Ruins of Caddo City
New Dallas
7th April, 3021
This was extremely depressing, being here in the ruins of what was once a bustling metropolis but now was a mere skeleton, shrouded in unbreathable gasses. That was going to be the main problem here, I thought – dealing with the atmosphere. The feel of the place, not the gases I meant. I turned to the Comstar Adept who was accompanying us to ask him a question.
"Are they all like this? Are they worse, or better?"
He also had a sad look in his eyes, thinking over the question for a time before he answered. "I think it really depends on the location and development of the world and how exactly it happened. Some of the Periphery worlds I have worked on where the terraforming failed due to lack of parts rather than war are sadder, certainly, because you could see the hopes for the future in how they were laid out. The ex-Hegemony ones are pretty much similar to this though, the great works of the greatest power in human history laid waste for nothing more than petty greed. Although I will say the level of destruction here is probably greater than the majority of them."
I nodded. "Yeah, apparently my maternal family came from a world in the Hegemony originally, but moved to a world in what is now the Outback Wastes just in time to have to leave the world because the atmosphere-converter wouldn't last another six months. They had to take the first world that would accept them as refugees, then never left." That story had been a bit exaggerated over time, especially by my mother's woe-is-me tale-telling. They'd been second-generation settlers on that long forgotten world when the processer began to fail, with the third generation born by the time they'd actually left. Relative johnny-come-lately's, so to say.
Caddo City had seen the most recent clean up attempts on this world, with the radiation levels only recently have dropped enough to allow a decent work period without incurring permanent damage. They had provided us with maps of the city including areas with significant damage and subsidence, as well as the areas they hadn't been able to penetrate to finish cleaning up the dead for various reasons. Combined with the original survey maps, the pre-terraformed city maps and the post-terraforming maps – sourced from multiple sources, to try and obfuscate where exactly we were looking until we found it – I was feeling much more confident of finding the boneyard in the first place.
With me was the lead Adept – Theo Boltzmann - plus a small Comstar delegation, a few more adepts and acolytes along with a platoon of ComGuard on a rare deployment off Terra (still being publically sold as a primarily infantry force for the defence of the home-world and of the HPG compounds, remember), several FWLM officers and civilian overseers and a detachment from the Twenty Fifth Marik Militia – them having deployed from Dieudonne – and my own forces, the engineering group I'd managed to piece together over the last five years on the Big Bobby B and Greyhond, as well as the Honestyand its marines.
All of us were in environmental suits, heavily shielded against the lingering radiation from the nukes which had destroyed the city. Nothing too serious unless you were out in it for longer than a few days unshielded, but the protection was necessary if you were working out here.
"I'm assuming you've already cleaned up all the militia units involved in the fighting? Or been beaten to them by scavengers?" I knew the answer already, it having come up in prior conversation with the Adept, but none of our Free Worlds companions had been involved in that particular talk. Figured I should bring it up myself before one of them tried to.
"Yes, what little wasn't destroyed and the scavengers get to was removed over a decade ago, none of it worth more than the metal content within it." He waved around the devastated cityscape. "As you can see, tac-nukes are quite good at destroying everything in the vicinity of their targets."
It would have been better to have been able to have a dig at the Free Worlders if the unit with us was one of the ones who'd done the nuking. As it was, the Comstar delegation wasn't above slyly working it into the conversation that this was their nations doing – and that it ultimately hadn't been necessary because the majority of the militia in the city itself had surrendered before the nukes were launched.
That was pretty much the next fortnight – leading scanner teams to various points identified as potential entrances to the old domes, helping with clean up when we found the dead that had been missed by prior groups and trying not be depressed by the oppressive atmosphere of the planet. Day thirteen was the lucky day we found the entrance airlocks (remember, underground city-domes converted to storage), so we moved up the heavy equipment to prepare to open it all up.
And holy shit was there a lot of stuff.
The first "room" in the first dome we found as we entered the massive airlock was a repair and refit centre, heavily damaged with most of the machinery inoperable. It must have been where the material to be stored is brought in and put into mothball status, with alcoves and gantries for working on two dozen different vehicles at a time – oddly modular ones that looked like they could be reconfigured to work on whatever mech, tank or fighter was placed in them. The actual entrance was massive too – someone muttered that you could tow a dropship through there if you had to and it lead into a passage way leading to the next dome. Words that proved to be prophetic.
The rest of that dome seemed to have contained the bits and pieces to put some of the cached material back into service quickly – if it hadn't suffered several cave-ins and collapses. None of it was salvageable.
Entering the second dome almost caused a traffic accident with the APCs and sealed vehicles we were driving. Rank after rank after rank of battlemechs, arrayed on all three "floors" with pathways big enough for recovery trucks to wind their way between the ranks and rows. I don't think a single design post-dated the Reunification War, hell it would probably be lucky to find something post-dating the mid-twenty sixth century, proving my theory that this was the deep storage site. And being the Hegemony and that old a storage depot, it was predominately Mackies. I almost forgot where I was and who I was with and compared it to Helm out loud – the amount stored here was greater than there, probably two full brigades in mechs alone.
We left a lot of the hangers on behind and continued on, entering the vehicle storage dome next. Again, nothing later than the Reunification War, at least that I recognized. A few different variants of Merkava main battle tanks stood out to me, mainly because the design still existed – just more advanced these days. Not as many units here, apparently they hadn't chosen to store them all unlike the battlemechs, but that made sense – combat vehicles were cheaper after all.
Then there was the last dome – air and aerospace assets. A whole slew of aerospace and conventional fighters, of which I only recognized the Hammerheadamongst the lot, as well as nearly two dozen dropships, carefully mothballed. What the hell was a planetary militia doing with this many dropships? I mean, they were mainly Drost variants which were used by first the Alliance and then the Hegemony for twenty odd years and sold on, why keep them?
I kept poking around after we found everything, leaving it to the others to tally up what we had. No matter what I got it was going to cost a hell of a lot of money to get everything up and running again so in my mind it didn't really matter. As long as I didn't just get stuck with just a whole bunch of Mackies it would be fine. In the meantime I was going to try and find that sweet sweet HCID memory core.
All I had to go on was that it was down here in the old domes but not directly part of the boneyard itself, the dome it was in sealed off from these ones centuries before. But the pathway between them had been reopened during the fighting, the shockwave of the nukes apparently triggering minor seismic events which shifted things around. When approached and asked about what I was doing I simply said "Hey, maybe there is some kind of hidden passageway here, leading to a marginally more recent force. This is the only entrance we found, after all – maybe there are others?" It worked, I got left alone beyond routine task queries from my troops – and I happened to notice several others doing similar things to me, searching for any sealed off passageways.
I'd actually given up when I found it. I was moving back towards the main entrance when I felt a chill go down my spine, so strong I froze in place momentarily, then turned to the right. There it was, a passageway semi-obscured by the repair equipment and the damage that first dome had suffered had dropped rubble around it that obscured it from view from most other directions. It looked like it had been sealed up and then had that seal broken.
Jackpot.
I wasn't sure if there was anyone watching me right now, so I kept a scan going of the walls around me, trying to pick up anyone looking at me from my peripheral vision. Then I deliberately slumped my shoulders a bit and made to sit down on a nearby workbench. After a few minutes sitting there and staring at the ground I looked around.
A few people were wandering back and forth from the entrance airlock to the other domes but no one was paying attention to me now - if anyone had even noticed my little lock up before there was no sign. In my backpack I had a couple of signal repeater blocks, for setting up a local comms-net on the surface mainly but also if the domes and tunnels here had turned out to be twisty, so if I set one at the entrance to the passageway it should easily relay messages to me without me undergoing a tell-tale blackout. It meant a little extra time searching without anyone being aware that I wasn't in an established area.
The entrance way wasn't particularly open, there was barely enough room to squeeze through without tearing the suit – I likely wouldn't be getting the memory core out with creating a lot of mess and noise. I lodged the repeater block at the top of the available space and made my way down the dark tunnel, waiting until I was a bit down it before turning on the extra lights on my suit. The tunnel itself had taken minor damage, cracks and small debris littering the floor, walls and roof but overall was fairly clear.
And there it was. At the end of the tunnel was a door emblazoned with the badge of the Terran Hegemony, a representation of the Sol system, as well as the symbol of the Hegemony Central Intelligence Directorate. Apt, considering it had been left here since before there was a Star League putting the Cameron Star on everything. Making it even easier, the door was ajar slightly – it looked like this end of the tunnel had shifted slightly with the subsidence and popped it open. I got inside and checked to make sure everything was working and sure enough it was still up and running – Ragnorok-proofing wasn't a strong enough term. The odd thing was that the memory core was physically too large to fit back through the door I'd used – there must be another entrance.
Hmm. I wonder. This core supposedly had access to all the designs built by the Hegemony and whatever they could get their hands on elsewhere up to the HPG getting knocked out during the Amaris War. No idea if it got reconnected between the end of that fighting and the nuking of the surface, but I didn't think so. Still, all the designs, hey - I wonder if it has any Nighthawk specs on it? Even the prototypes before they went into production would be more than alright for providing a base to build new versions of the suits. That'd make my infantry a hell of a lot more dangerous.
Well, would you look at that. MkVII through MkXVI Nighthawk prototype designs, not fit for service. Come to papa.
I set the other sensor repeater at the door as a kind of combination of door jamb and comms device, then set the computer to start a wireless transfer to the memory core I'd had stashed away on the Honesty. Whatever I could siphon for myself before someone discovered the passageway (or I was forced to publically admit I'd found it) I'd take just in case I couldn't get a copy of it later.
There was the other, slightly bigger access way on the other side of the room, this one definitely large enough to take the core out. It was still secure so I let it be for now and exited the room the way I came, quickly making my way down the tunnel and back out into the main area.
The next month and a half was a mix of hectic activity and lingering boredom. No one else tripped over the memory core or stumbled upon my data transmission – which continued the whole time – so that was okay, but we had a steady stream of visitors. The rest of the Twenty Fifth Marik Militia came to help secure the site, as well as the Fifth Regulan Hussars and whatever I could spare from my home garrison – namely the Wasphiveand its vehicle battalion and aerospace squadron. There was always a new cargo dropship arriving, mostly Mules with the occasional Buccaneer and rare Mammoth. It meant the whole process was much more drawn out but honestly, there wasn't many places to land dropships within easy loading distance so it ended up working out well.
I liked to believe that one of the reasons we didn't get jumped on the planet was that Comstar was softly softly stopping the flow of information to other interested parties about what exactly we were doing here, combined with SAFE actually doing a bang-up job for once. It could just be that no-one believed we'd found this many mechs, even if they were all primitive variants. Like I'd said to Duggan, stick them in rear or second-line formations and they'll work, especially to free up other forces for moving into the front lines, but put them out in front and you're basically wasting both the meat and the metal.
It was interesting though, watching the dropships getting restored to a minimum working order. Tough as they were anybody on board would die if they crashed on take-off, then they had to make it to orbit and from there to a jumpship – which in the interest of speed we'd gone and confirmed several potential pirate points closer to the planet than the zenith or nadir points, cutting journey times to barely a day even at a slower burn. But it would be too much work to restore them to proper working order here on New Dallas, so it was a case of "get them good enough and get them gone!"
Definitely weren't going to use them to take any of the other loot or people off New Dallas though.
But even with that slowing us down and dragging it out we were beginning to finish emptying the boneyard out. My siphoning of the core had finally ended six hours ago, a quick check revealing everything looked good so I headed back into the room it was held in and grabbed that door-jamb repeater block and wiped a couple of designs from the core. Then I unsealed the other entrance and went exploring it.
I honestly have no idea how we all missed it. The big doors led right to the Mech storage dome, they even opened up directly on one of the pathways there! Pretty much the only thing that gave us all a sort of saving grace was that it was where some damage had started to pop up in this dome – not enough to break the door open, but disguise the signs that pointed it out as merely being the results of wear and tear on the wall of the dome. The crew inside at the time had already announced the door was opening by the time I got back into radio contact with everyone, so I figured why the hell not and just made an open broadcast.
"This is Colonel Karter. I found a sealed lab space, a Terran Hegemony badge along with another one I don't quite recognise on the doors and wall. Managed to turn the computer terminal on in there and I've got to say it looks like a memory core containing designs specifications for different war machines. My quick search pulled up Mechs, tanks, fighters – hell, I swear there were Warship designs in there. Get me a security team and a computer tech team as soon as possible, this could be important."
Yep, certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Unfortunately nobody happened to have a spare memory core laying around on their ships so after a brief conference we agreed to remove it as quickly and safely as we could before taking it to Atreus for the Mariks and Parliament to decide. Adept Boltzmann tried to argue for taking it back to Terra but I pointed out there really wasn't any reason to take it there – Terra was pretty much out of the whole "making war machines" game these days. Better we take it to Atreus and let the Free Worlds disperse it to their production facilities. And hey, it wasn't like it was a how-to guide to bootstrap ones way up to the higher end technologies it had recorded away in its database, it was more like "You need X, Y and Z to make A, with parts B and C to run it".
It really only meant that some of the black-boxed factories producing things that only held the design specs in the black-boxed computers running them could finally shut those computers down to examine them without worrying they'd lose the designs forever if the computer wiped itself. A bit more subtle way to tech-boost, which I hoped hadn't occurred to Boltzmann – and wouldn't occur to his superiors until well after the fact.
Also letting the Mariks have it and distribute it around the League meant that sooner or later, everyone would have a copy of it. Even if I didn't throw out a helping hand and forward it to people.
Three weeks after the core was found and quickly evacuated we were closing up the airlock, paying our respects to the dead and leaving. The Fifth Regulan Hussars had left a week ago, with the majority of the Twenty Fifth Marik Militia going at the same time, drawing down to the single company. I'd sent all of my people except for the Honesty and its marines home to Helm the week before that, Moonlit having returned to bring me to Atreus, where I'd once again been summoned before Janos Marik. Except I wasn't to take my jumpship the whole way, I was to use the command circuit that had been set up to ferry the recovered materials back to Atreus.
This was going to suck. So damn much.
And sure enough it did. Instead of it taking two and a half months to complete the journey (roughly) it only took five weeks, but I had had to be sedated constantly after the third jump with IV fluids in me to replenish what I was losing. It took me another three weeks to recover enough to meet anyone in person, let alone a House Lord. Hell, the Moonlit had just sent a report from New Olympia saying it had arrived safe and secure when I was finally coherent enough to understand the updates I was getting – that was only two jumps away!
By the time I'd recovered and actually gone to the meeting with Janos the spoils had been divvied up and sent off to their various locations – he presented it as a fait accompli. Surprisingly – again, because of his history of not exactly being generous with mercs ala Snord – he'd been pretty generous to me. I got a fair split of the battlemechs, a regiment solely for me with a lot of variety – only two companies of Mackies - as well as a battalion of the Merkavas in two different variants and two extra companies of vehicles, one of hover tanks that looked like LTV-4s and the other Reaper artillery pieces. I only got two squadrons of fighters, one of the Hammerheads and the other Star Daggers – none of the Samuraimediums we'd found – but I did get two mixed-variant squadrons of the Ares small-craft, up-gunned landing craft basically.
Where he really blew me out of the water was the dropships. I got fully half of them, with enough repairs and upgrades done to them to make them safe to use to actually transport people, even for lengthy journeys. There were three Black Eagle mech-carriers (the original Union) and nine Drosts, six IIa and three IIb – basically enough dropships to put a force the size of my original combined arms regiment down on a world and then some.
"I have surprised you I think, Colonel. You have done another good deed for myself and the League as a whole and such good service must be rewarded. Then you went above and beyond, revealing the existence of that ancient memory core – a bounty of data that will bridge many gaps in knowledge, allowing us to revitalise factories without wondering if we will ever be able to use them again. If you didn't have your plans to go and resettle those lost worlds in the Outworlds I would be throwing whatever manner of enticements at you I could to keep you here, above and beyond what I have offered you." There was a bit of a spark in his eyes that had been missing from our last meeting. We were alone in the room except for a note-taker and bodyguard this time – none of the family had come and joined us this time.
"Sir, I have no words. You have been beyond generous and I thank you." I put actions to words, standing and bowing deeply before returning to my seat. We continued to discuss the memory core and again he surprised me by consenting to give me a limited copy – I basically asked for just the designs that I currently had in service in my unit, to aid in potentially manufacturing replacements in the future. I jokingly snapped my fingers in disappointment, saying I should have asked for a full copy and been bargained down from there. He laughed, so I hadn't screwed up there at least. Our discussion continued for a short while, but the time of a House Lord is limited and soon it was time to go.
"Before you go, Colonel – your third in command, do you know where he went off to in such a hurry?" Oh, boy, he was a tricky one, waiting until the last minute to ask this question. No way was he as disinterested as he was portraying himself as.
"As far as I am aware sir, he found something in the notes left to him by his father and decided to go looking. Nothing in the message he sent back to me indicated where he was heading, just that he was diverting with the troops available to him and that he'd be back eventually. As of three days ago he had not sent any updates."
"Ah. Please, keep me informed then. Enjoy the rest of your stay on Atreus."
Keep him informed, ha. He'll probably hear something long before I do unless Maxie's been a hell of a lot sneakier returning than he was in leaving. He has got to have at least reached the site by now, I'd have to check my maths on that later but he'd been gone for over six months by now and at least he could push for quicker jumps without wrecking himself. For now it was back to the hotel room so I can continue feeling sorry for myself but happy for my equipment status.
It wound up being a fairly nice vacation for myself over the week, then it was time to start heading back home, a much, much slower trip than the rush to Atreus.
And I was just fine with that.
I spent most of the trip to Helm trying to figure out how to leak the Hegemony core as many ways as possible only to be beaten to the punch – no less than seven separate Free Worlds companies lost their copies to industrial espionage and somehow, somehow, SAFE managed to hand over two full and unrestricted copies to unknown agents and then lose track of them.
You could not make this stuff up. Seriously. The jokes were almost as appalling as the fallout amongst the intelligence community in the Free Worlds. Heads quite literally rolled in a couple of cases.
The relics handed over to me slowly trickled in and were split into two categories – to be refurbished for the units use and to be sent off for the use of the Outworlds. From the mechs I gave them the all the lights, six Wasps and six Stingers, the majority of the mediums – the four Kyudos, four Rifleman(the original fifty ton variant) and eight of the twelve Shadow Hawks, the twelve Griffins(the original sixty ton variant) for the heavies and one of the Mackie companies. I also gave them the hover tanks and a single company of Merkava MkVIs, but handed over both aerospace fighter squadrons as well as all three Black Eagles and three of the Drosts – one IIb and two of the IIas.
So I had kept a lance of Shadow Hawks and Chameleons(the latter to be converted into trainers to replace the bug-mechs that currently served that purpose), twelve Archers, twenty four Orions(two different primitive variants, twelve apiece – though why they didn't keep them for themselves I don't know, it is one of the signature mechs for the Free Worlds post-Star League), twelve Mackies and six Banshees and Emperors, twelve Merkava MkVIIs, twelve Reaper artillery pieces and all the Ares small-craft along with the remaining dropships.
And I had to keep them visible while they were repaired and restored, no spiriting them away to the Hangar Queen for safekeeping. Damn it.
I got the units being sent off packed onto the dropships that were also heading that way, then arranged for crew to be put on for the journey there – a mix of new hires looking to get anywhere but here and old hands, the ones who'd come with us from the Outworlds and were looking to return home now that more time had passed and they were unlikely to get tarred with the same brush as me. Most of the repair work for that time was on those dropships – everything I could do to make sure they'd last the multi-month journey back there, I did. Then we sent them off with a small party and got back to work.
By the time that was all over and done with it was almost New Years again. Time was flying by and we were getting closer and closer to pulling up stakes and finding our own world. I'd arranged a much less restricted version of the Field Library core than what I'd already let leak out to be shipped off to NAIS(cleverly hidden in one of the droppers going to the Outworlds – it would drop it off somewhere along the route through the Suns to someone else who would "find it" and then take it to New Avalon for a hefty reward) as well as more information locally and to the Commonwealth since I was a lot less worried about a sudden Clan invasion once the Dragoons had still disappeared for a while between their Marik and Steiner contracts and not changed their pattern of engagment. A report finally came in on Maxie – not from, on – that had him showing up in the Aurigean Reach briefly some months ago before disappearing again.
Yep, Janos knew where he was before I did. It came through my liaison officer Costiniu, after all.
Still, the plan to get in and out of New Dallas had gone off without a hitch at least…