Trains vs Training

I was reflecting on the joys of being the CO of a mercenary company with a secret mission. Okay, it wasn’t a secret mission, it was literally spray painted on our mech bay walls, on our armoured company walls, it was on the back of our business cards. Yes, it’s an actual thing here. The Taurian Concordat is so howlingly fucking primitive that personal communicators are only really a thing for management level people, government or military. The rest still use line based landlines. I kid you not, telephones! I saw one on a museum in Sian once, but they are produced here and everyone has one, even if they have a personal communicator. This means people have “telephone numbers” and tacky little machines that print out”faxes” on this weird thin paper that take several seconds to come through instead of just projecting an intearactive holo of the document over your wrist like normal people. This does lead to something cool though. They have business cards. You put your logo on one side, and your contact information beneath it (comm codes, phone number and “fax” line). It is like something out of a bad Kurita period drama (which I totally never watched in case the Maskirovka cultural bureau is listening in). I sent Tina as our XO to get our business card printed and we had spent hours in the command group with techs, infantry, aerospace and mech command all represented going over the front of the card to make sure we set the right tone as a professional mercenary company with a side interest in weapons research and production. We didn’t think about the back of the card. Holographs don’t have a “back” so we never even thought of it. We had the Vindicated logo on the front, so putting it on the back just risked them not seeing the contact information, so Tina didn’t want to do that, and putting a picture of their mecha on the back seemed kind of unimpressive to new clients. Nobody in the Inner Sphere respected the Vindicator outside the Capellan Confederation, and them getting their ass kicked in the last war hadn’t helped. Our Vindicators could gut a Griffin at range and a Wolverine close up, they were the toughest medium mecha in existence, but that wasn’t externally obvious. So she winged it. The back of the card was black, with FUCK DAVION written in blood spatter.

Honestly, the Taurians loved it. Some of them. The kind that hire people to shoot at worlds held by the most powerful military in the Inner Sphere can be reasonable and rational on the face too, but flip their card or their soul and you will see the same message in blood spatter. We fit in here, which is an odd thing for a renegade Capellan deserter turned mercenary to say.

This brings us with the never ending talks with Taurus Territorial Industries. We had been in talks with them to develop some new technologies we had reverse engineered or frankenmeched from a salvage and figured were the way to get a very few things we had understood from the recovered Star League upgrade Mule Dropship conversion factory to quietly bring Taurian mech production to a level that would allow them to face an enemy that had House Davion’s irritatingly skilled military machine and intelligence assets coupled to the unmatched Lyran production capacity. Understand, we know that at best this is a David and Goliath moment, but if David had an extended range sling and the ability to fire as often as he wanted, there is the very slim chance Goliath would take a critical before he closed to his own range and blew David into scrap.

I never did figure out what kind of mecha a David was, but the Goliath is an eighty ton assault mech that walks on four legs has two LRM-10 racks and a PPC. From the sounds of it, the David is a medium or light class mecha with some sort of Autocannon 2. The Bible was one of those Davion things they liked to use to indoctrinate new subject populations to be obedient, so of course it’s heroes used autocannons. The Taurians in theory should be all over the idea of a weapon that had the same range as Davion’s precious AC-2 but did five times the damage. It is just that we were foreigners and to a Taurian that was about like saying “obvious thieves, spy’s or con men”. That was better than Davions. I mean if you are from the Federated Suns they assume you molest babies before roasting them over an open fire and eating them. That is only half wrong, maybe slightly more than half wrong, but it is right enough that I let it slide.

I had worked out with their engineering team what we could offer them, but had not been able to meet with their senior policy makers. I had the backing of the local TDF Millitia commander. He was running around in a Warhammer we had refitted for him and had ordered his Locust and Stinger pilots into training with our mech company to teach them the doctrine of The Classified Thing We Don’t Talk About, which somehow we must teach how to employ in combat without saying what it is. None the less, we were busy taking their NCO’s through training in Stingers that were equipped with training software that would treat their Medium Laser as an ER PPC, and their twin machine guns as medium lasers. Sure the pilots bitched the PPC was being given a bullshit long range, and wasn’t properly simulating the short range limitation, and they complained that they weren’t able to use their arms full firing arc. How do you train a bunch of smart professional mech warriors to expect a mech to shoot farther and faster than possible, and to expect to survive hits they know a machine this fast and armed can’t support? You tell them to shut the fuck up or the bar gets closed. You get booze, or questions, not both.

That actually works with Taurians. Professional Non Comissioned Officers (NCO) assume their officers are full of shit, and given the choice between confirming that or drowning their sorrows in booze, the Taurian NCO knew which tasted better.

The last ex had us run three scenarios in a row using our Vindicators as OPFOR for a company of Stingers imitating the Javelin JVN-17V that Taurus Territorial Industries (TTI) Jansen’s Hold had yet to agree to make for us. The first ex had our Vindicators imitating a lance of Jagermech, the 65 ton autocannon long range fire support mech that the AFFS loved to use to wear down its enemies at long range. The Twin AC-2 outranged even long range missiles and standard PPC, so the Davions loved to line up just out of anyone else’s range and soften the enemy with AC-2 fire. If they got upset and tried to close, then they entered the range of the sidecar AC-5 that did over twice the damage. At long range there weren’t light mecha that could take that, few medium mecha that could suck it up long enough to get to where their short range weapons mattered, and few heavy mecha that were fast enough to close the distance if the Jag’s wanted to retreat.

Given an ER PPC and two medium lasers, double heat sinks to run and gun to its hearts content, enough armour to survive dealing with AC-2 fire for a large number of exchanges and a top speed of 96kph to the Jags 64, the JVN-17V we designed around the only XL engine we could make, the same GM-180 that made our Vindicators work, could beat Davion’s prize gunslinger at long range all day long, with a little over half its tonnage.

The second ex we had them face Davion’s second favorite medium mecha, the Enforcer and Centurion. Armed with an Autocannon-10 and large laser or an autocannon-10 and LRM-10 (or medium laser close in) for the Centurion and a whole lot of armour to back it up, these mecha were easier to whittle down at range, but had the armour and the driver’s standard tactic to close aggressively to medium range where their weapons and armour would eat light mecha alive. To win this fight, mobility was life. They had to move to hit and run, but hitting could not be one on one snap shoots. That would be the instinctive choice for periphery mech warriors who traditionally fought light mecha on light mecha.

War in the Inner Sphere was fought on different rules. There were a lot of medium mecha on the field, but heavies and assault mecha were a lot more common. You did not “exchange shots” with a Stalker, Awesome, or Atlas. If you traded blows with those big machines, you died. Even medium mecha like the Hunchback could pack an Autocannon-20 that could shatter my Vindicator’s chest or blow a Javelin’s torso or leg right off. We Capellan’s learned this. To take Vindicators against an Awesome or Atlas you did not pop out and fire one on one, you didn’t fire until you had spread your enemy out and could choose to fire three or four on one. Three to four PPC hits could knock any mech on it’s ass, even if it wasn’t likely to have burned all the way through its armour. Do that a couple more times and you will bring even the biggest mecha down. You had to only fire if you had that advantage, because if you traded shots once, you lost a mecha.

The last op, we had to use a lance of officers in Stingers to simulate combinations of Griffin, Dervish, Shadowhawk, Wolverine, the standard “275 Mafia” or 55 ton mecha based around the 275 Coretek engine that made the most commonly used cavalry mecha move about 85kph and jump 150m. These enemy would be better armed, better armoured, and almost as mobile. Our Vindicators were tougher, but not as fast. The Taurian pilots had to get used to facing machines where their mobility edge was very small, and their weapon and armour deficiencies were fairly large. They could not fight fair. They had to ambush, to swarm, and to sprint the hell away once they broke contact as any prolonged exchange ended in a dead Taurian. It is hard to convince a mech warrior who was skilled and brave that running from a fair fight was his duty. Light mecha do not belong in fair fights. Fair fights were for line mecha, for things that sacrificed speed for weapons and armour. If you could run, you shouldn’t fight. If you can’t run, you had better fight.

This was a hard sell for the Taurians. They had pride that carried them through centuries of Inner Sphere persecution and oppression, but pride doesn’t stop autocannon rounds, and courage burns when hit by laser fire. We were drawing a lot of anger, and even some hatred from the Taurian NCO who were sure we were running a scam on their government to trick them out of their hard won credits. The Officers were cleared to know the wonders we offered, but the ranks thought we were just more spheroids come to swindle the periphery rubes. Granted, it happened often enough they had cause, we just were that one percent who were really offering the lost secrets of the fallen Star League to anyone who wanted to shoot Davion with it.

This brings us to marching our unit back to the Taurian Territorial Industries plant where our engineers were working on the hardware for building the chassis we would need should production ever get a bloody green light from management that still refused a meeting, when we passed the Grand Funk Railroad yard. The Grand Funk was not a mag-lev line like you would see in the inner sphere. These were big fusion powered locomotives that hauled long trains of cargo cars over paired steel rails like something out of historical fiction. No fancy magnetic levitation monorail operated from central switching stations with only a single engineer to control robotic cars. This was fully manned trains whose engineers got out with big steel bars and manually switched tracks in the big Grand Funk yard to redirect trains. It was howlingly primitive, but it got the job done. Mostly.

The road crossings were pavement over the big steel rails and given the rail to road ratio in a big yard with hundreds of spur lines, it had shitty traction in the rain. Given the delay on surface road traffic when trains crossed, there was a lot of commuting traffic who heard approaching trains and decided to get stupid to beat the train signal arms (literal poles with high vis stripes and flashing lights that came down to block the crossing). Today we had such a stupid.

I was in conversation with Captain Jeffry Sinclair, currently piloting the refitted Warhammer used as a test bed for the proposed refit. He loved the twin ER PPC, six medium lasers(split between side torsos) and twin ball mounted small lasers in the center torso for anti infantry work, backed by eighteen double heat sinks allowing his Warhammer to fire both ER PPC until well into medium range where he could swap one out for six medium lasers and still not overheat. He gave up the SRM-6 and machine guns, but his firepower increased, he lost the chance of overheating causing ammunition explosion and he stopped carrying things beside his delicate internals that might explode if a shot got past the armour. Jeff was a fan of how our upgrades used a very small amount of new technology (just the ER PPC and double heat sinks) combined with Taurian home grown weapons to double his machines effectiveness. He wanted to see his beloved TDF get the chance to face the new Federated Commonwealth, essentially a Federated Suns that ate the manufacturing power of the richest territory in history, on even terms. We were discussing the lessons learned from the ex, and the problems for training should we ever get the FUNDING to produce the new generation of Javelins and Vindicators built around the GM-180XL we could actually make when the accident happened.

A Tesla driver, yes the Com Star brand still sold electric cars for those who didn’t want the smell of Petrochem to dirty their cashmere even in the periphery, pulled a Tesla driver standard and raced to pass a school bus to beat the train crossing arms, then when he cut his ground car back in front of the bus, he got his wheels caught in the gaps between track and road where the spur line crossed the road at an angle almost the same as the one he tried to put his car on.

We could see the accident happen, and my goddamned Ostman Scrambler 7 targeting and tracking computer flagged the dangers, the vectors, the likely crashes, then pulled the data from the Grand Funk Railroads computers using its TDF military command codes and overlayed red threat icons on the incoming train containing propellant for long and short range missile systems. To say the product was volatile was to say Maximillian Liao was moody, Takahashi Kurita was grumpy, or Hanse Davion was a little ambitious. The stuff wanted to explode more than any of the actual explosives used in weapon production, it just did so less efficiently in a way that made it better rocket fuel than warhead filler. Each railcar in the oncoming train carried 114,000 liters of the damned stuff.

“CONTACT. Crash protocol” I barked, before Captain Sinclair’s old Warhammer’s non upgraded electronics could spot the problem. Once I screamed the warning out, Captain Sinclair gathered the risk in a single glance and shouted out the only command authorization I needed to here.

“The school bus!” Sinclair shouted, the only command we had time to respond to. A priority given, an authorization taken, actions to follow faster than civilian legal channels could operate.

The Tesla flipped, the school bus driver was a woman with sixty extra pounds and forty years driving school busses. She didn’t have cat like reflexes, but a mama bears instant instinct to protect her cubs and a Taurian’s cold ruthlessness when it came to fuck around and find out. She rammed the Tesla nose on, keeping her bus steady so it didn’t flip. It didn’t flip, but the Tesla burst into flame, the way Com Star’s vehicle of the future, dragged from some Terran hell of failed ideas was prone to do. The Taurian driver was stunned by her head splitting open on the big steering wheel, but she hammered the fire suppression system with the flopping hand that argued a mid third break in her left arm that would possibly cost her the use of the limb, but wasn’t stopping her from smashing it flat on the emergency fire suppression button.

That left the problem of 12,000 tons of highly volatile rocket fuel in the train doing 60kph towards a school bus that was dry humping a burning Tesla. Battlefield reflexes are a bitch. My commands were rolling before my brain thought it through.

I hit my jump jets and landed ON the tracks facing the train. 45 tons of fusion powered Vindicator in the path of 12,000 tons of steel and flamables behind a 125ton locomotive, with my arm mounted Kinslaughter ER PPC already precharging.

“Big, Fifi, BLITZ the locomotive. Irina, don’t let the tank hit the ground!” I screamed as I cut loose the big Kinslaughter ER PPC, a hose of man made lightning blowing the case hardened steel of the rail bougies along the side I decided to flip the locomotive starting the machine’s slump. Big Billy Wasserman and Philomena Teng hit the side of the 125 ton locomotive like linebackers on an unprotected quarter back as Irian sailed overhead on her jump jets, and executed a turn mid flight to land softly facing the train side I just sliced with my PPC as if she was still piloting a light 20 ton Wasp not a 45 ton Vindicator.

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I leaned forward and took the hit on my shoulders as I struggled to slow and flip the locomotive towards the side. My torso armour shattered, my shoulder actuators failed, and I felt the armour in my right leg start to give as my Ceresplex IV standard skeleton fought to take the charging mass of 125 tons of locomotive rather than the 45 tons of battlemech it was designed for. Give the Ceres arms engineers this, they may have been given the task to make a mech that does everything and costs nothing, but the mediocre product of that failed directive was an over engineered masterpiece that could, and routinely did, survive stresses and impacts that routinely destroyed far more expensive and theoretically superior designs. While the armour and actuators failed, the big bones of my blocky brick of a battlemech held.

Big Billy and Fifi hit the thing at a run, and it started to tip. When it looked like their combined power would not be enough, Fifi hit her jump jets, followed a half second later by Big Billy, and the train that was still striving to blast forward into the school bus started to tip.

The derailing train accordioned, each rail car moving first left then right to fold into an accordion like pattern, but if they hit while still moving forward, the cars would breach and the rocket fuel would go up. Sure my pilots could eject free, but the school bus and everyone inside would burn at temperatures that wouldn’t even leave teeth behind.

Mechwarrior Irina Kornikova, call sign Butterfly, put 45 tons of Vindicator under the front corner of the first tipping car, catching its body with her shoulder, sacrificing her left arm, and left leg, turning as the train hung in the balance and used her head mounted medium laser that had killed so many Vindicator pilots trying to eject to cut the coupling between the falling engine and the first fuel car. The big locomotive fell on its side off the tracks to slide to a halt five meters from the school bus, and the first car slammed into Irina so hard she was blasted unconscious in her mecha in a cockpit so badly damaged it would have to be totally rebuilt.

Two Vindicators, one half of my lance completely mission killed, requiring full and extensive rebuilds. One Grand Funk Railroad locomotive destroyed, one load of rocket fuel for Taurus Territorial Industries turned into an industrial accident that would require three times as much to transport the half kilometer to the plant than it should have cost to cross the continent by rail. One school bus full of kids not burned alive. As a mercenary commander, I was a complete failure. I had just lost more money in a single rash decision than my company as a whole made in a quarter year of garrison work. I had set us back years, assuming we were not getting sued into bankruptcy over this.

I kept remembering the lessons driven into us in basic training. The Lorix Order, the codex of the Liao mechwarrior. Sure it was a joke to the nobles, politicians and rich merchants who rules, but it was the life’s blood of those of us who trained from birth to be mechwarrios.

The Lorix Order wasn’t hard to memorize. We used to have to recite it while undergoing punishment of any kind, or gas hut training, or if we were running or doing a pack march and didn’t seem to be in enough physical distress.

1-The individual citizen has the right to expect the highest degree of professionalism from the officers who decide his fate.

2-The highest order of warrior and defender is, and forever shall be, the MechWarrior.

3-MechWarriors are and should remain a special breed unto themselves. They should be accorded the highest honor possible, and in turn should be expected to perform the most outstanding feats of daring in defense of the state and its citizens.

4-To perform their most important tasks, MechWarriors must be afforded the opportunities to advance their various skills and expertise to the highest possible level. To this end, war is an acceptable way of life because it inevitably contributes to the defense of the state through the increased skill of its defenders.

5-Once a MechWarrior has reached the summit of his profession, only another MechWarrior has the right to terminate his life. Conversely, in certain cases (such as personal or professional betrayal), the MechWarrior has the right to exact personal retribution without fear of reprisal.

6-The highest and most important ideal in any MechWarrior's life is loyalty: to the citizenry he protects, to the state that provides, and to the chief executive of the state, who is the MechWarrior's commander-in-chief.

I was a mercenary now, but the Vindicated existed to show WE FOLLOWED THE LORIX ORDER. We did not abandon the ideals of the Confederation, the Confederation abandoned us. We didn’t fight our unending war with Davion because of hatred of Davion, but because as long as Davion had the arms to pursue it, their war with our former homeland and our current one could never end. As long as that giant had fingers to grasp, all the worlds of the Inner Sphere were not, could not, be enough to feed its hunger. We were the defenders of the folk, the shield of the citizens, our blood for theirs. That is the code. That is the soul of the whole damned code. Lorix got it, Lorix codified it, and some of us still lived it.

There would be consequences.

In the Marshall’s office, five mech warriors were gathered on one table to the right side of the marshal’s desk; without side arms, those were behind the Marshal (Sam McLeod) on the book case behind his desk. On the left side table were the President of the Grand Funk Railroad (Mark Farmer), Com Star’s local Adept (Aurelius Nelson) representing the Mercenary Bonding Commission, the Vice President of Taurus Territorial Industries, Jansen’s Hold division (Grace Jones), the Chief of Emergency Services (Silas Dunkirk).

“I want every cent of the goddamned cleanup coming out of these money fighters pockets. Vandals! Pirates, goddamned Capellan spies most likely. They put one of my drivers in the hospital, the fired a GODDAMNED PPC and laser on my train. I want their heads, I want them arrested, and I want their damned mecha as payment.” President Farmer of Grand Funk shouted.

Grace Jones, the rail thin coal black woman with the sharp aristocratic features of a corporate predator snapped her wide dark eyes at President Farmer and snapped. “If they hadn’t stopped your train, it would have derailed uncontrolled when it hit that school bus and Tesla. A single breached car and you would be looking at how many dead, and how much damage? Chief Dunkirk, any ballpark?” She said turning to the director of emergency services.

Silas Dunkirk glared at the Grand Funk president. “Seventy two grade school children, one bus driver, sixteen other motorists, three rail workers inside the minimum blast radius, along side a lance of Vindicators with god only knows how much ordinance, and a Warhammer with even more. Damage from a single car breached range from 6-12 million, if the whole train became involved they we are looking at billions and the death toll probably moves the decimal place into the low thousands. For the record, your hospitalized train driver wants to pass along his thanks to the mech warriors. He saw a school bus get stuck on that idiot tesla driver, who at least had the good grace to die, and figured he was going to have to live with knowing he ran over a whole bus load of kids, but the mech warriors stopped it. Kind of why we pay them the big bucks. None of my trucks could have done that.” He said pointing to the mech warriors, two of them visibly injured still.

President Farmer shot a glare at Chief Silas and slicked his long black hair back, the whiskey tenor he used to sway shareholders and cow competitors rasped as he fired up his rant.

“The TDF is supposed to do that, only the TDF. These are mercenaries, they have no right to fire on Taurian citizens or property, this is a violation of their contract and I want their bond revoked.” Farmer snarled, turning to the Com Star Adept, “Aurelius, you know that Davion already filed a complaint about these guys violating the Ares Convention to bomb civilian targets, now they are firing on unarmed civilians in our cities, firing on my own employees. They fired a PPC and laser against a goddamned train in the middle of a city! Can you pull their bond or not?”

Adept Aurelius looked like knew more than anyone else in the room and remained above their petty concerns. It was a Com Star specialty, and was true often enough that they got away with it. He smiled but failed to respond other than flicking a glance at the Marshall.

Marshal McLeod adjusted his string tie and snorted. “The Aries Convention is not something the Taurian Concordat ever signed. The poor but free peoples cannot abide by the rules of the oppressor if they wish to retain their freedom, and fuck Davion anyway. The civilian target was a goddamned battlemech factory. That is about as civilian as the Magestrix of Canopus is a virgin (referring to the famously hedonistic state whose most famous export was porn)”

President Farmer snapped back. “Mercenaries fired on Taurian civilians, the law is clear, they broke it and I want them broken for it.”

Captain Sinclair spoke up, his low baritone sounding like it belonged on the pulpit preaching religion, or before a crowd calling for justice. It wasn’t that you heard choirs of angels back him when he spoke, but the man looked like he stepped out of a holodrama about knights or paladins in days where warriors fought with lance and sword not PPC and missile. He was a true Taurian, he held the kind of belief that allowed him to walk into a fight he had no business winning and shoot his way out the other side of it because sometimes right makes might too.

“I ordered them to save the school bus.” Captain Sinclair said firmly.

“And shoot my train? Endanger my employees, destroy my property?” President Farmer asked, not willing to back down.

“Captain Sinclair?” Marshall McLeod asked for clarification.

Sinclair shrugged “There wasn’t a lot of time. Frankly, that they took two words of command and translated it into a plan that didn’t leave us picking through the ash to find teeth for DNA extraction and victim identification was the kind of miracle they teach you not to bank on in officer training.”

President Farmer hammered the table with his fist. “Listen McLeod, if you don’t do your job, I will have you removed. I want those mecha as compensation, and I want those mercenaries bond revoked. I have been in communication with cabinet members, if you go against me on this one, it could cost you your job.”

Grace Jones facepalmed slowly. I went cold, thinking about who wanted our mecha, why they wanted the technologies inside by force when I was trying to offer them on a goddamned plate to Taurus Territorial Industries, but the first time I could get in a room with their senior management it was for this farce of a meeting about the accident where Grand Funk Railroad was using us stopping a planetary disaster and bus load of dead kids as an excuse to break our company. I was so deep in shock I missed Marshall McLeod’s gyroget pistol come up. The big pistol fired slow moving rockets that were designed for zero gravity combat on board space ships and stations. The slug accelerated on a rocket motor and hit President Farmer in the chest. The self forging tungsten projectile blasted from the rocket punched through the armourweave vest of the president’s garment, his chest, and the chair behind. Blood sprayed across the table and behind the chair.

“Bribing or attempting to suborn a Marshall in performance of his duties is a capital crime, attempting to undermine the defense of the Taurian Concordat by sabotaging its defense forces is a capital crime, attempting to bankrupt mercenaries that chose to risk their own asses and their precious machines to stop a bus load of our own goddamned kids from burning alive isn’t a capital crime, so I guess technically I only shot you for the first two.”

Marshall McLeod holstered his own pistol and started sliding weapons down the long table, including a slim needler to Grace Jones of TTI.

He then reached inside his jacket and pulled out a data stick he stuck into his desk which brought up a holograph of a document.

“For your actions in the grave peril of your life and the loss of your mecha, the Taurian Protector, at the guidance of his council, and with the recommendation of the Taurian Defense Force has directed that The Vindicated be awarded this day the Taurian Brand.”

I read the holographic document before me, not being familiar with the Taurian awards.

“The Taurian Brand. The origins of the Taurian Brand predated the Taurian Concordat and were believed to have begun within the ethnic group on ancient Terra referred to as "Native Americans". The Taurian Brand became a popular military tradition among the TDF after the first battle between Taurian and Federated Suns forces, during which a popular Taurian naval commander took a hit across his brow from laser fire. The wound created a mask-like scar and left the commander blind, and to honor the commander and commemorate the battle many of those who survived tattooed a red mask around their eyes.

During later years the TDF used the Taurian Brand to recognize those units that had performed a feat or been involved in an action that earned them the immediate acclaim of the Taurian citizenry; in such an event, the regimental commander was allowed to request the privilege of wearing the Brand. If the request was granted, the award was presented to the unit by the senior marshal, although those looking to wear the brand had to also request permission from their battalion commander. In each generation thereafter one direct, name-bearing descendant may take the Brand. MechWarriors qualifying for the Brand were also allowed to paint the Brand on their machines.”

It was more than a medal. It was CITIZENSHIP. I teared up. We had been citizens once, a hard thing to earn in the Capellan Confederation and after the fall of Algol that had been stripped from us. We had been warriors without a state. Mercenaries of no nation, whores of death used by all and welcomed by none, and now we were not only being honoured by the Taurians, we were being made citizens by them.

I pulled up the logo from the school bus, the Taurian Concordat bull with a scroll rather than the standard three stars between the down curving horns. It was the same sign that had been on Atlantis, the scholar’s sign of the Taurians slaughtered by the Federated Suns fleet on the world once known as Atlantis but now a graveyard known as Desolation Plains. It was not just our deeds today, but our taking up the cause of the fallen Taurians who had gifted us this lost technology that made our Vindicators special. I pulled up the sign, and shot it electronically to the Marshall’s system. The Taurian Scholar logo, beneath an eye mask of school bus gold.

“This brand. I would bear this brand for my troops, and I would ask the right to paint this on our mecha” I asked.

“Citizen and Captain Jimmy Chavez of the Taurian Defense Force independent mercenary company The Vindicated, accept this day and bear ever more for your people the Brand of Taurus. From this day, by this brand, you are all ours.” Marshal McLeod said in tones that hit me harder than the gyroslug hit that corporate toady Farmer.

Grace Jones tapped my hand as everyone filed out of the room.

“We have business to discuss. I have a board meeting set up by HPG relay to Taurus for tomorrow ten AM. I want your officers involved in the proposal to be there.” Grace said, her low and husky voice like the growl of a hunting leopard. “I want the lines set up for production of both fire support and close combat Vindicators, and your Javelin light cavalry mecha.” She said with the fierceness of a woman who already had the next ten years of progress and the ten thousand steps required to make it happen already unfolding in her mind.

“You don’t have a problem with the Vindicator being stolen from Ceres and the Capellan Confederation and the Javelin stolen from Jalastar in the Federated Commonwealth.” I said, treading carefully. I knew we stole them, she knew we stole them, but I wasn’t looking to produce them in the open for all the Inner Sphere and Periphery to see.

Grace Jones threw her head back and laughed in a way that would make male hyena tremble in mixed lust and fear. “This is the Taurian Concordat. Neither your former Confederation nor those greedy Davion animals admit we have the right to exist, to live as anything but their slaves, let alone produce weapons capable of scratching their pretty parade mech paintjobs. If you want, I can include a warning to the TDF and our affiliated partners throughout the periphery that these mecha are not licenced by or for use in the Capellan Confederation or Federated Suns. It’s not like we sell to the enemy anyway, we are periphery barbarians, not congenitally inbred sheroids.”

As I paused to reflect on this sea change in her attitude with my new Taurian citizen and my upcoming facial tattoo (school bus yellow mask, Taurian scholar brand (downward curved horn bull head with a golden scroll between the down turned horn tips). They were barbarians out here, but warriors are all more than half barbarian. The spirit of this place called to me. I had shed my skin as a Capellan mechwarrior. I would wear my Taurian brand with pride, as our mecha would bear it. The Vindicated had a home, and a new identity. We were Taurian.

Adept Aurelius Nelson swept by in his Com Star robes like some medieval monk, wrists bound with technology far enough beyond my own wrist-comp to remind me they held a monopoly on the Star League technology I was about to unleash in the periphery. He smiled and nodded to me with a whisper.

“It is always enlightening to see how business and politics are done here in the periphery. I am sure Precentor Davion doesn’t need to know. There are enough voices in the order suspecting his understanding of NAIS progress and developments may be far less perfect than his claims. While our blessed order wishes the Peace of Blake upon all people, having a small but strong force on his least defended frontier may well keep the Davion threat somewhat in check while our blessed order can attempt to restore balance and peace to the Inner Sphere.” The Precentor said, swishing off like an unworldly monk, not a cold agent of an interstellar organization that controlled interstellar commerce and communications for ends that were not, he suspected, simply for peace.

How would the guardians of all that was the Star League’s fallen technology react to a state that dared to fight the Star League of old beginning to produce its lost technology? How much did they know? How long could he hide from them