GblaRCS Chpt 51

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 51 -==
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
"The Niops Association is the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma of the Inner Sphere, we're probably the people that ComStar have conspiracy theories about. We should pick three diametrically opposed or mutually exclusive ones and drop hints to the Maskirovka that the first one of them is true, the ISF the second and SAFE the third, not just to obsfucate things but because it'll send ROM completely nuts when they read their mail."General Franklin Hallis has fun messing with Intelligence Agencies - 2843CE
----
===A Policy I can get behind===
Robert H Goddard Spaceport (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2842
"I peaked into your office on the way to the meeting room, love the new desk." Franklin Hallis told Admiral Bremman as he took his own seat at the conference table. As usual the building was warm enough, but Navy Headquarters had been built in a hurry with everything bodged together, including the holoprojector somewhat crudely bolted to the table. General Romanov was focused on examining the large projection currently floating above said table, a colony starmap zoomed in on the border between the Free Worlds League and the Lyran Commonwealth, and as the others chatted she was considering the strategic situation. If Irian there fell to the Steiner offensive it wouldn't just rob Marik of one of their most important industrial worlds, it could also lead to the eventual loss of every system the League owned from there to Terra she determined, frowning.
It was no wonder why Gerald Marik was throwing just about all the reserves he still had at Irian, even at the expense of other systems. Marcus Steiner, his opponent, being less overstretched however was also able to find forces to send other places, hence his recent conquest of Danais which put pressure on the border elsewhere.
All things considered the current situation still majorly sucked for the Free Worlds League, Romanov decided while pressing a button on her noteputer to center the starmap back on Niops instead. The ComStar Interdiction might have only lasted a couple of years, but Atreus might well take a couple of decades to fully recover from its consequences even if they were able to keep Marcus Steiner's boot firmly off their neck for now, which in itself wasn't looking entirely certain.
If it hadn't been Gerald Marik that had arranged his father's 'brain aneurysm' he might be wishing that whoever actually was responsible hadn't made their move earlier. Frankly he had inherited an absolute ******, and the only bright spot in his strategic situation was that the Capellan Confederation was too busy dealing with a major push into their own territory by the Federated Suns to maintain their offensive towards Oriente.
Bremman looked at Hallis askance. "You really had to mention the desk?" he asked rhetorically as Brigadier Nellis at the other end of the table tried to hide his grin behind a doughnut. "You just couldn't resist?"
"You can't still be sore about losing the last one Jake surely?" Hallis asked sweetly.
"I will hold a grudge about that until the day I die. That desk was an antique, came all the way from Terra back in 2741." Bremman complained.
"If it was that good then why did Olson have a new one made?"
"Because he wanted a bigger, more imposing one" Bremman explained. "That desk was the only thing in Navy Headquarters nicer than the furniture in Craig's office."
"Don't drag me into this, it's not my fault that the furniture and décor in my building isn't mass produced, soulless utilitarian junk." Nellis replied. The Star League had spared no expense when they originally established the colony, although this was of course an organization which had a budget that allowed for things like ordering two McKenna class battleships to be built annually for nearly a century-and-a-half at a cost of thirty billion C-bills each. 
"By rights the High Administrators old desk should have come to me anyway as ranking officer, but you didn't hear me whining about it" General Romanov interjected, sipping at her coffee. Somehow Bremman was still managing to get his hands on higher quality coffee beans than she was too. If she didn't know better she'd think he'd been getting it smuggled all the way from Jamaica on Terra all these years, right under the nose of ComStar.
She was definitely going to have the James Sever searched from stem to stern when it finally got back in a couple of weeks, mostly to check if the navy had sneaked a few hundred tons of contraband aboard. Apart from high-grade Terran coffee, genuine Scotch and Irish Whiskey were worth a fortune way out here and it was a lot easier to get your hands on it in Italy than on Niops.
The ever-dependable Colonel MacArthur was hopefully bringing her back a few kilos of First Flush Darjeeling Tea from India with express orders to keep quiet about it of course. "Please pass on my congratulations to your troops who participated in the latest training exercise on Reykjanes Island Craig." she requested of Brigadier Nellis. "I hear Colonel Benedict wasn't too happy about the outcome."
Hallis chuckled. "Jax Benedict practically had steam coming out of his ears after one of his battalions fell headlong into a NAM ambush and got themselves virtually annihilated" he said. "He's not the most placid of men at the best of times."
"Let's face it, my guys and gals were due another win, they don't happen that often. We've been regularly getting whupped by the SLDF for a decade now." Nellis pointed out. "It's a good thing you learn more from failure than you do success."
"No need for false modesty, for what it's worth I doubt there's many regiments of House regulars out there these days that one of yours wouldn't maul, let alone militia. It's not just the better gear, it's the training and doctrine" Hallis told him. "Just don't expect to be able to pull that particular trick on any of my people again. You're right about learning more from failure."
"Just so long as Benedict doesn't demand a Trial of Grievance for showing him up" Nellis joked. "I was never really that good a mechwarrior to begin with" he said before becoming more serious. "High Associator Murray told me that he's still in two minds about offering a contract to Bolton's Rangers."
"So am I, but not for the same reason I'll bet." Hallis added for himself. "If they had quit working for the Combine after the Kentares Massacre like the Eridani Light Horse did it would have been a better look for them but they didn't."
"We did raise the issue and they say they thought it was all exaggerated until they left Drac territory and got to see the evidence ComStar and the Federated Suns had collected" Romanov replied. "Could be true, it's not like the Combine is well known for having a Free Press, or for allowing you to express officially unsanctioned opinions as well as keep your head on your shoulders. If you only got to read their accounts of the war they'd probably seem just as honorable as they always claim to be."
"Maybe" Hallis replied, still not entirely convinced. "I suppose they were just lucky that they didn't end up like those poor bastards from the Paul Bunyan regiment when they finally realized that the Combine actually were the ****** the Steiners and the Davions always said they were."
"Murray's issue is more financial, if we hire them to take over protecting Comstock and Francas as proposed we'll have to cut back government spending somewhere else and the easiest place to do that is scale back on his pet project to place orbital telescopes around every world where we've placed an HPG before he leaves office."
"Those actually have a defence application. Why not just scrap that gigantic radioastronomy array he wants to build a couple of jumps out from McEvedy's Folly because it's so quiet out there?" Hallis asked.
"Oh no, he won't be doing that" Nellis replied, rolling his eyes. "If it came to it he'd delay construction of the shipyard again first."
Unfortunately for him Admiral Bremman had been taking a drink from his cup of coffee at that precise moment and he practically drowned as he made a strangled sound of horror and it went down the wrong tube. "No!" he eventually managed to protest through the coughing.
"Relax Jake, you're getting your damn shipyard" Romanov assured the admiral before he had some kind of seizure. Objectively he did have a point that the navy had been sidelined when it came to investment and procurement over the years, and he was also probably correct that it was their warships which deterred foreign aggression far more than their advanced battlemechs. If that had been in any doubt before then the press reaction to the James Sever being deployed to Circinus and then all the way to Terra had confirmed it. Despite not being deployed nearly as much now as they used to be warships were still the ultimate symbol of the power of an interstellar nation. There was a reason why Charles Marik had used a couple of his to destroy the ComStar orbital facility over Oriente in 2837, thus triggering the ComStar War and the Interdiction, rather than just take it out with squadrons of aerospace fighters. Sending warships to do a job sent a message that you were serious.
The Niops Association had warships, possibly more of them than they were letting on, that meant that despite them being a small periphery nation they had to be taken seriously by the Great Houses. This was particularly true of their closest neighbour, the Free Worlds League, which was still trying to recover economically and territoriality from Charles Marik's ill thought-out move against ComStar. If Atreus tried to lean on Niops at the moment then Niops would laugh in their face because Charles's successor, Gerald Marik, just couldn't spare enough troops and ships from the front lines to invade the Illyrian Palatinate right now, let alone someone that could, at minimum, ram a frigate and a couple of destroyers up his ass. 
"Good. It's bad enough that those orbital telescopes need electronics that would otherwise go into dropship production. They'll slow down the rate at which I can get CargoMasters and CargoKings into service" Bremman succeeded in getting out once he stopped coughing. The new Alliance class orbiting dropship yard could make most of the CargoKing and CargoMaster, but the advanced computers that made the things so superior to other cargo carriers had to be produced by the electronics auto-fac salvaged from Camelot Command. That auto-facs time was almost as precious as that of the Project Workshops, it could reproduce any circuit you fed the diagram for into it and even make custom electronic components not already in its inventory if it had to. The secrecy of Camelot Command had meant the station needed to be as self-sufficient as possible, the fewer SLDF ships traveling in and out of the Dark Nebula carrying supplies the lower the chances that the Rim Worlds Republic would discover the naval base hidden in their midst. 
Franklin Hallis looked thoughtful. "Maybe we're missing a trick here" he said, drumming his fingers on the table absent-mindedly. "What if there's a way to get Bolton's Rangers to accept a contract that'll cost us a lot less money and enable us to hold onto them in the long term?" he suggested.
"Such as?" Romanov queried.
"We were already looking to absorb Islington into the Hegemony, its prime real estate, a future breadbasket system with only a small indigenous population that is amenable to further migration. We could offer Bolton's Rangers land grants there in lieu of some of their pay, explaining that they'll be worth a fortune as more people from the Inner Sphere come to settle in the Hegemony."
"It's already been suggested by the treasury" Romanov replied. "Offering them land grants I mean, not necessarily on Islington."
"It has? Well, it's only part of my idea." Hallis replied. "What we also need is to get them to agree to signing up for the Niops Company Store."
Nellis blinked. "You're kidding. They'll never do that, a good part of the reason they quit working for the Combine is because they were getting screwed by that kind of system."
"That was the Draconis Combine Company Store, not the Niops Association Company Store" Hallis responded. "The one the Drac's operate doesn't have Ferro-Fibrous armor on the shelves because we're apparently the only people that can still make that stuff. Hell before too long we'll be literally the only game in town for new Double-Heat-Sinks, ERPPCs, Guardian ECM systems, all sorts of gear."
"Gear that we're either currently in the process of replacing with even better equipment or have in mass production already like the Ferro-Fibrous for the Blackjack" Romanov replied, nodding as she thought it through. Their cast-offs were worth their weight in gold to most anybody else, and for a lot of mercenary units signing a contract that lasted a few years just to get hold of them might be well worth doing even if the actual pay was better somewhere else.
"The Ranger's probably have a few Phoenix Hawk mediums in their inventory, the Niops company store naturally has an offer on compatible XL engines if someone should want to soup up their old PXH-1" Hallis said, doing his best impression of a used car salesman. "Here's another idea, Bolton's Rangers were originally the 208th Hussars regiment right? We could even give them an HSR-200Db Hussar light as a signing bonus, we already replaced them in SLDF service with the 250 model and now we've got the 260 in production. To anyone but us handing over a Royal would seem ridiculously generous, extravagant even, it would certainly make it easier to get them to sign on the bottom line."
"All the 200Db's were transferred to the Militia when you got the 250s, if you plan to give any of my mechs away to mercenaries I'd really hope you'd ask me first" Nellis responded drily.
"We'd replace them with either new-build 260s or 250s upgraded to 260 standard" Romanov told him.
"Great, so are there any other machines that belong to me you want to give away, because if I get better mechs as replacements I'm all for it?" Nellis offered magnanimously, immediately scrapping his initial objection to the proposal.
Admiral Bremman smiled. "I've got visions of Bolton's Rangers in ten years looking to go work for someone else but then realizing it'll be a bitch getting spare parts for all their fancy new equipment."
"If we wanted to keep them sweet in the long-term we could say we're okay with them basing themselves in the Niops Hegemony but taking contracts elsewhere." Hallis suggested. "That was part of my thinking in giving them land on Islington. It's five jumps from here, halfway to Frobisher. If they rotated one battalion to stay at home for training, and to look after their dependents say, while the others deployed, we'd get a free garrison unit in a strategically useful location."
"Anything like that would have to be agreed by the civilian government, I don't think the politicians would be happy allowing a mercenary unit based here to work for just anyone" Nellis said. "I mean, if they wanted to do work for the Palatinate or the Magistracy while living inside our borders I don't think anyone would have an issue with it. For that matter the Mariks, Steiners and Davions are ****** but they're not complete ******, and they all seem to have at least a vague understanding that people have individual rights, but in the Draconis Combine and the Capellan Confederation it's tyranny O'clock twenty-four-seven. Allowing mercenaries living under our flag to work for governments I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire wouldn't be a good look."
"I doubt that Bolton's Rangers would agree to work for Kurita ever again but it's a fair point" Hallis responded, reaching for a doughnut. "Widening the scope of this we might want to think about bringing our association with the Troublemakers into this discussion. Their contract with us is open-ended but they're bound to want to get out there and bringing in more money eventually. I know Tyson himself is looking into expanding recruitment, get his regiment back to being an actual regiment again."
"Yeah, I don't know if everyone heard but he inquired about maybe buying a Blackjack lance from us a while back" Romanov noted. "We had to turn him down of course, what we've got under the hood on those things is secret for a good reason, but he seemed to accept that all our production capacity for the next few years is already earmarked for our planetary militias. I offered to put in a good word with Majesty Metals and Manufacturing if he ever thought about buying mechs from them instead. We're on their Christmas Card list at the moment thanks to facilitating their arms contract with the Palatinate and the ongoing Sabre negotiations."
"If we can fix those Stasis Tubes for the Magestrix our rep on Canopus will head into the stratosphere faster than a Sabre on overthrust. That'll be the time to put in a good word for Tyson" Bremman observed.
"You're not kidding, the way I heard it Michaela Centrella would probably offer to blow the High Associator if she thought it would help." Romanov joked.
"I'm glad you're the one that said that, Ma'am." Nellis said, laughing.
"Jeez, imagine what she'd do for the anti-agathic treatments." Bremman asked rhetorically, laughing himself.
"Something you can pay good money for no questions asked on most any planet in the Magistracy most likely" Romanov replied. "I'll bet you've got no shortage of volunteers for the cargo runs to Thraxa do you Admiral?"
"No Ma'am, it's a very popular assignment. I'm not sure it's just because of the cheap tazqan burgers and the mountain climbing either" Bremman replied. Getting shore leave on a Magistracy planet was a lot of fun. "Talking of Thraxa, if we do hire these new mercs then we might want to think about planting the flag on Al-Farghani ahead of schedule. We'll have a few extra troops available for garrison duty and placing an HPG relay there means we won't be as vulnerable to more 'random technical glitches' in the Hednesford Station occasionally cutting off our communications with the rest of the Inner Sphere."
"I do hope you're not insinuating that Comstar might be screwing with us?" Hallis asked in mock horror.
"Nah, of course not, it's just that it would look a teeny bit suspicious if both the Hednesford and Thraxa stations went down at exactly the same time, more blatant than they might be comfortable with" Bremman replied, smiling. "I'd like to be a fly on the wall inside their Thraxa HPG compound when the first transmission arrives there from Al-Farghani. Anybody want to make a bet how long it'll be before a Jumpship appears to investigate what we're doing out there."
Hallis suddenly smirked, looking distinctly evil. "It's not like we'll likely ever actually settle Al-Farghani, there's no rocky planets in the goldilocks zone and terraforming the one moon around a gas giant that is on the outer edge of the zone would cost us a fortune, but if we wanted to mess with ComStar we could make it look like we're building a Castle Brian there" he suggested. "You know, signs of excavation, big piles of dirt visible from space, loads of landing pads and runways marked out on the ground a few klicks from the relay station."
Nellis grinned. "An automated warning buoy telling people to stay well clear or they run the risk of being targeted by surface batteries" he added for himself. "All we'd need is a radar with enough wattage to make it convincing."
"I'd bet ComStar would make sure to mention it to the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy given where Al-Farghani is located" Bremman reasoned. "Our cover story, which would actually be the truth, is that we've only got a presence there because it's within HPG range of both Comstock and Thraxa."
"Nah, we're also officially there so we can set up an orbital telescope" Nellis added. "Which will actually be true as well, but they'll all assume it's part of the Castle Brian's sensor grid rather than because the High Associator wants stellar observation data from as many systems as possible."
Romanov sighed. "If people knew how much time and effort we put into messing with the Phone Company they'd think we were either very petty or that we thought ComStar was some kind of dark malevolent force slowly twisting its tendrils into the galaxy."
"Eh, little of column A, little of column B" Bremman responded with a shrug. "In other news it looks like we're going to get approval from Atreus to begin relocating people from Cerignola and Melk, they've basically given up on both colonies and if we want to offer the people there a new home it just gets them out of Gerald Marik's hair."
"Any conditions?" Nellis asked.
"Only that we have to offer the refugees the option to be dropped off at Romita if they don't want to come live on Baccalieu" Bremman replied. "If it all goes smoothly it's possible we'll get people migrating from Stettin, Izmir, Revel, Turov and New Galicia eventually too, they're becoming almost as rundown as Melk themselves and they're not that far away from us either. That might depend on whether the Free Worlds League wants to plough in the money and resources needed to keep them viable or not though."
"Is it just a lack of fresh water for irrigation that's screwing all these worlds?" Romanov queried.
"That and a lack of Jumpships." Bremman told her. "If the League wants to buy J-U Purifiers from us, or even make their own, that would help with the water situation but they're still critically short of interstellar transport. Part of the reason they're willing to let us relocate their citizens without kicking up a fuss is because we're still helping them out hauling cargo between Westover, Lesnovo and Hednesford. Having one of our big Monolith Jumpships doing that heavy lifting for them frees up three of their Invaders that they really need hauling logistics up to the front lines."
"You know, when they find out about us moving cargo for the League the Lyrans and the Capellans probably won't be happy" Hallis observed. "Not that I really give a rat's ass about what Marcus Steiner or Laurelli Liao thinks of us, but it's still an issue."
"We're not moving any actual military units or equipment for Marik, so we can still claim neutrality, and we are charging a fee to ferry their DropShips around so we can claim it's just a commercial decision" Bremman replied. "Having the Free Worlds League feeling antagonistic towards us would be a much bigger pain-in-the-ass than having the other two feeling aggrieved which is also why we've just agreed that Andurien AeroTech doesn't have to start handing over the next Stingray squadron they owe us until halfway through next year. The FWLM desperately need to replace some of their own losses first."
"I hope we kicked up a fuss about the delay, we paid for those things in PPCs nearly three years ago now" Nellis pointed out.
"Yes, of course, on principle, but it's not like the Skunk Works doesn't already have plenty of other work to do so it's not like we've got people stood idle because they're not upgrading imported aerospace fighters up to our specs." Bremman told him. "On that topic I checked with the Skunk Works for an update yesterday and I was told they're confident that they can re-tool the line that made the 315XL engines for the Stag II to turn out 300XL engines they can cram into the Stingray instead. Having a little longer to sort out any teething problems could actually be useful though, it's not quite as simple as tweaking the engine being made for the Stag to power a Hussar they say."
Hallis chuckled. "Understatement of the century maybe given that aerospace fighters aren't mechs" he said. "It's not just about generating electrical power on a fighter."
"I'm told they're basically just going to borrow some ideas from the engine in the Voidseeker, it was based on the Stingray after all, and the legal ownership of the design is murky enough that hopefully we won't get sued by someone about it in the future" Bremman said. "The Terran Hegemony's Skunk Works operated in just as much of a legal grey area as ours does."
"Heh, if anyone asks we'll tell them Niops had a license to produce Voidseeker engines and be deliberately vague about how we got it. Just something else to add to all the conspiracy theories about us that are starting to fly around out there" Hallis said, grinning evilly. "My new personal favourite is the one running around the Magistracy that says Aleksandr Kerensky deliberately left the 295th behind at Niops to keep an eye on Lauren Hayes and Jerome Blake because he didn't fully trust them. That's the real reason shipped PPC's to help the Free Worlds League during the ComStar War, and why we're eventually going to break their monopoly on HPG's. Our orders were to make sure the phone company with delusions of grandeur didn't ever become too influential and powerful."
Bremman laughed. "Well we're actually here because of a different Kerensky but, that said, it's still a policy I could get behind."
----
===Wheeling and Dealing===
"The misdirection and obfuscation is actually pretty good for us" Hallis maintained. "We might want to spread a counter-rumor ourselves that we were actually in league with Herman Schwepps, the guy that was supposed to take over ComStar after Blake, and that our beef with Toyama and now Karpov is because they're not doing enough to restore the Terran Hegemony" he continued. "We know Toyama was telling the Great Houses that the reason he purged Schwepps and his supporters was because Schwepps wanted to leverage their SLDF divisions and control of the HPG network to that end, so it'll ring true in a few circles. Especially after we sent some people all the way to Terra and bigged up our Hegemony credentials in public" he said before smirking. "Even if Karpov wasn't paranoid about his own people before, I'd assume that rumour would tip the bastard over the edge."
"You've never managed to forget your time running an impromptu Intelligence Agency have you Franklin?" Romanov asked him rhetorically, wagging her finger in mock reproachment.
"Once a spook always a spook. I'm sometimes surprised that the galaxies most unnerving burger flipper never adopted him" Bremman remarked. "Although if we're talking murky, secret squirrel stuff I still think that Craig here is holding out on us after what we turned up in the old NAM database."
Nellis held up his hands. "As God is my witness, I have no freaking idea how the blueprints for Nighthawk power armor ended up on Niops" he insisted honestly, having been just as surprised as anyone else when a trawl though the old files in the archive looking for something else had recently turned them up. "My only guess is that they're from back when the Association was making spare parts for XXXIV Corps, they did have some Royal troops on their roster. Maybe the 187th Royal Striker regiment was going to be issued them as part of the next set of operational trials before the Periphery Uprising in sixty-five threw everything into chaos?" he suggested.
"Oh, come on!" Hallis replied, feigning suspicion because he did actually believe the guy. "It would be bad enough if Niops only had the design for the Mark XXI, that was at least actually in service before the Star League fell, but the Mark XXII was only a prototype undergoing trials. If the 331st hadn't been a Royal Division we wouldn't have even heard of the thing and we didn't even have the actual plans for them, just a few photographs."
"I was even more surprised than you were" Brigadier Nellis insisted. "If I'd had any idea we had the plans for those things then you'd have found us already using them when you people first arrived here" he told the SLDF officers earnestly. "Project Workshop time wasn't fully booked fifteen years ahead back then. We could have found some capacity to make a few platoons worth of the things if we'd known we had the blueprints."
"Tell the truth, NAM is just a front for a SOG sleeper cell, just admit it!" Romanov joined in, enjoying the banter. The Special Operations Groups of the SLDF, the Special Forces teams that performed Black Ops missions, had been equipped with Nighthawk Mark XXI power armour suits because the integrated stealth and ECM systems made them very difficult to detect. Making an infantryman wearing a heavily armoured suit weighing four hundred kilos that had a jetpack attached actually sneaky had been quite the accomplishment but Special Forces Command had managed to pull it off.
The Mark XXII version was essentially just a Mark XXI that swapped out the ECM for an automatic grenade launcher. It had been intended for large scale production and if not for the Amaris War the infantry units of the Hegemony-born Royal divisions would have started being issued them in quantity. Like a lot of Royal equipment the Mark XXII was intended to make sure that the Terran Hegemony remained very much first-among-equals in the Star League and it genuinely was a mystery how the plans for such a highly classified piece of kit not yet fully in service ended up in a database of a Scientific Research Colony situated in the back of beyond.
"It's true. NAM is actually an SAS unit in disguise. We've only been pretending not to be the elite of the elite all these years and until now we've just been letting your people win whenever we conduct exercises together" Brigadier Nellis replied deadpan. "And because that information is need-to-know I'll have to kill you all now" he declared, holding up his hands in a kung-fu stance.
"Can I finish my doughnut first?" Hallis asked.
"Sure, go ahead" Nellis replied, reaching for his coffee, while trying not to laugh.
"Before Craig breaks our necks and quietly disposes of the bodies I'd like your thoughts on Kepler" Romanov said, wondering to herself whether it was worth having another doughnut given that she would have to spend another thirty minutes on the damn treadmill if she did.
"Kepler? Well it's hard to get started when reading his Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, but once you get going it's a lot easier" Nellis replied, feeling pleased with himself until he realised that nobody else in the room seemed to get the reference. "It's an inertia joke" he explained, realising that people not born and raised on Niops wouldn't have necessarily have even heard of that book much less know what was in it.
"I'll take your word for it" Romanov replied flatly.
"Assuming that you mean the Kepler system not the astronomer I guess you're asking if we think we should go ahead and place a garrison there as well?" Bremman surmised. "If so I'd have to say yes. If anyone else ever finds out about all the oil and natural gas hidden under those sand dunes they'll plant a flag there even if it's just to stop us doing it."
"The oil down the desert way, has been shaken to the top" Hallis sang a line from an old song. He liked various types of classical music although dubstep of course remained his go-to favourite genre, much to the annoyance of his family he inflicted it on. "We'll have plenty of J-U water purifiers coming out of the factory on Alphard soon, which will make sustaining a small garrison in the drier parts of Kepler a lot easier logistically."
"It's not exactly going to be a popular posting, and not just because it's almost Alphard level arid" Romanov pointed out. "Our survey teams had a few less than encouraging things to say about the local fauna and flora, those Kepler Magnalizards can chew right through an armoured environmental protection suit for a start. When they caught one to bring it back for the zoo it ate its way out of the cage they stuck it in on the dropship, they ended up flushing the damn thing into space because they were worried it might start gnawing on the hull."
"Why the crap would anything need teeth and a jaw pressure like that?" Nellis asked reasonably. Even animals that could effortlessly crush bones with their bite couldn't chew through a dropship hull. 
"Supposedly they mostly subsist on a type of vine that's more like a steel cable than it is a normal plant" Romanov told him. "The Corps of Engineers has this notion that with a little genetic tweaking they can grow tow lines for tanks and suspension cables for bridges using it. Someone claiming a sense of humour even suggested making leashes for Thunderbirds out of it."
"Leashes? What about a lasso? I'd pay good money to see an assault mech rope and hogtie a thirty-five ton chicken with a bad temper" Bremman told them with completely sincerity.
Hallis blinked. "Okay, so I was going to suggest we enter a mech in the tournament on Illyria next year as part of our attempts to raise our profile in the Inner Sphere, but Thunderbird wrangling sounds like something that would really bring in the ratings" he opined. "Of course we'd also need an Atlas sized Stetson hat, something to add to the backlog of jobs for the Project Workshops."
"Sounds more like something we'd have to assign to the Skunk Works, they've got more of a sense of humour over there" Bremman decided.
"Children, I work with children." Romanov complained, rolling her eyes as she was once again reminded that men never grew up. "Galileo is the only system we already have a presence upon that's within a single jump of Kepler, so we might want to consider rotating the SLDF garrisons between those two systems every few months for the sake of morale. Building sandcastles and trying not to get eaten by lizards on Kepler is going to get old fast, knowing that it won't be too long until you rotate back to Galileo and can visit a bar and send an HPG home is going to make it much more bearable" she suggested. It could be years before Niops actually colonised Kepler, hydrocarbon deposits or not, and the garrison couldn't even look forward to seeing some action because no pirate was going to raid the place to steal sand.
"Any news on trying to get a license to produce the Crab, Mom?" Nellis asked. "I mean Ma'am" he corrected himself, earning a glare.
"Not yet, I'm still trying to get the High Associator to grasp that's it's worth doing right now despite the fact it'll be ten years or more before we can actually get around to building a factory for them" Romanov replied, wishing not for the first time that Brigadier Nellis was in her chain of command because Hallis and Bremman who were wouldn't have made that joke.
"I guess you explained that the only reason we want to try and get it now is because the Federated Suns took Northwind and with it the only part of Cosara Weaponries not under the thumb of ComStar?" Hallis checked.
"Yes, and I also explained that the reason we never tried thought about getting a license before was that with Northwind under Capellan rule we'd have been giving money to a tyrannical police state, which just wasn't morally acceptable" Romanov confirmed. "We already did deals with New Avalon to get licenses for the Blackjack and the CargoMaster, so we know they're open to approving them, and since the Cosara plant on Northwind is supposed to be a wreck they might not make us pay through the nose either. It's not like we'd be competing on sales, they aren't actually making the things just servicing them."
"If we can get them we'll have one hell of a good, reliable trooper mech on our hands, especially with our new ER Lasers, the next generation double-heat-sinks and the improved ferro-fibrous and endo-steel we'll have before we're actually in a position to make any of them" Hallis observed before chuckling. "Maybe we'll even get that weird new engine that Farnstrom came up with by then too" he added in jest.
"I'll believe that thing works when I see it, and by 'works' I mean consistently without periodic containment breaches that'll turn the cockpit into a blast furnace." Nellis responded dubiously. He had been dealing with that lunatic a lot longer than they had, and certified genius or not Farnstrom was still a confirmed whackjob. Just the idea of having to rely on what was effectively a forcefield to protect you from the particles being thrown off by the high-energy plasma inside the fusion reactor sounded way too sci-fi for his tastes.
Just because it looked like it would work on paper didn't mean it would work in practice and given that it would have to work reliably in the field on the move with people shooting at it, not just under ideal laboratory conditions, Nellis wasn't alone in being cautious.
They were about to start discussing the next item on the agenda when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Enter" Bremman called out. He knew his people well enough to know they wouldn't interrupt a meeting of the Joint Chiefs for something unimportant.
A young naval lieutenant opened the door and entered, smiling sheepishly. "Feels like déjà vu." she said quietly, looking at the admiral and the three generals with him. "Sorry to interrupt but we just received an HPG addressed to General Romanov and Brigadier-General Nellis from a mercenary unit looking for work."
"Bolton's Rangers are persistent, I'll give them that." Hallis remarked.
"It's not from them, that's why I thought I should interrupt." the lieutenant replied. "It's from the Blackhearts, they used to be the 77th Special Operations Group, you know, Special Armed Services." she said, moving to hand a piece to paper to Romanov and then an identical one to Nellis. "They were like SLDF Black Ops right?" she asked.
"The blackest." Hallis replied, looking pointedly at Nellis.
"I was just joking earlier. Joking!" Nellis insisted, holding up his hands. "They must have addressed it to me as well as General Romanov because Captain Carmichael mentioned I was his commanding officer when he was interviewed by the press on Terra."
"Okay, but I've had people waterboarded I've been less suspicious of than I am of you right now Craig" Hallis told him. "Just keep that in mind, Nighthawk boy." he said as Romanov ignored them and read the HPG message.
"Anybody got any ideas what we could find an elite special-forces unit with possibly flexible morals to actually do at the moment?" Romanov asked rhetorically after finishing reading the message. "They'd be wasted guarding sand dunes on Kepler." she said wryly, folding it up.
----
===Star Map of the Periphery - 2845===
----
==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The political and strategic situation in the Inner Sphere of the early 2840's was very much dynamic. The Free Worlds League was still trying to recover from the ComStar Interdiction with Marcus Steiner at their throat pushing hard at Irian, The Capellan Confederation had to deal with Paul Davion taking Northwind off them and ComStar's Operation Holy Shroud was messing with everyone. Interesting times indeed!With Northwind now in the hands of the Federated Suns not the Capellan Confederation trying to obtain a license to produce the Crab battlemech from Cosara Weaponries because more politically viable. The SLDF had intended on making the Crab its standard medium mech but events conspired otherwise.Kepler (Horatius) was known for its hydrocarbon reserves and some interesting local fauna and flora including the Ferrovine and the Magnalizard. It's nowhere near as readilu habitable as other worlds in the region such as Islington (a breadbasket world of the Marian Hegemony in cannon) but was still colonised because the spice oil must flow.Cerignola and Melk in the Free Worlds League both dropped off the map around this time, with many other systems to do so over the next few years. The League was unable to support all its worlds for economic and logistical reasons (not enough jumpships to go around) and isn't going to object too much if someone else offers the inhabitants of worlds it's given up on a new home.In canon the Niops Association began production of Nighthawk power-armor in the 3070s in response to the deteriorating strategic situation in their corner of space. Quite how a scientific research colony had the plans for the highly classified Mk. XXI and Mk. XXII Nighthawk in their database is one of those mysteries that leads people to think that's there's more to Niops than meets the eye. The Mk. XXII in particular was only in trials when Niops became isolated at the start of the Amaris Civil War.The Mk. XXI Nighthawk was used by the SLDF's Special Armed Services (SAS) branch which included the 77th Special Operations Group, AKA the Blackhearts, who stayed behind and became a mercenary regiment that operated in the periphery during the First and Second Succession War.
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
Chapter 51