GblaRCS Chpt 22

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 22 -==
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"You can easily spot someone from Niops when they're visiting Alphard, it's so much brighter than what they're used to that they always wear sunglasses. If they're from Frobisher instead they're wearing really big sunglasses."Lieutenant-Colonel Karin Kumar - 2840CE
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===Funny thing was discovered on the way to Taurian===
Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2832
High Associator Giles Olson stared across his desk at the naval officer. "I'm sorry," he interrupted. "Can you run that by me again?" he requested of Admiral Bremman and the younger female naval officer wearing the rank insignia of a ship's captain stood next to him.
"As you wish, Sir." the younger officer began again. "We took a direct route to Ballad in the Magistracy as planned, it's a regional capital so it was thought it would be a good place to try and get our hands on the equipment we were after" she said, "but after we made contact with the local office of Magistracy Metals and Manufacturing, telling them we were from an old Terran Hegemony scientific colony looking to trade, they seemed really confused because usually we deal directly with the Head Office on Canopus, and they also wanted to know since when did we have a Star Lord class jumpship"
"At this point everyone was probably confused, needless to say." Bremman interjected.
"Right" the captain agreed. "So, we soon realized that they thought we were someone else entirely, and eventually upon further investigation we found out that another Terran Hegemony colony where the Star League had placed a scientific research station had been making supply runs to the Magistracy for the last few years."
"Can you get back to the fish people already!" Olson insisted. Why the hell was it always Bremman and his minions that turned up the most implausible stuff out there anyway, he wanted to know?
"I'm getting there, Sir." the captain told him. "We do the deal, we've brought back some mining equipment, a couple of electric arc furnaces and some industrialmechs incidentally, and after asking some more questions we are able to find out a little more about this other colony, specifically where it was and its name, Frobisher. Turns out it's not going to take us too far out of our way to return to Niops via there, it's almost precisely ten jumps rimward of us, so on my own initiative I decide that under the circumstances we should probably go take a look."
"And this is where you met the fish people?" Olson said slowly.
"Eventually Sir. First, we had to deal with the problem that when we jumped in and made radio contact the authorities on Frobisher thought we were pirates, and it took me a couple of days to convince them that we weren't before they gave us permission to land."
"To be fair introducing yourself as 'Captain Blood' probably raised some suspicions, Anne." Bremman observed, trying to keep a straight face.
"It's Blüd, not 'Blood' Sir, as you well know, and it's not my fault that when Khan Hallis said we should start using family surnames again that was mine" the woman replied defensively, this was far, far from the last time anyone had intimated that which a name like hers she should have really opted for the buccaneer's life. "Anyhow, once we set down on this island where they have their landing pads, and they seemed satisfied that we were who we said we were, they seemed very happy to see us."
"The fish people?" Olson said once again, dearly wanting them to get to the damn point.
"We didn't meet any of them at first, only a few of the scientists and a couple of security people" the inconveniently named Captain Anne Blüd of the transport Jumpship Michael Cameron replied. "It turned out that the Star League, or rather the Hegemony, established a colony on Frobisher back in the 2690s, a few years before they colonized Niops, and built a massive research facility there, mostly underwater."
Olson narrowed his eyes "To make fish people." he said flatly.
"Yes, Sir." Blüd finally confirmed. "Someone back on Terra, someone with enough seniority to get the project funded and approved, had the bright idea that since so many habitable worlds were more sea than they were land then why not genetically engineer a race of amphibious human beings" she said. "With gills, and webbed hands and feet to better suit the environment."
"Christ." Olson exclaimed, burying his head in his hands.
"Yeah, they've got some serious Island of Doctor Moreau shit going on down there, Sir" Blüd agreed wholeheartedly with the High Associator's reaction.
"And they did it? I mean they actually got it to work?" Olson asked incredulously, raising his head once more.
"They did, although when the Star League collapsed the project went all to hell because they couldn't get replacement parts for all their fancy scientific gear anymore." Blüd told him. "They could still trade with the Magistracy for certain things, but not the high-tech Hegemony equipment the project needed to keep running as it had been. They've been doing their best to keep as much of it operational as they could but it's been half-a-century and the Hegemony did not see fit to give them their own Project Workshops."
"My guess is that Terra wanted to keep them on a leash by keeping them dependent on the Hegemony for replacement parts." Bremman correctly theorized.
That seemed plausible enough, Olson decided. It was quite telling that trusting a bunch of people with doctorates in physics on Niops with the ability to manufacture their own nuclear weapons was considered reasonable, but the geneticists on Frobisher needed to be handled with care. "And you've seen these, fish people, first hand?" he asked Blüd doubtfully, still finding it all more than a little hard to accept.
"Yeah, they all seemed nice enough, the ones I got to meet. They're really no different than most other people in terms of intelligence or personality wise, you just need to get used to them looking a bit funny." Blüd replied. "It's the eyes mostly, they're a little larger than normal, gives them more of an uncanny valley look than the webbed hands and bald heads do actually."
"Bald heads?"
"Only body hair they still have are eyebrows and eyelashes, and the hairs up their nose too I guess" Blüd told him. "Their hands are only webbed to the first knuckle so that's not nearly as immediately noticeable as the eyes" she said. "They could swim better if the webbing went to the second knuckle, or all the way to the end, but it would mess with their ability to use tools, or say type properly, so the scientists compromised on that."
Olson frowned. "How exactly do these fish people feel about being the product of some madman's vision?" he asked.
"The test subjects didn't seem to have any problems with it to be honest, though if I was born with gills, and there were thousands of other people with gills around, I probably wouldn't think it was all that weird either" Blüd replied. "It's not like they're treated like lab rats or anything by the scientists, they're free to come and go as they please, although most of them live and work at the research station."
"I assume this is paid work and not forced labour of some kind" Olson wanted to know. "If this is a Terran Hegemony colony then I will countenance no slavery under the Cameron Star." he firmly declared.
"A mix of paid work and voluntary labor" Blüd told him. "Most of the support staff and technicians are gen-engineered humans, and have been for a couple of generations now. You might be surprised how similar the society is to here, I mean here before the Capellans and then ourselves turned up anyway, Hegemony cultural norms. Just with the majority of the population being, well, amphibious."
"Hegemony cultural norms you say?" Olson queried.
"Yeah, so, to give you an example I was shown an elementary school and I swear they were using the exact same textbooks I've seen my niece reading for homework." Blüd told him.
"Did you introduce yourself to the kids?" Bremman asked.
"Yes, Sir" Blüd replied.
Bremman smiled knowingly. "Did they ask if you were a pirate?"
"Yes, Sir" Captain Blüd confirmed with a pained expression.
Olson pursed his lips. "I've got to ask. Did you take any photographs of these, ahem 'people', by any chance?" he inquired, more than a little curious to see one for himself.
"No, but I did bring one of them back here. Or rather I brought her parents here and she insisted on tagging along" Blüd replied. "The director of the research station is hoping that Niops is going to be able to help them out with new equipment, so he dispatched his deputy and her husband to come talk to you."
"You brought a fish person here, to Niops?!" Olson exclaimed, eyes widening.
"No Sir, I brought an administrator and her husband, who's a genetic engineer by the way, to Niops and their teenage daughter came with them" Blüd replied. "She's adopted incidentally, they don't have the gills. but she does" she said. "They don't like being call 'fish people' though, just thought I should warn you."
"What do they like being called?"
"People" Captain Blüd replied. "Or Homo Sapiens Amphibia, if you want to get technical about it" she said. "One word of warning, it's best not to call them mermaids, particularly the men among them, one of my crew nearly got slugged for repeatedly doing that."
"The deputy-director and her family are currently being detained, politely, at the spaceport" Bremman informed the High Associator, swiftly changing the subject. "For security reasons we were loath to bring them to the capital but that's your call, Sir" he added.
"If they weren't Terran citizens I wouldn't have brought them back, but they are, and the scientists on Frobisher are offering something in return for us fixing their equipment, Sir" Blüd said. "They say with their gear running properly again, and the right funding, they can reproduce Hegemony anti-agathic gene-therapy treatments and help out with biosciences in general. I know that's not exactly our strength, at least not compared to physics and chemistry."
"Frankly, compared to making people with gills, extending lifespans has got to be a breeze" Bremman wryly observed. "I think I can safely say that Frobisher is leagues ahead of us when it comes to genetic engineering, and there are definite military applications as well as civilian ones to that kind of technology."
Blüd nodded. "There's something else too, something I didn't talk to them about, there aren't enough of the bioengineered humans to sustain a stable population. They've had trouble achieving high enough birth rates for that, but they don't have Iron Womb technology like we do" she said, knowingly.
"You think we should help them make more of these… people?" Olson asked, surprised.
"Not a decision for the military to make, Sir, although I can't help but think that the SLDF's CAAN Regiments would have given their right arms, or other body parts, for a few special forces teams that could breathe underwater." Bremman said, chuckling at the notion. "I will say on a personal basis however that it sounds like the scientists on Frobisher skipped a few lectures on scientific ethics at university, so the galaxy at large might be better off if they weren't entirely self-governing regardless."
Olson frowned. "Annex them you mean?"
"Encourage them defer to a higher authority than their own conscience" Bremman suggested diplomatically. "I'm not totally convinced that their moral compass reliably points north, so some assistance with navigation may be advised."
"They all seemed very nice, they just seemed to have a blind-spot when it came to human experimentation" Captain Blüd observed with a shrug.
Giles Olson looked at them both askance. "You do realize that what you Wolverine people did to your sibko kids was human experimentation too, right?" he asked rhetorically. "He who is without sin, etc."
Admiral Bremman and Captain Blüd looked at each other. "It's not exactly the same thing." Bremman said eventually.
"Of course it isn't" Olson responded sardonically. "Okay, I guess I'll go there and meet them at the port. Make a decision on whether or not to allow them into the capital based on how the meeting goes" he said. "Rather than hitch a ride in your own VTOL, I'll take Bureaucrat One, her pilot probably needs the flight hours anyway."
"As you wish, Sir." Bremman replied. "Do you want to bring your own security detail?"
"Given that there has to be at least a battalion's worth of soldiers and marines stationed at Goddard to protect me against a pen pusher, a scientist and a teenage girl I'll take my chances without them." Olson replied, chuckling. "You can ride with me Captain, fill me in on anything else I might need to know on the way."
"Of course, Sir." Blüd replied, snapping to attention.
Olson stood up. "Just one thing, Admiral, if on their travels your people should ever find a lost Cameron heir, an advanced alien civilization, the Ark of the Covenant or God forbid, the clone of Stefan Amaris, can you please keep it to yourself until after I retire from politics" he requested, tongue-in-cheek.
"You didn't see the memo I sent last year about recovering the Ark of the Covenant?" Bremman replied, feigning confusion.
"No. What did you do with it?" Olson asked, playing along.
"We have top men working on it right now." Bremman told him.
"Who?"
"Top men."
Blüd laughed. "I love that old film" she said. "I still think that the fourth one where he finds Atlantis was the best in the series though."
Olson nodded his agreement. "You know, technically Captain you just found a lost underwater city belonging to a fallen civilization." he pointed out, smiling.
"It wasn't really lost, the Magistracy knew about it even if we didn't." Blüd replied. "That said, if we're going to station some aerospace fighters there to protect them from pirate raiders we should definitely go with the Trident."
It was certainly appealing in the humorous sense, but after a little sober contemplation Olson decided that it might lead to a diplomatic incident due to cultural sensitivity.
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===Unusual emissaries from Frobisher===
Three quarters of an hour later, Olson found himself knocking on a door inside a small office building on the outskirts of Robert H. Goddard Spaceport. There were a pair of SLDF marines stood guard outside the room and they had snapped to attention when he approached, one of them opening the door for him after he knocked, stepping to one side so he could enter. "No need to follow me in" he told the marines who looked like they weren't sure if they should or not.
"As you wish, Sir." the more senior marine, a sergeant, replied. The sergeant hoping like hell that the weird looking kid in there wasn't going to go nuts and assault the High Associator, because if he got hurt the non-com would surely get the blame.
At least the military hadn't stuck their guests into a cell, being nice enough to place them in a break room with comfortable furniture and some drinks machines instead, and Olson put on his best politician's smile as he entered. "Administrator Johanson?" he addressed the woman slumped on one of the chairs. She looked to be in late middle-age like himself, but if Hegemony born she could actually be decades older than the Niops-born Olson.
"Yes?" the woman responded quizzically, looking at the man wearing the expensive, well-tailored suit who had just walked in.
"Giles Olson" the stranger introduced himself. "High Associator of the Niops Association and its Protectorate Systems."
Johanson sprang up from her chair in surprise. "Eleanor Johanson, Deputy Administrator of the Frobisher Research Colony." she introduced herself in turn. "We weren't expecting you to come to us" she told him awkwardly. "This is my husband, professor Doctor Ian Johanson PhD, and our daughter Philomena." she introduced her companions.
"A pleasure" Olson said, shaking hands with the administrator first, then her husband and finally the girl, grateful that he was so practiced at maintaining a warm smile regardless of his personal feelings. The girl didn't look quite how he had expected, the bald head certainly did, albeit looking incongruous on a teenage girl, but her eyes were something else. Weirdly they were smaller than he had imagined, less cartoonish, but they were certainly larger than those of a regular human and were, to risk a pun, eye-catching.
They just made her face look a bit, well, wrong. Uncannily so, Olson decided, not letting his reaction show on his face at all. in much the same way as he did if encountering a particularly deranged weirdo on the streets with a political axe to grind.
"Sorry that you weren't transported to the capital to meet me in my office," Olson apologised to Eleanor Johanson, "but if you weren't Terran citizens from a Hegemony Colony you wouldn't have gotten any further than our Zenith Point, and we would have had to chat via video-link" he told her.
"Yes, Captain Blüd explained your, understandable, isolationist and secretive ways" the administrator replied.
"Secret, in the sense of it being an open secret that we don't want to risk letting the Great Houses know any more about the Niops Systems than they have to, including the locations of our military installations and industrial sites." Olson observed. "I assume that you are well aware of what happened to practically every other Hegemony colony that possessed something worth fighting over, or simply destroying to keep it out of the hands of one of the others?"
"We are, my family originally came from Lone Star." Eleanor Johanson replied, "while some of my husband's people lived on Inglesmond." she added.
"Oh, I'm so terribly sorry for you both." Olson commiserated. "Some of my family on my mother's side were from Haddings" he told them. "I should have cousins there, but I strongly doubt that I do" he said sadly. "The decision of my predecessors as High Associator to maintain a strict isolation seems to have been a correct one given the course of wider events, it has only been in the last few years that we started to look outside our own system and become involved elsewhere."
"If it's not a secret, may I ask why you changed your policy?" Ian Johanson asked out of curiosity.
"Because we are far more heavily armed than we used to be, and the Great Houses are considerably weaker" Olson replied. "After the fall of the Star League we inherited quite a number of SLDF units, thanks to our prior ties with them as a source of resupply out here in the periphery, and since then we have invested considerable money and resources into expanding our military-industrial base" he said. "To be perfectly frank if the Free Worlds League, or anyone else, turns up at our doorstep these days looking to make mischief then they had better all be wearing factor five-thousand sunblock because a great number of physicists and nuclear chemists, plus plenty of military hardware to study and the time to do so, results in a very impressive nuclear stockpile."
"And they'll assume you won't be shy in using them after what happened to the other Terran Hegemony colonies" Eleanor Johanson surmised.
Olson nodded. "I suspect that if the Marik's ever poke their nose into our affairs then a mention of what they did to New Dallas, and our…" he paused, "…feelings about that, in conjunction with some unsubtle sabre-rattling, will at least give them pause for thought."
"And if they think you're bluffing?"
"Then they find out the hard way that we're not" Olson stated firmly. "Fortunately, we have ways to make them reconsider short of a full-scale thermonuclear exchange" he said. "There aren't many periphery nations that can dispatch a couple of warships to raise hell, but we can."
"Warships?" Ian Johanson responded with a gasp of surprise.
"Yes." Olson confirmed. At some point soon the Inner Sphere would find out that the 295th ended up on Niops, even if the presence of the 331st as well would be kept firmly under wraps, and the records would show that the 295th had warships with them when they disappeared, so he wasn't revealing anything they planned on keeping secret in the long term. "With the navies of the Great Houses tied up hammering each other again, our analysts consider it unlikely they're in a position to send enough ordnance our way to simply sweep us aside. If they try and grab Niops for themselves with anything less than a full-scale invasion right now then they'll draw back a bloody stump."
"That's a rather, graphic, mental image." the administrator responded, looking to her daughter who seemed rather less than perturbed.
"My apologies, too much time spent talking to those of a military persuasion perhaps." Olson replied. "I doubt back in my younger days working in the field of radio astronomy I would have phrased myself quite the way I do now."
"You were a radio astronomer?" Ian Johanson queried.
"According to my own PhD, yes." Olson replied, "Although to be honest I was never at the top of my field." he continued, smiling. "My wife convinced me that it would be easier to win an election than it ever would be to obtain tenure at the university, so I turned my back on academia and went into politics" he said. "But enough about me, I believe your intention in travelling to our corner of space was to request technical assistance with some of your scientific apparatus?"
Eleanor nodded. "We've been able to keep most of it operational until recently but a lack of advanced domestic production capability, and our inability to get hold of spare parts elsewhere, means that much of our equipment is doomed to eventual failure" she said. "Frankly the situation is grave because we need that equipment to keep Homo Sapiens Amphibia genetically stable."
"We're not genetically stable and we're in danger of becoming inbred because there's not enough of us." the girl, Philomena, spoke up, sounding surprisingly blasé about it.
"Inbred is an exaggeration, at least so far." Ian Johanson responded. "Despite low birth rates we're still above the Minimum Viable Population threshold, if below the optimum number to prevent unwanted recessive genes rearing their ugly heads every few generations, so as long as we can deal with random mutations we should be fine" he said. "Without our equipment however, problems are likely to cascade in the long term. If we can't keep control of the extra genes we spliced in it's possible we might overshoot our goal."
"Overshoot how?" Olson queried.
"We'll end up more fish than human" Philomena said wryly. "It doesn't help that pretty soon we'll all be cousins."
"Could be worse." Olson remarked. "We've run across isolated colonies out here where the population is so inbred the greetings cards say 'Happy Birthday Uncle Dad' and the family tree is a telegraph pole" he joked, trying to get a laugh out of her.
The girl didn't laugh but she did at least grin. "Do they have webbed hands and feet too?" she asked holding one of hers up, fingers splayed to show him.
"No, but at least you've got the right number of fingers and thumbs which is more than I can say of a few of them." Olson replied. "Great banjo players though thanks to the extra digits" he joked again before turning back to Eleanor. "I certainly can't promise we can help you out with your technical difficulties, for one thing until our engineers can take a look we'll have no idea if it's something our Project Workshops can replicate, but I will say that historically there has proven to be precious little our experts can't copy or fix so feel free to be optimistic." he said.
"You'll help us?" the administrator responded, surprised.
"If we can" Olson told her. "You're a Hegemony colony, that makes you our responsibility. You're not even the first other than ourselves we've encountered. We already have people working on Comstock and Francas to get them back on their feet."
Eleanor frowned. "I've never heard of those worlds." she admitted.
"Don't worry, neither had we until we tripped over them." Olson replied, smiling. "They're about three jumps rimward from here, Francas was established to farm cattle and other livestock, Comstock was a low-tech industrial colony. Believe it or not they mainly made footwear."
"Footware?"
"Initially boots for the SLDF, it was a big military contract that got them started, but when we ran across them we found warehouses full of all sorts of shoes" Olson told them. "Of course, when the Star League fell they found they couldn't sell them, and they certainly couldn't eat them, so their society collapsed. Naturally we're making sure that their economy is going to be a lot more diversified in future although that is going to put some strain on our finances."
"Finances, yes." Eleanor said. "I assume that Captain Blüd mentioned our offer to assist you in recreating the anti-agathic treatments available on Terra in return for your assistance?" she asked. "That research will needed to be mostly funded by yourselves though, I'm afraid. Our own economy is tiny compared to yours."
"She mentioned it, I'm sure we can come to an arrangement there" Olson replied. "However, if you want us to assist with your population issues we're going to require a little something more from you."
"What?" the administrator replied, frowning.
"Acceptance of protectorate status and yielding authority over your diplomatic and interstellar trade agreements to ourselves" Olson explained.
"No, I meant what do you mean you can help out with our population issues?" Eleanor told him.
Olson crossed his arms. "Come with me, I've got a VTOL waiting outside to take us somewhere" he told them. "Trust me, it'll be worth the trip" he promised, giving them his most winning politician's smile.
Two hours later, the Johanson family were stood in a research facility north of the capital staring at rows of unborn babies in their third trimester of development, all floating in tubes like they were some kind of macabre display, except they were all very much alive according to the monitoring equipment.
"What the hell is this?" Ian Johanson wanted to know.
"Artificial wombs able to carry a child from gestation to birth, or perhaps decanting might be a better word" Olson told them. The facility staff had been given fair warning he was coming there with guests so most of them were taking a break, although a couple were present towards the back of the room making sure everything was fine with the machines.
"Are they… clones?" Eleanor asked, more than a little taken aback by what she was seeing.
"No, these particular infants aren't even genetically engineered to any appreciable degree, think of it as artificial insemination except that the egg isn't inside the mother" Olson explained. "Our people do screen for genetic diseases of course, we're not nearly as advanced in the field as you seem to be but our scientists can fix things like that readily enough."
"How did you get hold of this technology? I'm not aware of the Hegemony working on anything like this" Ian Johanson asked, nonplussed.
"Military R&D project, a super-soldier program if you will." Olson replied, leaving out a great deal of superfluous detail. "Currently we're using them to help out members of our society that want children but for various reasons are unable to do so naturally."
"Super-soldiers? Really?" Eleanor responded dubiously.
"Honestly. Is it any harder to believe than people with gills?" Olson asked rhetorically. "I can probably arrange for you to meet a couple of them, the oldest is probably about your daughter's age" he said. "The program is on hiatus at the moment, our resources are overstretched as it is, but resources could be reallocated if we found ourselves faced with solving a problem such as your own."
"You want to create more Homo Sapiens Amphibia in these… what do you call them?" Ian Johanson asked.
"Iron Wombs, and the question is really whether you want to do that?" Olson replied. "It would surely assist with your issue of a stagnant population, and I doubt you're ever going to get a better offer from anyone else" he said flatly. "Cards on the table. Your expertise in genetic engineering is something that the Niops Association would dearly love to get hold of, bioscience is the one major scientific field that we probably don't lead the Inner Sphere in these days, but you still need us more than we need you and our conditions are far from onerous. Becoming a protectorate doesn't mean becoming a vassal, for the most part your domestic affairs are your own to decide."
Eleanor looked him in the eye. "In what way aren't they ours to decide under this arrangement?"
"We would expect you to govern yourself under the legal system of the Terran Hegemony, as we do so ourselves" Olson replied. "We expect you to have an elected government, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial… the usual trappings of a liberal democracy" he explained. "Oh, and I'll warn you that if your webbed-fingered citizens are treated as some kind of lower caste then our surprisingly anti-authoritarian military will take a very dim view of it" he advised seriously.
"That's it?" Eleanor replied, raising her eyebrows.
Olson chuckled. "Did you expect I'd demand that you drop to one knee and swear allegiance to me as First Lord of the Star League?" he asked, smiling. "We're a democracy, a somewhat technocratic one admittedly, but we're not the Capellans or the Combine that want to control every aspect of our people's lives" he said. "I mean we're not as chaotic and disorganized as the Free Worlds League, but we're hardly some kind of centralized autocracy. Our long-term goal is to try and create a new Terran Hegemony out here, not a new Terran Alliance."
Ian Johanson stared at the High Associator. "A new Hegemony? Seriously?" he asked incredulously.
"Well, calling ourselves the Star League would be a little grandiose don't you think?" Olson replied, amused by their reaction to what he had just told them. "Look at it this way, we hang together or we hang separately. Eventually someone was going to look at worlds like ours with envious eyes, technology is already backsliding in the Inner Sphere which puts us at greater risk each and every day of looking like a very juicy target. All that Hegemony tech you have on Frobisher is going to be well worth invading you for, and I'm not just talking about your genetic engineering equipment, just the electronics from your other devices will soon be worth a fortune."
"You think?" Eleanor replied, frowning.
"Do you know how expensive basic mining robots are to buy now?" Olson asked rhetorically. "We've been mostly buying up broken ones and fixing them ourselves the last year because the trickle of new ones that Earthwerks are still turning out cost more than some Battlemechs" he said, grimacing. "Inside of ten, twenty years at the outside, there's going to be a whole list of things that nobody in the Inner Sphere can make anymore. The only people that will still have technology that was common a century ago will be ourselves and ComStar, and ComStar won't be sharing."
"What makes you think so about ComStar?"
"Because they've been doing very nicely for themselves with their monopoly on Hyperpulse Generators and having the monopoly on other things only makes them stronger relative to everyone else." Olson replied. "If they can retain a mid-twenty-eighth century tech-base while everyone else is sliding back towards the Bronze Age it's only good for them."
"You're assuming ComStar think in those kinds of realpolitik terms" Eleanor replied, not completely convinced.
"Jerome Blake took control of Terra with eight divisions of SLDF troops, which would indicate he had a certain grasp of the way Great Power politics is done" Olson responded drily. "ComStar's altruism is a fig-leaf, they're playing their own game and seeking ways to enhance their power base. That's not an assumption on my part either, we've seen them playing the game ourselves" he said, recalling the concerning though hilarious 'Canada Tribe' incident. "All this talk about the nefarious scheming of the Telephone Company aside, we're offering by far the best deal you're going to get. As well as repairing your equipment I can have a full battalion of troops with battlemech and aerospace fighter support on the ground on Frobisher well before the end of the year to protect you from ne'er-do-wells and we can do something to help with your low birthrates too."
"Frankly this is all a little overwhelming. I'll need time to consider all of this" the Deputy Administrator replied honestly.
Olson smiled. "I'm sure you do. We'll find you somewhere to stay overnight at the spaceport while you think about it" he said as one of the staff poked their head into the room and coughed to attract attention. "Yes, what is it?" the High Associator queried of the interruption.
"My apologies Sir, but there are a couple of people here that were hoping to visit their unborn son" the staff member by the door told him. "Serving military officers" he added.
"Oh, okay let them in. We were just about finished here anyway" Olson replied.
Claire Donovan of the 295th Battlemech Division had not been expecting to run into the High Associator when visiting the facility with her husband, but they were both seasoned enough to snap to attention when they were directed into the chamber where the Iron Wombs were situated and found him there with a couple of strangers and a rather odd-looking teenage girl.
"At ease" Olson told them. "I think I've met you before" he addressed Claire.
"Yes Sir, you awarded me a special citation for my role in apprehending the war criminal Bernard Critchly" Claire replied, trying not to stare at the girl's eyes.
"Ah yes, you were the one that blew the bastards mech out from under him as I recall" Olson remembered. "Excuse my language in front of your daughter Eleanor but if there was ever a man that deserved to be called a bastard it was surely him."
"Critchly?" Ian Johanson repeated, "as in the man that slaughtered all those monks at the Vatican? I thought he was never caught?" he asked, confused.
"Oh, justice caught up with him eventually, in the form of a battlemech wearing Niops Association insignia" Olson told him. "You're visiting your son I'm told?" he asked Claire.
"Yes, Sir, he's in the third cannister over. We never thought we would be able to have children but fate intervened I guess." Claire replied. "My husband fought on Algenib too, it helped bump us up the waiting list."
"That's wonderful, children are a blessing." Olson replied warmly, "You might not think so when they reach their teenage years though." he cautioned, smiling.
"Hopefully, we'll have grandchildren before we're much past a hundred and twenty-five, be nice to see them grow up too" Claire replied, smiling back.
Olson nodded. "You know, with any luck, and with the assistance of our new friends here from Frobisher, your son there might still be alive a hundred and fifty years from now." he told Claire. "They're from another Hegemony research colony that specialised in genetic engineering."
"Really?" Claire responded in surprise.
"Don't worry, the eyes aren't compulsory." Philomena interjected having noticed them trying not to stare. She had gotten used to it travelling with the crew of the Michael Cameron and knew full-well how weird she looked to anyone not from Frobisher.
"Bringing back the Terran Hegemony one system and one technological miracle at a time." Olson declared proudly, deciding that might make for a decent election slogan when he ran again in 2835.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Frobisher was another Terra Hegemony scientific research colony in the periphery but they were working in a very different field. The goal on Frobisher was to produce genetically-engineered humans that were amphbious and they actually managed that, although the fall of the Star League soon caused problems because they could no longer obtain the high-tech equipment required to keep going. The genes they spliced in weren't quite stable enough and needed repairing periodically, and the population was never high enough that inbreeding was not an issue (they seemed to be barely above Minimum Viable Population (MVP) and in canon they were basically utterly screwed by the late 31st Century.It's still not too late for Frobisher in 2832 however, most of the equipment still works (the pirate raids by those looking for lostech aren't a big thing yet) and only a few of the scientists have left for the Magistracy of Canopus. Incidentally, since it's canon that some scientists from Frobisher did relocate to the Magistracy there must have been contact between them (either Frobisher had a jumpship or jumpships from the Magistracy went there). My supposition is that Frobisher was trading with the Magistracy for supplies and spare parts (spare parts that weren't Hegemony-only tech).The SLDF had a few CAAN Regiments (Cavalry, Armored, Aerospace and Naval) that were mainly deployed on ocean planets. Frobisher seems like a place where one of those would be very handy (and the locals are pretty optimised to recruit for them).As regards the fourth Indiana Jones movie being about Atlantis (not Crystal Skulls) the Battletech Universe diverged from ours in the 1980s (Reagan got the Strategic Defence Initiative, AKA 'Star Wars' operational in 1985 for example) so I thought a little nod to that was warranted.We last saw the Donovan's in Part XIV (Chapter 14), they never managed to have kids on Buffalo Meadows but thanks to the Iron Wombs they now have a son on the way. Claire had the luck to be the mechwarrior that brought down Critchly's Rampage which looks very good on her record.Oh yeah, and with a name like that Captain Blüd really should have been a pirate.
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Chapter 22