Sakhara 1.5
Sakhara 1.5
The weekend had finally dawned, and he had hastily perhaps even in an unseemly manner beaten a retreat to his land hold deep in the red desert and mountains to the northwest of the capital. It had been here that they had conducted testing and evaluation off campus of Justin's class.
Making a decision that might have in itself have been partially ill advised he decided to expanse the small force of Freebirths who had participated in the battle of Halstead Station. On Halstead he had deployed a pair of Zorya light tanks of Clan Hells Horses... today however in similar colors of black of stylized orange flames a Triumph arrived. Its heavy vehicle bays carrying only, admittedly fusion powered, eighty ton IS standard vehicles.
Sckrek and Devastators... the latter some times known as Demolisher Mk III tanks using the same 240 Fusion engine as the triple PPC carrier. The Eight Light Vehicles though were more Zoryas bringing his total to ten.
... but that wasn't all the essence allowed the generation of crew personnel. The ability to give them ATOW esque character builds. While everyone had character skills, and traits, they couldn't be modified after the effect, and all subsequent 'level ups' had to be done manually. He had to spend BV to level up his own skills, which seemed to be the only exception.
Halstead, and of course just recently he'd been in such a rush he hadn't bothered to do anything more than allow auto generation from a list of options and basic backgrounds. The transparent screen prompted him to designate a unit name, and in a fit of pique so was born the Robinson Assault Cluster under one of the few trueborn in the unit utilizing the tanker bloodname Robinson.
The Zorya profile was already known the FedSuns and he doubted the light tanks would attract any further attention... at least as long as he was careful. The 'cluster' was also in its current form very understrength... he could change that later, but for now he just wanted a DropShip full of angry vehicles to give anyone attempting to attack him head on a very bad day.
He was also banking on heavy vehicles, even fusion powered ones so long as they weren't lost tech SLDF designs were unlikely to attract the sort of attention that an equivalent tonnage of mechs would.... it was the reason he had had to pass on spawning similar cost and tonnage Fury Tanks at the moment... a 4.17M C Bills they would have been ideal but they were 'los tech'... but Bristol was 7 Jumps from here.
In order to further obfuscate any other necessities, he also intended to establish a secondary jumpship contingent of nominal Jarnfolk origin, but he probably wouldn't do that until the first of the year. It would provide JumpShips for the Federated Suns in the form of nominally nomadic weirdoes with some ties to himself, but without explicit ownership of such ships... and it would allow him to open up trade away from the front lines with the Draconis Combine. P{erhas a dedicated route from Robinson to New Avalon... or an internal circuit that expanded trade with the interesting worlds of the Federated suns 'interior', rimward... but that would be for later.
While he might expand the Cluster to an actual cluster it would be much much later, though it would probably be a proper assault cluster along Hells Horses lines... the Combine would probably come knocking eventually.
Of that he was sure.
In the mean time though... he needed support personnel. Unlike crew personnel or infantry ... well support personnel only cost 1 BV and were subject to the same character generation as crew personnel. Infantry were way more expensive by comparison, it was quite absurd in his opinion... maybe the essence identified as Clanner, he mused as he scrolled through the cost of infantry equipment.
For that single BV a unique person came into the world. Farmers, blue collar workers, office salaraiman. That was just a handful of inner sphere options. Clan affiliations were broken along caste lines... in the sense of merchant, laborer, technician, and scientist castes.
When you got right down to it, with some finagling he could go find some lost world and build his own hidden world.
--
Yvonne Davion ignorant of machinations within the county to the north east of her present residence. What was really the duke's guest house, and indeed one she suspected signified that her presence alarmed him... most likely his newest noble neighbor, who of course Ian had directly enfeefed to New Avalon was a beacon to invite the Combine to attack.
Which wasn't an unreasonable assumption. Where in trivid blockbusters for the masses there were crass jokes that whole divisions would come crashing down for defiling some nobleman's daughter ... in the Combine's case it wasn't unreasonable to assume that another Sword of Light unit might attempt to avenge the Second's destruction... and it wasn't impossible that some warlord might try to win fame and distinction by acting on his own.
They had no evidence to support such a thing being in the works... and the truth was the DCMS probably were unable to support such an offensive... not after the victories on Mallory's World and Hallstead station the combine's other mech units had taken a beating that would take years to recover from...
... and indeed from their intelligence reports the Combine was proving slower to recoup its losses than expected. Since Halstead Station had been a raid the Combine should have been able to salvage their losses after the battlefield, but it seemed as if the toxic nature of the planet had hampered recovery efforts... not surprising given the loss of the city of Madison as a consequence of the fighting. That bought them time at least... but the Coordinator would need to make a move sooner rather than later it was the nature of the beast.
"Are these the reports?" She asked rhetorically to one of the Davion Guards officers who occupied a position on her staff.
"They are ma'am."
"Anything in particular?"
"Corean Enterprises construction on New Avalon, in particular the cost of the deal to build the battlemech line."
She raised an eyebrow. Most people asking about BattleMech factories wanted ... well other details, things like production volume or in the case of sabotage security procedures... the monetary value of a factory was... was if a corporate interest or noble wanted to know how much something cost... because he wanted it, or a competing option...
... but that was absurd, even the most quintessential lyran social generals didn't pour their entire gdp into new factories for bragging rights... and yet... by all indications they'd seen no evidence that the income earned by the more than a dozen JumpShips now plying routes from New Avalon was doing nothing but sitting idle in the banks.
There had been no activity... despite some of those ships starting their routes in January of 3014.. and those also tended to be the more impressive large Star Lords not the smaller more common Merchants.
Working from the heir theory it wasn't unlikely that the day to day expenses of maintaining a noble household couldn't be maintained through another account, perhaps money inherited alongside the JumpShips themselves, but even so the complete lack of movement in the cash from the carrying trade was unusual.
... but she was already over the line with the DMI's mandate and into MIIO's territory. She'd need to pass it along or there would be a turf war, especially if there was nothing here. If this was completely benign and for the benefit of the Federated Suns... well the succession wars had reiterated the Age of War before it the lesson of don't kill golden geese... and more importantly don't allow rival kingdoms to kill your golden geese.
--
He made the return to campus Sunday evening, and Monday morning had found himself in a conversation the officer who served as the 5th Guards liaison... who was himself embroiled in a discussion, by the time he arrived, about the planned new garrison for the RCT on Spica.
Spica.
Now there was something he dreaded. He remembered painfully little of the details of the warrior trilogy, and in truth he liked the actual Justin Allard moody teen mechwarrior more than what he remembered of the protagonist of the trilogy... and while quintessentially BattleTech and emblematic even of the sort of table top rpg games he would play in another world... he wasn't sure he could allow by choice the events of the novel to play out.
There in sort of lay the logistical issue... "Correct me if I am mistaken but Spica is, by its most direct JumpShip route, fifteen jumps?"
"That is correct." The officer from the fifth replied clearly weighing his age versus his reputation... and it looked like his age was winning that. The truth was it couldn't really be helped, and to a degree was probably to be expected. Some people were just not going to get around it.
"And that assumes you want to to jump into capellan space." The Field Marshal remarked.
"Which I wouldn't be," He replied, unless he was invading... and well if he was doing that... well Star Lords were cheap, so much cheaper than outfitting them with the necessary invasion force to bring a planet to heel... but he reminded himself that he could not do that. He wasn't the wolf dragoons spawning five regiments of pristine battlemechs was absolutely out of the question... "that's about twice the distance I'm comfortable with, to be honest." Doing the mental math of 15 jumps that was a hundred and ten days... three and a half months. That was just one way, and even without skirting the border issue at almost 360 ly distance ... too far. "Its too far," He muttered.
His mental mathematics were abrogated as the Chancellor cleared his throat... "I am pleased to announce to you all that our storied institution will be playing host to a special event. His Grace the Duke of Robinson is en route with the finest cadets of the RBA looking to test themselves against our own, in addition we will be playing host with another Opposing Force Candidates as well." The chancellor's words were perfunctory, rehearsed, calm.
Vice Chancellor Coleridge immediately left the stage as soon as the polite applause for the Chancellor ended and made a beeline to the cluster he was standing amidst. Sakhara was fully prepared to host RBA or DMM OpFor... but they absolutely wanted to win. Coleridge wanted to win. Enough that if he could have gotten away with it ... well he'd have resorted to a change in line up... but the Chancellor had refused to allow it. So Colonel Coleridge intended for the next best thing... the cadets needed to be ready.
A readiness he did not believe that they had achieved in part due to the events of the previous week.. not only were there extant disciplinary problems one of the more capable classes of mechwarriors had been trounced by an OpFor unit despite their numerical advantage. To Coleridge this signified that they weren't ready... and that meant pushing them to do better.
--
Notes: Yes theoretically a a union might occur in the 3040s but that would run into pother potential issues that I have planned in that part of the timeline. That being said the Essence says don't worry about where the money goes so I won't.
But 'recycling' well those recycled HPGs are going to end up somewhere and with knock on consequences down the road, after all the successor states would pay money for those... but thats down the road.