GblaRCS Chpt 13

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 13 -==
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"To borrow an old quote, we didn't hate the Amaris Dragoons during the war because they were incompetant in the devil's work, we hated them for their competance at it. Admiration for the technique was part of the process."General Jenna Romanov - 2835CE
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===Clash between ancient enemies===
Najd Plateau - Algenib – 2829
When the Blood Rain had first arrived at Algenib they found a small but growing population already living there, not too surprising for a habitable world that might be in the periphery but was still closer to Terra than half the systems of the Outworlds Alliance. Almost entirely lacking in military capability beyond hunting rifles, and a single lance of archaic Korvin tanks that some army offloading its obsolete equipment had sold off as surplus before the Reunification War, the locals had little choice but to accept their new overlords and begin to provide tribute.
Naturally the pirates had sent out their 'Insurrection Suppression Lance' consisting of an old Locust, their infamous black-painted WTH-0 Whitworth and a couple of Firestarter BattleMechs to shoot-up and torch a couple of villages anyway. It always paid dividends to teach the local yokels what the price of future resistance would be after all, but so long as they paid their 'taxes' without kicking up a fuss the people of Algenib would be left largely alone after that. Stefani Marcus considered it bad policy to shit where you eat, and she wanted the people on Algenib frightened and compliant, not angry and defiant, so she didn't outright enslave the locals, or abduct any of them for recreational purposes. What she did instead was take people from other worlds by force and bring them back to Algenib both in order to perform manual labor and undertake other less savory duties.
Most of the 'Pressed Labor', as Marcus liked to euphemistically refer to it, hailed from Comstock, an abortive former colony of the Terran Hegemony situated not too far from Algenib and which appeared on even fewer maps. Originally intended to become a logistical hub for the SLDF in the region between the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy of Canopus, the colony had been barely established when the Periphery Uprising began, and it quickly fell on bad times as the Inner Sphere lurched into the greatest bloodbath since the Age of War. The only industry that had been established on Comstock before it was cut off from the Hegemony was the manufacture of boots for the Star League Defense Force, utilizing leather imported from Francas, another colony in the region, though given the sheer size of the SLDF with its fifteen-thousand regiments constantly marching around wearing out shoe leather just that one contract would have permanently employed a lot of people on the planet if things had turned out different.
The Blood Rain didn't come to Comstock looking for boots of course, though they did all take a few pairs each from the warehouses full of them there, they wanted laborers to build them a township on Algenib so they didn't have to live on their dropships anymore, and they weren't exactly asking for paid volunteers.
Deciding to set up home on a large plateau on the edge of a mountain range, a number of streams running down from the mountains converging into a river there that snaked across the plateau before ending in an impressive waterfall, the Blood Rain had chosen a rise located near the waterfall to build their settlement. Situated next to the rise an expansive and conveniently flat area of firm ground was not only ideal for parking their dropships and operating VTOL aircraft from, part of it also served as a parade and training ground because they weren't fighting or partying the Blood Rain still tried to keep up some basic military standards. Other pirate bands might sneer at the notion of being made to march in formation, or forced to do regular exercise including a fairly harsh PT regimen that would have been familiar to every professional army since the Roman Legions, but in a fight the Blood Rain would hammer those amateurish ass-clowns into the ground like tent-pegs.
With much of the plateau covered by an alpine plain, one occasionally dotted with small forests, it was easy to send logging parties of slaves upstream to cut down groves of native trees situated near the river and roll them into the water, letting the slow current carry them down to where the lumber for construction and firewood for cooking and heating was actually needed.
That pool of manual slave labor was now also coming in very handy for other reasons, as the Blood Rain's captive workforce was encouraged to dig trenches and revetments for tanks with haste. That 'encouragement' including the liberal application of both a whip and a threat of being thrown under the tracks of an Ignis combat vehicle, or worse having one of its flamers turned on them.
It would take some time to construct a worthwhile defense line however, time that Stefani Marcus wouldn't have if she just sat and waited for the enemy to come to her. She knew she needed to be proactive, meet them half-way and conduct a fighting retreat back towards her base. She wasn't looking to fight a decisive battle, at least not yet, she wanted to delay their advance, hopefully screw up their dispositions, and make them cautious. Cautious meant slow, and slow meant that by the time her two battalions had conducted the planned series of withdrawals she envisioned she would be properly entrenched and in a much better position to receive and hopefully defeat an attack by a larger force.
One of the organizational changes since their days as the 141st Amaris Dragoons was the adoption of the habit of many pirate bands to elect their leader. Unlike most of the others however the successful candidates in the Blood Rain did not typically stand on a platform of 'I'm the toughest' or 'I'm the best mechwarrior' but rather 'I'm the smart, experienced one that actually knows what they're doing' which was why Stefani Marcus won the vote. Even the runner-up in the election grudgingly conceded she was a better tactician and strategist than him, but a few years after the fact he was still aggrieved at just how much he lost the vote by.
Marcus sitting him down and explaining that while he was probably the best company commander in the Blood Rain these days, and still a gifted mechwarrior in his own right, one widely respected for his skills in the cockpit of an assault mech, he was also an abrasive, and generally unlikeable, octogenarian psychopath with notoriously poor personal hygiene. Frankly, that just didn't play too well with the electorate, and his platform of having suspected potential deserters flayed alive simply wasn't the vote-winner he thought it would be either.
Anyhow, she didn't really care how bitter he was as long as he continued to do his job, and to his credit he was professional enough to obey the orders of someone he reluctantly accepted as having a better grasp of how to command a force of battalion size or larger than he did. There was a good reason he was still only a captain more than half-a-century after his glory days on Terra while Marcus was not.
It helped that he knew the truly monumental price on his head meant that he was safer sticking with the Blood Rain than he would be anywhere else. The job opportunities for elderly war criminals don't tend to be that good, and only other war criminals will willingly socialise with you and laugh at your war stories that anyone else would find gut-wrenchingly sickening and offensive.
The opposition had set down at the other end of the thirty-five kilometer long plateau. A Fortress class dropship landing first to secure their landing zone, then the Overlords set down next to it and finally the Triumph which was escorted in by a pair of aerospace fighter squadrons from the Titan that stayed in orbit.
Those were some serious machines, Marcus had to admit, particularly the Fortress which had soon begun lobbing large-calibre artillery shells at any Blood Rain scout mech that tried to approach. They may have assumed that she had a Long Tom or similar howitzer of her own, or else they would have surely set down close enough to shell her with theirs directly. This was an erroneous assumption on their part, the only artillery she had was a single battery of Thumpers, but she was grateful for their imperfect intelligence as to her TO&E.
A half-hearted attempt to disrupt the enemy landing with the bulk of her aerospace fighters, and her two Leopard CVs, had only managed to confirm that their Titan was carrying its full complement of three squadrons and their Overlords three more between them. On average the Blood Rain aerospace fighters were heavier, nearly half of them were Vulcan's and she also had a few Eagles and Ahabs, but the other side had both weight of numbers and generally more modern designs.
Better to retain an air-fleet-in-being than to throw her preponderance of heavy aerospace fighters into a fight they couldn't win, even if they might inflict heavier losses than they took, Marcus decided, calling off the attack on the inbound dropships almost as soon as it began. As long as she kept her fighters mostly in reserve, only carrying out the occasional needling attack to keep them fixated away from her ground forces, she denied her foe unchallenged air supremacy and prevented them from bombing the crap out of her BattleMechs and tanks at whim.
Looking up you could see vapour trails in the sky high above, as fighters from multiple squadrons on both sides tested each other out, the occasional bright flash from a PPC visible as someone got a little too close. Eventually it would have to be settled as to which side owned the sky, but for now both seemed willing to delay aerial armageddon, ordered only to prevent the other side from conducting reconnaissance and ground-attack missions.
For their part the SLDF fighter-jocks had been unpleasantly surprised by just how many Vulcan heavy aerospace fighters the former Amaris Dragoons were fielding. Being a classic Rim Worlds Republic design they had of course expected to run up against a reasonable number of the things, but not considerably more than every other type combined. Moreover, quite a few of them were seemingly the upgraded VLC-6N model, the one with the autocannon in the wings swapped for far punchier gauss rifles. It was known that a lot of former Rim Worlds pilots had turned mercenary, or flat-out went pirate after the war, and it seemed that the Blood Rain had managed to recruit more than their fair share of them. Whether this was because the pilots were die-hard Amaris Loyalists to whom signing up with the former 141st Dragoons was appealing, or because the Blood Rain simply paid well, didn't really matter so much as the fact they were there with their machines.
As far as their other fighters went, they had a few Lightning mediums and a handful of somewhat less archaic Swift and Zero lights but they were clearly a Vulcan orientated force that valued raw firepower over speed and maneuverability.
Taken all in all, it was a good thing that the SLDF weren't just bringing plenty of the upgraded 'Royal' versions of their fighters to the fray, but further up-gunned and up-armoured versions of them. It was only a shame they didn't have even more machines with Enhanced ER PPCs.
The other clans might have bid away some of their fighters to make it a fair fight, but Wolverine doctrine, not to mention Jenna Romanov's notions of how to fight a battle, followed the classic SLDF policy that fair fights were for suckers. That of course was why they had historically liked to send battleships to deal with anything bigger than a corvette, war being serious business, not a sport. Frankly it was far less unbalanced in favor of the SLDF than they would have liked, even if they did have something particularly nasty to unleash on those gauss-rifle armed VLC-6N fighters when they stopped dancing with the Blood Rain and went for the throat.
While the fighter-jocks jousted and skirmished above, neither side looking to fully commit to a massive furball of a dogfight as yet, down on the ground companies of tanks and BattleMechs started moving as both Stefani Marcus and Jenna Romanov moved their pieces on the board.
The geography of the plateau meant that the SLDF forces could not conduct a wide, sweeping flanking manoeuvre and would have to advance more-or-less straight towards the Blood Rain settlement. This was less than ideal because by preference Romanov would have pinned their two battlement battalions with two of her own while the third, accompanied by the combined-arms battalion smashed into their side or rear, but as usual alas it was the privilege of the defender to choose the ground.
With the battalion of BattleMechs under her direct command taking the centre, Franklin Hallis on the right, and Jax Benedict on the left, Jenna Romanov formed up her reinforced regiment regiment in front of the dropships and ordered the advance, the mechanised combined arms battalion and the self-propelled artillery following on as a reserve.
Sending fast scouts equipped with specialist electronic warfare gear ahead to reduce the chances of falling headlong into an ambush, these being Beagle hovercraft and three battlemech types; Hussar, Mongoose and Hermes lights 'Mechs. The SLDF made good progress at first, unopposed by anyone until they were out-of-range of heavy artillery support from the Fortress dropship.
They soon ran into their first Blood Rain units, a couple of lances of PPC armed LTV-4 hovertanks supported by a larger force of Jackrabbit light mechs that seemed reluctant to throw themselves headlong into a fight, but neither were they skittish, more cautious perhaps. The Jackrabbit was a late Star League design that had been mass-produced on occupied Terra for the Rim Worlds Republic Army, becoming a signature machine for them as it simultaneously became tainted in the eyes of many SLDF mechwarriors.
The original model of Jackrabbit, the JKR-8T, was a classic example of a well-engineered machine that suffered due to some very poor design criteria that had saddled it with a single AC-2 autocannon that had plenty of range but was more of an irritant to whatever it hit than a threat. After plenty of complaints from RWR mechwarriors handed a JKR-8T that they would be better off using harsh language against the enemy than their autocannon, the original model was replaced by the JKR-9R that swapped the AC-2 for a Large Laser that was actually a pretty potent weapon for a light mech.
In combat the biggest pain-in-the-ass for SLDF mechwarriors facing the Jackrabbit turned out to be a mixed lance of the things, with a pair each of JKR-8T's and JKR-9R's. Two of them would annoy the crap out of you by sandblasting you with AC-2 fire from too far away to hit them back and when you just couldn't take it anymore and charged at them the other two would open up with their lasers.
Upon encountering the Blood Rain units the lightly-armed and armored SLDF scouts immediately requested support. This soon arrived in the form of Panther and Talon mechs that were themselves only classified as lights according to their tonnage, but they carried a PPC and an ERPPC respectively letting them punch above their weight. A short-lived firefight then broke out in earnest that ended with the pirates withdrawing, perhaps because a stray hit from any particle projector cannon could utterly wreck a hovertank or a Jackrabbit and an AC/2 didn't out-ranged an ERPPC by nearly enough for comfort.
Suspecting that it might in fact be a feigned retreat intended to draw her light mechs into an ambush by more powerful mechs, mainly because the Jackrabbits didn't seem to have taken much if any damage before, well, jackrabbiting, Romanov issued orders not to launch a headlong pursuit and to resume a steady advance instead.
Romanov was correct, two kilometers further on, concealed by trees and with an easy route of escape when the time came, two companies of medium BattleMechs lay in wait, the majority being the Phoenix, a native Rim Worlds design, plus a lance each of Shadow Hawk and Griffin mechs. Although they missed out on the opportunity to spring a perfect ambuscade they still performed adequately enough, though opening up at fairly long-range before they risked being detected by either Beagle Active Probes, or the Mark One eyeball, and losing any of the element of surprise they might have. The SLDF lights immediately disengaged rather than try foolishly slug it out with machines that could soak up a lot more punishment than they could, and they were smoothly replaced on the front lines by those better suited for the task.
This was around the point at which the SLDF learned that they weren't the only ones bringing upgraded machines to the fight, because a lot of those PX-3R Phoenix mechs seemed to be packing ERPPC's instead of the regular PPCs that they should. It was discovered later that while stomping around the Terran Hegemony decades before, taking advantage of the sources of better grade equipment readily available to them there, the 141st Amaris Dragoons had undertaken a program of field upgrades for their most common medium battlemech. These upgrades included installing double-heat-sinks and ferro-fibrous armour, replacing the original SRM-2 launchers with the superior Streak SRM-2 (already used by their Jackrabbit mechs so ammunition supplies were readily available), the aforementioned ERPPC replacing the original PPC on one arm and adding a medium laser to the other.
Not all of the PX-3R's belonging to the Blood Rain had all, or even some of the upgrades, but the large majority did which was why when their own mediums clashed with the Phoenix Hawk, Dervish and Wolverine mechs bearing the Red Cameron Star which now moved against them it was a more even fight than Romanov would have liked. If it wasn't for so many of her own war-machines being the 'Royal' PXH-1b and WVR-7H models the fight would have actually been lopsided in the pirate's favor, and she would have been forced to bring up heavies to deal with mere enemy mediums.
Given that much of the fighting so far consisted of plinking with particle projector cannon and LRMs at ranges where accuracy was lacking, and therefore placing precise shots on weak points was nigh impossible, most of the limited amount of damage that had been incurred by either side only consisted of armor plates being ablated away and a few lost heat sinks and damaged weapons. That situation wouldn't last forever of course, as armor was scorched or blasted off the more critical systems underneath would be completely exposed to incoming fire with subsequent shots in the same location causing catastrophic levels of damage. Eventually, Battlemech limbs would be blown off, engines damaged and gyros crippled bringing mechs on both sides crashing down. Fortunately for the SLDF their advantage in numbers meant Jenna Romanov and her battalion commanders were better able to rotate which machines were fully engaged and taking the most hits, pulling back any which were starting to lose too much armor and replacing them with a fresh machine. The longer the engagement lasted the worse it would get for their foe who were accumulating too much damage to keep this up for long.
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===Calling One's Bluff===
Once more the former 141st Amaris Dragoons started to withdraw, the weight of forces being skewed badly against them as more SLDF battlemechs arrived on the scene. They weren't interested in a bloody fight to the death as part of a mere delaying action, and, as they pulled back, they scattered smoke grenades while the LTV-4 Hovertanks and Jackrabbit mechs from earlier appeared again to provide some cover-fire and a temporary distraction.
Stefani Marcus had been buying time, not just to fortify the settlement but in order to get all of her heavy and assault mechs to the piece of ground where she could mount the best forward defence and inflict some real damage before falling back yet again.
When the lead Hussar scout caught up with the Blood Rain's mediums again it found them formed up in a line on a long ridge that ran across the path of advance, the approach to the ridge being a steep escarpment that could only be climbed slowly, unless you had jumpjets of course which was presumably how they had all gotten up there so fast.
The spacing was odd though, leaving gaps between them so wide it would limit their ability to properly concentrate fire against a single target, the most efficient way of reducing the number of machines assaulting the ridge.
As the rest of the SLDF arrived the reason for the spacing became clear as more Blood Rain battlemechs started to appear from behind the ridge, plugging the gaps.
This was going to be interesting, Jenna Romanov thought to herself as a mixed lance of enemy heavies and assaults came into line-of-sight slotting themselves between some of the Phoenix and Griffin mediums. The Awesome, Battlemaster, Marauder and Warhammer battlemechs alone would have frightened the life out of most mechwarriors in the Inner Sphere that had to go up against them but then came the real surprise as five lances of AEM Dragoon heavies and three more of RMP-5G Rampage assaults appeared.
They had suspected that the 141st Amaris Dragoons might still have a few such machines. The Rampage was an indigenous Rim Worlds design which had equipped quite a few assault lances in their army, while the Dragoon had been produced specifically at the order of Stefan Amaris to replace older less capable machines in his elite Amaris Dragoon regiments, hence the name, but that was a lot of the things now stood up there on the ridge any observer would have to admit.
The AEM-01 Dragoon was inarguably one of the most advanced war-machines of its era. Not only was it powered by an XL fusion engine, carried ferro-fibrous armour and mounted a Guardian ECM system, an ERPPC and a pair of LB-X autocannons, all hallmarks of a 'Royal' battlemech, it had an almost unique modular design. That modularity, based on that of the advanced Mercury light mech, allowed it to be not only easily maintained and quickly repaired after taking battle damage, it could also have its weapon-systems swapped out for alternate configurations without resorting to welding gear and some serious McGuyvering.
As Romanov took stock of the enemy she noted that most of the Dragoon battlemechs were the standard AEM-01 model, but there were at least three of the AEM-04 type that kept the ERPPC but swapped the autocannons for a Gauss Rifle. Then, as the final lance of Blood Rain mechs arrived on the ridge, Archer and Catapult LRM throwers, it became apparent that the enemy massively favored long-range weaponry and had drawn the SLDF battalions here where they could use it most effectively.
Almost as soon as the SLDF units started to advance towards the foe they would start to receive incoming fire from anything carrying an ERPPC or gauss rifle, then a little further on it would start raining LRM's, and then LB-X autocannon rounds and then standard PPCs would join in the party too.
Normally you would counter this by using terrain, or else sending in your most heavily armoured mechs to soak up the hits on the way, closing to brawling range as fast as possible and overwhelming the long-range specialists with more powerful short-range weaponry such as the AC/20, or even just massed medium lasers or SRMs. Unfortunately, since 'heavily armoured' and 'fast or has jumpjets' generally tended not to be found on the same battlemechs, climbing that escarpment to get into brawling range would be slow-going and that typically meant taking a lot of damage before you could effectively shoot back.
Sat in the cockpit of her personal AEM-01, Stefani Marcus looked down at the regimental sized force arrayed against her and smirked. If she was right her opponent was down there right now, sat in that fancy Nightstar command mech looking up in the other direction and calculating just how many machines they would lose pushing the Blood Rain off this ridge.
"You're thinking 'Is this really the hill I want to die on?' aren't you" Marcus assumed, speaking out loud to herself as she continued to imagine what was going through the mind of her opposite number. They were putting on a good show of being the actual SLDF though, she had to admit. Lots of nice looking, well-maintained battlemechs painted up in olive drab and they had kept a nice, ordered and properly spaced formation as they advanced, looking just like a real Star League regiment would have.
They could simply go around of course, but only a complete moron would leave two battalions to their rear, and if they split their force she could take them on one at a time with what she assumed were her generally superior machines.
If they went all-in they could, and would, push her off her ridge, Marcus knew that. They had more than three battalion's worth of mechs to her two, plus combat vehicles for support as well from the looks of things, but it would cost them, and battlemechs and trained soldiers were getting harder to replace these days. Would they want to negotiate rather than pay the butcher's bill maybe?
Marcus recalled facing the Onverwacht Guards regiment on Ype-Jhu more than a decade earlier, that was during the Blood Rain's extended campaign in the Outworlds Alliance that her predecessor as commanding officer had embarked upon because 'the problem with always fighting Capellans is that an hour after you've raided one of their towns you want to pillage another'. That day on Ype-Jhu she only had a single understrength battalion under her command, and the Onverwacht Guards could have probably beaten her decisively, but they were a combined-arms unit mostly made up of mere armour and infantry and they didn't want to take the severe losses required to do it. After some words were exchanged, as well as a token amount of autocannon rounds, they agreed to let the Blood Rain just pack up and leave as long as they promised to depart Alliance space and bothered someone else instead.
An unencrypted radio channel opening up, a signal that could only be coming from the opposition seemed to answer Marcus's quiet prayer. They indeed wanted to talk, not fight.
"I repeat. This is the commanding officer of the SLDF forces on Algenib to the commanding officer of the piratical force occupying the planet. Please acknowledge transmission" a woman's voice requested.
"This is Stefani Marcus, Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain, who are you and what do you want?" Marcus responded, trying to sound bored and generally disinterested as if she had nothing to gain from the conversation and was only replying out of courtesy. It was an open channel, and she knew all her people would be listening in so she wanted to play this right.
"This is General Jenna Romanov, formerly commanding officer of the 295th Battlemech Division, now commanding the Eleventh Army of the Star League Defense Force as constituted in the systems belonging to, or protectorates of, the Niops Association." came the reply. "And I want you to lay down your arms and surrender."
Marcus laughed. "The 295th?" she repeated. "There's already someone else pretending to be them. Find your own schtick." she advised, amused by the lack of originality.
"We're the real 295th, we've got nothing to do with those imposters and.." the person claiming to be Jenna Romanov began before trailing off. "Wait, you know they're imposters? Do you know who they really are?"
"Sure do." Marcus confirmed, honestly.
"Care to tell me?"
"Nah, if it's bothering you I'd prefer you stayed miserable." Marcus replied. "Whoever you really are I'm assuming you were paid by someone to push us off this rock? The Magistracy or maybe the Mariks? Either way I'm prepared to negotiate, I'd rather leave here with my regiment intact so if you grant us free passage, and give me back my jumpships, we'll be on our way. I'll even agree not to attack your employers for five, maybe even ten years so they aren't too pissed off at you" she offered.
"We're not mercenaries, we don't negotiate with pirate scum, and we certainly don't negotiate with the rabid attack dogs of Stefan Amaris you Dragoon, bitch".
"Rabid?" Marcus repeated the word, laughing. "There's only one of us that snarls and drools and isn't house trained and he's not one of my Dragoons, he's just a stray we picked up on Terra before we left."
"Go ****** yourself, Stefani!" the familiar voice of a man interjected. She knew full-well he wouldn't be able to stop himself responding to the jibe. The man had little self-control and even less decorum.
"Stay quiet, Captain or I'll offer you to them as part of the negotiating process" Marcus threatened her subordinate who was currently sat a few hundred metres away at the controls of his Rampage. It wasn't a serious threat however, at least not unless it proved absolutely necessary to seal a more favourable deal. "I apologize for the interruption, General. You were calling me pirate scum as I recall? Oh yes, and a Dragoon bitch. That seems rude, not untrue I'll grant you, but rude nonetheless" she continued, her accent and educated manner of speaking betraying her rather aristocratic upper-class origins. "Since we're not going to lay down our arms then I suppose we're at impasse, although you should be asking yourself the question, 'is this really the hill I want to die on' because I guarantee that if you lead your troops up that slope a lot of them will come back down in a body bag."
"You're very confident in your position. Given that you have no idea exactly what cards I'm holding, consider that might be hubris on your part."
"I play poker too and it sounds like you're trying to bluff" Marcus replied, smirking. "I'm very cognisant of how much long-range firepower I have up here, and I can see what machines you've got down there. You don't have the fire-superiority needed to overwhelm my tactical advantage of holding the high ground" she stated confidently. It wasn't just her long-range direct-fire weapons that needed to be factored in here, launched from a height advantage her LRM's would carry further than ones going the other direction as well. "Tell me the truth, what surprised you more, all the Dragoon heavies or running up against Phoenix mediums mounting an ERPPC?"
"Hard to say, wasn't expecting either, not that it'll change the outcome. This is your last chance to surrender with a promise that the death penalty is off the table for your trials, which is frankly more than a bunch of pirates and war-criminals deserve but I was instructed to make the offer in an attempt to reduce bloodshed. I don't have the authority to offer any deal better than that and I sure as shit don't have the inclination. Take it while you can. The clock is ticking."
Nobody ever expected the ER PPCs, Stefani Marcus knew, ignoring the ultimatum. They had been the trump card of the Blood Rain for decades, allowing them to sweep aside planetary militias, and occasionally rival pirate groups, with impunity because those types never had the effective counter of either heavily-armoured assault mechs or equivalent long-range armament. After fleeing Terra in 2778 the 141st Amaris Dragoons had headed for the periphery, stopping only to raid spica in the Capellan Confederation for supplies, with the objective of rebuilding themselves as an effective fighting force at one of the Rim Worlds Republic's outposts in the Deep Periphery they knew of situated rimward of the Taurian Concordat at the edge of the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex.
When they arrived they found the outpost was well-stocked, unusually so in fact because it was being used as a way station for supplies being shipped to other facilities even further out in the Really Deep Periphery, and that the small garrison was only too pleased to see them and invite them to stay. They had been there nearly four months when a Royalty class armed jumpship appeared, having just returned from delivering a shipment of ammunition and spare parts all the way out to Rim Worlds Republic Outpost 11, a base that was so far away the crew didn't even know that Apollo and much of the rest of the Rim Worlds Republic had been conquered and absorbed by the Lyran Commonwealth during their absence. Finding themselves with their homeworlds under occupation, the Amaris Empire reduced to a few hold-outs fighting to the last man on Terra and with no better prospects the captain and crew of the Royalty signed up and the 141st Amaris Dragoons got themselves a another jumpship plus the two squadrons of Vulcan aerospace fighters it carried.
With more than enough spare parts at hand for their Jackrabbit and Rampage battlemechs, and their Dragoon heavies actually designed to be easily maintained, the 141st soon reconstituted themselves and with Amaris dead and the Rim Worlds Republic itself no more they became to recruit from the ranks of the angry and dispossessed former RWR military that drifted out to the periphery looking for work as mercenaries or pirates.
Upon learning in time that Kerensky had thrown a tantrum, picked up his ball and went looking for a new home the 141st had known it would only be a matter of time before the entire Inner Sphere erupted into open warfare. When the inevitable outcome of the SLDF not being there to keep everyone else in line came to pass the Amaris Dragoons, now rebranded as the Blood Rain, had come thundering back out of the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex and starting by plundering and pillaging their way across the rimward portion of the militarily overstretched Capellan Confederation. Later, after their sojourn up to the Outworlds Alliance and the end of the Succession War, they had raided periphery worlds from the Magistracy to the Concordat before deciding to see what opportunities might present themselves further afield.
They had been so successful in the early years that several Capellan worlds they had raided, often more than once, had ended up abandoned, including Kimi, Weldry, Sunnywood and Merdal. In one battle they still celebrated the anniversary of they had knocked the hell out of the 7th Sian Dragoons on Itrom, reducing them to a third of their full-strength and recovering a fortune's worth of salvage.
In almost all cases this success had been made possible by the simple expedient of fighting the enemy at ranges where they only weapon they could hit back with were AC-2 popguns. It was a simple battlefield doctrine that relied on the fact that only the SLDF had ever fielded large numbers of machines armed with ERPPC's, Gauss Rifles and large-calibre LB-X autocannon and that once you got out as far as the rim they were all as rare as rocking-horse shit.
If it ain't broke don't fix it, as the saying goes, and so as the Blood Rain under Stefani Marcus prepared for battle on Algenib they put their trust in their ER PPC's once again.
Unfortunately for them, Jenna Romanov's troops also had a doctrine based on fighting at long-range and they were putting their trust in the Enhanced ERPPC, plus a few other fancy gimmicks.
It looked like they were going for it, Marcus decided as 'Romanov' ordered her assaults and heavies to the front of the line ready to advance into battle.
Oh well, didn't haul my ass up here for nothing, she thought to herself, issuing orders to her battlemech lances on the Blood Rain's encrypted channel to make ready to fire on her command. Then she contacted her artillery unit that was positioned several klicks to the rear and should be already prepared to ballistically deliver hefty packages of high explosive on demand.
As the 'SLDF' began to form up for an assault up the hill, moving their most heavily armoured machines to the front Marcus ordered her Thumper battery to open fire, that should shake them up she decided with satisfaction as large-calibre indirect-fire artillery rounds soon began to fall around the enemy battlemech lances. Not many shells, it was only a single, and slightly-understrength, battery of five guns after all, but there was little in life as disconcerting as being under indirect-fire artillery bombardment, in large part because you didn't have the cathartic option of shooting back yourself.
Her good mood was short-lived and ended abruptly however when multiple fast-moving shapes leaving streaks of rocket exhaust behind them arched up from below the horizon ahead of her and sailed overhead, following a trajectory that headed back down to the ground a few kilometres to her rear. "****** me" she swore, not having seen the like since fighting the SLDF on Terra. "Arrow IV's" she realised with dismay as multiple batteries of enemy MLRS systems, firing guided missiles with warheads that could bring down a hundred-ton assault mech brough fire down on where her Thumper self-propelled-guns would be.
A titanic explosion in the far distance behind indicated that at least one of the Thumpers took a direct hit, with all its ammunition going off at once in a secondary explosion that would have sent pieces of the thing flying clear off the plateau.
That was some nicely played counter-battery fire, Marcus had to admit before a second volley of missiles came streaking through the sky in her direction. Once more she watched them sail overhead, though in an arc that would end much closer than the last batch. For a moment she thought the enemy gunners had aimed right at her position and simply missed, overshooting her mechs, before she saw the missile housings break open and dozens of small black shapes rained down from each of them.
Arrow IV FASCAM rounds, instant minefields deployed by missiles that scattered the things wherever you wanted them. The bastards had dropped a minefield right behind her to prevent her retreating, or at least not without paying a hefty price for it.
The FASCAM mines had barely landed when at least two batteries of conventional artillery now opened up directly on the Blood Rain line, the shells exploding around her battlemechs landing too close for comfort, and all too accurately for a first, uncorrected salvo. That probably meant Thor Self-Propelled-Guns with forward observers using the fancy trans-optical aiming system that connected back to a ballistic computer in the SPG.
Not a bluff then after all apparently, Stefani Marcus, Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain, former Captain (and brevet Major) in the 141st Amaris Dragoons and distant cousin to Stefan Amaris himself concluded gloomily.
On the plus side, sat in his Rampage over there poor old Bernard Critchly, formerly of the Legos's Lancers mercenary company, AKA the 'Greenhaven Gestapo', must be shitting himself even more than I am right now, Marcus decided with a certain amount of schadenfreude tinged with morbid satisfaction. She might get out of this alive, he wouldn't under any circumstances. She wasn't the one whose commanding officer had executed the Pope in Rome and then personally murdered a few Cardinals, had her own portrait painted over the Sistine Chapel, slaughtered a few hundred monks for complaining about it all and then spent the next half-century checking under their bed for agents of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Critchly had always expected the Inquisition to get him one day, he got the return of the Star League Defense Force instead which in the balance of probabilities had seemed far more unlikely.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : House Marcus were one of the most influential families in the Rim Worlds Republic and married into House Amaris at some point (making them maternal cousins from that point). Stefani Marcus was named for her distant cousin and her background got her a commission in a well-respected regiment (well respected in the RWR anyway. despised by everyone else).Thanks to his penchant for planning ahead, and his paranoia, Stefan Amaris had military bases constructed in numerous places in the Deep Periphery, some of them ludicrously far away from the Inner Sphere like RWR Outpost #11 and RWR Outpost #4. The one the 141st holed up in after they fled the SLDF on Terra in 2778 is much closer than some, being situated on the edge of the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex. These facilities were often well-stocked with supplies and equipment that could even include reserves of battlemechs and aerospace fighters. After putting themselves back together, and a recruitment drive, they started hitting worlds on the rimward edge of the Capellan Confederation, then raided the Outworlds Alliance for a while, then the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat. They've been at this for decades doing very well for themselves because they have good training, large numbers for a pirate band and excellent equipment.You can fairly say that the signature aerospace fighter of the Rim Worlds Republic was the Vulcan which they used in profusion. As far as battlemechs went they produced the Jackrabbit light, the Phoenix medium, the Dragoon heavy and the Rampage assault which are all effective machines (even the Jackrabbit once they started making the JKR-9R model). Given their predilection for war crimes involving incendiary weapons they also liked the Firestarter and the Amaris Dragoons in particular their rare custom WTH-0 model of the Whitworth that complemented their beloved Ignis flamethrower tanks nicely. The RWR also used a lot of LTV-4 Hovertanks.Undoubtedly the worse regiment in the service of Stefan Amaris was a mercenary command, the Legos's Lancers (later the 'Greenhaven Gestapo', meant as a derogatory nickname but they liked it) commanded by his good friend Antilos Legos. Having been given control of Italy on Terra, Legos had fun with the locals and when Pope Clement XXVII failed to meet his tribute demands Legos shot him and then had his men slaughter the College of Cardinals.The Greenhaven Gestapo met their end at the Battle of Ferrara in 2777, although they did manage to inflict some quite heavy losses on the SLDF first (they were more than happy to use WMD in combat, including artillery shells full of Nerve Gas). One of their most notorious officers, Bernard Critchly, survived the battle and went missing with his Rampage never to be seen again. Known as the 'Ogre' Critchly really did have his portrait painted over the Sistine Chapel in canon, and personally killed six hundred of seven-hundred-and-fifty protesting monks who were staging a hunger strike in John Paul II Square.The Arrow IV missile artillery system (and its various launch vehicles) became extinct lostech in the Inner Sphere by 2835 (only the Terran Hegemony had the manufacturing plants to make them, and they were destroyed in all the fighting). They're just not something you would ever expect to encounter in the Periphery (the last remaining stockpiles were used up right at the start of the Second Succession War). The SLDF used the Thor self-propelled-gun but everyone else made do with the inferior knockoff the Thumper.
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Chapter 13