We were sitting in the briefing room of Winter Moonrise, strapped in as the jump ship kept a steady 0.5G as it furled its great solar sail preparatory to jumping. We had achieved everything we wanted. We had become and officially registered mercenary company, the Vindicated Mech Company, and we had our first contract. Granted it wasn’t a contract we could ever put on our resume, but when you are hired under the table by Com Star and you both do your job and keep your mouth shut, it isn’t just your C bill account that gets credit. We stood to receive a C rating from the Mercenary Bonding commission, a rating some companies serve honourably for a decade without receiving.
Our officers were debating the contract now with the usual mix of laughter and rage, fear and calculation. Our first contract after all would quite readily become our last if even a third of the expected enemy actually existed.
“Millers Marauders.” Lt Andre Chu, leading our third mech lance, sputtered in indignation. “Millers, fucking MARAUDERS. It isn’t just clever wordplay, they have two full battalions of Marauders, and they are fucking MASTERS at using them.” Lt Chu was almost frothing at the mouth, and was spitting a bit. Granted the idea of twelve 45 ton Vindicators taking on nearly a hundred of the 75 ton lords of war is on far side of fantasy and solidly into the stupid. The Marauder was seventy five tons of Star League designed long range killer. Two claw mounted PPC the equal of our own one, and a long range torso mounted AC-5 to complete our long range inferiority, it also boasted two claw mounted medium lasers, should one of survive to close. The machine had two and a half tons more armour, and both the same heat sinks and ground speed as we did. It couldn’t jump, but if a building was in its path, it would simply blow it apart and use those stupid bird legs to stalk over the rubble rather than bother jumping over, or walking around.
Lt Tyrone Jackson looked up briefly and then put his data slate down in depression. “They are there to back up the local planetary defense force. They make Vedette tanks, fifty tonners, with so so armour and better speed than my Partisans but only one AC-5. I mean my Partisans with the quad AC-5 would totally own their asses, if it wasn’t for the fact that I have four, and they have four regiments. They aren’t going to stop you mech boys, but they are going to slow you down and if those Marauders get even a decent piece of you, the Vedettes can run down and kill the wounded.”
Lt Hawk Heimdalson worked his toothpick around his mouth, and worked his cowboy hat on his head as he thought. “Yeah, I get that Ty, I am not arguing the point. It’s just that our contract is to get eyes on the central mech depot and confirm that Miller’s Marauders are actually on planet. It seems with the little gems of data we dropped on Com Star they are starting to doubt their own intelligence. I can’t see the Fox letting Miller’s Marauders sit this war out on the bloody side lines, I mean, the Fox actually managed to get the Northwind bloody Highlanders to jump ship. That is five elite fucking regiments not just deserting the Capellan Confederation mid war, but attacking the Draconis Combine forces pushing into the Federated Suns. The Fox lured Wolf’s Dragoons from the Kuritans, the Northwind Highlanders from Liao, we know he has used the Eridani Light Horse on our front, you think he’s letting the fucking Marauders with those shiny seventy five ton monsters just sit quietly in butt fuck nowhere while his Davion Guard RCT are bleeding themselves white facing us? No, I think Com Star is 70% sure the Marauders are off world, and we are just going to confirm that.”
Tina was doing her job as XO and throwing cold water on the first sign of the optimism that gets you ambushed.
“Com Star suspects MOST of the Marauders are off doing Hanse Davions bloody work, stomping orphanages and burning down schools for Freedom and the Federated Suns, bringing enlightenment and justice to however many Capellans survive the weeks of long range missile bombardment and liberal flamer use inside our cities. Most of two reenforced battalions leaves us with a whole lot of unknows. Did they leave a lance, a company, a full training battalion? I assume they took the Vedette regiments as their occupation forces for the worlds their mecha take, the damned things are second line machines, but did they take all of them? What is most of them gone look like? A company, a regiment? A regiment of mediocre tanks and green pilots can still put enough autocannon shells in the air that I could walk my Vindicator the length of the battlefield and not step off the bullets.”
I stepped in to lend my supposed wisdom as the commander. “Listen, this is a reconnaissance in force, a raid for information. While we do have full salvage rights and Com Star, who is definitely not hiring us for the record, because they are pacifists and don’t use violence to serve their holy ends, is offering us enough head hunting bounty for every Marauder we kill and do not leave behind intact that we will literally be able to buy a brand new Vindicator for every two Marauder we kill, even if we can’t salvage the beast.”
I could see greed and hubris making my pilots lose their rationalism at that news, dreams of big payouts danced in their heads. Putting a bounty on Marauders for Vindicators was like putting a bounty on cougars for house cats. They would survive long enough to realize they screwed up before they got gutted. Still, we got paid if we got into the Marauders mech hanger to confirm or deny the presence of their two mech battalions on world. If we could avoid contact all together, we would still get paid.
Our musings were ended by Fleet Captain Tsarkov of the Merchant dropship Potempkin interrupted with a priority call. Our jumpship was still busy furling its sail before we could jump, a good five minutes away from jump stations. The good reasons for his call were few, and the bad reasons were, well, pretty bad. I piped his com call to the central table for the assembled officers to hear.
“Fleet Captain Tsarkov, what have you got?” I ask.
“Captain Chavez,” The old Russian grumbled, “The robes security sucks. When Com Star updated our mercenary profile and availability for contract, the bloody Feds figured out who was sitting in their own system. We have a wing of Stuka heavy fighters escorting a Seeker infantry dropship on heavy burn out of the recharge station on the other point. They are demanding we surrender and stand by to be boarded. They are threatening to destroy our dropships and even disable our jump ship if we do not heave to.”
I guess dropping four Urbanmech on their nuclear reactor factory in the middle of one of their industrial cities is enough to really piss them off. Still, my blood went cold. You didn’t fire on Jumpships. Even pirates didn’t fire on jumpships. Jumpships were all that kept commerce and war possible between far flung worlds, the whole of the Inner Sphere produced less than a dozen a year, and most of the existing ones were centuries old.
I called up the tac feed. The wedges of the wing of ASF came with vector numbers beside them, along with offsetting cones ahead of them representing their threat arc. That arc didn’t touch the Jumpship yet, but it wasn’t far off, and it was actually accelerating towards them at several gravities, something the ancient and weak station keeping drives of this Jumpship could never match. I glanced at the “time to jump” displayed on my wrist timer, and at the display. I did some quick math in my head, roughly, very roughly, and then frowned.
“They aren’t going to make it.” I said.
Fleet Captain Tsarkov sighed deeply. “They aren’t going to make it. If they were serious about risking the Jumpship they might launch LRM-20 from those Stuka and let them coast ballistic once their drives burn out, and trust that some will still hit us somewhere. I shuddered, unable to suppress it. You do NOT shoot jumpships. They were almost losttech, almost beyond our ability to produce anymore. If we lost that, then mankind as a civilization was over. Interstellar civilization died, and mankind gave up the stars to huddle on its planets and murder itself back into the stone age.
We jumped with three seconds left on the jump timer, jumping the second that the sail was furled. The flare of our jump caught a tide of incoming missiles. They fired on a jumpship. Just to catch us, they fired on a fucking jumpship! House Davion were insane!
Our discussions about the ground raid were forgotten. We had no Aerospace fighters, and while the Overlord Winter Moonrise was powerful, it could not stave off a carrier group from a dedicated Aerospace fighter carrier. If they were willing to kill our jumpship to stop us, they could do it. Our ships had the same 30 light year range, we had the same data on jump points in habitable worlds within range. Worse, a single HPG message and they could position other jumpships carrying Aerospace fighter carriers to the systems ahead of us. The trap was closing, and Davion meant us to be caught.
We were four days at Kayama when we picked up the IR flare of a Davion pursuit ship. It released two Leopard C dropships, and within two hours their own massive drives had ramped up to maximum then launched a wing each of heavy Aerospace fighters. They were eighteen hours from light fighter range, a good day from high speed brush pass by the heavy fighters, and we had a decent chance of surviving one maximum speed past. Unfortunately one wing already cut its acceleration, making it clear that the two wings were splitting. One closing at max speed for a crippling shot, and a second closing at controlled speed, able to change its vector to keep us under their guns no matter how we ran.
Fleet Captain Tsarkov said simply. “I will be one day from normal recharge when they catch us.”
Dropship captain Xi Beng added his corpse rasp of a voice. “If we jumped, there are decent odds that any inhabited world within range either has a waiting carrier group, or has at least got Aerospace fighters blasting off now with tankers to keep them on station to catch us when our jump flare announces our arrival.” We were deep in the belly of the beast, and he planned on digesting us.
I turned to Fleet Captain Tsarkov, “So that is it. They either blow the jumpship from space and claim you were lost in transit, or we surrender your ship to them, and they space us here at the drop point and just hand our stuff over to the nearest Capellan March militia unit?” The idea of being tossed out an airlock to scream my last breath into the void, caught in the gravitational eddies here at the jump point and not even permitted the grace of falling into the star to burn up did not thrill me.
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Fleet Captain Tsarkov took out his flask. He carefully unscrewed the cap and put the zero G totally illegal booze holder to his mouth and sucked thoughtfully on something clear and high enough test that he shuddered when it hit him. Then he smiled softly and turned to us.
“Call that plan A. Plan B is slightly riskier than Death by Davion, but has the possibility of getting us out of the trap the Fox has laid for us. In the days of the Reunification war against the Periphery this ship was part of the SLDF. The only way the Star League could surprise someone as paranoid as the Taurian Concordat was for their invading warships to appear out of nowhere, hitting the inner worlds of the Concordat without being detected by the pickets and spy ships scattered along both sides of the Federated Suns and Taurian border.” The good captain, reminding me of the old history lessons from my military academy days.
“I know I’m not going to like this, how do you surprise someone when they have picketed the approach worlds, and even the Star Legue could only jump the same 30 light years as the rest of us?” I asked, all reasonable answers having failed to materialize.
Captain Xi Beng reached out and grabbed the flask and took an angry pull, his eyes tearing as he choked on the cheap rotgut. He knew the answer, and didn’t like it.
Fleet Captain Tsarkov met my eyes with the flat empty eyes of a deep sea shark. Life or death had no meaning in those eyes, for they were given to the black sea, the dark places where light wasn’t welcome and life was an unwelcome intruder.
“Simple really. They turned their back upon the inhabited worlds, they leaped into the great black, jumping from star to star, all without life, some without planets, crossing the great empty so far from any help that if they called for help even with a ship mounted HPG like the big warships had, your cry for help wouldn’t be heard for years after your air ran out. They dared the deeps, and even at the height of the Star League, with escorting warships mounting sensors and computers we don’t even have legends of, they did not all return. The Potemkin here was one of those ships. She served in a convoy based around the name ship Potemkin, and brought the Star League and Federated Suns armies to rain down on from the skies of the Concordat five hundred years ago. We will do the same, and Davion dare not follow. Even then, without the Star League to hold their hands, they were too terrified of the dark to risk a half dozen jumps in the deep black with no hope of aid.”
I reached out and grabbed the flask. The moonshine in it could be used to break off the armour slag on my actuators from energy weapon hits, but I looked at the closing Davion Stuka wings and knew if we stayed, or even stayed sane and jumped to another inhabited star within range, the Vindicators would die in the cold black of space, without even the hope of shooting back.
“If we were to die in the deep black, let it be dying as hunters, not prey. Hot charge your jump drives with the ion engines. Shave off as much time as you can. Double check those five hundred year old records, and take us into the black. Davion does not get us without working for us.”
Twelve hours from safe jump time, six hours from initial fighter range, the Merchant Jumpship finished hot charging its engines adding engine power to the safe and regulated flow of the solar sail. The jump drive pulse lacked the smooth wash of the tide and had more of the brutal hammer of a mech fist to the brain. Hot charging the KF drives was routine in the days of the Star League, the stress of the hot charging was something that reduced the lifespan of the KF drive core to a mere twenty years, but the idea of replacement KF drives died with a hundred worlds in the Amaris Civil war and fall of the Star League, by the end of the First Succession Wars the jump ships had become so scarce the loss of a ship and the loss of a world were viewed the same by Successor State houses. The drive core on the Potempkin had last been replaced two years before the Amaris Coup, when the Star League was expected to rule over a united humanity for a thousand years, justifying the long bloody road to unification.
“Hahahahahahaahahahaha. Fifty credits Yevgenny. Fifty credits. Good C bills, not any of that House Davion crap. You bet me fifty credits we would blow up before we completed the jump!” Fleet Captain Tsarkov was hammering his groaning chief engineer, the one who knew the ancient K-F drives better than any man alive, or any man in the ships last century.
I struggled to gain the ability to speak. Jump shock was always a bear, but this time it was like a Polar Bear mama on her period with a missing cub.
“Your own engineer figured we were going to die, and you told us this was the smart move.” I rasped slowly, feeling like something scraped off an Atlas foot after a long swamp forced march.
Captain Tsarkov took the C bills from his wincing engineer and fanned his face with them. “Da. Given a nice slow charge and a fresh helium load like we got from hitting the feds in the last raid, thank you for that by the way, this ship in Star League service would have only a 10% chance of going incoherent during transit to a higher stress jump point like this. It isn’t in the green zone, but its only barely in the amber. In the old days of the Star League, a merchant skipper with a time sensitive contract might take the same risk, as long as he kept his side arm on and had someone tastes his food in case the crew didn’t want to die for his profit.
“This ship hasn’t been in Star League service in almost three hundred years. How much lower are our chances for real?” I asked.
Captain Tsarkov floated over to me and he was no longer laughing. His face was haunted and his eyes were cold and hard as the barrel of a gun socketed in your temple.
“Softly good Captain. Softly. Over a third of the critical components on this ships drive are Succession War replacements, not quite up to spec, including the sensors to find out how dangerous those harmonics are off what is required. In all honesty, a jump into this system alone could have somewhere in the twenty to thirty percent chance to kill us, and a fifty percent chance of wrecking my KF core when it suffered feedback hitting in an unstable gravity field. Doing it with a drive whose heat was already high, whose harmonics were already off because of the hot charge? We had less than fifty percent chance of making it, and about twenty percent chance of getting here without a wrecked drive, having a good long time to decide how we wanted to die, but at least not giving Davion the salvage.”
I looked at the engineer still shaking at his station, and wondered how many of my warriors would have felt compelled to do something violent to protest this choice had they known the truth. We would have died if we stayed, or ran along the green lines of KF transit Davion patrolled. Twenty percent chance of life, is twenty percent more than we had. The booze in my belly twisted, but in zero G I had no willingness to float in a cloud of my own boozy puke. I reminded myself that Jimmy Chaves mama hadn’t raised any cowards. Of course, if I ever returned to the Confederation, they would put us all against the same wall to shoot us, so maybe she regrets having this one right about now.
Both Fleet Captain Tsarkov and I were pulled out of our depression by the words of Spacer Trudeau.
“Captain, we are not alone. There is another vessel off the jump point by about twenty thousand kilometers north of us at the apex point.” Spacer Trudeau offered in a voice of quiet wonder, her voice holding the odd calm of someone whose emotions had taken a good solid look at the information in its brain and run off somewhere to have a good breakdown.
The Fleet Captain pushed off me and shot to her position like a barracuda (the predator fish or the ship killer missile), and snarled. “Main display, now.”
I was slower to reach Spacer Trudeaus station, and frankly I lost my breath when I hit the grab bar with my chest. My mind and body had both frozen when we saw what hung above us, almost directly, twenty thousand kilometers farther from the star and slightly rotating and spinning in a slow majestic manner. An Aegis Cruiser. A warship. A Kerensky be damned warship. Three quarters of a million tons of lost technology, with Naval Lasers that could cut apart our Overlord at ten times our longest anti mecha or anti fighter mecha range, and batteries of naval grade autocannons that could shatter whole cities at a trigger pull, that could sweep a fleet of dropships from the sky as fast as its massive guns could swing.
As I watched her rotate slowly, I saw the great gaping wounds in her. The holes were probably larger that three of our mecha standing on each others shoulders, and there was something funny about them. I was struggling to put my finger on it when Fleet Captain Tsarkov swore, having figured it out first.
“Trakhni menya iz pushki!” the Fleet Captain swore, which if I remembered my one semester of Russian properly was something about fuck him with a cannon. “That blew from the inside. It is nowhere near the engines, nowhere near the docking collars, and the guns are all recessed into the hull, so she wasn’t cleared for action when it blew. Someone blew that whoreson up from the inside!”
I looked at the four lumps bulking it out like tumours between the forward and broadside gun belts. Dropships. Two Overlord, a Mule and something that looked like a big robot octopus. Two of those were mech carriers, one was a cargo ship, and one was what I recognized as a space tug/starship rescue vessel . I think the Lyrans had one that worked, and the Free Worlds league claimed to have one, but I have never met anyone who has seen one operating. They could tow any dropship ever built, and even cruiser and below class vessels.
“Fleet Captain, do we have the air and food to stay and conduct salvage operations on that vessel?” I said as calmly as I could. I mean, that was a Star League Defense Force heavy cruiser with troop and cargo ships attached. If there was anything on it that even semi worked, it would be worth more than any of our lives to recover it. Wars would be fought over the chance to salvage it, or they would if we bothered to mention it to anyone.
“Fuck your mother, pup. If I have to learn to breathe vacuum I will board that bitch myself. Even if its all wrecked, and that is not a given, those fuckers were armoured beyond the dreams of any dropship you have ever seen, before any planetary defense fort that survived the First Succession Wars, just seeing how they put it together, how it controlled, cooled and stabilized itself would give us knowledge we lost in ship building centuries before I was born. Hell, we can’t even build toilets or water recyclers like they did. You have no idea how far we have fallen. If it cost my soul, I will board that ship.” Captain Tsarkov was not joking, he had tears streaming from his eyes. None of his bridge crew were blinking, and Crewman Trudeau’s shoulders were shaking as she sobbed silently looking at the lost glory of our fallen race.
I don’t know about Jumpships, or even dropships, but I knew mecha. My own Vindicator was born from the wreckage of the First Succession War when we forgot how to build things like they did in the Star League, we couldn’t make the skeletons or armour the ancient machines used, we had to replace their engines with something simpler, we had to replace their guns with something cruder we could still make. The best Vindicator that rolled off the line would be sneered at by the worst mecha in Star League service, half blind, short ranged, slow, and weak, the mechwarrior in me had dreamed of piloting one of those perfect war gods, then woke to the dirty reality of being in the poorest and weakest of the Successor States, doing more with less every year, until more became less, and less became an unattainable dream.
I too would give my left hairy nut to board that ship, and my right one to get my hands around one of those perfect war machines from the days of the glorious and perfect Star League.