On board Intruder-class Dropship Honesty
Iasceau Dropport, Maxwell, Free Worlds League
26th January, 3014
I'd wound up spending the better part of a month wrapping things up on the derelict, which Alexia had given the new name Hangar Queen with a wicked smile on her face during an interim meeting. Battle damage had been repaired on all ships, the captured Mules the pirates sent against us were patched up enough to survive re-entry (the only ones that needed that level of repair, though they were still very iffy) and we'd gotten permission to use the captured jumpships to bring everything to Maxwell, minus the Leopard that was on Dalcour. By the time all the dropships were launched and the jumpships charged and everything was ready to go we'd scrapped as many crewers as was safely possible off our ships and onto the derelict, along with one of the marine platoons to provide security and extra hands - their job to relocate the ship to another secure point for the time being.
The report I'd forwarded when the Breaks originally jumped out back to Dalcour had said I'd ordered the derelict deorbited upon our departure since it was beyond repair, to deny the pirates their forward operating base. Couldn't make a liar of me if someone came by to have a look and found it still there now, could I?
League Central Coordination and Command had been the ones to direct us to take everything to Maxwell when they had responded to my request to use the captured jumpships to bring everything out. As the centre of power for the region – it was the primary base for the Second Fusiliers of Oriente deployed out here at the moment, as well as being the capital of the Abbey District - it had the facilities available to process everything without having to send it halfway across the League. They would also be doing the debrief - asking me about everything in the report as well as discussing the salvage distribution. Included with that report I'd sent ahead from Dalcour had been claims for the Union and the Fury but the rest, including the equipment on board those two dropships, the recovered fighters and pirate loot we'd grabbed from the Newgrange I wasn't interested in and would gladly hand over to the League.
Being back on a planet felt good. I looked around the spaceport from the control centre and could see all but three of the dropships I had brought were either landed or on final approach – the two Mules were stuck behind us somewhat since the crew on board hadn't been willing to push it. Also, it was a pirate crew on board – I wasn't going to risk my crew on a dropship that might explode – so they were probably trying to drag their heels a bit. Best Policy was following them closely with its fighter squadron, just in case they got stupid. The sensor tech grabbed my attention and pointed out the small convoy of cars and APCs which were approaching us, including what I considered a fairly nice hover-limo. I nodded my thanks at him and departed the bridge. Time to go meet some people.
I met up with Lucas at the exit closest to where the convoy was pulling up and left the dropship with him. They were still sorting themselves out when Jessica and Evangelos – who had made his own way here from Merton – came along on a golf-cart looking contraption to join us. Evangelos was in a suit but the rest of us had put on the closest thing to a formal uniform we had – the garrison uniforms with navy blue trousers with white stripes down the leg for all of us, with Jessica having the aerospace green shirt/jacket combo, Lucas the marine navy blue one and myself having the jump trooper sky blue one.
Side note – the Mechwarrior top was grey, the vehicle crews got brown tops. The dropship crews used a dark green, when they bothered to wear it at all. Ditto the jumpship crews. At some point prior to my getting the company my father had bought something like twenty thousand pairs of uniform pants and a few thousand of each different colour shirt and jacket – it was kind of insane. That didn't include the actual fighting wear of the different branches either, he'd bought all of them too. I had no idea how long he'd been sitting on them for because apparently they'd just shown up out of the blue one day in the warehouses back in the Outworlds.
The approaching convoy finished coming to a halt and disgorged a number of people, both uniformed and not. The Comstar rep approached first, an Adept Rainer who was representing both the HPG station and the MRB, to lead the introductions to the League and planetary officials. There was Colonel Payton, representing the Maxwell governing military junta, Major Radulov, battalion commander from the Second Fusiliers and Captain Costiniu – our newly assigned replacement liaison officer, the previous one Lieutenant Costa having left us three months before. Those were the important people, at least for me – a fair chunk of the rest were lawyers and then there were the media and public relations types. The planetary militia types stood to the side near their APCs and waited for pirates to be lead out for transfer.
After a brief photo op to show us all shaking hands and being all brotherly and sisterly, I led everyone into the Honesty and into the briefing room, minus the majority of the media types who went off to do whatever it is that they were told to do. Take pictures of the pirates being lead out in chains, maybe.
Anyways, it didn't take long to get everyone settled in and the briefing started.
"Good morning, ladies and gentleman, I am Colonel Karter of the Valiant Defenders and we are here to answer whatever questions you have brought to us regarding our operation in the –" I peeled off a long string of numbers and consonants without pause "- system. You should all have copies of our forwarded written engagement reports, but do any of you have questions before we go on to the battleROMs and other presentations? If not, Major McIntyre will lead the next portion of this debrief."
Nothing beyond general headshaking and muttered no's were the responses I got, so I stepped back and let Jessica take the lead. She took them through the initial engagement – taking the two jumpships and the first Leopard – before covering the return and the fight against the pirate dropships and pirates. Some of it was the briefing plans she'd worked up before the battles, other parts were direct pulls from fighters and dropships alike sensors. The Leopard going up in a ball of flame got a couple of low whistles from people, especially since the footage was taken from Hadrien's gun cameras. After about half an hour of running through different parts she was done, pausing for questions for a few seconds.
"Can we hire the Tomahawk pilot off of you?" Major Radulov asked jokingly, snapping his fingers in disappointment when Jessica and I immediately said no. She waited a little longer for anyone else to speak up then yielded the floor back to me.
I did a quick run through of our boarding operation, first with images of the flybys done to examine the outside of the ship then following up with body camera shots of the inside. The half-wrecked Behemoth was noted with some murmurs, which I realised was down to we not having actually told anyone what those dropships were just that there was an additional five damaged ones there. "The dropships left behind by the pirates, especially the Behemoth and the Aqueduct, were not salvageable at all. The ones attached to the drop collars were unable to detach and the two found inside attached to the docking gantries had suffered damage due to infighting between pirate crews. Technical reports are available if anyone believes they are required."
It didn't take me very long to run through the rest of the operation, though I did take a few moments to emphasize that the ship's crew had taken every opportunity to surrender they were given. A quick run-down of the post-battle process later, I finished with "Once the dropships finished clearing the docking space I had the team of techs and marines on board commence de-orbiting operations to drop the Newgrange, SLS Caelestis, into the gas giant. The engines began their burn shortly thereafter and the team left via small craft, returning to the dropships. Last we saw of the ship was it disappearing further into the ring system, headed for the planet." I stood back from the table and waited for the response.
There was some polite clapping from everyone, started by the Major, before Colonel Payton leant forward in his seat. "Why did you choose to deorbit the vessel? Could it not have been salvaged for materials?"
"No, according to our own techs, the pirate techs and the surviving records from the SLDF naval techs, the main transit drive was trashed almost to the point of destruction, capable of barely a tenth of a G for short periods of time and the KF-core itself was completely inoperable. Whatever of value wasn't taken in the original scrapping of the ship – which we think was pretty much everything due to hints of another Newgrange being in the system with them at the time found in records on board – had long since been taken by the various pirate crews or used to do ad-hoc repairs on the ship systems itself, including the salvageable germanium in the jump core. I made the call to deorbit the ship due to the fact multiple pirate groups over the century have used it as a port of call when conducting raids in the region – we needed to deny any future crews or other current ones aware of it the usage immediately." Lying through my teeth, I was. Apparently quite well, according to my minions when we went over it later.
That was the only real question anyone seemed to have. Major Radulov stood up and as the senior FWLM officer in the system thanked us for our service to the League, we shook hands as the PR people who had attended the meeting took another picture and then the real part of the meeting began. The next level of arguments over the salvage rights.
Another run down, for those who might not have been paying attention. We'd taken two jumpships, a Tramp and a Merchant. We'd captured six dropships – Two each of Leopards and Mules along with a Fury and a Union. One more dropship had been destroyed outright. Aerospace wise we'd taken five Stingrays and three Lucifers with varying degrees of damage, having destroyed a Luciferand three Cheetahs. Then we had the thirteen Battlemechs recovered from the bays on the Union and the non-carrier Leopard – there had been fifteen, but two had taken pretty hefty damage during the battle even inside the dropships and had been determined to be fit only for scrap. Honestly, the mechs conditions were pretty bad overall, what with them being pirate rides and the attendant repair issues and all. The Mules had had an assorted amount of shitty Periphery vehicles inside but most of them had wound up being tossed around or blown up inside the cargo bays, similarly being left for scrap. Lastly the Fury hadn't been carrying its full compliment of infantry but had had their vehicles and other gear still on board.
I only wanted three bits. The Tramp, the Union and the Fury though I'd settle for the Merchant if it came down to it or the Tramp. The rest of it, including the contents within the two dropships I wanted, they could take – if they wanted to give me stuff for spare parts I'd take it too, but that would be it. It would be good to get the Merchant too but I figured that was being greedy.
My attitude seemed to confuse everyone not on my side of the bargaining table, even the Adept. While the lawyers were talking it out some more I leant over to the military people and shared my thoughts on the matter. "I've got over a hundred practically factory fresh Star League Regular Mechs, tanks, fighters and artillery. I really don't need more combat units right now, especially ones that would just add to my repair bills with how damaged they all are, but I can use a couple of extra dropships. The Union so my non-Dispossessed mechwarriors can go back to piloting their own rides or hand them over to new hires and be deployable, the Furyso I can move some more of my vehicles and infantry around, spreading their deployments a bit. One of the jumpships is just to go back to my father's original company roots and providing whatever area we're in with transport options."
"That has got to be an Outworlds frame of reference there, I can't imagine any other unit giving up combat units just in case they need the spares on hand." The Colonel was shaking his head at me, but Major Radulov seemed to get it. Figures the guy who actually had to transport himself and his troops over interstellar distances would get it over the militia officer.
The thing was I had spares - of Battlemechs, at least. Of my thirty six mechwarriors, twenty had still had their mechs with them when they signed up, even if the majority of them were quite heavily damaged – to the point a few had considering selling them off. I'd told them not to, that we'd hold onto them and get them fixed up eventually – priority given to the ones worst off. It was one of the side projects a lot of the techs worked on while they were on base at Merton, gradually getting them up to scratch. The vehicle and artillery crews had come to us without any of their stuff beyond what they could carry but would be easier to find things to replace them with.
And pretty much all my aerospace pilots were ex-AAA, of course. They didn't have their own rides, beyond that original squadron.
So yeah, I had eleven extra mechs currently operational – if still somewhat marginally on a couple of them – with three more able to be piloted in a worst case scenario. Shortly all but the worst damaged three would be up to the point they could be used as either training machines or as last ditch defenders, though it was looking like those three would end up being broken down for scrap since it seemed they were beyond repair.
Some of the pilots were actually looking forward to getting out of their shiny new heavy machines and back into their familiar lights. The weirdos.
A couple of hours later the meeting was over and nothing was quite yet concluded. Evangelos told me over dinner later he was pretty sure he'd already locked in the Furyand was confident they were coming around on the Union, considering how much other equipment we were forgoing. He had no clue as yet on the jumpships – both had apparently been in pirate hands for decades with no trace of their original owners to be found on board, so it was taking some time to determine if there was any outstanding claim on them that way. He thought it was a slim shot either way in the end.
Huh. If the Fury is locked in, I'm naming it Big Bobby B. You know, because mine is the Fury? Get it?
I crack me up.
If I ever get Fury tanks I'm making the crews call them different Baratheon names. I don't care if no one gets the reference, I'm the boss and sometimes I get to do whatever I want regardless.
Alright, enough getting distracted. The next few days were spent finishing up transferring prisoners to the locals, getting my crews back on to their proper dropships (and quietly hiring replacements for the ones left behind) and generally seeing the sights. A very mountainous planet, Maxwell, also a good mix of high and low tech – a lot of farming work was done with the local animal, the tarise, yet every farmer had a hover-car or two in their garage. It felt both like being back home and not, because the attitude towards tech was so different.
The only bit of business I otherwise got personally involved in – the lawyers were still meeting all week and I wasn't going near it unless I had to – was going and checking out the Hero Training Academy, which was celebrating twenty five years of training Mechwarriors for whoever wanted to send them there. It was pretty dodgy, actually – they seemed to have only recently moved from advertising on stuff like matchbook covers and word of mouth to datanet ads and they didn't really talk about the quality of the training you would get. But they did accept all comers who could pay, so they seemed to be doing okay with getting people in the doors. There was even some mention of satellite facilities being set up on other planets, at least for basic piloting instruction.
By the end of the week we'd been awarded both the Union and the Fury. They'd been completely unloaded and left for us to take whenever we wished. Leaving preparation (including hiring more crew for the new dropships) was about halfway done when we got a frantic call from Evangelos.
"We got it! The Tramp is ours!"
So we ended up delaying our departure for another day while we celebrated and looked to scare up some extra crew for our new jumpship.
It was almost the end of March by the time I was back on Merton. It would take some time but we were switching up our patrol pattern a bit too, thanks to the extra jumpship. High Haven would switch with Best Policy in accompanying the Breaks everywhere – it would go with the Roam - while Honesty would accompany Fancy Free– I'd wanted to throw a Footloose in there - as its escort. For now Big Bobby B and Little Bit O' Scrap were pretty much permanently assigned to our base.
Yes I did appoint the name for the Bobby B by decree. I would have thought Scrap was a better name for a Leopard rather than a Union, but it was still funny and fit a theme. Though what we'd name future mech transports was going to be a bit more difficult to link to it.
We'd started recruiting too, a few new mechwarriors and techs as well as new infantry and the necessary crew for the dropships and jumpships. I'd also decided to invest in some Planetlifter cargo planes after seeing some demonstrations on Maxwell of the versatility of the things. You could airlift Mechs of up to seventy tons with them, if you had too – apparently some crazy people in the Silver Hawks Irregulars actually combat dropped bug-mechs from them too. The other civilian-ish thing I'd also looked into was getting some Karnovs for lifting cargo too, since they should work well with the Cobras that were our primary jump infantry transport and could acts as replacements if I lost the advanced VTOLs.
My new infantry were just pure ground pounders recruited from the various planetary militia, not more jump infantry or marines - basically they were going to be base security, in a way. Sure they could be moved around with the Bobby B but if I had to use them I was in all kinds of trouble. It was more to free up the guys we'd been using as base security - our actual training cadre in addition to whichever unit was on base at the time - to do future recruit training, since we'd started to get people drifting in to the base looking to join up. I think McHayes was looking forward to it.
Though the base security guys would be offered the opportunity to do all the advanced training if they wanted to. Actually, I might look into seeing about getting them some sort of military police training as well, though finding something suitably generic would probably be difficult. Local laws being local laws and all.
Something that did pop up though. Apparently the Fancy Free had been one of the very few of its class to be graced with a Lithium-Fusion battery refit. It didn't work anymore - of course, since if it had the pirates would have gotten away or the Mariks would have personally seized the damn thing - but still. As soon as I get a chance to get to Helm I'd be hunting down what I needed to repair it along with the Hangar Queen's FTL engine.
My subunits continued there rotations around the systems surrounding us for another month while I looked into what we needed to do to get the aerospace cubicles ripped out of the Scrap. Take those out and replace them with better living and enviro systems, that's what I say, make those long space trips a bit more comfortable. Honestly, it was almost the most common Unionconversion. Next time Metal was on Merton for its time I'd send Scrap to Maxwell, apparently there was a couple of good engineering firms that could do the job there.
And then it was May.
Most of the month was pretty quiet, the end of the month was where it got noisy. May 22nd 3014, Anton Marik proclaimed himself Captain-General of the Free Worlds League and announced his intention to unseat his brother Janos for being unfit to rule. By the 24th word had reached Janos on Atreus. After a day of silence on the matter he declared he had no brother and issued Executive Order 1136 that proclaimed the rebelling planets and provinces were subject to the Replevin Doctrine and could expect no mercy. In other words, loyal troops could loot them to the ground and cart everything back home for the benefit of their own planets and the rebels would all face execution.
The news spread fairly quickly after that and by the end of the month my people were wondering what it meant for us. I had ordered a general recall as soon as we got the news, to bring everyone back to base including the escorting dropships for the jumpers. Luckily the only ones we had to wait for was the armour battalion – everyone else had been in the middle of transport and so arrived back home within a week. In the end I didn't wait for Leo and his battalion to return for the meeting I wanted to hold.
There was a big empty hangar at the base. Nobody knew what it had been used for originally, since it wasn't big enough for a dropship to be put inside yet didn't have any of the framework for storing mechs, planes or tanks, so we'd more or less been using it for a variety of different purposes – storage, training (a place to do PT in bad weather and somewhere to build shoot houses), social events. By now there was somewhere close to two and a half thousand people working for me so it was the one place I could gather them (most of them anyway) into one place and talk at them.
So the bleachers were assembled, extra seats procured and set out, the sound system set up and not giving multi-tonal feedback, my people were filtering into the hangar and I was trying not to puke. Hey, not afraid of public speaking, but still not used to speaking to such a large, all at once crowd. And the potential reactions to the content of my speech were making me a little nervous too. The last seats were getting filled so I stepped up to the little stage and began.
"Good afternoon everyone." There was a dull roar of replies and I smiled. "Pretty sure most of you are wondering why I've called everyone back here for this meeting. By now you'll have heard about a little rebellion happening here in the Free Worlds over on the Capellan border almost, led by Duke Anton Marik. First up, I will say that as far as I and our liaison Captain Costiniu -" I pointed out Sanda, sitting off to the left side of the stage "- are aware none of the local or provincial governments out this way intend to support Anton. So far, we have received no orders to do anything about potential rebellious elements here on Merton or in nearby systems but I can only assume that will change. And when it does, I'll be taking most of you to do whatever our orders end up being."
Some muttering from everyone came up when I said that, the Outworlders not wanting to be used to put the boot in, the more mercenary worried about doing it for cheap, the rest just generally concerned. "Look, I'm not saying we're going to go looting and pillaging everywhere we go. I'm also not saying we aren't going to be going into this without signing a new contract for proper remuneration. Nothing in our current one covers this, after all. I mean technically if a rebel unit were to come through the door right now and start to mingle with us, we would be in breach of our current contract for attacking a Free Worlds force if we tried to take them into custody." It was true. Our current contract didn't cover rebellious forces, only non-League enemies.
There was still some muttering going on but I got some cynical laughter from a couple of groups in the crowd for that last bit. "Yeah, you get it. I brought you all in here today to let you know that if we get called up we will be participating in the fighting. I'll be trying to avoid dropping us all into a meat-grinder but unless they decide to leave us here completely some of us will be seeing combat by the time it all ends."
I looked around. "Like I said, I'll try and leave some of you behind to continue on our current contract but I'm fairly certain we'll have to take the majority of our forces on whatever mission we end up being given." Dragging my gaze across the crowd I paused for a moment. Then I spread my arms out wide.
"But since you are all here, let's have a party to celebrate all being in one place!" That got a cheer from everyone, a nice little boost to the spirit. It didn't really come as a surprise, of course, because it was an in-house catered thing and a fair few of them had been involved in setting it all up.
So we celebrated for the night, just relaxed and had a bit of fun. It wasn't in preparation for people getting hurt or killed or anything like that, it was the first time since we'd landed on Merton that everyone had been together like this. Even the pirate fight most of them hadn't been together there for – that had just been the marines and the fighters. Here and now, like I said earlier, we were only missing the tank drivers. Even the majority of the dropship crews were currently here on planet with us.
Not a single one of the people I'd been funnelling to the Hangar Queen though. I'd stripped the Bonnet of the majority of its crew then replaced them. Figured it was a good way to see how trustworthy people were, put them on a Q-ship and see if they blab. If they don't, ship them off to secret derelict Warship base!
A few days later Costiniu asked to meet me in my office. He had a few things to talk to me about, apparently.
Time to start planning a cunning rescue of some Wolfs