Helmfast
Helm
20th September, 3015
It took nearly a month but we'd finally finished fully exploring the cache and knew what we had, right down to the last bullet. A full SLDF Division sized force, three RCTs with a full battalion of supporting elements - aerospace, artillery, engineering – for a total of a regiment of each, three hundred and sixty four mechs, seven hundred and twenty combat vehicles, gear for three infantry regiments including APCs, sixty aerospace fighters, a hundred and eight artillery pieces and a wide assortment of support vehicles in total. There was spares and ammo to keep it all running for six months, including food and water processing equipment, as well as things like disaster relief packs.
There was also a supply of ship parts, for a few different kinds of vessel - dropship, jumpship and warship. Unfortunately nothing we needed to repair the KF-drive on the Hangar Queen, but it would help speed up other repairs.
Now I just needed to set up a routine of searching around Freeport and other sites in the vicinity, so that when I "find" the cache publically there's evidence I've been looking for it off and on until I'm ready to reveal it – once it's emptied out of everything I want.
We'd also settled Jarrod and Maxie's (he was insistent on being called that, said he kept feeling like his mother was standing behind him waving a finger at him when we called him Maximo) dropships down on the planet and begun to reorganise the units, including working out the legal relationship between who owned what, who's responsibilities they were and how it was used by the unit. The two of them had been handed down units that had been "lost" during the Amaris War, hence having even more cutting edge systems on board. Maxie even had a chunk of Royal-grade equipment, stuff looted by Rim Worlds Republic from Terra and meant to equip their troops which had been… rerouted.
Jarrod brought with him an Overlord, a Lee, a Mule and a Union-CV in addition to his Leopard-CV, Risky Business, all fully manned. Maxie had three Fortress's, a Mule and finally another Union-CV – though only the Mule was manned fully, the rest had skeleton crews. They were carrying two more battalions of mechs, four more of vehicles and two more battalions worth of infantry gear, two wings and a squadron of fighters, an artillery battalion and similar numbers of supporting craft towards what I currently, just doubled. The three jumpships were fully manned and repaired, so after some discussion we decided to have the two Invaders – Long Dark Night and Moonlit – go establish local trade links, setting them a month and a half long cycle to surrounding systems, coming back every here every few jumps. The Star Lord, the Celestial Ego, remained behind in case we wanted to deploy something out-system for whatever reason that might deelop.
Between the two of them we had nearly three more squadrons of pilots and their tech crews as well as two lances of mechwarriors and their techs. Neither of them had recruited any additional support staff, infantry or vehicles crews so we were well short of personnel in comparison to our equipment now. Etsuko was given an updated list of our recruiting requirements when she departed for Galatea as well as changed instructions – previously Evangelos had been looking for formed units, lances and companies with their own dropships that might want to join a smaller unit as well as promising recruits and trainers, as well as snagging any combat or civil engineers he could get whereas now we wanted bodies even without machines. All our dropship and jumpship captains had standing orders to look for new recruits to bring on board so we could cycle our trusted crews out to the Queen or onto the Bonnet, so we weren't looking on Galatea for that.
Jarrod took his mechwarrior recruits and used them to formally create our Third Battalion, while Maxie set himself up as Second Wing leader with both of their pilot pools. I told Samira that she could have Third Wing if she wanted, otherwise we'd crew it fully with new people, as well as composing messages to Jessica, Jaye and the rest to explain what was happening and our extra windfall. I sent along some preliminary organisation tables, more just making people aware of what we had available to us now then trying to lock it in stone – I did have a firmer handle on the details this day but it would come down to the people running the individual companies, lances and squadrons how they wanted to set themselves up.
The only definite change I made was switching out the current Home Guard mech company, the former Second Company, with some mechs from the new stuff – a lance each of Lancelot LNC25-01sl's, Kintaro KTO-19s and Lynx LNX-9Qs, with the techs on hand switching out the NARCs on the Kintaros for 6-tube SRM launchers. Jarrod arranged to swap ownership of his Overlord and Lee for Maxie's three Fortress's to use them for his battalion, allowing him to spread out his unit to multiple worlds and we were looking into converting one of the two Mule's as an additional troop transport as well as passenger carrier, unless we could get our hands on a Condor or Seekerwith similar modifications to the Low-Brow. That could wait until the third Jump Infantry battalion was starting to form up so we had some time to decide on what exactly we needed and which Mule to do it to, or pay for a new dropship for the other options.
We also talked about looking for someone who would want either of our two Overlords for an equivalent carrying capacity of Unions, with maybe an extra aerospace carrier or two thrown in – especially since we were looking at smaller detachments on multiple worlds. I favoured getting two more Leopard-CVs, since I wanted one always riding herd on either of our two larger jumpships.
Something both Maxie and I insisted on was getting two of the pilots in Jarrod's ASF squadron out of their Lucifers. We took their suicide sleds off of them and put them in two of the new Gothas instead, that way if the worst happened they could at least have the chance to eject. Most of the squadrons were pretty forthright in setting up on paper, but we'd discovered that the two shot down Tomahawks had suffered sufficient damage they needed to be replaced – testing during repairs found several issues that meant it was too risky to try actual flight with them. Instead, they got two Royal Tomahawks as replacements, since I had two "free".
The final decision was to put some of the more high profile lostech mechs away - Five Highlander HGN-732s, four Excalibur EXC-B2s, a Victor VTR-9D, Pillager PLG-3Z and a Crusader CRD-1R and the real super rares – ones we weren't even letting our own people know we had, Jarrod and his friend Lydia had been the ones to move them from where they were stored away on the dropships up the Nagayan Mountains - four Exterminator EXT-4Ds and four Spector SPR-4Fs. There was some discussion of chucking the Alacorn MkVIs and Fury tanks into that particular cache too – since they were Gauss Rifle-equipped designs and it would be almost impossible to replace those systems if they lost any, even considering the spares we had on board and ones we'd found in the cache here on Helm – but they provided enough of an extra firepower punch to the vehicle groups that we agreed to keep them in the end.
Now onto the real prize, the memory core. I'd procured a number of blank memory cores years ago, under the pretence of using them to record our operations and review later for training purposes, storing them away on the Bonnet and leaving them alone so that everyone forgot about them, quietly getting them taken off and put in a warehouse before it had left Helm for Merton. Maxie had taken a few of them along on a Vector he'd spun up and taken on a trip, carrying them with one of the loading exoskeletons from the Mule so he could handle it himself. I'd spent a day up there myself before that scanning through the programming and trying to figure out what I could about exporting the information without tripping any booby-traps. Luckily, Major Keeler – he of the incredible foresight – hadn't left any tricks behind in regards to that. I found the self-destruct codes though and carefully steered away from them, I wasn't up to disarming them yet – I'd have to try and vet someone else with better skills to have a go when the cache was cleared out.
Gradually we copied cores over and then brought them back to the plateau one at a time over the course of a week, then spent time browsing through them. I'd isolated the things I needed for the KF-drive repairs and spun them off to a smaller drive when a small opportunity arose to spread some knowledge elsewhere.
One of the injured jump troopers wasn't going to recover for a decent quality of life without cybernetics and since we were in the Free Worlds - where there was a bit of stigma about the whole issue - we were sending him back home to the Federated Suns for his surgery and recovery, as well as discharging him from service. Even with the replacement limbs there was a high chance he wouldn't be combat effective again, meaning he'd never soldier again outside of a militia outfit and even with the payout and medical insurance it was going to be tough for him.
That's why I visited him late one night with a small satchel full of data chips.
"Here, for your retirement." I told him as I handed it over. He looked very puzzled, so I explained a bit. "It's a bunch of data chips from the Newgrange the marines took. We weren't able to get through the encryption here – " an outright lie considering I'd encrypted them myself two hours ago using a key I'd found in the core "- but that new NAIS of Hanse Davion's should have something that can get through it when they finish building it, hopefully there's something useful. But remember – one of the marines gave it to you, as a farewell gift."
If anything he looked even more puzzled, also a little bit concerned. After all, something like this I should be selling off myself, or handing over to the Mariks for them to decide what to do with. Not handing it over to an infantryman going away for treatment.
"Hey, there's equally every chance it's useless as it being something useful. When you get home get in touch with someone and pass it up the chain, or take it to New Avalon yourself. Whatever comes of it is yours, though if you want to kick some back this way we won't say no." I winked, patted him on the shoulder and left the room.
Everything on there was information on Hegemony technologies. Mainly to do with medical and terraforming equipment and techniques, though there were several minor industrial processes that were involved with the creation of the more high-end structural and armour technologies, like endo-steel and ferro-fibrous/aluminium/carbide. They were structured like self-study course guides, something an medical or engineering officer - or enlisted even - might use to study up for promotion or skill-building, which would hopefully make sense if anyone probed into the "found on derelict Newgrange" story.
It was only a little bit, but it was a start. And done as subtly as I could arrange. The trooper (and several others, but most of them were either coming back or had taken a payout to medically retire with lesser injuries) lifted off two days later and all I could do was wait and see if it paid off.
Then more exciting duties! New hires began trickling in from Galatea, mechwarriors, pilots, tank crews, techs, medics, dropship crews, they all began to show up. The main group of support personnel arrived on the hired Monarch and got settled in just in time to help with the admin on all of the new arrivals, which was a godsend to actually letting me keep up my own training. Every evening I sat down in my quarters with Jarrod and Maxie and plotted out getting the stuff stored under the mountains out to the Hangar Queen and who we could absolutely trust to do it all before then spending the time until sleep scouring the core for what I needed to find to repair the KF core.
I sold off the two Lucifers we had sitting around (because the hell do you need with a fighter with no ejection seat?) as well as my Chaparrals – I'd decided to take the crews off them and move them onto the new Marksmans and just sell them rather than refit with fifteen-tube LRMs – to the League, then got a bite on swapping Maxie's Overlord for some Unions. I also got rid of the three command trucks we'd inherited between the three of us – I hadn't used mine beyond a few test cases, with neither Jarrod or Maxie even unpacking theirs. Got a pretty good sum for just them, too.
The unit that had once called Helm home, the Juggernaut, came to us and offered the required three Unions, all with their aerospace cradles intact, as well as a Leopard-CV. In addition to that they expressed an interest in swapping some of our SLDF heavies for some current-era ones – you know, if we were ever interested. I talked it over with Maxie and he agreed to the swap almost straight away, so off he went with the Overlord to the Celestial Ego and returned several weeks later with our four new dropships. We immediately got started on ripping out the ASF cradles on the Unions, trading them for more living and environmental space – anything to make those long journeys a little bit more comfortable.
We were still getting dribs and drabs of people coming in when I sent Jarrod off to Merton with two fully stocked Fortress's (Grimtol and Longrach) and both the new Leopard-CV (Abstract Tumble) and the Risky Business, along with the Mule Dingy Bargain taking some equipment along for people the others had recruited both on their route out there as well as locally. So there went two companies of mechs, tanks and infantry and two squadrons of fighters that were all adjusting to their "brand new" equipment. It had been three months since I'd sent the then majority of the unit back there and they should have arrived and dispersed back out to patrol and I'd sent a message to send the Breaks back here as soon as it could depart, with Lucas and the Honesty to escort it and the Bonnet along with bringing the training cadre on the Big Bobby B.
The reports from that way were getting interesting too, the marines hadn't seen any excitement since Sackville but Uljana and her mech company had beaten a pirate group who'd come sniffing around, hoping to slip in to an undefended area during the chaos of units moving around post-rebellion. The four bug-mechs they'd brought along had somehow managed to run straight into the two Hunchbacks of her medium lance and promptly melted under the combined autocannon and 5cm laser barrage before the rest of their lance could get to them, while the recon lance had pounced on the cobbled together raider tanks and destroyed them, but not before their screams for help made the pirate dropship burn for orbit. It had made it back to the jumpship that brought it there and then disappeared. Minimal damage to my people, a fair bit of ammo expended and a bunch of dead pirates – a good killing, except for missing the transports.
Training, signing off on new hires, working out who went where and was in charge – that was the extent of my experience for the next few months, unless I could find time to get up to the mountains. The Lee – now the Wasphive – was jaunting around the planet dropping off its cargo in lance and company lots for exercises as recruits showed up, the two Union-CVs (Low Roost and Clifftop Nest) were taking the new pilots out and about the system, getting them used to flying their birds and visiting the old outer-system bases to do the refurbishing they required with Maxie in charge – Samira remained on Helm itself to continue working on vetting the new pilots.
We were large enough it was probably time to do a completely reorganisation of equipment as well as personnel, since the current organisation was kind of hodge-podge – especially split so far apart and recruiting in dribs and drabs. I worked up an inaccurate list, just to make sure everything was represented, sent it off to Jessica, Jaye and Leo (and Jarrod as well when he arrived there) for them to have a look at and propose their own versions while showing it to Maxie and the rest of the staff here too.
Also the rate of expansion we were undergoing was probably allowing all sorts of infiltrators as well as other problem children to creep in. Where possible I wanted to put our longer-service people into various command roles but unfortunately, not a whole lot of them were really comfortable being more than company commanders. I'd been lucky with Jaye, he'd been a fantastic hire who'd worked well with Colmazio and Robin – who themselves had been great hires along with all their people – but I was nervous about looking at new people. In a way, Jarrod and Maxie had been a godsend there – instant battalion and wing commanders, even if technically they didn't have the skills or knowledge base, but we knew and trusted each other. The pair of VTOL company leaders, Cammi and Leilani (well, more accurately just Cammi, but she'd worked with Leilani since their MAF days and said she'd be up for it) had been the only vehicle commanders beyond Samuel - the XO - to step up and volunteer to lead a battalion, so I'd split up the various VTOLs under the two of them. And Samira had wound up refusing to lead Third Wing, wanting to stay with the rest of the Outworlds pilots – even though I'd said we'd likely move people around to provide a good backbone.
Honestly, I'd been extremely lucky in my original recruiting. A lot of the hard work had been done by my father before he'd died, setting up the backend with extra support and technical people as well as our piloting group, then managed to get a lot of experienced personnel who came as units to various degrees, either as little as pairs or as much as companies. It had helped get up to speed quicker, which wasn't happening here.
The biggest hassle was the engineering group. Just because of the expense. Ouch, the hip pocket. It was getting to the point we were seriously considering recruiting directly from universities or technical schools and doing the military training side ourselves.
Time was passing. The Breaks and the Ego were doing six month round trips between our two areas, with the Roam and Fancy Free joined by the Moonlit ferrying troops along the deployment border. I rotated everything but the Metal and the Low-Brow to and from Merton, using the Bobby B to shift companies of Jump Infantry around between the two. In the end I hadn't converted one of the cargo Mules to carry the third battalion, since we'd wound up recruiting most of them from civilian sources – I'd had to send McHayes to Galatea to recruit more trainers, sending a few out to Merton to run a basic training school which then sent the new soldiers to Helm to do the actual training involved in whatever branch they were joining. Instead they acted as additions to the planetary garrisons on Helm and Merton, a kind of quick reaction force, and as local replacement pools for the other battalions.
When the Breaks made its first trip back to Helm I started the long term heist operation. The Bonnet had come with it, emptied of cargo, plus Lucas and his marines on the Honesty. Taking the most trusted of them – men and women who had worked for my father for years before he'd found the Breaks – up to the cache under the mountains under the cover of nightfall, using them to load the Bonnet with gear. Since it was barely more than a platoon in total it took a few days to get the cargo bays filled full of stockpiled equipment and Warship parts, but that did feel like a good amount of time all things considered. Maxie took his pretty much formed Second Wing as an "escort" for it on the Long Dark Night, managing to get to the Hangar Queen with no issues. That ended up being the main pattern for the move – either Honesty or Big Bobby B would be with the Bonnetas an escort while it took one of the three-collar jumpships to the Queen, after doing the majority of the trip on one of the two bigger jumpships. It took a few trips but then the good news came – the repairs had been made, the Queen once again had a functional FTL drive. Other repairs had seen it much improved in condition, most of the way to a full G in thrust and the second grav-deck fully repaired. They'd managed to get the Aqueductdetached from its collar, but the ruined Behemoth was still stuck. The only thing left to do was get a qualified navigation crew on board, rather than the glorified bridge-watch that was there now.
Now, to fix the Fancy Free's lithium-fusion battery.
I continued to act more as an administrator than a soldier, but that was fine with me. I kept up my fitness and skills, training with the new recruits whenever I could. I divvied up the information in the memory core more and more, little memory chips created and sent to Galatea, from there spread to major nodal locations elsewhere in the sphere and then be randomly dispersed from those places after a period of delay. Hopefully, I was creating enough confusion to hide the origin of where they started out. I'd even tried to carefully create clues that lead back to Terra after a discussion with Maxie one day, implicating both disgruntled/idealistic Comstar acolytes or Terran citizens in the wording of messages with the packages.
A couple of years after we'd settled down on Helm we got an unexpected visitor in the form of a Wolf Dragoons detachment. They were in the middle of what they'd later call their "cattle-raiding" period while they rebuilt after the Civil War - having taken a contract with Janos even while the New Delos Treason Trials were on-going – and happened to have Epsilon Regiment coming through our area on their operations. It wasn't the whole regiment, just a part of it, but they were sent on their particular route specifically so they had a chance to stop by and hand over a package, with thanks from Jaime Wolf and families of the saved personnel.
The whole thing was basically a small-craft launching from the jumpship, burning in system at high-speed for a least-time course, landing at the base outside Durandal then refuelling while the courier came up to Helmfast, then doing it all again in reverse. I only spoke to the courier himself and even then that was just the bare courtesies before he handed over the package and left.
I took some time to look over the contents – a few handwritten letters and some data chips, mostly messages from the spouses, children and parents of those who we had pulled out of the cells, thanking me for removing them as bargaining chips. The highlight was the one from Jaime Wolf himself – in his full young Connery glory – thanking me for saving his wife and daughters, promising me a favour should it ever be possible. Whether I would use it to get a hold of some of the Blackwell product range, or use it to arrange a meeting sometime between 3019 and 3028, or even something else - that would take some thought.
Time continued to pass. My troops saw skirmishes all along their patrol range and took some damage though they dished out more than they took, we recruited up to strength and beyond, keeping a pool of reserves both at Helm and Merton. We got the LF-battery on the Fancy Free working, bringing it to Helm and using it as the transfer ship to the empty system where the Hangar Queen took up residence, gradually emptying out the cache.
The Warship itself continued to see more repairs – the mining-modified Mules repaired and crewed, used to transport raw materials to effect crude repairs to the exterior of the ship and to the holds to make sure it could take all the materials we were dumping on it. Several weapon bays were fitted out with weapon systems taken from the cache – not capital ship scale weapons, normal ones set up as anti-dropship/fighter batteries. They wouldn't do anything near enough to fend off attackers on their own, but with over half of the small-craft bays converted to aerospace bays it gave the ships real defence force a place to launch from. The main issue with the whole project was getting it manned – we'd get hunted down and killed by everyone for concealing it.
By the end of 3020, the cache was emptied of all the advanced materials and war machines, leaving large stocks of ammunition and spare parts that were still commonly produced with the current state of technology – plus or minus some stuff that I'd had deliberately left behind, hidden away in corners and under or behind other materials. Now we came to the crunch point – getting the core itself out, then erasing any signs it had been here.
Myself and the tech teams had managed to isolate most of the equipment in the Field Library and remove it, leaving the Core itself as the last removable component. We were about seventy percent certain that we knew how to get it out of there without dropping the mountain and releasing the Yehudan Sea. It was time to risk it.
The remaining equipment was carefully removed, equally carefully moved to the waiting truck, then rushed along with all of us to the Bonnet, waiting nearby to lift off as soon as we drove on board. The cargo bay door slammed shut behind us, the cargo hands quickly running the tie-downs even as the engine began to build up for take-off. Soon it was secured and we all headed to our launch positions, barely getting to them in time before Kjetil ordered the dropship into the air.
Soon we were doing a loop high above the mountains, every sensor available keeping a close watch on the Nagayan Mountains for any signs of subsidence or shaking. It took a couple of hours for us to be satisfied, but eventually it was the consensus amongst the crew that we had successfully disabled the self-destruct, thus leaving a nice empty Castle Brian-like base for either ourselves or the Mariks to take over.
It was time to move on from this plan and start with the next…