GblaRCS Chpt 58

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 58 -==
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"Calculating the Three Body Problem isn't the problematic part of jumping into non-standard jump-points, computers given access to system charts can deal with that just fine and plenty fast enough for our purposes. The problem is that the most convenient non-standard jump-points, like Lagrange points for example, have this nasty habit of collecting orbital debris over time and it's that debris itself, not the negligible gravity the mass of that debris creates, which can easily kill you. In simple terms, potentially jumping face-first into a big floating rock is bad and is best avoided whenever possible."Zen and the Art of Kearny-Fuchida-Drive Maintenance - New Earth Press, 2650CE
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===Meeting with False Smiles===
Amaris City – Von Strang's World – 2844
Baron Karl Von Strang sipped from his glass of imported, and very expensive brandy before putting it aside. "The Aquila Rift?" he repeated, quizzically reaching for another cream-filled pastry from the large platter that sat between them on the small dining table. He had originally considered hosting a massive feast in the main hall of the baronial palace for his guest, but this cozier, more intimate meeting seemed more likely to sway the man he had eventually decided instead.
Colonel Mitch Johnson, the nametag on his uniform naturally showing that of his fake identity as one Captain David 'Davy' Jones instead, nodded. Brigadier-General Franklin was of the opinion that going this far with the ruse was insane, actually landing on the planet and meeting Von Strang himself, but agreed that if Johnson was crazy enough to try and pull it off he was welcome to try.
Worst case scenario, mercenary gets caught and shot and the expedition has to conquer Von Strang's World the hard way without detailed knowledge of the situation and layout inside the city.
Fortunately the uniforms Niops had provided passed muster as genuine, mostly because they were genuine Rim Worlds Republic uniforms, ones that the SLDF had picked up somewhere while searching for caches of equipment left over from the war. The patches and insignia for the Finmark Free Republic sewed to them were fake of course, but they were well made and certainly looked the part. 
"According to my father when he opened his sealed orders as to what to do if the Steiners invaded they basically just said, 'hide until they go away again' and he figured that a nebula larger than the entire Lyran Commonwealth should fit the bill." he responded, sipping at his own brandy which was truly excellent. "It's still basically uncharted for the most part, and the molecular cloud is so dense in places that it obscures the stars themselves, so Dad figured that even if Richard Steiner somehow knew we were out there he wasn't exactly in a position to deploy half the Lyran Navy for a search that could last decades and still come up blank in the end, not with the Combine breathing down his neck anyway."
Von Strang frowned. "And how long did the Durant Star remain hiding in the Rift?" he queried.
"About two years the first time." Johnson replied. "That seemed long enough for things to have quieted down so they jumped back to Finmark in late 2794 intending on reporting back and making contact with the authorities there once it was established that the Lyrans had left." he continued. "Dad and his crew had no idea that the Lyrans had glassed most of the planet until they got back, they had always assumed they would just take out the shipyard and then ****** off back to Tharkad after putting the 'periphery barbarians' in their place, but they found Finmark a scorched wasteland with all the major cities destroyed and the planet just recovering from the nuclear winter caused by all the dust kicked up from the orbital strikes."
"That must have been heartbreaking to see." Karl Von Strang empathized.
"Dad wasn't hit as badly as some, he was actually raised on Dijonne, but the majority of his crew were Finmark born so you can imagine what they were feeling." Johnson told him, glad that he had put so much work into concocting a cover-story and detailing a fake personal history.
The baron reached for his brandy again. "Dijonne you say? I assume he wasn't happy to learn that the wretched Steiners had occupied his homeworld even if they didn't destroy it?" he asked, sipping from this glass.
"He wasn't best pleased, no" Johnson replied wryly, understatement at its best. "There were still a couple of other systems professing to be part of the Finmark Free Republic back then, but without Finmark itself it wasn't realistic to think it could last. My father allowed his crew to vote as to whether they should pledge allegiance to the government-in-exile that has established itself on Lushun, but they decided that if they did it might bring the wrath of Steiner down upon that planet as well" he continued before sighing. "The Durant Star isn't technically a warship, but it's close enough, and they can't let the periphery have nice toys. We might get uppity" he added with a momentary look of anger on his face before he sipped on his brandy again. "This is very good stuff" he opined, savoring the quality of the liquor.
"To my eternal shame it's Terran." Von Strang admitted. "The Antithesis Creed made preach that nothing good ever comes from the Inner Sphere, but this may be the exception that proves the rule."
"Antithesis Creed?" Johnson queried, feigning ignorance.
Karl Von Strang smiled. "I forget just how out-of-the-loop you are" he responded. "It likely only took off in earnest a few years after the Finmark Free Republic followed the Rim Worlds Republic itself into late lamented history" he explained. "Essentially it's a philosophy that hold that everything not stemming from the periphery itself is tainted, and its adherents rail against any Inner Sphere influence on our lives. If it wasn't for the unfortunate fact that most people ascribing to the Creed were of an anarchist bent they might make a powerful ally in my own crusade, but as it is they are merely the enemy of my enemy, not my friend."
"And you're hoping that my ship and crew can be actual friends" Johnson replied.
"Quite so, you've as much reason to hate the accursed Steiners as we do, perhaps even more so, and between us we can be more than just an irritant, we can be an actual threat to Lyran rule over systems that rightfully belong to those whose ancestors settled them like ourtselves" Von Strang replied, sounding like a man that really believed in what he was saying. "If you had returned even a mere ten years ago it would have been naught but a pipe dream, Tharkad would have dispatched warships to quash any hint of a revival by the Republic just as they did at Finmark, but these days whatever meager naval strength they still possess has to be kept close to home for fear of Luthien striking at their own capital."
During the initial remote discussions via radio in which he feigned ignorance of the current state of the Inner Sphere Johnson had made out to be shocked that the Successor States had so few warships these days, Von Strang suggesting that at the start of the Second Succession War they likely had less than a hundred between them, and notably fewer now after another decade-and-a-half of war.
Johnson had 'let slip' that the reason the Durant Star had stayed so far away for so long was that after the orbital bombardment of Finmark, during which a small fleet of Lyran warships had laid waste to the planet, discretion had been clearly the better part of valor. A Royalty might be seen as a dangerously formidable combatant when measured against civilian JumpShips that might boast an armament consisting of a couple of PPCs at best, but even a warship as small as a Lyran Mako class corvette would pound the Durant Star to scrap in minutes.
If the Lyrans didn't have all those warships any more however, certainly none to spare to effectively patrol their periphery border, then that changed everything surely, Karl Von Strang had argued, desperately trying to land the catch of the lifetime. Johnson had feigned being talked into meeting to discuss it all further in person.
The mercenary was still feeling pretty pleased with himself for the way he had managed to finagle permission to land on Von Strang's World while making Karl Von Strang firmly believe that he had been the one to talk his guests into visiting, allaying any suspicions he might have had otherwise. It naturally helped that, like most absolute rulers, Von Strang spent so much time getting his ass kissed by minions that he overestimated his intellect compared to others, but it still took talent on Johnson's behalf to play the man quite as well as he had.
Getting Von Strang to agree to jump his own Jumpship from its previous station at the Zenith Point to the Nadir alongside the Durant Star had been the real masterstroke in Johnson's opinion though. Johnson insisting that if he was going to risk becoming a potential hostage against his crew on the planet that he wanted something of equal value, well at least as far as he was concerned personally, under the guns of his ship as a guarantee of safe passage and conduct had been accepted after some argument.
Von Strang's Invader had made the jump when the Jumbo arrived in orbit, though Von Strang did at least have the good sense to insist upon a real-time conversation first to ensure that Johnson wasn't still on the Royalty and it wasn't just a trick.
It was a trick of course, just not the one Karl Von Strang thought it might be.
Johnson put down his glass of brandy and reached for a pastry of his own before Von Strang ate them all, the man must exercise quite a lot to not be fat considering his evident love of the things, he decided. "I know I've said it before but you seem very certain of your estimates for the amount of Lyran warships still in service." he observed doubtfully. "Have you got anything to back up your numbers?"
"If they still had more than a fraction of the fleet they did back during the First Succession War they would have deployed it against the Free Worlds Republic during the ComStar Interdiction to deliver a swift knock-out blow" Von Strang stated with certainty. "It was an opportunity too good to miss unless they were simply incapable of still putting together an expeditionary force of warships for deep strikes far inside the Marik borders. Stripped of HPG communication Atreus was fighting blind, even a handful of destroyers or corvettes could have utterly devastated the League, but it never happened. If you'd been Marcus Steiner, and had reserves, wouldn't you have committed them?" he asked rhetorically. "It was the best chance the Lyrans ever had to break one of their mortal foes and then be able to throw their full force at the Draconis Combine instead."
"Maybe Marcus Steiner is just an idiot?" Johnson suggested. "The history of the LCAF is hardly resplendent with military genius."
"He's not." Von Strang replied flatly. "As much as it hurts me to say it, Marcus, like his father, is quite competent strategically, even if many of his generals do continue the grand tradition of Lyran tactical ineptitude. It's not that he deployed a fleet and it failed to achieve its assigned objectives in a timely manner, despite the FWLM having to rely upon semaphore for communications, it's that there was no such fleet."
"So, you're concluding that what with warships being so scarce that they're worth their weight in germanium these days that the next best thing like my Royalty is at least worth it's weight in gold?" Johnson suggested. "Or rather diamonds."
Von Strang laughed. "At no point did I offer you your Jumpship's weight in diamonds." he replied. "I got you down here because I offered to pick up half the tab for the repairs to your ship if you heard me out and gave my ideas a fair hearing" he said. "Diamonds are just the unit of exchange." he noted. "After you get the Durant Star serviced and repaired at Star's End come back here and I'll hand over a bucket of shiny rocks, plus another bucket as a signing bonus."
"I'm not going to lie and say that the idea of sticking it to the Steiners isn't appealing, I've spent my entire life looking for Jumpships with Lyran registration so I can get in whatever modicum of revenge I can, but if you think I'm going to pledge allegiance to the Barony of Strang you're sadly mistaken" Johnson told him. "I appreciate the exemplary treatment I've received since I landed, you're one hell of a host Baron, and it was good to learn out that we weren't the only people holding out, but if you're expecting me to kiss the ring like some Inner Sphere lickspittle I won't."
"I'm not making demands upon your and your vessel, Captain Jones" Karl Von Strang replied, "certainly not ones for fealty, I'm asking you to join me in a joint venture. One that will not only give us both the opportunity to hit back harder and more effectively than either of us could alone but will also make us fabulously wealthy as we strip the coffers of our joint foe."
Johnson smiled "People with buckets of diamonds to spare are usually regarded as fabulously wealthy already" he observed with a chuckle.
"There's rich, there's rich enough to possess a small private army, and there's rich enough to possess a large private army and an actual navy" Von Strang replied, smiling back. "I crave the latter, not in order to boost my ego but so that I can restore our people to greatness" he declared, sounding like he might actually mean it which was frankly far more disturbing than mere greed or egocentric self-aggrandisement would have been. "Incidentally, I've been meaning to ask. Why did you set down in that shuttle rather than in your DropShip?" he asked out of curiosity.
"Because my JumpShip isn't the only thing that's many years past its recommended mechanical service date" Johnson lied. "If the Nellie had made a landing here I wasn't entirely sure it would have been in a fit state to climb back out of the gravity well again afterwards" he lied having very different reasons for arriving that way.
"Ah, I see" Von Strang replied, thinking that he had the man at even more of a disadvantage when it came to negotiations than he had thought before. It sounded like the Jumbo waiting up in orbit must be a near wreck and that could only strengthen his hand when it came to striking a bargain. "I imagine that repair facilities for DropShips are almost as uncommon out in the Deep Periphery as shipyards?"
"If there's a yard corewards or anti-spinwards of here I've certainly never seen it." Johnson replied, one of the few truthful things he had said since arriving. "Admittedly there are a few sectors we always steered clear of. Have you had many dealings with the Void Nation?"
"Rarely, they don't usually range out this close to the Inner Sphere."
"We usually tried to keep out of their way." Johnson told him. "Not that we didn't have any of their raiding parties outgunned, it's just that there's a lot of them and replacing losses is difficult. If it wasn't for stumbling across a few colonies in the Rift that were amenable to the cause we couldn't have even recruited new personnel over the years."
"Amenable to the cause?" Von Strang queried, that sounded intriguing.
"Mostly refugees from the Rim Worlds Republic, but there's even a world that was originally settled by Taurians after the Reunification War. They thought the Rift would be a good place to hide from the Star League, which I guess it was because they outlasted it without ever being found" Johnson told him. "My father ended up marrying a woman from there, if you can hear a trace of Taurian in my accent that's my mother's fault."
"Ah, that's what that is mixed in with the Finmark."
"I've got some crew whose Taurian accent is so strong you'd think their name was Calderon." Johnson joked. "If you were proposing fighting the Davions instead of the Steiners you'd have their vote at least."
"They're all the same," Von Strang contended. "Inner Sphere scum that think they can take anything they want from the periphery." he said sadly. "Foreign flags flying over worlds that rightfully belong to the Concordat, the Magistracy, and the Republic, worlds that our people settled and which were stolen from us. The Succession Wars are God's judgement upon them for their sins."
He might be right about that last part, Johnson thought to himself, although if Karl Von Strang thought he was an instrument of the lord he was very much mistaken.
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===Executing a carefully orchestrated Operation===
There was at least one higher power looking down upon them right now however, but it was actually the DropShip in orbit. As the Jumbo circled the world from above it was taking absurdly high resolution satellite photographs of the surface that would become very useful in short order.
Prior to leaving the Niops system a very large optical telescope of advanced design had been stuffed into one of its expansive cargo bays. The mirror size of the reflector and lens, and hence the potential resolution, had of course been limited by the size of the cargo bay door, but since the hatch was sized to allow a ten meter tall industrialmech access it was still an absolute beast of a telescope as far as Johnson was concerned, even if the Niops people considered it to be 'a little on the small size'.
It wasn't just in there to take unnecessarily detailed reconnaissance photographs from orbit of course, during the Jumbo's two-week long journey from the star's Nadir Point to the planet the big telescope had been making long-distance observations of other places of interest.
According to the crew of technicians operated the device, these being supervised by a professional astronomer along for the ride, the telescope was able to resolve an object a couple of millimeters across at a distance equivalent from Terra to its moon. Since leaving Niops they had used the thing to make stellar observations at every stop along the way, making the astronomer very happy, and during the flight from the Nadir Point to Von Strang's World they had used it to take a close look at the system's Lagrange Points, which in turn made the military people very happy.
Since Lagrange points are a lot closer to the planet you want to get to than the standard jump points are, people often wondered why they weren't used more. After all, the math involved to calculate where the Lagrange points were in a system isn't that complicated once you've mapped the orbits of the planets and moons. You could save yourself days, or even weeks of intra-system travel time by jumping to one of them instead of the Zenith or Nadir points of the star surely?
This was of course true, but ignored one of the reasons why starship captains are usually very loath to do so, by their very nature Lagrange Points tend to be places where space dust and debris accumulates over eons and while the emergence wave of a Kearny-Fuchida drive can push dust and small rocks out of the way before the ship itself actually arrives, larger chunks of material have too much mass for that to occur.
Jumping your ship through hyperspace directly into an asteroid is, to put it mildly, very bad for the ship and crew, and doesn't do the rock any favors either, not that they have any feelings on the matter as such.
While pirates are often willing to take the chance for the tactical advantage, if they were risk averse individuals they would have taken up a different line of work after all, most people preferred a long boring DropShip ride to a leap into the unknown and a potentially messy close encounter between a floating boulder and a starship.
Since most people did not own a honking great portable telescope, one of the most advanced designs that the Star League could come up with at its height, inspecting Lagrange points from a truly colossal distance to determine the best spots to make your jump to was not really an option. Niops meanwhile had some really good navigation charts for every inhabited, and many uninhabited, stellar system within several jumps of their home, and now Von Strang's World too.
Johnson had queried why more people didn't do this sort of thing themselves, or at least he did before he found out just how expensive the telescope the Jumbo was carrying actually was and just how difficult it was to produce scientific equipment to the necessary tolerances. The mirror inside the telescope had taken months to painstakingly grind to the required precision, and that was using manufacturing equipment that nobody but them likely even had these days, with the possible exception of ComStar.
That did at least help explain how Niops was able to make royal-grade SLDF military equipment. Compared to much of their civilian gadgetry an ER PPC or Beagle Active Probe must look like it was designed and built by ****** monkeys.
The mirrors for the really big orbital telescopes, the DropShip sized ones that were literally made in the same yard as their new CargoMaster and which they were in the process of placing in every system in the new Hegemony, supposedly took a full year to produce, which was far longer than it took to make the entire rest of the satellite-mounted telescope it would be fitted to, and they could only make one at a time. Rather than have the yard stand idle they would make an orbital telescope, put it to one side, then turn out a couple of DropShips in the interim while they waited for the mirror to arrive for final fitting.
The last part of the process was supposedly fitting a docking collar and K-F Boom to the telescope so that it could be carried by a JumpShip to its final destination, they were just too big to move otherwise.
After dinner Karl Von Strang insisted on giving Johnson a personal tour of the town, Johnson noting the considerable amount of bowing and scraping from lackeys as they strolled through public areas and that Von Strang was always accompanied by armed bodyguards.
The slaves might appear submissive and deferential but Von Strang clearly feared that without his guards one of them might take the opportunity to slit his throat.
The tour very much suited Johnson's purposes and as he took mental notes on the surroundings, determining the weak and strong points of the defenses and weighing up the best direction to attack the city from, he assumed that his reconnaissance teams would soon be doing much the same from outside the capital.
thumb|Mark VII Landing Craft landing
That was one other advantage to arriving in an aerodyne shuttle instead of the DropShip. The old Mark IV Landing Craft utilized for the trip had taken a deliberately long shallow re-entry path which was perfectly timed so that it would arrive at the city's spaceport just before the crack of dawn.
About forty klicks out from Amaris City, still cloaked in darkness and just as the shuttle neared a thick bank of cloud for additional concealment, a company of Blackheart commandos wearing sneak suits and utilizing parafoils had performed a HALO jump that would see them land before the sun rose and then go to ground until night fell once again.
Only moving at night and making sure not to be seen it would take them a few days on foot to reach their destination, but landing well outside the capital that way almost guaranteed they would not be discovered as the planet's tiny population was concentrated around the capital. Heavily loaded down by food and ammunition, though at least they could rely on local water supplies, it would be quite the hike but they lived for that kind of thing in Black Ops.
This was the kind of operation that the Blackhearts excelled at, having boots on the ground reconnoitering the approaches to the city from ground level in conjunction with the satellite photographs and Johnson's own observations from inside the objective was the kind of target intel that could turn a hard fight into an easy one, or at the very least a less costly one.
Passing the big statue of Stefan Amaris in the town square with his guest in tow, Karl Von Strang began espousing his vision for a better future and how the Durant Star and its crew might fit into it, Johnson managing to look like he was hanging on every word while actually still surreptitiously mapping the area in his head.
With the Durant Star, its own aerospace fighters and military DropShips, supported by the Battlemechs and Aerospace Fighters of Karl Von Strang's Guard Division, they could conduct operations against the Lyran Commonwealth that were more than mere pin-pricks, safe in the knowledge that these days Marcus Steiner couldn't simply send a warship to chase them off, Von Strang contended. Simply disrupting Lyran trade near the periphery border would soon destabilize the region, loosen their grip on the worlds they had seized from the Republic. More than that there were plenty of mercenaries available to hire on Fredotto if Von Strang needed more troops and had the ability to pay for them in loot, hell with a Royalty and its fighters backing up the Guard Division they might even have enough firepower to ensure the right faction on Fredotto won the ongoing civil war there, which opened up all kinds of possibilities given that the world still maintained an industrial base.
Like his predecessors as Baron of Strang Karl Von Strang had a vision, a vision of driving the Lyrans back to their original borders and restoring the Rim Worlds Republic to glory. Just dangle the vaguest chance of that dream coming true in front of a man like that and he would grab hold of it with both hands, which he had.
It was of course, an entirely unrealistic aim and Johnson knew. Even if the Draconis Combine enjoyed battlefield success beyond even their own wildest expectations and smashed the LCAF to the point of putting it into headlong retreat, the Lyran Commonwealth was unlikely to ever be weakened to the point that the shattered and destitute Rim Worlds Republic could possibly rally enough strength to take back Apollo and the other worlds conquered by the Steiners in the previous century.
For one thing if it ever looked like they might Tharkad would likely just break out the nuclear weapons again, as they had before to put Finmark back in its place. They might not have as many warships as they used to, but they still had plenty of armed DropShips and even aerospace fighters you could sling a couple of five-kiloton Alamo missiles underneath if it came to that.
Not that it suited Johnson to burst Karl Von Strang's bubble as the man enthused about a glorious future where the decent, hardworking, and patriotic people of the Rim Worlds Republic rose up, united, and removed the Steiner boot from their necks. Instead he expressed his own supposed bitterness at what had befallen the homeland of his forefathers, and made sure to voice suitably derogatory comments about the Lyran Commonwealth.
Von Strang clearly wasn't a complete idiot as such, in fact some of his observations regarding the current state of the Inner Sphere were downright insightful, but like most men he was still very much prey to Caesar's dictum that 'men willingly believe what they wish'.
Weeks later, while discussing the man with Brigadier-General Franklin, Colonel Mitch Johnson diplomatically refrained from drawing parallels between the utopian vision of a restored Star League or Terran Hegemony that the Niops people occasionally waxed lyrical about, and Von Strang's dream of a restored Rim Worlds Republic.
Just because the Niops Association had a few ships that were even more formidable than a Royalty, and a lot more mechs than Von Strang could boast, didn't make their own tilting at windmills any more realistic.
They were well-meaning though, Johnson had to give his latest employers that. Furthermore the continued existence of a place like Von Strang's World did rankle more than a little for those like himself who were still quietly pining for the Golden Age of the Star League, despite considering the possibility of its return a pipe dream. It wasn't that Johnson was a starry-eyed idealist like some of those that sought to white-wash the Star League era and spoke of it uncritically in gushing speeches or flowery prose, it was simply that the Succession Wars era was objectively far, far worse.
Stefan Amaris and his minions like Gunthar Von Strang had ended what was effectively the Golden Age of Humanity, ushering in a time of endless fire and ceaseless bloodshed. While Niops couldn't really bring back the Star League they were certainly right that those that murdered it should not be ****** venerated like they were on this planet, Johnson decided as Karl Von Strang suddenly decided that they should pose for a photograph together in front of the Amaris statue.
If it wasn't for all the collateral damage and civilian deaths that would result, at that moment Johnson was sorely tempted just to tell Franklin that the city was completely impregnable so that he just leveled the place with an orbital bombardment. A naval autocannon round hurtling in from above the mesosphere impacting with the statue and scattering teeny, tiny pieces of Stefan Amaris from one side of the horizon to the other was very appealing to contemplate.
After a few more hours of pretending to be slowly talked around by the rhetorical wizardry of Karl Von Strang, that was how Baron Von Strang judged his skills of persuasion anyway, Johnson agreed that not only would he return here after getting the Durant Star serviced at Star's End he would take one of Von Strang's DropShips with him and leave one of his Dictator class and its crew behind as a guarantee.
That was the kind of outcome from the meeting that Karl Von Strang was overjoyed to hear, and he personally saw Johnson off from the spaceport when the Landing Craft lifted off to rejoin the Jumbo in orbit a few hours later.
During the next two weeks as the Jumbo headed back to the Nadir point to rejoin the Durant Star Karl Von Strang actually played a game of correspondence chess with Johnson by radio, the Baron fancying himself something of an expert and still feeling very pleased with himself for securing an actual armed JumpShip to his cause.
Annoyingly Karl Von Strang proved to be a better player than Johnson, who had intended to throw the match if needed but in the event that proved unnecessary because the Baron won the game fair and square.
It might have been a little petty, but when the Jumbo carrying Johnson finally reached the Nadir point and docked with the Royalty class JumpShip once again he sent a signal to the planet asking for a rematch.
Sending another high-powered signal directed out towards the edge of the system where the rest of the fleet had been hiding beyond detection range, Johnson waited for the reply to come confirming the mission was a go before he had the Royalty switch its transponder codes over from reading as the Durant Star to identifying itself as the NAS Dragoon's Loss instead.
The crew of the Invader had just enough time to wonder what the hell was going on before the armed JumpShip floating beside them opened up with its guns to disable them and ordered them to surrender or eat a nuclear warhead.
They did get off a warning to Amaris City before they surrendered, but thanks to the light-speed delay in the signal reaching there the Dragoon's Loss had already performed a jump before it did.
Arriving at the L2 Lagrange point of Von Strang's World before the warning from the Invader reached the planet it was the arrival of the emergence wave from the jump that provided the first indication to the locals that something was up.
Detecting several other emergence waves at the L2 Lagrange over the next few minutes, they realised that something was very up indeed.
The radio warning from the Nadir point arrived at Von Strang's World just ahead of a one-word transmission broadcast by Mitch Johnson.
<<"Checkmate.">>
It was very cute most everyone agreed afterwards, although apparently Karl Von Strang was initially far too busy losing his mind about the Carrack class warship that had just jumped in with several companion vessels, seemingly heedless of the potential dangers of running into floating debris at the L2 point, to be much bothered by the obvious taunt at his expense.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Standard jump-points are used because they're generally safe, even though they are situated so far out from the plane of the elipitic and the Goldilocks Zone that they're inconvenient as hell. Non-Standard jump-points such as a planet's Lagrange points are inordinately closer to where you want to be but they come with considerably more hazards. The Jupiter Trojan asteroids are an example of the tendancy of Lagrange points to hoover up rocks and keep hold of them.One or two weeks stuck on a dropship heading to and from a jumpship at the Zenith or Nadir point might be a pain-in-the-ass, but unless you've got a really good map of where the floating rocks are in a system it's worth putting up with it. Niops is just really, really good at mapping floating rocks from a distance.Many dropships like the Jumbo carry a small craft or two (unless they're carrying aerospace fighters in the bays instead). Leaving the dropship in orbit and heading down to the surface in a shuttle, or landing craft gave them a chance to use that big telescope to play Spy Satellite.Dropping off SpecOps paratroopers utilizing stealth gear such as Sneak Suits to scout a target is very much the sort of thing the Blackhearts excel at. They've pulled off this sort of thing against much better trained and equipped opposition than Baron Von Strang can boast of.
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