiments, not against poor dirt farmers with rifles that dates from the Reunification War, and who would love the chance to stomp pirate scum into the dirt.
On the subject of pirate scum, Tyson noted that the holovid was repeating the news conference from the Vatican on Terra, the one he had first watched in the bar last week along with several other off-duty Troublemakers. How the Niops people had managed to keep the almighty whupping they had inflicted on the Blood Rain under their hats all these years he couldn't imagine, they were certainly on-point when it came to stopping intel leaking out, but damn wasn't it good to hear that the fist of justice in the form of the Star League Defense Force had smashed the last of the Amaris Dragoons but good, and even managed to finally capture that evil prick Critchly into the bargain.
It had turned out that Major Marcelo Gao, the current commander of the small contingent of infantry belonging to the 295th on Galileo, technically its official garrison even if the Troublemakers provided most of the actual firepower, had himself fought in the Battle of Algenib. This had resulted in him being bought so many drinks at the bar by not only Troublemakers, but also miners born on Comstick and Francas when he let that slip that he had to be carried back to his barracks.
Grabbing the remote-control, Tyson turned up the volume on the Holovid and dropped into a chair to watch the press conference again just as Colonel MacArthur and the others were answering questions. The holovid projected a 3D image of an unusually well furnished and ornate press room situated in the Vatican on Terra, some five hundred light years away from where Tyson was sitting, but if not for a slight shimmer to the image he might have even been there in person. Colonel MacArthur's presentation on the Battle of Algenib and the capture of Bernard Critchly had already been shown, along with part of the press conference which followed, but some of the best parts were still to come and were well worth seeing again.
"Émilienne Guérin, Federated News Services" the female journalist given the chance to ask the next question introduced herself on the holovid, her French accent typical of many in the Federated Suns. "If you've had Critchly and the others in custody since 2829 why has it taken until now for you to hand him over to the Holy See?" she asked reasonably.
"Because we wanted to get as much useful intelligence as possible out of them first, and also because much of that intel might have been useless if it became public knowledge" MacArthur replied. "To give one example it was via interrogation of the commanding officer of the Blood Rain that we learned the true origins of the mercenary regiment known as 'Raymond's Redcoats', establishing them to be the 38th Amaris Fusiliers" he said. "I mean, we always knew they weren't really the 295th Battlemech division as they purported to be, because we were, but it was certainly nice to find out exactly who was going around pretending to be us."
"But you publicly revealed the true identity of the Redcoats years ago" the journalist persisted.
"We did" MacArthur confirmed, "though I note that the Lyran Commonwealth continues to employ them despite that" he said disapprovingly, "but they were not the only Rim Worlds remnants we learned of from the Blood Rain, and if we had gone public with the news of their defeat and capture a decade ago it might have wrecked our chances of dealing with some of the others before they panicked and went to ground."
"Are you saying that the Battle of Algenib was not the only occasion when the Niops Association has gone up against former units of the Rim Worlds Republic?" the journalist asked in surprise.
"While I am not at liberty to disclose everything we've been up to in the last few years, I have been authorised to announce that if anyone ever finds an old Rim Worlds Republic outpost or two a few jumps from the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat, outposts which somebody has smashed from orbit with naval autocannon, that they shouldn't be surprised to find a sign saying 'Niops was here' sticking out of one of the craters" MacArthur replied drily. "One of them was the base the 141st Amaris Dragoons initially fled to after they made their escape from Terra via Spica in the Capellan Confederation in 2778."
"Wouldn't that make those military operations the 'Last battle of the Amaris War' rather the one on Algenib?" the journalist, Guérin, queried.
"The outposts in question were no longer in operation. They were smashed to stop them ever being so again by other Amaris Empire remnants who also knew their location" MacArthur replied. "A battle is when there are two sides shooting at each other, those weren't battles, those were pest control."
"Just prior to this press conference the Niops Association has also revealed to the Lyran Commonwealth the existence of two more such facilities in the Deep Periphery anti-spinwards of their territory, these being Rim Worlds Republic Outposts 25 and 27, along with our best guess as to their location" Gareth Jeffries, sat next to MacArthur, added.
"For what it's worth, I still think before we did that we should have made them promise not to offer any pro Amaris holdouts they might find there a job first" MacArthur interjected sardonically, the various journalists laughing in response, except of course for the one from the Lyran-based Donegal Broadcasting Company, "but our civilian government back home isn't as personally aggrieved about the 38th Amaris Fusiliers, or Cameron's Curse, or Raymond's Redcoats, or whatever the hell it is they're calling themselves this week, as I am."
Tyson didn't know what was funnier, the SLDF officer's sarcasm or the look of mild dismay on the face of civilian diplomat beside him when he said it. Either way it was surprisingly entertaining television for a press conference. He was pretty sure that his dearly-departed Mom would have had a few issues with that bunch of former Amaris soldiers turned buccaneer too. Calling themselves 'Cameron's Curse' for a while certainly didn't make them sound all that repentant, with switching from piracy to mercenary work under a false identity probably just being a savvy career move rather than a complete change of heart.
There were quite a few other Rim Worlds Republic units turned mercenary about Tyson knew, even a few regiments that contained both former RWR and former SLDF troops, but those Rimjobs hadn't turned pirate first after losing the war. The rep of the 38th Amaris Fusiliers wasn't actually as bad as that of the 141st Amaris Dragoons had been, but in some ways that was just damning them with faint praise. The SLDF had still very much wanted a piece of them after winning the war for their actions on Castor which had included the use of tactical nuclear weapons in civilian areas, which was why of course they had fled to the periphery in a hurry to take up piracy.
There was a school of thought that it had been the reopening of the nuclear genie by Amaris that had led to their far more widespread and devastating use by all sides during the First Succession War. While the Star League had officially put aside the Ares Conventions when it had launched the Reunification War back in the 26th Century, use of WMD, particularly on civilians, was still very much frowned upon which was why the casualties of that war paled beside those incurred in later conflicts. Wars were rarely ever clean, but the Amaris Civil War had heralded an era where they had become dirty beyond imagination.
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===News Conference with SLDF Officers===
"Stefanos Rallis, Irian Media Interstellar" another journalist introduced themselves before asking a question. "Your choice of transportation when conveying Bernard Critchly to Terra certainly raised a few eyebrows, warships, particularly ones that large, are scarce these days. According to the records I've seen the SLS James Sever was lost during the Amaris War. How did it end up very much intact and flying the Niops flag?"
"Looks like somebody did the research, well done." MacArthur replied. "The records you've seen may have indicated she was lost, but she wasn't actually destroyed, just disabled with internal and external damage severe enough that she wasn't able to be repaired by the Star League Navy at the time. We recovered her a while back from a system near Finmark where she had been floating as a derelict and after a lot of work eventually put her back into service."
"Does that mean you have a naval shipyard?" Rallis asked as a follow up, this question causing something of a stir with the other journalists.
"No, if we had we could have built a brand-new Congress from scratch in less than a third of the time it took us to get the James Sever running again" MacArthur told him. "Quite a lot of her systems were actually salvaged from another Congress Class frigate we located that had been hit even harder than she had. Effectively between the two wrecked ships we had just about enough parts for one working frigate that we spent years putting back together."
Wishing that he had grabbed a sandwich from the canteen before heading home Tyson momentarily considered going to get one but decided to watch the rest of the broadcast first. He wasn't that hungry but he was already pretty comfortable in the chair in his quarters, it had originally come from an old dropshuttle and was nicely padded to cope with high-gee acceleration.
"Jane Moore, The Times of London" another reporter interrupted. "Has the Niops Association salvaged any other warships?" she asked.
MacArthur and Jeffries looked at each other. "Well of course we have" Jeffries replied after a pause. "So far we've managed to get forty McKenna and Texas class battleships back running again, not to mention a half dozen Enterprise class supercarriers" he deadpanned. "The High Associator is only days away from signing an executive order that will send our whole fleet on a mission to reconquer the Terran Hegemony. Our plan is to appoint Duke Ian Cameron-Windsor as the new First Lord of the Star League… could you do us a favor and pop into Buckingham Palace when you get home to let him know."
This time everyone in the room laughed, except for Robert MacArthur who was looking at Jeffries disapprovingly. "They never got the Enterprise class ships to work" he said, shaking his head.
"Really? Damn, do you think they might have bought it otherwise" Jeffries asked, looking like he was trying to keep a straight face and almost, but not quite, succeeding.
"Probably not" MacArthur had replied. The exchange between them being so funny Tyson couldn't help but suspect it had been rehearsed. You could get away with a lot of obfuscation if you turned everything into a joke. The mercenary honestly wouldn't have been too surprised at this point if Niops had a few other smaller warships they had recovered squirrelled away, joking about having a fleet of battleships was a smooth way to avoid answering questions about corvettes or the like.
It would certainly help explain why the hell Niops and the 295th had been so quiet during the First Succession War, Tyson reasoned. As well as stockpiling nukes so the Mariks didn't do to them what they did to New Dallas, they were also surreptitiously salvaging every warship they could and emptying every Star League cache they knew of.
Reestablishing HPG contact with the Inner Sphere had waited until Niops was in a position where if the Great Houses tried to lean on them the response would be the flat, 'Come at me Bro', which had always worked for the Taurian Concordat.
You could conquer the Taurian Concordat, hell the Terran Hegemony wearing their Star League hat had actually done it during the Reunification War, but it just wasn't worth the cost in blood and treasure to do it.
"In all seriousness," Jeffries continued on the holovid, "while we wouldn't tell you if we had salvaged any other warships, any serious naval analyst can provide you with an estimate of just how large a fleet a polity our size could realistically crew and maintain" he sagely advised the journalist from the Times. "I will say that the vast majority of our salvage operations over the years was just us collecting spare parts from old hulks that we needed to keep the ships we have running. That said however, I am prepared to reveal that we successfully captured a Royalty Class armed Jumpship of Rim Worlds manufacture from the Blood Rain, effectively their flagship. Unfortunately in that engagement our own flagship, the James Sever, had to riddle her so full of holes before she lowered her colours that we're still in the process of trying to get it fully operational again."
"It's like trying to get hold of parts for an old car. The Terran Hegemony built over two hundred Congress Class frigates, and we know where most of them were lost, so finding spares for one isn't as difficult as it is for some limited-edition custom jalopy built and operated by someone else, like a Royalty for example" MacArthur added for himself.
The journalist from Irian Media Interstellar nodded. "Presumably it's also a little easier for you to keep your Lola III class destroyer running than your Essex II for the same reason?" he asked.
MacArthur nodded though Jeffries looked at the journalist amused. "Okay, you know far too much about this stuff" the diplomat observed. "Did you used to make little plastic models of warships as a kid by any chance?" Jeffries queried wryly.
Being someone that did that as a hobby himself as a boy, although in his case it was battlemechs not warships, Tyson felt somewhat personally aggrieved but judging by their expression the reporter took it in good humour.
"Rebecca McTavish, Donegal Broadcasting Company" a reporter from the Lyran Commonwealth now spoke up. "Can you tell us anything more about the Blood Rain and how Bernard Critchly came to join them?"
"Not much more to tell beyond what Colonel MacArthur already said in his presentation on the Battle of Algenib earlier" Jeffries replied. "The 141st Dragoons fled Terra before the noose closed around them and it appears Critchly bribed them to take him along. Given that they were also a bunch of wanted war criminals with a price on their head he probably thought it was safer to stick with them afterwards than risk associating with less disreputable folks that might turn him in. When the original commander of the Blood Rain retired from piracy Stefani Marcus took over. Her being an actual cousin of Stefan Amaris himself, and named for him no less, apparently gave her the edge in the election. She liked to call herself 'Colonel Marcus', or even the 'Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain', though we mostly just call her 'Inmate' these days as you'd expect."
"Election?" McTavish repeated quizzically.
"Yes, the Blood Rain held an election to choose their new commander, we're given to understand that Critchly also stood himself but recieved hardly any votes." Jeffries replied. "Even other scum think he's scum. Everyone has standards I guess."
"And she's really a cousin of Stefan Amaris?" the Lyran journalist asked.
"Yes, DNA test confirmed it." Jeffries replied, nodding. "She did tell us that despite her not liking Critchly personally that she freely admits he was her most effective company commander when raiding. Unsurprisingly being a murderous, bloodthirsty pirate suited him down to the ground."
"Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life." MacArthur said wryly.
"James Clark, Interstellar News Network, given the claim of the Niops Association to be a de facto, and de jure, continuation of the Terran Hegemony some might be wondering why you didn't come to the aid of the rest of the Hegemony during the dark days of the First Succession War." the reporter for ComStar's own news organisation asked.
"We didn't wade into the fray with our single battlemech division for presumably the same reason Jerome Blake didn't with the eight SLDF divisions at his disposal, that being because we're neither stupid nor insane." Jeffries replied coldly. "If you think that the Terran Hegemony citizens of Niops, Comstock, Francas and Frobisher are indifferent to what has befallen their brothers and sisters in the core worlds of the Hegemony then you are very much mistaken. We were simply in no position to intervene on their behalf."
"I see, and how do you respond to allegations that Niops proved itself merely a puppet of the Free Worlds League by its supply of weaponry to that star-nation that it then used against its other neighbours?" the reporter from INN queried.
"We only made payment in arms for purchases made by us from the Free Worlds League during the ComStar Interdiction because we were unable to do so with C-Bills, we certainly weren't engaging in barter by choice, it's a pain-in-the-ass." Jeffries replied evenly. "ComStar also effectively froze our bank account, one denominated in germanium bars, which was deposited with them at Hednesford, which didn't help matters either, but I guess that's all in the past now. The Niops Association no longer sells or barters weaponry to the Free Worlds League, and we certainly don't give them away either."
"Your germanium reserves do seem quite extensive, care to comment on that?"
"Captured war criminals and pirates swinging pickaxes in germanium mines can be surprisingly productive" MacArthur replied. "The secret is motivation. They know we're motivated to find an excuse to hang them so they don't give us one. Next question please."
Tyson laughed. Deal with Niops long enough and you soon learned they had a very technocratic, generally rational way of doing things. Imposing capital punishment on the worst of the worst might be cathartic, but being sentenced to twenty-five to life of economically productive hard labour instead of being executed still monumentally sucked for the person concerned and was better for the taxpayer.
"Philippe Lefort, Le Figaro. The 295th Division was not a Royal formation but despite that you seem to have a lot of Royal-grade military equipment in your inventory. Was this merely recovered from star League caches or are the rumours true that the Niops Association manufactures such extremely advanced weaponry itself?"
"Both" MacArthur replied. "By which I mean we reverse-engineered Royal equipment that we recovered and put it into low-level production to replace less capable equipment as it wore out."
"We don't have issues with so-called 'lostech' on Niops, though occasionally we do have to figure out something that the Terran Hegemony didn't deem to provide a mere astronomical research colony the blueprints for." Jeffries interjected. "I can give you a less warlike example of our scientists and engineers reverse engineering some tech we never had ourselves too. The Magistracy of Canopus has asked for our assistance in maintaining their Terran-supplied Stasis Tube technology and we have a team taking one apart right now to see how it ticks."
"Interesting. Will you be disseminating that technology for free as you are the J-U Water Purification system and the medical diagnostic equipment?" the reporter from the French newspaper asked curiously.
"That's really a question for the Magistracy, it's still their intellectual property after all, but I doubt my own government would be averse to doing so. It's a non-military medical technology that could potentially save a lot of lives." Jeffries replied.
"I'll try and reach the Magistracy for comment then. On a wider point, I'm sure that many people will be wondering why a self-described minor power in the periphery is simply giving away advanced technology it could readily demand and obtain payment for."
''
"Because there are people throughout the Inner Sphere who are starving because they can't irrigate their crops, and they're dying from diseases that our great-great-grandparents thought they had eradicated forever." Jeffries replied. "We're doing it for the same reason we smash pirates and hunt down war-criminals, because it's the right thing to do and somebody damn well should."''
Jeffries shook his head and sighed. "The Star League used to do these things, it's gone and everyone else is too busy slaughtering each other over where a dotted line on a star-map is drawn to worry about the little guy, or even see the big picture. The reason why every hospital doesn't have a Eligus Medical Diagnoser anymore is because they were made on Saffel, and the Federated Suns and Draconis Combine wrecked the place fighting over it. The reason why all the colonies that depended on Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifiers are falling off the map is because the Free Worlds League devastated the planet where they were made with nuclear weapons just to make sure the Capellan Confederation didn't end up controlling the supply. If you're going to claim you're the rightful heir to the Star League you might want to try acting like the Star League and remember that despite commanding the most powerful military in history it still built more often than it destroyed."
MacArthur nodded. "Somebody needs to step up and attempt to reverse the decline, not just sit back and wait for it to happen, so the Niops Association is stepping up. Maybe we'll fail miserably, let's face it we probably will, but at least we're out there trying."
"Okay so we're maybe a little naïve, utopian even, but we're also technologically advanced and heavily armed so hopefully we'll get away with it." Jeffries added, grinning. "Don't worry, we'll head back home soon returning all you cynics to your regularly scheduled entropic decline into a new dystopian dark age. We'll be roleplaying the Eastern Roman Empire out in the hinterland." he joked as a call-back to something he had said earlier about history not really repeating itself but rhyming on occasion.
Tyson didn't think that the analogy fitted perfectly by any means, but Terra being Rome, the Terran Hegemony being the Western Roman Empire, ComStar being the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages and the Niops Hegemony being the Eastern Roman Empire lined up just well enough to make the historical allusion work.
The Successor States might not be best pleased at being equated to the Goths, Vandals, Alans, Visigoths and whatever, but they had sacked, pillaged and burned enough worlds that Tyson himself thought that if the shoe fits wear it.
Resolving to go get that sandwich after all Sam Tyson turned off the holovid and was already starting to climb out of his chair when his thoughts of pastrami on rye were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Enter" Tyson said loudly, standing up.
The company clerk opened the door and stepped inside holding a letter. "Sorry to disturb you Sir, but the mailman just dropped off an HPG that's come for you" he said, holding it out.
Tyson took the letter and dismissed the clerk who hurried back to their work closing the door behind them. Because only a small minority of people on Galileo as yet had a noteputer that could be connected to their data grid NHCOMNET operated a postal service in town to deliver printed-out HPG's by hand which was a little low-tech for Niops but this was the frontier after all.
The mercenary commander opened the letter assuming it must be from Niops but as he started to read he realised it had come from a lot further away from that, being routed into NHCOMNET from ComStar's own separate network.
Raising his eyebrows when he saw who it was from Tyson read it through twice before stuffing it into his pocket and going to fetch that sandwich while he thought about how he was going to reply.
It wasn't like Tyson's Troublemakers were exactly tight with Bolton's Rangers whose commander had sent the HPG. The two mercenary units had actually fought on different sides during the First Succession War, with the Rangers signing a contract with the Draconis Combine while the Troublemakers did so with the Federated Suns, although they hadn't ever actually come to blows in the field.
They were both former SLDF though, and the SLDF turned mercenary units liked to keep track of each other, partially because they rated each other as dangerous potential foes, generally superior to House regiments, and partially because it bothered them somewhat shooting at each other.
Ever choosing to work for the Dracs wasn't a good look for the Rangers in Tyson's opinion, although just as you'd expect from them the Combine had screwed Bolton's Rangers over with their 'Company Store' policy and a few other things, leading to the Rangers leaving their employ for that of the Duchy of Oriente a few years back.
Their timing to go work for one of the big three member states of the Free Worlds League just before the ComStar Interdiction hadn't been great though, especially given that the Duchy directly bordered the Capellan Confederation.
Just making their way across the Free Worlds League during the Interdiction in order to take up their contract with Niops had been a major pain in the ass for Tyson's Troublemakers, meanwhile Bolton's Rangers had to help deal with a full-scale invasion by angry Capellans looking to exploit the chaotic situation.
There was one thing that most every former SLDF unit knew about Bolton's Rangers, mostly because it was something they went out of their way to tell you. Back when they had been the 208th Hussar Regiment they had fought beside Aleksandr Kerensky right at the end of the Amaris War, literally right beside him.
Unlike most units saying the same they could actually prove it too. They had video footage taken by one of their mechs at the time which showed Kerensky's Orion kicking down the gates of the Presidential Palace on Terra where Amaris was holed up.
It was a good thing that Tyson did know the story because if he hadn't the part of the HPG letter than said 'Turned out we didn't fight in the last battle of the Amaris War after all. Kinda annoying but when we heard we raised a glass to the 295th anyway' would have made less sense.
The part of the letter where Colonel Bolton asked what it was like working for the Niops Association, did Tyson know if they were hiring, and, if so, could he put in a good word, was fairly self-explanatory.
Major Sam Tyson knew something else about Bolton's Rangers, something that almost made up for them working for the Dracs at one time, they still painted their mechs up in SLDF colours and they always wore the Cameron Star next to the insignia of whoever they were working for.
From a personal perspective, being effectively asked for a letter of recommendation by a unit that boasted one of commendation personally signed by Aleksandr Kerensky made Tyson feel pretty pleased with himself too, even though he knew it was basically just because he commanded the only mercenary unit Niops currently had under contract.
For most of the Inner Sphere the Niops Association was still an unknown quantity, if one that had just managed to drastically raise its interstellar profile in a very dramatic fashion. Just finding out that the 'Niops Association Hegemony' already controlled multiple star-systems and was continuing to expand territorially likely surprised a lot of people almost as much as learning that their navy was even more powerful than thought did.
Getting in on the ground floor before everyone else tried to sign up was probably a fortuitous decision, Sam Tyson thought to himself with satisfaction. The Troublemakers weren't nearly as large a mercenary command as Bolton's Rangers, for example, but when negotiating a future contract with Niops they could always point to the fact they had offered their services to the people still flying the Cameron Star first and cash in on that.
As to whether or not Niops might be interested in hiring on any more mercenaries or not at the moment Tyson wasn't sure. They certainly weren't at war with anyone right now, although for a while it had looked like they might be about to go and give the Circinus Federation a hammering, but conversely they were still planting their flag in new places and those places would potentially need a garrison to both keep pirates away and stop that flag being pulled back up by someone else.
Deciding to go and see Major Gao before replying to the HPG, Sam Tyson made sure to remember to grab his wallet on the way out as well as get that sandwich. Gao's truly epic hangover from last week must have faded by now and he might accept being bought a drink again.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : In case you've forgotten Galileo is what the planet Pompey is called in this story (instead of the Marian Hegemony naming everything after famous Romans we have Niops naming everything after famous astronomers). Pompey was known for exporting diamonds and fire opals and while the name is different the geology is the same. Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in italy hence the capital of the planet being named that. Bit of trivia, the UHF transmission tower on top of the NHCOMNET station on Galileo has a noticeable lean, this is deliberate.Like Tyson's Troublemakers, Bolton's Rangers was a former SLDF unit that stayed behind during Kerensky's Exodus and became a mercenary regiment (in the latter's case they were originally the 208th Hussar Regiment of the SLDF). The Rangers initially worked for the Draconis Combine but got screwed over (the Combine's rigorously implemented Company Store policy seems very much intended to do just that) and so they went to work for the Duchy of Oriente instead (part of the free Worlds League). In canon Bolton's Rangers signed up with the Duchy permanently in 2845 becoming the 5th Fusiliers of Oriente regiment but that hasn't happened yet (and won't).The Eridani Light Horse and the Crater Cobras might be the most famous former SLDF units turned merc that still express some loyalty to the Star League but they are by no means the only ones. Bolton's Rangers were extremely proud of having been with Aleksandr Kerensky when he put an end to Amaris and retained SLDF colour schemes on their mechs even when they signed up with the Duke of Oriente as House troops.Incidentally we're now at chapter fifty and well over 280,000 words (roughly three novel's worth of text). Nice to see plenty of people still reading at this point!
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Chapter 50