IWTTD Chpt 1

==If We Turn To Dust - Chapter 1 -==
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===Reflecting about the Past===
HILL OF VISION, VAIVAR STEPPE
FINMARK, RIFT APPROACHES, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
APRIL 12, 3027
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There had been a time when I didn’t believe in visions. When I’d’ve been polite to a tribal holy man and witch doctor, but no more than that.
 
The man across the fire from me, both of us sitting cross legged and wrapped in blankets against the chill wind, grinned at me. He’d had dental work done in the years since I’d met him; the gaps had been filled, and his remaining original teeth were visibly cleaner and straighter. He wasn’t all that old - I knew he was somewhere in his fifties - but he looked older, bent, seamed, and weathered by decades as a hardscrabble nomad. “You’re thinking about how things have changed.” he pronounced in his people’s language, which after centuries of tribal life and oral tradition was barely recognizable as being descended from English.
 
I replied, haltingly, in the same tongue. “Yes. Is day for… thinking of past.”
 
“A day for worrying, you mean,” he said, teasingly. “But that’s not a bad thing. It’s good for a leader to worry. Worry of what might go wrong. Worry of the consequences of what has already been done. Worry of the consequences of what is to be done. Just don’t ever let that stop you from acting.”
 
I giggled, and looked up at the sky. It was late afternoon, with the sun still clearly over the western horizon at just the level to start shining into your eyes; most of the sky was clear, save for a single fresh contrail and a scatter of cirrus, but there was an isolated storm building to the south. “That is good advising.”
 
“Well, advising is one of the things a shaman is for.” he said.
 
“Advising, healing, and…” I trailed off, rubbing my thumb along the soft intricacy of my blanket’s weave. I didn’t like thinking about the last part.
 
“And spirit-speaking,” he said easily. “Which bothers you because of the worry about what that great spirit of yours, that Guardian, has asked you to be.”
 
I’d never discussed or explained how that worked, with him. I’d explained it to the Lyran Intelligence Corps specialists who debriefed me, years and years ago, about everything I remembered of another lifetime, where the entire universe I lived in was a cheesy science fiction game franchise, because they’d asked and I’d volunteered to be hopped up on enough happy drugs to spill my darkest shame without a blink. But knowing that some incomprehensibly powerful entity, as close as I’d ever see to a god, had switched my soul with another volunteer in an effort to butterfly a better fate for humanity in both of our worlds…
 
That was terrifying, as much for its implications as its facts. Though I took a little comfort in the fact that he’d asked permission, at least.
 
“I will say again, then,” he said, “that we trust in our Ancestors… and the Ancestors have said to trust in the Guardian.” Another flash of humor made him grin. “And have they been wrong yet? These teeth of mine, and my grandson whose club foot was made good by your doctors that he walk straight? That the summers grow greener, and the winters gentler? Whether you were sent for us or not, or by whom, we have done well on your coming.”
 
“...That is true.” I had to admit.
 
He sobered. “And so I asked that you come here, because in that discomfort of yours, you listen clearly. To speak clearly between the living and the dead asks much of both - and we have spoken. The work you’ve done until now was well done… but it’s not finished.”
 
I shifted automatically to English, not the modern interstellar form of the thirty-first century that my body had learned and the whole of me used every day, but the now almost Chaucerian dialect of my soul’s childhood. “Well begun, half done.” Then back to the Vaivar’s dialect. “Is much work, always.”
 
“There are many kinds of work,” he said. “This… well, the spring wind smells of snow, and it’s time to sharpen your spear.”
 
Not so long ago, a late or snowy spring that came on one of the Vaivar tribes meant desperation and hunger, meant stretching food supplies to last longer and longer. And if they couldn’t - it could mean starvation, or war to claim the reserves of a rival.
 
“...Yes,” I agreed. “I will become ready.”
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===Admiring the Sites===
CASTLE BLACKWING, ALGANIK
FINMARK, RIFT APPROACHES, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
MAY 10, 3027
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“When I saw reports of what you’d done here, I thought it was just an indulgence.” Katrina Steiner, Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth, etc. etc. said as she stepped off the now idling 5th Royal Guards' Karnov. I shook hands with my boss, then she waved at the landscaped area of browned grass, greyed moss, and evergreens that surrounded us. “But this is really lovely.”
“It’s really just slapping some landscaping on top of the practical aspects,” I said, while her personal security detail filtered out and linked up with the larger detachments already present. “The entire hill is actually an example of House Amaris being supervillains. Fort Ranson was built as a hardened arcology, to provide ‘security forces’ for Old Alganik and the rest of the planet, and when the garrison rebelled, the Amaris of the day decided not to dig them out. They tapped a lava vent, built a viaduct to channel it…” I gestured to the south, where the collapsed wreckage could still be seen, “...and buried the entire fortress in basalt and obsidian, leaving the rebels to die.”
Katrina considered the fate of those men. “That’s ghastly,” she said.
 
“That’s the Amaris for you. Stefan’s the famous one, but he actually only stands out by scaling up his family’s usual.
 
“We moved the remains to a plot towards the end of the ridge, overlooking the water; services, consecration, the whole lot,” I said, waving west towards the end of the fjord as we started to walk. “We don’t have nearly as much of a secret police institution as they did, so there’s enough space that when we converted the place to office space, we had enough for most projections of the entire Rift’s needs for the next few centuries. The spire…” a jagged crag of apparently upheaved rock, looming ahead of us through the spruce boughs, “...is actually new construction, clad in more rock over reinforced cermacrete, with garrison reserves inside. Too tall for a mech to jump up, so we put the house at the very top… and that style was always designed to stop infantry, now wasn’t it?”
 
She laughed. “The climb up would be even worse than the walls.” she said.
 
“We’ve actually had some rock-climbers ask to have a go at it in good weather,” I said. “And we’ve let the ones that have security clearances try. They usually make it, but we’ve had to rescue a couple.”
 
When we emerged from the woods - such as they were, the trees were still young - Katrina paused, taking in the pond and the waterfall pouring down the side of the spire from about a hundred feet up. Then she looked around again, taking in the growing landscape being made of what had been the arcology roof and the piles of lava that had covered it. “This entire area is one big garden,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
 
“Sort of,” I answered. “We’ve got playing fields and that landing pad and some other stuff that was placed where it’d go best. But everything in between, and here at the base of the spire, yeah, that’s garden, with walking and riding paths. Brought a designer in from New Kyoto to supervise.”
 
The Lower Gatehouse was surrounded on three sides by the water features, with a mostly-decorative bridge leading across the pond to it. Equipment and the like came up elevators from the main fortress, not through the Gatehouses. For that matter, in practice, almost nobody used the switchbacked road that climbed steeply up the sides of the crag, shadowed by overhangs and guard posts and too narrow for mechs to find purchase on it unless they were in my wife’s skill bracket.
 
Climbing a hundred and sixty vertical feet of ten degree grade was a pain in the ass.
 
Which was why the 3/4ths-hidden lift had been installed, of course. Technically, it was an inclined railway, lifted by cables from a powered top station, but at over seventy degrees incline, it was closer to an elevator.
 
Rising above the tree level - and the Gatehouse’s roof, which was actually higher right now, with how young the trees were and the limited amount of growing they’d been able to do with the climate still so cold - revealed the valley around the Castle - a long, twisting glacier-carved one, vertical-sided and with a slowly sloping bottom. When we’d started construction, the ocean had been nowhere in sight, but as the temperature slowly climbed and Finmark’s icecaps melted again, the waters had returned. Now, the glitter of waves showed at the very downhill end of the section we could see, creeping up again towards the Star League-era shoreline, just short of the foot of the hill.
 
The New City of Alganik was already well started, safely above the predicted line of the new shore, and seawalls and water sealing measures around each building had been put in place in the Old City, whose streets would be flooded. The combination was modern, and the brutal order of the Rim Worlds street-plan was easy to pick out, at this distance, from the more subdued grid of the New City.
 
Of the barely metal-working reindeer-herding tribes that had been all that the loss of Finmark’s terraforming left of a thriving civilized world, Alganik showed no sign. They still existed, of course; I’d done my best to make sure that they’d continue to do so, on their own terms.
 
Time would tell.
 
Katrina, meanwhile, was smiling. “It’s quite a view,” she said softly, not noticing the dark turn of my thoughts.
 
“Yeah,” I agreed, and pushed the moment away from my mind. “People like that idiot from Loxley complain about how fake it all is, but it’s not meant to be real, it’s meant to be beautiful.”
 
“And you’ve made it to work on a human scale, rather than a palatial one - deliberately,” she judged.
 
“Everything is ultimately on a human scale,” I said. “It’s important to remember that, and where better to start than the place you live?”
 
She laughed. “I envy you that.” she said.
“I’ve seen your desk,” I answered dryly, and got another laugh. The desk in question would have gotten a failing grade in any woodworking class, but it had been a gift from her late husband and the Kell brothers. “One of the most frustrating things about this is keeping in mind that I’m establishing traditions, so I have to think about every damned little thing.”
 
“Oh, you innocent darling.” she cooed, and then we both sobered as the lift car’s door slid open.
 
The camera crews and very carefully vetted newsies that hadn’t been present at the landing pad where I first greeted her were waiting. The lift opened out onto one side of a small open plaza, opposite where the terminally switchbacked road finally rose to its end. The Upper Gatehouse loomed over one side of the plaza, and the valley was spread out on the other side, behind us.
 
As Katrina’s publicity director had put it when he laid out the itinerary, the vista of black stone and white snow and the new city would be a perfect backdrop for showing the two of us - her, average height but seeming taller and slim about it, pale blonde and dressed in dark Steiner Blue, hair and skirts fluttering in the wind; me, already short and curvy and wearing flats to her heels, my black hair in a high tail so that it caught the breeze in a single streamer rather than a fan, wearing a suit in the white with matching cape (dramatically blown, for the occasion) that had half-accidentally become a personal signature.
 
Posing without seeming to was a job skill for both of us; I covered by expositing: “The Gatehouses aren’t really part of the security arrangements as such, though the designs are functional enough. The Lower Gatehouse is mostly set up and intended as a visitor’s center, since the plateau-” not the best word for it, when it was the roof of an arcology, but as close as you could come after the place was landscaped “-is open to the Hill’s inhabitants at least. The Upper-” I gestured.
 
“A flight control tower?” Katrina guessed.
 
“That’s over on the other side of the plateau.” I said. “No, it and the other minor towers are each a guest suite. This one has the best view, but it’s the least secure. Your detail picked the southwest tower, which is the most secure.”
 
“Of course they did.” she said tiredly.
 
I laughed and led her inside, through the gatehouse tunnel, chattering all the while about how each of the towers had an independent physical plant and staff quarters in the bottom three floors, then had the actual apartments on the upper three. The gatehouse, the same height, added an extra two floors of security, including no less than four Class Twenty autocannon set to sweep the plaza we’d just walked across, but had double the floor plan to create the same amount of guest space.
 
Creating a naturalistic shape for the underlying ‘crag’ had meant a ridge structure, and a long and narrow hexagon shape to the castle itself, with the keep at one of the ending points and the gatehouse at the other. The yard in between them had a playground and a rock feature that looked like it should have been an extension of the ‘ridge’ the castle was built on, with more gardening and a pavillion.
 
“You’re very proud of what you’ve built.” Katrina observed as I talked her ear off and this time I just grinned.
 
“I didn’t build this,” I said. “I mean, I’m proud of the way our government and courts are coming together, and seeing off the pirates and what my people have been able to start building on those, of course I am. But the hill and the castle, even the city, really? They’re Sophitia’s doing.”
I grinned at her, and waited until we were in earshot of where the lady herself was waiting with our youngest daughter in her arms and the older two fidgeting next to her. “I have the best wife in the universe.”
 
I loved to watch Soph blush like that.
 
The official blueprints called the little room we led Katrina up to the Breakfast Room, but in practice it was the ‘little dining room’. The large dining room, the Great Hall, filled one of the narrow ends of the courtyard, with the keep looming behind and above it. Overlooking about a thousand feet of sheer drop down to dusty valley-bottom that would be ocean breakers in twenty years, the Breakfast Room had one of the better views in the place, and most of its outer wall was window after window looking out on it.
 
Katrina Steiner wasn’t the kind of person to look around at something she approved of and go ‘Awww yeah, now that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout’, but there was a distinct whiff of the same sentiment in the air around her as she took in the decor. “Is the entire interior in this style?” she asked.
 
“I’m sorry.” Sophitia said. “I know it’s not very impressive, but…”
 
Our daughter Odelia looked up from failing to eat the honestly tasty-looking concoction of peas and potatoes on her high chair and reached up to pat Sophitia on the cheek. “Don’ be sad,” she said.
 
Katrina laughed. “That’s hardly how I meant it.” she said. “In fact, I quite like it. It’s so rare to see a space that’s graceful and, well, it is impressive, without being deliberately overwhelming or gaudy or both.”
 
“That’s just because it’s Tharkad and-” I started to tease.
 
“You, watch your tongue.” the Archon said, pointing a quelling finger at me before I could go off on a comedic spiel about how little taste her ancestors had had.
 
In deference to the presence of children, I didn’t stick the item in question out at her.
 
Fiona, our oldest, was old enough to look worried at the apparent threat - but she giggled when Katrina turned her head as though ‘dismissing’ me, and winked at her with the eye I wasn’t supposed to be able to see.
 
Baby Clair stirred in her carrier, and I leaned over to beat the nurse to scooping her up before she could start actually crying. It was easier than usual, since for this dinner it was only us three adults and the girls; the nannies were waiting outside with the security teams.
 
A moment later, a thought and memory struck me and I freed an arm to grab my napkin and tuck it between her and my chest.
 
When I looked up… Well. I have seen Katrina Steiner, Queen Bitch of the Commonwealth, go gooey, and it is even more terrifying than you think.
 
What she was saying, though, was directed at Soph. “You can’t have had an easy time arranging the woodcarvings, though.”
 
Oh, no.
Sophitia ignored my mental begging. “All of that was done by local craftsmen, actually. There aren’t very many of them, there were only about fifteen thousand people living on the planet when the terraforming teams arrived, but they do some really quite lovely textile and inlay work.” She glanced at me, then added the worst part: “Ash hates to think about it. We had a delegation of the Vaivar shamans meet us when we landed for the first time, and they announced she was the holy savior sent by their gods to lead their people into the promised lands.”
 
I tried to ignore her, and my own blushing, by concentrating on Clair. It didn’t work.
 
Eventually, I admitted, “They knew things about my past that LIC never asked about.”
 
“Ah,” Katrina said, and I saw her sit back in her chair. “Yes, that is disturbing.”
 
Come to think of it, after the way I’d dropped my own outside context knowledge here, eight years ago, she would understand the innate weirdness.
 
“A lot of the planetary legal code, we put together by sitting them down with the experts you sent out,” I said. “Because of, well, y’know, they were willing to welcome us, but we’ve been trying to manage the way all these changes end up happening to them, so that their kids still have a society to call their own, rather than just being folded into the Commonwealth and vanishing. Their hunters are all in neck-deep with the ecology management people from Renaissance, learning wildland management.”
 
“The Vaivar are… herders, I thought?” Katrina said. “I’d have thought that they’d prefer fishing, since the oceans were in better shape.”
 
“Sort of halfway between herders and hunter-gatherers,” I said. “And as for the coasts, well, the biggest surviving predator species is a divergence of the terran leopard seal - they absolutely will go for humans, and the most common filter-feeder is a native fishalike that’s smart enough to believe in vengeance and ‘do unto others first’. And more than big enough to smash any boat they could build with the amount of wood they had.”“And by decorating your seat in their styles, you ensure that they’re in a position to benefit from the inevitable fashions.” Katrina concluded.
 
“We’ve licensed each tribe’s designs as intellectual property.” I agreed, “held by sovereign wealth funds, and then use rights are leased out to manufacturers. Plus handmade for the elite markets.”
 
Katrina raised her glass of wine in a toast. “And everyone wins.”
 
Sophitia giggled. “Except for Ash, because Claire’s just spit up on her.”
 
I looked down and, sure enough, the cover I’d tucked over my chest was covered in baby barf. I laughed and reached for a cleanup cloth.
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===Touring with the Boss===
LYRAN OCEANIC SHIP USEFUL BURDENS, UNDER WAY
FINMARK, RIFT APPROACHES, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
MAY 11th, 3027
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“I don’t know.” I said.
 
Katrina raised an eyebrow at me.
 
“In the worst case,” I explained, “I have secure copies of the location data in my vaults and backup caches, but right now, I, personally, have no actual need to know where the site is. I just have to sign the authorizations, right? Aside from the survey and navigation crews for the supply ships, nobody knows, and I know you know how hard we vet them. We run Kwangjong-ni the same way.”
 
“My reports indicated you had more than a hundred thousand people involved,” Katrina said. “That can’t make the concealment easy.”
 
“Sort of. We distributed each of the component plants - microchips, structure rails, armor presses, and so on - to different sites, with dead drops in the middle so that each submarine crew only knows the location of their site and their dead drop. Different crews for pickup and dropoff, too. Not all the sites are underwater; a couple are landside bunkers with more or less ‘open’ delivery via tunnels, either because the incoming volume was too much or because the processes are simple enough to replace easily,” I explained. “But yeah, overall, between the different sites, we’re employing about a hundred thousand people directly, another seventy-five in dependents, and about fifty in support roles like food service and basic education.”
 
I waved at the metal walls around us. “Thing is… how much feedback are you and I getting about where we are right now?”
 
The intercom over our heads bing’d for attention and a voice announced, ((“The vessel has arrived and passengers may begin disembarking.”))
 
“Besides that.” I said, annoyed.
 
Fortunately, my boss’s opportunity to tease me was cut short by introducing her to the plant managers, who’d come to meet us at the airlock. I knew all of them already, of course, and Katrina could probably charm her way through a meet-and-greet like this literally in her sleep. Pretty soon we were out onto one of the catwalks that ran down the length of the five-kilometer tunnel, looking down over the moving production line and the rail-carried inspection cabs. Even with the earplugs and the sound-deadening tiles that the inside of the tunnel was fitted with, the noise was epic.
 
We walked the first part of the line, watching workers in teams lift hundred-kilo spars in place against preset forms and then tack weld them in place, then do the same again after the line had advanced to the next chassis, then moving on ourselves to see the main welding team secure those same bars into the distinctive polygonal cages of battlemech internal structure. Connectors and brace panels went on next, then brackets that linked those things to all the other elements that would make the mech actually work.
 
And then a klaxon sounded and the entire line stopped, workers swearing tiredly then setting their tools down and stepping back. We turned off and into a monitor room, overlooking the plant floor, right before the first of the actuator mounting stations.
 
“...Only a hundred thousand workers?” Katrina said.
 
“About thirty thousand, at this site,” I answered. We both knew that that was as many direct employees as Defiance Industries used on all of Hesperus II. “Right now, we’re only working two shifts out of a planned four, because an operation like this is as much a matter of institutional knowledge and training as an elite regiment. We’re working as much or more to find bugs and problems as we are to produce mechs. Every problem is something we have to stop the entire line for and study, figure out how to clear or deal with and ideally keep from coming back. But as time goes by, we find fewer new ones and get better at dealing with or avoiding old ones.”
 
“If it weren’t for other reports, I’d have been content with four mechs a month.” she said.
 
“You’re talking about the tuning yard?” I said. “Right now, when we’re running which is maybe half the time, we’re producing more like four a week. But one of the problems with human labor is that, even if the parts are interchangeable, the combination isn’t as precise as an automated factory.”
 
“Like assembling a new mech from spares in a mechbay,” she said. “It needs to be adjusted, broken in.”
 
“Exactly,” I said. “So every mech needs to be hand-tuned before it’s ready for delivery and service, and that factor was one of the things that nobody thought of going into this project. I’ve had most of our qualified techs concentrating on training new teams, so that rate is also a lot lower than it will be.”
 
“And also lower than the numbers actually built.”
 
“And also lower than what we’ve built,” I agreed. “Geometric progression being what it is, that’ll change, call it a year, maybe two at the outside at this rate. And that’s with spinning up the other two shifts and going to full rate across all of them.”
 
Katrina Steiner nodded and looked me square in the eyes. “And once that’s been done? How many mechs can you deliver? No more of your hedging and conservatism now.”
 
I didn’t need to glance at Feinster, the plant head. We’d talked about it often enough and in enough depth. “I’ll guarantee one mech per day,” I said. “Two might be doable, but I have doubts how sustainable it would be.”The groundcar plant he’d run for Avanti had been capable of scaling up to build a new two-ton vehicle every five minutes, though they’d rarely run at that level for lack of demand. Even the tank plant he’d started setting up for us could manage one hull every eight hours, give or take. But mechs were fiendishly complicated, both in assembling and in needing vast amounts of precisely-linked chips and circuitry that were… troublesome… to set up for.
 
“Can you scale the circuit supply faster than the main assembly?” she asked.
 
I felt a trickle of ice water down my spine. She was sounding like… “Yes. We couldn’t go to full production tomorrow, but within a month or two. Why, are Defiance’s new plants behind schedule?”
 
“Yes,” Katrina Steiner said. “They have been. But three months ago, the latest Combine deep raid had a meeting engagement with the Fifth Rift Regulars. We suppressed the information, hoping that they wouldn’t realize the significance, but we’ve begun to see reports that the DCMS is assigning increased responsibility to their front with us.”
 
“Well… shit.” I said.
 
She nodded, all whimsy gone. “We knew, of course, that our schedule for the new factories was ambitious, and in other circumstances it would be no more than an annoyance. Defiance, Coventry, and the others have already begun to prepare for full production. We’ll ship these ‘untuned’ mechs of yours to forward depots for finishing.”
 
I grimaced. “I was hoping to avoid turning into Quikscell,” I complained… No, to be honest, I whined. Then I waved it off. “Never mind. Needs must prevail when the Devil drives. Let me make a couple of calls and I’ll get the circuit thing started, and then we can start working out how to ship them where they’re needed.”
 
“How many mechs will that be?” Katrina asked.
“One hundred, one-ten maybe. I don’t get daily updates on the tuning teams,” I said. “I figure it shouldn’t be any trouble fitting them into the Patton shipments.”
 
Unlike the Chameleon line we were overlooking through monitor booth windows, the production line for the Lyran Commonwealth’s first omni-tank had been fairly straightforward to set up.
Omni-tech was the combination of three big, individually useful technologies. The simplest one was standardized and redundant connections and ammo-supply runs for weapon hardpoints, a concept that the SLDF had spent most of its history working towards in a haphazard kind of way, finally culminating in the Mercury. For our Pattons - which were fifteen tons heavier than the ‘canon’ one I remembered and driven by fuel cell engines besides - we’d been careful to design the mounting racks so that the Clan-standard pods in Cranston Snord’s files would fit… but the pods we had designed ourselves would require, um, substantial modification to fit into a Clan rack.
 
Next, and a complete nightmare for even the tank teams, let alone the fighter and mech development people, was the way omni-units were put together. The Chameleons we’d just seen were conventionally arranged - standardized materials, welded together nice and solid. Structure welded to actuators welded to myomer mounts, and armor mounting racks welded onto those with individual panels’ backing plates welded on top.
 
Each of the standard mounting points was designed to take a carefully measured amount of load, with other concerns, like weight, access, and removal, being distinctly secondary. Making them easy to cut away and remove meant making each connection point much lighter, and therefore weaker. Which meant that you needed more of them for a given amount of strength, which meant finding places for all those redundant points and designing them to take incoming stresses evenly rather than concentrating and ripping off in turn. Which changed literally everything about the design, by the time you accounted for access measures for all of them.
 
Yeah, doing that was just as much of a colossal pain as you think, and finally explained to me why omni-unit chassis elements were fixed at the design stage - the cascading of every alteration made was almost unmanagable on the drawing board. Somebody asking a frontline or depot technician to deal with it would be murdered with a wrench inside the week, Trueborn or not.
 
When the Coyotes had created the first Omnimechs, of course, they’d had to solve the third technological element, a control and tracking system capable of adapting modularly to whatever weapons you stuffed in it without bluesceening and horking bits of half-digested driver software all over itself. No mean feat, as any Windows or Linux user can tell you, but fortunately, the factories that the Wolf's Dragoons had helped Blackwell set up on New Valencia included Clanspec Badger IFVs - which were tiny and wimpy for omni-vehicles, but still used the software base we needed.
 
But the upside was that designing and assembling vehicles, including ones that could use big gangs of fuel cells rather than fusion engines, was a great deal simpler than building mechs with the same technologies, so we’d been able to get the more conventional Patton production line in operation a year and a half ago. An individual fuel cell was a tricky bit of kit, but they were small, which greatly eased the process of dealing with them in a way that just wasn’t possible for fusion reactors.
 
Other planets, elsewhere in the Commonwealth, were building them, too - Finmark wasn’t even the largest single production line, nor the first - but we’d gotten the Armaments Corporation of the Rift in on the ground floor, and by acquiring Avanti and their expertise with Henry Ford lines, we’d given ourselves a niche in the partnership as the ones designing the process.
 
“Arcori’s cooperation is appreciated,” Katrina said. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m going to be forced to ask more from you.”
 
I gave her a worried look - that tone of voice from her rarely meant anything good - then sighed. “All right,” I said. “Hit me.”
 
“I’m going to need you to take command of one of the frontline assault forces,” the Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth said.
“...You’re going to have to unpack that one for me.” one of her three most powerful vassals answered.
 
“There are two reasons,” Katrina said. “First, I have exactly eleven people available to me in any capacity who have commanded more than a single regiment in an assault on a defended world. Four months ago I had fourteen, but that was before a stroke, a cancer diagnosis, and a combat death on Symington. Six of them have major staff postings that will be… difficult to replace. And at last intelligence, we have five target worlds in the first wave with multiple regiments posted to them.”
 
I didn’t bother protesting that my formal education in the military sciences amounted to jack and squat; even in the famously over-political and dandified command structure of the LCAF, my part in the assault on St. Ives earned respect.
 
“And you want experienced commanders riding herd on the multi-brigade forces hitting them,” I concluded.
 
She nodded. “In addition… Selvin will be on Tamar, and Margaret-” Margaret Aten had become the Duchess of Skye more or less right on schedule, “-on Skye, of course, making them both reasonably available to deputize for political duties in Rasalhague or Dieron, but the Benjamin front would be a bit out of the way for either of them. I know that leaving your daughters to nannies and their grandfather will be difficult, but…”
 
“I don’t think, under the circumstances, that Soph will even want to come to the front.” I said. “She never really enjoyed going to war in the first place, and the kids should have at least one of their mothers around…”
 
This time I was the one who trailed off. I’d never seen Katrina make an ‘oh shit’ face before, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
 
“...Katrina?” I asked.
 
Give her credit, she hesitated only a second or two before she said, “Sophitia has already asked me for a recommendation letter to the Fifth Royals.”
 
The Lyran Commonwealth had five regiments titled as Royal Guards; four of them, the First, Second, Third, and Fifth, were recruited from and specifically associated with the member states - in order, Donegal, Skye, Tamar, and the Rift. The Fourth Royal Guards, recently reconstituted out of Helm, were explicitly intended to symbolize the entire Commonwealth. Technically, all of them were supposed to be invitation only, but a woman who’d been Champion of Solaris would find that pretty much a formality.
 
Of course, she hadn’t breathed a word about wanting to to me, so…
 
“Oh,” I said. I took a moment to think, to try to plan. My first impulse was a flat, absolute denial. It was bad enough, but manageable, if one of us left - the girls would still have a parent, who’d be able to take care of them, make sure that they knew that whoever had left still loved them. Sophitia and I had braced ourselves for that, if not for… for whatever was actually happening on her side.
 
But the same thing that had made that a real possibility, my own duty to the Rift and the larger Commonwealth, was still happening. In theory, I could burn a lot of the favors I’d built up with Katrina and stay home with the kids… but that would do a lot to constrain my options meeting other problems, later on, and in all honesty, saying that Katrina’s reasons for wanting it didn’t have a point - a point that would directly impact the lives of at the very least all of the thousands of troops involved - would be false modesty.
 
I gritted my teeth and accepted the inevitable. “I’ll still do it. But I’m… gonna need to talk to her, I guess.”
 
What the hell was going on?
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===The conversation you didn't want to happen===
CASTLE BLACKWING, ALGANIK
FINMARK, RIFT APPROACHES, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
MAY 12th, 3027
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After being together for eight years and more, Sophitia and I didn’t need actual words to exchange an agreement that we needed to talk and would do so after the kids were in bed. I spent most of the evening nervously working up dozens of increasingly absurd disaster scenarios in my head, and then forcing myself to dismiss each of them.
 
It wasn’t until that had happened that I worked up my courage enough to start. “Katrina said that you’d applied to the Fifth Royals.” I said.
 
“I’d… been looking for a way to tell you,” she admitted, glancing aside in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up in alarm. More than it was already, I mean. “But… I wouldn’t have expected the Archon to… bring up my contacting her.”
 
“She’s called me up for… Well, it looks like the big Combine offensive will be this year, rather than in three or four,” I said. “And, well, that means we’ll both be away from the girls.”
 
“I can probably.” she started to say, then visibly bit it down and slapped herself across the cheek.
 
“Soph?” I asked, still more worried because that hadn’t been a joking hit, she’d used real force, showing red all across her face.
 
“I have to go.” she said.
 
I bit down the argument that one of us needed to stay with the girls, and I didn’t exactly have a choice. “Why?” I asked, as gently as I could.
 
“It’s… I’m trapped into being somebody I’m not, somebody I can’t afford to be.” she said.
 
“Soph, I don’t, I don’t want to…” I floundered, trying to find the words for how much I wanted to support her, to help her be happy on her own terms.
 
She interrupted. “I know! I know that it’s not something you want to do, it’s… It’s not you, it’s me. It’s in my head, it’s me being broken. That’s why I have to go, go someplace I can’t just turn around and decide to come back from, where I can be just me.”
 
Wait, was she… what?
 
“What?” I said.
 
“I… I need us to, to spend some time apart,” she said. “I’m doing a terrible job explaining this. I wish… you deserve to have me do this properly, but if I stop… I won’t start again. I have to go. She...” she bit herself off again, shaking her head sharply.
 
Oh, god, she was.
 
“You’re… leaving?” I said. Croaked. My eyes were blurring and something was in my throat. “Not, just deploying, but…”
 
“It was supposed to be… be for a year or so. But that was before… Well,” she said, and I could see her wave vaguely, taking in the entire looming war. “I’m sorry. I love you. And… I know that you, and Papa, would take care of Fi, and Del, and Claire. He will, even without us, without her here.
 
“So… Goodbye.” she said, and was gone, running.
 
“What?” I repeated to the empty room.
 
What the fuck?
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===The Goodbyes as ships set sail===
CASTLE BLACKWING, ALGANIK
FINMARK, RIFT APPROACHES, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
MAY 14th, 3027
----
 
Katrina was leaving, and Sophitia was going with her. I’d said fond and tearful goodbyes, as appropriate, and so had the girls. I’d be following later, once I had the Rift government set up for caretaking and a command circuit together to whip the Argo out to Baxter.
 
It was a sign of my mood that that border world’s name had none of its usual power to bring a smile to my face.
 
I’d stayed out of the way as Sophitia said goodbye to our daughters, and poured my sleepless energy into the preparations - and, after the dropship lifted, into comforting them in their confusion.
 
Christ, at these ages, this was going to be so hard on them. A spark of fury caught at the back of my throat, in the middle of the shroud of grief and depression, despite my best conscious effort to push it aside.
 
It wasn’t Sophitia’s fault she hadn’t known I’d be leaving until it was too late.
 
But, the bitter me whispered back, she hadn’t sworn any oath yet, had she?
 
Between one thing and another, I hadn’t been in my office since my initial review around breakfast, and when I got back a little before dark, I found a sealed letter waiting, centered on my blotter… With my name written on it in Sophitia’s handwriting.
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Ash,
 
I’m sorry. I know that I did a terrible job explaining what I’ve been thinking and feeling these last few weeks. You deserved better - Fiona and Odelia and Claire all deserved better of me. I love you all dearly, and I dearly want all of you to be happy. But this isn’t just driven by the feelings that have been haunting me these last few months, but things that I’ve known and feared about myself for most of my life.
 
You’ve tried to be kind about Mama for my sake and for Papa’s, but I know that you think that she’s a monster. That you’re willing to become so angry for my sake worries me to some extent, but it also makes me happy and tells me you love me in ways clearer than any words. But even after all the years pass and even with everything we do, all of us are in some way forever the children we were, carrying their fears and feelings forward through our lives. I’ve realized more and more that in my case, that child knows that if she doesn’t cater to every whim of those she loves, they will never love her in return. Doctor Markham’s advice for dealing with this in our therapy sessions has always been to establish boundaries around my own desires and will, to take a stand for what I need and am and choose to be.
 
I think that the greatest progress I’ve made in the years that I’ve been seeing him is that I actually do believe can trust you to respect those boundaries. I can believe it in my heart as well as merely with my waking mind. But this is so much more difficult when I must draw those lines around the real needs of our children, and your position and all those who must depend on it. There are details that Doctor Markham doesn’t have the clearances to know about, and many others that are far outside his experience - I can’t rely on him to tell me, even if it wasn’t ultimately a choice that rested on my shoulders.
 
For a while, I hoped that simple persistence would be enough to establish that understanding, but only a week or so before the Archon’s visit my mother came to visit.
======================================================================================================
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I stopped reading for a moment. That I hadn’t known; I hadn’t seen her and Sophitia had never breathed a word of it. For a moment, I wrestled with the temptation to just set the letter down and head out to wreak bloody vengeance, but if it wasn’t too late, it could wait a little bit longer.'
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...came to visit. In a lot of ways it might have been wiser to turn her away, but it would have been too cruel to not even let her meet the girls. Seeing her hold them gently reminded me of the good moments of my own childhood, and I let my guard down. When we started talking about other things, it was easy, at first. But I realized before too long that I was agreeing to everything she demanded, just as I always had as a child.
 
I felt so horribly trapped in that moment. Everything I had done and found in the years in between fell away and I was at her mercy again. It took all my strength to promise to speak to her again so that she would just leave. I told the staff to turn her away if she came again, and return anything she sent, and asked them not to mention it unless you asked. I hoped that that would be the end of it. 
Of course it wasn’t. After that day, every time you asked something of me, and every time our daughters asked, I was instantly back in that room, trapped behind the glass and with nowhere to turn. Could I break out? How should I break out? Should I break out at all?
Writing this letter after I’ve committed myself, I know that I’m running away. But at the same time, I’m running to a place that offers me the only hope that I can think of. If there is one thing consistent about military life, it is that its limits and constraints are clear. Intrusive, by most standards, but clear, and I think that if I’m going to be the mother our daughters need, the wife you deserve, I have to find some clear ground to stand in.
 
I can only hope that I’m right to think that our combined absence will be less harm for them than having a broken woman for a mother. I can only hope that your love will be strong enough to forgive me running from you in such a cowardly way. I can only hope that my love for you will be strong enough to drive me through as I fight with myself.
I love you, and I’m sorry.Still and always yours,Sophitia
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