Part 749: Let's Read Ghost War - Part 8 (Unfinished)
Let’s Read Mechwarrior Dark AgeA Brand New Era, A Brand New Saga!
GHOST WAR
a BattleTech novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
MICHAEL A. STACKPOLE
Part 8
Chapter 20
Our main character, whose name I’ve forgotten, leaves Terra to go do his counter-terrorism thing. He’s planning on arriving early for spy reasons, and of course since this is a sitcom his girlfriend’s parents are riding on the same DropShip so he has to dodge them (which he does by dying his hair blonde, growing his beard out, and not bathing so he looks like a scruffy but image-conscious space hobo).
He lands on Basalt, and gets a hotel in downtown Mansville, which really feels phoned in even for BattleTech city names. Plants on Basalt have a blue color, which is actually a nice little detail. Racism is in full force, with all of the forcibly-transplanted Kurita and Capellan populations being treated as second-class citizens by the pro-Davion minority. This is one of those little things that makes me appreciate Stackpole’s writing, his characters aren’t the best but he excels at establishing a mood and his basic world building is very solid. Of course, it’s blatantly obvious he’s setting the scene for Space Kristallnacht, but he might change his mind.
He returns to his hotel room to find the door wide open, gives a little spiel about why he doesn’t bother with the usual juvenile “spycraft” of putting a thread on the door bolt, and then walks in like a moron. A man as big as an Elemental is chilling on a chair in his room like Darkseid. Mason gets forced up against the wall and patted down by Colonel Nicodemus Niemeyer, private enforcer of the local royalty. Niemeyer wants to know why “Sam Donelly” is on Basalt, and Mason replies flippantly that he’s just there to go fucking day hiking.
Niemeyer then cements himself as the best character in the novel.
Ghost War posted:
“Then you will be remembering the key rules to your wilderness adventure. Leave everything as you found it. Don’t disturb the native life. Stay on the paths and don’t go wandering because it could be dangerous out there.”
[…]
“Now, this is the part of the conversation we’ve never had. I know why you’re here. I know why all of you are here, and I won’t have it on my planet. If trouble erupts and I know you did it, I’m not going to worry about proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If I bring you in and book you on charges, I face hours of paperwork, months in court, and I hate that. If I burn the back of your skull off with a laser and leave you out there for the nibblers, I file one missing persons report and I’m done. I already have yours filled out, in fact.”
Aside from hitting Peak Stackpole at the end,
You get the idea, chapter over.
Chapter 21
Mason immediately starts working, getting a feel for the political situation and seeing if he can determine where Mr. Handy’s other ‘teams’ might be. He does so by immediately hitting the nearest dive bar, where, true to his stated intentions of keeping a low profile, he immediately picks a fight with the biggest, dumbest, hairiest man he can find.
He is then immediately rescued by a hot woman who buys him a beer. Mason offers to pay as “thanks for saving his life,” but the woman declines and says if that was the rationale the hairy guy owed them both since Mason had been a hair’s breadth from tipping the guy’s stool over and stomping either his nads or his throat.
She introduces herself as Abla Dolehide, who wears a Stone’s Lament tattoo. She immediately makes him as a fellow MechWarrior and the two sit down to chat.
Ghost War posted:
She started off through the crowd and I found myself distracted again, but not just by her body. She moved so well, so supple and lithe was she, that parts of me were inclined to aching. Her long back hair had been loosely knotted with a red bandana and swayed back and forth from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. She wore her sleeveless gray shirt snug where it should have been snug, and that applied to her cargo pants as well.
I should’ve kept a casual sexism counter for this read through, but needless to say if a character is a woman Mason immediately spends a paragraph contemplating how fuckable they are. He does note that before she’d stepped in, the bar had been hostile, but having her approach had won Mason a measure of respect, which suggested that the ex-Mechwarrior from Stone’s Lament must be an important person (no shit).
She’s a mercenary now, and knows she didn’t call Mason in, so she suspects he’s with the ‘other guys.’ Mason says he’s here hunting someone unrelated then trots out the ‘enemy of my enemy’ garbage to try to win her over. Mason immediately makes someone up who’s generic-Chinese so Abla can admit the guy’s not one of hers. Mason asks, if the guy he made up isn’t one of Abla’s, where might he find the guy? She doesn’t have a clue since apparently Mercenaries are being collected on Basalt “like coins.”
Mason asks who has the biggest collection, Abla deflects his questions and makes him guess, so of course he picks the local nobility (and is correct). He then tries to find out what she’s being paid, which she also deflects, so he tells her where he’s staying and sets off to go ‘test the market.’
Mason returns to his hotel and finds someone’s broken into his room again, the ‘spy trap,’ a piece of thread he’d left on the floor where it might have fallen if housekeeping had knocked it loose, had been set up in the doorjam to make it look like no one had ever entered. Rather than walking in on someone who’s obviously trying to surprise him, he returns to the hotel lobby and calls his room three times until a woman (of course) answers. Mason tells her she’ll be a long time waiting for him, and pissed she says that ‘Gypsy sent her to fetch him.’
Gypsy is, of course, Mr. Handy’s local racist code name. Mr. Handy has, of course, learned that Mason’s arrived early. He and his contact meet in the hotel lobby where neither can ambush the other, then go for a walk. Mason tricks the woman into revealing that Mr. Handy has a contact in local spaceport security. He’s led to a group of about 20 people, which he comments is “roughly enough to lead a pair of battalions” which is about right (commander + aid + 3 company commanders + 6 lance commanders x2 = 22). There’re a couple of cyborgs, but no one has a Stone’s Lament tattoo so we can immediately tell he’s not on the same ‘team’ as Abla.
Mr. Handy immediately begins his briefing, admits that the plan is to overthrow the local nobility, and immediately puts Mason in charge of “second battalion” which surprises everyone. One of the people present Mason recognizes instantly as someone who tried to restart the Eridani Light Horse but failed when the Republic told him to fuck off. The other person he recognized was a war criminal who’d murdered civilians and whom his girlfriend had caught, scarred up, and put in prison before they’d started dating. They glare like they’d expected to be given Mason’s command, but suspects if they had their way they’d be causing a lot of collateral damage.
Handy begins his briefing but Mr. Light Pony cuts him off to outline a plan for dismantling the noble’s support network, starting with Neimeyer’s group. Eridani Light Brony’s plan basically consists of “kill everyone until there’s no one left to fight,” which Mason points out is stupid and then suggests a plan of ‘low-intensity terrorism.’ Before he can explain what that means, the chapter ends.
Chapter 23 (I missed the Chapter 22 break somewhere in there, but it happened)
Mason immediately gives us a history of terrorism that’s about as bland and poorly thought out as you can imagine.
Ghost War posted:
It’s tough to peg when the first act of terrorism occurred. A case could be made for the plagues on Egypt. If we start it there, that’s the only instance where the killing of people has actually succeeded in winning a social cause. Then again, killing one person in every family is a far greater impact than any other terrorist group has ever managed.
Mason then exposits that mass murder isn’t convincing in a modern society, all it does is unite people against the murderers and make them seem homicidally insane—since most people ‘know inherently’ that ‘killers can’t be trusted.’ He then jacks off poetically about Stone being the only person in the Inner Sphere who truly understood that power comes from the people, something which had been forgotten in the neo-feudal Inner Sphere.
BattleTech in a nutshell posted:
The outright overthrow of a government assumed that the masses didn’t exist. While many of them might not care who was sitting on a throne, their lack of connection with the government created an inherently unstable situation. Once someone with a bigger club came along, the old government was history and new faces appeared on the coins.
So, to overthrow a modern government and make it stick, you have to avoid killing too many people and you have to get the citizenry behind you. If the people are stable and relatively happy, as they are on Basalt, you have to manufacture dissatisfaction with the current government. You have to attack society at its weakest point, show the current rulers are out of touch, and point out that they are impotent and untrustworthy.
Which is where Mason’s plan comes in, since ‘modern society’s weak point is its insulation from reality. No one knew where the food was coming from. He then comments on 21st century politics.
Ghost War posted:
Low-Intensity Terrorism […] attacks that safety net. Attacks in one area lead to attacks in others. Events begin to snowball because we provoke a particular reaction by the government. Having anticipated that reaction, we trump. People lose faith in the government and within months of a concerted effort, the tattered local regime will collapse.
The plan starts with blowing up power junctions to disable just a part of the city’s power (so neighbors are left thinking ‘I’m glad that’s not happening to me,’) and branching out from there until people start realizing the attacks HAVE happened to them and are left wondering why the government isn’t stopping it from happening again. The Government will respond by making grand promises but won’t have the manpower to really stop attacks, and isolated targets will continue to be picked off. The city’s ability to affect repairs will be targeted, and from that point everything the government says or does just makes them look incompetent.
Mr. Eridani Light Brony hates the plan, but he’s a strawman who exists for Mason to demolish so Mason’s certain to get his way. He talks about honor and the way of the warrior and immediately loses the argument by doing so. Of course Mason knows immediately that Brony and Scarface are going to try to have him killed, because his plan ‘offended their honor’ and they’re both big dumb hammers looking for a nail to hit.