Book 1 - Chapter Five

Chapter 5: Release the Hounds!

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My first thought of Patrick Kell was that he was a recruiting posters wet dream. He cut a rather striking figure in his BDUs, certainly looking the part of an elite Mechwarrior. And given that he had almost single handedly held what was left of the Kell Hounds together after Morgan had his nervous breakdown, fired two thirds of his Mechwarriors and run away; he was not someone I was inclined to underestimate.

With the younger Kell brother came a number of officers, including Dan Allard, who clearly both knew and was happy to see Ardan again and to whom Ardan passed on a hug from his father (in a kind of adorkable manly way) that got a chuckle from everyone present. The rest of the officers names were vaguely familiar to me but the only one I recognized was Salome Ward. The future wife of Morgan … and mother of Phellan Kell.

Everyone's favorite traitor.

On the other hand, her first reaction to seeing Morgan return in the original timeline wasn't to gush over him like the other idiot Mechwarriors, but to punch him in the face and storm off, so bully for her. She could hardly be held accountable for her son's actions I suppose.

Enough people were in the briefing room on the jumpships grav deck that we were rather tight for space. I squeezed in between the commander of the Guards Jump Infantry and the leader of the technical team handpicked from NAIS on a fold out seat. A few lower ranked officers (as in one star Generals) seemed a little surprised to see me in the room but as none of the top brass even blinked at my presence, they kept their mouths shut as the briefing started.

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"Alright" Ardan started the briefing with a nod after the hatches into the room were dogged down. "Our mission for the First Prince and Archon is an objective raid on the Stewart Commonwealth world of Helm". The holoprojector engaged as the lights dimmed. A map of the Inner Sphere showing the Lyran/League border and the relative positions of the fleet and Helm flashed for a few seconds, before it zoomed 'in' to show first the star system, then in on the planet itself. "The secondary target of this raid" Ardan continued, "is a cache of SLDF Mechs, vehicles, equipment and other such supplies we strongly suspect are in a depot under the Nagayan Mountains" and with that, a part of the globe flashed with a red circular targeting marker on a mountain range just barely visible on the hologram, zooming into a 3D map of the region.

Damn that was cool. Sure it was probably not as high-def as something ComStar or the Clans might have … but it was a free standing holograph! Awesome!

"How big a cache are we talking about?" Patrick asked, clearly doing the sums on the cargo hauling capacity the Archon had sent along...

Ardan then glanced at me and all my geeking out vanished behind a stab of sudden nerves. He knew the answers of course, but he insisted, firmly, that he wanted me to lead the briefing on these questions.

Apparently he thought I had a strong future ahead of me in this kind of staff work after some of the conversations and insights I had offered. Which I thought was bullshit; having unique insights into people thanks to foreknowledge didn't make me any less a complete armchair General, but who the hell was I to tell a man the Guards thought could walk on water -with an Assault Mech!- that?

Clearing my throat, I gave the best answer I could remember from Gods knows how much speculation on Spacebattles about what could have been there, based in turn on Carlyle's too few observations in the book and probable SLDF unit structures.

"Best estimate is probably between two and six Regiments of Mechs and a comparable or greater number of armoured vehicles" I said clearly and steadily as every eye in the room snapped to me in surprise. "We can expect late Star League SLDF regulars equipment in all probability, but there will probably be a considerable amount of advanced Star League weapons technology nonetheless given its vintage. Also an undetermined number of supporting units, infantry gear, general supplies and logistics support, spare parts and so on…"

"As I recall, Helm was heavily hit in the opening battles of the First Succession War" Patrick noted into the slightly stunned silence evenly. "Something about a logistics base raid?"

Huh, man has a good memory. I mean, there were a lot of planets blasted to hell in the first two Succession Wars, sad to say...

"Correct I nodded. "Helm had been a key base of operations for the SLDFs Army Group Marik during the civil war, with a major logistics hub on the ground. After the SLDF jumped out of the Inner Sphere and while Free World League factions were squabbling over who had the legal rights to it, Minoru Kurita quickly sent a heavy strike force to seize and make off with the supplies, citing the precedents of 'Might makes Right' and 'Possession is nine tenths of the law'".

Ha! Got a number of smiles at that joke!

"However" I continued, "he found nothing there. Kerensky, it was assumed, had loaded up the contents onto his fleets and left nought but empty warehouses. True to form, Minoru decided to throw a temper tantrum at the wasted trip and launched a saturation nuclear bombardment that killed about eighty percent of the planetary population before leaving" and with a gesture at the tech, the holograph of the world vanished to show a scattering of stills and vid pictures of the destruction from archives I had been able to find prior to leaving New Avalon.

Well that killed the mood. Variations of 'fucking snakes' echoed around the briefing room at that from both Guardsmen and Hounds. Heartwarming the way hate for the Draconis Combine could bring everyone together so easilyfrom opposite sides of the Sphere...

"So I guess this 'apparently' was not quite accurate?" Patrick continued, unerringly drilling down into my briefing in a way that was just slightly unsettling, but kept things moving.

"To the best of our intelligence" I started and I didn't miss the eye rolling from some others as I pushed forward quickly "the officer in charge of the Freeport logistics base, Major Edwin Keeler, did not join Kerensky on the exodus. Instead he decided that with the SLDF going, total war was more likely than not to break out. Accordingly, with remarkable foresight, he decided to hide what Kerensky did not take. Keeping it safe for the SLDF to use when they returned, presuming I suppose that Kerensky wouldn't be gone long. But just in case he was …" I paused here, to glance at Ardan.

Partially for effect I admit. I did have some sense of the dramatic after all.

"Suffice to say this next information is absolutely need to know. It will not be discussed outside this room" Ardan said, looking everyone in the room in the eye and getting an acknowledgement from them and raising the tension in the room a notch that he was taking this so damn seriously, before he turned back to me and nodded. "Proceed agent Smith".

"Major Keeler also placed in the cache a Star League library core" I said slowly and clearly.

I wanted to make damn sure no-one missed or misunderstood this.

"A database containing civilian and Military information across most every key field of human knowledge. We're talking both the complete scientific andengineering data to, from first principles, build the tools to build the factories to build the tools to build late Star League era technology. From advanced weapons to Jumpships and Warships. From the most basic to impressive civilian hardware such as terraforming technology and biomedical tech that House Cameron held close to its chest. Knowledge chosen specifically as a doomsday record of last resort to ensure humanity could recover the Star Leagues complete knowledge should the war Keeler thought was coming do … well, exactly what it did do. In short; you may consider this the ultimate anti-lostech device".

The room had gone dead silent as I carefully laid out exactly what we were going after. It took a good five seconds for some Guardsman in the back to sum up the general thoughts of everyone in a low whisper.

"Jesus H Christ..."

"Our primary objective is thus to recover this core and evacuate it - along with any other salvage we can without compromising extracting the core - to Tharkad" Ardan took back the briefing smoothly, wrenching the shocked gazes back to him and snapping them out of it with his crisp tone, kickstarting their military discipline. "Specialist Rastcor" Ardan gestured to one of the other civilians in the room, "from the New Avalon Institute of Science and his team are probably the best Star League era computer experts in the Federated Suns. They will be responsible for finding, securing and extracting the core. Make no mistake ladies and gentlemen" Ardan looked around" with a pointed gaze. "For the sake of getting this core -or at least a complete copy- to safety, the First Prince considers this entire task force, if need be, expendable".

I expected an uneasy ripple at that but got nothing but dead silence. Either they were all still in shock at what they were going after … or they all grimly agreed with that conclusion given the sheer stakes of this mission they were now aware of.

"Sir" General Lawrence, commander of the 14th Lexington Armored Regiment asked into the silence as the officers digested that statement. "Where on Helm are we hitting?" Again Ardan nodded to me and I took the hint.

"AO will be in the vicinity of the Nagyan Mountains - exact location will be slightly dependant on some specific … intelligence ...we're waiting on" I said, expecting to get another eye roll at that, but a clearing of a throat directed my attention to the back of the room.

"I can speak to that" a man in civilian clothes who I had noticed leaving the Kell Hounds shuttle spoke up. I blinked, not even having seen him enter the room, but confidently he stepped around to the front near Ardan and Marshal Felnser.

"Ah, Agent Williams, good" Ardan noted, glancing around to quickly explain. "Prince Davion sent a number of MI5 and MI6 teams into the Free Worlds League to lay the groundwork for this operation some months ago. Your report?"

The other straightened at that - his civilian sort of air vanishing as I recalled that unlike MIIO, DMI were in fact serving members of the AFFS. "Got back from Stewart two weeks ago via Helm, Sir. While at the Jump point posing as a commercial freighter passing through, we got an encrypted update from the ground team there - it was a hefty burst, but it contained the second package you were waiting for".

Ardan shared an intense look with me before turning back and I felt that kind of butterflies in the stomach deal hit me as this got more and more real. "You have both?"

The other smiled faintly and moved forward to the thin table that ringed around the holoprojector, placing his briefcase carefully on it. He then worked the combination locks very carefully, before retrieving a key from a pocket and, with it in place, carefully opened the armored case.

Inside, carefully placed into a foam insert, was a small black rectangular device about the size of my iPhone with a faded purple eagle drawn on it that I recognized as a memory chip. Essentially a portable solid state hard drive.

THE memory chip … I hoped.

The Colonel accepted it before he carefully handed it off to the technician with a few muttered orders, the NCO inserting it into a slot on his console and getting to work.

"Any problems stealing it?" I asked in a tone that could best be described as 'forced casual'. The DMI agent actually laughed at that, a short bark of contempt.

"SAFE are hit and miss at the best of times" the other didn't quite roll his eyes. "This time the coin came up tails; most of the Stewart family are offworld on vacation on Marik -probably plotting takeover attempt number six of the Captain Generalship- and took their best security with them. Everyone left was pretty much asleep. We got into the archives past three rent-a-cops who didn't even leave their break room and swapped the chip for something that looks the same, without anyone the wiser. Short of plugging it into a machine, no-one will ever know the difference I'd bet. And most likely they'll just assume the old thing finally kicked the bucket".

I got the distinct feeling that the spy was mildly insulted at his crack team, probably one of the very best in the entire Federated Suns used to daring missions against deadly, competent enemies, being sent in a priority one rush … to steal a worthless trinket from a planet that was asleep,

"Okay, I'll bite. What is this?" General Felger, XO of the Mech Regiment (and more typically its CO when the Marshal was busy leading the RCT) asked. And again Ardan nodded to me.

"In part, this is in essence a badge of office for the noble invested into the land hold of Helmfast. Which is basically the whole planet minus the capital. The chip should contain a Star League era high resolution map of the entire planet - before the Snakes blasted it that is" I added as the map in question loaded onto the screen.

It was hard to not grin like a madman right now.

"And if we combine it with the requested current maps..." I left the hint hanging and with a smile, Agent Williams retrieved another item from inside his case, this time a standard holo-disk. Looked exactly like a CD, but I knew its data storage was on the order of hundreds of terabytes, with data stored in multidimensional holographic constructs rather than the 2D laser etched storage used in CDs/DVDs/BlueRays back in my time.

"The locals idea of flight control is 'just don't bother us until you're ready to ground at Helmsdown" Williams grunted as he passed the disk over. "The inbound team were able to make multiple passes at multiple angles over the target area with a high resolution imager before landing to conduct trading for our cover and put a ground team into play".

"And their cover is?" Ardan asked with a raised eyebrow. I recalled he had very little time for the cloak and dagger side of things, only slowly growing to understand that not all battles were fought on the open field. The events of 'The Sword and the Dagger' at least had seemed to make him understand that Hanse had to play those games - and play them better - or else he'd lose everything...

"Selling stolen top of the line Lyran medical equipment at a very very cheap price. Not that they say it's stolen of course, they are just a 'free trader' who jumped the border for some reason and are selling it at five percent market price on a planet that wouldn't even get close to being able to afford it normally. Locals get their hospital in Helmsdown up to standards you might actually consider near acceptable equipment wise and our team has no questions asked as they sit around waiting for the next free jumpship collar to wander through - which is about two weeks away".

I nodded in approval of that. The people of Helm - hells the Free Worlds League in general - were hardly Kurita or Liao. And I knew the locals would never have gotten so much as one eagle if they had found the cache; the Duke of Stewart, Captain General and probably every other province would have shown up wanting a piece. And Comstar would have probably just slipped in and nuked it (and framed the Lyrans for the dead of course) while they were busy arguing over the thing.

A refurbished hospital in exchange for the cache might sound like a rather dud deal … but to be brutally honest, it was a step up from what they got in the past - which was a little civil war on their planet followed by a whole load of nothing. And the locals probably couldn't care about wider geopolitics, just delighting in the fact that they didn't have to fly to another system to get an MRI now or wait for the very infrequent mobile hospital dropships that showed up to rent their services.

"Any military activity?" Ardan brought my attention back

"Zip according to the report" the man said shrugged. "No line units, just the local militia who barely know one end of their rifles from the other and would be hard pressed to stop a scout Lance, let alone what you've brought. The latest LIC reports of activity on the border are also on the disk, complements of Simon Johnsons people".

"Anything else to report?" Ardan asked.

"No Sir".

"Very well. You're dismissed for now Agent Williams, we'll debrief in full later. And I remind you this briefing is classified".

"Roger that Sir" the other saluted and left. When the door closed behind him, then Ardan nodded to the tech.

The holographic projection split at that point, the left hand side showing the old map from the Star League era chip, the right the map scanned by the Stealthy Foxes dropship as it orbited. Apparently the Star League standards for topography and mapping were still fully in force and it allowed a quick calibration to the point that each map was showing the same location to the same scale. And the difference between the verdant world on one side and the one with only patchy signs of greenery on the other was slightly depressing. Fucking snakes.

Gods, I was starting to sound like a local. And to be slightly fair, Kurita were hardly the only party guilty of fucking over entire planets in the succession wars…

"What else is in the chip Agent Smith?" General Felger cut into my thoughts as the tech recalibrated the maps.

"Pardon me General?" I asked turning to face the other.

"You said in part it's the maps, what else is on it?" he insisted, his eyes narrowed.

"Ah. In essence, that chip contains a secondary command layer, either in the firmware or its software. Undetectable if you plug it into just any computer. But when the chip is interfaced with a specific 'gatehouse' computer outside the cache, it will authenticate us as authorised personnel, open the gate and shut down the security systems".

"And how could you possibly know that?" the General pressed, sounding unconvinced.

"That is classified level Sword-One " Ardan answered for me - causing the General to immediately shut up and almost cringe back into his seat as if a child scolded. 'Prince's Eyes Only' meant that they did not need to know and that Hanse had made judgements on my knowledge personally. Ergo, questioning it would be questioning their Prince; end of discussion. "As for where the cache is; Agent Smith?"

I nodded, standing up and feeling the eyes of everyone in the room on me as I gestured to the tech working the computers. "Sergeant, can you mark out the locations of Helmsdown, Freeport and Helmfast please?" I asked and in seconds the barely visible urban center of Helmsdown, rubble of Freeport and invisible landhold of Helmfast (seriously, no creativity in the names here) were tagged on the main continent on the current map.

Oriented, I nodded. Showtime. Gods I hope this was correct - but on the plus side this was also a nominal abort point if my information was way out of whack.

"Okay, first, you can all note a few things changed after the bombardment. Can you please refocus in on Freeport? Scale one to one thousand".

The pictures both swirled and dove through the 'sky' until the city of Freeport in all its former glory with the gleaming green/blue sea … and the ruins of freeport on the grey and dead seabed were side by side.

The signature of orbital bombardment and major nuclear detonations were also painfully clear.

"Please note that Freeport and the inland sea that used to be there are several hundred meters above the planetary sea level. Suffice to say that entire area was searched pretty heavily by Kurita for his loot before he gave up and more than one Lostech prospector has searched since without any trace. But our information was that while the cache was moved, it was not moved far. Without Jumpships, the people on the ground didn't have the ability to do so" and with that I stabbed a finger at the bloody red river snaking away from the town towards the south west. "The river is the key to the cache. Follow it please and cut back out to one to ten thousand?"

Obediently the viewpoint on both screens started to follow the line. On one, despite its red colour (as I recalled some algae or what not caused that), it was a healthy river, full of water bouncing along as it cut its way through the region. On the other screen … it was no longer a river, just a dry riverbed. Dried up, yet still faintly red even after all these years.

"The Vermillion river cuts across the planes, through the foothills of the Nagyan Mountains and into deeper canyons until … there, right there" I smiled with a sudden surge of confidence as, just like in the original novel, the river took a sharp turn and vanished under what looked like a massive overhang after the tech zoomed right in.

On the original picture that was.

On the right, while the riverbed was still visible and distinctive the river itself no longer flowed. But more interestingly, a large boulder in the first had seemingly of its own will, stood up on its side to block that end of the canyon and cave where the river had apparently vanished. And, had been rather clearly to my eyes, squared off. Also sitting off to the side was the truncated pyramid of the 'gatehouse' as I thought of it, an artificial structure not present in the past.

Which wasn't really proof of anything, it could have been anything after all. But for me it was the first real evidence that this WAS exactly like in Battletech and not a wild goose chase.

"Zoom back and move to the west … okay hold it" I said as the crimson line re-emerged, three or four klicks away in a straight line distance, on the reverse slope and side of the mountain. "And now, the river re-emerges and eventually winds its way into the sea. And clearly has other sources of water, although it's still almost dry today. So. How did it get from one side to the other. Anyone?"

"Probably just an underground cave system" Daniel Allard responded first with a shrug. "There are plenty of examples across the Inner Sphere of rivers digging under and through mountains or terrain to reemerge on the other side. I know on Kestral there is a river that goes about two klicks under a mountain before coming out and some crazy people like to put on scuba gear..." he started to tell a story when suddenly his words caught up with him and he straightened slightly, his eyes widening in sudden revelation. "An underground cave system…"

Ah, with the repetition and emphasis, suddenly everyone in the room started to shift and glance at each other. Now they were getting where I was going with this and I smiled as I started to explain