WP3025 Chpt 17

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==Chapter 17 - Winged Praxis (Battletech 3015 CYOA)==
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===Revelations===
Dropship Siduri, Nadir Point 
Nullarbor Independent System
Free Worlds League
20th February, 3015
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To: Ellen Winningham
I have reason to believe that your husband's employer wishes to retain his services and may respond to attempts to find employment elsewhere before the current project is shipped with extraordinary disciplinary action. I have further reason to believe that a rival organization may wish to offer your husband and as many of his team as he could bring with him lucrative employment. If you would like further information, please, do not hesitate to contact my firm.
 
Cordially yours,
 
John Travis
Ford, Travis, and Reece
Darienbad, New Olympia
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I could still see the text of the note I had typed up and paid a random man to send for me as I was waiting for Phillipa to finish up her communications back in Darienbad.
 
I hadn't planned to reach out to the Dragoons, as they were still working for the Clans at this point, but Anton's execution of Dragoon dependents cost a planet in the end. Even if I hardened my heart to the Dragoons, the people of New Delos did not deserve the fires that would reduce their planet to a barren cinder.
 
Who knew? Maybe the Dragoons could be peeled away early, leaving the rebellion toothless and quickly resolved.
 
I didn't have much time to get across what I wanted in that message, and I was pretty sure my oblique reference to the company store would sail over the heads of Clanners and Spheroids alike, but referencing knowledge of Jamie Wolf's cover story for his children and his efforts to disentangle the Dragoons from Anton's rebellion should have gotten a second look at the seeming spam message from any woman sharp enough for Wolf to have married.
 
If nothing else, it should get the nascent Wolfnet to reevaluate its position.
 
I had congratulated myself with a drink for it!
 
And now, as I collapsed back down into myself, safe in the Nullarbor system, I was bone-certain that that simple nine-line message had been responsible for everything going so catastrophically wrong.
 
The drive flare of Socks' launching in the Corsair for an immediate patrol of near space illuminated my horrified face for as long as it took for him to cruise out of line with the window of the bungalow.
 
Long enough for Terri to see.
 
"Gid, what's wrong?" She reached up to cup my cheek.
 
"I…" I took her hand in mine, looking down at her. "It sounds crazy."
 
"You know jumps can make us see and feel things." she reminded me. "Remember how I told you about the living webs of light I saw on my first jump?"
 
I nodded slowly. It was a well-known phenomenon of KF travel that even those of us who didn't experience physical shock, disorientation, and nausea from the jump were likely to have a variety of hallucinations during the moment of transit. I was no stranger to it, but before any moments of revelation I had experienced had faded with the KF field.
This was sticking.
 
"Gid?" prompted Terri. A bass clunk reverberated through the ship, and we hooked our toes under the bed's lip to control our drift during the undocking procedures.
 
"I was just certain that something I did is responsible for the state of the League right now." I said with a sigh.
 
"Like what?"
 
"I sent an anonymous note poking at the Dragoons back on New Olympia," I said. "I just have this overwhelming feeling that's where things went wrong."
 
"How could a note tweaking the Dragoons get the Diablo to send in the Highlanders?" asked Terri reasonably.
 
I didn't have an answer for that. "It couldn't," I said, frowning. "It's just sticking in my mind."
 
She smiled softly. "You want to do something, Gid. We're stuck on this contract, the League is going mad, and you're itching for something, anything to do that'll make things better."
 
I returned the smile. "About some thing you know me like you know yourself. You feel the same, don't you?"
 
She nodded. "Yeah. I think my father gave me a few more lectures on the subject of the limits of my influence than your mom gave you, though." She cocked her head to the side. "Serenity, courage, and wisdom," she said with an air of paraphrasing.
 
I chuckled. "I'm not so much on serenity," I said. "You may have noticed."
 
"Oh, absolutely," she murmured, giving me a quick kiss and disentangling herself from my limbs as the Siduri's drives throttled up and gravity started to grip us again. "I'd better get back to TASS country before Cliffhanger chews me out." She glided out the door, steps shortening as the gravity increased.
 
I frowned after her, the conviction that this was all my fault resettling on my shoulders like the thrust G.
But how had it all gone wrong?
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===Alert! Unexpected JumpShip Inbound!===
Open Space, Zenith Point
Cirebon System
Cirebon Independent System, Free Worlds League
22th February, 3015
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It wasn't until I was strapped into Cliffhanger's CSR-V12M, hanging in freefall as I supervised Siduri's transfer from one jumper to another that I realized how it could have happened.
"Kristofur." I snarled.
 
(("What was that, Duster?")) asked Socks over the comms.
 
"Nothing," I said, giving my threat board a check. "We're still clear out here."
 
(("Copy,")) said Socks. (("Not a big surprise. I think we're plenty rimward of the fighting by now."))
 
I grunted in agreement and pushed myself back against the seat to think.
 
If I trusted my knowledge, Vesar Kristofur was the man most responsible for Anton's rebellion as it happened. He was the one who had planted the idea in Anton to reach out to Maximillian Liao for support, and his agents had probably pushed the Chancellor to provide mercenary support as well. He had been/would be the one to stoke Anton's paranoia towards the Dragoons, and the one to personally kill Joshua Wolf.
He was industrious, intelligent, and ambitious. And now he was trying to do two things: damage the League's economy and find out more about the Dragoons. If I was right, he was angling for the seat of Primus, and thought this mission might put him in contention. Which led to the top guy in ROM doing a field agent's job. I imagined that he didn't trust anyone else to pull off such a critical ploy.
 
His aversion to delegation probably wouldn't gel with the Primacy if he did get it, but that wasn't my problem. My problem was that he was the micro-managing leader of the Inner Sphere's masters of sigint, and I had sent a message that referred to his plans to a member of one of his primary targets.
 
I hadn't tweaked the Dragoons, I'd tweaked ROM.
 
Frowning behind my breath mask, I tried to put myself in Vesar's place. If I had his resources and was investigating the Dragoons, I'd certainly be monitoring all of the HPG traffic going to and from the Dragoons. Trivial, when I was the message the fighter carrier.
 
I'd also be controlling what messages they got. Not an interdiction, just making sure that they got intel reports that were consistently off just enough so that they would suffer greater attrition than if they could plan properly. It'd also allow me to render rare high priority messages 'lost or delayed in transmission', degrading the Dragoons further.
I could also draw out the conflict by messing with rebel or loyalist communications in turn. Though that hadn't worked out so well in the original series of events. Maybe that would be too overt, risking Comstar's image as the neutral and reliable provider of interstellar communication or maybe Vesar was underestimating the Dragoons.
 
That didn't matter. What mattered was that he was almost certainly monitoring the message traffic to the Dragoons. And even if ROM didn't trace the anonymous note back to me, which I was pretty sure they could if they cared to, that sort of message was the sort of thing that would probably be brought to his attention.
 
Maybe when he read it, he thought that his initial plan was too obvious if a message from New Olympia was warning about it. Maybe he shifted plans to counteract a presumed SAFE operation to suborn the Dragoons. Perhaps he was in a particularly manic mood and reading my message set him on a quest to deliver more from his 'project' than he originally planned. It didn't matter.
 
A butterfly's wingbeat was not the hurricane, it just set into motion the events that would build the storm. Vesar had apparently been a tropical depression right on the edge.
 
It fit. Even if my local self existed in the original timeline, there was no way he would have sent that message. I had, because I had knowledge that he didn't, and a different set of values. I'd barely thought about it, and now…
 
I blipped the maneuvering jets, countering a slow roll I had picked up relative to Siduri.
 
So, what had Vesar done? He'd obviously done something to encourage Max Liao to put more effort into backing Anton, that was obvious. Perhaps Max had been convinced that a border cease-fire and marriage alliance with the League would be worth it for his state. Perhaps he thought that reinforcing the rebellion would provide disproportionate results for the resources he was investing still. Either way, the Chancellor was at least nominally on-side. And there was nothing I could do to affect that.
 
I needed to look at it another way. What did Vesar want to do? He still wanted to damage the League's economy. This did that. It'd do even more damage than the original timeline, barring a string of miracles. He'd still want to damage the Dragoons and collect intel on them. Well, extending the war would do that. But that wasn't enough. Even if I had shifted him to greater action, this was such an escalation, and it had to come with risks. What did he stand to gain?
 
Well, he was ambitious, and wanted the Primacy. How did Precentors Atreus and Sian feel about him? I didn't know. Actually, I realized I didn't know who Precentor Atreus was at this point. I knew Tiepolo had held the post prior to becoming Primus, but I wasn't sure if Aliz had taken the post yet. Nor did I know much about him, damn my patchwork memories!
 
Sian though, I was pretty sure that was held by Villius Tejh, though didn't have a great read on him. He might be trying to improve his base of power by shoring up the Confederation's position, or perhaps Vesar was doing an end-run around him to undercut a rival on the Circuit. I leaned towards the latter, given that Tejh was supposed to hold his post from sometime in the early thirty first century until 3041. That spoke of a man who wasn't inclined to rock the boat with risky plays.
 
What if he thought he could get Anton to win? If Anton took the Captain-Generalship and married Candace Liao, that would leave Precentor ROM with the personal ear of the leader of the FWL, or more likely what was left, and a conduit to the Liao court. That would be a hell of a coup, and even if the FWL shattered entirely, that wasn't so far out of line for the Blakist doomsday prophecies. Elect me, I am the instrument of Blake's will?
 
If I was right, his new actions prolonging the war would better accomplish his original goals and could potentially either shatter one of the Successor States in accordance with Blake's vision, or forge the first serious alliance between the States, with himself at one remove from the levers of power. And that was a win-win for Max Liao as well. Any way things played out neutralized the threat on his anti-spinward border, allowing him to focus on the Davions.
 
And there wasn't anything I could do about it. I may have flicked the first pebble, but the avalanche was in full thunder now.
 
(("Emergence signature! Infrared!")) Socks voice cut through my musings like a lobo plumbado through a Ranger herd. "Looks like an Invader. Couple of Mules Cargo DropShips and change, maybe?"
 
<<"I'm in cockpit.">> said Terri. <<"Spooling her up now.">>
 
"Copy," I said, bringing the throttle forward and shifting to the side of Siduri that was closer to the emergence signature. "Siduri, Duster. Moving to investigate jump-in. Now might be a good time to encourage people to be in their cabins."
 
<("Copy Duster, we'll run a drill. Do we need to man the turrets?")>
 
"Not yet," I said as I ran self-tests on the laser array just to be sure. "Currently we're just taking a look at someone who jumped in a little close." I toggled on a comms laser as the jumper popped into view. "Unidentified jumpship, this is Coyote 1-1 on Bankhead Lines escort duty. You've jumped in awful close to us. Please identify."
 
The threat board pinged as two smaller contacts detached from the JumpShip. (("Fighter separation!")) yelled Socks.
 
"Terri, you are clear to launch," I snapped on our operations frequency. Siduri, TASS is taking tactical control! Cliffhanger, you're running the bridge."
 
"Yes, Sir." said Captain Kumari, puffing as she dashed through the ship.
 
"Copy." said the Siduri's captain, sounding sullen.
 
"Captain," I said, "I'd take it as a great favor if you would remain on the bridge and handle your ship and crew. I just want Captain Kumari there for command and control purposes." Also to make sure the Siduri wouldn't just leave us behind in a mad dash for our new Jumpship, but I wasn't going to say that.
 
<("I hear you, Colonel.")> said the captain. "Gunners to your stations! Hospitality, get the passengers squared away and seal all bulkheads! Engineering, prepare the torch for high G operations…"
 
I tuned her out as I dragged a cursor onto the fighter contacts on the threat board, focusing the Corsair's sensor suite upon them.
<<"Coyote 1-2, launching!">>
 
I slewed the telephoto camera to see Terri's Stingray launch from the Siduri's bay. "Coyote, BARCAP on Siduri," I ordered. "Form on me and go combat spread."
 
"Two." grunted Terri as she engaged overboost to get out to me ASAP.
 
I returned my attention to the fighter contacts, which were forming up themselves. Reading the alphanumerics, I was relieved to see that the contacts were light fighters, and they weren't instantly boosting in on us. If push came to shove, I was confident that Terri and I could take them as a team, especially if they were trying to take the Siduri. As I waited, the tonnage estimates updated, both of them twenty-five tonners.
 
>>"Coyote, Coyote, this is the free trader Wiglaf. We have no, repeat, no hostile intent. We're just being careful. We ran into some trouble at the last jump point. Our escort has been heavily damaged. They've suffered main drive damage, and the PPCs are not responding. Last we heard, Hrothgar had depressurized. I don't suppose you might be able to help?"<<
 
"Hold one, Wiglaf." I toggled back to our ops freak. "Siduri, hold at alert, but our contact is declaring a casualty and is requesting help. They're claiming that they ran into some sort of trouble one jump from here. Could be military, could be raiders. Assuming this isn't a trick to sucker us in close, this is Bankhead's call, Captain."
 
I heard the rapid clacking of keys over the link. <("What's the worst-case, Colonel?")>
 
I looked back over the threat board. The Wiglaf had a pair of Mules and a damaged Leopard CV attached to it. No, as I looked closer, Wiglaf was one of the Mules. The fighters had been identified as a Sabre and a Cheetah. "Worst case is that they're raiders, we come in fat dumb and happy, and they spring a couple of lances of heavy fighters on us at close range. T-bone and I go poof and a couple of Mules full of pirates swarm the Siduri."
<("That would be bad.")> said the captain with a parched tone.
"I don't think it's likely, though. That Leopard could run you down by itself, not to mention the squadron it carries. There's no need for them to get cute like this."
 
(("You think they're being genuine?"))
I nodded to myself as I studied the LADAR returns on the threat board. "I do. That Leopard is awful chewed up, and I'm seeing minor damage on the Mules too, mostly around the thrusters. I think we're looking at pirate victims, not pirates."
 
<("I can't risk the ship for no reason.)> she said with an uncomfortable edge. It was obvious that she wanted to help, but that company policy was tying her hands.
 
"It'd be the neighborly thing to do," I said, "And I would like to get some information about the raiders out here. Could be valuable for our defensive planning."
 
<("That's true.")> said the captain, teetering on the edge.
 
"1, 2," cut in Terri. "What about the tug?"
 
"What about it?" asked the captain, intrigued.
 
"You could load up an engineering team and fly them out on the tug. Or your shuttle. It'd be faster, but the tug has the gantries and tool racks for open space repairs."
<("I like it. Colonel, do you consent to using your tug to ferry my engineering team?")>
 
"Happily, Captain. Always glad to be a good neighbor." I toggled back to my comm laser with Wiglaf. "Wiglaf, Coyote. We're putting together an engineering team and ferrying them over by tug. Don't know how much we can help, but we'll make the attempt."
 
>>"Bless you, Coyote."<< said Wiglaf's comm officer
 
I toggled to the private lance freak. "T-bone, we'll have you escort the tug in. Once you're there, take up station off the Leopard's six. With a little luck, your Sunspot aimed at their weakest armor ought to induce them to play nice if this is hinky."
 
<<"Like say if those fighters were painted up with skulls and crossbones?">> asked Terri.
 
"What?" I selected the telephoto camera as SOI and tracked the Cheetah, which was looking worse for wear. It did have big, obvious Jolly Roger stencils on its wings and vertical stabilizer. But if they were pirates, what the hell were they doing being so obvious? And those colors looked familiar…
I switched the comm laser to track the Cheetah. "Cheetah, Cheetah, this is Coyote 1-1. Vixen, is that you?"
 
The reply came over radio, crackly and weak. But the interference couldn't hide the exhausted, wounded sound in Vixen's voice. (-"Duster…you have no idea how good it is to hear a friendly voice."-) Static crackled. (-"We need help,"-) she said. (-"It's bad."-)
 
I glanced down at my threat board, willing the tug to separate from Siduri. I knew that every minute of delay spent coasting would result in complaints from the passengers and could cut into Bankhead's bottom line. In that moment, I couldn't care less.
 
"We're here," I said simply. "What happened?"
 
In a halting, pained voice, she started to tell me.
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*;Notes from the Author : We keep on trucking down the jump chain as the League descends further into chaos.
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