Book 1 - Chapter Seven

Chapter 7: Always the last place you look...

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It was amazing how efficiently armies worked when operations were ruled over with an iron fist by competent NCOs. 

Like most professional armies, one of the key pillars of the AFFS was the training and skill of its non-commissioned officer corps. I had heard the role of NCOs once defined as being the lubricant through the machinery of officers and men. Without them, if you were lucky, you would have a poorly running machine that would seize up at the first sign of trouble. Or, more likely, you would find a machine that refused to start at all or ended up exploding spectacularly if you tried to force it to.

The Heavy Guards were clearly firm believers in applying generous amounts of lubricants to all the pieces of their machinery and were, to my delight, clearly a group who mostly shunned the whole 'Way/Cult of the Mechwarrior' BS that permeated the Inner Sphere. Not to say that Mechwarriors didn't think they were Gods gift to mankind, but here they kept that attitude firmly in check and 'offstage'. When on duty there was a real teamwork attitude … and the NCOs were undoubtedly the coaches of these athletes.

I watched, amused, as a Sergeant waved one arm to direct an Archer while screaming invective to the infantry running around. The sum total of all these efforts being that the Battlemech carefully lowered the cargo container exactly as directed onto the back of a flatbed truck, before backing away as Infantry jumped up and lashed it into place with the others already there. Eventually satisfied, the Sergeant gave a gesture to the driver and the flatbed jolted into motion, making its way to join the never ending convoy of flatbeds, recovery vehicles and APCs making the trip to the local exit doors as a new empty flatbed moved up and the Archer walked over to pick up the next container - this one filled with spare Streak SRM-2 missile launchers.

It was slightly surprising to me that the RCT could turn into such an efficient transport machine at the drop of a hat, with frontline soldiers turning into expert logistics personnel and tank drivers hauling around cargo on trucks like they did it for a living. Ardan Sortek had put things into perspective for me though, reminding me that salvage operations were a critical thing in the 31st century. Battlefield salvage was often the only thing keeping a military unit running really. And accordingly, the better units had become very good at jumping the battlefield -often while the guns were still firing! - to drag 'shinies' off with a determination the Blood Ravens would have applauded.

And when people were not shooting at you and the 'salvage' was mostly loaded up in standard shipping containers … well, that was just gravy then, wasn't it?

The progress was slower than I would have liked, with the current ETA for finishing looting the cache of everything even remotely valuable another seven hours, but inside of two hours everything on the 'alpha' high priority list would have been stowed. For my part, the six copies of the core were all locked away - even better 'my' team had found both the software to read the first two cores we had copied and in turn made a copy of that, as well as the spare memory cores stashed in the cache late last night. Accordingly I had simply given orders to keep copying right up until the last minute and Arden had backed me to the hilt. Call me paranoid, but if every military Dropship didn't have a core under lock and key by the time we dusted off, I didn't think enough redundancy was in place yet.

I made my way back to the command centre just outside these doors - enjoying the salt air from the sea only a half dozen klicks away beyond a distant line of grassy sand dunes. The Iron Fox had landed closest to the doors with its command centre serving as a traffic control point for the vehicles driving all over the place and there I stopped to report in on the status of 'my' team. Said report amounting to 'They're getting some sleep not quite at gunpoint, having stayed up all night browsing through the masses of data the core contained and would continue copying more cores later'. 

No I was NOT taking any chances.

The Helm Core was the key to the technical renaissance of the Inner Sphere. As far as I recalled, the New Dallas Core, while incredibly useful in military matters, didn't have anything like the fundamental science and engineering data critical to rebuilding the Inner Spheres infrastructure. If I fucked this up, the consequences … 

Huh. Consequences. I wonder what he would have made of all this back on EssBe? 

Snorting after a moment, I couldn't help but imagine him popping up as a 'shoulder devil' cackling, telling me I had done well and to move onto phase two; framing Myndo Waterly for abducting and killing Romano Liaos favorite pet turtle. THEN, encouraging me to have Jamie Wolf kidnapped, tied to a chair and slapped with a hardcopy of his Khans final orders, repeatedly, until he absorbed them through some kind of osmosis process. 

The 'shoulder angel' version of him that popped up then of course proceeded to say the exact same thing … but at insisted on at least using an ergonomic chair.

Shaking that thought off and with nothing better to do, I wandered to the nearest logistics controller and offered myself as a pair of hands, correctly anticipating that they could find a use for me. And so I found myself attached to a scratch platoon of infantry and dismounted tankers who were busy unloading cases of infantry gear from the back of the flatbeds into Star Barge IX - a Mule class dropship - for the rest of the day...

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Sortek was present in the command centre when I squeezed through the bulkhead hatch that evening. I felt exhausted - but in a productive sort of way having spent the day lugging stuff into dropship cargo holds (note; Mauser-960 rifles were too fucking heavy for a standard issue rifle!). Sortek also looked exhausted; he had been up all night and most of the day first working out the plan and then helping to run it on coffee and stim-pills. Full credit to the staff officers of the Heavy Guards, the operation had gone incredibly smoothly and I told him as such, earning a tired smile in exchange but otherwise I just kept out of his way as he directed me to sit at a tiny mission specialist seat, taking the opportunity to log in and start to read over the status reports directed to the HQ while we waited for the final Mechs of the LZ guard to trudge into the Mech bays and headcounts to be confirmed that no-one had been left behind.

It seemed that the loadmasters had lived up to their projections, managing to squeeze just about everything of any value on board the fleet. Even the mobile gantries the Star League Mechs had been standing in had been collapsed and shoved onto the dropships; apparently the computer controlled diagnostic and repair systems built into them could be adapted to drive parts of Star League era factories long mothballed and replaced by 31st century kludges - and were thus possibly again worth more than the Battlemechs they had enclosed.

Defiance would probably pay a pretty penny for them, although Katrina would be more likely as not to just give her share of them away to boost production on Hesperus II I guessed.

Also as anticipated, with so much loot the cargo dropships had proven to not quite have enough storage - a question more of volume than mass it seemed. So the Heavy Guards had been forced to dump more than a bit of gear that could be replaced for Lostech that couldn't. Starting with almost all their auto-cannon and missile ammo … which had been shoved inside two Regiments of APCs the RCT had also abandoned to make room for vehicles from the cache. With demolition charges rigged to blow them all sky high once they were clear.

The Infantry were agreeably indifferent to blowing up their rides. If anything, the Combat engineers seemed to be gleefully looking forward the explosion they were going to make when they pressed the button.

And I mean disturbingly gleeful. Bunch of bloody pyromaniacs. 

I somehow doubted Mechwarriors would have been so casually happy with blowing up their rides…fucking silly Cult of the Mechwarrior. Not that I dared say that out loud of course!

So, at exactly 22:33 local, the Iron Foxrose from the ground along with the two dozen and change other dropships that made up the RCT. The Mammoths and Mules of the cargo force were already underway for the jump point, having lifted an hour ago and soon enough we would burn hard after them to overtake … but not quite yet.

There was one final act to the Helm story yet to play out.

And it wasn't the APCs blowing up - which I have to admit from 30,000 feet at night was pretty bloody spectacular.

"We're in a stable geosynchronous position over the cache" one of the officers on the very cramped command deck called out half an hour later, relaying data from the ships bridge. "All ships are in formation".

"Kell Hounds report a successful launch" another officer called from off to the right. "Twenty minutes behind schedule - apparently the Castelan wanted to make a farewell speech" the officer added, generating a snicker from the crew and at that, I flipped over to the Kell Hounds reports...huh.

Well now. It seems that the Kell Hounds had 'stumbled onto' the MI5/MI6 team that had been 'hiding out' in Helmsdown (in a dive of a bar of course where they had been busy racking up a 'mission expenses' bill) after finding their dropship sitting empty at the spaceport. At that point they had arrested them for theft of several hundred million kroners worth of medical equipment and seized their dropship, all simply to confuse the FWL just that much more and provide a seemingly valid reason for this whole raid - Mercs often were hired for 'repossession' missions and to recover stolen property. That in turn had caused the locals to freak out, concerned that all the shiny new medical equipment they desperately needed was about to be taken away. With appropriate showings of concern for the locals after touring the hospital, Major Ward had formally waived the claims of the Commonwealth on the medical equipment, stunning the local officials before sending them into celebration. With her even sending a HPG message to Tharkad saying as much on her authority. And plenty of posturing that the Lyran Commonwealth is not the Draconis Combine and is not going to loot medical gear that is clearly desperately needed.

Good propaganda, even if probably blatantly untrue. On the other hand, it did let Ward send a message to Tharkad which, contained in the specific phrasing entirely innocuously, a report that we were withdrawing from Helm with our Primary and Secondary objectives accomplished and no enemy contact. Gave me a warm feeling to have ComStar unknowingly pronounce the beginning of its doom to the Inner Sphere...

"Very well" Felsner acknowledged the update about the Kell Hounds from his station, turning to glance at Ardan and nodding.

The Colonel then turned to me.

"John, we good to go?" he asked directly and I final check of my board. The reports from the tech team seemed to be indicating they were ready … and there was nothing else I could think of.

"Good to go" I agreed.

And with that Ardan made a brief transmission to the surface. There was a static filled but intelligible military acknowledgement and with that all we could do was wait, everyone staring at the long range camera which was currently showing an IR picture of a lone dropship sitting on the ground just outside the doors we had only opened up yesterday.

Man was it only yesterday? It felt like it had been a week since we touched down … although that might be my muscles protesting from the strain I had put them under today. Mental note; never try to match the pace with the 31st century equivalent of paratroopers. Although I'd like to think I had earned enough respect from them to graduate from 'REMF weiny' to REMF weiny at least willing to get his hands dirty'.

Still I had no idea how long this would take, so I keyed up the loadmasters reports that had been compiled for each dropship, entertaining myself by reading through the haul we were taking away. Some interesting things in there. Example; there was a bloody Devastator in the cache - apparently one of the only six built, some Gunslingers ride they were forced to leave behind for more colony supplies I'd guess.

Too bad I wasn't a Mechwarrior or I would have been all over that. I allowed myself a few moments thinking of it painted bright green with purple highlights, a Decepticon logo on its chest as I kicked in the front door of Hilton Head shouting 'PREPARE FOR EXTERMINATION!' before I turned my attention back to the list. There were some other impressive finds. No mobile HPG unfortunately or Exterminaitors with Null-Sig technology or Nighthawks or anything like that. Nothing bleeding edge or super classified … but we did find half a dozen SLDF mobile command vehicles that made the one the Guards used look like a kids toy. With holotanks and augmented reality command systems I recognized as the same tech Focht had used (would use? might use?) on Tukayyid.

Anyway, I was just looking over the listings -ohh, four Kanga tanks, nice!- when a sudden crackle of transmissions came over the repeater speakers and my gaze quickly shifted to the large flatscreens on the bulkhead. Down below a tiny little hovertruck was skidding out of the cave entrance and I watched fascinated as it bounced along leaving a cloud of dust. The picture zoomed in and refocused on it, the IR resolution poor but good enough to see that in the back of the open truck were a couple of industrial exoskeletons, with a large refrigerator sized box between them still glowing with residual heat. Said truck skidded up the ramp of the waiting dropship and barely a second after the ramp closed behind it the Dropships thrusters ignited, almost flushing the picture with light before the computers compensated, zooming back out to show the ship slowly clawing its way into the sky.

"Sirs" a Com-tech put in, turning from her console to catch the Marshals eye. "Transmission from Wolli Pride; Code Firefly".

A relieved and happy sort of sigh passed through the command centre at that news and I personally had to squish the urge to raise a fist in triumph. Firefly meant that the original core had been extracted, as far as the ground team knew, safely and intact. Combined with the half dozen copies onto the cores we brought with us, the extra dozen copies that had been made using the spare cores we had found in the cache … well that might be just about enough redundancy.

Not a bad days work I reckon-

"Sirs" the man said in a sharp tone that got attention at once. "Stay behind sensors are reading a seismic disturbance building across the region. Scale four and rising".

"Give me a close up of the door" Ardan ordered … then I spoke up without thinking if protocol even let me speak up.

"Can we also get a shot of Freeport and the area around it?"

The tech hesitated and turned to look at the Colonel and I felt a twinge of sudden unease as I remembered, belatedly, that I was not part of the command staff-

"Why exactly are you looking at me instead of putting it up, Sergeant?" Ardan gave the junior NCO a look that had the other instantly hammering his keyboard and seemingly firming my rather nebulous place in the chain of command rather substantially.

Awwww. That was sweet of the guy.

The main screen split now, with one shot on the cache door and one on the ruined city, both in the green of faint green of night vision. The picture quality was poor; this was not FLIR let alone synthetic aperture radar technology -bloody future of the 80s - but it was still detailed enough blended into a visual light picture that you could make out features of a ruined city easily.

"Center it on that dam on where the sea becomes the Vermillion River" I clarified and the picture shifted to do so, focusing and zooming in… and I couldn't have timed it better if I had tried. The dam wasn't small, it stretched for at least a couple of kilometers and was a solidly built structure, to put it mildly. Which made the fact that even from hundreds of kilometers in the air, it was clearly rocking and moving rather odd.

Then things escalated to Michael Bay Grade.

The ground opened under the dam, causing it to buckle and start to collapse into a great rift, of which little could be seen in the IR picture. Moments later the dam was airborne, hundreds of fragments the size of office blocks exploding back into the air. A wall of water was rising -literally rising vertically into the sky- and despite having a rough idea of what was coming, I felt my jaw drop at the sight before I gained control. The picture zoomed back out hastily and stabilized to show that explosion of water slow and finally fell apart tens of thousands of feet in the air, spraying out in all directions to rain back down over the entire region as an opaque fog started to form.

"Mother of God" one of the officers said for the room. Yup, that about summed it up.

"What in the hell is that Smith?" Felsner asked in shock, turning to look at me followed by most of the rest of the officers.

I tried to be as nonchalant as possible under their gaze, most of my attention remaining focused on the force that was turning much of what was left of Freeport into … well, not rubble as it was already trashed to all hell, but it was doing a fine job of spreading the rubble out over a much wider area.

"I believe that's the Yehudan Sea" I noted after a pause. "You know, I have to admit I was wondering where the SLDF put that thing. Always the last place you look…"

Marshal Felsner stared at me for a long, long moment before turning his gaze upon Ardan. A gaze that said without saying 'Who the hell is this guy?' and Ardan just shook his head with a smile, having grown more used to my eccentricities.

Or perhaps just giving me a lot of slack given that he knew I was not military or even intelligence, despite this costume I was wearing. Or perhaps I had just broken him with how everything I had said about Helm had come to pass.

"Sirs - at the cache" the tech called and switched the feed back to show a massive cloud of steadily thickening dust pouring out of the 'front door' followed by the entire cliff above it seeming to crack and implode, collapsing the entrance and burying half of that canyon around the gatehouse in shale and rubble. Zooming out we could ridgelines and peaks of the hidden complex seemingly shudder, some of the mighty mountains sagging and even sliding in slow motion as the massive network of caves under the region collapsed.

Well, scratch one Star League cache.

In theory, we could have disabled the self destruct sequence that had started as soon as the techs yanked the core from its mount - the techs had in fact isolated that code mid-morning after cracking the system to take complete control (with the admin stick of doom, it wasn't exactly hard). However doing so would have left the FWLM a perfectly intact psudo Castle Brian that they could slap guns all over and suddenly find themselves with an ideal forward theater logistics base. One that a single garrison regiment could hold against probably a dozen if the FWLM engineers did their job correctly, which would be ideally placed to support massive attacks against the Steiner border.

Patrick Kell had been given the job of making the call, given that he was representing Katrinas interests. He had decided in the end that while it was a true shame and sad loss, the strategic threat of such a complex was just too great to leave intact.

Ergo, boom.

Even so despite the impeccable logic, I couldn't help but feel that something ancient and incredible had just died as I watched the complex slowly collapse on itself. I made a mental note to get Hanse to at least put a statue of Edwin Keeler up in NAIS somewhere -his service jacket including a holographic representation had been in the computer core. A monument so the Federated Commonwealth would always remember who they owed this priceless second chance to.

The return of the Yehudan Sea was the final act in this chapter of the story. Shortly after that, our ships ignited their drives as the Woli Pride slotted into formation, breaking orbit. The Kell Hounds squadron merged before we were even a light second out, the combined fleet now burning hard as we accelerated away from the planet. No need for stealth now, just speed. Our fleet expanded once again as we caught up to the Mammoths and Mules by the end of the day and folded into their formation, reducing our acceleration somewhat. Then came the waiting game as we slowly but steadily chewed up the distance to our Jumpships.

This part of Battletech that was so much easier to read about than live.

Travel in Dropships and Jumpships sucked, no question as far as I was concerned. All I could do was sit in my tiny rack (and keep firmly in mind that it was tiny in comparison to my bed back on New Avalon; it was positively palatial compared to the troops living arrangements) and watch various vid shows and movies - the dropships memory core at least contained a pretty huge library of media - even if in the common areas only Solaris ever seemed to be shown. Possibly because current popular entertainment was pretty damn horrible, making me wonder if I could make some cash selling some of the content on my devices as 'lostech' movies from the 21st century or something. I had a feeling the AFFS would be able to relate to Generation Kill...

The troops at least were kept busy cleaning their field gear that had gotten little use - and poking at a handful of examples of the Star League technology they had salvaged and been allowed to play with, like children on Christmas day. The officers started to catch up with paperwork, reports and what not. Ardan - the bastard - even asked me to write a report, blithely ignoring my protests that A) I was not in the AFFS B) I didn't have the first clue how to and C) It would be classified so high that no-one bar he, Quintus and Hanse would be able to read it anyway...

Nonetheless he insisted and so I humored him, working out three pages that described the actions of 'my' team and noting they had all performed well under quite high pressure. I added in a couple of pages of suggestions for the use of the materials we had looted based off future and past knowledge, but otherwise left it there. I'm sure Hanse had entire buildings full of people to work these things out after all.

Still it starved off cabin fever and helped the days pass.

All ships went to Battle stations as we closed in on two hours to the jump point, the fleet decelerating hard at 1.5Gs, the maximum the massive Mammoths could safely take. My mind was working overdrive now about worst case scenarios, starting with Yorinaga Kurita applying Phantom Mech to an Achillesclass ship. Then came ComStar giving one of their Warships a test drive after someone panicked and ending with the Perigard Zalman being ripped through time and space thanks to a K/F butterfly fuckery I had somehow induced. Culminating in its Star Admiral deciding to shoot up as many Freebirth Jumpships as they could see because, you know, why the hell not…

It was thus a very welcome anticlimactic outcome when … nothing happened. No incoming, no surprises, no malfunctions. Our dropships simply decelerated hard into the jump point and in a chaotic yet well-coordinated ballet, linked up with their jumpships who had long furled their sails with fully charged drives.

Then bare seconds after the final CAP birds had landed, there was an explosion of exotic particles and in a blinding flash of light, the fleet gave the middle finger to causality, the concept of Lostech, Jerome Blake and the Concord of Kapteyn and flung itself out of the system. Leaving behind a bunch of highly confused locals wondering exactly when the Yehudan Sea had come back