Valiant Defender's Main Compound
Helm, Free World's League
26th August, 3015
"Colonel Karter, I'd like to introduce Misters Jarrod McKenzie and Maximo Cutino. They say they have an offer for you." Etsuko had led the two familiar figures into the room and was performing the introductions. "Mister McKenzie, Mister Cutino, Colonel Karter."
"Thank you, Etsuko, I'll be fine taking care of these two on my own for now. If it seems like their offer has strength to it I'll bring you back in to weigh in on it then." I needed her out of the office to ask these two the questions that were burning a hole in my mind, so I was a bit blunter than I would normally have been with her but she just bowed her head to me slightly in acknowledgement and then made her farewells, closing the door behind herself on the way out. The two newcomers had come forward and now seated themselves in the chairs across from me, both of them grinning at my badly hidden wondering shock.
"Christ Lancer, act less suspicious. Anyone would think you knew the two randoms who came from nowhere to meet with you." He was friendly yet quietly snarky, almost soft-spoken. Damn, he even sounded the same as Furnace – Jarrod – sounded like the few times I'd met him in person back in that other life. And he even looked almost the same – that weird hair colour that was almost brunette, almost blonde, almost redheaded, thin build and average height – except I'd never known him when he was twenty.
"Yeah Lancer. Try not to give the game away!" Magical – Maximo – sounded a bit different, hints of accents he had never had before, but still spoke the exact same way. He was smirking insolently at me, looking the most physically different of the three of us – a bit more Italian in him this time, instead of him putting himself in an Italian. I cringed internally even as I thought it, he'd been about to get married to his long-term girlfriend last time I'd spoken to him and it had been a crude joke he'd made several times over the course of that relationship. He was still somehow a ginger though and otherwise physically similar – also not as big an age difference between now and when I'd first met him, fresh out of his final exam for his university degree and hitting the town to celebrate.
"Fucking hell Magical, Furnace, how by all the gods dark and light are you two even here?" I threw my hands up in a combination of exasperation and joy. "I mean, I know that other people have been inserted into this shitshow universe, but one at a time, not three at once!"
Jarrod levered himself to the edge of his seat and steepled his hands in front of himself. "Yeah, imagine our shock when we were on Galatea in June getting ready to start up our recruitment drives when we saw you on the screen getting your awards for New Delos. Hell, we didn't even know the other one of us was there, in that very same bar, until we both shouted bullshit as loud as we could. I sprayed my friend with a mouthful of beer, I was so shocked."
Maximo had twisted himself around in the chair so one leg was cocked over the arm, swinging a little as it hung there. "Yeah, I almost deafened my dropship pilot when I shouted in his ear. Then I thought I'd heard an echo of bullshit so I looked around the bar and made eye-contact with him doing the exact same thing."
He'd jerked his head over at Jarrod at the end there, still smirking. I slumped backwards in my chair. "Well damn, I don't feel half as special any more, even though this is fantastic. It's great to see you two! So, recruiting on Galatea? Your father's in the here and now gave you some toys to play with too?"
The two nodded and launched into their stories. Jarrod had been at the Nagelring, having just finished his second year as a mechwarrior cadet. The New Years celebration he'd been a part of had also hammered him hard, so waking up to hear his genetic paternal donor had died and left him a lot of hardware had come as a bit of a shock on top of waking up in a body over twenty years younger that was experiencing a massive hangover. He'd resigned from the 'Ring that very day, a few of his friends had decided to tag along with him after hearing of the windfall. They'd been picked up by the Risky Business, the Leopard-CV which had brought the old man's crew to Tharkad – his father's personal dropship, which carried his loyal squadron of fighters. Many years before it had been the only thing he'd taken with him when he'd had to flee the Magistracy due to some indiscretions and he'd used it to form a small merc company providing convoy protection. It had kept him in money and allowed for several investments in jumpship and cargo services in lieu of actual payment.
It was a similar but different story to mine. Jarrod had never met his father and had mainly gotten the inheritance because he was the eldest child of the unmarried bachelor, as well as because he was in the Nagelring preparing to serve his nation. His mother had died shortly before he'd left to begin training and as such had nothing tying him back home, except for twin half-siblings who were still underage – a part of his father's fortune was tied up in waiting for them to decide if they wanted a cash payout or to join big brother as soldiers of fortune. His father had had family stories of the previous inserts but that line had long lost the actual writings, though when'd stumbled across the drifting jumpship he'd realised that it potentially meant one of his children was the next in line to continue that family tradition - and since it was almost Jarrod's birthday he'd figured it was him. He'd set about preparing the ships for transport only to die before he could hand it over in person.
"I had the use of the Merchant my father had managed to get a lot of shares in for a month, which was enough to get me to where the Star Lord he'd found had relocated. Then it defaulted to the parent company and they paid out the shares, which is where I got the majority of the money I have. From there we headed to Galatea, in a kind of roundabout route. Detached the Risky Business in a system a couple of jumps out and collar-hung the rest of the way while the Star Lord took the others to a quiet system nearby and went dark, waiting for us to get back to them – they were running a shuttle to the HPG on the planet every fortnight. We'd picked up a few more flight crews and a couple of Dispossessed mechwarriors and their techs but were taking it easy, trying to insure there was less of a chance of someone setting us up to be fleeced or rolled for the gear – there are a lot of lostech systems in amongst what I got handed to me and I don't want to wake up to find my throat has a new speaking hole because someone decided that using a knife was easier than paying for it. Then we were sitting in the bar one night just keeping up with the news when, bam!" Jarrod mimed an explosion with both hands.
Maximo began his tale next. He'd woken up in an orbital station above Terra, again hungover as hell and being informed that his father had died. His father had been a minor noble and business man from the Free Worlds and during one of his visits to the motherworld had met Maxie's mother and had a fling. Hence Maximo was the only one of us with elder siblings, the sister who had inherited his father's actual title and lands and two other sisters, though they had agreed prior to their father's death to let Maximo have the equipment their father had found in a long-lost journal his ex-Rim World government worker ancestor had left - of how he'd faked orders to cache two jumpships with a load of SLDF materials in a dead system - and then leveraged his business connections to retrieve it for his bastard son, also believing that Maximo would be the next insert.
He'd grown up on Terra, but been absolutely flight mad as a child, spending every second he could behind the flight-stick of whatever he could get into – he'd wound up having all his qualifications for up to multi-engine conventional aircraft and up to small craft for void-piloting – and had been celebrating his new job that New Years piloting shuttles around Earth-Luna space (with the potential to go on runs out to Mars and Venus) when he'd gotten the news, especially after losing his mother – who'd always encouraged him to go for his dreams - only the month before in a vehicle accident. He'd had to get a lift out of Sol before linking up with the two Invaders that comprised his space lift, fully crewed by people his father had employed and vetted. He'd taken them both towards Galatea and then done something similar to Jarrod, stashing one of them in a nearby system while taking the other to the Mercenary Star to recruit, taking with it the least impressive dropships and their cargo. Except he'd been even more hesitant about recruiting – he hadn't wanted to broadcast he had three more dropships filled with lostech tanks and mechs with its own jumpship, so had been primarily recruiting pilots to protect his haul against anyone trying to grab them in the void.
After Maximo had finished I gave them my run down. An older SLDF convoy found out near the borders of the Suns and the Combine inside the Outworlds, being raised to take over my father's businesses but not his land due to my being a bastard and the trials of dealing with my gold-digging mother before she'd left for good, the trip from Alpheratz to Galatea and then taking the contract for Marik out on the Periphery border.
"I woke up a few years earlier than you two so I had a few more options. In the end I picked Marik because I figured I'd be able to leverage fighting against Anton into a landhold on Helm and what do you know, it worked! Now I've just been waiting for things to calm the hell down so I can slip away and inspect the cache – which you've thrown another wrench in my plan to get out there, coming now." I grumbled at the two of them, almost petulantly. The two of them smiled merrily at me in response for a moment, the bastards. I wanted to see the goodies!
"Why go the long route though, why not go straight to one of the Houses? Especially Katrina or Hanse?" Maximo was the one to ask me, but from the sharp interest in Jarrod's eyes I knew he wanted to know too but been beaten to the asking.
"Well, for one, Ian was First Prince when I woke up and as I travelled through the Suns, he only died a few years ago – that's why no Hanse. I thought long and hard about taking it to Katrina, but in the end I decided that it was better off not going directly to any House but come at it at an angle. How would I prove that I knew the cache was under the mountain? What surety could I provide? I didn't like any of the options that were available to me there, let alone taking it one of the other Houses or one of the Periphery states either. No way in hell was I going to even hint at offering it to the Combine or the Confederation though, you know my opinion on those two." They nodded in agreement. Many an argument had the three of us had with the two Kurita fanboys and the Liao one in our MWO group about the impossibility of those two actually having functional star nations as the parodies they were portrayed as in the fiction. The actual versions of them still held elements of WTF but it at least made some sense from both an internal and external viewpoint even if it still seemed wrong – the context of it all made sense and let it work, if that makes sense.
"Marik was right out, even going with my plan to fight against Anton. The League is too fractured, either internal enemies would waste it or let it get stolen and external ones would destroy it. No, the idea is grab the landhold, get the memory core copied and split up as much as possible and get the best loot out and then remove the memory core entirely – preferably without destroying the whole complex. If the core can't be removed without activating the self-destruct loot everything down to the bedrock and then remove the core, blaming the destruction on finding the cache and accidentally triggering a self-destruct." I took a breath and continued. I hadn't told them this little factoid yet. "Store the material away on the Newgrange my aerospace wing found derelict in a dead system that had been used as a pirate base since sometime early in the First Succession War that has a repairable KF-drive – which I'll need to access the library to figure out how to actually make the parts needed for the repairs that need doing – then take everything back to the Outworlds well before the Clan Invasion hits and resettle worlds in the Outland Wastes."
They had both almost came out of their chairs, Jarrod barely stopping himself with the desk and Maximo twisting himself around to put his feet on the stairs. They both shouted in unison once I finished speaking, having somehow held themselves back until then.
"You have a WARSHIP!"
I laughed at their reaction, serves them right for dropping in on me like this. "No, I don't have a Warship, I have a heavily damaged Newgrange yardship with no weapons, minimal and spotty armour, heavily damaged system- and KF-drives, no manufacturing or repair capabilities, three jammed and occupied docking collars and two dead grav-decks with one only working about fifty percent. I told the League I dropped it into a gas giant but I left a crew behind and moved it to a different location in the system to hide it. Once I know how to make the stuff I need to do the repairs for the KF-core I'll have it start working its way here, so I don't have to jump across half the damn League to hide the loot."
From there I shared the outlines of my father's plan, to resettle or garrison worlds in the Wastes to bring them back into the Outworlds proper, or even form a smaller independent nation if it worked out that way, using the Newgrange as an orbital depot/factory if I could buy, beg, borrow or steal the things I need to rebuild and convert it to be able to do so. I was hoping in the next couple of years to start sending stuff back that way, not stuff from Helm or my unit but current era vehicles or salvaged mechs and fighters, enough to hopefully stock up a few battalions of armour or mechanised infantry at a minimum to pay off any ill will that might be hanging around from absconding with my stuff four and a half years ago.
"There is some rich worlds out there that were abandoned because without the SLDF there was no one to defend them – especially with the Omniss forcing through stricter penalties about using mercenaries for defence, against both the mercs and their hirers." I explained. "And with the Hangar Queen as an orbital factory and the memory core techs available we'd be able to build the tech required to keep up our advanced machines. And then there's the ones where the terraforming stalled or failed too."
The two of them looked at each other and seemed to be having a conversation without talking. Weird, I didn't think they would know each other well enough, in person at least, to do that trick.
"So, not going to warn anyone about the Clans coming?" Jarrod was the one who spoke up, though Maximo was nodding along even as he began. I'd put a lot more thought into this over the last few years and I think I had a solution.
"Of course I'm going to warn people, but honestly I can't do a hell of a lot yet. If I let the core tech spread straight away, or tell anybody anything before the Dragoons go back to report for the final time in 3019 about the Clans it could trigger the invasion three decades early. Remember, the only thing keeping the Crusader Clans from forming a majority and kicking off the invasion is the reports from the Dragoons that the Inner Sphere is on the verge of collapse and so they don't need to invade – any hint of a technical resurgence or something like the Federated Commonwealth would see the Crusader's numbers surge and boom! It was hard enough to stop them when tech levels here were on the rise, but while we're still at the bottom of the plunge? Impossible, they'll be in Terra before the Comguards get a chance to un-mothball their caches and recruit enough bodies to use it. There's too many butterflies I can stir up to cause potential hurricanes, so a lot of things I'll wait until I have a fewer failure points available." I spread my hands. Too many of our ancestor-inserts had tried to make sweeping changes and failed, the only one to succeed in her appointed task just made it so that the Battlemech designs she'd stolen were a bit more widespread at the time. There had to be a reason for that.
"I will point out one thing I've done that could be a factor there – Joshua Wolf is still alive, as is Jaime's wife and daughters. What effect that will have down the line, how that will change Misery and the events leading up to it and after that, I don't know. I've been praying it will be positive and potentially give me an in with them down the line – if I can prod them to actually follow their Khan's orders and prepare the Inner Sphere for the invasion it would be fantastic, even more if they do it on their own, but otherwise I hope to get a hold of omni-technology for my own use. They've been sharing that with Blackwell to make those vehicles they produce for them."
It might be kind of a long shot but hey, if I got a visitor from the Dragoons asking for something they could give me in return for saving their people it would be permission to buy the Bandit or the Badger APCs, maybe along with the Kestrel and the Peregrine VTOLs. The two APCs were pretty well armed and versatile, especially some of the alternate configurations. Their main use would be used as the basis for my own R&D efforts into reverse-engineering omni-technology – unless I could figure out a way to imply I understood just how modular the two APCs were.
Though I'd also hope to have a word with them in about six years' time to see about getting any of that sweet Clan-tech they might have access to when they get cut off. It might have to be put off until I can see if they get sucked into the events leading to Misery, or find some other way to help them in the interim that lets me be in position to ask either way.
"I've also been laying the plans for being able to have a go at New Dallas without having to sneak in – outright ask Comstar for permission to go after the older militia bunkers, the ones that wouldn't have been used up when they were trying to fight off Amaris or later the Mariks. Still not quite sure how I'm going to spin how I know about it though, plus I want to see what is actually inside the cache here non-warfighting wise first. Might have to use whatever I get to keep out of that as a bribe, it should interest them at least."
Maximo let out a low whistle of disbelief even as Jarrod's jaw dropped slightly. "You're going to ask the robes to grave-rob? Really?"
"Well, not grave-rob, but go in and get the things that have been stored away since before the Reunification War." I shrugged as I spread my hands. "The stuff is so primitive it will cost almost as much to rebuild as build new in the first place, unless you're gifting it to people who would mainly be fighting pirates – which would be the main plan for their usage. I don't think I'd be keeping the majority of the stuff for myself, maybe a few choice pieces – the rest of any share I got to keep would be going to the Outworlds ahead of time. The hardest part would be keeping the memory core that's the real prize there out of sight of any observers."
"What about other places? Columbus, Phecda, the Argo. Any plans for them?" They'd both gone thoughtful and then seemed to find themselves in agreement with me on New Dallas, but now Jarrod had more questions. I shook my head.
"Phecda, maybe if I could swing a contract there before the Irregulars find it. The Argo, the same sort of thing, if I could get out there I'd take it – I think I could find a use for being able to carry a dropship with another dropship, don't you? Also as a forward operations base in a system it's pretty good but otherwise it's a bit of a boondoggle. Columbus I have no idea how I'd get out there and loot it without tipping people off that it was there. Maybe if I'd been able to go straight there from Alpheratz when I woke up but since then I've kind of had too big a visual profile. I've thought about dropping hints into peoples' ears about salvageable Warships and things like the Ruins of Gabriel but again, cannot risk getting word of some stuff getting out and setting off the Invasion or even the Jihad decades early."
"Well damn man, you've put a lot of thought into this. I honestly don't know if I'm past the "fuck yeah Battletech!" stage, myself." Maximo threw up the horns as he finished his sentence, causing Jarrod and I to chuckle. "But I'd rather work with you two than against you. I'm in. Even if we do go to the Outworlds because at least out there will be pilots who are as half as good as I am."
We jeered him a little bit, though he'd been incredibly good at all sorts of flying games and it seemed like his youth here had prepared him to transfer those skills into actual real world ones. As we all quieted down I look Jarrod in the eyes, noticing Maximo was too.
"How about you Furnace? I'll take the lead for now, but it'll be the three of us long term. Just like back home, except with real stompy robots this time." I put my hand out flat, stretching it over the desk towards the two of them.
"I'm in too. Let's see how this goes." He slid his hand over the top of mine, then Maximo slammed his down on top of both of them.
"Go team go!" he shouted and then started laughing hysterically. Goddamn injokes from old voicechats. I shook my head.
"Right, well, welcome to the Valiant Defenders mercenary group. I'll put you down as Lieutenant Colonels for now, we'll transfer your machines and people to our rosters too and go from there. Now, how do we sell it to our respective people so they don't think we're crazy?"
That seemed to be something we'd all thought of separately – ways to tell people we knew what was going to happen in the future without revealing we were from a time and place where this was fiction. Luckily there was some precedent in the wider universe for people having various types of precognitive visions – for a not-widely known example one of the prior Comstar Primus's had had a vision which would later show she'd forseen the Clan Invasion, a wave of animal totems sweeping in from the top of the maps aiming at Terra. She'd pushed to form the Explorer Corp to try and find them and stop them early – which backfired incredibly badly, as it would be an Explorer Corp jumpship arriving above Huntress that would trigger the Invasion in the first place. Several members of the extended Cameron family had reportedly had visions of the future and it seemed to pop up intermittently across human space in general – we'd just have to play it up as popping up in our family history every now and then. We could even then use the written records (or at least an edited version of them) to provide the truth, since we'd had so many ancestors wrote of things that weren't going to happen for centuries back when they'd been alive.
Then we just had to link how we knew each other and luckily the two of them had already done most of the work with having had to convince their own people that they hadn't gone insane. It didn't necessarily make sense but we were going to say we were all each others imaginary friends growing up. No idea how it actually worked but I'd been the oldest, those two had been the youngest and we'd had several other friends, all of whom had seemed to have gotten sick or suddenly disappeared on us one at a time over the years. That was how we'd recognized each other, we had known each other as children.
From there we linked it to our family line also having been precognitive to various degrees, sort of pushing the idea that our other "friends" had been other descendants who had passed away, leaving us as the sole inheritors of our family legacies – various low-level spooky powers. It was a total load of crap, but it would have to do.
We spent the rest of the days getting the paperwork sorted out and figuring out where we were going to put things in the interim. The two of them returned to their dropships momentarily to send a message off to the jumpship they'd come in on to go and get the others and bring everything down, then came back and got stuck into the rest of the paperwork with me.
The main thing was sorting out what we could risk taking damage in combat from what we couldn't. It was going to take a while. Luckily neither had registered the full extent of their resources when they'd arrived on Galatea, having been content to recruit people they could trust and grow from there. All in all it meant a straight up addition of three more jumpships, ten more dropships, plus similar to what I had in my original cache for each of them – one each of a Mech battalion, tank battalion and infantry battalion, transports, artillery and other assorted vehicles as well as a wing of aerospace fighters. The main difference was they had a lot more advanced equipment, hell, outright Royal grade equipment than I had.
There was no way we'd be able to openly use a lot of it. People would be all over us trying to get their hands on it or not let us have it at all. It would be even more difficult to replace the lost systems than what it was already with my stuff!
Two days later I'd had enough of dealing with the minutia. I'd been planning on going on a little spelunking trip around now anyways so I told everyone I was going exploring in the mountains for the day, grabbed Jarrod and Maximo even as they got up to follow me out then grabbed Cammi and told her she was going to be my pilot for the day. We loaded up with a whole bunch of equipment for laying out signal relays – for use in exercises and communication lines in case of an attack - then boarded her Ripper.
A couple of hours later she landed on the dry riverbed just around the valley corner from what I was ninety percent certain was the cache entryway. Her and her co-pilot remained behind while the three of us grabbed our gear and headed towards the otherwise dead end. The large flat space was enough to land a handful of dropships here, especially if you were using Unions or Mules, and at the end of the valley was a distinctive "rock" formation.
The truncated inverted pyramid of the gatehouse. There it was, the entrance to probably the single greatest store of lostech and other materials outside of a Brian Cache. The three of us made our way over to it and easily managed to open the door. There was a computer terminal inside, seemingly determined to remain off to all three of our efforts.
"Right, where's the map chip, one of you two should have it. Might as well just try and plug it in." I gestured at the slot we'd managed to uncover, taking a sip of my canteen water. The two of them looked at each other and then back at me.
"When'd you give it to one of us?"
"Yeah, I haven't got it."
I sighed. "Damn it, one of you must have left it back at the… no, I can't do it. I was going to say one of you two has to go back to the Ripper to get it then open it when you were half way to the bend but I can't. Hang on." I swung my backpack around and onto the ground before reaching inside the upper compartment, retrieving the battered memory chip from its case quickly. The two were rolling their eyes at me as I did it, then moved up next to me as I moved up to the console.
"Open Sesame."
Pushing the chip in didn't provoke a reaction out here, the terminal remained blank. But very quickly we could hear rock grinding and rushed outside. The ground was vibrating and loose rocks were rattling around, but the door was opening.
The three of us stood there for a few minutes after it finished opening, a dark gap ten metres tall by twenty wide. Then as one we stepped forward to go exploring.
You can't make a plan if you don't know what you have to use with it…