Interlude
What, you thought you were alone in this?
A Random Bar
Galatea
June 6th, 3015
"Son of a bitch!" The twin cries went through the low hum of background conversation in the pub on the Mercenary Star. One young man sprayed his companions with beer even as the other almost deafened his offsider who'd been leaning close to him to catch his earlier words that had trailed off.
The sudden noise temporarily silenced the bar as people turned to look at the two different groups sitting about a third of the room apart before laughing and losing interest. A few eyes continued to pay attention to the two parties, but couldn't figure out what set the two young men off to begin with. Neither had been paying attention to the other before, just two groups of mercs drinking to celebrate the end of the working day here on the Mercenary Star. Even as his companions complained about the beer spray the first turned in his chair to see who had echoed his cry only to freeze as the other young man did likewise.
Holy-shit-I-know-you-how-the-fuck-are-you-here.
After a few moments of eye contact that felt like long minutes the deafener threw his head over in the direction of the bar exit and the sprayer nodded in agreement. Waving off the concerns and questions of their companions who'd noticed the two lock up on seeing each other, the two gathered their parties up and departed the bar. They stood outside the door for a second, before asking each other a single worded question.
"Magical?"
"Furnace?"
They nodded in response to each other. There was a few seconds silence, and then they started moving.
"You have a secure room?" The deafener asked. The sprayer nodded, pulled out a notepad and pencil out of his pants pocket and quickly jotted something down.
"Be here in half an hour. I'll clear you and however many of your people you want to bring through, but I think we need to talk in private."
The two went their separate ways, continuing to avoid answering the questions of their compatriots while on the street.
"Jarrod, for fucks sake answer us! What the hell was all that about!" One of the sprayers' people finally snapped, slugging him in the arm as they finished climbing into their transport back to base.
"Fucks sake Lydia, keep your mouth shut for now. I'll explain back at base. Hold your horses till then." He hadn't known most of the people with him at all six months ago, but Lydia had joined him in leaving the 'Ring when he'd gotten word of his inheritance. She was his second in command for now, until they started getting more up to speed. Him swearing back at her like that got everyone to shut up, though the weird looks they'd been sharing increased.
Maximo (the deafener) had a similar talk with his subordinates Keru and Kamala as they raced back to their hotel rooms to pick up the few extra they'd brought with them to Solaris that hadn't stayed with the dropships that they'd brought here rather than leaving with their other jumpship. He grabbed a few more of his people and some things from his room before returning to the transport, dragging everyone along in his wake.
A short trip back across the district had Maximo and his people pulling up at the address, a small barracks/office combo. The guard at the gate pulled them up briefly, checking the inside of the van before waving it through. Another guard waved them to a parking spot and then took them inside to the meeting room where half a dozen people waited.
Jarrod was the only one standing. "People, the two of us need to have a chat first before we can share what's going on. Wait here, we'll be next door."
He walked out, Maximo following him and telling his own people to join the others in sitting. The two went to the other conference room, Jarrod opening the door and waving Maximo through before shutting it firmly behind him.
"Jesus Christ, Maxie! What the hell are you doing here!" Jarrod snapped. He started pacing up and down the room, Maximo mirroring him on the other side of the table.
"What am I doing here, what in Cheffies name are you doing here?"
The two kept pacing each other up and down the room, before Jarrod stopped and started laughing. Maximo slowed down, looking at him askance before starting to laugh too. The two sounded semi-crazed but it seemed to work to calm themselves down, Jarrod gesturing towards the chairs. After they were seated he spoke again.
"And what the hell has Damon been doing, getting involved in Anton's Rebellion when we both barely made it to Galatea? At least, I'm assuming you just got here. I woke up on Tharkad at the beginning of the year with a massive hangover and a lawyer calling me saying my dad was dead."
"Hell if I know what the lunatic has been up to, maybe he came to on Atreus, but that sounds similar to what happened to me. I woke up on Terra – more exactly one of the orbitals, also hungover as hell and a lawyer calling to say my sperm donor had died."
The two were leant back in their respective chairs now and started sharing their respective stories. Jarrod had just finished his second year at the Nagelring, the premier Lyran military academy, having made it in as a Mechwarrior candidate. His father had found an SLDF Star Lord jumpship floating derelict while doing an anti-pirate run, sweeping empty systems with his Leopard-CV Risky Business and squadron of ASFs off of the Merchant he had had shares in. Since it had been a private contract – and he'd somehow contrived to hold both ends of the contract as well – he'd been the one to have sole majority claim to the jumpship and the four dropships attached, an Overlord, Lee, Union-CV and a Mule. Investigating the derelict produced the information that it had been sabotaged by a Rim Worlds agent after picking up materials from the conquered Republic during the Amaris War, to be sent to the SLDF armies marching through the Hegemony. The agent had implanted a virus to feed the wrong jump coordinates to the navigational computers and then post-jump completely vent all the ships of atmosphere, killing everyone on board. Repairs had been simple and they'd begun making their way towards Galatea to find meat to crew the metal, a full combined-arms regiment, when disaster struck – a piece of the malicious coding had somehow survived and opened an airlock when someone was walking past – his father.
Jarrod was his father's eldest, even though he'd never married either of his three children's mothers. He had once held a position of some importance back in the Magistracy of Canopus, but had had to flee in disgrace with his personal dropship and fighter squadron before he'd fathered his offspring. He'd made his way to Lyran space and brought into a transport group, providing them with anti-pirate/raider cover and continued to invest in other business opportunities. His niece would inherit the position back in the Magistracy, while his two younger children were still teens and had money held in trust for them – or positions with big brother if they wanted it.
His father had also had records of ancestors who had also woken up on their twentieth birthdays having lived an entire life in a different 21st century Terra. Unfortunately the complete records archive had long since been lost due to various misfortunes, only a couple of random phrases had survived the centuries since the second son of the last insert had fled the Rim Worlds Republic barely a step ahead of people – SLDF, Lyrans and even other Rim Worlders - hunting down former Republican soldiers.
Maximo had grown up in this life as an absolutely flight mad young lad on Terra. By the time he was sixteen he'd finished off all airbreather qualifications he could get on the homeworld and had gone in search of more in space. His father had been a business man from the Free Worlds, who'd encountered his mother on a business trip to the homeworld and indulged himself – even though he was married with kids back home, a minor noble of an unaligned world. Using old family records to first track them down (it had taken fifteen years due to the vague nature of the clues) he'd then leveraged his trading connections to find the two Invader jumpships that had been hidden away years ago, still carrying five dropships – three Fortress-classes, one Mule and another Union-CV – carrying again a full combined-arms regiment worth of gear.
Those records were from the third son of the last insert, having been a member of the civilian Republic government that Amaris had brought along with him to Terra to govern the Amaris Empire. He'd diverted the equipment and left the clues, knowing (or at least hoping) that a descendant of his would need to use it many years in the future. He'd then survived the SLDF counter-attack on the Hegemony by having assisted resistance cells during the occupation, helping them to escape raids as well as supplying them with weapons to fight back. He'd settled down and started a family on the world he'd helped before eventually leaving the Hegemony during the First Succession War to settle in the League after the terraforming began failing due to lack of infrastructure, leading to the world dying. Again during the scramble they'd lost the pre-written history/predictions, leaving them solely with the knowledge that they'd known what could happen but didn't have access to it anymore, just the personal writings of the third son and things he remembered.
They figured Damon was also descended from one of that family too – there had been another brother and sister which their respective ancestors had lost track of as well, after all.
"And the bastard must have a plan for Helm too, if he's managed to get the landhold there. We need to work together, but how are we going to sell it to everyone without making it seem super suspicious?" Maximo was leaning forward as he said it. "He could be from anywhere, and our closest blood relation to each other is apparently two hundred and fifty odd years back. How can we not make it seem fully random?"
Jarrod was quiet for a bit before he answered. "Did you ever have an imaginary friend as a kid?"
His answer was a snort. "No, not as I can remember – in either life."
Unperturbed, he continued. "Look, there are a few different semi-psychic elements to this whole universe – phantom mech, a small amount of people who seem to have genuinely been precognitive, and I'm not just talking about the Scorpions or the Nova Cats but other places too, some of that whole Drac chi bullshit. We can just claim we both saw one of our imaginary friends all grown up on the screen, only to look across the bar at the other one. And now, since our first friend has apparently made something of himself in the here and now, we are going to go and see if it really is Lancer – and if he can use a hand."
Maximo nodded his head slowly, running the idea through his brain. "I think we can make it work. Unless you want to try and do an end-run around him to get to the cache, use that for getting our own prestige up?"
"Man, you can be a bit of a prick Maxie. No, I'd rather not raise too many eyebrows than I have to – I've already got far too many lostech machines in my roster, that's enough attention for me."
He shrugged. "Had to ask, devil's advocate and all that. I'm in the same boat too, with the loot I got. How did we both get so lucky to get SLDF grade equipment in this era? And also to be young again!"
"If Warsie was here I'd suggest he was giving whatever ROB was involved a handie under the table, but the two – no, the three of us? That can't be it."
The two of them chuckled a bit before falling silent for a time, thinking on the what and hows of being where they were now. After a few moments, Maximo shook himself out of his funk.
"So, how do we sell it to the people next door?"
Five minutes later, twenty minutes after leaving their subordinates in the other room, Jarrod and Maximo headed back to rejoin them. Twenty minutes after that– and a fair amount of uproar and raised eyebrows – they had the basic outline of a plan to merge their two separate units along with what recruits they'd currently managed to gather together, then leave Galatea. An hour later they'd convinced everyone that they weren't crazy, they had known each other for years even across the light years and that their third friend was out there waiting for them to go and join them. Now the two groups split up and made preparations to leave.
Destination, Helm.