GblaRCS Chpt 30

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 30 -==
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"Not long after we landed at the largest settlement, Camp McEvedy, aerial recon found signs of human life over at Fartown settlement on the other end of the continent. Leaving Major Gao to investigate Camp McEvedy further we relocated the dropship to Fartown where we met our first group of locals who seemed not too sure if they should feel really happy to see us or really mad that it had taken the Star League eighty years to come back for them. They also reacted poorly to meeting Mechwarrior Jennifer McEvedy for perhaps understandable but nevertheless irrational reasons because blaming her in any way for a distant cousin of her grandfather going batshit crazy before her mother was even born isn't all that fair to say the least."Colonel Rory Fallstaff - 2838CE
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===Perilous recovery mission===
Outskirts of Fartown – Project Sagittarius Umbrella (McEvedy's Folly) – 2836
This was by no means the way that Frederick Hallis expected to die though he was pretty sure he was about to. Sure, he was sat in the cockpit of a mech fighting for his life as he always assumed he would be, but whenever he had idly pondered his eventual fate his imagination had conjured visions of fighting to the last against overwhelming odds, his crippled Battlemech surrounded by the wrecks clanner or maybe Marik machines as he screamed defiance to his last breath.
What he had not expected was to be pounced upon by thirty-five tons of carnivorous flightless bird as his Wasp idly strolled down a canyon, and to meet his end lying on his back, Battlemech limbs flailing away ineffectually, expecting to be torn apart and eaten any moment. The gyros and myomer muscles of his twenty-ton mech had been completely unable to deal with the collision and the impact had sent him crashing to the ground, at which point the ****** bird jumped on top on him and started clawing at his upper torso and cockpit, massive talons raking great tears in the armor.
Instead of screams of defiance he was mostly yelling for help on the radio and asking anyone that might be close enough to help to "Get this ****** thing off of me!" while still struggling to break free. Given the size of the area that needed to be covered for the reconnaissance sweep, and that the perceived likelihood of encountering a meaningful threat was zero, the scout lance had spread out to cover more ground so he wasn't sure how quickly any of his lance-mates could get there.
An aerial survey would have gone much faster of course, but from above you might not be able to spot any old Star League equipment that might be worth salvaging, simply because it was powered down and most everything was covered in a layer of snow and ice. Finding people had been somewhat easier from the air, the campfires they lit at night had glowed in infra-red and establishing there were largeish groups living in or around what had once been the settlements of Fartown and Strangetown had been easy enough, if surprising, but while the operation had turned into a rescue mission the original purpose of the expedition was to retrieve any tech that might be found.
The world officially known as Project Sagittarius Umbrella was the type of place that reminded you why the Viking's believed hell was cold, not hot. As snow fell all around amidst the orange sky of the system's K type star it looked the part of a personal Ragnarök for Frederick Hallis, but being slain by the serpent Jörmungandr would have a certain dignity to it that getting killed and eaten by a giant chicken would not.
With the right arm of his mech, the one with the medium laser mounted on it, pinned, and the safeties on the SRM launcher refusing to let him fire any missiles because the computer detected something right on top of them, that being a BattleMech-sized abomination of science, all he could do was start punching the creature repeatedly with his mech's left fist wishing the thing's neck wasn't so long that he couldn't reach up and poke it in the eye.
If he had been in something larger, like a Thug for example, he could have throttled the thing, or at least pushed it off him, but he wasn't.
The little voice in the back of his head that was now chiding him for not believing the locals when they said the so-called 'Thunderbird' was this big was not helping matters either. At the time assuming that they were exaggerating when talking about hulking ten-metre-tall predatory birds had seemed like a safe bet, but if he got out of this alive Frederick swore to his creator that the next time a fisherman boasted of the size of the 'one that got away' he would believe him.
Frederick's creator not being a deity, but rather a former Clan Wolverine geneticist named Vaun who was currently to be found a couple of thousand light years away in the Clan Homeworlds, was entirely unaware of the young MechWarriors's vow of course. Vaun had chosen not to join the Switchback Fleet back in 2823, because he was old and thought his place should go to someone younger, and he had been captured by some warriors belonging to Clan Ghost Bear. Subsequently being conscripted into their own scientist caste had grated, though not of course as much as that the bastards had also chemically sterilized him and every other captured member of the Wolverine's civilian castes as per the ilKhan's orders. At the exact moment Frederick Hallis was fighting for his life against an angry avian monstrosity Doctor Vaun was dying of natural causes in a hospital on Arcadia, the medical staff there wondering why he had this weirdly triumphant look on his face. Vaun's only regret was that he wouldn't be there to see the faces of the Spook Teddies when they found out he had been secretly splicing the DNA of warrior caste Wolverines into cannister-born Ghost Bears all this time. It gave him great comfort as he prepared to meet his own maker that the ilKhan fellating sons-of-bitches would surely be apoplectic with rage.
Meanwhile, still pinned and fervently wishing he was in a Crosscut loggermech rather than a Wasp right now, because a mech-sized chainsaw and a huge claw would have absolutely rocked in this situation Frederick decided, he suddenly realized that one of the Thunderbird's legs had shifted so it was now just behind his BattleMechs right foot and he immediately hit his jumpjets.
The Rawling 52 jumpjets being designed to lift an upright twenty-ton Wasp vertically into the air, not to propel the currently horizontal mech with a thirty-five ton bird on top of it anywhere useful, they weren't quite powerful enough to throw the beast off him as they simply didn't have enough thrust. However, when the superheated plasma washed over the Thunderbird's lower leg it let out a deafening screech of pain and jumped clear which was still a pretty good outcome from Fred's perspective.
It would take a while to get back up, and his SRM launcher wasn't at the right angle to fire, but with his other arm now free Frederick raised it and fired the Medium Laser mounted on its forearm right into the Thunderbird's chest.
The thing was far too damn big for that to drop it, but it screeched in pain once again as the laser scorched into it, moisture in its flesh instantly boiling and causing a ragged wound that was half bloody gore and half charred overcooked meat.
Frederick was lining up another shot when two streams of tracer fire from a pair of machine-guns coming from the left just outside his field-of-view stitched their way across the Thunderbird which screeched yet again and span to face the new threat.
When they had handed one of the new-model Hussar scout mechs to Jennifer McEvedy for this mission the intention had been to see how it coped with the extremely harsh weather conditions known to exist on the world. It had not been so they could find out how well it did in a fight with a monster from a low-budget monster holomovie, but as it turned out a pair of fifty-caliber machine guns proved pretty effective at getting its attention at least, if not downing it because while those were rounds that were excellent at carving up infantry carving a turkey this size was another matter entirely.
Holding the fire button down McEvedy hosed her dual fifty-cals over the Thunderbird, realizing after a few seconds that they just weren't penetrating deep enough to hit any vital organs. While they surely hurt, and sheer cumulative damage would eventually bring it crashing down, so far all she was managing to do was make it extremely pissed off.
The Thunderbird charged her, which while frightening in the extreme brought it close enough for her to use the other weapon the Niops designers had added to the HSR-250-Dbn model of the Hussar to give it a secondary role as an anti-infantry mech.
The flamer mounted just under the cockpit sent out a huge plume of plasma fed straight from the fusion reactor, the flame so hot that up close it could not only melt flesh it would make lead run like water and aluminum burn.
The Thunderbird had no concept of firearms but fire itself was something else entirely because like most animals it was instinctively terrified of it. For the first time it was the one that was scared as Jennifer McEvedy's Hussar bathed it in hot plasma.
It still wouldn't ****** die though. More than twice the mass of a Giganotosaurus, the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered in the Terra fossil record, a creature that had once strode across the homeworld of the human race like a colossus, the Thunderbird was going to need more than mere anti-infantry weapons to bring it down.
Jennifer swung around the four-ton Extended-Range Large Laser mounted on a turret atop the Hussar and taking careful aim shot the Thunderbird in the head.
Thirty-five tons of genetically-engineered flightless bird crashed to the ground like a puppet with its string cut, feathers still burning thanks to the flamer and blood running out of the myriad holes punched in its flesh by the machine guns.
Grateful to be alive, Frederick Hallis was still righting his mech and struggling the thing back onto its feet when he heard Jennifer's voice over the radio. "Well, that's going to make for a good war-story to tell at the bar after a few drinks" she said. "I mean, if we were actually allowed to go to a bar for a few drinks" she added wryly.
"****** thing came out of nowhere" Fred replied, steadying his breathing as he defended how he gotten himself into the situation.
"I don't think the sensors flag up biologicals as a potential threat even if they're the size of a freaking Whitworth." Jennifer replied, accepting his excuse. To be fair if you were in a BattleMech, even a light one, the chances of there being a predatory animal which represented an actual threat were pretty slim. There were a few places where that wasn't the case of course, during the Star League era wealthy big-game hunters were known to travel to a world dubbed 'Hunter's Paradise' where they could take on huge reptilian Megasaurs with anti-mech weaponry, but that was hardly the normal state of affairs.
They both knew from his reports that Major Gao's recon team had run into a pack of local 'Hook Wolves' a couple of days before while scouting around the original Star League settlement on the planet, but the Dire-Wolf sized predators with oversized talons had proved no match for their Mauser 960 laser rifles. Of course, if they had met a Thunderbird instead their rifles and grenade launchers would not have been much help, and they would have had to hope their single Chevalier light tank and a few shoulder-launched SRM's were up to the job.
"You know, I may be starting to reassess my views on the merits of genetic-engineering" Fred joked, his mech now stood up as he looked at the corpse of the Thunderbird. "Oh, and I've got to say that your family's inclination to ignore those in authority when they think they're wrong isn't always a good thing" he added, his subsequent laughter as much stress relief as it was a belief it was all that funny.
"Bite me Fred" Jennifer replied. "You do know I just saved your life right?" she added, thinking that should warrant him giving her a break on the jokes and wry comments she had to put up with since they had arrived on 'Sagittarius Umbrella' and managed to locate some locals.
Seriously, they find a planet that's actually named after a member of her family, she thought to herself bitterly, albeit a distant cousin, and it's called 'McEvedy's Folly' because he went full-on Mad Scientist to the point that the geneticists on Frobisher who were making fish-people would have regarded him as nuttier than a packet of almonds. Alpheus McEvedy might have been a certified genius, a pioneer in, and a master of the field of genetic-engineering, but his reputation had suffered a little due to his also being certifiably insane.
Fred pursed his lips looking at the Thunderbird. "You know if we had like half-a-ton of Gloria's secret herbs and spices it would go a long way to getting me over the trauma of nearly being lunch for emu-zilla" he told her, making light of the situation.
"You want to eat it?" Jennifer responded nonplussed.
"It only seems fair under the circumstances" Fred replied. "You know the BRV aboard the dropship could pick this thing up and then haul it back to Fartown. We know the locals hunt the little ones, the regular Moas, for food. They might appreciate the feast."
Jennifer thought about that. The Battlemech Recovery Vehicle on their Fortress could certainly manage that. Although huge by the standards of any animal that wasn't aquatic in nature, there were some shark-like alien species on other worlds that could eat a Thunderbird for a snack, the bird was still lighter than some of the machines a BRV was designed to lift off the ground and carry it back for repairs. "Okay, but I want to get a photograph of the thing with me standing beside it before anyone starts carving off any chunks for the barbeque." she replied. "It's not like I've got anywhere to put it if I had it stuffed and mounted, so I want one souvenir at least."
"Flamer ruined it, and besides which if you brought that back to Niops and presented it to a taxidermist the poor guy would have a heart attack" Frederick observed. "You wanna get on the dropship band and tell them to send out the BRV?"
Jennifer thought about that. "I'd best tell them to bring an escort along in case of another Thunderbird, the Shadow Hawk should do and it could help load the bird onto the trailer" she replied. They had a Lancelot and a Hoplite aboard the dropship too, but while they had more firepower than the Shadow Hawk they didn't have hands. Their lone assault mech did have hands, but that would be overkill and would also mean having to deal with Billy the Kid who had been assigned to this mission for the same reason the Gammas had. For all their undeniable skill in the cockpit they were all kind of a pain in the ass, albeit for different reasons.
"Good thing we brought along a few bigger machines in case we ran into pirates." Frederick observed. The SLDF had dusted off a few different BattleMechs that had been placed in mothballs a couple of years back for this mission, types that they didn't have in large enough numbers to keep them in regular service but weren't rare enough that spare parts to repair them or keep them running were unavailable.
The comments made by the MechWarriors at the controls of the Shadow Hawk, a cranky old veteran from the 295th nearing retirement, when he arrived an hour later and saw the dead Thunderbird were pretty amusing, though what the combat engineers crewing the BRV had to say about having to recover a dead bird instead of a broken 'mech was funnier, even if they gave Frederick some shit about the mess the thing had made of his Wasp.
Frederick and his mech returned to the Fartown settlement with the BRV while Jennifer signaled the other two members of the lance to join her so they could continue their recon together as a unit, the three light Battlemechs sticking together for safety in case another Thunderbird appeared.
By the time the now three-mech lance returned to Fartown, the orange sun was setting and the glow of several large campfires in the middle of what had once been the town square was easily spotted from a distance. The locals were usually loath to make their presence quite so obvious to all the hostile wildlife but they rightly assumed that the Fortress class dropship now towering over the ruins of the old settlement would be more than sufficient to ward off any threat.
If it wasn't for the presence of the massive atmosphere processor positioned just outside the settlement the Fortress would have dominated the skyline of the whole area, but by comparison to the gigantic piece of terraforming equipment even a dropship near a hundred metres in height and wider than that in breadth looked tiny. The Star League's Department of Mega Engineering had tended not to mess around when handed an assignment and two more of the things could be easily seen from orbit, each with another settlement constructed beside it, once drawing power from the fusion reactors than powered the gigantic machines.
The terraforming equipment had been shut down since well before the Amaris War of course, its work incomplete as the Star League abandoned the project though it might have restarted at some point if not for the war, but even as it rusted and decayed it remained the treasure-trove of technology that had drawn Niops to send an expedition to retrieve as much of it as they could.
As she dismounted her Hussar near the camp if Jennifer had been expecting any gratitude from the hundred or so who had set up home in the mostly ruined settlement about all the meat she had provided for the feast underway she was sorely disappointed. The oldest of the grown-up locals still looked at her with expressions of either distrust or dismay while the little kids regarded her like she was more to be feared than the Thunderbird was.
Somehow, Jennifer had found herself in the only place in the galaxy where the McEvedy name was hated even more than it was on Strana Mechty. What were the chances?
Jennifer's heartfelt protest that 'If someone named Smith kicked your cat you wouldn't hold it against everyone named Smith would you?' fell on deaf ears unfortunately. Not that anyone owned a cat on Sagittarius Umbrella, they used to have some pet cats in the past, but they were easy prey for the Hook Wolves apparently.
At least I got to slay the feathery dragon, Jennifer decided, finding some solace in that at least as she was handed a plate of roast Thunderbird by one of the dropship crew whose turn it was to help the ship's cook feed everyone. A couple of the medics were still performing medical checks on the locals and providing treatment where needed, while Colonel Fallstaff commanding the expedition was talking to the 'tribal elders', that being an odd description for a couple of guys with doctorates in genetics and a female xenobiologist, all three of them pushing a hundred years old and unlike most Terran-born people very much looking it because the last few decades had been hellish for them.
Between the testimony of people who had actually been there to witness what had happened on the planet decades before, plus the files, data and records retrieved by Major Gao's recon team at the main settlement 'Camp McEvedy', Colonel Fallstaff decided he had a decent understanding of what had transpired. It was a tale worthy of a bad science-fiction novel, or a better-than-average movie, and made this mission a couple of orders of magnitude more interesting than he had ever expected it to be when General Romanov gave him the assignment to travel down here and look around.
With Frobisher signed up for the Hegemony, the SLDF Navy had begun scouting the systems around them and eventually, two jumps out from there to rimward and anti-spinward, the Tramp class jumpship being used to survey the area discovered a system that had clearly been settled at some point. This turned out to be the K4V Orange Dwarf system that the Star League Department of Mega Engineering had named Project Sagittarius Umbrella and the reason the Tramp immediately knew that the place was worth investigating was the huge orbital mirrors that SLDoME had placed above the second planet in the system to warm it with additional sunlight.
At some point in the past someone had raided and then orbitally bombarded a Star League facility situated on the planet's moon, but enough had remained behind to help answer a few questions and indicated that there might still be a fair amount of terraforming equipment and other useful salvage to be had down on the planet itself.
It seemed that a couple of centuries ago the Star League Exploratory Brigade had discovered another potentially habitable world not far from Frobisher, but they had initially rejected it as suitable for colonization because it was in the midst of an Ice Age. This glacial period was so severe that the world looked to be on the verge of slipping into a so-called Cryogenian era, such as happened on Terra seven-hundred million years ago when the whole planet froze over, so it wasn't exactly prime for human settlement.
The Star League Department of Mega Engineering took a look themselves and thought, 'Ice Ages are easy to fix' and set to work reversing the cooling trend, starting with the orbital mirrors but also setting up atmosphere-processors that would increase the levels of carbon dioxide in the air to foster a beneficial greenhouse effect.
The additional heat directed at the oceans had resulted in more storms of course, and an increase in precipitation both rain and snow, but that was better than the northern and southern ice-caps meeting at the equator which is what would have happened eventually without the Department of Mega Engineering who continued to live up to their unofficial motto of, ' The impossible we do immediately, the merely difficult was finished the day before yesterday.'
With the ice being slowly pushed back instead of expanding, it would take centuries to complete the job but SLDoME wasn't in a rush, the Star League then turned its attention to the native fauna living on the planet. There were fish living in the mostly frozen oceans, though not ones you would want to eat because the natural antifreeze they had evolved was toxic as hell, while the large continent on the equator, the only one on the planet that wasn't just glaciers and tundra, still harbored various bird species though many had already died out.
The man they put in charge of repopulating the now warming planet with animal life took a look at the remaining native species, those who had managed to survive the climatic catastrophe, and finding them uniquely suited to being genetically engineered he was struck by the possibility he could create, or rather recreate, new/old life here.
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===Monster Wrangling===
Quite what the Star League thought when Doctor Alpheus McEvedy and his team announced that they had brought back the extinct Terran Dodo, releasing the species into the wild before starting work on bringing back the equally extinct Passenger Pigeon, the Bush Moa and then the Giant Moa was sadly lost to history, but a reasonable assumption would be, 'That's actually pretty neat but we don't remember asking you to do that and while we're on the subject who said you were in charge of the whole planet, including the terraforming teams, and not just the biologists? We've had complaints from the engineers about you bossing them around'.
After forces unknown attacked the facility on the moon in 2752, Fallstaff theorised it would have been the Rim Worlds Republic because Amaris was very active in the periphery even well before his coup, the Star League had decided to shelve Project Sagittarius Umbrella and recalled McEvedy, his research team and the terraforming crews. McEvedy and many of his team however had refused to go, opting to stay behind with their families to continue their work.
Unfortunately for the other volunteers, while Alpheus McEvedy had always skirted the line between genius and insanity he now, totally unsupervised by any higher authority and unrestricted in what he could choose to do, crossed so far over that line you would need a Kearny-Fuchida Drive to jump back there. Always somewhat driven, not to mention dictatorial and authoritarian in his approach to his staff, with the Star League stepping back McEvedy quickly went full-blown tyrant and mad scientist.
Since bringing back extinct species of Terran birds had been working so well why not bring back some extinct mammals too, he decided? Thus it was that McEvedy recreated the Mammoth, the Giant Ground Sloth, the Auroch, the Quagga and then, because they would need predators to keep their numbers in check, the Dire Wolf.
Recreated as best he could visually at least, because deep-down they were genetically still local birdlife not Terran mammals and without ongoing intervention they would gradually start reverting to more bird-like features, such as feathers replacing fur for example, Alpheus McEvedy dived into his great purpose.
McEvedy's staff started to become increasingly concerned when he decided that he needed another carnivore and so abandoning his policy of simply copying extinct Terran life he created what came to be called the Sabre-Beaked Tucan. Then he came of the opinion that the merely two metre tall Giant Moa just wasn't impressive enough and started splicing together what became the Thunderbird, retaining some Moa-like features but crossed with those of the extinct Phorusrhacidae family from South America, more usually known as the 'Terror Birds'.
The Terror birds of prehistoric Terra had only reached three metres in height of course, which in itself had made them the apex predator of their age, but that just wasn't enough for Alpheus McEvedy. He more than tripled that height with the Thunderbird, figuring that the Aurochs, Mammoths and the Giant Ground Sloths were all big enough to represent a suitable species of prey animal for his masterpiece.
The first sign that, as expected, his experiments to create mammalian species weren't genetically stable came pretty early as his 'Dire Wolf' gradually evolved, or perhaps de-evolved, into what became the 'Hook Wolf' which kept all the sharp teeth but whose claws became long, vicious talons. Naturally McEvedy's reaction wasn't to question his methods but rather to look for new avenues of research instead.
Alpheus McEvedy's next wave of experiments involved splicing animal and human DNA together, his source of human DNA being his staff and their families regardless of their personal feelings on the matter. When this came to light most of them decided enough was enough, concluding that their boss was completely nucking futs, and grabbing everything they could carry they fled to the hills leaving behind McEvedy and the handful of people still inexplicably loyal to him and his vision behind. Unfortunately the loyalists were the only ones with guns or otherwise the rebels would have approached the situation somewhat differently, put a few bullets into the lunatic and his minions, and then renamed 'Camp McEvedy' something else.
McEvedy lived nearly another three decades after most of his people deserted him, sliding further into madness and obsession as the years passed. Major Gao's team had found indications that the man finally ended it by committing suicide in 2783, leaving behind a mass of potentially valuable genetics research, numerous new or occasionally 'new' species, the most insane diaries this side of Stefan Amaris's personal journals and having become the boogieman for what eventually became a several human tribes on the planet.
During the eight decades since they, very sensibly, deserted Camp McEvedy for the safety of the wilderness, where they only had to worry about genetically-engineered super-predators not a deranged scientist and his equally crazed minions, the human population of the world now known as 'McEvedy's Folly' had grown to perhaps a couple of hundred people. Most lived in large groups near the old Fartown and Strangetown settlements, but a couple of small bands of hunter-gatherers roamed the forests looking to animals to eat while trying not to be eaten by other animals.
Naturally the locals had always felt pretty sorry for themselves, regretting that they or their ancestors had not left with the people that returned home as ordered back in the 2750's. Their reaction to being told by Colonel Fallstaff and the others that most of the Terran Hegemony had been blasted to radioactive, poisoned rubble in their absence, and so in a way being stranded on this frozen hellhole of a planet being chased by battlemech sized carnivorous birds wasn't an entirely unfortunate turn of events, had been utter disbelief, and in a couple of cases complete nervous breakdown.
Fallstaff had told them the SLDF would ferry them all back to Niops to start a new life in just about the one place in the galaxy that resembled the Terran Hegemony the oldest among them still resembled and they seemed happy enough about that at least. Unlike most everyone else that visited Niops VII they wouldn't even find it all that chilly which was a definite bonus.
As regards salvage, other than the Fortress, the L-F Tramp Jumpship which had transported them to Sagittarius Umbrella had brought along a Mule transport dropship, but such was the volume of equipment that appeared to be worth carting back to Niops Colonel Fallstaff was of the opinion that they might need to dust off one, or perhaps both, of the huge Potemkin class Troop cruisers for a second far larger expedition.
With the solar mirrors still in orbit McEvedy's Folly grew slightly warmer each year, within a couple of centuries it should be on the cool side of temperate and someone might look again at colonising the world if they could deal with the problematic wildlife, but for now everything SLDoME had left behind was of far more use elsewhere.
After discussing it with a few of the locals Colonel Rory Fallstaff determined what was the most valuable items he could load on the Mule, after making space for all the people and some of their personal possessions of course, and he set about making plans to dismantle some of the equipment at Camp McEvedy for transport.
There was one other matter he decided that needed to be addressed, something that might make operations on this planet easier for subsequent salvaging operations.
The Thunderbird, soon to be officially named 'McEvedy's Thunderbird' much to Jennifer's chagrin, was going to be a pain-in-the-ass for anyone trying to work in the zones they inhabited which covered quite a large area because they were usually solitary and had their own hunting grounds.
The problem was that the creatures regarded anything other than another Thunderbird as a potential meal, and they were big enough to make that happen. Doubting that the civilian authorities would be happy if he just wiped the species out with heavy weaponry, airstrikes would have made that a safe and relatively easy task alas, Fallstaff sought suggestions from his people as to how to go about putting the Thunderbirds in their rightful place, that place being lower than humanity on the food chain.
Based on their prior experience Jennifer and Frederick suggested flamers, the creatures definitely feared fire, but Colonel Fallstaff concluded that risked accidentally risked burning down the forests where Thunderbirds liked to hunt, prey being more common there.
The civilians back home wouldn't like them setting all the trees alight either most likely, Rory Fallstaff decided sadly, just before he realised they were thinking about this all wrong.
If the Thunderbird feared no other creature in its native environment what they needed to do was make it afraid of something even bigger and meaner, so when one of them showed up it would run away making the area safe to work in.
Doing it right would require something that looked the part and walked in with exactly the right attitude, and Fallstaff realised he had exactly what he needed to achieve that.
The locals warned that it was mating season, when the Thunderbirds were not only more aggressive but could be encountered in groups. At this time of year nobody walked into the region East of Fartown they called the 'Moa Lands' they said, to which Fallstaff replied that was because you needed to walk in looking like you gave no ****** whatsoever and would eat them if they started something.
On their very last day on the planet, with Colonel Fallstaff and Major Gao observing from overhead in a VTOL, as per his orders Mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson set about teaching the Thunderbirds of McEvedy's Folly some manners.
The Moa Lands were no stranger to the sound of the stomping feet of massive creatures, in fact the Thunderbirds had helpfully made their own wide trails into the forests and had created large clearings where they fought each other for mating privileges, but that day something a lot heavier than a Thunderbird was on the move.
Sampson, AKA 'Billy the Kid' had been told he needed to try and put some attitude into the way he drove his mech, and that shouldn't be too difficult given just of cocky and arrogant he was in or out of a cockpit. Orders were to walk in like he owned the place, let the oversized chickens know who was boss, beat up a few of them if he had to put don't use your guns unless you really have to Fallstaff ordered.
Realising that he needed to be in the right frame of mind as well as the right machine Sampson had grinned as he worked out his game plan. If the Colonel wanted attitude then he was going to get it.
The Thunderbirds couldn't hear the music Billy the Kid was playing in the cockpit of his twelve-meter-tall, hundred ton assault mech as he stomped through the forest, but Fallstaff and Gao could over the radio and despite finding it hysterically funny both had to admit they didn't think that anyone apart from Sampson could make an Atlas strut.
"Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
I'm a woman's man, no time to talk
Music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around
Since I was born"
Appearing in a huge clearing where half-a-dozen Thunderbirds were screeching at each other in a mating display the first of them that saw the Atlas immediately charged at Sampson who kept walking straight towards it. As it neared the battlemech opened its right hand and twisted its torso as it brought up its arm.
Sampson back-handed the Thunderbird just as it reached him, sending the creature flying away stunned as he smoothly pimp-slapped it while on the move.
The Atlas stopped, beckoning the other Thunderbirds to attack as well with one hand while clenching its other into a fist.
The video recording of the next ten minutes taken from the VTOL ensured that Sampson's celebrity status as the best Mechwarrior in the SLDF would endure long after his death, with the still image of him throttling one Thunderbird with his left hand of his Atlas while punching out another with his right, ending up as a poster on many a kid's bedroom wall.
By the time it was all over one Thunderbird was unconscious, the rest were limping away, the clearing was covered in feathers and Colonel Fallstaff was wondering how much they would pay on Solaris for a few of these things because watching that beat mech-versus-mech gladiatorial combat all to hell entertainment wise.
He wasn't the only one to think so and in later years the staff of 'McEvedy's Folly Planetary Wildlife Preserve." found themselves fighting off poachers trying to steal Thunderbird eggs all the time. Fortunately seeing as how they were the only Park Rangers in the galaxy that operated assault mechs in order to keep the animals in line that wasn't as big of a problem as it could have been otherwise.
==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The story of Project Sagittarius Umbrella, otherwise known as 'McEvedy's Folly' is given in Touring the Stars: McEvedy's Folly where we learn of what mad scientist Alpheus McEvedy got up to on the world that ended up bearing his name. Maybe if he had stuck to recreating the Dodo and the rest it would have been one thing, but when you're splicing together thirty-five ton Thunderbirds and seeing your staff as convenient sources of human DNA for new experiments you might have gone a little too far.From a distance the ten-metre tall Thunderbird looks a lot like an extremely oversized Giant Moa apparently, but in terms of attitude it's more like a Terror Bird.Other extinct Terran birds that Alpheus McEvedy decided to bring back included the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon and the Bush Moa before he moved onto mammals like the Giant Ground Sloth and the Quagga, I can't help but suspect that McEvedy's version of the Auroch might have looked like a big cow but it still tasted like chicken not beef!Sagittarius Umbrella was a project of the Star League's Department of Mega Engineering (SLDoME) for who fixing a planet well on its way to becoming like the Cryogenian period of Earth was a doddle (a few orbital mirrors to push back the glaciers and icesheets to start). Someone attacked their base on the planet's moon in the 2750s which (along with disquieting rumours about Alpheus McEvedy) caused them to shelve the project witrh some people refusing to leave. The Star League might have come back to check on them one day but the Amaris War messed up a lot of plans.According to Betrayal of Ideals, Clan Wolverine geneticist Doctor Vaun chose to remain behind when Operation Switchback was being put together because he was an old man and there was limited space on the ships. Sarah McEvedy considered him a genius and apparently so did Clan Ghost Bear because after they captured him they put him to work on their own genetics projects. In canon they found out what Vaun had been doing in 2839 but it was too late to punish him fdor it because he had died three years earlier. There is some indication that the Wolverines may have had the edge on the other clans as regards genetic engineering, the other clans certainly seemed to think so at least, and after the Wolverines constructed a new Genetics Research Facility in Bearcat (the Wolverine city on Strana Mechty) Clan Wolf challenged for the research fighting a Trial over it (they lost, that being something that happened a lot to clans fighting trials against the Wolverines at the time).The Atlas assault mech was designed to look intimdating. Strutting along to the Bee Gees and slapping the shit out of Thunderbirds was not in the requirements that Aleksandr Kerensky set for the machine but with the right person in the cockpit it can do it.
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