Strat-2 Chpt-25

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==Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!) - Part 2 - Chapter 25 - Something Clever==
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===Aftermath of a hot date===
"You were found…
...in Peace Park. You left a Mark VII Shuttle parked on the Star League Monument in Peace Park." The President wasn't quite as humorous as Victoria had been. "With one of Vincent Kurtia's sons."
"He was a fun date?"
"At least she didn't think robbing a bank would be good fun." Lori commented. "Still, on the Monument?"
"It was flat?" Amanda hazarded.
"I have to make it up to the Combine somehow." President Avellar scolded. "This is coming out of your pay, believe me, but it might have to… how do they say it on Sevon V?"
"Come out of her hide?"
"Yes, that. There are diplomatic consequences."
"Um, point of order, 'not a diplomat'," Amanda offered "Also… uh… ******. Lori??"
"Don't look at me, Captain. I didn't try to stay up all night doing Fission Ball Shooters with the Coordinator and his bodyguards! Then haul off with his son to hit the town at zero three in the AM, 'requisition' a shuttle from the port, and land it on the ferrocrete tumor… which is still not flat despite your engine exhausts and the weight of a two hundred ton smallcraft!"
"It's a dome, innit?"
"Yes, it still is. The engineers even say it's still structurally sound." Avellar's eyes twinkled, "So…give me solutions."
"You've been talking to Foster… right?"
"He and I are often of like mind… but no. Do I give them the note on your ship?"
Her eyes goggled, "God, NO!!!"
"Solutions."
"We don't have anyone qualified on Land Air 'Mechs, do we?" Amanda asked.
"No, we don't, and neither do the Snow Ravens…why?"
"Thirty-six of them, practically new in box on Port Orphan, in Cargo 12. Fill the hydro tanks and spark the fusion toroids and they're ready for use." she almost moaned. 
He turned to the side, "Vincent?"
Vincent Kurita stepped into the room. "Those will do. I have… discussed the matter with my son, and the story should be quite amusing. I'll give you three-quarters book price for the lot."
"Deal." Then the President fixed Amanda with his gaze again, "You cost us a chance to sell those collector's pieces at a premium, Director Roberts. Remember that."
"Miss Roberts?" the Coordinator spoke, "You are not to be alone with my son again. Am I clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"I had better be, next time. I might make you come home with us." the Coordinator warned, "I prefer my son to be married in a proper way to a proper Noble, but there are always spaces available in his seraglio for concubines… after some classes in decorum at Sun Zhang."
Amanda caught the underlying threat, but it took Desmond to point out it was multilayered.
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===Discussions of Punishment for bad girl===
"So, Lady Cameron…
… Vincent and I cooked up a way to scare your little…cousin." Mitchell Avellar was having lunch with Helena. "The normal means of discipline aren't really available and I can't be seen paddling an officer for sowing her wild oats, even if it could have gone much worse."
"What did you do?"
"Threatened to send her to the Combine." the President stated. "As a candidate for one of their concubines…you should have seen the look on her face!" he chuckled.
"You weren't seriously going to-"
"Of course not!! Vincent might accept it, but getting a quarter knocked off the price of thirty-six prime condition PHX-HK1 LAMs still in the presenol, plus spares? Honor was satisfied and we taught her a valuable lesson…and he got a good laugh after."
"And you get the cash."
"AND the Alliance got the cash," he nodded. "We don't have anyone trained well enough on the specific skills to make use of them, but the Combine?? They do."
"But there was a full battalion plus one extra company according to -"
"I'm selling the other twelve from cargo 12 to Yvonne," he said. "And I don't have to eat a discount. It's enough to cover fueling and repairs for the Lynnwood." He grimaced, "We can't afford to keep them."
"Do you know what bothers me the most about this whole situation, Lady Cameron?" Avellar looked old as he said it. "Besides the fact we let this go on for so long?"
"I can think of a list of things that bother me, but what's yours?"
He sighed, "They're all young. The Roberts girl was sixteen when she started. Sixteen! She is barely over eighteen now, but…" he sighed, "Too young." and shook his head. "She should be in School still!"
“No one saw this one because interstellar distances mean no one had any reason to check if the relocations were anything other than what was listed and there are so many other problems going on. Even with the help of sophisticated AIs watching HPG broadcasts and sniffing around I missed it because it was simply buried in the monotony of everyday traffic.”
"How are your people finding Roberts' Nest base? You've had them there for months now." he asked, steering back to the topic. 
“It is an excellent base. My people have had no complaints.”
"I'm going to ask you to detail some of them to bolster at Ruins of Tuesday, and maybe Port Orphan. The Clan's gearing up for the offensive and they're finding that after thirty years of drawdowns haven't left them enough trained staff to handle it-god help us if we'd gone fifty. The Ghost Bears and Falcons are still six months and eight months from having anything moving in besides supply ships and some fighter wings they can move by DropShip on circuits."
“I should have enough people to spare to make it work but yes this could be an uncomfortable year coming up. We may have to proceed more cautiously than any of us would like. If we overextend on offensives now the Sons of Plunder could wreak havoc in the back lines. They still might because as large a force as we have we still can not be everywhere at once.” Helena nodded.
"I avoided most of the Jihad years, the other succession wars…and now, we're earlobes deep in something." he sighed. "Does it get easier? Making the compromises?"
“If you are a good man, no. If you are a wise man you will still make them anyway because you know they must be made. But only the ones that must be. Make too many of the wrong ones like I have and it gets all too easy.” Helena sighed.
"Then…here's to making the right ones, and living with the nightmares for doing it."
“Cheers.” Helena grabbed her cup of tea and raised it.
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===Planning for a the Dim Future===
"I'm not going to take…
your head for doing the intelligent thing!" Katran Cameron, Basileus and official Final Scion of the Cameron Dynasty stormed. "You preserved assets, Halford, I should be making you an Admiral for knowing when to fight, and when to withdraw!!"
"Things went badly." Lord Commodore Cecil Halford half-asked.
"We lost the Tokyo over Quatre Belle, and the mission to Sevon V was a failure that cost nearly a brigade of ground forces, and left us with a damaged Texas class." she half-sulked, "We underestimated, and that is on the Intel section, not on you."
He winced, "Purges?" 
She shook her head, "it would be impractical to keep them from learning from past mistakes-the error was at the policy level, and that level is me, I can hardly take my own head!!"
"What do you require of me, Your Majesty?" he asked.
"Formulate a defensive plan, and formulate an offensive plan." she said, "We will need a year to make up losses, but the Royal Fleet cannot be idle in that year. We need some victories besides the defense at Grankum, we need to force them to the table..and failing that, we need to have a defensive strategy able to hurt them so badly they will accept a negotiated settlement."
"You are talking defeat."
"I can do basic math." Her Majesty stated. "I made some critical errors, those errors have put us out irreplaceable assets and left our supply chain vulnerable, and we are outnumbered-they can conceivably defeat us through attrition alone, now that they know we exist."
"Scale?"
"Small Scale. Focus offensive forces on small-scale raids and strikes to hamper their build-up and confuse their support and supply line, while concentrating our best assets for either an emplaced defense, or a sharp counterattack." she mused for a moment, adding, "Use only assets we have the capacity to replace quickly for the offensive operations. No more grand gestures with the fleet until the fleet's fully up and combat ready."
Her Majesty sighed and looked out the window of her throne room at her children playing with staff-serfs in the garden. "I made a critical error, Halford. All we have left is to salvage something to survive with."
"You are the inheritor of the First Lord." he stated, "You are the Baslieus. Your will be done."
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===Words are Spoken===
"In the fall of 3118…
... A conference was held. A Summit of powers. There would be consequences for what was decided on Alpheratz in November of 3118. Some foreseen, others, not so clearly. Historians may note it, in passing, as a footnote in the brief history of the Republic of the Sphere. The Slaver's War will be remembered in the periphery long after it has been forgotten in the more civilized core of the Inner Sphere. But for a brief time, the potential of Devlin Stone's dream would be a fact, and not merely a promise… What could be done, when all work together as one.
-Roberts, Jeffery Lamb, 'The Slaver's War', Sevon V publishing, Raven Alliance
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"The release of the 'client lists' savaged intelligence agencies across the Inner Sphere. You have to understand, Spies don't just sneak in and take pictures. Sometimes the information requires getting in bed with the worst sorts…or catching important people in bed with kids… a lot of blackmail was aired quite suddenly, and even here in the Federated Suns, some of the perpetrators named in it turned out to be in critical government positions. We're still prosecuting and finding foreign agencies. It's caused Prince Henry no end of grief rooting out the bastards…"
-LaFollette, Henri, 'The Secret World of Spies!', New Avalon International Press, 3128
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“No sane person wishes to turn a blind eye to that kind of evil. It is just a sad fact of reality that when you focus on one kind of evil another flourishes elsewhere and there are only so many good people to go around. It is no wonder that such a thing went on so long.”
-Dubrauch, Gregory, Tikonov Historical Publishing, 3128
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"Pursued into darkness.
Looking into the eyes of monsters.
Gaze into the abyss."
Yueh, Chie, "A song of war and Pirates" Luthien Music LTD.
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”People ask me all the time how can such things go unnoticed for so long. I answer with what I call the Langstrom effect. See back before the fall of the Star League there was an Admiral in the procurement office of the SLDF named Victor Langstrom. He put forth the theory that the Star League had become such a bloated bureaucracy that the best way to hide something was to toss it in with all the ordinary messages. Classifying it would actually make it easier to find. I think we have to face the fact our societies have become much the same with how much we rely on the HPGs and love to generate memos, reports, and studies. Make it in triplicate any time anyone suggests we’re becoming a paperless society.”
-Causes, Phillipa Professor of Political Science and History University of Atreus, 3128
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"The question of Freedom, or Safety can be answered at last… everything the Sons of Plunder did was framed initially as 'safety'. And they took the freedom of millions and did the most horrific things imaginable for generations in the name of 'safety'. Open your texts to chapter one-eighteen…"
-Esmerelda Gomez, Instructor on Political Theory, Dante Training Grounds, Raven Alliance (3132)
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”Why did I wait so long to reveal myself? You try spending three centuries and then some watching the worst of humanity fall in upon itself. Yes I still feel like a coward for it, but that is the kind of fear and despair that none of you can grasp. I hope none of you ever will.”
-Cameron, Helena 3132
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"Yo Ho Ho."
-scrawled on a spaceport bathroom wall, 3135 below the crude image of a bird wearing a tricorn hat.
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End of Part 2, the story goes on to Part 3.
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