Part 408: Political Vote 15 Results and Combat Theater Vote 14
Combat Theater Vote 15:20 June 3034
“William, has Colonel Varas’s report come in yet?”
Stefan Amaris VII loomed over his paperwork. Although most mundane requests were handled by the Republic’s senate some key requests still required the President’s signature or, in some rare cases, his veto. One such petition had crossed his desk earlier this morning, and while it was critically important he wasn’t willing to rush to a decision. And so he sat, tapping the tip of his pen against his desk and daydreamed while he considered the possible consequences.
Kleinwelt, an independent world within Republic territory but which—unlike many such worlds—had not been founded by Republic colonists, was requesting disaster relief after a rogue comet destroyed their orbital. Orbitals or, more specifically Mk. I Modular Orbital Factories, were a Rim World innovation intended to significantly boost a fledgling colony’s industrial output. They had all the plans and equipment necessary to gradually upgrade their own production or hydroponics capabilities while still supplying a new colony with all the tools and equipment it might need in the short-term. The Republic had been generous with orbitals in the past, as there was little point in maintaining trade with independent worlds that couldn’t produce things the Republic wanted. Their generosity had earned the loyalty and eventual peaceful annexation of the Marian Hegemony but it was official State policy to only ever gift one orbital to an independent world, even if that world had been colonized by Republic citizens. Any world that needed a second would have to petition for Republic membership.
In theory and practice both, every world the Republic colonized was an independent colony. They could opt to officially join the Republic if they so chose, and there were economic advantages to doing so but the people of the periphery had always been proud and independent. This was doubly true of worlds like Kleinwelt, which had survived the attentions of the Terran Hegemony’s Explorer Corps, capricious abandonment by the Marian Hegemony during the chaos in the wake of the Star League’s fall, and hundreds of years of food shortages. Kleinwelt also hosted a bevy of Marian malcontents, who’d fled the Hegemony during their annexation. The Republic made few demands of their constituent worlds but the Bill of Rights made most forms of slavery illegal. Kleinwelt still clung stubbornly to the practice, and resentment at being forced to join the Republic would quickly outpace their relief. In Stefan’s experience people forgot generosity in an eyeblink but kept grudges indefinitely.
He could do without a world of future malcontents; but that led to other problems. His people wouldn’t like outright rejecting a request for help, especially from a world populated by less than a hundred-thousand people, but at the same time worlds that felt they’d been pressured to join the Republic would complain that they weren’t offered the same chance. They wouldn’t secede but they would be noisy at a time when Stefan needed Republic solidarity.
Stefan smiled faintly, and hand-scrawled a note at the bottom of the form, then signed. Kleinwelt would get their orbital and a Mk. I hydroponics as well. It would take a public speech rather than one in front of the senate but sway the people and their senators wouldn’t complain. The fallout for expressing anger at humanitarian aid would prove cancerous to a political career and, deprived of something to talk circles around, the Senate would soon forget it was supposed to be angry that he’d broken state policy.
“Ah, William, I’m glad you’re—” Stefan began as a white-robed figure slipped through his office door. His eyes settled on unfamiliar features and his mind stopped like a misfired engine. “—you’re not William. He’s on his way to New Avalon.”
The tall, bald young man opened his mouth to speak but Stefan interjected. “You’re one of his old aids. We met once, eight months ago? What was the name? Demi-Precentor. Will. William Blane?”
Blane bowed his bald pate, “It’s Precentor now but otherwise you were spot-on. I’m surprised you remembered.”
“William always was cautious about introducing me to too many of his subordinates. He never did like letting me see how many of you he kept.”
“It’s not that,” Blane reassured congenially. “It simply isn’t proper for a ComStar acolyte to be seen as more powerful than the First Lord. Some people equate hangers-on with power, and since you don’t keep a retinue he made a point of appearing alone. It’s a policy I intend to maintain.”
“Nonsense,” Amaris laughed. “Utter nonsense, but very like him. Keep as many aides as you need, Will. Nobody here on New St. Andrews will care. Do you mind if I call you Will? Calling you “William” feels awkward.”
Precentor Blane shook his head, “”Will” will be just fine, Lord Amaris—”
“Please,” Amaris held up a hand to forestall the Precentor. “Stefan, in private. President Amaris, if that’s too informal for you. Did Varas’s report come in?”
Blane offered a slight bow, and handed Amaris a sheaf of papers at least a centimeter thick. “It’s exhaustive.”
“You’ve read it?” Amaris continued, not giving Blane an opportunity to deny or apologize for doing so. “Good, that will save me some time. What are your thoughts?”
Blane hesitated for about the same split-second span that’d passed when Anastasius Focht had given Amaris his answer weeks before. To lie or not? It was a question that always made men pause for an extra heartbeat. It was a tell Amaris had grown adept at spotting, as typically it meant whatever the speaker was about to say was untrustworthy.
“The summary is succinct,” Blane admitted, raising Stefan’s estimation of him slightly. “He estimates Clan armaments are fifty to a hundred years ahead of Star League Royal. Armor is “comparable to RWA-6” I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means Clan armor is a generation behind. That’s interesting,” Stefan paused, stroking his round, clean-shaven chin. “I wasn’t expecting to have any advantages. It looks like I owe one of my analyst teams a raise: I didn’t believe them when they told me a duelist culture wouldn’t prize armor research. What of their warships?”
Blane blanched at the reminder. “Fifteen, at least. All positively identified as Star League designs but their capabilities are potentially unknown. One of them is a McKenna.”
“If they’re Star League designs, even upgraded they likely share the same vulnerabilities.”
William Blane regarded Amaris curiously. When the President didn’t continue, Blane pressured, “I’ve never had to consider a WarShip’s weaknesses before. What are they?”
“Nukes, mostly.” Amaris shrugged helplessly. “If I can’t find a way to eliminate those ships through diplomatic channels then I won’t be held accountable for destroying them by any means at my disposal.”
********************
“Takin’ an evenin’ constitutional all alone, are yeh Sal? You’ve got guts, I’ll grant,” The boxy, manlike form of a Centurion stepped from behind the skimpy cover of a three-story hovel. It walked with a slow, dragging gait and a pronounced limp that suggested every actuator in the right leg had failed simultaneously. Its awkward posture kept the right-arm autocannon hidden from sight, but its left hand was raised with a finger outstretched in an accusatory fashion.
“The Lady Death’s dead, an’ the sharks are out for blood. How’s it feel bein’ the last Consort, eh? Think mebbey you coulda saved her from rottin’ away on New Avalon, Sal? Well we’re sick a you, an’ the Consorts lordin’ over us. This’s been a long time comin’,” the speaker’s voice boomed through the Centurion’s external speakers, shaking shoddily-installed panes of glass nearly as much as each shuddering, ill-timed footstep. The speaker put extra emphasis on his last word, trying to drive it home like a nail. “Mate.”
“Blind” Sal Guignard took a jumping step backwards as the Centurion twisted, narrowly missing her Quickdraw with a blow from the wrecking ball attached to the crimson machine’s right arm. Forgetting—or simply not caring—that his external speakers were still engaged, Sal’s attacker uttered a string of invectives that might’ve peeled paint if the volume of his broadcasts weren’t doing so already. The ball smashed through the fading façade of a corner shop and sent a cowering second-floor resident tumbling to the cobblestone street below.
Sal fixed the Centurion in her mind’s eye as she toggled her own speakers just to laugh cruelly at the other pirate’s failure. Her Quickdraw’s arms snapped upwards as the Centurion retreated behind its protective, human-infested building. She fired anyway, her medium lasers making short work of stone blocks and sheet rock. A figure flailed, aflame, through the hole she’d punched in the building’s side. As her laughter subsided, Sal sneered, “It’ll take more than a ball-and-chain to beat me, Cordeaux.”
“I know,” it was Jag Cordeaux’s turn to laugh.
A few hundred meters down the street, the boxy wall of “Genghis Khan” Arroca’s eighty-ton Awesome smashed through another light building. The machine, christened “broadside,” was nearly as big as its pilot. At two meters tall and nearly half-that wide, it was a miracle Arroca could even fit inside his machine. Arroca cleared his throat with a booming cough that wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place coming from the barrel of an autocannon and spoke as more crimson-colored machines filtered in behind him.
Arroca’s voice was so deep it sounded almost alien. “That’s why he brought friends.”
“Of course you did, none of you has enough balls to act alone,” Sal laughed, as her bone-white Quickdraw retreated lazily down the block. She snapped her fingers next to her helmet microphone and above her head a star fell from the sky. As if by magic a dozen or so black-painted shapes seemed to appear from darkened side-streets and alleys, “But I brought more. A place in the consorts to any scab who brings me Jag Cordeaux’s head! And if the Lady Death really is dead, well, that just means we’ll have even more openings to fill, doesn’t—”
Sal was interrupted by the shriek of an electric guitar—not over the open air, but over an open broadcast. It subsided in an instant, and in that instant curiosity overwhelmed her growing anger. Brighter than any star, the spheroid shape of an unexpected and unreported Overlord-class DropShip descended towards the combatants. Hope swelled up in Sal’s chest, that Paula Trevaline had finally returned to Tortuga. Taking advantage of the surprised silence, a man spoke and dashed Sal’s hopes the same way a two-storey fall might dash an infant’s brains against a street.
“This is “Redjack” Ryan, late of the Oberon Confederation,” the newcomer sounded young, and friendly. Sal hated him immediately. “Our old homeland’s become a little—I’ll say ‘hostile’ to avoid a terribly unfunny pun—to honest, hard-working pirates such as myself. I hope you’ll welcome my men and I with open arms or, at least, a well-stocked bar and a Jenny or two! Now then, what’s this I hear about Paula Trevaline being dead?”
********************
A timer ticked closer to zero as Khan Michael McKenna waited out the three-minute latency his comtechs had told him to expect. The distance between Andurien and the Clan fleet was staggering, nearly double the length of the space occupied by the Clan homeworlds. They had been surprised when the coordinates and frequencies had yielded not a Rim World transmission but instead an open HPG circuit. It seemed the latest Amaris wanted to speak face-to-face in as close to real-time as the massive distances involved would allow.
As the timer hit zero, the face of the Usurper's spawn burned itself into his memory: a dark, swarthy young man of Mongolian descent. He looked every inch an Amaris, from the way his dark-eyes seemed to gleam covetously to what was undoubtedly a carefully-crafted image of humbleness. The cost of keeping an HPG channel open for two-way communication between Strana Mechty and Lum was a cost that even Khan McKenna would have balked at; and yet here was Amaris calmly doing so over thirty-times that distance. McKenna’s normally calm features twisted into an angry frown as he fought the urge to kill the transmission out of spite.
“It is too early for a Batchall, freebirth,” McKenna growled. “You and yours have already sacrificed your right to be treated honorably.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Amaris replied sardonically, minutes later. “Nor do I care. I am glad that you’ve received my message, and have chosen to speak with me. I was expecting more of you.”
“Yes, I got your savashri disk. The sight of you makes me nauseous, what is it you want?”
Amaris laughed, “The disk? The disk wasn’t my message! So I guess I’ll explain it to you, even though an explanation kills the poetry: you are vulnerable. You are weak and alone, you have no support or possibility for resupply, and you’re fighting a war you don’t understand or have even the faintest potential of winning. Khan McKenna,” Amaris paused for a moment, to let the extent of his knowledge strike home an instant before going for a killing blow, “There is nowhere in the galaxy you can be safe from me. Not in the Free Worlds League. Not in the invasion corridor you abandoned.”
“Not on,” Amaris paused, licked his fingertips, and turned the page of a document on his desk, then looked up. His monstrous, inhuman black eyes stared into McKenna’s and for a moment the Khan forgot he was looking at a hologram. Amaris finished with a voice empty of compassion, mercy, or even emotions that McKenna would’ve found less alien like anger or spite. “Lum.”
“How?” McKenna asked, dumbfounded.
Amaris wasn’t done, having predicted McKenna’s surprise the dark, swarthy young man’s anger seemed to explode into his tirade. “Because you have the audacity to threaten me on my own homeworld, it’s only fair that I threaten yours in return! That’s how war works! It’s why any sane society considers it a bad thing!”
“I will face you on Andurien, as you hope. I’ll even remain after we’ve finished evacuating the other noncombatants so you can try to claim my head the way Kerensky tried to claim my great, great grandfather’s.” The Usurper’s descendant held up a sheet of paper so the holorecorder could read the string of jump coordinates located there. “By the time you arrive here I will have mined every jump point with enough nuclear weapons to annihilate your entire fleet. Except for this one, single pirate point at a LaGrange point two days transit from the planet itself.”
Amaris set the paper down, and held up a verigraphed holodisc that bore his likeness. “If even one of your warships moves so much as a kilometer from that pirate point, I will transmit the location of the Clan Homeworlds to every man, woman, and child in the Inner Sphere. So you have a choice, Snow Raven Khan. You can die, testing my minefields. You can play your little gambling games or fight me en masse even though this war has grown beyond your ken under terms I have dictated from the start. Or you can go back to your little star cluster in the deep periphery, and live.”
The hated image of the usurper’s progeny flickered once, and then vanished.
Political Vote 15b
Khan McKenna
A) “Monster! We’ll fight you until the stars themselves are burnt to ashes, no matter the terms of your Batchall!” (attack Andurien under Stefan Amaris VII’s terms)
B) “This requires consideration.” (Inform the Sea Fox Khans, and the surviving Ghost Bears)
C) “Such a childish bluff from a man who isn’t even a warrior.” (Proceed as planned, don’t inform the other Clans of the risks)
D) “And live.” (Clan Snow Raven retreats from the Inner Sphere)
E) “And we all shall live.” (Clan Snow Raven, Clan Sea Fox, and Clan Ghost Bear retreat from the Inner Sphere)
********************
Combat Theater Vote 15:
A) Falling Hammer (3-way battle)
Clan Widowmaker has grown increasingly frustrated in the periphery. Their plan to secure a narrow supply corridor through the so-called “Rasalhague Insurgency” in order to allow their isolated units a chance to resupply, have been met with civil disorder and stiff resistance from hidden BattleMech forces. With Clan Burrock hard at work subverting insurgency territory, Khan Kerensky has issued an ultimatum to her forces: secure the supply corridor at all costs, because she will not allow Clan Widowmaker to be beholden to Clan Burrock for supplies.
B) Harmless Rebellion
Clan Ice Hellion has found a loophole and have launched an invasion of the Draconis Combine’s periphery holdings. Because their goal isn’t the conquest of Terra, they hope to secure several swift victories and establish their right to participate in the invasion before the other Home Clans can protest their brash and poorly-planned action.
C) King of the Pirates (3-way battle)
The Pirates of Tortuga are up-in-arms yet again, with the disappearance of the Lady Death and numerous failures to seize control of the desperate pirate bands, an outside force of refugees from the distant Oberon Confederation may be able to seize control of the Dominions and establish a new pirate kingdom for themselves in Tortuga!
D) Larsha under Seige (3-way battle)
Unsatisfied with their invasion of the Duchy of New Syrtis, the Taurian Concordat has also launched a simultaneous invasion against bordering Capellan worlds occupied by the Duchy’s forces. Has the Concordat come to the Confederation’s aid, or is their goal something more insidious?
E) There’s No Way I’ll Lose
Thomas Hogarth (+15 impulse votes) has arrived on Skye to deliver Frederick Steiner’s plan to restore the peoples’ faith in the Commonwealth’s economic recovery: the peaceful reintegration of Skye and the institution of Melissa Steiner-Lestrade as Co-Archon. Unfortunately, a delegation from Task Force Serpent arrived on the very same day to discuss Skye’s future as the cornerstone of a new Terran Hegemony (under the wise and not-at-all insane leadership of Task Force Serpent). The Steel Vipers have demanded that the bewildered Clovis Lestrade and Melissa Steiner grant them the opportunity to prove the merits of their claim by engaging Hogarth and his supporters in single combat.
F) Maelstrom (3-way battle)
Clan Goliath Scorpion has won the bid to capture Tukayyid but a “rogue” element of Clan Widowmaker has launched an invasion anyway, in the hopes of winning the world before the Goliath Scorpions can do so. This is the moment Clan Goliath Scorpion has been waiting for: the world is theirs by Clan law, and the forces of Clan Widowmaker have begun a Grand Melee. The Goliath Scorpions are now free to hunt down the Widowmakers while the ilKhan’s hands are tied.
G) Trial of Position
Mechwarrior Adrian McKenna has been disgraced and even her bloodname can no longer protect her. With nothing to look forward to save a transfer to the Gamma solamha Galaxy, Adrian must prove her fighting spirit and secure a position worthy of her exalted name if she ever wishes to face the soldiers of the New Rim Worlds Republic again.
H) ?????
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I) Kalma-Youngblood Mercenary Company, LLC
The newly minted millionaire Duncan Kalma (and his new friend, Jason Youngblood) have decided to heed the Bounty Hunter’s advice to turn their fortunes into something useful: the creation of a brand-new Mercenary unit! They’ve traveled to Galatea, the Mercenary’s Star, in the hopes of recruiting at least a company before Kalma-Youngblood Mercenary Company, LLC (Name Pending) take on their first contract!
Combat Theater Vote
A) A Falling Hammer
B) Harmless Rebellion
C) King of the Pirates
D) Larsha under Seige
E) There’s No Way I’ll Lose
F) Maelstrom
G) Trial of Position
H) ?????
I) Kalma-Youngblood Mercenary Company, LLC.