Chapter Text
If there’s one thing that never changes in the universe, it is the monotony and drudgery of military life. Hurry up and wait, as the saying goes. Well, perhaps nowhere was it more true than in the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces, despite the eagerness of Katrina’s reforms, which had just begun to truly start.
We’d arrived in-system just two days earlier, and had already approached to orbit. In truth, this was blessedly quick, as opposed to the standard one week in Dropships, but upon arriving in orbit, our Union-class Dropship had rather annoyingly come to a stop. The planet below, bearing yet another unfortunately generic name, had informed our Colonel that all the spaceports were absolutely full to capacity, and it would be some time before the landing pads could be cleared for us.
Now, perhaps this might be a regular thing on another world. After all, our BattleMech Regiment was carried by no less than seven Unions and nine of the smaller Leopards… if it weren’t for the fact that the planet beneath us had numerous spaceports, at least three of which were within range of the capital, and one of which was solely reserved for military use.
Perhaps I should revise my earlier statement. A military life is full of drudgery and monotony, but so too is it full of politicking, backstabbing, gambling, drinking, whoring, and sudden onset bouts of extreme violence. As this planet was the beating heart of an internal opposition to the Lyran Commonwealth, it appeared that the politicking had arrived before we’d even made planet-fall. I would say that it had arrived before the gambling or the drinking, had I not become rather intimately acquainted with the Chief Engineer’s private still just off the primary engine space.
But, alas, as full of danger and boredom though a military life is, it was nonetheless, my life. And so here I was, a youthful looking man of supposedly thirty years, on my first line-duty assignment after eight years of ‘alternative duty’.
Though I know that no-one shall ever read these diaries or know the truth of my origin, as Gothic, both Low and High, are functionally either extinct or not-yet-invented, I still feel a sense of yearning to elaborate upon the many adventures which I so often find myself embarked unwillingly upon. If, at the least, it provides some frustration to dear Thelos Auburn or his daughter Misha to attempt to decipher these diaries after I’ve died, then perhaps that alone might be worth the effort.
So, as we of the 10th Lyran Regulars began an irritating wait of eight hours of zero-gravity, I looked forward, at the least, to once more to being able to simply shoot my enemies, rather than politely smile at them.
Of course, I mused as I gazed down at the planet of Skye, that only counted for the Draconis Combine.
There is something quite ego-inspiring about piloting a BattleMech, I found. For others, it would be the sight of people scurrying like ants beneath your feet, the raw destruction at your fingertips. For me, I’ve found that it was the eleven tons of armor plating wrapped around me. Despite the unpleasantness of the associated costs – the occasional headache, some shoulder pain, and a mild bit of sweat – there’s really nothing as comforting as so much armor in between you and the enemy. About the only downside that I’ve found to BattleMechs is that they lack a shower. Were it not for that, I’d try to live in one full time.
Of course, as a mere Captain, or ‘Hauptmann’ in the quaint local dialect, I couldn’t get away with that. Strange habits are encouraged for heroes, allowed in generals, but most certainly were not appropriate for junior officers. Junior officers weren’t supposed to stand out in any way. Unfortunately, some of that was inevitable for me. Past sins coming due, perhaps.
As I marched my Griffin out of our landed Dropship, I couldn’t help but suspect that a large amount of attention was on my BattleMech in particular. It might have been the modifications I’d had the First Royals do back on Tharkad, but whatever the reason, there were an awful lot of bystanders pointing specifically at me, it seemed, and that’s never a good feeling. An awful lot of them were wearing the day uniforms of the current garrison, the 17th Skye Rangers. An ‘Elite’ unit, according to the LCAF’s performance metrics, but one with abominable loyalty levels; more loyal to their local Duke than to Archon Katrina Steiner.
And I’d been in the news just a few months before leaving Tharkad. A publicity operation for the LCAF, giving a speech at the Nagelring, my alma mater, about something or other. Infantry tactics, I vaguely recall.
The discontent was sadly expected in this part of the Commonwealth, as Skye was the spiritual home of the ‘Free Skye’ movement. It was my experience that any politically radical movement had to be full of a mix of idealistic fools, greedy parasites and plain nutjobs. From what Katrina had informed me, Free Skye was no exception. They held two simple beliefs: that the Lyran Commonwealth under the Steiner dynasty had failed to defend Skye (the regional province, not the individual planet), and that therefore Skye would do better if they were independent.
The first belief was fair, to their credit. Katrina’s predecessor, Archon Alessandro, was too aggressive in reforms and strategy, and paid the price for both. More broadly, the Lyran Commonwealth had been losing the three-hundred-year war against the neighboring Draconis Combine, and largely due to military incompetence. Even Katrina agreed with this. That’s why she’d overthrown Alessandro, dragging me along for the ride.
But the second belief, that they would do better independent, was exactly the kind of mind-numbing stupidity that true radicals believed. The so-called Isle of Skye bordered two hostile nations, so why not make it three hostile nations, and fight with barely a quarter of their current military production and support? That couldn’t possibly go wrong!
I suspected that the leaders of Free Skye were fully aware of that uncomfortable truth. The occasional bomb aside, Free Skye mainly just grumbled and made loud protests. They had committed no carefully orchestrated bombing campaigns over extended periods, no planetary revolutions or attempts to seize government buildings, no attempted assassinations of major Lyran figureheads. No, I think that the real leaders of Free Skye were smart enough to know that they needed the rest of the Lyran Commonwealth. The complaining and independence movements were likely nothing more than an attempt to con some additional funding and military defense. Cry out the loudest, get the most reward, that kind of thing.
As I’ve often found over the course of my life, however, it doesn’t take a grand leader to cause enough problems for me. Just a few individuals with stupid ideas can do just as much damage.
I was very careful when piloting my BattleMech to our nearby hanger as a result. No active mag-res scans that might trigger an alarm, plenty of caution where I placed my feet, and a couple quick looks around to make sure there were no suspicious packages inside the cubicle set aside for me, Captain Ciaphas Cain.
“What do you think of the place, David?” I asked my crew chief, after I’d swung out of my cockpit with appropriately dashing flair.
“Looks proper to me, sir,” Staff Sergeant David Totentanz answered, looking up from where he was plugging some manner of large umbilical cord into my Griffin’s back. “Barracks is clean, Mechbay isn’t dirty, and no unpleasant gifts left behind.”
“Excellent,” I told the man. “Still, doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out, eh? Tell the boys there’s an extra drink ready if anyone spots any unpleasant gifts.”
“Aye, sir!” the sergeant replied, a look of agreement and perhaps hunger on his face.
Ah, the joys of the Lyran Commonwealth. Unlike some other places, the Lyrans seemed to understand quite well that a little incentive went a long ways, particularly when it was something like good beer or better yet, raw money. Since my last assignment had been to Asgard, otherwise known as High Command, I’d had ample time to acquire both.
In the meantime, I walked around the cavernous Mechbay, greeting each of the ostentatiously named ‘Mechwarriors’ under my command. It was a bit odd to me, having spent so many years in the infantry or artillery, to technically have only eleven soldiers under my command. Of course, while my BattleMech Company comprised only twelve ‘Mechs, it also contained roughly four service crew for each ‘Mech, bringing the total to roughly fifty men – far less than the thousand I’d held at least nominal authority over, just a few decades back, albeit as a political officer rather than line command.
It did wonders for the morale of the men when I addressed them all by name, or better, asked after their interests or families. It was exactly the sort of thing that a kind, caring officer did, and it fit with their romantic ideas of what heroes did. Far more importantly, it meant that they were devoted and loyal, and would keep an eye out for my safety. Even the technical crews, who didn’t go into battle, would be invaluable for making sure nobody slipped a bomb into my cockpit, or sabotaged my heatsinks, or any one of a dozen ways to kill me.
Yet sadly, I couldn’t delay forever. After doing my best to ensure that my direct subordinates continued to treasure my existence (without pushing it too far), I had to depart for my spot in the officer’s barracks, and pray that my adjutant had managed to already flush out whatever surprises awaited us. A waiting open-topped groundcar was shuttling Mechwarriors back and forth, and I cheerfully hopped on, exchanging jokes with members of my own 1st Company and a quite nice redhead from 2nd Company to pass the time.
The officer’s barracks was set in a relatively nice block of buildings. Almost all military structures are blocky, boring, and utilitarian, but at least this one had been power-washed sometime in the last few years. Further, the doors were guarded by MP’s of my own regiment, rather than the local 17th Skye Rangers. Of course, there’s no telling what they might have done before we got there.
I kept a smiling, jovial expression firmly in place, of course. Never let them see your panic, my old schola mentor always told me. Shame he wasn’t on the official teaching list, but sports like scrumball (or rugby, as closest local equivalent) were perfectly useful tools for an aspiring soldier.
Once I’d flashed my identification and pressed a thumb onto the fingerprint scanner, the MP’s let me past the sturdy double-set of doors. Two steps into the entry hall revealed an emplaced machinegun covering the door, a trio of serious-faced infantry manning it. I nodded politely to them, masking the sudden bowel-clench, but they merely nodded back, and I swiftly walked out of the line of fire. In time, I’d grow accustomed to it, of course, but no soldier likes to find himself staring down a gun barrel.
My room was fairly spacious, given that I was in charge of a Company. A decently sized desk, a bed, a wardrobe and a closet, and enough space to pace. My adjutant was already inside, and had just finished putting my dress uniform out, in preparation for the welcoming ball tonight.
“Everything accounted for, George?” I asked, as I entered the room.
“Of course, sir,” George replied, looking up. A quietly effective man, George had been with me for some time, ever since that mess on Poulsbo. Still, the sight of him left an unpleasant pang in my stomach, like I’d eaten a pastry left out for too long. Nothing against him personally. I’d simply grown used to being able to tell my adjutant by smell.
I trusted that he’d managed to ensure my quarters were free of listening devices, and that he’d have my back in a gunfight, and that would have to be good enough.
“As a reminder, you have an invitation to the formal welcome dinner at the palace tonight,” George said, nodding to the dress uniform. “I’ve also taken the liberty of finding an exercise room that is sufficiently sound-proofed, and booking you a timeslot for the next hour.”
“Thank you, George,” I replied. “I’m in the mood for a quiet workout after all that fuss in orbit. In the meantime, why don’t you take a look around at the local recreational situation?”
“Of course, sir,” George said, with a calm nod.
Life without strong enemies was meaningless. Just as the Dragon fought nobly against the Hound, so too did DEST fight their shadow-war against the enemy, and they were better for it.
Shiro Ishikawa, trained from childhood to be a warrior, could find no fault with this. He had not merely been told such things, but had experienced it himself. From the day of his first assignment, to his current status as a trusted senior operative, his own skills had grown with every hard-won victory, every close defeat. The times of plenty were slothful, for there was no hardship to force a man to grow. Even those truly devoted, who would stay vigilant in peaceful days, would not be pushed quite as hard, grow quite so mighty.
So life was, in the greatest and the smallest of ways. His nation, the Draconis Combine, proved this with every world taken from the feckless and indulgent Lyran Commonwealth – yet they prized their battles with the hardened, experienced soldiers of the Federated Suns all the more.
For Shiro and the Internal Security Force, they were far more fortunate. While only one of two neighbors provided a worthy military opponent, both Davion and Steiner wielded formidable intelligence agencies, and with such diverse strengths! Davion’s MIIO and DMI were inventive, talented, and daring, while Steiner’s LIC was well-equipped, ruthless, and methodical.
Perhaps nowhere was this shown better than Skye, the namesake capital planet of the region. Despite growing separatist behaviors, much like the Draconis Combine’s province of Rasalhague, they were devoted to counter-intelligence operations. The fears of LIC spying sharpened the local security, and the LIC’s attempts to outwit the growing rebellion honed their edge further.
Were it not for the pivotal timing, the ISF might well have left Skye alone for a decade, smiling over tea as their enemies gutted themselves instead of watching the Dragon on their doorstep. But fate did not often allow such opportunities, and they would be fools to allow this one to pass.
The Archduke of Skye, Grethar Lestrade, had died in a civilian car crash of all things. The LIC and local intelligence investigated furiously, but indications were starting to show that it was an accident. Rumors had circulated that perhaps his young nephew, Aldo Lestrade, had arranged it to take the throne himself, but those rumors were dying down as evidence became more clear.
More concerningly, the rumors that DEST, the elite assassins of the Draconis Combine, had killed the Archduke were also dying down. In truth, the Draconis Elite Strike Teams had nothing to do with Archduke Lestrade’s death. Yet to admit so would not aid the Dragon, nor further his goals. The Dragon could not claim credit for an assassination that happened months prior, with none of the clear signs of their involvement, for it would be so obviously a lie.
Where a clear statement would not do, however, a subtle implication would be more effective, showing that even Skye itself was not safe from the Dragon’s reach. To have a ‘second’ assassination within mere months of the Archduke’s death would lead many to suspect that the Combine had been behind the first as well, even with the lack of evidence. The LIC might not be convinced, but it would strengthen the separatist sentiments to point to how the Dragon could have achieved it, for they had just demonstrated their ability.
But who to target? Similarities to the Archduke were of the highest priority, to further tie the ‘two’ deaths together. Someone who had a reputation for caring for the youth. Someone who was a supporter of the new Archon, Katrina Steiner. Least of all, someone who had some military importance, whose death would aid the Draconis Combine even if it did not convince the people that DEST had killed the Archduke.
And like the gift unlooked for, the 10th Lyran Regulars had arrived on-planet. They were traveling to the frontlines, and re-routed to Skye as a show of the Archon’s support for the new Archduchess. Within their ranks was the perfect target – a bonafide ‘Hero of the Commonwealth’.
Ciaphas Cain, despite being a mere Hauptmann, was a symbol of Katrina’s new reign. A personal friend to the Archon, a supporter of her military reforms, and a surrogate uncle to her daughter Melissa. His face was widely circulated in recruiting posters, his deeds exaggerated in their decadent media. He was even expected to shake hands with the new Archduchess tonight.
What a pity for the Hauptmann, that he will miss the opportunity, Shiro mused as he slowly picked his way through the crawlspace between floors of the LCAF building. The ISF’s network of informants had spotted Cain entering this building not ten minutes ago for exercise. Cain was an avid swordsman, as rumor had it, and the long padded box the informants had spotted him carrying had confirmed that.
Swordplay was no mere exercise for the Draconis Combine. Where the occidental cultures of the Lyrans treated it as a curiosity, the Combine knew well that swords were still a viable weapon of war, and trained themselves ruthlessly for it. Shiro himself had slain five men with a blade; two in honor duels, three in his work for the ISF.
He wiggled further along, suspending his bodyweight along the bolted metal service-lines. Typical Lyran work, the supports were over-engineered to withstand earthquakes or enemy fire, despite merely carrying networking cables and phone lines. They were more than capable of holding his weight, allowing him to easily bypass the otherwise vigilant sentries and guards. The Lyrans had tried to patch this weakness with thermal sensors, but DEST’s infiltration suits had long been capable of disguising such signatures. Had the Lyrans simply shrunk these spaces, it would be impossible for a man to crawl within them, for assassinations. But it would hinder their laborers from managing the cables, and so the Lyrans had made the decision to allow a security weakness, all to aid a low-born servant in his tasks.
A ventilator grate showed slivers of light, and Shiro carefully fed a tiny fiber-optic cable down. The miniscule camera displayed a typical exercise hall, with rows of treadmills and weight racks, but no sign of Hauptmann Cain. He must already have ensconced himself inside a private room for sword-drills.
Long minutes passed slowly as Shiro crawled along, spreading his weight carefully to avoid weaknesses that might give way, or flimsy materials that might make noise. It was unfortunately inevitable that he could not avoid dust, but that evidence would only be visible after he had accomplished his mission and escaped the base.
Shiro checked the private exercise rooms one-by-one. The first was empty, the second occupied by two Lyran officers that may have been conducting an affair, or incompetently trying to wrestle. The third, however, contained a man stripped to the waist, running through sword drills with an absurdly large abomination in his hands. It was only by rote training that Shiro confirmed the identity of Cain, as a dark haired, tall, broad-shouldered man of occidental descent, with a prominent jaw-line.
His personal attention was on the sword in Cain’s hands – if he was even willing to call it that. Katanas were slim blades, and while occidental medieval blades were thicker, more like his DEST vibro-katana, the weapon in Cain’s hand was enormous. The blade was long, like a bastard sword, and it had the long grip capable of either one-handed or two-handed use, but instead of a blade of folded metal, it held a boxy rectangular housing with small, shorter blades sticking out at regular intervals. The main body was even painted, as if it was some piece of repurposed junkyard scrap. Perhaps it was a weighted blade for training? Clearly, it was not a practical tool.
Still, bizarre weapon or not, this only played further to Shiro’s advantage. Kendo emphasized the speed and precision of a strike, whereas European swordsmanship emphasized versatility and endurance. Despite Cain’s evident training, he could be expected to be slower than Shiro… and Shiro did not carry a regular blade, but a DEST vibro-katana, which would pierce through armor plating or other swords, while Cain would have to use his heavy, almost bludgeon like weapon, against the Kevlar-weave of Shiro’s infiltration suit. Better yet, the sweat indicated that Cain was well into his exercise, and would be tired by his prior exertion.
As the Lyran carefully pulled his club through a slow series of strikes, Shiro carefully reached for the ceiling panel to his side, detaching it quietly and positioning himself. He would need to be swift in this kill, and return to the ceiling very quickly so that he may escape the base before Cain’s body was found. If the man had reserved it for a full hour, then no one should even attempt to open the locked door for another twenty minutes, which might be enough to see him safely out.
Cain let out a harsh exhale and rested the training cudgel on a shoulder. He made an odd gesture, as if rubbing a palm, but Shiro paid it no attention. His target’s back was turned, and this was his moment.
With the greatest of trained ease, Shiro Ishikawa dropped from the ceiling without a sound, drawing his vibro-katana as he rose from his crouch.
Yet some noise must have betrayed him. Cain’s head whipped to the side, and the corner of his eye caught Shiro’s black-clad form.
Shiro did not hesitate, leaping forward and thumbing the activator for his vibro-katana. One clean stroke would remove the Lyran’s head from his shoulders.
But the Lyran dove to the side faster than Shiro expected, rolling on the padded flooring and rising back up, his cudgel held in two hands before him. Before Shiro could launch a second strike, the Lyran’s thumb moved, and the weighted blades on the cudgel revved. It was not a training blade, Shiro realized. It was a vibro-weapon like his own, but shaped bizarrely. The small blades spun, rather than the whole blade vibrating.
His vibro-katana flicked out, his feet shifting closer in a perfect stance to redirect his momentum if need be, but the Lyran did not dodge a second time. Instead, the blocky weapon interposed itself, in a horrifically pathetic block that would not stop his vibro-blade. Yet his face was calm, his eyes blank mirrors reflecting the serene acceptance of his own death that marked a true samurai.
Then, with a snarling growl of some motor, the teeth of the sword caught the thrumming vibro-katana, and Shiro’s blade nearly ripped itself out of his hand, like a bucking horse. The metal teeth had trapped his blade, spitting it out much lower, at an awkward angle.
Shiro’s eyes widened beneath his helmet. This was no training tool. The block was designed to trap other swords in the teeth. This was a fully functional style, which he had never once heard of.
The enemy’s sword lashed out at him in a savage slash, and it took every ounce of Shiro’s training to raise his own vibro-katana fast enough to deflect the attack. But this was not kendo, and the howling teeth of the blade once again caught on his katana, and nearly tore it from his hand, throwing his katana out of position again.
Cain was no amateur. He was fast, faster than any man should be with such a heavy weapon. It should have been wielded like an axe, yet Cain’s wrists bent like it was just another sword, switching smoothly from two-handed to one-handed grips with ease. His blows were ruthless and swiping, as if it was a saber, but his style was utterly incomprehensible, with the revolving teeth. Shiro’s strikes were smashed aside as if struck by a sledgehammer, and it was a struggle not to be disarmed with every clash.
And in Cain’s eyes, Shiro saw complete emptiness. No tightening of lips, no scowl of concentration. His face was blank, giving no clues as to his thoughts.
Fergus let out a long-suffering sigh. Fuck these bastards, he thought to himself, glancing at the green uniforms of the 10th Lyran Regulars around him.
Johnny-come-lately’s, all of them. Where were they when the boys of Skye had been forced on a suicide run to blow the Mantty River Dam with a nuke to drive the Dracs back? Where were they when Zebebelgenubi and Freedom fell to the Dracs? Where were they when the 17th Skye Rangers defeated the 5th Sword of Light, becoming the only unit to ever best the so-called Gold Dragon?
Oh, Fergus could think of one time that the Lyrans were present. Just six years before on Summer, when the Dracs raided, and killed the Duke. The Archon oh-so-nobly sent the Third Royals, supposedly the best damn unit in the Commonwealth, to garrison the planet, and even they couldn’t keep the Dracs away. It was sheer luck that the Duke’s son, Aldo, was still alive. Crippled, with cybernetic hand, leg, and hip, unable to ever serve on the frontlines, having literally watched his father die before him.
Fat lot of good these Lyrans had done for Skye… and now they showed up, all ready to support some street brat that good Archduke Grethar had adopted. As if she was of the same blood as the Lestrades that’d ruled Skye for centuries. As if she was the rightful heir, and if anyone disagreed, the jackboots of the 10th Lyran Regulars would enforce her whims.
Now, Fergus wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Steiners were all bad. He’d had the joy of meeting at least one good Steiner, General Frederick, and watching him thrash the ever-living hell out of both the Leaguers and the Dracs. Which is why in the Lyran Commonwealth’s wisdom, they kicked him out to the toughest, hardest situation with barely any support, while Katrina Steiner sat on her stolen fucking throne, after going AWOL for years.
AWOL with her husband, his cousins, and this jackoff named Cain. The husband was dead from cancer just a year back, the cousins were off playing daddy’s rich-boy mercenary for the Fed-rats rather than defend their home, and Cain had spent four years kicking back on Tharkad in luxury, despite being a nobody.
It was all too easy for Fergus to get lost in these thoughts, because there were just so goddamn many of them. So many ways that the Lyrans had failed Skye, and still demanded their taxes, as if they’d upheld their end of the bargain.
Which is why he’d take an extra-special pleasure in this fun little moment, as Fergus looked to John and Sylvan, making sure they were backing him up closely, as they marched towards the cordoned-off gymnasium.
The official word was that two of the 10th Regular's officers had reported a security breach, involving this Hauptmann Cain. The unofficial word, already spreading on the base in just five minutes after the alarm sounded, was that the two officers had been fucking in one of the gym’s rooms and heard a crashing sound from Cain’s room, so they panicked and ran out.
Namby bastards didn’t know anything. Didn’t know that you took your woman out to have a date, instead of fucking in a goddamn common area like savages. Didn’t know what a real Drac infiltrator would be like.
That was why the 10th Lyran Regulars had called them in. For all the rumors about them being a full ‘Regimental Combat Team’ with a full infantry Regiment, at least one sensible head in the Regulars knew that the 17th Skye was the best damn unit in this theatre, and that they’d actually tangled with Drac infiltrators trying to kill VIPs. It was likely that they’d be redeployed to Summer eventually, when the fake Archduchess inevitably kicked them out, but in the meantime, they were the best on-planet, which meant their MP’s would control the damn crime scene.
It wouldn’t be fair to call the lingering bystanders outside the gym a ‘crowd’, because the military didn’t do crowds. They were a respectful distance away, and they were keeping to themselves, and that’s all that Fergus cared about. At least half of them had clearly been kicked out of the gym in the middle of their workouts, but the rest were just lackadaisical little rubberneckers.
Fergus nodded politely to the Sergeant standing sentry by the door with a full squad in combat gear, rifles at the ready. Trust the infantry to understand the basics, even if they were Lyrans.
“Victim still inside?” Fergus demanded, as John split off to join the guard team at the front door.
“Hauptmann Cain is still within,” the Sergeant said. “Only asked to leave once, and when I said no, he cooperated.”
“I’ll interview him,” Fergus told the man. “Sergeant Rochfert here will handle the crime scene.”
“It’s pretty bloody in there,” the Lyran Sergeant warned him.
Fergus smiled back politely, and walked in quickly, so that he didn’t say something rude back.
Bloody, indeed. It’s almost like two people tried to fuckin’ kill each other inside. Who would have guessed! Sergeant bumfuck clearly hadn’t ever had to get in the dirty. Not just shooting a man from a couple hundred meters out, but actually in the melee and scrum with a man, where you might have to use your knife, your boots, or even your bare hands.
A few steps in, and Fergus sighed. Maybe he shouldn’t be too hard on the kid. They were just giving out Sergeant’s stripes left and right these days. Didn’t mean that he should wish for the kid to see all the horrors of war.
He walked down the hallway, noticing the abandoned water-bottles and towels. Signs of panic, but no violence. It must have been fairly contained. A couple hallways down for the private rooms, and bam, there was Hauptmann Cain, all two meters of him.
The Archon’s man was wearing a loose, unbuttoned jacket and some dark sweat-pants wet with something, sweat probably. He’d clearly been in the middle of a workout, with his hair still slick. Most concerning, he had some long box leaning nearby, easily long enough for a gun.
“Hauptmann Cain?” Fergus called out, keeping his attention firmly on the man’s hands.
Cain jolted up from his slouch against the wall, and his body-language changed from exhausted athlete to tired officer in an instant.
“Ah, Sergeant, good to have you here,” Cain replied with a nod, as if he’d been expecting them sooner. “The body’s inside there. I’m afraid there isn’t much left of the man, but he wasn’t surrendering, so I was unable to take him alive.”
The Lyran gestured at the still closed door, and Fergus couldn’t help but notice a splatter of blood across the man’s hand.
“Are you injured?” he asked, pointing to the hand.
“This? No, that’s his,” Cain said, his tone remarkably even.
Right. Oldest trick in the book, that. Get yourself an injury to look heroic, then pretend it’s the blood of your enemy. Fergus wasn’t buying that for an instant.
“What’s in the case, sir?” Fergus said, keeping his tone as polite as he could manage.
“My sword,” Cain replied calmly. “I was in the middle of some practice drills when the Drac dropped in front of me. I’m just glad he wasn’t smart enough to wait until I’d put the sword away.”
“Do you have any guesses as to why they targeted you?” Fergus asked, gesturing for Sylvan to go check out the room.
“None occurred to me at the time,” Cain said, as if he’d simply forgotten to think about it. “Perhaps he assumed I was up for a match?”
“Sir, you need to take this seriously,” Fergus said, tightly leashing his flash of annoyance at the man, as a slow odor of some foul smell started trickling into his nose.
“Oh, I am,” Cain said with a smile. “It’s just-”
“Fergus?” Sylvan interrupted, his tone disturbed. “You should see this.”
Holding up a finger to cut off the too-calm Hauptmann, Ferus went over to the door. Sylvan was already inside, and he had a look of almost stupefied horror on his face, like he couldn’t believe something. His jaw was clamped tight, like he was trying to keep from gaping.
Fergus took one step inside the room, and a wave of that smell from earlier smacked into him, like he’d been clubbed with a raw fish. The wall had a splatter of blood across it, like some movie-director’s idea of what arterial spray looked like, rather than the real thing.
It would have been almost comedic, were it not for the dead man on the ground, a horrendous gash torn in his side, like a bear had taken an enormous bite. Bits of flesh were scattered around the man’s feet, a couple of which looked awfully like fingers. The bright red blood was hard to see against the black of the exercise mats, and the thick black body-suit that the man was clad in. Add in the damaged vibro-katana lying on the ground a couple meters away, and the distinctive tri-goggle helmet, and it was clear – definitely a DEST assassin.
“What the fuck makes a wound like that?” Sylvan muttered, crouching down as he stared at the ragged hole.
Fergus could barely look away himself. It wasn’t a knife-wound, or even a clean vibro-blade cut. It was like something had gripped the Drac’s skin and torn it piece-by-piece, like a cat clawing at a scratching post – and straight through the armor-weave that Fergus knew from experience could stop pistol rounds.
“Do you need anything else from me?”
He looked up, and Cain was standing in the doorway, that placid expression of military boredom still on his face, even with the corpse of his would-be assassin right in front of him.
“Yes,” Fergus said slowly, looking back at the long case resting against the wall. “I need to see your sword.”
“Oh?” Cain said, as if surprised. “I didn’t have the chance to clean it. Are you sure?”
“Hauptmann, show me the weapon,” Fergus repeated, staring Cain straight in the face.
Cain looked back, his expression finally shifting from polite calm to something that actually indicated he’d just butchered someone. His eyebrows tensed, his chin dipped, and he looked at Fergus with a long, knowing look. It still showed no shock, no guilt, none of the jitters that Fergus expected… but finally, Cain wasn’t pretending this was all just routine!
“It’s not a pretty sight,” Cain said, his voice still nonchalant, as he reached for the case and opened it.
Fergus looked down at the weapon. It wasn’t a sword. It was a chainsaw, shaped like a sword. The rectangular body was professionally made, but had small dents and a thin slicing line halfway down it’s boxy shape, matching the damage to the vibro-katana. The chainsaw’s teeth were stained red, and Fergus realized why the blood on the wall had looked so fake – the chainsaw-sword had sprayed the blood like it was sawdust.
What kind of madman uses a weapon like this? Fergus wondered, unable to take his gaze from it.
“I’d be more than pleased to assist in your investigation, of course,” Cain said, in the background of Fergus’s hearing. “But I’m afraid I do have a pressing dinner invitation.”
Fergus snapped his head up, and glared at the Lyran Regular officer. Like hell was he going to be wandering off for some dinner after the goddamn bloodbath he’d made of that man, Drac or not! At the very least, he needed to be questioned extensively, in a proper interrogation room
Cain looked back at him, and the knowing expression changed once more, shoulders rising and a firm look of disapproval, punctuated by the click of the chainsword’s case snapping shut. Despite being a Lyran, and outside of Fergus’s chain of command, he resisted the involuntary urge to stiffen to attention, as the stare of Command gazed at him.
“I’ll be sure to pass on word of your diligent work to Duke Lestrade, of course,” Cain said, and Fergus’s thoughts came to a grinding halt. “But since he cared to send a personal invitation to tonight’s dinner at the palace, I would rather not disappoint him. Would you?”
“No sir, I would not,” Fergus said, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Good work, trooper,” Cain said, patting him on the shoulder. Fergus stared at Cain as he walked off, the case for his chainsword tucked under his arm, not noticing the blood still spattered across his hands and legs.
Chapter Text
I’m still not quite sure what I think of formal parties. They were quite enjoyable in my youth, and like most soldiers, I’m always fond of a chance to drink the best liquor and sample the best foods. Easy enough to play up the simple-minded, humble soldier, which the nobility expects of me. On the other hand, I’ve seen enough formal balls and glamorous shin-digs wind up in firefights and assassinations, which usually involve me in some way or form.
Further, unlike my old Commissariat uniform, the LCAF’s dress uniforms were not armored, nor designed for combat. They were strictly dress uniforms, with dark-blue jackets with a high neck and stirrup-style white pants that attach to foppish black shoes. No practicalities, more resembling court garb than a proper uniform. During my time at the Nagelring, this had struck me as a clear sign of the old LCAF’s priorities, and why they historically had more incompetent officers – but I digress.
All of this meant that I was walking into a formal event with no armor, and would be highly dependent on the local palace guard to defend me; a terrifying thought, particularly after remembering that this was a periodically rebellious province, and the palace guard might shoot me instead of the local terrorists. Worst of all, with how vulnerable and exposed I would be, like a duck floating with the crocodiles, I couldn’t even drink to any enjoyable amount, lest it dull my senses.
All in all, I was prepared for a quite miserable evening as the regimental limousine trundled along up to ‘Honor of Skye’, the local palace.
My CO, the venerable Lieutenant-General Ashberry, must have agreed with me, because there were no other officers of the 10th with us, despite this event supposedly being held in our honor. Ashberry was an emotionless sort, the kind of man that could be mistaken for a wall in dim lighting. He spoke as little as possible, and drilled his men to the best of their ability, but unlike some officers, appeared quite understanding that some men simply weren’t capable of that much.
Even before I’d joined the 10th, I gathered that he was quite a competent commander, for the 10th were a Veteran-rated unit despite being of the ‘lesser’ Lyran Regulars, rather than the Lyran Guards. Yet there was some political factor that had kept Ashberry stuck here, in this posting. I wondered, sometimes, if his understanding nature was actually just sad exhaustion at how poorly his unit was regarded, how terrible most of his replacement soldiers were, and how most of the Regiment largely preferred to hang around bars rather than train for combat.
To his credit, if he did think this way, the General never let those thoughts show, particularly around me. He did the best he could, with what pitiful left-overs he was given. His ability to turn shit into silver (yet never quite into gold) was perhaps his best quality as an officer, but it meant that after he’d finally turned his men into something good, they were transferred out to better units, and he was given more slackers, malcontents, and bums. Too often, they also took their BattleMechs with them, and replacement ‘Mechs were slow in coming.
From a glance at his file, I knew that his promotion to Lieutenant-General when the 10th was re-built into a full Regimental Combat Team was the first promotion he’d gotten in two decades. I didn’t know if he regarded the additional Regiments as a sign of trust in his ability, or more trash for him to turn into competent soldiers, before watching them leave to earn glory with another, more reputable Regiment.
I never was quite sure what Ashberry thought of me, even after our long years of working together. Another slacker and party-animal, drinking amongst the common men? A potential reformer, often found amongst the Infantry Regiment attached to us? Katrina Steiner’s glory-hungry war hero, foisted off to a training unit where he wouldn’t get into too much trouble?
On this night, like many others, the man was simply inscrutable. I suppose that worked out for the best, in the end.
Honor of Skye was a fairly interesting palace, as far as my standards go. I’ve seen quite a few, and while it lacked the golden luster of many, it had something which other, more ostentatious palaces simply lacked. Perhaps it was the utilities, like the tennis courts and stables I spotted, showing that the obligatory sprawling gardens were more for actual use, rather than solely for showing off. Perhaps it was the practicalities, like the road channeling us into fire-lanes and past shrubberies that were perfect spots for heavy weapons teams, with decorative, white-walled buttresses that were functional cover.
The palace simply didn’t pretend to be more extravagant than it truly was. I’d seem some planetary governors with mansions that looked like they were from Holy Terra itself, golden walls and guards with golden lasguns and carpet designed to replicate their faces. Gaudy things, full of elaborate decadence, while their cities were entirely different in architecture. They simply didn’t fit. But Honor of Skye did. It seemed perfect for the mixture of industry, economy, and nature reserve of Skye. Emerald-green armed infantry from the Skye Rangers stood as ceremonial guards, with all-too functional weapons for my liking.
The General’s driver pulled us right up to the edge of a polished white marble portico, and we stepped out of the limo, our black shoes standing out nicely.
I nodded politely to the driver, a non-com that would spend the night gambling and drinking with the other non-commissioned officers in a back hall. He drove off, and it felt like my heart tried to follow him, yearning for any escape.
The reception hall was filled with preening nobles, immaculate architecture, and gaudily dressed LCAF officers. I was no stranger to elaborate uniforms, but the key word in that phrase is uniform. I’d once seen twenty-five officers bedecked in bright red battledress, their buttons in gold and their stitchwork in silver, and what had looked strange on an individual settled into a pleasant appearance when repeated across many. LCAF officers, however, seemed almost allergic to the word. My practiced eye could not spot a single uniform regulation that was followed faithfully, and each one deviated from the next, so they weren’t even consistent.
The surroundings, on the other hand, were the same mixture of tasteful but functional architecture as the exterior. Light-colored marbles mixed with rosewood paneling on the floors and walls, plush green carpets with golden tassels in the center of rooms. No excess of gilt or glitter, no wealth thrown in your face. Tasteful, I believe the interior decorators call it.
The result was a clash of appearances that almost made my nose wrinkle. It was like a junior cadet prom in civilian dress; a mix of high-class and low-class that worked together poorly. The worst part was that I’d seen people deliberately alter uniforms before, and that still looked better than this. One officer wore his school rag (a local tradition involving a sash, but which is worn like a cummerbund) around his upper arm, while his conversational partner wore his around his shoulders, like a half-cape. Another officer had swapped his dress shoes for riding boots, but brown suede boots instead of slick black cavalry boots that would have worked with his uniform and been perfectly sensible.
The gaudiest of them all was a tall blond-haired man holding court with a half-dozen Kommandants in one of the numerous sub-rooms that were publicly open for the ball. He wore an emerald dress jacket, rather than the light-blue jacket from regulations. The metal shoulder-epaulets were gold, instead of standard silver. His school rag was a darker forest green, indicating he’d graduated from the local academy, Sanglamore, rather than my own Nagelring, and the sash itself was edged in gold. Though he bore both the Dragonslayer’s Ribbon and the Eagle’s Feather, the ‘place of glory’ at the center of his school rag was occupied by the Honor of Skye – a medallion normally worn around the neck, much larger than the usual small pins or medals placed in that spot.
All in all, the man was a near perfect icon of Skye’s separatist wing, which made three things about him very unpleasant. The first was that he was a high-ranking LCAF officer, a General by the insignia. That such a high-ranking officer from a non-Skye unit was so strongly aligned with them was a bad sign.
The second, which I noticed as he turned and locked eyes on me, was that his own eyes were steel gray, Steiner gray. This was Frederick Steiner, the Archon’s own cousin, commander of the 10th Lyran Guards, widely regarded as one of the best military minds in the Commonwealth, and noted domestic political enemy.
The third unpleasant thing was that Frederick stopped talking abruptly with his current partner, and started walking straight towards me.
I turned and beelined it for the buffet line. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that Frederick had simply mistaken me for someone else, or that he’d lose track of me (not with my height); I just wanted to grab a quick drink before he cornered me. Sadly, there was none of the imported Capellan teas that I enjoyed, so I grabbed a cup of fortifying black tea.
Katrina had told me about Frederick’s personality, but it had been years ago. I tried to remember what she said, but all I could think of was a casual mention that he was great friends with Aldo Lestrade, Duke of Summer, and unofficial leader of the Free Skye movement – as if that wasn’t blindingly obvious from Frederick’s leprechaun green dress uniform. Nothing about his personal foibles jumped out of the swampy quagmire of my old memories.
“Hauptmann Cain,” a rumbling voice said from behind me, like the growl of an Ork warbuggy. I took a swig of the unfamiliar tea, and turned around to face my superior officer.
“General Steiner,” I greeted, looking down at him and nodding politely. “What can I do for you?”
“You can answer some questions for me, Hauptmann,” Frederick said, looking up at me, with a distinctly unamused expression on his face. I didn’t know if it was because he was irked at me running off, or because he was used to being taller than junior officers, but I wasn’t about to apologize for my height. Wish I’d been born shorter, yes, but apologize? Never. If I did that, then people might start to make more demands of me, and who knows what kind of mess that would lead to.
I hesitated for a millisecond. When in doubt, fall back on your strengths – and one of my few strengths was my ability to pretend to be a simple, honest military man. Still, Frederick was already inclined to hate me, just from my friendship with his cousin, so I needed to put him off balance quickly.
“Absolutely,” I told Frederick. “A full briefing for you and your command staff, at whatever time works best. Or if you want, I can give an abbreviated one without the slides right now – though we might want to clear the room of civilians, since it’ll probably bore most of them, and they wouldn’t understand it.”
“What are you talking about?” Frederick asked, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “I wasn’t informed of any briefing.”
Of course, he wasn’t. I’d just made the whole thing up, but he didn’t know that.
“The new Regimental Combat Team structure,” I told Frederick, trying my best to look earnest and plain. “It’s a bit unorthodox, but High Command thinks it’ll do wonders against the Mariks, and help blunt the Kurita blitzkrieg.”
“Is that what Katrina sent you out here for?” Frederick demanded, his voice twisting into something dark at the mere naming of the Archon.
“Truthfully… no,” I said, pausing for a moment, before glancing to the side and leaning in a bit. “The 10th – sorry, the 10th Regulars, I know that must be confusing with you running the 10th Guards-”
“It happens,” Frederick interrupted, a little impatience in his voice, as he almost subconsciously leaned forward a little as well. “Talk. Why are you here?”
“We were originally intended to garrison Ryde,” I told Frederick truthfully, before laying on a little of my own supposition. “High Command re-tasked us to help garrison Skye after news of the Archduke’s death. They didn’t know if Kurita was behind it, so a good show of strength to show the damn Dracs that they can’t intimidate the Commonwealth.”
“Damn right, they can’t,” Frederick agreed, taking a chug of his fluted drinking glass like it was a beer stein, and then gesturing with the glass for me to continue. “You think there’s any truth to that, or is it just more smoke being blown up our ass from Tharkad?”
“Well, I can’t say what information the LIC has, of course,” I replied, shrugging modestly, before continuing a little more casually. “But in my opinion, it’s a damn reasonable guess. Just three hours ago, a Drac tried to gut me in the middle of Fort McHenry.”
“What?” Frederick snapped, his raised voice drawing more than a few nearby stares. “In the middle of my base?! Was security asleep? I’m going to keel-haul those bastards!”
“I don’t think so,” I disagreed politely, as Frederick stared. I almost imagined that I could see little snorts of fire coming out of his nose, though I couldn’t tell if it was at the idea of Combine infiltrators inside his base or at a lowly Hauptmann disagreeing with him. “They responded quickly when I alerted them. The 17th Skye secured the gym within two minutes.”
“Run off to find the nearest MP, did you?” Frederick asked, a slight tilt of the lips betraying his dismissive amusement.
“Oh, no!” I said, forcing a chuckle and a slight grin of my own. “Typical Drac arrogance saved my life, really – he must’ve seen me practicing with my sword and decided that I was an offense to his honor, or something like that. He had the drop on me, but didn’t even try shooting! Jumped out of the ceiling with a katana and tried to chop my head off. I don’t think he expected me to actually be good.”
“You’re telling me that you killed a DEST ninja in a sword duel?” Frederick asked, rhetorically. “Like I’d buy that, coming from-”
“I can show you the body, if you want,” I offered, cutting him off with a smile that didn’t reach my eyes. “Sergeant Fergus of the 17th Skye secured the crime scene, we can ask where he put it.”
Frederick went still, his eyes locked on me, and I held my smile and stared back, the jitters locked firmly in a clenched hand behind my spine. I’d let Frederick drive the conversation thus far to keep him happy, answering whatever questions he’d asked, but I couldn’t just bend over the whole time, or he wouldn’t respect me as a soldier, and that would spell my death just as quickly as calling out his Free Skye sympathies would.
Yet I’d trapped him now. He couldn’t doubt just my word, he would have to disagree with a Skye Ranger from the most separatist-influenced unit as well.
“You’re that good with a sword, eh?” Frederick said, after a few moments of staring.
“Captain of the Fencing Club at the Nagelring for three years,” I told him. “Truth be told, I’m damn glad he did try it while I had a sword in my hand. I wasn’t the best student, spent more time on the rugby field and the fencing salle than I did in the libraries.”
“A good sport, Rugby,” Frederick said, eyeing me a little less suspicious now. “What position did you play, prop?”
“Eight-man,” I replied, gesturing at my shoulders. “You?”
“Same,” Frederick said with a nod. He stared at me for a few moments, without any attempt to disguise his curious look, before he continued. “Hm. My staff will inform you what time works for that briefing.”
General Steiner took a final chug of his fluted drink, then turned and walked back to the gaggle of Kommandants, leaving me along at the buffet table. The Kommandants had been polite enough to pretend that they weren’t staring, but as Frederick rejoined them, they swiftly returned to their previous discussion with practiced ease.
And that was how I met Frederick Steiner, the single most graceless man I’d ever met. I’d seen Orks with more ability to deceive and Tyranids with more discretion than that gloriously blunt man.
Still, there was not a single man more capable of fighting a battle. I could only imagine how good of friends we might have been, if he’d lived in the Imperium when I was a Commissar. I could have pointed Freddy-boy at any number of enemy formations and trusted him to win the day, while I ran off to hide, and he never would have suspected that I was just making up excuses.
It might seem strange, but sometimes a good commander must ignore things that he couldn’t control and focus on what he could, and Frederick, that blessedly simple-minded soul, was amazing at that. Of course, the one issue Frederick refused to ignore was his belief that Katrina was a traitor, and that he would do better on the throne. Typical, really.
I fled the room as quickly as I could. Practically everyone was staring at me, with how loud Frederick had been, and that kind of attention never bodes well. I lifted my teacup in a salute to the stares, and then strode out like I was off to conduct an emergency inspection, chin lifted and eyes straight ahead.
The next room over was the dancing room, and the slightest swell of nausea trickled out of my stomach as I looked at the dancing couples whirling in a waltz, while the immaculately tuxedoed orchestra played. I think it was bad tea, though I’m not unwilling to admit that the music itself didn’t help. I kept waiting for the traditional waltz to transition into a more jazzy tune, with a singer, yet it didn’t come.
The businessmen had taken over the next room, an ostentatious and cavernous hall that held an enormous hand-carved table pushed up against the wall. Perhaps it was the main dining room for formal dinners. Though the surroundings were grandiose, the businessmen – and women, for it was hardly gender-isolated – were clad almost uniformly in tailored business suits. Cream, navy, tan, gray – every fashionable color was in evidence, but fashion in business is thankfully far more subdued than among the nobility.
My dark-blue junior officer’s jacket and white trousers stood out amongst the crowd in contrast, even though I was almost entirely abiding by the uniform regulations, unlike most officers present. I will admit to one small modification, but I was hardly the only man carrying a sword on his hip, even if LCAF rules didn’t officially allow it.
I mingled among the businessmen for some time, but they didn’t seem to much like my presence. A few asked about what tax changes Katrina might make, and my humble soldier routine was incapable of answering their questions. I did have an enjoyable conversation with a representative from Timbiqui Spirits, since I’d spent some time at Poulsbo, just two jumps from Timbiqui itself, but it didn’t last long, and I had to move on soon enough.
I slipped into the next room past a set of door guards, like every grand doorway had, but these were far more attentive, and their eyes lingered on my saber and my holstered laser pistol. It didn’t take long to realize why – the room was nearly empty, and standing next to a large bay window was a woman with pretty, though not beautiful features. Her dark skin contrasted nicely with a green dress.
Archduchess Margaret Aten looked up as my bootsteps echoed on the marble, just audible over the dimming sounds of the businessmen next door.
“Your grace,” I said, clicking my heels together and bowing at the waist, in the proper Germannic style.
It also kept my face out of sight for a moment, as I tightly stuffed my rising panic out of sight. This was no mere Planetary Duke, but the equivalent to a Sector Governor. She was the ruling authority, and I hadn’t actually been planning on meeting her tonight. Once nobility knows your face, they’ll never let you escape their power games. The only way out is a deployment far beyond their reach – and with an Archduchess, that reach is very long.
“Hauptman… Cain,” the Archduchess said, her gaze sweeping over me. I could almost feel a sweat building in my armpits – she already knew my name.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, your grace,” I said, rising from my bow. “I apologize for intruding, but I must confess that I was fleeing the businessmen. Not quite a proper place for a soldier, you see.”
“Really?” the Archduchess inquired politely, one elegantly-groomed eyebrow quirking upwards, as she turned away from the window. “I’m surprised. Not going to milk them for a few beers?”
“I – must confess the thought hadn’t occurred to me,” I said, hesitating a little at her words.
“Bull,” the Archduchess said, looking me straight on.
“Bull?” I repeated, unsure of what she was precisely saying.
“Bull,” Archduchess Aten said again. “Short for bullshit. As in, I’m not buying it.”
“I’m… sorry?” I said, that suppressed panic rising back up.
“Three months in Dropships, with the 10th Lyran Regulars,” Aten said, still staring straight at me. “You probably ran out of booze three weeks in. Moonshine’s decent, but you just spent four years on Tharkad, so I imagine you didn’t like it much. You were polite enough to most of them, but as soon as the Timbiqui rep appeared, you latched onto him for twenty minutes.”
It took an almost physical effort to keep my expression straight.
“How…” I started to ask, before trailing off.
Aten gestured with one hand towards the window she’d been staring at, and I saw a faint light coming from the sill. There was a small tablet there, the screen displaying a camera feed.
“You were watching?” I asked, the question almost redundant. “How… security conscious of you.”
“You mean paranoid,” Aten said.
“I would never be so bold,” I replied, from a long-trained habit. Downplay, demur, doubt, tone it down, the four watchwords of bluffing.
Aten said nothing in response, merely staring back. I felt an unpleasant sensation, not unlike the common fear of waking up to find you’re late for a vital appointment, or that you haven’t studied for that test, or you’re standing in front of a crowd in just your underwear.
I was rather distantly impressed, beneath the building worry of so much attention from an Archduchess. Aten was so young, barely into her twenties, and yet she’d cut straight through my little act.
“Why are you here, Cain?” Aten asked, finally breaking the silence.
“You know, you’re not the first to ask me that tonight,” I told her. “General Steiner didn’t seem to believe that we were simply here to reinforce Skye, given the… unfortunate circumstances. You have my condolences, my lady, from one orphan to another.”
Aten blinked, and for just a moment, I saw her mask of blunt indifference crack, and there was an almost intolerable sadness in her eyes. Pain, both raw and fresh, but also some old, long-buried suffering resurfacing. Then the stare was back, and Margaret Aten’s face closed up like a Dropship’s loading bay, leaving nothing but bare steel before me.
“Thank you for your honesty,” she said, her voice perfectly steady. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why are you here?”
Damn. Try to deflect with actual sympathy, and all you do is piss her off. Great job, Cai, now she’ll never forget you, I told myself silently.
But what to say? Well, when in doubt, blame your superiors and say you were just following orders.
“Where Katrina Steiner points, I go,” I told her.
“Katrina,” Margaret Aten repeated.
“Katrina,” I confirmed, with a slight nod.
The Archduchess pressed her lips together tightly, and didn’t say anything for a few moments, clearly tossing some thoughts around inside her head. I waited patiently, though I’m not quite sure why she was putting so much thought into such a simple excuse.
“I am happy to have the confidence of the Archon,” Margaret Aten finally replied, her tone appropriately formal. A polite say-nothing phrase, the perfect response to my own excuse.
I nodded, and despite the natural ending of that conversation, I forced myself to stay put. I was no longer a Commissar of the Imperial Guard, and therefore able to ignore some noble protocols – like having to ask permission before leaving the presence of such a high-ranking noblewoman.
Margaret Aten seemed to have understood, however, because she returned my nod and flicked her eyes over to the door, with implicit permission to leave.
“Excuse me, your grace,” I apologized, bowing once again. “I’m afraid I should probably make my appearances among the sharks before they try to hunt me down, and disturb you in the process.”
The Archduchess’s lips turned upwards ever-so-slightly, and she watched as I carefully stepped back, turned about face, and strode away smoothly, calmly, and most definitely not hurrying out.
The rest of the ball passed quickly, as best as I can recall. There were several congratulatory nods and slaps on the shoulder from some suddenly friendly Skye noblemen, and I wasn’t quite sure why until near the end of the night.
Perhaps two hours after my chat with the Archduchess, I’d just finished off a cup of tea, and nearly ran over some poor little man as I turned around to refill my cup. Thankfully, the cup was empty, or I definitely would have spilled it all over him. As it was, the cup nearly smashed into his chin, he was so short.
“Oh my, I’m so sorry!” I apologized quickly, stepping back, biting back an instinct ‘I didn’t see you there’ that the man would almost certainly take as an insult about his height.
Then I got a good look at the man’s face. Maybe I should have made that insulting comment, no matter the political consequences. My prior headache came rushing back all at once.
“No problem at all, Hauptmann,” said Aldo Lestrade, Duke of Summer, in a warm, friendly manner, like we were two old acquaintances re-uniting after a long absence. “I’m so glad that you could make it, I was afraid you hadn’t gotten my invitation!”
There was a flicker of shutter-sounds, and at the corner of my eye, I could see a paparazzo a few dozen feet away, snapping pictures as Aldo Lestrade extended his hand, a broad grin on his face.
Danger, my instincts were screaming. Two contradictory urges sprang into mind, and I had to suppress both of them quickly – shaking the rebellious Duke’s hand would be a propaganda victory for him. Archon’s Agent makes Friends with Duke Lestrade! Hero of Commonwealth supports Free Skye! Similarly, no matter how personally satisfying the urge might be, shooting Aldo in the head as a traitor would start an outright rebellion.
Lestrade’s hand hung out in front of me, and the camera was still clicking away. Not shaking his hand would look rude, insulting, and perhaps damage the Archon’s attempts to keep Free Skye calm… but I couldn’t bring myself to offer even the dour, expressionless handshake of a soldier. My palms with itching just looking at the short, stumpy little man, and maybe it was just the lingering Commissar in me, but I couldn’t even imagine shaking a traitor’s hand.
“Duke Lestrade,” I finally said, after another few moments of awkward tension, as I scrambled to find something to say. “Any chance to drink and meet pretty women, I’ll be there.”
Aldo laughed, a boisterous noise for such a small man, and threw his head back as if I’d made some humorous joke. The cameras clicked, but my hands were carefully away from Aldo’s, and my face was as cold as a Valhallan holiday resort. Aldo wiped a pretend tear out of his eye, and I saw a flash of something angry, something burning in his eyes, as he finished his faked laughter.
“Hang around me, my good friend, and there will always be plenty of both,” Aldo said, spreading his arms wide, dropping the attempt to shake my hand.
I nearly groaned as I remembered that among his many, many personal habits, Aldo Lestrade was a notable womanizer, flirt, and social drinker. My usual humble soldier act wouldn’t be quite as effective here, and I’d already stepped in crap by admitting some shared interests with the Duke. I would need something more stoic, more stern. Thankfully, there was no end to stoic and stern figures in my life, and I myself had put on a good performance when the troops needed me. Lyran Generals might be social butterflies, but Imperial Generals were bulldozers and meatgrinders.
“Please, you must come to one of my parties,” Aldo said. I was quite surprised at his ability to look up at my face, two feet above his, and not look ridiculous. He must have practiced his posture endlessly. “I’m holding a small gathering of friends just next weekend, in downtown New Glasgow. I’d be honored if you could attend.”
“I cannot,” I replied, a touch stiffly, as I looked down with a tinge of disrespect. “I’m afraid I’ll be busy for the next several weeks with my Regiment. The enemies of the Commonwealth will hardly sit around and wait for us.”
Unfortunately, we were starting to gather a bit of a crowd. Some of the men were clearly Aldo’s lackeys, but others were finely-garbed Skye noblemen, with very few women for some reason, and quite a few were military officers with the circular unit-patches of the Skye Rangers. To my regret, very few wore the shield-shaped patch of the 10th Lyran Guards, Frederick’s unit, which was historically commanded by the Archon’s Heir and might have been a bit more sympathetic to the LCAF over Skye. Katrina herself had commanded them for a time, before that whole going AWOL to play pirates adventure of ours.
Still, a few of those military officers were nodding at my words, despite being from the Rangers. Their worlds had been constantly attacked by the Dracs over the centuries, so I suppose that shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise.
“An important duty, but surely you have the time to come break bread with us?” Aldo replied easily, nodding slightly at my words. “The enemies of the Commonwealth are many, and strong, but with your Regiment here, I’m sure you can take at least one night to enjoy Skye’s warm welcome?”
The little weasel, I thought sourly. Aldo was no slouch in politicking – the real politicking, rabble-rousing a crowd in person, acting like he was talking to an individual when his words were actually for everyone to hear. He’d phrased things like we were friends, inviting me to ‘break bread’, and implying that if I didn’t show, I would be snubbing not just him, but all of Skye. He was offering to be friends, and I would either have to accept, or be the rude Lyran bastard refusing his generous offer.
He’d made a mistake, though, I realized. Aldo was acting in the Lyran style – the womanizing, the parties, the drinking, all of which were symbolic luxuries of the nobility and the rich – while his public arguments against Katrina emphasized how slothful the Lyran Commonwealth was, how lazy their defenses of Skye were. A hypocrite, like many nobles. I didn’t have to point that out, because most of the nobles in the crowd had already heard Aldo’s prior complaints.
Even better, Aldo was not solely a symbol of Skye’s nobility, but a personal patron of the 17th Skye Rangers, and other Skye units. If I could get them on my side, this whole thing might turn around… and as Frederick had demonstrated earlier today, there was nothing that’d get a military man’s attention faster than being told his perimeter had been breached.
“I’ve been on Skye a single day, and already a Kuritan has tried to kill me,” I told Lestrade disdainfully.
The noblemen in the crowd let out gasps and signs of surprise, but the military officers stared harder, their eyes locked on me. Perhaps a few had heard of Frederick’s earlier outburst, but it was clear that Aldo had not, for he held his warm, friendly grin just a moment too long, and then dropped it suddenly in surprise, an expression of shock and outrage.
“A Draconis assassin on Skye itself,” Aldo repeated, clenching a fist. “This is outrageous! What happened, did he get away? The 17th Skye will hunt the bastards down, I’m sure of it.”
“No need,” I informed the man calmly, keeping my words simple and projecting my voice outwards with the ease of long experience. “The Drac is already dead.”
“What happened?” someone in the crowd demanded, just as Aldo opened his mouth to say something. A gossip-monger, perhaps, or just a nobleman accustomed to being in charge and too impatient to wait. Either way, it was the perfect opportunity for me.
“DEST assassin,” I told the nobleman, turning to look in his general direction and patting the hilt of my ceremonial saber. “He interrupted my sword practice, so I gutted him.”
The nobleman in question, a blond, almost perfectly groomed, looked shocked at my words. The rest of the crowd broke into whispers and mutters, both the nobility and the officers. Aldo had lost control of the crowd very quickly, and I could see a rising surge of red skin charging up his neck, and his clenched fist became genuinely tight, with almost white knuckles. I almost smiled at him, to rub it in, but that would ruin my stoic, stern soldier act.
The real trick to rabble-rousing a crowd, as any good Commissar knows, is to never let the buggers have a chance to interrupt you. Sure, some dealt with interruptions via summary execution, which was an effective way of silencing any dissenters, but it had horrible long-term effects. I’d given this crowd some motivation, lit a fire to learn as much as they could, either for scandalous gossip or for military security reasons, and now all I needed to do was point them at an obstacle and let them loose.
“If anyone wants to know more, I believe General Frederick Steiner has promised to do a full security sweep,” I said loudly, addressing the whole crowd before they could toss up another curveball. “I’m sure he’s eager to tell anyone exactly what he’ll do to any Drac infiltrators he catches.”
Freddy-boy had promised no such thing, unless you counted promising to keel-haul whatever security had let the Drac through, but the crowd didn’t know that – and they didn’t care, as several of them hurried off, trying not to run in their elaborate court garments as they rushed to find Frederick and make sure that no such DEST assassins would get a chance to kill them. The military officers likewise left, albeit in a less visibly-panicked manner, no doubt to tell all of their fellow officers the news ASAP, before that security sweep caught their illicit card games, hidden moonshine stills, and dancing girls in the officer’s barracks.
“Duke Lestrade,” I said, looking to the man. “I should go.”
“Perhaps one day we’ll meet again, and you can take up me on that offer,” Aldo said, doing an admirable job of controlling his visible temper.
“Perhaps,” I replied, before turning and striding away, leaving the short man stewing in my wake. Not bloody likely, I thought to myself.
If I’d known then what kind of trouble Aldo Lestrade would bring me, I would have turned right around and strangled the traitorous bastard on the spot, and damn the consequences.
Chapter Text
The day after the formal celebration at the palace, I needed a celebration of my own to recover. Luckily, the city of New Glasgow was highly recommended among the many aged, worn guidebooks that littered our barracks block, many of which boasted ‘new drinks from across the Star League!’
The reality was, naturally, far more disappointing. The capitol city of Skye had fallen far since the glory days of three hundred years before. Some of that was the technological decay that Katrina often bemoaned, but some was the simple inevitability of warfare, with Skye being the target of numerous raids over the years.
Yet the people of Skye I met on the streets had a certain… toughness to them. They weren’t quite enduring, duty-obsessed automatons like Kriegers, or devoutly wrathful Emperor-botherers like the Tallarn, but something more rugged. The average Skye native was stubborn and spiteful, I found, and if you told them to not to do something, they’d do it anyway – because how dare you tell them what to do.
They were almost amusingly contrarian people, and I never could get over how strange I found it all. I’d met my share of arguers and malcontents before, of course, but as a former Imperial Commissar, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the sheer guts some of these people had, to be so strongly opposed to the military that was literally keeping them safe from the enemy. Stupid, of course, but also gutsy.
With that in mind, I ditched my uniform and dressed down as casual as I could. I was just pulling on my overcoat when my adjutant George entered, took one look at what I was wearing, and gave me a disappointed look.
“Are you going to a bar, or a book club?” George asked, crossing his arms.
“I’m going out to a bar,” I replied, a touch annoyed as his imposition.
“Not looking like that and not without me, you’re not,” George replied, walking up and pulling my perfectly modest overcoat away.
“What’s wrong with the way I’m dressed?” I asked, looking down at the shorter man, who was shrugging out of his own uniform jacket and grabbing a raggedy beat up jacket of inferior leather.
“You look like a nobleman out for a stroll with his lady wife,” George informed me, throwing the patched leather jacket at me. “You want to look like a local slumming it, someone from the lower class that just got off-shift on payday and has some money burning a hole in his pocket.”
“That’s hardly respectable,” I said, confused. “And you didn’t say a word when I dressed like this on that world with the vanishing sea. What was it called?”
“Son Hoa,” George answered, still looking hard at me. “And you were the distraction that time. Nobody wants to look like nobility, except the actual nobility.”
“Isn’t that a sign of being well off?” I asked, thinking back to how people dressed on Tharkad, and ignoring the unfortunate revelation that I was just a distraction – it was far from the first time an attractive blonde had used me as such. “A sign that you’re someone important?”
“It’s a sign of arrogance,” George said. “Like you think you’re more important than the other guy – which is a good way to get a knuckle sandwich. Here, put these on.”
A pair of thick canvas pants with grease stains hit me in the chest, and a thick belt with an absurdly large buckle followed. At least this finally explained why Kell Brothers dressed like slobs, despite being nobility on Arc-Royal and cousins to whatever Luvon was now Archduke of Donegal, after Arthur’s death.
George left for a few minutes to let me change, and when he returned, he was wearing similarly worn clothing; a sleeveless leather vest with biker patches over a long-sleeved tan shirt, brown leather pants, and a snakeskin belt. He looked like a mercenary, honestly.
“Why do you get to look like a mercenary, while I look like a welder?” I demanded, looking over both of our outfits.
“Because you’re taller,” George said, which didn’t explain anything.
The night started out pleasantly, from what I remember.
The first couple bars we went to weren’t exactly to my style, and I complained quietly to George about his choices, but he held firm against my annoyance. That’s the problem with adjutants, you see; the better they are at doing their job, the more they think they can get away with – and the worst part is they’re generally right.
The main problem I had with the first few bars is that they were bad bars. It wasn’t that they were dive bars, because I’m quite experienced with all manner of dive bars, and they can be great fun. The best gambling doesn’t happen at casinos, and the best booze – for a certain understanding of ‘good enough’, but also ‘cheap enough’ – wasn’t at the tourist traps. The problem was, they weren’t even good dive bars.
Each bar was full of exhausted factory-workers and miners, just trying to get a drink before they collapsed for the night. Not exactly the kind of company that a soldier likes to keep – too tired to have a good conversation, too cheap to get the good beer, too stationary to have exotic stories, too poor to be worth gambling against, and too damn murderous if you tried to start a good bar fight.
In some ways, I pitied the unlucky bastards. For all the luxuries they had compared to the average hive-city dweller, they were essentially stuck in the same lot in life – wageslaves with no upward mobility, save the military. Normally, I’d have tried the old ‘Hero of the Commonwealth’ routine on them, but on Skye, I didn’t want to take the chance.
The fourth bar was technically better, but George still hustled us out of it as quickly as he could. I went along without a single protest, because this bar was as offensively Free Skye as possible, and just walking in without certain patches on our jackets or known faces had caused a lot of glares and hands subtly moving towards belts and under coats.
We struck gold at the fifth bar, which was exactly the right mix of grizzled mercenaries, off-duty soldiers, and easily impressed locals who weren’t exhausted. The lights weren’t too low, and the bar itself was an enormous cut of beautiful redwood, polished to a shine.
George went up to order us two Timbiqui Darks, while I found a good table to sit at. A very important job, because you never knew who might walk up behind you if you sat at the bar, even with the traditional mirror. It also saved me from having to pay. The corner booths are a bit oversold, in my experience – they single you out, and limit your options for retreat into the obvious. Better to have a booth along the wall, but in the middle, so you have more ways to run.
I was waiting for the first star-struck fans to approach, and strangely enough, none were, when George returned with the beer. Maybe being dressed like a welder had some advantages, I conceded. My attempts to blend in with the locals back home had always been more a matter of reducing how much attention I got, and I’d never really managed to fully avoid it. Of course, I was also far more famous then.
We didn’t talk much, just savoring the taste of our beers for the first few minutes. I’m sure George was thinking about his distant wife and daughter, or perhaps trying to figure out how to keep my quarters secure from unwanted entrants, or something else along those same dutiful and solid lines.
Personally, I was having a hard time staving off an attack of morose melancholy. George was a friend, but he was no Katrina, much less Morgan or Patrick, and certainly not on the level of my old friends. I still woke up some days, wondering if Zyvan was up for another regicide game, or thinking about touring the Valhallan barracks for a spot-inspection to keep morale up. Worse still were the days when I caught myself looking twice at every flash of blonde hair, or sniffing for a familiar odor.
I was getting bored, I realized, with a bit of a hesitant fear.
Boredom was a nightmare for someone like me. Boredom meant complacency, and complacency meant getting comfortable, and getting comfortable meant I was about to be blindsided by something that I should have kept on top of.
It was only now, several weeks of Jumpship travel away, in a wonderfully dingy bar on Skye, that I could admit to myself that maybe Katrina hadn’t been a bad friend to make. Entirely aside from the luxuries that being a friend of the Archon afforded me, that is. Katrina was… so driven. She had a million priorities, and was masterful at scheduling them just right, and that meant that she always had orders to give me.
Perhaps it was all those years of serving as a political officer, or the few negatives experiences where I’d been unwillingly forced into a commanding position over some ragtag band of miscreants, but I think I just wasn’t suited for command. An advisory role, certainly, because then my failures wouldn’t doom entire units to horrific deaths.
But without Katrina here to grab me by the scruff of my collar and kick me in the ass towards some decadent fop in need of a phony friend and a thorough corruption investigation, I was becoming… aimless. I suppose I was still in charge of training my Company of Mechwarriors, but that was routine, and I never needed to think hard to pull out some trick from my long years to surprise them in the simulators and make them think twice.
“I suppose you should contact General Steiner about that briefing,” I mentioned to George, after finishing most of my brew. “Before he decides to hunt me down.”
“Very good, sir,” George replied, glancing over at a group of newcomers that had just walked into the bar. “You’ll be his new best friend before you know it.”
I couldn’t help but let out a laugh at that. I didn’t think that Freddy boy would ever come to like me, but dropping a security weakness on his lap in our first meeting definitely hadn’t helped.
My laugh was a little too loud, however, and it attracted the attention of some of the newcomers. A couple of the thugs looked, but lost interest and looked away. The weedy looking man in the middle of the cluster had a vaguely familiar face, however, and he looked at me once, then twice, and promptly let out a terrified scream.
“It’s them! They're after me! Shoot them, you morons!” the man yelled, all in a rush, shoving one of his larger companions in my direction and bolting right back out the door at a dead sprint.
To be honest, I had absolutely no idea who the weedy looking man was. But his companions all followed his orders instantly, heads snapping towards and hands reaching underneath jackets to grab weapons, so the man’s identity quickly became the last priority on my list.
“Cover!” George yelled, charging out of the booth in complete defiance of his words. I tried to flip the booth’s table over, but it was bolted to the wall, and all I succeeded in was knocking our beers off. A number of the bar’s military and mercenary patrons were already diving for their own cover, but the ring of shattering glass woke up the civilians, and they started to scream and duck.
I dove out of the booth as the first shot roared over my head – some kind of conventional pistol, with a large caliber – and came out of my roll by smacking my head right into the nearby table that George had already overturned for cover.
By the time I’d shaken my head and drawn my laser pistol, the well-populated bar was full of gunshots and streaks of light, and I could barely tell who was shooting who. It seemed that half of the mercenaries had been packing heat, and some of the off-duty military, and they didn’t appreciate gunshots in their bar any more than I did.
Under all that return fire, I expected the street thugs to be retreating back out the door, but instead they were almost berserk – and they were charging towards me!
My pistol snapped up almost instantly, and I placed a shot at one of the thug’s upper-chest. The unfortunate man ducked at the wrong time, and instead of hitting his jacket, it speared him right through the throat, dropping him.
There couldn’t have been more than six or seven of the men, but they were almost all built for the ugly gang brawls that you found in inner cities like this; tall, strong, short hair or shaven heads, and packing body armor under their jackets, as I learned by watching one thug shrug off a pistol shot to the chest. A few of them were bleeding from some shots, but not a one of them were slowing down.
With enemies coming from the direction of the door, I immediately started scooting towards the bar, which had a second door to the stockroom that I'd subconsciously taken note of earlier, firing a few snapshots to keep the thugs from getting a clean shot at us.
I bumped into George as I ran from behind our table, and I guess he took that as a sign to reposition, rather than an accident, because he followed right behind me, his own compact laser pistol sending shots at the intruders.
There was a howl behind me, and I ran even faster. Whenever someone’s angry enough to scream during a firefight instead of just shooting you, it’s generally a sign that they want to tear you to pieces with their bare hands, so it’s best to get some distance as fast as you can.
I cleared the bar in a ungainly leaping dive, but smashed a couple of glasses aside in the process, and George followed at a much more controlled slide over the top, still firing as he went. The benefits of no recoil on laser weapons, I guess. The bartender didn’t look happy to see me diving over the top of his bar, but then, I was hardly the only person running for solid, durable cover, and there were a few mercenaries already with him. A few shots smacked into the bar, and the fact that they stopped dead proved that this was a smart decision.
A few moments later, the gunshots and laserblasts started to trail off, and when I poked my head up, the last thug was down, a half-dozen holes punched straight through his chest. He’d managed to clear half the room, but the bodies of his fellows trailed out behind him, along with a string of punctured tables, shattered glasses, and stunned civilians.
“Sound off, who’s not dead?” one of the mercenaries called out, and a ragged chorus replied with groans, grunts, and swear words. Some of the civilians were starting to look up from their positions on the ground, and at least one woman was crying from a stray bullet.
George stood up from behind the bar slowly, laser pistol still raised cautiously, and moved out to inspect the bodies. I wasn’t going to expose myself so quickly – what if one of them was only playing dead, or there was another gunman outside the entrance, waiting? – so I quickly made myself busy.
“I apologize for knocking over the beer,” I said to the short, aged bartender, as I helped him back to his feet.
“Bah, don’t worry about it,” the bartender snarled, looking over the wreckage, and shaking his head fiercely. “Damn bastards… who’s stupid enough to shoot up my bar? It’ll be all week cleaning this shite up!”
“Not the faintest clue,” I replied, looking carefully around the room, perfectly ready to drop back behind cover, just in case.
“Well, get the fuck out then!” the bartender snapped, smacking me on the side with a knotty, gnarled cane of some kind. “You’re the one they were pointing at, aye? Get gone, before more come back!”
The old bartender’s shoving barely pushed me a step or two, but the mercenaries and military men were starting to look at me with squinty eyes, and I quickly hopped back over the bar and quick-walked to George.
“Time to go!” I said quickly to him, as he finished rifling through the pockets of one of the dead goons.
George looked up, made a single glance around the room at the glaring bartender and unhappy mercenaries, and nodded sharply. We hustled out of the bar as quickly as possible.
The cold air of a Skye night pierced the lingering adrenaline, and I decided that I’d had enough excitement for the night. Walking around exposed after an attempted hit - even an accidental one - was hardly my idea of a good time. The local police were almost certainly on their way, and it was possible that the weedy, familiar-looking man from before had summoned reinforcements.
“Back to base?” George asked, accurately reading my nervous glances.
“As fast as possible,” I replied.
About an hour after all the excitement in New Glasgow, I was safely ensconced in my office back at Fort McHenry, with a nice mug of imported Capellan tea.
George sat at the nearby side-desk, ostensibly filing paperwork on his terminal and inspecting his laser pistol, though I couldn’t help but notice that the weapon’s battery-cell never left the housing, and it was always close at hand.
“Jimmy McClellan,” George declared after some time, turning the monitor of his terminal to face me.
“Who?” I asked, blinking at the words, and looking at the mugshot of a clean-shaven man on the screen, before realization hit me. “One of the thugs.”
“And noted Free Skye street tough,” George told me, his lips pressed in a grim line. “He’s had a half dozen arrests for assault, two for rioting, three instances of carrying a concealed weapon against his parole, and two dozen more suspected crimes that the New Glasgow police could never pin on him, including three murders.”
“And this information’s just floating out there on the planetary net, publicly?” I asked, giving my adjutant a look.
“I’ve got a few friends on-planet,” George said, not rising to the bait.
“Did your friends happen to know anything about the man who was with him?” I asked. I’d known that George was involved with some kind of clandestine organization, but seeing as it was the same group that sheltered me during the mess on Poulsbo, and which Katrina Steiner apparently trusted, I didn’t think it was much worth investigating – that kind of thing let to uncomfortable questions being asked, and even more uncomfortable weapons being pointed.
“They’re quite familiar with Jimmy, but they didn’t know anything about him playing bodyguard,” George replied, shaking his head. “Not his usual kind of deal. Too much of a blunt instrument. He’s more likely to kill a man than keep him safe.”
“Which just makes the other man even more interesting,” I remarked. “Particularly since he didn’t seem to be a thug himself. I could have sworn I’d met him before; he seemed faintly familiar. Did you think so?”
“Possible,” George admitted. “Something from Tharkad, or further back?”
“Further, I think,” I said, thinking back. “I definitely haven’t seen him in several years, or I’d have remembered his name… perhaps…”
I made a vague gesture to my hair, as if I was wearing a wig of long flowing locks, and George nodded immediately. It was the same gesture that we all made whenever we referred to the old pirate days, when Katrina had played herself up as the megalomaniacal Red Corsair, and had dyed her bright blonde hair into a scarlet red to better fit the role.
“Certainly possible,” he answered, also neglecting to say the name aloud, just in case we’d missed a listening device. “I’ll check.”
“Good man,” I said approvingly, before returning to my own paperwork. As an officer, I’d technically been the officer in charge at the scene, and I wanted to have my report on the shootout on Lieutenant-General Ashberry’s desk before the New Glasgow Police decided to wave a warrant under his nose and demand to take me into custody.
It was important that I lined up the facts of the matter so as to prevent anyone from reading suspicious motivations in our brief sojourn beyond the fort’s walls. Yes, we didn’t feel that the first few bars were appropriate to hang out in. No, we did not have any prior knowledge that anyone wished us dead, or have any idea why the shooting had started.
Honestly, it was just a few dead street thugs. There were thousands of their profession roaming the streets, and no one was going to miss them much. I personally wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of reporting their deaths, but I knew that the bartender was certainly going to report me as a potential suspect, so I had to beat him to the punch.
After a few minutes and a quick refill of my tea, George turned his terminal back around to face me again. The face of the man from before was on it.
“Good work,” I said, a bit surprised at how fast he’d done it. “Who is he?”
“Terrence Moore,” George said, pulling up the man’s file. “Known pirate, from the Black Brotherhood.”
“Which one was that?” I asked, the name also sounding faintly familiar, but without any real details coming to mind.
“Good question,” George chuckled. “He was a Jumpship captain that worked for three separate groups all calling themselves the Black Brotherhood. Noted for running into the Red Corsair in the All Dawn system six years ago, in 3005. He disappeared after that.
“Hm,” I hummed, looking over the picture. “An old friend, then… of a sort.”
“Of a sort,” George agreed.
“So what was he doing all the way in here?” I wondered aloud. “If I were a retiring pirate, I’d hardly want to move to Skye of all places…”
“Can’t figure that part out,” George admitted. “But it’s interesting.”
“Certainly is,” I agreed.
Jumpship captains in pirate bands were an interesting position – they held huge power with control of a pirate’s mobility, yet they were often treated as far less important than the Mechwarriors or tankers that they carried for raids
A bad pirate Jumpship might replace it’s captain every few months as a new opportunist shot the old one for being too pushy or too weak… yet according to the LIC file that George had pulled up, Terrence Moore had been in the game for at least three decades. He’d managed to thread the needle between both dangerous positions to survive, even thrive, in multiple different pirate bands.
I could have admired that, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d ordered his goons to kill me. Instead, it just made me even more curious. What was he doing on Skye, why had he tried to kill me?
The mystery ticked away in my head for the rest of the night, long after I dismissed George and headed to sleep. As I lay in bed, a final thought struck me – at least I wasn’t bored any more.
Chapter Text
“And now, I’ll take your questions.”
I turned back to the podium, keeping my polite expression firm, and trying not to show my exhaustion.
It wasn’t so much physical exhaustion as much as the mental, honestly. It’d been an hour since I started this briefing, and that meant that I should have been finishing up – not just getting to the question period.
But alas, the 10th Lyran Guards deserved their reputation as one of the best units in the LCAF, and their officers were both fiercely curious, and very aggressive about asking questions… in the middle of my presentation. I’d had to continuously remind them to hold their questions until later.
Of course, I wouldn’t ordinarily have become exhausted just by dealing with a few questions. I had handled briefings for dozens of Regimental CO’s before, in meetings hosted by Lord Generals of imposing stature! Yet in those meetings, I’d often had the privilege of preparing the field ahead of time, ensuring that the hosting officer was a friend, or at least favorably inclined towards me.
Frederick Steiner was no such friend, and his laser-tight stare made it clear that he was not favorably inclined towards me in the slightest. Whether for my association with his cousin Katrina, or for sending a flurry of panicking nobles to bother him about his ‘security sweep’ at the formal ball a few days ago.
As such, my attention was quite naturally split. The questions from the 10th Lyran were insightful, intriguing, and interesting, but I couldn’t focus solely on them, and risk ignoring Frederick, and offending him further. As well, I couldn’t rely on Frederick to back me up, and tell his officers to knock it off. So I’d asked the 10th Guards to write their questions down, and ask me at the end of my presentation. Repeatedly.
I refused to entertain the notion that my exhaustion was related to the prior night’s drinking with the men – I was an experienced bar crawler, as was any member of the 10th Lyran Regulars, the ‘Stinging Barflies’. Naturally, as we were turning into a Regimental Combat Team, with numerous attached Regiments of infantry, armor, and more, this also meant that we needed to spread the unit’s traditions, which meant that practically every night that I couldn’t beg out, my adjutant and I were out with the men.
The forest of upraised arms boded… poorly for me.
“Yes, Kommandant?” I said, picking a fairly young-looking woman.
“You emphasized the integrated nature of the RCT,” the Kommandant said, her gaze strictly professional, unlike some of the female officer’s I’d met in the LCAF. A welcome sign that she, perhaps, wasn’t looking to snap me up as a husband. “How might that integration help or enhance training exercises?”
“An excellent question,” I replied, nodding. “Training exercises with the various elements of an RCT are both absolutely essential, and perhaps the single most important advantage that you’ll have.”
A few murmurs broke out at that, and I spotted at least one ‘mechjock frowning.
“You see,” I continued swiftly, changing my intended words and not allowing any of them a chance to interrupt. “As there are so few BattleMechs remaining in the Sphere, one often unnoticed problem is that most Regiments of infantry or armor have never had the chance to train alongside ‘mechs. Since this scarcity has only increased throughout the Succession Wars, many otherwise superb infantry or armor officers have, essentially, no experience in fighting against enemy BattleMechs. As a result, unless they attended a very excellent academy such as Sanglamore or the Nagelring, their closest reference is… Immortal Warrior episodes.”
The murmurs died down for a moment, then chuckles broke out, as bemused 10th Guards officers looked at each other and smirked.
I’d been planning on telling them that training was important because infantry, tanks, and artillery could be amazingly effective in a cohesive Combined Arms doctrine – which I had much experience with, in my time in the Imperial Guard.
But one of the more important things in public speaking is to know your audience, and thank the Emperor, I had gone to the Nagelring, and been exposed to the… unique cultural outlook of the average Mechwarrior.
You see, most non-Mechwarrior officers would be at least neutral to a discussion about Combined Arms, but Mechwarriors had a disproportionate amount of arrogance, jealousy, and stubbornness. In many ways, they were like the nobility, but with the added problem that they had some legitimate reason to believe that they were important, as Mechwarriors often held the line, drove off the Dracs, and saved the day.
Telling that kind of Mechwarrior that a tanker or infantryman could be just as important as him would not be accepted easily. In their eyes, other soldiers were there as background extras, stunt-doubles, and adoring fans.
But with their blinkered, biased perspective, they could easily believe that the real problem was poor bloody infantry and armor had never had a chance to train alongside the real soldiers. That the closest they could get was the infamously bad action movie series of Immortal Warrior, which was near legendary for its aversion to realism and its adherence to buxom wenches in tight shirts, unlimited ammunition in firearms, and cool explosions without blast waves. Enjoyable entertainment, I suppose, but highly unrealistic and hardly something that inspired confidence in actual soldiers.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that in the Stinging Barflies, some of the infantry genuinely had wanted to try out some of those stupid stunts – to disprove them, naturally, they claimed.
“As humorous as the thought is, I’m very glad that in the 10th Regulars, our infantry had in the intelligence to ask before trying some of the stunts they had in mind,” I said, in a tone of idle recollection, as the tension in the rumor diminished a little further.
“What was the stupidest one?” a dark-haired officer in the back row of chairs called.
“Well, I can’t remember the stupidest one,” I admitted. “There were a lot of stupid suggestions. One officer seemed to believe that if he somehow suspended steel cables or myomers across two buildings in an urban environment, he could use it to trip ‘Mechs.”
“Did you actually try it?” the dark-haired officer asked.
“Of course not,” I replied dismissively. “For starters, where would we get the myomers? Nobody wanted to shill out that much kroner out of pocket, and the techs started reaching for oversized wrenches when they heard. Even if the idea worked, a tripped BattleMech would quickly get back on its feet within just a few seconds anyway, and the fall wouldn’t do too much more than shake up the pilot.”
“Were there any suggestions that genuinely had merit?” a more genial, polite Hauptmann asked.
I made a show of considering the suggestion, tilting my head as if in thought. I couldn’t contradict myself too badly in front of all these officers – not to mention Frederick! – but it wouldn’t be good to encourage the same stupidity that I already disliked.
It was a bit difficult, I conceded, to think of an example that would fall into their preconceived notions while still genuinely being useful. I couldn’t suggest that infantry were more important, so it needed to be a supporting role of some kind.
“One of the infantry officers made one suggestion that I quite liked,” I finally said. “He pointed out that infantry could, in urban combat, cause plenty of damage to a BattleMech unit via attacking from concealed positions.”
“Yes, yes,” someone replied dismissively from the crowd. “We all know that.”
“If you’d care to wait until I’m finished?” I asked politely, smiling at the man and putting on a bemused, almost paternal expression of patience.
The officer in question opened his mouth again, but one of his companions quietly stuck a finger in his side, and he closed it.
“As I was saying,” I continued smoothly, “the infantry officer argued that the real strength of infantry in an urban combat situation was actually wasted when they conducted hard defenses – that strength being their stealth. The most successful infantry actions have relied on luring the enemy into ambushes, relying on their concealment. But why use infantry for the actual ambush?”
“Because otherwise, it couldn’t be an ambush,” a frowning Lieutenant said. “The enemy would detect our fusion reactors.”
“Yes, but we could easily just power down, and then power up when they walked into the trap,” a more experienced Hauptmann pointed out. “Some units do it occasionally, but the difficulty is keeping eyes on the enemy, luring them into the trap, and getting the timing right. Too early, and you don’t get as much effectiveness. Too late, and you risk heavy losses.”
“Which is where the infantry come in,” I finished, swooping in to take credit for the Hauptmann’s answer. “Against BattleMechs, the job of infantry isn’t to stand and fight – it’s to be the unkillable fungus that sees everything on the battlefield safely and covertly, with enemy sensors blocked by the urban jungle.”
I risked a glance at General Steiner, and observed that Frederick had finally broken his expression – no longer was he staring at me like a hostile target. Instead, he had an almost… pensive expression on his face. Perhaps he was actually considering these tactical ideas?
“With the large numbers of infantry attached to each RCT,” I continued, not allowing my thoughts to interrupt the presentation, “you can keep enemy detachments under constant observation and surveillance. Conceal the communication lines, and you can remove the ‘fog of war’ that conceals your enemy – while keeping them unaware of your own deployments. Then, as a final measure, add in the ample coordination with your artillery section…”
“And smash enemy concentrations flat!” a Kommandant said viciously, smacking a clenched fist into his palm as he picked up on my trailing que.
“Exactly,” I confirmed, nodding with a serious expression. “No battlefield control will ever be perfect, and we are hardly the first military to think of these things – but we are the wealthiest nation to do so. Our army will always be able to afford the material costs of dedicated, in-depth battlefield observation.”
I paused, as did most of the assembled officers, as General Steiner finally spoke up.
“And the casualties?” Frederick asked, his voice guarded, careful, as if I was some peddler on the street that had managed to corner him with a sales pitch.
“Casualties are an inevitability in war,” I answered, looking Frederick in the eye. “These tactics do increase the risk of exposure, that is true. However, we expect that casualties shall actually decrease with these tactics. Statistically, most infantry casualties are the result of entrenched positions being attacked and over-run by BattleMechs or tanks using flamers and mech-scale machine guns.”
“Spread them out, and waste five lives, instead of fifty,” Frederick rumbled. He wasn’t quite challenging me, but he definitely wasn’t agreeing with me.
It was a tricky argument to defuse – and one that made me wonder if Frederick truly was the bumbling oaf in politics that I’d seen at the Archduchess’s ball. Of course, only an utter idiot would dare suggest that Frederick was militarily incompetent, and this question fell right into his area of expertise.
But how to respond?
Argue that those sacrifices were needed for the cause? Technically true, which was the best kind of ‘true’ in the military, but it could seem heartless and cold in front of officers that might be one of those sacrifices. In the old Imperium, I would have played that role in a heartbeat, because Imperial society expected it of me.
The counterpoint, that it actually saved more lives, might work better. Spend a few here and there, to preserve vastly more in victory. That would work, but it wasn’t quite right – it was missing something, some little element that would keep me from alienating or infuriating several higher-ranking and politically well-connected officers…
Ah. The personal element.
“Soldiers die,” I answered, putting on a softer, more distant voice, as if I was reflecting on something hard. “Sometimes they are wasted. But that is our job, ladies and gentlemen, as officers: to keep those lives from being wasted. To take acceptable risks when necessary, and in doing so, to save vastly more lives.”
I folded my hands behind my back, and took my gaze off Freddy-boy, and looked at the 10th Lyran Guards officers as I spoke. Not a fast sweep over the crowd, but slow, taking a few seconds to lock eyes with each individual.
“This is why for countless generations, back to the dawn of warfare itself… the officers lead from the front,” I told them, as if they were a crowd of cadets in some Schola, like distant Perlia. “This is why, as soldiers, the men will never respect an officer that hides away like a coward.”
I risked a careful look back to Frederick, matching gazes with him again, as I continued. His pensive expression was back, but this time it was focused more on me, rather than the back wall of the briefing room.
“Some infantry will fear this very thing – that you will waste their lives,” I said slowly, returning my eyes to the crowd. “That you are some… uncaring, distant figure. An officer in a BattleMech, not even aware of the poor bloody infantry under their feet. But this is not true. An RCT cuts out the red-tape and the bureaucracy, but it also forges tighter bonds between its components. The infantry will know your name, your face, your preferred beer and your favorite sports team. And you will put a face and a voice to every soldier that you must send into danger.”
My audience was silent, which I was very grateful for. There is nothing worse for a morale than a heartfelt speech being interrupted by some jerk. It was like there was a blanket covering the crowd, binding us all together – but it was thin, and fragile, and could be ripped away in an instant by some callous interruption.
“As officers, we must always worry about wasting the lives of our soldiers,” I said, deciding to bring my short speech to a close, before any such jerks could speak out. “And after many years of serving in BattleMechs, it is easy to grow accustomed to armor damage and injuries, but very few deaths. The RCT structure means that we, as Mechwarriors, shall know far more of the dead. Treat this as an incentive!”
My sudden snap caused a jolt to shoot through the crowd, some of them flinching minutely at the whip-crack of my voice.
“Train them well,” I told the officers, my voice rising to be sharper, more authoritative. “Teach them when your BattleMechs can detect them, and when they can’t. Drill them until your infantry troopers are like ghosts in the city. You may not be their direct superior, but you will be one of their officers – and they will be your men.”
I stopped talking at that point, before I could say anything foolish and ruin my own speech. The 10th Lyran Guards officers were still quiet, and were looking at me with some odd expression. Not the deference shown a superior officer – which I was glad for, seeing as there were a few Kommandants that outranked me in this mix – but a more… accepting expression of some kind.
The clatter of a chair broke the silence, and I looked over to see General Steiner standing up.
“Walk with me, Hauptmann,” Frederick Steiner said, without the slightest care that he was ending my briefing. There were plenty of officers who still had questions, but nobody protested or even looked disgruntled – it seemed that Frederick’s lack of manners was well known amongst his subordinates.
But he was a General, and I was just a Captain, so I nodded, pulled my datapad from the podium’s computer and followed him out the briefing room.
“Nice speech,” Frederick said, walking behind his desk as the door clicked shut behind us. He reached into a drawer and withdrew a bottle to pour himself a drink – and noticeably, not pouring me one. “Did you mean any of it?”
Ah, Frederick. Blunter than an Assault ‘mech, and twice as slow.
“Every word,” I lied. “Do you trust any of it?”
“Not a single word,” Frederick said, honestly.
Just like I mentioned. Gruff, blunt, and stupid. The better move would have been to say that he did, even if we both knew that he was lying. At that point, he could probe and question about my own motivations, or subtly cast doubt on if Katrina’s ideas were good.
Now, however, he’d openly declared his opposition, and that just gave me more options to figure out his motivations, his thoughts.
Really, it was a bit surprising that Frederick was such a political moron, considering his tactical and strategic brilliance – the two things were far closer related than some people thought. Probing at the enemy’s perimeter, trying to discover what clever tricks they were planning, while trying to conceal your own.
Of course, while I was no slouch tactically, I preferred a far more enjoyable profession: card games. And as anyone who’s ever played poker can attest, there’s a quite a lot of similarity between gambling and politics. In this particular instance, bluffing and calling bluffs was the most obvious comparison.
“You really hate Katrina, don’t you?” I asked Frederick idly, leaning against the back wall as Frederick took a seat in his leather chair.
“I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t,” Frederick said. “She abandoned the Commonwealth. She overthrew the Archon. She’s a traitor twice over, and everyone ignores it.”
Oh boy, I thought to myself, stuffing my surprise down into my boots. I’d known that Frederick hated Katrina, but to openly talk about it with another officer, even in the privacy of his office?
Was that why he’d invited me in to have a talk? Because he wanted to vent?
If so, he could hardly have chosen a worse person – I was openly known as one of Katrina’s largest supporters, and I’d been on the still-secretive AWOL vacation, which, contrary to expectations, only increased my popularity. It gave my heroism the allure of being a maverick, a rogue, as opposed to just another loyal soldier that was called a hero for standing in place and shooting at the enemy.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Frederick was actually trying to gauge my willingness to support Katrina, and if I might ‘defect’ to his political faction. If he was, I couldn’t figure out if that would be an incredibly stupid move, because I was so obviously in Katrina’s camp, or a very clever move, because I would know so much about Katrina.
But… why display the vulnerability, then? It wouldn’t sway me to his side. If he wanted to do that, he’d be trying to demonstrate his superiority over Katrina.
Could Frederick be looking for a friend? Some form of platonic companionship?
Was that why he’d latched onto Aldo Lestrade so desperately? Sure, Frederick was politically moronic, but it was obvious to everyone in the military that Free Skye could never truly win, because even if they did, they’d be quickly crushed by their far more powerful neighbors – so clearly he wasn’t friends with Aldo because he liked the man’s politics. In addition, from what I’d heard, their friendship actually pre-dated our return from the Periphery, and subsequent rousting of Alessandro Steiner from the throne.
Well, I don’t know if Frederick was looking to make a friend or not. The man was thirty-nine years old, a General in the LCAF, and a Steiner with his own planet to rule. He must have had confidants and compatriots and plenty who were willing to listen to his grumblings.
No, that wasn’t it.
“You can’t understand it?” I repeated curiously, wondering about the word choice. “That people would disagree?”
“Of course I can’t!” Frederick snapped, giving me a glare. “It’s insane! It’s like the whole damn universe spontaneously decided that up is down, left is right, the Kuritas are good guys, and the Star League was bad. Why the hell do you think she’s so wonderful?”
“I don’t think she’s wonderful,” I said carefully, doing my absolute best to step over that particular landmine. “She’s a bit demanding, honestly. It’s always ‘Ciaphas, go do this, go do that’.”
Downplay, demur, doubt, tone it down, the four watchwords of bluffing. Freddy-boy hated Katrina, and while I did genuinely like her, she wasn’t in the room with me. Even if she learned about this conversation later – and even that thought filled me with a little dread – she would understand that a little white lie to keep myself safe was understandable, considering the circumstances.
“Then why, in God’s name, did you side with her?!” Frederick demanded. His fists were clenched, and he seemed just moments away from smashing them on the desk.
“She was better than Alesandro,” I replied truthfully with a casual shrug, before returning to my lies with a practiced ease. “She isn’t great, but Alessandro was much worse – both for the Commonwealth, and for me, personally. He tried to kill me, you know.”
Frederick stopped, almost freezing in place, his mouth already half-open to shout back at me.
“Alessandro did what?” he asked, unbelievingly.
“Well, he tried to kill us,” I clarified, slouching against the wall and sticking my hands in my pockets. “I was having a nice drink in a hotel bar in Poulsbo, and the next thing I know, someone bombed the lobby and started shooting up survivors. One of Alessandro’s ‘suppression’ missions, with Loki.”
Frederick didn’t look convinced, but I didn’t give him a chance to interject – just kept talking, riding right over his opening mouth.
“Oh, they weren’t gunning for me, of course,” I continued. “Katrina was the target. Alessandro wanted her dead, personally. I just got rolled into that whole mess by accident, really.”
“That’s…” Frederick muttered, still looking unsure. “That doesn’t make sense. Alessandro named you a hero for Poulsbo. He said-”
“He said I died fighting,” I interrupted, with a shrug. “The glorious last stand of Hauptmann Ciaphas Cain, defending Lyran citizens from terrorists. It sounds nicer to the public than admitting that I was collateral damage in a Loki black-op against his own niece.”
“Maybe he had a reason,” Frederick countered. “I know my Uncle Alessandro. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t have a good reason.”
“Maybe he did,” I replied, uncaringly, as if it didn’t matter to me if Katrina had lived or died. “But he didn’t limit his damage to just Katrina, did he? Plenty of people died in that bombing, and he wrote me off as an acceptable casualty, just so he could pretend he didn’t do it.”
Frederick scowled, and didn’t say anything back.
I crossed my arms over my chest, and watched Frederick as he sat there, clearly thinking.
He’d said earlier that he couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t hate Katrina. Yes, he hated Katrina… but he wasn’t speaking colloquially. He truly didn’t understand.
Here he was, a General in the LCAF, preparing for battle against the Enemy - but his subordinates were saying it wasn’t an enemy. People disagreed with him. They publicly wondered why he was so antagonistic. Why he was causing trouble… when to Frederick, it was Katrina who had started it all, by going AWOL and then overthrowing Alessandro, her lawful superior.
Personally, I doubt that Freddy-boy was ever going to think for a moment that Katrina truly was innocent, or that he might be wrong about her. He was too locked in. I’d seen the same thing before. He was about as stubborn as an ambull, and just as surly.
Still, he wasn’t completely blind. He could see that other people, some of which he probably respected, didn’t agree with him – and that confused him. I was fairly sure that in Frederick’s mind, Katrina Steiner was pure evil…
…but I was beginning to suspect that the bigger problem, the one that confused and terrified Frederick, was that nobody else seemed to think so. Nobody else agreed.
That was the real vulnerability that Frederick had exposed: not his belief that the Archon was an evil traitor, but that he didn’t comprehend why people disagreed with him. And he’d exposed this vulnerability to me, one of Katrina’s friends. He wasn’t angry about this vulnerability, he was confused. He was searching for answers, not lashing out in anger.
And so, I couldn’t argue with Frederick. That didn’t work on fanatics like him. Opposition gave him a clear enemy to fight against. Their real enemy was themselves. So I had to point out the holes in his worldview, the contradictions, the hypocrisies.
Archon Alessandro Steiner had accepted the possibility of collateral damage – killing someone by accident, just to strike at his true target. So I told him that I didn’t join Katrina because I liked her, but because it was in my own self-interest to get Alessandro removed from the Throne.
But Katrina very clearly wasn’t as trigger-happy, because Frederick as still a General. Still trusted with the 10th Lyran Guards, one of the most prestigious units in the LCAF. Even Frederick could clearly see that. If she was such a monster, why hadn’t she tried to kill him, like Alessandro tried to kill her?
I hadn’t been arguing that Katrina was good – just that she wasn’t absolutely, completely evil.
Frederick shifted in his seat, and folded his hands over the desk. I wasn’t fooled for a moment – it was a move that made him look calm and controlled, but it was so overdone that it was obviously fake.
“You’d best get back to your Regiment, Hauptmann,” he said, sounding as if we’d just finished a pleasant work conversation.
“Of course, General,” I replied, straightening up from my lean against the wall, and saluting.
I’ll give Frederick this much: his expression didn’t shift as I opened the door and left. It was, at the least, a sign that he could keep his personal feelings under control.
Still, I hadn’t quite figured out the true source of Frederick’s dislike of Katrina. It seemed too visceral, too powerful to have just appeared in the few years since Katrina overthrowing Alessandro. Perhaps there was something more to it, in their youth. They were cousins, after all.
That was hardly my problem, of course. My problem was that Freddy had grouped up with Free Skye in the process. Anything that caused him to doubt the Free Skye propaganda that Katrina was the Iron Bitch, evil in every way, oppressing the common man of Skye, would help with that goal.
As far as I could see at the time, the best way to do that was to cause Frederick to doubt himself. To point out that confusion, that uncertainty, and keep Frederick wondering why nobody else agreed with him – and by extension, consider the thin possibility that perhaps… he might be wrong.
If that eventually led to Frederick sorting his feelings out, and coming to terms with them, I would consider that a pleasant side effect.
Chapter Text
Since the city of New Glasgow had proven itself to be not the most hospitable location to spend my time, be it physically or politically, I did my best to escape it – at least for a short while.
That’s one of the key elements of military service, I’ve found. It’s important to treat it, in some ways, like a ‘proper’ civilian job. There are, of course, many ways to interpret that saying, like all truly useful sayings, allowing you to tailor it to whatever your audience happens to be.
In this case, what I mean is that it’s good to get a vacation every now and then. Take some time away from your responsibilities.
Now, I’ll admit, I’ve not had the best luck in the galaxy when it comes to that final point, but as the saying goes, it’s the thought that counts. If you let the occasional failure deter you, then you’re never going to enjoy life.
Still, even if your duty cannot spare you for a vacation – the Imperium certainly didn’t put much stock in the notion, even though the Lyran Commonwealth did – it’s still possible to make a little vacation for yourself out of your duties.
Take it from an expert, there’s always some nice little niche hidden away on a planet, if you look hard enough. The most boring planet in the galaxy has a nice beach somewhere, but you’ve got to go find it first.
Skye was much easier to find a nice vacation spot on – after all, more than half the planet was set aside as a nature reserve! More ‘forest’ than ‘tropical beach’, but that could also be perfectly restful.
The only remaining complication was finding a reason for a good vacation. Can’t just go swanning off whenever you want, of course, because then every soldier would go AWOL the moment they heard a rumor about a young unattached woman and cheap beer! Particularly among the 10th Lyran Regulars, we of the Stinging Barflies.
Ideally, what you want is a nice official duty that leaves you with little actual work. That way, you get to relax, you’re still being paid, and most crucially, you don’t look like you’re trying to slack off.
With all that in mind, in the week after my briefing General Frederick Steiner on the RCT structure, I set about trying to find every possible duty detachment away from New Glasgow that I could.
The complications of Jumpship travel worked in my favor, of course. With Skye being at least four days from the closest ‘safe’ jump point, that meant that it was perfectly common to disperse garrisoned units around the planet for various duties, inspections, random sweeps, and exercises. In the event of an enemy raid, they’d be able to gather the unit back up and prepare to deploy wherever the enemy looked to be landing.
My search led me to the usual places, of course – administrative offices, bars, and gambling halls. It’s not about what duty you’re assigned, but about who assigns the duties, as I’d known ever since my very first assignment, quite a while back, where I’d found the right bureaucrat with a weakness for cards and managed to secure a very safe posting with an artillery regiment.
Yet just as I was close to securing an inspection tour of the military weather station near a gorgeous chain of equatorial islands, a set of orders fell on me from Command, and my dreams of warm sand and cool drinks slipped away like my breath in a Valhallan hotel.
George entered my office on Sunday afternoon with a scowl, a tablet computer, and the largest pot of tea that I owned. In retrospect, I’m not sure which of those things was the biggest warning sign.
“Oh no,” I groaned, leaning back in my chair. “What is it?”
“Exercise,” George told me. “Defending a remote installation with a combined arms force.”
“Anywhere warm?” I asked, not bothering to conceal my hope from my loyal adjutant.
“Pack a coat,” George said, shaking his head. “Local temperature hovers just over freezing.”
“What forces?” I asked, reaching out for the tablet. “And who’s in charge? Ashberry himself? Ferretti? Kommandant Wagner or Hoffman?”
George looked at me with a pitying expression, which could mean only one thing. I glanced down at the tablet, and sure enough, ‘Hauptman Ciaphas Cain, CO’ was at the top in bold.
The rest of the details weren’t any better – particularly when I got to the force list, and saw that of my 1st Company, none of them would be coming along. My second, First Lieutenant Jackson, would be in charge until I returned from the exercise in… approximately a week’s time.
I didn’t recognize any of the names on the list, and worse than that, there was no dedicated unit names – it was a scratch unit thrown together for the exercise.
One Lance of BattleMechs, one Lance of tanks, and one ‘Lance’ of infantry – which really meant a full company of four platoons, as the common thinking was that it would take at least one platoon of infantry to equal a ‘Mech or a tank. LCAF infantry platoons tended to be overstrength compared to the rest of the Inner Sphere, but that still only came to a little more than a hundred and sixty soldiers.
Intelligence on the opposing force was naturally not available to me, as that would rather ruin the point of a military exercise, but even so, I had a bad feeling that I was being set up to take a fall.
The RCT structure was new and untested in the line of battle – assuming that you ignored the nearby Federated Suns, which had been using it effectively for over a hundred years. But, alas, that was a foreign nation, and so clearly inferior to the good old Lyran ‘wall of steel’ approach. Nevermind that they were arguably the most competent military in the Sphere, tied only with the Dracs, and that ‘we’ Lyrans had been losing fairly steadily to the same Dracs.
And even within the logic of Katrina’s military reforms, the infantry of an RCT were never meant to have an important role in a major battle – they were attached more as an afterthought, to help with holding ground, securing the base, and policing territory. No one honestly expected a hundred or so men with manpack SRM’s to be equal to four BattleMechs, or even just to hold them off!
Combine that with the specific Mechs and tanks I was getting, and it was looking to be a pre-decided loss for me.
I had my personal Griffin, of course, but beyond that, I had a Commando, a Locust, and a Valkyrie. The first was a Lyran staple – a lighter Mech with a heavy punch of short-range missiles, but a tad slower and thin-skinned, making it more of an ambush Mech. The second was a rather ubiquitous scouting Mech, but that was largely because scouting was the only possible thing that it was good at, being very fast, very weak, and very fragile. The third, I was honestly having a hard time remembering at the time. I think the Federated Suns used them a lot. I recalled something about them using long-range missiles.
On paper, that Lance is well balanced, but it was decidedly light weight, averaging just over thirty tons in weight. That would be fine for scouting and reconnaissance, but we were being tasked with defending a stationary structure, meaning that our speed was less important than our firepower and our armor… of which, only my Griffin had anywhere near an acceptable amount.
No assessment of the terrain was attached, nor any local advantages I might use. This was the kind of blind exercise that the Nagelring liked to drop cadets into, not the level of intelligence normal LCAF exercises.
“Well, I suppose we’d best get packed,” I said with a sigh.
Installation RS1-45 was a fairly boring piece of real estate, at least from what I could see on our ride in. It was just a few hours out from New Glasgow, but then, everywhere on a planet was just a few hours by Dropship.
I’d already talked to the other three Mechwarriors riding along with me in our Leopard, and came out fairly disappointed. They might not have been the worst pilots in the 10th Lyran Regulars, but they were close, and they were definitely some of the least disciplined.
Take for instance Sergeant Davis, piloting the Commando. He was one of the youngest Mechwarriors in the 10th Lyran, and had wonderful ‘neurohelmet compatibility’, which basically meant he could pilot a Mech very naturally, with less use of the manual controls. Unfortunately, he was a little too natural of a pilot, and he had a history of repeatedly damaging his Mech while idly rubbing his fingers, hopping in place, or any number of unconscious actions stemming from his lack of self-control.
Or perhaps Senior Corporal Nguyen, a fiery young woman from some near-Periphery planet. Her short stature due to her asiatic heritage seemed, as is common with many shorter individuals, to have left her with a massive surplus in aggression, both on and off the battlefield… which would have been fine if she’d piloted a Heavy or rare Assault Mech, but boded poorly in her Locust, which had only slightly more armor than a dictionary. The fact she was a Senior Corporal instead of a Sergeant was due to a recent disciplinary flare up resulting in her being busted down in rank.
Sergeant Parker, by comparison, was far more sedate, which was, perhaps, fitting for his Valkyrie, which hung back and lobbed LRMs at any enemy that got close. Still, he was a little too sedate, and that curbed a lot of his Mech’s potential use as a harasser, as well as harmed his situational awareness. It shouldn’t be easy to sneak while stomping around in a giant robot, but in the 10th Lyran Regular’s last raid, a Drac Mechwarrior had managed to walk up to him, completely unnoticed, and blow off his Mech’s left arm. Nothing important was on that left arm, luckily, but there was still the principle of the thing.
Still, my Regiment was officially rated as “Veteran” under the LCAF’s performance metrics, so it’s not like they were green rookies, fresh out of their training. They had skill and experience, they just also had some… rough edges that needed polishing off. Preferably before they wound up discharged and they found their way to some rag-tag band of mercenaries, where those rough edges wouldn’t be so much of a problem.
After talking with them all for a few hours and trying to run some basic tactical ideas past them, I was quite eager to descend and get out onto the field so I could actually figure out what was going on. There’s a sharp limit to strategy when you don’t know anything about who you’re fighting or where – which is why books on the subject often read more like philosophy texts or those little pithy quotes that you get in cookies.
As our Dropship approached, I got a good look out the bridge windows, and felt a cautious hope rising within me.
The installation was built into a set of forested hills, with the winding ridges of river-valleys blocking almost every approach. The one exception was a flat plain that was clearly set up as a kill-box, and was five kloms at the nearest edge from the installation, putting it nicely in range of Large Lasers and LRM’s from defensive turrets, and tightening into a chokepoint as it approached the hillside.
The ridgelines were far too step and heavily forested to be viable for anything but infantry, so the opposing force would be forced to attack through the plains, right into the chokepoint. That was almost certainly why the facility had been built in this particular spot, I imagined.
I could work with this, I realized. My Griffin and Parker’s Valkyrie giving long range fire support, Nguyen’s Locust running recon patrols, and Davis’s Commando for surprise ambushes.
It even worked, if not quite as well, with the tank Lance I had.
The two Vedettes were cheap and lightly armored, and their supposed benefit of speed was fairly minimal… but on the other hand, their autocannons would reach out to around six kloms, which was their only real advantage aside from being incredibly cheap. They were the ‘pop-corn’ of tanks, as their drivers cheerfully told me – a cheap local snack that tasted good with seasoning, but was completely unfilling unless you had far too much.
The third tank had a similar autocannon, but was much slower, and the crew appeared reluctant to even get inside of it. Personally, I thought they were being more than a bit ridiculous about it. Yes, the Marsden II had officially been retired from LCAF service well over five hundred years ago, but it clearly still worked, so I told the tankers to treat it as a learning opportunity. I’m not quite sure where the exercise’s planners dug it up, to be honest. Something from the Skye militia, perhaps?
All that really mattered was that despite being only ten tons heavier than a Vedette, the Marsden II had more than twice the armor – making it easily the most heavily armored war machine in my scratch company, with my Griffin coming in second. Armed with the aforementioned autocannon, and two six-pack of SRM missiles for close-range fighting, it performed it’s job as a defensive bulwark ably.
Of course, it was rather slow, in addition to being out of production. You’d think that being out of production would be the death knell to a military war machine, since they do tend to go through spare parts like a glutton at a buffet, but the Inner Sphere as a whole was surprisingly handy at keeping such ‘Mechs and tanks in service.
Officially, the Marsden II was retired due to the lacking speed making it unable to keep up with a ‘modern war’ – which is why my fourth tank, a Demolisher, moved exactly as slow, had much less armor, and was absolutely adored as the best possible tank in existence by the LCAF Armored Corps. Or so I gathered from listening to it’s crew bragging to all the other tankers.
To be fair, the Demolisher did have two good reasons to love it – twin autocannons, class twenty. The biggest and most powerful guns that could be placed on a mobile vehicle short of artillery, which had fragility concerns. Still, I thought the disregard for one tank, but love of the other, was a bit ridiculous. Firepower was all well and good, but it was short-ranged and slow, and the armor was about the same as my Griffin, despite being much heavier.
As our Dropship approached for a combat landing in the middle of the plains, and I scarfed down the last of a ham-and-cheese sandwich George had acquired for me, my tactical plan slowly came together.
I would shove the Vedettes out in front of the base, using them as bait to encourage the enemy to charge into the teeth of the defenses, rather than hang back and skirmish, where they might have a firepower edge with long ranged missiles. Their speed would allow them to safely attack, then retreat back to the base’s walls. The Marsden II would do similarly, but would remain closer to the walls and expose itself to ‘sink’ some damage if absolutely necessary.
Additional support from my Griffin and the Valkyrie, possibly combined with the turrets, would encourage the attackers to clear the killzone and rush into the base as quickly as possible – whereupon they would run into the Demolisher’s twin AC/20’s, with a follow-up punch from the Commando.
I nodded to the Dropship’s captain, and made my way towards the Mech gantries. There was a powerful symbolism in leading from the front, and being seen to do so – the reason why all good officers should have a nice hat, so long as you weren’t facing an enemy smart enough to use snipers.
With that in mind, as soon as I was out of the bridge, I pulled on my own officer’s cap. In the LCAF, this kind of thing was only used with a dress uniform, which I thought was rather horrific failing. An officer’s cap, like any good flag, is a potent symbol for the fighting man to look for, in the chaos of battle. A reassurance that no matter how badly the situation seemed, that your entire nation was with you.
Of course, it also helps condition your soldiers to always thinking of you as an authority who they should rely on. Then, when you take the cap off, dirty up your face a little, and you’re practically unrecognizable to them.
All of which is why I wore my officer’s cap as much as I could, whenever the men might happen to see it, and where it wouldn’t get me a punch to the face. That it was a comfortable familiarity is something I entrust only to this recollection.
“David,” I greeted, nodding to my crew chief as I arrived at the waiting hatch of my BattleMech. “All ready?”
“Yes sir!” Chief Totentanz replied, giving me a casual salute. “Medium Lasers are switched to training mode, as is the PPC. The other ‘Mechs and tanks have training ammo loaded, and I think – yes, Jorgenson just finished with the Medium Lasers on the Locust.
“Good, good,” I said. “And the quick-switch?”
“Working just fine,” the chief answered, with a pursed frown. “But, sir, it’s unnecessary. It’s more wear and tear if you switch from training to live fire too quickly.”
“David, a good soldier is prepared for anything,” I said chidingly, before throwing in an old cliché to make the reprimand sting a little less. “Yes, it might be a little more wear and tear, but we are soldiers of the Lyran Commonwealth – constant vigilance!”
Chief Totentanz shook his head and gestured at the open cockpit hatch, as if telling me to get in before he started swinging his wrench. Well, I didn’t see a wrench on him, but he was a mechanic – I’d learned years before to always assume a mechanic had a wrench on him.
Across the ‘Mech bay from me, I saw Sergeant Davis standing next to his smaller Commando, and caught his eye. He tossed a salute at me hastily with one hand, the other carrying his bulky neurohelmet, and I returned it as properly as I could, with the stiff formality of a parade ground. In response, Davis grinned.
Then I lowered myself into my Griffin, clambering down the ladder and sealing the top hatch above me. My neurohelmet waited inside, as I rather sensibly wasn’t going to be carrying it around, and risk damaging the old SLDF model. I took my cap off and set it inside a storage compartment, so it wouldn’t bounce all over my cockpit during battle, and then settled into my command throne with a restful sigh.
On went my neurohelmet, and I started the start-up sequence, flipping switches and pressing buttons as necessary.
The computer asked the usual question, and I gave the correct reply. A minor security method that some Mechwarriors didn’t bother with – but any additional security is a good thing, in my book. Without the right code, the Mech simply wouldn’t start.
“Reactor online,” the computer recited in a flat woman’s voice, as the fusion engine beneath my buttocks began to churn to life. “Sensors online. Weapons online. All systems nominal.”
“This is Green Lead,” I said over the comm system. “All units, report in.”
“Green Two, ready to rock and roll!” Sergeant Davis declared, his youthful voice undimmed by the comm.
“Green Three, ready,” Senior Corporal Nguyen stated. Her Locust was highlighted with the rest of my Lance on the display console, and I could already see it bouncing a little, flexing its leg myomers up and down, like a runner on the starting line.
“Green Four, ready,” Sergeant Parker said, his voice steady. I might have to rely on him to keep the more hot-headed members of the Lance under control.
“Yellow Lead, my Lance is ready,” came the older voice of the Demolisher’s commander, a middle-aged First Lieutenant named something vaguely germannic that I couldn’t quite recall. A steady hand, which paired well with the slow and powerful tank.
“Red Lead, all Platoons ready,” First Lieutenant Bradley, the infantry commander reported. Younger, but still with enough experience. He also was decent with an épée, and one of the few in the 10th Regulars that practiced swordplay. He still had quite a lot to learn, but I supposed he would get better with time.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as soon as the hatch opens, we’ll be heading for the installation,” I informed them. “The base commander has not responded to our hails, probably for the sake of the exercise. As CO, handling him will be my responsibility. I want you all focused solely on your men and your machines – if you have a spare moment, I want you working out another trick, another defensive line to fall back to, and another flanking maneuver.”
“Red Lead, it’s possible that the base will not have been properly prepared for the exercise, so your men might need to assist the locals in shifting things around,” I continued, as the large floodlights in within my Mechbay flashed yellow for the stand-by signal. “If necessary, call on myself or Sergeants Davis, and we’ll lend a hand for the larger materials.”
“Yellow Lead, find some good cover for that Demolisher, and some ready fallback points for your other vehicles,” I said, probably unnecessarily given the man’s experience.
Despite my probably over-cautious orders, they all replied appropriately, as my ‘Mech’s stand finished rotating around to face the still-closed bay door to the outside world.
A few moments later, the yellow floodlight turned green and the Dropship shuddered as it made firm contact with the ground. The enormous twenty-meter-tall blast door opened, sliding back as the docking ramp lowered in front of me, revealing a momentary stab of glaring daylight.
The ‘glass’ of my Griffin’s armor-plast window dimmed automatically, reducing the outside light to a much more reasonable amount. Without a moment of hesitation, I stomped out with a forward push of the joystick in my right hand, and the throttle in my left.
There really is nothing quite like piloting a BattleMech. The sense of scale and size that you get from looking down on the tiny world around you is nothing compared to the raw emotions bouncing between your brain and the machine, churning through your neurohelmet. You weren’t just big, you felt big. You didn’t need to trigger a zoom function, just think of it, and it would do so.
I cleared the loading ramp easily enough, and eased up on the throttle, slowing to a walk as I gazed around at the battlefield. The grassy plains around us were still slick with the morning dew, but the ground was firm enough – while my Mech’s steps would make muddy footprints, the tanks and APCs weren’t having mobility issues.
Unloading from Dropships was perhaps one of the more universal things to my life – though it still felt slightly odd to be doing so from what was, by my old life’s reckoning, a small Titan. Some part of me braced in anticipation of the gut-slam of an armored personnel carrier hitting the bottom of the ramp, as the infantry of Red Lance were feeling.
Still, as my scratch Company was entirely mechanized, we were spared the usual chaos of men stumbling, dropped kitbags, stubbed toes, and other assorted mishaps that soldiers seem to inevitably attract.
The APCs roared into the lead of our caravan towards the installation, while Nguyen went on a quick recon sweep around the edges of the plains. It would take the rest of us three to five minutes to get to the base, but her Locust was fast enough to do recon and still arrive shortly after us.
I still had no intelligence about our opponents, but their arrival point was fairly obvious. The forests surrounding the plains were a bit thinner, and could probably permit Mech travel, if someone followed roads or paths that I couldn’t see from my position in the convoy. In comparison, the trees along the hillsides by the base were a little denser, as well as taller for some reason. Combined with the steep angle, and it would be slow movement at best for any enemy – and all the worse to be caught in, if someone took a flamer to the forest while you happened to be within.
Granted, for an exercise, that would probably be seen as unsporting, but as far as I was concerned, if it was a viable tactic on the battlefield, it was a viable tactic for an exercise. All the more shame that I had no ‘Mech-scale flamers, and the infantry were carrying simulated Inferno SRM’s, rather than live ones.
“George, how’s the ride?” I asked, flicking my comm over to our private frequency.
“Tight,” George replied, the rumble of the APC’s combustion engine echoing in the transmission. “I forgot how closely these things pack us in.”
“Cheer up, it’ll only be a few minutes at most,” I said, stepping smoothly off the grass and onto a wide gravel road that wound its way up the rising hills to the base.
“I’d rather I was at a nice resort by Kilkenny,” George replied.
“And allow this priceless chance to work on combined arms doctrine to pass you by?” I asked rhetorically. “Not a chance. Besides, you get to wait out this whole event in the command center. I’m going to have to sweat up a storm in this tin can.”
George grumbled back good-naturedly, and the next few minutes passed with some idle banter between the two of us. I’ll confess, I hadn’t particularly liked the man when we’d first met, but he was growing on me in the way that all companions do after enough time – a gradual awareness growing about which topics were safe to discuss, which should be avoided, and what manner of banter we could share.
True, he was no tactical genius, nor a dull and blunt instrument, but in some ways, he was more philosophical than I was, and that alone provided some interesting conversations – though I was usually quick to redirect that inquisitive mind away from the subject of myself, when possible.
Our arrival at the base proved not quite so cooperative, however. The APCs and Davis’s Commando arrived first, and both promptly started filling out my orders to prepare the base for battle – to the apparent dismay of the local security forces, one of which was arguing fiercely with First Lieutenant Bradley when I arrived alongside Parker’s Valkyrie and the Vedettes.
Now, by all social customs, I could just flip on my loudspeakers and demand to know what the problem was. It was what most Mechwarriors did, and it tended to piss off everyone else in the process when they were shouted down at from a towering war machine. To be fair, it was quite an athletic feat to disembark from a BattleMech outside of specialized gantries – but I would gladly deal with some physical exertion in order to not have the local base security angry at me, when they controlled at least four or five turrets with what looked like very functional autocannons and lasers.
It only took a minute for me to finish clambering out of my Griffin and safely descending down. I must have looked ridiculous in the cold weather, clad in nothing but my Mechwarrior’s cooling vest and shorts. I certainly felt ridiculous, as the cold air nipped at my bare skin, but I had decades of pretending to be fine with far colder weather than this, so it wasn’t any real hardship.
“What’s the matter, Lieutenant?” I asked, moving to stand alongside my subordinate. It’s a small thing, but standing by someone’s side in a confrontation is a good way to solidify their beliefs that you’ll truly have their back in a fight – nevermind if you actually will or not.
“I was just explaining to Lieutenant Anderson my orders,” Bradley replied, gesturing with an open palm towards the red-faced man with rather round belly.
I nodded, and opened my mouth to ask the aggravated man a question, when he interrupted me instead.
“This base is off-limits!” Lieutenant Anderson snapped, his face blushing even further red. “Don’t you Mechjocks even read your briefings?”
“Every word of them, Lieutenant,” I informed him with the precise, clipped intonation of any officer to a lower-ranking soldier that had forgotten their rank.
True enough, I wasn’t wearing any rank insignia, but it was still Anderson’s fault for not automatically assuming that he might be insulting a superior officer. Bradley had deferred to me, and I’d just emerged from a Griffin, so it was more than a reasonable deduction.
Lieutenant Anderson stiffened in response with the gut-instinct response of any good soldier.
“Hauptmann Ciaphas Cain, 10th Lyran Regulars,” I introduced myself before Anderson could take back the conversational initiative. “You’ve already met First Lieutenant Bradley of my Company. For the duration of this military exercise, we’ll be defending this installation.”
“But – nobody does that!” Anderson said, with a tone of abject confusion.
“It may have been some time since a military exercise happened here,” I said, trying to smooth things over, “but it won’t take too much time or distraction from your work, Lieutenant. We’ll beat the tar out of our opponents and get out of your hair soon enough.”
“Oh, it’s not that, uh, sir!” Anderson replied in a panic, stumbling a bit as he remembered to include my rank. “Military exercises are supposed to be carried out in the plains! Not at the base.”
Bradley glanced at me with a slightly confused expression, perhaps with a little suspicion in the mix.
“Expand on that, please,” Bradley said, his mustache bristling underneath his helmet.
“We get military exercises, sure,” Anderson explained, his hands fluttering as he tried to illustrate his words with gestures. “But they always happen at the plains. Not in the base, that just wouldn’t work out. We’ve got a lot of personnel here, and their vehicles, and there’s movement between the buildings throughout the day – not to mention the repair costs if any accidents happen. It’s just not… efficient, sir.”
Efficient. Oh, what a marvelous word for corruption.
To my regret over the years, I was familiar with corruption, in its many shapes and forms. This, like much of the corruption of the Lyran Commonwealth, was primarily fueled by laziness, and was barely even worthy of the label on the small scale – but on the larger scale, a little bit of laziness swiftly became unreasonably powerful.
It was one thing to take a break or be a little late on some paperwork, and another thing to have military exercises in perhaps the stupidest manner possible. How many military exercises had taken place here over the decades or centuries, with two forces standing in an open field and slugging away until someone won by random chance or weight of metal? It taught soldiers nothing of real war, and worse, it taught them to fight stupidly.
“Where is your commanding officer, Lieutenant?” I asked, smiling pleasantly at the man. “I think I can smooth this whole thing over, but I’ll need a word with him in private.”
Hauptmann Engel was a very focused kind of man, I soon discovered. Unfortunately for me, he was like many intelligence spooks, and was very focused on his ideas, and no one else’s.
“This is absolutely unacceptable,” he said. “Intelligence analysis is a highly complex process, and interruptions like this, this… this playtime will result in deaths by delaying our work.”
“I am sorry you feel training our troops to be playing, Hauptmann,” I replied, matching his glare with an even, unruffled expression. “But I am afraid that I will be executing my orders as given by General Ashberry, and that means defending this installation. If you’d care to lodge an official protest, you are, of course, welcome to do so.”
Engel glared at me, no doubt fully aware that lodging an official protest in the middle of Katrina’s anti-corruption reforms would result in an awfully close inspection of his facility. What a pity. Of course, I knew that as well. I’d started quite a few corruption investigations myself, back on Tharkad.
Threatening a person to fall into line was never the best play. You never can truly know quite how they’ll react, and they might just decide to spite you even if it will do them more harm.
Unfortunately, this rather peculiar situation required me to do so, at least at the start of the conversation. I’d love to appeal to this man’s stomach with a bottle of booze slipped out of my Griffin’s cockpit, but Engel had the tight, pinched expression of a control freak – the kind that cropped up in analysts – and I’d already stomped some muddy boots into his metaphorical garden. This was his personal fiefdom, and I suspected he wouldn’t tolerate anything short of absolute subservience at this point… which I was not inclined to give.
And so, just like the meat-head barbarians that we were all descended from, I had to demonstrate that yes, I was able and willing to grind him into the dirt, if he so insisted upon it.
Yet with the stick, so too came the carrot.
“Of course, I am aware that this is an imposition upon your command,” I continued smoothly, keeping my expression smooth, so as not to offend Engel with some minor tick. “As a result, I took the time to inspect the relevant regulations, and I think you’ll find that this can be quite a boon to your command.”
Engel’s narrowed eyes untensed, just a little, and turned a suspicious look at me. Truthfully, I had done no such thing, but I had done something more important – I’d written the aforementioned regulation.
“As I’m sure you’re aware, LCAF regulations require all installations to undergo a yearly combat readiness drill,” I told him. “With the recent reforms, it’s been argued that this can result in some… inefficiency, if you will. As a result, if a military exercise is conducted at said facility, that can replace the yearly drill.”
Engel’s eyes widened; not drastically so, like you see in the tri-vids, but enough that an observant man could notice.
What I didn’t say, and what Engels knew quite well, is that the LCAF was so rich that the yearly combat readiness drills were actually paid readiness drills, requiring base commanders to pay for certain ‘realistic’ elements to ‘enhance the training’.
But since my unit was handling all the realism, that part of the budget could be quite easily saved… and if that money happened to be recorded as spent for the yearly readiness drill, well, who was to know?
What Engel didn’t quite know was that he’d be hard pressed to repeat this trick – as it required signing off by not just the base commander, but by the CO of whatever military unit was conducting said exercise. Not a detachment, like my unit was, but the Regimental CO. In this case, General Ashberry. If Engel tried this next year, he’d need to convince a Colonel or General to sign off, or forge the signatures – either of which would be automatically reviewed by the LIC.
It was a neat little trick, and I could take almost all the credit for it. Katrina hadn’t wanted to approve it at first, seeing it as a potential road for more corruption to sneak in. In one of my few successes over her, I’d pointed out that such a signature was an official LCAF document, and made both officers liable for any potential wrongdoing. Anyone foolish enough to try to exploit this would have provided evidence against themselves in any corruption investigation, and any use of this regulation prompted a check-up by the local LIC office to see if that money had indeed been put back into the budget, or if it had somehow disappeared.
After all, much like with Engels, if you simply presented the corrupt with a stick, they would rarely cooperate. Provide them a carrot, instead, and watch how they race to get the first bite.
Despite that regulation being created as a trap, there was some genuine use in cutting down the inefficiency. Engels was exactly the kind of checklist-worshipper to appreciate that, given his security officer’s emphasis on the word ‘efficient’ earlier.
In no time at all, I’d gotten him to sign off on my datapad for the exercise, and as I left the office, the intercom was already ringing with his announcement to the installation regarding our exercise.
As I left the heated confines of the installation’s HQ, I could already see the base garrison and civilian contractors rushing hastily about the place.
The whole base would be acting as if they were under genuine military threat, and the buildings would be locking down shortly – meaning that all the office drones who’d been away from their desks suddenly realized they might get locked out, and scurried on home.
There was also some kind of hubbub over by the base’s reinforced parking structure. It seemed that Yellow Lead was intending to park his Demolisher in it. I wholeheartedly approved – it would provide excellent cover and concealment, and played to the tank’s short-ranged ambush role.
Alas, the base employees did not appear to see it that way, and were hastily driving their personal vehicles to another, off-base parking garage, lest they get a scratch or two.
Lieutenant Bradley’s men were eagerly setting up positions around the base, and I nodded to a few of them as they debated the best way to demolish one of one of the defense turrets – which Engels had unhelpfully told me I was not allowed to use as part of the exercise. Still, if we simulated a demolition of the turret’s tower, it would smash down across the gate, easily knocking out a BattleMech and requiring the attackers to spend time ‘digging’ the simulated rubble out of the way.
This, however, left my Mechwarriors alone. As reconnaissance runs would leave them exposed, and I had a clear line of sight to the only real avenue of advance over the plains, I was hard pressed to find much for them to do.
A thought popped into my head from something that my crew chief had said earlier, about the training munitions – while the quick-switch was a simple way for the energy weapons to return to lethal power, I had a Commando with SRM’s and a Valkyrie with LRM’s. If I had them practice swapping ammunition loads, it would keep them out of trouble under the justification of practicing rapid reloads.
Of course, I didn’t have any spare practice missiles for them to swap around, which was a slight problem. Just doing unloading and reloading would not be enough. The off-limits base turrets should have ammunition, including practice rounds, however, so therefore the base armory should have plenty stocked up.
As such, I went off to go badger the base’s quartermaster. They tended to be rather possessive of their munitions, so it was best handled in person.
The armory was set close to the HQ, and appropriately labeled. I slipped inside with a swipe of the keycard that Engels had thoughtfully handed me after we’d shaken hands, and took two steps into the door when my keys caught sight of a weapon in someone’s hand, and I instinctively froze.
The weapon was a Sternsnacht, a ludicrously oversized slug-thrower that was popular among two kinds of people – inexperienced morons who believed the marketing lies, and expert shooters who relished the challenge. Three wrist-breaking shots that, as the marketing tagline went, could punch through BattleMech armor.
Worse, the man handling it was clearly no moron – and it was the base quartermaster, a Sergeant Major that looked like he’d been dug out from an iron mine.
Even sitting in a padded chair, I could see that he was one of the few men who could match me in height, and his shoulders were even broader than mine. Clean-shaven with bright red hair, I’d barely had time to freeze in reaction to the weapon before the quartermaster nearly pinned me to the wall with a ferocious glare.
Thankfully, he wasn’t pointing the weapon at me, but that’s about all that was good about the situation. The quartermaster had been cleaning the hand-cannon with his feet up on his desk and his fatigue jacket resting on the back of his chair, showcasing a weightlifter’s physique in his undershirt. A rack on the wall held a few medals, including quite a number of marksmanship pins and ribbons.
Jaunty bagpipe music was playing from a radio on the desk, and I could see a clearly non-regulation calendar pinned up on the wall, showing a wonderfully detailed picture of a pale-skinned woman with a lot of freckles in interesting places, a short green dress slipping off her shoulders, and a shock of bright red hair. A pair of magazines were scattered across the desk; the Patriot Piper and the Skye Scene, both of which were notorious for being thinly-disguised Free Skye propaganda.
And here I was, clad in nothing but my Mechwarrior cooling vest and shorts, my officer’s cap on my head, and my own reputation as Katrina Steiner’s errand-boy. I couldn’t have made myself a bigger target.
I did have a laser pistol at my hip, but the moment after I instinctively closed the door behind me, the Sergeant Major dropped the cleaning rod out of his Sternsnacht, inserted a magazine, and set the loaded pistol down on his desk, not quite pointing at me, but not quite pointing away – all the while keeping his glare pinned on me.
“Good day,” I said automatically, nodding to the man, while my mind raced for some way out of this situation.
Chapter Text
“Good day,” I said automatically, nodding to the man, while my mind raced for some way out of this situation.
The base quartermaster didn’t respond, keeping his glare pinned on me.
I was in a bit of a pickle, as the local phrase went. There I was, standing before a man who matched me in height and musculature, who clearly had sympathies to the Free Skye terrorists that likely wanted me dead, and who had a loaded hand-cannon sitting on his desk.
So, how does one defuse a situation like this?
Well, the answer is simple really. You pretend it didn’t happen, be your best charming self, and continue on with your life. All the while, you keep a careful watch on the potential problem, just in case the worst does happen, and you need to fight your way out.
You see, one of the few things that you can truly rely on in life is human psychology. Not on an individual basis, of course, because individual people can be intensely variable from one to the next. But on a grand scale, when you meet enough people, you’ll start seeing the same repetitions and behaviors, and you can start leaning on those.
A person who freezes up in an obviously fearful manner in a dangerous situation is actually making things worse for themselves. The other people in the situation – those who presumably are the cause of the tension – will notice this fear, and understand quite instinctively that they have power over the fearful man.
By acting normal, you throw off the other person’s expectation of you. They might think that you’re completely clueless to the danger, or that you’re very capable and thus unafraid of the danger, or that you’re any one of a dozen different things. That’s the real rub – they can’t know for sure what you really are. If you’re just an oblivious idiot, then they could kill you nearly instantly. But if they guessed wrong, and you’re actually a highly experienced killer, then they might suffer the same. That slight hesitation would induce doubt, and worse, would make them predictable.
As with many things in life, I’ve found that it bears a shocking resemblance to card games, almost certainly because both things revolve around the same psychological trickery.
“My name is Hauptmann Ciaphas Cain,” I introduced myself, pulling off my peaked officer’s cap as I stepped forward, smiling at the hostile quartermaster. “My men and I have been assigned here temporarily for a military exercise, and I thought I should introduce myself.”
The quartermaster worked his jaw for a moment. I wondered if, perhaps, he was debating how to respond, when he turned his head to the side, his eyes still locked on me, and spat a fat wad of black chewing tobacco out, nailing a spittoon hidden behind his desk.
I didn’t break character for a moment. I kept my smile on my face, undeterred by the show of masculine machismo.
Because frankly, at this point of my long and storied life, I was more of the latter option than the former option. I’d broken up riots with nonsensical humor. I’d fought against superhumans, psychic witches, soulless machines, and more. This quartermaster, while in excellent physical condition and apparently possessing many soldiering skills, judging by the qualification marks on the back wall, was ultimately just a good soldier.
I had met many good soldiers over the past few hundred years. I’d seen hundreds of men like him. I’d killed some of them. I’d outlived almost all the rest.
The silence stretched between us. Perhaps he thought it would make me nervous. It didn’t. I kept my smile plastered on with the hard-won skills of many, many long hours of shooting pics for propaganda posters.
“Pleased to meet’cha,” the quartermaster finally grumbled out. “Now get out my armory. Sir.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, and I let it out.
“Oh, not just yet I think,” I replied, stepping forward and pulling out a chair to sit on. I turned it around, so that I could rest my arms across the back of the chair, as if it was a horse’s saddle, and sat down across from the disgruntled non-com. Then, to put the cherry on top, I placed my peaked officer’s cap back on my head, at a jaunty angle.
The man’s eyes narrowed, and I think I could see the moment that he made his assumption, deciding that I was a clueless idiot. After all, from his perspective, surely anyone reasonable would have seen that they were not welcome.
“You see, I’m in need of some munitions,” I said, still smiling at the man. “It may be some time before my opponent for the exercise decides to show up, and to keep my Mechwarriors from getting bored, I’m going to have them practice ammo reloading in the field. Of course, since we only brought ammunition for ourselves…”
“Absolutely not,” the quartermaster declared, his face tightening. “You are not in my chain of command. You have no authority on this base. We carry no training munitions, and I refuse to hand out live ammo to anyone without authorization, much less a stranger.”
My smile dropped, and I instead gave him a quizzical frown, as if I was bemused by his response.
Of course, legally speaking, the quartermaster was absolutely within his right to say all of that. Each separate statement was completely true, and even his refusal to hand out live ammo was defensible, as my purpose here was to command a training exercise, and at the very least, the exercise proctors would not approve of the idea of mixing ammo loads for the chance of so much as a single stray shell being forgotten.
All well and proper, had I not already secured the permission to do this from the exercise proctors, under the promise that all loading would happen with them present and that so much as a single lapse would be my personal responsibility. And, of course, the fact that I’d received permission to request these munitions from the base commander, the socially-challenged intelligence analyst having accepted my logic.
But I said neither of those things. Either one would have shown the quartermaster that I believed he would obey me because I was right, and he was wrong.
And with a man like this, that assumption would be a fragile one. This was a man who cared for strength, and while he might obey under threat of court-martial, that was hardly the best way to go about things.
“Oh, we wouldn’t need much,” I drawled, putting a little whimsy in my voice. “Just three cases of class-5 Autocannon shells, and a single case each of ammunition for Short-Range Missiles, Long-Range Missiles, class-20 Autocannon shells.”
“No,” the quartermaster ground out. “Even if I wanted to fulfill that order, I can’t. We don’t carry class-20 shells. Don’t have the turrets for them.”
“Really?” I asked, affecting surprise. “That’s odd. I could’ve sworn I saw a case of them listed on a shipping report for this installation a month or so back. Something about a… shipping error?”
The quartermaster’s face was like stone, but his body language was much more indicative. His right hand twitched, moving infinitesimally towards the loaded handgun on the desk.
I smiled again, but this time it was not the same as before. Instead, I smiled at the man like a Commissar, and his hand stopped. His eyes narrowed, and he abruptly realized that his assumption was wrong, and that I was not, in fact, acting calmly in the face of danger because I was a clueless, bumbling fool of an officer.
“Now, I’m quite familiar with the LCAF’s shipping,” I said, slowing my cadence down, to pull his attention even further. “Given how many irregularities it unfortunately suffers from, I’m sure it’s just a simple mistake, but it seems to me to be almost… lucky. After this exercise is over, my dropship will be picking us up, and I’ve got a Demolisher in my company that will have likely fired most of it’s ammunition at that point. We can easily take that case of Autocannon shells back with us, since, as you said, you don’t have the turrets to fire them anyway.”
“Get to the point,” the quartermaster growled.
“Well, if you insist,” I replied with an overacted shrug. “You see, I’m quite confidant in my company’s abilities, so I’ve told the dropship crew to load a few cases for our celebration flight home. I could call them up quite easily and have them add… oh, a case of Donegal bourbon? For you and the rest of your compatriots to share, as… gratitude for your helpfulness. A much more useful replacement than Autocannon shells, don’t you agree?”
The quartermaster stared at me for a few moments. Finally, slowly, his right hand lifted off the table, and reached behind the table. I didn’t move a muscle as it disappeared, calmly matching the man’s gaze. The hand reappeared, clutching a distinctly non-regulation tin of tobacco. I didn’t react as the quartermaster rapped it a few times in a rhythmic manner, then withdrew a sizable pinch and carefully inserted it into his lower lip.
He masticated it for a moment, his jaw clenching and unclenching, while his eyes stayed locked on me.
“Aye, that sounds… reasonable,” he finally replied.
“Of course it does,” I said.
I stood up slowly, my officer’s cap still at its rakish angle, and extended my hand to the thickly built man. The quartermaster chewed for another moment, then stood up as well, and met my grip. He squeezed tightly, perhaps trying to crush my bones, with the strength from many workouts and perhaps a few of those regional sports that the Scots-Irish enjoyed.
I squeezed back with the technique and muscle from all my sword drills, and the quartermaster’s lips twitched upwards for a moment, before returning to their previous position.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” I told him.
I left the quartermaster’s office with a smooth walking pace, showing the world that everything was completely fine, and I was absolutely in control.
Which, bluntly, I wasn’t, because that entire time I’d been wondering what the quartermaster was going to do.
After all, while he was intelligent enough to be running a smuggling operation at a quiet backwater, he was also unintelligent enough that I’d managed to actually catch him at it. And he was probably affiliated with Free Skye, who, as I’d expounded on previously in these journals, were particularly inept at understanding when you should be picking fights, and with whom.
The annoying part of psychology is that it easily applies to you, just as much as it does to others.
Yes, I probably could have gotten the first shot off and nailed the quartermaster before he nailed me, but then I’d have had to explain why I’d shot him. During a training exercise, no less, when everyone was supposed to be carrying non-lethal weapons. These things were always simpler in the Imperium – just say that the other man was a traitor, and lean on your reputation (and connections) to get you out of trouble.
I strode away from the armory as quickly as I could without giving off the impression that I was fleeing.
“George,” I said into my comm. “The quartermaster has agreed to share some munitions. Be a good man and arrange it, won’t you?”
“How bad is it?” George Wentworth asked back, the comm hashing his tone somewhat, but still clearly conveying his suspicion.
“I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about,” I replied, smiling and nodding to two of First Lieutenant Bradley’s infantry on their foot patrol around the compound.
George didn’t reply, merely waiting for me. That was the problem with the more aware, intelligent adjutants. Sometimes they notice things that you’d really rather they didn’t.
“Nothing wrong,” I told him eventually. “I’m sure he’s just a fan of redheaded women, nothing more.”
“I see,” George said, masterfully refraining for any further statements.
“Anyway, I’ve just got to-” I started to say, before I spotted something across the access road and promptly froze.
“Sir?” George asked swiftly.
“Handle the quartermaster, I’m busy,” I told him curtly.
My eyes locked onto the sight of three infantry troopers stacking something that greatly resembled live ordinance at the foot of my Griffin. Class-5 Autocannon shells, at least three dozen. Where they’d gotten them from, I hadn’t the slightest, because it couldn’t have come out of the armory that quickly. All I cared was that they’d had the genius idea to pile it up in front of my BattleMech.
They continued their task merrily, apparently unaware of my return. That state of affairs did not last long.
“What are you doing?” I snapped, the ring of authority in my voice echoing across the hardened structures of the base.
Two of the troopers stopped instantly, and slowly, carefully turned around, their eyes wide. The third did not, and instead continued to fiddle with something that greatly resembled a detonation switch.
“Trooper, I asked you a question!” I barked, stepping towards the man in a fury.
“Jesus, Cherry, I told you this was a bad idea,” one of the other troopers hissed, jabbing the third man with an elbow.
The elbow seemed to work on the trooper more than my voice, and when the man turned around to look, I saw why. His face was singed, and I noticed that he had no eyebrows. No wonder the man hadn’t reacted to my words – I’d be surprised if he could listen to heavy metal without needing a hearing aid. I recognized the type fairly easily; after all, where else could a pyromaniac find both steady employment and an ample supply of high explosives than the military?
“And just what, Private, are you doing?” I asked, making sure to speak much more loudly, and enunciate my words, so that he could at least read my lips.
“Hauptmann Cain, sir!” the bomb-monkey exclaimed, jumping up and standing at firm attention, something that I would have appreciated had he not saluted by smacking his own helmet with the detonator.
I felt my stomach squirm for a moment as I braced for a sudden unexpected demise. I hadn’t been expecting the man to be so wildly incautious with explosives, because people with that specific character trait don’t exactly tend to live long enough to meet anybody else.
But no explosion came, and after a moment, my gut unclenched.
I very gently reached out, and laid a hand on the soldier’s shoulder.
“Soldier, what the fuck?” I asked again, this time much more slowly.
“Oh, just one moment!” the bomb-monkey said cheerfully, reaching a hand into his helmet, revealing that it was much looser than the regulations dictated, and fished out a set of audio earbuds. “Sorry, sir, the music helps me concentrate! Don’t worry, I had my squad-comm in the other ear, in case I got any orders.”
I tried very hard not to scream at this man. If there was any singular position in the infantry that absolutely could not afford this kind of lackadaisical behavior, it was the explosives expert.
By the Throne, even if the forward observers got something wrong, the artillery fire at least had a chance of being anywhere on a map, including away from your own formation. An explosives expert was fiddling with the stuff while surrounded by other soldiers, including me!
“Explain,” I told him, my voice flat.
“Oh, these?” the bomb-monkey replied with a chuckle, kicking a heel back and knocking one of the shells over. It clunked onto the base’s concrete road with a dull thunk. “Don’t worry, sir, they’re harmless!”
My eyes bored into the trooper, and I slowly tightened my grip on his shoulder. His chuckles faded slightly, and he seemed to realize, abruptly, how the situation must have looked to me.
“They’re fakes, sir!” the bomb-monkey clarified hurriedly. “No core, no filling, no nothing! Just the exterior shell, filled up with sand, that’s all!”
I felt an enormous relief was through me, from the tips of my ears to the soles of my feet, but I didn’t show a single glimmer of that relief to the trooper. He absolutely did not deserve it, with what he’d been doing.
“And why… are they in front of my Mech?” I asked, slowly.
“One of the boys overhead that you wanted to practice ammunition swaps, sir!” the bomb-monkey explained, his voice raising in pitch as his eyes flicked between my face and my hand squeezing his shoulder. “So we asked around, and it turns out that some of the intel weenies had a collection of empty ones! We thought, y’know, that we’d show them to you, and help with the practice!”
“And why, trooper,” I asked him, leaning forward. “Are you not following my previous orders to Lieutenant Bradley, and preparing for the imminent attack by the opposition?”
“Ah, I already did, sir!” the bomb-monkey nearly squealed. “Five planned demolitions of the gate, ten for each of the buildings closest to it, and I’ve cleared them all with the proctors already!”
“So quickly?” I asked, loosening my grip and squinting at him. “That must be… forty demolitions, at least. Are you lying to me, trooper!”
“No sir!” he said swiftly, stiffening even further to attention. “Standard LCAF architecture, sir! Same designs, same structural weakpoints, both intentional and unintentional! All I had to do was explain them to the proctors, and they agreed sir!”
“You have the structural weakpoints of LCAF architecture memorized,” I repeated, a hint of my confusion entering my voice, against my will. “And yet you’re… a Private First Class.”
“Sir!” the bomb-monkey replied, completely unhelpfully.
“Ah, Hauptmann sir,” one of the other soldiers, a Corporal judging by the hunter’s point arrow on his shoulder. “Cherrybomb here is one of the best in the Regiment, but he’s… a bit…”
“Absentminded?” I inquired, looking straight at ‘Cherrybomb’.
“Um… enthusiastic might be more accurate,” the Corporal corrected me with a wince.
“I presume he’s been demoted several times for that enthusiasm,” I said – a statement, not a question. “What was the most recent case?”
“General Ashberry’s car,” the other trooper muttered, giving me an apologetic smile as he did. “Stuck a cherrybomb in the tailpipe, sir. That's why we call him that.”
I blinked. I’d actually heard of that incident.
‘Cherrybomb’ had timed it right as the General had started up his precious little sports car. It wasn’t much more than a noisemaker, but it had sounded like the rear-mounted engine had spontaneously broken, and Ashberry had not taken the implication well. In fact, according to the RCT’s rumor mill, it was perhaps the only time in living memory that Ashberry had come close to losing his temper.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten slowly. None of the three infantry troopers made a single sound as I did, not a vocalization, not a shift of their feet, nothing.
“You are going to move these fake munitions away from my Mech within the next two minutes,” I said to no one in the particular, my eyes still closed. “If they are still here at the end of that, you will be volunteering for janitorial duties for the next six months.”
I opened my eyes, and looked at each one of them. They nodded furiously in response, and I released my grip on the bomb-monkey. They each saluted, ‘Cherrybomb’ smacking his helmet with the detonator yet again to my dismay, and then hurried to work.
I climbed the rope ladder dangling between my Griffin’s legs, doing my best to ignore the three infantry troopers hauling away the fake rounds beneath me. I didn’t hurry, but I wanted to.
As soon as the hatch sealed, and I was safely behind eleven and a half tons of armor plate, my rage and fear started to fade away.
By the Emperor, what a mess.
My Mechwarriors were the dregs of the Regiment, my infantry lance was full of discipline cases, and my tankers were running scared of a brand-new design. I’d already been unhappy about being here, instead of at some comfy villa or some sunlit beach, and I’d already known that I was being set up to fail by putting my combined-arms force into a defensive situation against an incoming Mech assault, but it seemed that whoever had it out for me had decided to pull out all the stops.
“George,” I whispered into my comm, as I started up my Mech. “Give me some good news, I don’t care what it is.”
“Hauptmann?” my adjutant asked, concern discernable through the radio’s crackle.
“Good news, George,” I said. “Anything.”
“The armorer’s not with Free Skye,” George Wentworth told me.
I paused, my hand holding just above the reactor’s ignition switch.
“What?” I asked, confused. “The man’s practically their poster child. Didn’t you see the magazines? What are you talking about?”
“He reads them for the women,” George said, his voice deadpan.
“The women,” I repeated, unbelievingly.
“Yup,” George confirmed flatly.
“He reads magazines that advocate for overthrowing the government because they have pin up models.”
“Yes.”
I stared at the comm set for a moment, and considered what a bizarre universe I was in. That an open dissident could be forgiven for public signs of allegiance to traitors, on such a flimsy excuse. In the Imperium, mere possession of those magazines would have been a firing offense, much less actually reading them while on duty.
What kind of defense was that?
‘Oh, yes, I have traitorous propaganda, but it’s OK, I’m only reading them because I’m easily seduced by cheesecake.’
Yes, yes, I’d been a part of a government coup myself, but I had a good reason, so it doesn’t count. And while I’d occasionally enjoyed a dalliance with an attractive woman, I had never been so susceptible to their charms that I would risk my own life for them, not once.
“George, I’m going to forget that last thirty seconds happened,” I said slowly, pinching the bridge of my nose with one hand as I activated the Griffin’s reactor with the other. “Just get the ammunition out to Davis, Parker, and Lieutenant Thorsen, and get them started on ammo-swap drills.”
The reactor came online with that familiar meditative chant from the computer, and my displays flickered to life. The familiar euphoria of being in command of such an awe-inspiring machine kicked in, and I waited long enough for the three misfit infantry troopers to clear the fake munitions away from my feet – my Mech’s feet – before I started moving.
What a mess, I mused unhappily. What a mess indeed.
I’d have loved to lay a minefield on the only path up the road, but the exercise proctors refused to allow it. I’d wanted to seed infantry through the tree line for scouting and target spotting, but they’d refused to allow that either. I’d wanted to one – just one – of a dozen tactics that utilized my combined arms force to its true potential, and they’d steadily refused to allow any of them.
If I’d known what kind of political hit job I was being set up for, I’d never have stepped on the damn Dropship, I thought to myself grumpily.
Not that I could do much more than lodge a half-hearted protest, and suffer through the automatic assumption of personal bias at my own failure to perform. Even my best points about how forced this scenario was could be counted with the argument that this exact scenario could indeed happen, and the exercise proved a weakness in combined arms.
We already knew this was a weakness in the doctrine. We weren’t fools. I’d had over a hundred years of service in one of the best combined arms militaries in the entire universe. Katrina herself had a remarkably good grasp of the core tenets as an amateur, and had served in every single component of a ground-pounding army. And even without either of us, the Davions had been systematically carving up the Capellan Confederation for nearly two hundred years with this exact doctrine!
But military politics are still human politics. Defeat had a stink that rankled the noses of any competent officer, and the excuses wouldn’t help.
I patrolled through the streets of Installation RS1-45 with a restless pace. To the scale of infantry, the place was large, with nearly a dozen hardened military structures, a thick anti-Mech curtain wall, and defense towers with class-5 Autocannons – AC/5’s in the parlance – mounted atop the walls.
But to a Mechwarrior, the base was cramped, tight, and small. It had a handful of tight streets that formed as fire lanes, buildings just tall enough to obscure visuals and your fire, just short enough to be good high ground for anything with jumpjets or the patience to climb, and it was all in painfully short ranges. Every single weapon could fire at this close range, with all the randomness that came from every potential enemy turning a corner and alpha-striking you.
Not to mention that in these tight quarters my PPC, normally one of the most effective and efficient weapons in the Inner Sphere, would only work if I disengaged the field inhibitor that kept it from spontaneously exploding. Only a small chance of exploding, so the physicists claimed, but it was a risk that very few people were comfortable with.
So yes, I was feeling quite tense as I stalked around the installation, checking over every one of my Scratch Company. Frankly, my behavior would have been an immediate give-away to anyone who truly knew me. It wasn’t duty that drove me to inspect my men’s drills, or professionalism that pushed me to inspect every possible corner, firing angle, and ambush site.
It was perfectly rational self-preservation instinct. I’ll admit that it might have been the tiniest bit overdeveloped, given that I was doing it for a mere military exercise, rather than an actual, life fire battle, but that didn’t change how it felt at the time. I probably should have paid more attention to my instincts, but hindsight is 20-20, as they say.
It took perhaps thirty minutes of my relentless patrolling before the first signs of our designated enemy appeared. If we’d been stupid enough to wait in the killbox as the previous exercises had apparently done, then we would have been waiting there, doing nothing, for nearly an hour.
“Contact!” the lead Vedette reported, as the dull retort of its AC/5 firing echoed across the base. “Enemy mechs, looks like a full Company. Sending visual data now!”
I glanced at one of my multi-function displays. Normally, it wasn’t exactly a good idea to send tactical data in the open, encrypted or unencrypted, but playing on defense had some advantages, and one of them was running a line of fiber-optic cables out to your forces so that they could securely transmit.
My Griffin’s battlecomputer was already hard at work analyzing the Mechs visible around the killbox to provide me a list of their models and weight-classes, but I was looking at something different – their positioning. The Company had split into its three component lances and emerged from the valley’s hilly woods in a near perfect pincer attack.
There was only one problem. We hadn’t been stupid enough to be standing there in the open like morons.
Well, I mused to myself as the Skye Militia BattleMech Company emerged, torsos twisting as they looked around for any sign of us. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, if our opponents were dumb enough to have not done any reconnaissance.
The Vedette’s AC/5 boomed again, accompanied by it twin, and the training munitions blasted outwards. They couldn’t do any real damage, but the exercise proctors would obligingly note any hits, as would the Vedette’s onboard targeting computer.
A few shots with the AC/5’s to lure them in, I reminded myself. The Vedettes would fire off a few shots, act as bait, and retreat backwards into the base, with the Marsden II doing the same, while Sergeant Parker lobbed some LRM’s at them from the safety of the walls, using their targeting links for indirect fire.
Once the enemy started their ascent up the long, twisting road to the installation, we’d start pulling further back, while the infantry prepared their simulated demolitions and SRM volleys. Even if the enemy tried to simply pound the facility into submission rather than advance through the gate, their only practical way to continue was to advance up the mountain road anyway.
Then, when they got close enough, we’d unleash our ambush. Lieutenant Thorsen’s Demolisher II would start lobbing AC/20 shots at them while they were all bunched up on the road, Sergeant Davis and the Marden II’s crew would toss in their Short-Ranged Missiles, and we’d have a good firing line set up on a bunched up enemy.
Then the battlecomputer pinged, and started rattling off a list of the enemy BattleMechs, and my mood soured again. It grouped them into lances, and obligingly put a little icon over each once with their names.
Griffin-1S, Shadow Hawk-2H, Hunchback-4G, Commando.
Firestarter, Stinger, Stinger, Wasp.
Griffin-1N, Rifleman, Vulcan, and finally, Crusader.
Five hundred tons of metal coming out to meet my force. Worst of all, they had a number of jump-capable Mechs, which could surmount the winding road by simply jumping up past large portions of it, and then do the same to the walls.
Things couldn’t get much worse, I thought to myself without thinking, before pausing and realizing exactly what I had just done.
The Vulcan twisted towards us, spotting the fake ‘incoming fire’, and returned fire. It was a tall, scarecrow of a design, and it was armed primarily for in-fighting and suppression missions, but some idiot weapons designer had given it one of the longest ranged weapons in the Inner Sphere’s arsenal: a class-2 Autocannon, or an AC/2 in the mech-jock parlance, which fired out to eight kilometers – one kilometer more than Parker’s LRM’s, and two more than the AC/5’s of my tanks.
I watched through the MFD as I navigated through the streets back towards the gate. I could contribute the occasional PPC bolt, and that would be useful. The Vedettes were already maneuvering, because standing still is a terrible idea in combat.
The AC/2 shell came zipping in and missed by a fraction, so close that I could actually see it on the lead tank’s transmitted readouts. I paused in my stride, and wondered why I could actually see the shell.
Then a second shell smacked into the tank, and the display rocked as the tank absorbed the hit.
“Hit! Hit!” the tanker barked over the comm. “That was live ammo! What the hell is that dumbass playing at?!”
My heart sank, and I realized that my jitters and bad feelings had suddenly vanished, leaving behind only a cold, comfortable certainty that I was very familiar with.
Once again, someone was trying to kill me.
Notes:
Chapter Text
“Scratch Company, this is no longer a training exercise,” I barked into the comm system.
As I spoke, my off-hand reached for the emergency arm function and smacked it solidly. My Griffin’s fusion engine rumbled as the computer system overrode the training settings and began powering up my Particle Projector Cannon and my five-centimeter Medium Lasers. I’d had my crew chief install the feature because I held the professional belief that there was no such thing as too little paranoia, and once again, I had been proven completely correct.
“Yellow Lance, fall back,” I continued, as I navigated my BattleMech through the LCAF base’s tight confines, towards the front gate. “Ditch the training ammo and re-arm with live ammo, immediately! Green Two and Four, likewise.”
“Confirmed!” the Vedette’s commander yelped, as another AC/2 shot came zipping in from eight kilometers away, missing him and impacting the base’s high, thick anti-BattleMech walls, sending a loud crack through the base.
This wasn’t the greatest situation that I’d ever found myself in, but luckily, I still had quite a few advantages. The single biggest was that my enemy had presumed that I was an idiot, and that I’d sit still in the killbox. Obviously, they now knew that I wasn’t there, but my position was less important than their assumption of my intelligence.
Warfare is complicated, as I’ve discussed before, but fundamentally it is still a psychological game. At least among humans, Orks, Tyranids, and occasionally Eldar, though I would not bet on that last one. Human psychology, in particular, was a bit of a hobby of mine, and I knew quite well that once someone made a large assumption, they were often very reluctant to change it.
Critically, that meant that the enemy probably still assumed that I was an idiot. One of the classic blunders of history, a mistake that one must do their best to avoid. Once you start assuming you’re dealing with an idiot, then you start assuming that you know how events will proceed – what strategy will work, how many men you need to send, things like that. But you don’t really know for sure, and your assumption often comes back to bite you.
“Hauptmann Cain, what the hell is going on out there?!” a shrill, infuriated voice demanded over the comm system. I glanced down at the multi-function display that was currently handling my comms, and read the name ‘Hauptmann Engel’ displayed in bold.
On the other hand, I mused idly, sometimes a spade is, in fact, a spade.
“Hauptmann Engel,” I greeted the installation’s commanding officer. “We’re under attack, and unfortunately, it is not a simulation. A hostile Company of BattleMechs are attacking, and they’ll be here in less than five minutes.”
The Stingers, Wasp, Firestarter, and Vulcan could all make 97 kloms an hour. At eight kilometers, they’d be here in a hair less than five minutes at a straight run on flat land. For the Griffins, Shadow Hawk, and Commando, their 86 klom speed mean they’d be here in five and a half minutes. The Hunchback, Rifleman, and Crusader were much slower at 64 kloms, and they’d need seven minutes.
In truth, the situation was far worse than that, and I doubted that Engel understood that. Yes, the terrain wasn’t flat, and the Mechs without jumpjets would have to shuffle single-file up the winding road, which should slow them down. But that was for the enemy BattleMechs to be physically standing in our base. They would be in range for Long Range Missiles within less than a minute, even that slow Crusader.
Since the AC/5’s on the Vedettes, the Marsden II, and the base turrets could only shoot out to six kilometers, we were forced to hold our fire until after the first enemy salvo came in.
Forty LRM’s weren’t a horrendous amount of firepower for an enemy Company, but thirty of them were coming from the Crusader alone, and that meant they’d probably be concentrated on a single target. That was more firepower than the Vedette’s glacis plate could handle, and that was the thickest armor plate the tank had.
The Hauptmann said something back, but I couldn’t make out the words over the spluttering, outraged incoherence that filled the comm line. Just like I’d thought, the man was a perfect intelligence analyst; a disciplined man capable of great hyper-focus, which naturally came with a real difficulty in adjusting to unexpected situations.
“Engel, I don’t have time for this,” I said, cutting him off and raising my voice. “You need to go to full battle readiness immediately. Send out the garrison’s gunners and activate the turrets. Once the enemy starts coming up that road, those turrets will be our primary method of returning fire, and we must stop them before they get into the base itself, or we’re all dead.”
“I can’t activate the damn turrets!” Engel shouted back at me. “They don’t work!”
“They don’t what?!” I repeated, trying to keep my horror from entering my voice.
“They haven’t worked for thirty years!” Engels told me, clearly panicking. “The last CO told me not to bring it up! Even if they worked, we’ve barely got any shells for them!”
Unbelievable. I shook my head, and bit down a bevy of curses. It was times like this that I wished that I was still authorized to shoot soldiers to ensure competence and discipline. This was why those infantry had found a ‘collection’ of fake AC/5 shells – the damn things had been used to fool visual inspections.
“Hauptmann, got another problem,” Yellow Lead comm’d in, my main heavy-hitter. “The quartermaster is refusing to hand over the ammo for my AC/20’s.”
“Engel, I’ll get back to you later,” I lied to the base CO, flipping channels over to the tanker. “For what reason?”
“No idea – he’s locked the armory down,” Yellow Lead explained.
I grimaced, and hunted through my HUD until I dug up the correct comm code for Installation RS1-45’s armory, half focused on that, and half on my piloting as I rounded the final corner and approached the gate.
The Vedettes were returning fire now, but it wasn’t working well. In principle, you wanted to shoot and scoot – fire your shot, and then reposition as quickly as possible to prevent the enemy from shooting you back. But the tanks had a highly restricted field of movement – they had to exit the gate to fire and back up through the gate to avoid enemy fire. Those were their only options.
This was why my original plan had been for the Vedettes to already be out on the road, and fire as they retreated backwards. They were supposed to skirmish from extreme ranges, with much more room to dodge return fire. The enemy would have to hit a moving target from extreme range while they themselves were on the move. Instead, now the enemy just had to aim for the stationary gate. It didn’t take the world’s best marksmen to keep pounding it, making it too difficult for the Vedettes to sally forth and skirmish.
I finally found the right code and punched it in, making sure to secure the connection.
“Quartermaster, where are my shells?” I demanded.
As I spoke, I poked my right arm outside of the gate, took aim, and fired off a PPC shot at the nearest enemy – the advancing lance of a Firestarter, two Stingers, and a Wasp. It was a snapshot, and though I was aiming for the center torso of the Firestarter, the Mechwarrior piloting it managed to notice and shift to the side at the last moment, resulting in the double-helix of lighting slamming into its right side-torso instead.
I grit my teeth. The Firestarter was a Light Mech, and it was probably near naked on that right side-torso now, but I’d make an emotional mistake in targeting it in the first place. True, the flamers it carried were easily the largest danger to the base, but they were pitifully short ranged. If I’d shot one of the Bugmechs instead, then I could have blown off an arm and directly reduced their firepower instantly.
Damn it, why was I even trying to defend the base? There was a back road I could escape through! Yes, it was a tight, confined thing that had been designed to be difficult for BattleMechs to use, but that was for formations, not a single Mech on its lonesome.
In a flash, the solution came to me. If I used my jumpjets to get on top of the reinforced military-designed structures, I could fire my PPC over the walls while I jumped between buildings. It would be incredibly difficult to hit anything, but it would also be hard for the enemy to hit me. I could pretend that I was deliberately distracting them, buying time for my soldiers, while I actually retreated, block-by-block, towards the back road.
I had no illusions about success. Yes, Davis’s Commando could potentially do some real damage in confined space, as would Yellow Lead’s Demolisher II if the quartermaster coughed up the ammunition.
It didn’t matter. We were still talking about a medium-weight Company of Mechs assaulting a mixed company of mostly light-weight Mechs, a tank Lance with two useless bodge-jobs, and a Lance of infantry trying to go up against a Firestarter, which was designed to massacre infantry.
“I’m not coming out,” the quartermaster growled at me over the comm network. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, but I’m staying down here until it’s all over. This is the toughest damn building in the base.”
On one hand, I certainly empathized with his stance. If I were in his position, the God-Emperor knew that I would be unrepentantly doing exactly the same thing, save that I would of course have created a much better excuse.
On the other hand, I was not in his position, and the quartermaster’s cowardice was going to get me killed when my biggest and best combatant had no ammunition to use.
“We’re all going to die here if you don’t get off your ass and give me those AC/20 shells!” I snapped at him, losing my temper.
“Oh, you’re dead for sure,” the quartermaster snarled back. “But me? Nobody cares about an enlisted man like me. Nobody’s gonna care.”
“I am Hauptmann Caiphas Cain,” I told him coldly, reverting back to using my own authority like a cudgel. “Three months ago, I was talking with Katrina Steiner in the throne room. If I die here because you refused to give me those shells, she is going to send LOKI after every single person involved.”
A bluff, mostly. Katrina despised LOKI, and she certainly didn’t care about me enough to break that personal preference.
“Maybe that’s true, and maybe you’re lying,” the quartermaster shot back. “I don’t care. LOKI can find me if they want.”
“If you give me the shells, everything will be fine,” I said quickly, as a thought flashed into my head. “Clearly we brought them on the Dropship, and I was mistaken. The turrets, too. Clearly those were damaged by the enemy Company. I’ll write them all off as battle-damage.”
“Why?” the quartermaster asked, suspicious but less aggressive than before.
“You might not fear LOKI, but what about the Inspector General?” I asked him, already knowing the answer. “Or the revenue service, double-checking those taxpayer kroner?”
The quartermaster didn’t respond, and I poked my arm out again to fire off another shot from my recharged PPC.
This time, I made sure to aim for one of the Stingers, and I nailed it squarely in the center torso before hurriedly yanking myself back behind the wall’s cover. Through the feed from one of the wall-mounted cameras, I watched the entire glacis plate be smashed through, armor-composites liquifying from the particle cannon’s force. Most of the Bugmech’s internals were damaged, too.
The Mech lurched. It had been approaching the bottom of the winding road up to the base, and the sudden damage had thrown its footing off.
Or… no, I realized, as I caught a glimpse of a whirling object in its chest that was suddenly spitting out a shower of sparks across the terrain. I’d damaged its gyro, and the Mechwarrior wasn’t able to compensate without it!
The Stinger tripped and crashed to the ground. There was an abortive attempt to rise up, but then the Mech slumped and fell still. Had that fall broken the last of it’s internal structure in that center torso? Had the gyro failed from my shot and the fall? Had the Mechwarrior simply given up? I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.
I’d reduced the enemy’s numbers by one Mech out of twelve, which might seem like an accomplishment. Unfortunately, I’d only taken out twenty tons from the enemy’s combined five hundred tons of military machines – and as the Lyran preference demonstrated, sometimes all you needed was the sheer weight of metal on your side.
“Alright, fine!” the quartermaster snapped. It had only been a moment since I’d offered to cover up his corruption and sloth, but damn if it hadn’t seemed like an eternity. Combat was peculiar like that. “I’m sending out the shells. But you’d better fire ever last one!”
“I don’t believe that will be an issue,” I told him honestly, as I watched the rest of the enemy Mech Company advance.
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Surviving7 (Guest) on Chapter 1 Fri 19 Feb 2021 04:33PM UTC
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