We had spent a week each of us doing our best to figure out how bad our situation was, vis a vis what we could steal in the time and air we had allowed. Our time and air were not unlimited, but not, yet, urgent. Still, we were sitting deep in enemy territory with the fleets of the most powerful star nation in the world at our back, and the treasure that would give them dominance of the whole Inner Sphere sitting in front of us, and we were figuring how much would fit in our one shopping cart before we ran off. It was criminal. We would leave behind riches to build an empire, but the graffiti was right, “Fuck Davion”, and the authors of the Silence of Atlantis would not gain the weapons of the lost Star League to crush the rest of humanity under Hanse Davion’s benevolent boot. No ruler in the Inner Sphere could be trusted with it. Now a bunch of homeless former Capellan’s who have been an accredited mercenary company for a hot minute are clearly the only safe guardians for such dangerous technology. We voted, and everyone in the room agreed only we can be trusted, that is 100% of humanity in this star system, so as democratic as it gets.
“Talk to me people. What can we steal, and what do we do about the rest of it. I take it we agree we can’t leave anything behind for Davion?” I opened the meeting, looking at a crew that was wrung out physically and emotionally. I get that. There were moments of transcendental joy, crushing despair, and a whole lot of “what does that even mean?”. Never meet your heroes. The Star League wasn’t half as magical as we were told, but having said that, they really made us feel like monkeys with sharpened rocks walking into the main mech factory at Ceres Sian and trying to figure out how the big shiny robots make boom boom.
Captain Xi Beng, drop ship commander was first.
“I can answer the last one. With help from Fleet Captain Tsarkov, we can get the Octopus tug to detach from the drop collar, we are going to have to do that anyway if the one dropship we can outright steal is going to be physically unmounted from the hull, then we grab onto the Bismark and drop the last Aegis Cruiser into the sun, and let the Federated Suns sons go suck some fire.”
I blinked. We could take a whole DROPSHIP. “Tell me its an Overlord!” I begged, each of them had at least two companies of mecha, another two of tanks, and a full squadron of Aerospace fighters that were being upgraded for the Reunification War on the way to the rim. The look on Captain Xi Beng and Fleet Captain Tsarkov’s face told me what ground pounders should do when civilized deep space sailors were talking involved more shutting up and being grateful and less asking for the fattest red envelope possible at New Years.
“No. Lets ignore the fact they were too close to the core when it melted down and their avionics are shot, once we got them off, even if we used the tug to get them to us, we could not attach them to the Merchant afterwards. They didn’t blow up at the time, but that was mostly luck and Star League over engineering rather than human effort. The Mule on the other hand, that one was shut down by her Captain, and her circuitry was deliberately uncoupled physically to prevent any cascades, so thanks to her redundancies, when powered up she works better than Winter Moonrise. The Merchant has the arms to dog a Mule down, where we cannot control the Overlord. The Mule we can play pirate with, but I have to rotate crew to do it.”
I blinked, it actually still flew. Mind blown. The Mule began life as a Merchant ship, but this was a dedicated Taurian Fleet Landing Auxiliary. It was a frigging mecha repair facility and upgrade ship, designed by the Taurian’s to upgrade whatever home grown and scavenged mecha they had to as near to peer to the SLDF’s best as they could get in the latter half of the Reunification war with whatever tech aid the Magistracy of Canopus and Outworld Alliance had been able to share with them. It was a good enough ship that the real SLDF had taken it, filled it with their own Star League Defense Force bright and shiny toys and used it to up arm an Armed Forces of the Federated Suns (AFFS) landing group to SLDF standards. We didn’t have a full battalion, we had an overstrength company both mecha and armour in personnel, we had a few Aerospace fighter pilots and a few other pilots of conventional craft, mostly logistic. Physically working we had a reenforced company of Vindicators and a lance of Partisan tanks. We had the better part of two battalions of techs, and boy if that wasn’t a handy mix.
I turned to my chief technician. “What can we steal?”
Before he could answer, Lt Tyrone Jackson burst out. “Sir, the tanks work. Please can I have them! I had my crews check them over, and I don’t care if you have to kick my Partisans out the airlock, I want these tanks sir.”
I blinked, the idea of taking tanks went against the grain. Mecha were the peak of human technology. Then again, these were Star League tanks, and I had a lot of armoured crewmen who may or may not ever be trainable as mech warriors, but they were absolute beasts in ground armour combat, and skilled at combined arms warfare. Combined arms won wars, mech forces won raids. We were at war, we might be on a raid, but anyone who wasn’t ready to go to war would eventually be found dead at the feet of the guys who showed up to fight one.
“Talk to my Tyrone, sell me on your tanks.” From what I could see, the Star League mecha were kind of disappointing. They were amazing, but they were more weird that mythical. Tyrone seemed to be less confused by his tanks.
“Sir, they are called Rhino, from Leopard Armour on Holy Terra itself.” His eyes went wide, Terra was controlled by Com Star and had to be terraformed after the Amaris civil war and the fall of the Star League, they had done that much damage to it. Now Com Star didn’t let lesser beings, like everyone who was not Com Star even set foot on the mother world. A lot of people tended to look upon it as something special, which Com Star used heavily in its own recruiting, much like the Star League technologies that they alone understood. I used to think that was bullshit, until I tried to read the tech manual of the Royal Wyvern, a mech the same size and performance as my Vindicator that was filled with things I still could not understand.
Tyrone was less mystified and more aroused, he was sweating visibly as he rhapsodized about his tanks. I swear if I notice any white stains on the armour I am getting biohazard to clean it, his tankers were that excited about the things. He was rattling off about his Rhino’s and I admit, I was becoming a convert.
“Fusion powered, kind of like your engines, so we did learn it in school, the techs are running us through the tutorials on reactor care that are part of the fucking tank software sir, tests included! It is eighty tons, can sprint up to fifty kph, but cruises about 30 so just like my Partisans, but the thing is massively armoured. It can take four PPC hits to the ass and not die, it can take five to six everywhere else. It packs twin LRM-20, so forty tubes of long range missile fire with enough ammunition to fire twelve salvo, and if it gets close range, I have four medium lasers and thirteen heat sinks so I can fire both LRM or all the medium lasers and move without generating a lick of heat.”
The thing is, we had always functioned with LRM carriers as our main artillery, but the LRM carrier is an eggshell with a hammer. It can’t take more than one hit from a PPC or it blows up killing the entire crew and anyone nearby. ASF take them out in groups when they strafe them, Long Tom Artillery can shell them to scrap before their advancing mecha ever get within range, and fire support mecha target them first, so they are never really available in an open battle. Those Rhino were not as fast as our mecha, but they could provide a defensive line and fire support base in a moving battle, and their potential in an ambush was unreal.
“Sold. We take as many as we can shoe horn in, even if we have to strap some to the Merchant dropship hull, it has external racks, so we worry about how to get them down when we have a base to call home.” I saw grim looks from my Dropship and Jumpship captains, but the armoured officer looked happy.
“The mecha?” I asked turning to Al Leong who stroked his long mustaches and goatee.
“Forget it. There is too much I don’t understand, and they were half way through conversion anyway. The tech is pure Star League and that is a fucking curse. They are more complicated than they have to be and almost none of it is going to be any good to you. They were backed by a tech base and manufacturing centers that got glassed down to bare rock either in the fall of the league or the First Succession war. Let me tell you a few things that you can’t have.
Streak Short Range Missiles, they are magic somehow and wont fire if they are not guaranteed to hit. No five hundred year old missile still works, they will blow the fuck up if you try to launch them and nobody knows how to make more, they have these things called Artemis IV Fire control, they are for both SRM and LRM and somehow correct the missiles that would have missed from your solid target locks and guide them home. Again, nobody knows how to make the missiles so don’t bother. They have special magic LBX autocannon that fire cooler, at longer ranges, and fire flechettes with a higher chance to hit that spread damage like missiles, but nobody knows how to make the ammunition and if you want to trust heavily radiated explosives I do not understand sitting right beside your reactor, then you put it in. There are things called Gauss rifles they talk about but didn’t include, those I could have pulled off ammunition for, they are just metal balls. Those I could have done, but of course, Davion loves his autocannons so much none of these machines had any.
On to energy weapons. They have an extended range PPC that fire about a third farther, have no minimum range, you could literally tuck this under an Atlas chin and lead him to enlightenment. It does the same damage, but produces half again the heat. They have an extended range large laser that fires about a third farther, does the same damage and half again as much heat. They have these things called pulse lasers that do more damage, have a better chance to hit close, but their ranges are actually shorter than ours and they both weigh more and produce more heat.
They have funky skeletons that are half as heavy, but twice as bulky, they have really neat ferro fiberous armour that is 1.12 times more effective, but again, eats up critical spaces inside the hull, and they have engines that are half the mass, but the damned things extend out of the center torso into both sides, eating more critical spaces. The whole bloody thing is a trade off.”
I worked to process that slowly. The Star League really did have magic missiles, and I couldn’t have any. That kind of hurt. The magic guass rifle I couldn’t have, but really wanted. I wrote off the autocannons, those were a Davion thing and I was never sold on them. The energy weapons, they raised more questions than I liked.
“Al, how the fuck did they use those energy weapons if they run so hot? If my PPC gave me 15 points of heat for every shot, that is damned near my entire heat sink total, if I walked and shot that ER PPC that is all I could do without overheating. Why mount all these guns if we can’t shoot them? How does that make Star League mecha more dangerous.”
Al smiled, and our good Tech Sgt Leong looked like a holodrama villain.
“Oh I can answer that one.” He flashed up a pre-programmed image on the screen, it was a sort of a heat sink, but a lot more elaborate. “Meet the double heat sink. Takes up about three times the space of a normal heat sink for the ones outside the ten build into the fusion engines, that is a big part of what makes the extra light engines so bulky I think, but they do twice the cooling of a regular heat sink. Now I can’t build new XL engines, or new magic missiles for the special magic Star League Streaky Artetmis bullshit, but this double heat sink, this is just plumbing, bootlegging and copyright infringement, which are three things a good Capellan learns at the tit.”
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“Yank all the XL engines. The Royal Wyrverns we were looking at are all 45 tons with a 180 engine like our Vindicators. Yank all the extended range PPC or large laser. We will find something to fit it, if not, then we will need the spares. Leave the missile systems and autocannon, we can’t feed them so we don’t need them. The special magic armour and skeletons, again, we can’t fix it or replace it, so I don’t want it. Now the combat computers, communications, the fancy combat suits and all those special magic small arms, I want to loot as much of that as we can squeeze in. Anything else?”
At that point, the stiletto sisters spoke up for the first time. The stiletto sisters were alive today because they had been in lockup when the invasion hit. I am not saying that the CCAF is staffed with saints, but the ground forces are at least disciplined. The air corps tends to attract more nobles because it is higher profile lower risk, and greater chance of surviving a botched offensive raid. The nobility as a rule treat other rules, like sexual harassment rules, more as guidelines for lesser beings than things that applied to them. Kate Beckinsdale and her wingwoman Lucy Liu had stalked from their Capellan Military Academy class as the number 4 and 5 pilots (numbers one to three being a given as the most noble candidates in the school class, so number 4-10 tended to be in high demand for regiments that needed functional air superiority) but number one on the disciplinary list for self defense involving knife use. Seven stabbings before graduation, and yet another the night before the invasion when the drink brought to their table at the dance club set off their drug detector.
“One thing. Between the two Overlords, we can get you six heavy Aerospace Fighters. I just want the Rapiers, the other ones are based on weapon systems I don’t know and don’t trust. These have the double heat sinks fitted, two of the extended range PPC and six medium lasers.” Kate said softly.
Lucy carried on as if what Kate just said made any sort of sense. “Eighty five tons, as fast as most mediums and as armoured as most heavies, good fuel for a lot of linger time in theater, we can escort you down and be available for ground support, but are going to need to tank up before the extraction if you want a multi day raid. The avionics are a lot more advanced, but a lot of it is instinctive. It has a system similar to a mech gyro which makes stabilizing in gravity easier and makes recovering from high g turns in space a little easier. The engine is standard, but with the huge number of heat sinks in it, there really isn’t a space centemeter left that isn’t filled with avionics fuel weapons or coolant radiators.”
Tall and clad in skin tight black flight suits, hilts of various implements of destruction visible, one set of blue eyes and one set of almond eyes gazed back at me like a matched set of falcons that had just decided they were hungry and required someone to find them prey. The stiletto sisters did a hair flip so natural and in sync that you know they didn’t practice it, they were just that in tune. We didn’t just have air cover, we had a full wing of special magic Star League defense force fighters. The Rapier were so famous they had an actual holo drama series about it that ran for like twenty years in the Star League. I had even seen some at a film festival. It was like being told that I could have dragons if I could find hanger space for them. Of course I wanted them.
“Do we have pilots?” I asked. The stiletto sisters shared a look. “Enough. Two aces scoring in the top hundred in active service Confederation wide,” Kate said, leaving out that at least half that list were nobles stroking their egos, I would be surprised if the stiletto sisters were not in the top twenty active service pilots who actually deployed to combat, and possibly the only two who flew together. “Another two who are fighter qualified but had been flying small craft, and their two flight engineers had enough flight hours to qualify as shuttle pilots now if their family records had been better. They can be trained up, the Rapier come with simulator software in the cockpits, we can literally sim train in the machines as a squadron while we are locked down and safed in the hanger.” Kate concluded. Lucy smiled as I nodded slowly. I pitied the other pilots. There are training norms, and then there are what the stiletto sisters considered the bare minimum combat proficiency. If the pilots survived training, I had no problem taking them to war.
Okay, so if the Wyverns are out, what is the most badass loadout we can come up with for our Vindicators?
As we watched the Octopus slowly push the Aegis class cruiser Bismark to its grave, and our new Mule Dropship sat comfortably snuggled onto its docking collar, the locking arms would hold it down until we had some time on the ground to fix the physical collar, I reflected on what our Vindicators had become.
No one was going to expect that we were piloting losttech machines. The Vindicator was produced after the fall of the Star League and after the Capellan Confederation lost most of its mech production facilities in the horrors of the First Succession wars, where humanity undid about five hundred years of progress in about five years of mutual slaughter. It was the first post Star League design of the Confederation, and was as simple a machine we could produce to do a little bit of everything well enough to survive on a battlefield where every enemy mecha did one job better, but we had just the one to match it at everything.
The XL or Extra Light engine saved us a few tons and with the double heat sinks allowed us to go from 16 heat skinks worth of cooling, roughly one PPC and two medium lasers worth of heat, to 17 double heat sinks doing 34 standard heat sinks worth of cooling. That allowed us to fit an ER PPC, hitting just as hard one third farther out and able to fire at even point-blank range, unlike our old ones that tended to melt down if we used them at close range. We also had a total of six medium lasers, one in the head, one in each torso, two in the center torso and both a medium laser and small anti infantry laser in the left arm. We could fire the ER PPC and all six medium lasers at once. That gave us the ability to do approximately five times the damage of a PPC or autocannon-10 hit at anything medium range or below, and the ability to do a five times the damage of Davion’s super long range AC-2 at the same range, double the damage of his standard long range AC-5 at outside of its range. We saved a bit of weight to add some armour to our legs maxing out what the structure could support. Our targeting and tracking systems were Ostman Scrambler 7 and upgrade from the Ostscout which was the premier scout mech that were guarded like the heirs to the Successor Houses, they were that much better than anything the houses could make now. The communications systems were Ostman AMB, they were frequency agile rolling encryption with blue force tracker that data shared among all linked systems to provide a total systems overview that was the next best thing to being able to share actual targeting data. Each mecha came with deployable drones, short ranged, less than a kilometer, and you couldn’t target through them, but they could scout for a treat on pure visual, thermal, or audio levels, It made me wonder if the Star League hadn’t melted down if their command and control would have gotten to the point that they could actually use the spotter mecha to target whole lances, or whole company’s worth of fire based on whoever had the best line of sight. I wept for what we lost, but rubbed my hands together and chuckled about what we had like some bad holo drama villain.
Hanse Davion, First Prince of the Federated Suns piloted a Battlemaster, an 85 ton assault mech. Its primary armament was a single PPC and six medium lasers, it had to switch to an SRM-6 pack at close range or the PPC would slag itself. It had a lot more center torso armour, but its flanks and legs didn’t have much more armour than us, and we could hit just as hard, and stay cooler. Our poor much maligned Vindicators now hit as hard as a Battlemaster, could outrange anything that hit harder than a light cough and eat alive anything that could match its range.
Star League tech wasn’t what legends told us it was. It was so much better than anything we had, but it wasn’t free. It was all about trade offs. Light mecha (20-35 tons) couldn’t save enough mass to use their space and armour themselves enough to be worth the expense. Heavy (60-85 tons) and Assault mecha (85-100 tons), those ran out of internal spaces fast when they wanted to use advanced materials like the endo steel skeletons, ferro fiberous armour, double heat sinks, and XL engines. Sure they could get more benefit from every one of those things, but when you went to add weapons, you started having space issues. I could see why the ancient machines had mixed weapon systems, too much energy and you can’t fit the coolant systems, autocannons ran cool but ate space, missiles ran cool but ate space, energy weapons took up less space, but stack them and you stack heat burden. The trade offs made it impossible to exploit more than a few of the new technologies.
Medium (40-55 ton) mecha though, we had the armour to survive putting in an XL and not being a one shot kill to either torso. We had enough mass to afford to mount the amount of energy weapons that the free space allowed us room to fit double heat sinks to cool. We could actually use more of the Star League technology than any other class of machines. The Vindicator was not fast and didn’t jump far for its class, saving the rest of the room in the machine for weapons and lots of heat sinks. Our refits used an even smaller engine of the same output, a GM180XL to replace our existing GM180, added one heat sink, but doubled the efficiency of those, and gave us an extended range PPC, and enough medium lasers to peel a heavy mecha like a grape at close range. Even an Atlas would have a hard time not falling on its ass if we caught it with a full salvo of ER PPC and medium lasers, as the weapons if they all hit would blast almost three tons of armour off in one trigger pull. Granted, that same Atlas could blow us away in return, but still, the idea a mere Vindicator could be threat to the hundred ton king of the Assault Mecha was a testament to how powerful Star League machines really were.
Com Star hired us to scout Miller’s Marauders. No freelance merc company wanted to take the contract, because if they were home, that meant tangling with two battalions of 75 ton bird legged twin PPC clawed and AC-5 dorsal mounted heavily armoured killing machines. Nobody in anything less than an assault mech had any chance of closing with a Marauder and surviving. Nobody with half a brain risked their assault mecha on scouting, and nobody with a medium mech battalion was willing to risk hitting the Marauders to find out they were still home. The Marauders were heavily balanced for long range combat, sure you could run away from them, but you would be in range a long time, and nobodies back is up to taking that kind of fire.
We had reason to believe that they were part of Hanse Davion’s little shell game for his invasion of the Capellan Confederation. If I was right, there wouldn’t be all that many of them, and not all that many tanks backing them up. The problem is I didn’t have a battalion, I had a company, and a little Marauder goes a long way. If I pushed in and found out most of their two battalions were in fact off world, whoever was left would not let us live to carry that intelligence away. Our new improved Vindicators were many things, but we were not faster than a Marauder. Whatever Miller’s Marauder had left, if we snuck and shocked our way in for a close look and got gun camera and drone records, whoever was left would do their best to get those Marauders between us and getting home.
Miller’s Marauders best was pretty damned good. We had been the 1st Ariana Fusiliers, and those who survived long enough to become The Vindicated were veterans of the most intense combat the Inner Sphere had seen in living memory, but were we good enough to go up against elite mercenaries? Memories of watching the 2nd Battalion getting taken apart by the 71st Eridani Light Horse haunted me. Sure the Marauders were not the Eridani Light Horse, but they were elite mercenaries, and we were just a Capellan Confederation line unit that refused to die. Was that enough?
I felt the shock of Jump wash over me, the gentle wash compared to our hot jump into the graveyard system. We had hit the pirate point close to Wrentham, which ironically had been part of the Taurian Concordat that had been conquered by the Federated Suns in the very war that the Aegis class cruiser Bismark had been on its way to fight five hundred years ago. Now we were here to hit the Federated Suns in service of Com Star, the last existing arm of the fallen Star League with material the Star League intended for the Federated Suns to use against the Taurian Concordat. If we lived, and got paid, we were intending to go calling on the Taurian Concordat and convincing them hiring us was a good idea.
Politics and war in the inner sphere was insane.
I was dropping twelve 45 ton Vindicators against what could be just short of a hundred 75 ton Marauders piloted by the best Marauder pilots in the Inner sphere.
It was madness season, and the forecast called for raining Vindicators. Buckle up Miller’s Marauders, a storm is coming.