To say we were welcomed with open arms was a gross misstatement. We had exchanged HPG messages on four different occassions, but when we arrived at Jansens Hold III, we took onboard two platoons of some of the hardest most paranoid special forces I have ever seen.

I know intellectually the Death Commando’s of House Liao or the DEST of the Draconis Combine are technically more terrifying because they can also pilot both battlemechs, dropships, and jumpships in addition to being terrifying infantry, but the Taurian Defense Force Asteroid Commando are freaking terrifying.

They are infantry that train to fight on board ships, or without even bothering with a ship. These crazy bastards think that huddling in your space suit for weeks with improvised weapons while tethered to a rock or chunk of ice stuck in orbit is a wonderful way to go hunt dropships during planetary invasions. They carry enough explosives in thigh pouches to render your spaceship into hard vacuum just so they don’t miss the wide open spaces of deep space. They routinely get strapped in pods to TDF Aerospace fighters to be shot like torpedo at incoming dropships with the intent to make them more about the drop and less about the ship. If things go well, the ship they are on won’t survive reentry. If things go poorly, they die but the ship gets to land. These guys and girls are so motivated that you realize killing them is in no way enough to protect you from whatever they were intending on doing in the next few seconds. They were experts on making the most of those seconds.

I remembered the halls of the Bismark, I remember the way the peaceful researchers and academics had embraced their own death just to make sure the Davion bastards who murdered their worlds died too, and realized that the warriors of such a people could only be, well, like these bastards right here.

Negotiations for service with the TDF hit a few sticking points.

First, we were sticking together. We were all that we had, all that was left. We were the Vindicated. Sure we were an odd duck of a unit, twelve Vindicators, four Marauders almost up and running, a dozen heavy Rhino tanks, and too many technicians. We had a full wing of heavy Rapier Aerospace fighters, an Overlord and Mule Dropship (the latter not actually a cargo carrier but a dedicated mech upgrade center), and a Jumpship.

I had forgotten, that here in the Periphery, we were too big. Light mecha were the rule out here, mediums were considered to be serious metal, and four heavy mecha made you a real threat. No one really knew how powerful Rhino were, but they were ninety ton tanks with huge missile batteries, so it didn’t take a tactical genius to conclude they packed a serious punch.

In fact, we were a bit large to be a normal garrison of a world without high value assets. We were also mercenaries whose only employer had been Com Star. Here in the Taurian Concordat, a religious order from the Inner Sphere that worships the same Star League whose crusade burned whole worlds and enslaved entire planetary populations during the Reunification Wars was not the recommendation that you would hope for.

Second, we had a mission to return and bury the dead of Atlantis with honours. The world the city of Atlantis had once graced was now simply called Desolation Plains, a graveyard of a world no one bothered to raid anymore, since its atmosphere was toxic and its settlements proved too vulnerable to raiders who didn’t mind cracking the dome to get to the rare earth minerals. No one bothered rebuilding anymore. It was a land of atrocities and ghosts, and we brought some of those home.

While this seriously chaffed the chaps of the TDF Mercenary Liaison, it proved to be a bonding moment with the Asteroid Defense Force commando.

When Tina, Hawk and I got done yelling at Major Tibalt VII (why seven, I don’t know, I don’t want to know, I didn’t ask). Over his insistence that we didn’t get to wander around Taruian Concordat space as we chose, but we had to request travel orders, which would be refused, until we had earned enough time for leave, and even then we would not be allowed to bring a military dropship on a pleasure cruise I may have come on a little strong.

“I swore an oath to the goddamned dead. I tossed an Aegis class Battlecruiser into the sun, rather than leave it for Davion. Had I turned it over to him, Hanse Davion would have given me a planet of my own, and raised my officers to the nobility, but I fired it into the goddamned sun because Davion cracked the dome on Atlantis and let a city of millions die screaming as their lungs burned.

This woman, and her people, gave their lives so that the Federated Suns and the Star League should not profit from that crime, and they did not fail. I am bringing them home. I am burying them in the wreckage of their home, among the bones of their murdered children and if you think you can stop me BRING A FUCKING FLEET!”

A hand closed on my shoulder and squeezed. One of the blank helmeted Asteroid Defense Force commando, the leader of the group on my Overlord, drove his armoured exoskeleton enhanced fingers into my shoulder and a cold voice echoing through his suits external speakers silenced both Tibalt VII and us.

“Show me. Now.” Is all the voice said. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. It was as if death suddenly reminded you they were in the room, but now they cared enough to take a look at you. Not the sort of experience you want to remember, but not one I will ever forget.

Tina, curse her black Maskirovka heart, had an edited version of Lori Wood, PhD etc etc etc last will and testament ready to play. It played on the main conference room holo with data stream to Tibalt VII in his office, with all sorts of flashing hyperlinks that promised nested files with further data and authentication codes.

It had been a long time since the Reunification Wars, and the fall of the Star League had done nothing to help the periphery rebuild. Centuries of Davion and outright pirate raiding had kept the Taurian Concordat’s attempts to rebuild to barely breaking even outside the core clusters of the Concordat. What the Star League tablet did in seconds took a painful two minutes for the planetary defense computers of Jansen’s Hold III to sort through and verify.

Tibalt VII, his black faced mask of noble officer dropping for a few seconds to show the core of ice cold steel that seemed to lie beneath even the most pleasant mask of the Taurian’s I had met. When the emotionless voice of the Asteroid Defense Force Commando spoke, it was an order, and everyone knew it.

“We will escort the dead home. We will inter them with honours. Blood has been given to the void. Blood for blood. Blood remembers.” The Commando said, and every one of those spooky fuckers echoed the phrase.

“Blood for blood; Blood remembers.”

Orders were snapped and one of the Commandos on the wall stepped forward. “Show me the dead.”

That was pretty much that. We were not allowed into the bay we had cleared to vacuum to store the bagged dead of Atlantis. The crazy bastards of the ADF stood in ranks silently over the dead for the rest of the trip in shifts. They seemed to think it an honour, and far more important than keeping an eye on us.

We were shadowed still as we jumped system to system, but now it was education not interrogation that was the order of the day. They briefed us on their ranking systems, their organizational systems, their logicics systems, their pay structure, their benefits packages. You think I am joking? We were from the Capellan Confederation, the idea that you had every person born here was a citizen is hard enough to understand (Citizenship in the Confederation is hard to earn, some families sacrifice for half a dozen generations to raise one child to that status), but that such citizenship entitles you to free healthcare (not free, they tax evenly but thoroughly) and education regardless of your station was more than a little hard to accept.

Remind me again, why did the Star League come to conquer them again? Freedom, democracy, opportunity? I hate to say it, but they were freeer than we ever were in the Capellan Confederation, and “Freedom” in Davion space depends on birth. Core worlds were free and rich as any in known space, but resource worlds were kept poor and ignorant, their only purpose to generate agricultural surplus and mineral resources for worlds and people that mattered. They were not slaves, they just weren’t allowed to leave, change jobs, or stop working. It makes Davion lovers in the Federated Suns froth at the mouth when you point out Capellan subjects lived better than that. Taurians were not rich, but they were hard working, industrious, and if they made a profit they kept it. Government really did stop the big dogs from crushing startups that found a new way to make something.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Sure, they were not up to the standards of the old rich worlds of the Terran Corridor that most of the fighting in the Succession Wars has been over, but compared to most of the worlds in the back woods of every one of the Successor States I had seen, they were doing pretty good. Still, they were barbarians in one thing. They didn’t want anyone else's worlds, they had zero interest in conquest, but they would die to the last toothless granny or grade school child before you could take one sewage treatment plant or garbage dump away from them.

When we dropped on Desolation Plains, towards what Atlantis computers told us were the remains of the City of Atlantis, we did so in our Overlord. We did a full combat drop.

Twelve Vindicators fell from the sky in flames, our jump jets reacting with the atmosphere to produce a strange aroura as we fell. We took station in three blocks of four, and the Overlord settled ponderously between us.

The doors opened, and one Prime Mover, a fifty-ton mech wrecker flat deck proceeded by twenty-eight marching black space suited ADF Commando marched forward, heavy support lasers held like the anti mech weapons weighed less than my pistol.

Four Vindicators marched on each side, and four before. We marched slow, kept to the funeral pace of the marching Commando. We were alone with our thoughts, but our drones were soaring about us, recording the whole procession for whoever cared.

We came to the edge of the cracked dome, and the command was given by the ADF Commando leader, whose name was oddly enough Lance Sgt Percival Stewart, not exactly what I expected, but faceless killing machines may well once have been pink cheeked naughty schoolboys named Percival. This is the Concordat, shit gets weird here.

I knelt my Vindicator down, and with my right hand, dug a deep pit in the tortured earth. The soil had streaks of rust in the dark brown of the soil, like the memory of blood. I shuddered in my cockpit as two of the commando laid a body in the hole I had dug. I covered it again with about a ton of the soil, then stood back to attention.

Lance Sgt Stewart called the roll, listed the name and honours of each of the dead. All Taurian adults were reserve soldiers at the least, so all had military ranks, but their civilian honours were also listed. Not simply their educational titles, or their earned titles, but if they had married, if they had children those relationships were also named. We didn’t bury a dozen dead, we buried all the people they had been to each other, and to their fellow citizens, we buried everyone they could have been, every dream they ever had.

Then he stepped back and called out that strange ritual again.

“Blood has been given to the void. Blood for blood. Blood remembers. Let it return to the soil that bore it. The flesh is fleeting, but Blood Remembers.”

Upon the completion of that ritual, his ADF Commando shouldered their anti-mech lasers and fired a single burst of salute.

Marching past us, his troops formed behind the Vindicators, and as one we lowered our PPC, and keying our own microphones, both on loudspeaker and our shared frequency chanted the last line.

We waited until our six Rapier ASF came screaming overhead, the flight second Lucy Liu (call sign Dragon), peeled off at the last second, breaking vertical to leave a gaping hole in the formation. This was the “missing man formation” done at Confederation remembrance ceremonies. As the Missing Man formation flew overhead, we triggered our PPC.

“Blood remembers.”

With a blast, we seared the graves of the honoured dead into glass. The Commando hopped up onto the Prime Mover and we rolled back to the Overlord, the funeral done, they reverted to tactical movement like the heavy, almost religious ritual had been years ago and planets away.

I expected to face a lot of grief from Tibalt VII when we returned to Jansen’s Hold III, as we had basically told the officer in charge of mercenaries in this sector to go pound sand we are going to wander off and bury some people on another planet, we will get back to contract negotiations when we damend well feel like it.

In the Capellan Confederation you could expect either arrest and execution, if you were less important, or quiet assassination if you were too important to murder in plain sight. I know we were among barbarians now, and the Taurians had been more than a little odd. I firmly expected us to get arrested when we returned.

Instead, I had Lance Sgt Stewart ask if I would use our K1 shuttles to fly his troops to the moon above Jansen’s Hold III, because they were going to do a tour on that airless rock to work out the lazy that crept in from too much ship duty. The ADF are weird, but happy vacuum breathing monsters are always good to have on your side, so we gave them a pair of Rapier ASF as cover and flew them to their airless radiation blasted vacation spot.

Descending from orbit, we were given direction to the military starport. I was a little surprised, because it was collocated with Taurus Territorial Industries main facility. Granted it was the whole point of having a garrison here, but dropping a company of mercenaries so close to the biggest high value target on the planet argued that either we were about to die when the port defenses all came online and blew our dropship apart, or the Taurians had mellowed on us.

Honestly, getting weird about Taurian war martyrs and dropping a losttech battlecruiser into a sun, because FUCK DAVION, is enough to make the Taurians decide you might be good people. Note to new immigrants, try to find one.

We had our Aerospace fighters land at the Aerodrome and our pilots were arguing with their technicians now about whether or not you needed an adaptor for the fuel couplings. No, the SLDF fuel ports were as magical as everything else. They irised to size to whatever hose you wanted to insert. It looked creepy and a little sexual but the Star League did everything disturbingly well, including pump reaction mass.

Marching off our Vindicators, we assembled them in two ranks of four to watch as the ground armour and infantry assets offloaded, not bringing down our Mule until we knew how tight we had to guard our secrets.

Three weeks of meetings later, we had a contract on the other continent to guard three different feeder facilities that were high value targets they could not afford to garrison with more than a single lance of their own mecha and an armoured company.

Now we had our three lances of Vindicators paired with their militia lances for training (the TDF was making shameless use of us as trainers), and our full armoured company of Rhino and what would be four functioning and refitted Marauder were added to the Starport defense team, which at that point was a single company of mecha, and a company of Bulldog tanks.

On the one hand, it kept us all on the same planet and in mutual support range since we kept the Overlord on station with our Mule, but it kept us nested within the local TDF forces, both heavily outnumbered and yet honestly more powerful than each of the formations we nested inside of.

I could see from the TDF’s point of view, they were making the most of us as a tactical resource, as they had been raided before by superior Davion forces intent on using our conveniently gathered resources rather than rely on their own shit internal trade network (plus keep us poor and weak, so bonus), as well as try to make sure we were not secret agents for Liao or Davion. Even though we were clearly Capellan, given St Ives broke off from the Capellan Confederation and made peace with Davion, and that our own Tikonov Confederation had “voted” (while under Federated Suns occupation) to join the Federated Suns (or I guess Federated Commonwealth since Katerina Steiner sold the whole Lyran Commonwealth to Hanse bloody Davion along with his daughter), so Davion had enough former Capellans in his service to find a company worth of traitors to send.

I didn’t care.

We had a home. A home that was filled with people worth defending. Granted they were the barbarians everyone accused them of being, but they were an incredibly vital and open kind of barbarian. They were not chasing the dream of some fallen Star League they could never equal. They were building a Taurian Concordat for their own children and grand children to inherit. A land where dreams were carved from bare rock, forged in fire, and tempered in their own blood.

Let them spy on us, as we would spy on them. When the day came we could trust each other, I had such secrets to share. Until then, we would stand guard. Let Davion come. Our war was not over. We are the Vindicated.