On board Intruder-class Dropship Honesty
Approaching Pirate Jumppoint
Kennard System, Federated Suns
19th March 3011
After a short radio conference with my senior personnel which largely consisted of various levels of disbelief over another rare find, we'd completed our preparations and jumped for Kennard. A short term plan had been thrashed out and our best computer techs would start looking at ways to poke the systems, hopefully without setting them off. I'd returned to the sickbay on the Honesty for the jump itself. Our arrival in Kennard had been handled by Jessica and Etsuko dealing with the authorities while I recovered from the jump, even with the lightspeed lag. It had helped that the only dropship we sent down to the planet was the Honesty itself, the rest remaining with the jumpships in preparation for our next jump.
It took us four days to reach the planet itself, even with using a pirate point closer in-system – it would be the last time we'd use that particular trick since we were at the edge of the good quality transport company maps. I'd more or less recovered by the time we made planetfall so I got pushed forward into meeting with the local government heads as well as the commander of the Davion military forces on the planet, apparently part of the 35th Avalon Hussars not with the rest of the unit on Bryceland. Didn't do too badly, I thought, not too sure really. Most of them were kind of bemused by the fact we were a bunch of people from the Outworlds, of all places, that wanted to become mercs. They agreed to pass along our planned route so that we wouldn't get jumped by an overly aggressive patrol – at least, not an AFFS one.
Then it was a quick visit to the local Comstar facility to send our all clear to the lawyers back on Alpheratz as well as sending ahead recruitment notices to worlds we intended to visit. I tried to get out of going there in person but apparently I needed to be there to supply the signatures for the necessary paperwork. I still was having difficulty reconciling the two different views about Comstar in my head – the in universe and out of universe, I was calling it for things like this. In universe, if my father hadn't made the plans he had for me I'd likely have joined Comstar as one of my potential career paths, since they were fairly well regarded in the Outworlds, even this early on – they'd started making massive investments in basic teaching infrastructure only in the past few decades. Out of universe knowledge had me looking back at that and snorting – of course Comstar was working hard to better its' image in the Outworlds, it fit into their whole benevolent guardian of knowledge image to look after the poor, simple farmer folk. The knowledge of Holy Shroud, ROM, the Wobblies in the future added to that, even as I remembered interacting with the local acolytes who genuinely believed the public image presented.
I digress. I finished up what business I needed to in person and headed back to the dropship. We had gotten permission to briefly circulate a message around the planetary nets regarding recruiting so we hung around for another couple of days before boosting off-world and returning to the jumpships, having had no takers beyond a few looking to work off passage. A brief report on the techs trying to access the Pueblo's systems – they'd gotten nowhere yet – and we jumped again.
Later on I found out that Jessica had set it up so that all our pilots, both aerospace fighter and combat dropship, were at Ready-5 condition at every jump along the Suns/Combine border, which really explained the speed with which they surprised the hell out of the pirates we found lurking in the dead system that we jumped into.
According to Lucas, who led the interrogation of those we captured, the pirate crews on their two dropships – a Leopard-CV and a Buccaneer – had been waiting with their jumpship, a Merchant, for a supply convoy of valuable materials being shipped along the frontier. They'd been expecting a few assorted jumpships and their attendant cargo dropships, so hadn't been too worried with the size of our emergence signature, figuring we were their target's arriving a little early. They'd deployed the dropships and their fighters and prepared a surrender demand, only to suddenly be facing twenty four enemy fighters and a number of combat dropships.
Someone on their side had panicked and fired from well out of their range before charging in, then for some unknown reason the rest of the pirate pilots had followed suit. The mix of Sholagar and Centurion light ASFs had been knocked out of combat in the first volley of missiles as they tried hard to get in close enough to actually fire their weapons, with the pirate dropships showing a bit more restraint and trying to return to their jumpship. They had to be battered for several minutes with long range fire before they surrendered. The jumpship itself surrendered pretty quickly, before we'd even had a chance to send boarders in the Observatorys – apparently they'd been taken themselves in a pirate raid only a few months earlier and the remaining crew had overcome the few pirates on board when they'd heard the dropships surrender to us over the radio.
We recovered the surviving pilots and their birds, had marines board and occupy all their spacecraft, then spent the rest of the eight days we were stuck here making sure none of them got any bright ideas. My involvement was practically nil, since I still hadn't done any training regarding prisoner capture or interrogation and such forth. I kept up with my training exercises and what was happening with the pirates as well as the work being done on the Pueblo until it was time to jump. We could have sent the captured Merchant ahead since they were already partially charged but I figured it was better to go as one complete unit to avoid any potential mishaps, which Jessica and Lucas agreed with.
The supply convoy popped in about halfway through our wait time, but at the other jumppoint. No idea how the pirates would have gotten around that, apart from jumping between the two. Ephraim had sent them a heads up message regarding the fact the pirates had been waiting for them and got a thankful reply shortly before we departed.
Eventually both our actual jumpships were charged up and we took the leap to Lyceum. Jessica and Lucas took the lead in handing over the captured pirates to the local garrison, including all the equipment too. At this stage I really had no use for any of it, the fighters were more or less destroyed and I had better ones anyway, the two dropships were pretty much surplus to my requirements and I figured the jumpship had been taken recently enough that the owners would probably want it back – there was no way I'd be able to keep it. In recognition of our effort we were allowed to restock our ammunition stores for free and were told that there might be later follow up rewards. Two weeks later everyone was back on our jumpships, including the prize crew and my marines and thus we continued our journey.
Four uneventful (but sucky) jumps and thirty two days later we reached Barlow's End, our first chance to hit a proper recruiting hall. This meant we were taking all our ground forces transports while the rest remained behind with the jumpships.
When we arrived we were greeted by a small party people beyond the custom officials. It was a couple of corporate representatives, a Comstar Adept and several members of both the local authorities and media. I was given a massive novelty check by the corporate reps – their company had owned the jumpship we'd captured – who thanked me and had a couple of pictures taken before bowing out, the Comstar Adept said our account had been recredited for several of the HPG messages we'd sent over the length of our journey in recognition of our deeds and the Davion officials also gave me a check for a portion of what the dropships and fighters had been worth. They didn't even get us off the tarmac for it all, just breezed in while we were still getting our planet legs and then breezed out again.
Weird.
I was later informed that it was because we were pretty much unknown newcomers that they didn't try to make a press circus out of it, the corporate types excluded. Notes had been made and entered into files but for now, we were being kept quiet.
The recruitment went well, though. We actually got a company of experienced Jump Infantry under Henrik Grimstad, all ex-AFFS servicemen who decided they wanted to go merc for a few years, they'd all came from the same regiment and their terms were up so they figured why not – it would be cramping our accommodations until we got the Seeker but I gladly took them on. A couple more tech teams and our first tank crews also signed on, again mostly ex-AFFS looking for something new now that their terms were up. No mechwarriors though - a few applied but they sort of portrayed the bad example of Dispossessed, records showing they lost their previous rides in various stupid ways. A few more people signed on as hands for journey, again working to pay for passage.
We got everyone loaded on and then blasted off for the jumpships. Total time in system, fifteen days. Nine days in Fairfield, then eighteen in Hoff – hitting that recruitment hall as planned. More tech teams, plus the entire artillery company – a former militia unit who all just decided to up and go as one, including their tech teams who were scratching their heads over the systems on the Marksmans we had – and a number of tankers who expressed interest in our light tanks, bring their support teams with them. Ended up taking fifteen of them along with us, split between the Zephyr and Chevaliercompanies.
Franklin next, then the jump into Robinson, capital of the Draconis March. We jumped into the zenith point and found a whole bunch of people waiting for us at the recharge station – they'd flown out to show they were serious about joining up, so of course I sat down and interviewed them. Considering we hadn't actually planned to do any recruiting here at all, we cleaned up pretty well – the majority of the people who came were the remnants of a different Taurian mercenary armour battalion that had gotten smashed and hadn't been able to recoup their equipment costs enough to resupply. So, I got my armour commander, Major Leo Foster, his second Samuel Berganza and all his crews and techs on a good deal along with a cash infusion – they'd sold their existing equipment off as soon as they finished putting pen to paper. I still didn't have any VTOL pilots yet but the rest of my vehicles were now fully manned.
Leo took his people over onto the On The Trail and got started on settling them in with the rest of the tankers while we waited for the station to get around to us. It was a pretty good haul for four days in the system. Still no mechwarriors, though. A seven day lay-over in an empty system and we reached Layover, along with our long-awaited (and now actually needed) Seeker dropship. Theo quickly got his crew on board and we moved some of their future "cargo" over – it had actually started to get a little crowded on some of the ships, just because of the way the jump infantry had been sprawled about everywhere, some of them had even been complaining about being shoved into random quarters for the various ground crews rather than platoon quarters. Their gear, along with the VTOLs and the Gabriels, were also transshipped over before we jumped out.
I thought it was funny that the name for the new dropper had been selected long before we even left the Outworlds, the new guys had had no say in it at all. Low-Brow Good Time. Pretty sure it was everyone taking a shot at the infantry it was meant to carry. I was tempted to move over there myself but decided against it in the end – I might still wind up with the tanks rather than the jump soldiers.
The tech crews working on the Pueblo had managed to crack the weapons bays open, so we could operate them now as required. Ended up recruiting an additional twelve crew for it – though technically we put the new hires on the other droppers and pulled our most trusted older crew onto our spyship. It was also now called the Pretty Floral Bonnet, which was my idea – I recounted the story behind it ("But if your hand touches metal I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you") and most of my people had loved the idea, and so my choice of name actually won for once! Apart from the guns they hadn't made any headway with unlocking anything else - the surveillance stuff was more secured and they had apparently almost shat themselves when they thought they'd tripped the security on what I thought was the mobile HPG. Luckily they hadn't, otherwise the whole ship would have exploded according to them.
Two days was definitely not enough time for me to recover completely. Four at Robinson had been pushing it, but two days between jumps meant when we jumped to Exeter I was sick as a dog for all eight days. There was still lingering effect on our next jump to Olancha, just enough to make my feeling like shit drag out a couple of extra days. The next five jumps proved to be normal by the standards of the journey, though I spent a fair chunk my of time with the new jump infantry guys going over their training to get a troopers-eye view of it all. At Northwind we arrived at the zenith point taking advantage of the recharge station but I insisted on waiting until the fourth day before jumping again.
I always wanted to visit Caph. For some reason it was one of the worlds in the franchise which I always came back to, so when the opportunity came up I made sure we went through it and would be able to spend time on planet. A hub of Hegemony scientific research and there had been (and would be again) dinosaurs! Who wouldn't want to visit?
Of course the way the planet had been fought over first during the Amaris Civil War and then the First and Second Succession Wars meant that pretty much nothing had survived. The planet that had pretty much brought the universe the Battlemech had – at one point or another throughout all the fighting - seen practically every single structure on it flattened. It seemed a huge surprise that it hadn't just been abandoned with that level of damage but people had remained, even with the majority of two of the continents pretty much glowing in the dark due to wide spread nuking. I felt it embodied a lot of the good and bad about the whole concept of the Battletech franchise.
Plus there was that awesome story by Lordsfire. Caffeine Trade Authority, you tricksy tricksters.
So for a week I played tourist along with several of the original Outworlds contingent. We'd been traveling for over six months by now so a lot of them were glad for some lengthy planet time. In the main we relaxed, though I did arrange for myself several overflights of the dead zones, to sear those images into my head. Nothing like this had really happened in the Outworlds. Worlds had died due to the wars, but from neglect and abandonment, not by the various methods of mass destruction. It was a sobering experience.
Still, there was the rest of our journey to finish and then it would be time to fully embark on our new career paths. Three more jumps – New Earth, Zollifoken and then Galatea itself. Etsuko had long since negotiated sufficient space over expensive HPG transmissions for us to all land if we wanted and even the more recent hires were looking forward to being on the ground again for the time being. I was personally ecstatic about not having to suffer through a jump until we were at full capacity.
Speaking of which, we needed to hire all our mechwarriors, six more jump infantry platoons plus the VTOL crews, then our remaining tech crews, forty four in total. That would bring us to our full roster of two thousand and thirteen people, including dependants. I still got a slight case of the sweats whenever I thought of that number, the idea that I was responsible for that many people at barely twenty years old.
So after setting up a rotation for the marines and ASFs to cover the jumpships but still get some planetary time we headed towards Galatea itself. I went ahead in the Honesty with Etsuko to get everything finalised and get the paperwork started while the rest loitered behind us a bit and then spent some time in orbit while we did the paperwork at Galaport. From there it was a short hop to the long-term landing pads we'd hired, with the rest of the dropships coming down to join us there. I'd ordered that, for now, anything that didn't have a pilot or crew would remain on the dropships, but the rest would come to the combined apartment/warehouse block/hangar thing that would be our home until we'd filled the roster.
We apparently made the news once someone figured out how much of our unit was cherry-condition SLDF gear. Made me glad we had the three platoons of marines for security at the landing pads as well as the jump troopers for our base. It wouldn't stop a fully fledged assault but that would be very noisy and easily traceable to whoever did it.
It took a couple of days to get everyone settled in and then the interviews began. Jessica and Leo led the interviews for the vehicle crews and the mechwarriors while Lucas and Henrik looked after the infantry. I would occasionally join them for the initial interviews, depending on how my training was going that day, mostly I just went to sit in and get an impression of what was happening. Every evening all the company level officers – minus Samira, Abdul and Janne who were all out at the jumpships – would gather together and spend a couple of hours going over the various candidates for the day.
Mercenaries, it seemed, always wound up back on Galatea. Even when they lost everything but the shirts on their backs they made their way back here to try again – like some of our passengers picked up along the way. In one go we got the remnants of two small mercenary Battlemech companies that were down on their luck, each one consisting of slightly less than a full company of mechwarriors. They'd both gotten hammered fighting in different area of the Sphere and managed to get the funds together to limp back to Galatea but were otherwise in no shape to take another contract. Neither of them had their own transport (one had had a Union but it had taken significant damage and been deemed beyond their capacity to pay for the repairs, thus sold off for scrap) and between the two of them could maybe have fielded two full lances of mechs in somewhat battle ready condition. Not having reached the point of selling of their damaged machines yet they'd been offering themselves out on lance level contracts but not getting any takers.
Twenty one experienced mechwarriors, nearly all having gone through actual military academies rather than picking up things here and there. Plus the tech teams, twenty three in total. The deal that both parties found acceptable was the pilots would use our mechs, keeping theirs in storage either with us or long-term elsewhere. If after five years everything was still a going concern and there had been no issues with their behaviour they would have the option to take possession of the new mech in place of their old one or have us fully repair their old mech, or otherwise replace it with a newly salvaged mech – that option was also open for the truly Dispossessed amongst them too. Otherwise, pretty standard mercenary contracts. Neither of the two leaders had ever lead a force higher than a company so we agreed they'd take over as second and third company commanders, while we'd keep trying to find a battalion-level officer to lead overall. The ex-LCAF officer (Robin Kandel) bucked the meme trend and took the medium company, while the former FWLM one (Colmazio Salvati) took the heavy company and the position of Mech Battalion executive officer having served as such briefly before he'd left House service. None of the new pilots took an assault or a light though, they stuck to the mediums and the heavies with the exception of the Lancelot's, no one took one look at any of them either. I couldn't really figure out why, I would have thought some of them would have leaped at the opportunity to get their hands on the big boys in particular.
The jump infantry was fairly easy to fill out. Soon enough we'd recruited the other two companies and a senior officer to lead them. Not all of them were actually experienced as jump infantry, but they'd all seen at least some combat over their careers and it wouldn't be difficult to cross-train them over. Pauu Topia and Joshua Isley were the company commanders with Pauu taking the XO spot, and Dawson Ventura was selected as our new infantry battalion commander. Lucas still had separate command of the five marines companies in their demi-battalion I decided.
Weirdly we picked up a whole bunch of VTOL crews who all seemed to hail from the Magistracy of Canopus. They were pretty tight lipped about what had brought them all the way here as a group, especially without being part of a bigger unit and completely sans equipment, but they quietly took possession of their new rides and proceeded to fling them about while getting used to them. I mean, they even had a doctor that we could put to work in the MASH Cobra as well as all a few tech teams, enough to cover the ones we were missing for the vehicles. Twelve of the crews were apparently rated as veterans and seemed to drool over the chance to fly the Ripper's and Cyrano's. Overall it meant our VTOL crews were largely female, with a quarter of the Cobra crews being male, hired from different sources.
It took a couple more months where we would occasionally pick up a single mechwarrior or tech crew but finally I found my ground force commander. Former AFFS, having served with the Davion Heavy Guards before a minor scandal sent him into a mercenary career (more to avoid serving with a couple of senior officers who had him on their shitlist), Jaye Downland brought with him enough mechwarriors and techs to fill out the rest of our table of organisation, including a largely veteran lance of Dispossessed light mech pilots. After giving everyone a week to celebrate the news and finish getting settled in to the unit it was time to go contract hunting.
Don't think we hadn't been looking in the interim, because of course we had. I personally had browsed through a couple of options my support staff had advised we look at but until our roster was full it would have been pointless to start pounding pavement for one, so to speak. I'd set our parameters for what we were looking for as defensive/training contracts mainly, preferably anti-pirate work out on the Periphery borders of either the Free Worlds or the Commonwealth. I still had enough Outworlds staff to make raid/counterraid work cause a bit of friction, but everyone hated pirates and we could use the training time to coalesce as a unit better.
People were both curious and hesitant about hiring us. A brand-new combined arms regiment, with more than its own full lift capacity? Where did it come from? Oh, the Outworlds huh, that's weird". What, it's all old SLDF gear that they found somewhere drifting in space? And they've been recruiting heavily since they got here? Are they actually any good? We at least had the positive report about our pirate encounter to show our aerospace wing was good, but the rest was a bit more haphazard looking though we still got a fair amount of attention brought our way.
In the end I got us a contract with the Free Worlds League, based out of Merton, an individual world just outside of the Abbey District near the border with the Circinus Federation and providing garrison and cadre support for worlds within a jump of there – Aylmer, Sackville, Sierra, Dalcour and a couple of worlds in the Abbey District itself, Maxwell and Manotick – as well as backing up whatever federal or provincial forces were in the area. A five year period, nothing really special about it all, decent coverage for pay and supplies with basing rights to an old FWLM base with its own starport. I'd agreed to waive a lot of the salvage options for ground forces unless we suffered combat losses – if we lost a light we'd be able to salvage a light, and so on.
By the time we had signed the contract and were ready to leave Galatea it had been more than twelve months since I'd woken up in that dorm room on Alpheratz. I'd finished my training with McHayes and was acting as a sort of supernumerary officer with the jump infantry and marines, occasionally joining the various tank companies in doing exercises to familiarise myself with them. The regiment was fully staffed and ready to go, so we packed up and got onto our dropships to begin the journey to Merton. I'd already suffered through twenty nine jumps, what was another sixteen?
It was a pretty direct route we took and just under four months later we arrived at the Merton Nadir point, with nary a thing happening along the way. I ordered all the dropships to head down to the planet – this time we weren't leaving a guard unit behind, beyond the marines that were squirrelled away on the jumpships. After we landed I threw a small party to celebrate the beginning of our new lives before dispatching units around the place to get on with the work.
One of the Mech, tank or infantry battalions was always going to be on Merton with their dropships here at the base while the other two were off performing duties elsewhere. All the battlemechs our pilots had insisted on keeping where brought into the base and set up to be worked on while their owners were off working, using with my mechs. I sent Jessica off with High Haven and Honesty attached to the Roam to go pirate hunting while the Breaks went on a circuit around our patrol worlds with Best Policy and its own marines for protection – plus whatever dropship it happened to be currently carrying. And the Pretty Floral Bonnet, since we'd managed to successfully unlock the surveillance equipment finally! That would make anti-pirate work a fair chunk easier, with better signals interception ability, it was back to performing its Q-ship role.
Honestly, it was pretty quiet for the rest of the year. My soldiers worked hard at their various jobs and I worked with them where I could. Sometimes, plans work out okay.