PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Clean bills are the cornerstone of a helthy bussiness cooperation, if both parties are worthy of the trust. I hope they will manage to keep the location of Catachan secret for the next 60+ years.
Battletech Welcome to the Jungle
- Thread starter Speaker4thesilent
- Start date
This is Battletech. That only works for the WOB.
Interlude 2-O
Speaker4thesilent
Crazed Deplorable
Interlude 2-O
Archduke’s Palace, Tamar, Tamar System
Tamar Pace, Lyran Commonwealth
January 4th, 3010
The audience was largely informal. Archduke Kelswa customarily took the last couple weeks of December and the first week of January off, so obtaining an appointment had been a bit difficult.
On the other hand, using the pretense of delivering a belated Christmas gift for the Archduke and his daughter opened some doors.
Still, it was best to present a certain face.
Especially since I ended up missing nearly an entire year at court, Narcissa considered as she entered the sitting room where Selvin Kelswa, Archduke of Tamar, and his daughter Morasha waited.
“Ah, Baroness Olivetti!” Archduke Kelswa greeted her enthusiastically, “It’s so good to see you, my dear. How was your trip?”
Narcissa took in the rapid greeting with the ease of familiarity. It wasn’t difficult to get a read on the Archduke even when he was trying to be restrained, and today he wasn’t trying.
He’s in a good mood, she decided. That was a relief. She could probably still have turned the situation around, but Selvin Kelswa’s disposition could be … mercurial.
“Enjoyable, Your Grace, but exhausting,” she answered.
“So what was it like in the Periphery? And you said something about gifts?” Morasha, fifteen and looking more like her mother all the time, demanded.
“Indeed,” Narcissa said, “but there’s a story that goes along with them. You see, Catachan, the world I visited has an unusually high level of metals. As a consequence …”
XXXXX
The panoramic pictures of the mountains around Weber’s Holdfast had drawn appreciative murmurs from the Archduke as had the shrouded cloud forests of the upper reaches of the Catachan jungles. The video clips her porters had taken on the flight out to the Tungsten mine had turned out spectacularly as well.
However, the picture of her in her safari khakis, massive pulse laser cradled in her arms, with the dead pack hunter to one side had been the big hit, as she’d expected. Morasha had gasped, then launched into a whole series of questions.
All in all, it had been an hour well spent. Morasha, in particular, was a natural center for the gossip of the Court, and the datachip full of pictures and videos Narcissa had shared with her would no doubt be central to that gossip for weeks.
Still, that was only the first of the objectives she’d set for this visit. As Morasha poured over the photographs on her datapad, Narcissa met the Archduke’s eye and raised an eyebrow.
Kelswa smiled back at her and nodded. Harder men than the Archduke could be softened through kindness to their children. Really, Morasha was a likable girl, so it wasn’t even the trial it might have been under other circumstances.
A wave to the guards had the twin doors swinging open and servants hurrying to move her two packages inside.
That was enough to finally pry Morasha’s attention away from the photo album.
“Oh, presents!” she exclaimed, and set to circling them as soon as the servants had withdrawn. Shrouded as they were in dust covers, there was little hint as to what precisely they were, though they were of a size.
After a long moment, Morasha turned back to her father.
“Can I, Dad?” she asked.
“I don’t know, can you?” he fired back.
“Dad!” Morasha objected, her tone the archetypical aggrieved teenager.
The Archduke stood and approached, apparently deep in thought.
“I suppose there’s no point in making you wait,” he assented. “Go ahead.”
With a wordless expression of happiness, Morasha immediately displaced the dust cover only to gasp as what was beneath it was revealed.
“Oh, wow!” she breathed, fingers reaching out to trace one of the veins of silver on the desktop. “It’s beautiful! What is it?”
“A desk,” Narcissa responded. The Archduke began to chuckle even as Morasha pouted at her.
“Narcissa! Not you too!”
Taking pity on the teenager, she responded seriously.
“Something I found on my trip. On Catachan they call it Argent Maple. Thanks to the high metal content of the soil, the trees have bark like BattleMech armor, but once you get underneath, they’ve got pale, fine-grained wood with veins of silver running through it.”
“It looks almost like granite,” the Archduke commented, his own near-matching desk now revealed as well, though he was folding the dust cover instead of having dropped it on the floor.
He met her gaze with an appreciative smile, but she could tell by the look in his eyes that he knew there was more than one motive behind the gift.
Morasha was polite in her thanks, but the way her eyes kept drifting back towards the gift let Narcissa know that it was definitely appreciated.
“Why don’t you go figure out where in your rooms you want to put it,” the Archduke said after a moment. “I think it’s a bit larger than your current desk, isn’t it?”
That set off a torrent of speculation from the young Archduchess-in-waiting along with a second round of thanks before Morasha departed, a small entourage of servants hauling her new furniture behind her.
“I suppose I just need to contact Olivetti Weaponry’s representatives in order to commission the matching bedroom set she’ll undoubtedly want to match the desk?” Archduke Kelswa asked as soon as the doors swung closed.
“While we could certainly recommend a good carpenter on Sudeten, Olivetti Weaponry only handles the raw materials. If you’d prefer a local craftsman, we could certainly supply what they would need,” Narcissa smiled artlessly.
“A well-executed plot, my lady,” he congratulated her with the tip of an imaginary hat, “I do believe you shall have my court in an uproar for months,” he said and paused. “And I do believe I shall be placing a commission. The effect really is something,” he continued, fingers once more tracing over the top of his new desk.
When he looked back up to meet Narcissa’s eyes, however, his own were serious again.
“Still, I recognize a woman with weighty thoughts on her mind,” he said. “What’s the real agenda for this meeting?”
And that was why people respected Selvin Kelswa. Despite his spates of … enthusiasm, the man was a shrewd politician.
“As you may have heard, Olivetti Weaponry has managed to obtain a supplier with a previously untapped source of fusion engines, PPCs, and other critical materials such that it is practical for us to increase production of Warhammers. In fact, we will be doubling production in less than two years.”
Whether he’d heard any such thing or not, his reaction was no more than polite congratulations.
“That is impressive. If memory serves, you already had substantially better productivity per line than any of the Commonwealth’s other BattleMech producers, save perhaps Defiance. With Lyran technical skill and economic power, it’s only a matter of time before we start pushing the Combine back out of the Tamar Pact!”
“We had the advantage of a Star League line to learn from. We still can’t quite equal what our ancestors could manage, but we’re working on it,” Narcissa accepted the compliment in the spirit in which it had been offered before continuing.
“That does, however, lead to a potential problem,” she temporized. “With a second Warhammer line, we’ll be producing a regiment and a half of Heavy BattleMechs each year, in addition to our Hunter tanks and J. Edgar Hovertanks. Then there’s THI’s Demolisher line.
“Yet, despite this, the LCAF has only posted a single regiment on Sudeten as a garrison, and not even a storied unit like the Arcturan Guards. One regiment of Lyran Regulars is all that stands between Sudeten’s factories and a DCMS raid.” That wasn’t quite the case.
THI had a small corporate security element, and the Ducal Guard could be trusted to see off anything less than a battalion of the Sword of Light.
“And the Dracs are only two jumps away,” she concluded.
“I can understand your frustration, but I don’t know that there’s much I can do to help,” the Archduke said in response. “I’ve been lobbying for a push on the Combine for years, but after the disaster of Alessandro’s Concentrated Weakness and with Archon Katrina focused on reforms and stamping out corruption, it’s been difficult to even secure sufficient garrisons. Especially with the Free Worlds League slowly pushing back the border.”
Narcissa nodded along sympathetically. She strongly suspected that the reason forces for an offensive were unavailable was that no one trusted the Archduke to command a serious action. His participation in the defense of Tamar itself on the three occasions it had been attacked since his assumption of the Archducal title had mostly balanced out: the morale boost to the militia from knowing that their Archduke was in the field with them offsetting the harm he did with his hamfisted interference with the LCAF’s deployments.
“In this case, I think we can help each other, Your Grace,” she began. “With what happened to the Jägers on Memmingen, I assume that the unit will need time to rebuild before they’re battle-ready again?”
By the frown that immediately crossed Kelswa’s face, she knew that she was right. The Tamar Jägers were the Archduke’s pet project: a unit in the image of the Tamar Tigers, lost to the Succession Wars. Their first major deployment had gone poorly; someone had leaked their target to the Combine. Instead of a small garrison on Memmingen, they’d run into three regiments and had been mauled viciously before they could extract themselves from the trap. Really it was a miracle they’d only taken fifty percent losses.
“They will,” he admitted, “As much as their spirit still burns brightly, they will need time to make good their losses and ensure that replacement personnel have the proper Esprit de Corps.” The look he was directing at her was sharp and considering.
“Then why not have them take the time to rearm and train back up to your demanding standards away from the lights of the Court. And whatever spy betrayed them to the Combine.” Before the Archduke could fixate on that detail, she continued.
“In return for the consideration, Olivetti Weaponry would be willing to extend to you the right of first refusal for purchase of up to thirty-six Warhammers from our new line, as well as opening our holdings to the Jägers for repair and maintenance needs associated with training. Additionally, we would be willing to supply everything from spares to armor and munitions at cost for their training. Perhaps seeing them in the field more than twice a year might shame the Regulars into improving their own performance.”
Kelswa had gone from looking irritated to appearing thoughtful. If she could track the political implications of the offer, then he certainly could as well. The Archduke had insisted that the Jägers, like their predecessors the Tamar Tigers, utilize fast medium BattleMechs almost to exclusion. He didn’t need the Warhammers Olivetti produced, but the LCAF loved them.
By holding the threat of taking a battalion of them off the market each year, he could definitely secure the right to purchase the Mediums he wanted. By positioning the unit on Sudeten to work up, they would have the advantage of easy access to Olivetti’s tank lines to replenish their scouting element with J. Edgar hovertanks as well as fire support tanks in the form of the Hunters. If the bug bit him, THI’s Demolisher line would now presumably be selling to Lyran units instead of indirectly offloading their products to the Combine via the supposed mercenaries LIC had caught them dealing with. The ability to fall back on a prepared position defended by heavy tanks with a pair of assault autocannon was nothing to sneeze at.
Lastly, they’d be defending one of the Tamar Pact’s largest sources of tax revenue with the additional prospect of showing up the Regulars on-world. The prospect of easy access to repairs and cheaper maintenance was really just the cherry on top.
The thoughtful expression was quickly replaced with a smile.
“Baroness Olivetti, I believe you have yourself a deal.”
XXXXX
And that’s one interlude down. I played silly buggers a bit with the Jägers, but FASA absolutely couldn’t manage to make them coherent at all, having them founded at both the beginning and the end of the 3SW, so I feel my interpretation is justified.
Thanks again to LordsFire, Seraviel, and Yellowhammer for beta reading, idea bouncing, and canon compliance checking.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
With Olivetti ''increasing'' the production, the Combine raid is practically guaranteed to happen.
Tryglaw
Well-known member
That, or the toaster worshippers will hit, directly or by proxy.
If the spy is actually in the Jagers and not a political hanger-on or political flunky. Might even be a military admin pogue with access to movement and/or supply orders.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Comstar will only move against them once they smell the technology recovery.
Tryglaw
Well-known member
Or... your (not so) friendly interstellar phone company that is transmitting those orders...
Interlude 2-R
Speaker4thesilent
Crazed Deplorable
Interlude 2-R
Lyran Regulars Base, Hamarr, Sudeten
Tamar Domains, Tamar Pact, Lyran Commonwealth
November 5th, 3010
Leutnant Wilfred ‘Fredrick’ Richthofen stormed into his Hauptman’s office, a paper of some sort crumpled to unreadability in his clenched right hand.
“What the hell is this shit!” he demanded, waving the paper around. A small part of him was aware that he was fortunate that there weren’t any MPs around, because it looked remarkably like he was shaking his fist at his commanding officer. It was repeated displays of this sort that had landed him with the Lyran Regulars in the first place, but at the moment he was too pissed off to care.
“I have no idea, but I’m certain you’re going to enlighten me,” Hauptman Keller, gaze only moderately annoyed at the disruption, replied.
That only put the flame back on Fredrick’s temper.
“Don’t give me that!” the Leutnant growled as he slammed the crumpled paper down on the desk. “I know you have to approve the work schedule for the techs!”
That seemed to finally clue the squadron commander in.
“This is about the standardization order?” the Hauptman demanded, irritably. “If you’ve read it, you should know that it was ordered by Admiral Cain of the Quartermaster Corps with the support of Planetary Command,” he said, his expression managing to convey ‘What the hell am I supposed to do about it when orders come down from those stratospheric heights?’
“It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad call. The Corp’s already short on Aerospace Fighters that aren’t shit in the black!” he bit out. “You know what they want to do to my baby? They want to ‘fix’ the problem with the stress on the nose structural members by hanging a Deleaon Five Autocannon from Quikscell -- QUIKSCELL -- on the nose instead of the Sunspot that it’s designed for!” he bit out angrily. “My family shelled out a lot to get a Donal PPC to replace the Sunspot and make it fit!”
“It helps bring the overheating problem under contro-” Hauptman Keller tried to placate him, but Fredrick was having none of it.
“I’m not one of those half-trained baboons that fill out the rest of the squadron,” he spat back at his CO. “I can handle a lack of responsiveness for a few seconds while the sinks catch up, especially if it means keeping the only gun I’ve got with a chance to punch through a Slayer’s armor in a head-to-head pass!
“And because whoever designed this imbecilic refit couldn’t do simple mathematics, they decided to reduce the armor by a ton. So instead of pulling a second heat sink to fit in the ammunition for the paperweight they’re planning to hang on it in place of the PPC, they’re leaving it oversinked and trying to make my Stingray as much of a deathtrap as a Goddamn Lucifer!”
Momentarily out of vitriol as well as breath, Fredrick was left leaning on his squadron commander’s desk, panting in fury.
Hauptman Keller looked … less than pleased.
“If you are quite finished with your tantrum,” he began, which immediately got the Leutnant’s dander back up, “There is nothing that I can do about it. The refits have been ordered and will be carried out. The matter is not up for discussion. What is under consideration is how long you’ll be spending in th-”
“Like fucking hell that refit will be carried out!” the irate pilot snarled, going from blowing off steam to deadly earnest in a heartbeat.
“Section four, subsection two: ‘Regarding privately owned aerospace fighters approved for deployment with the Lyran Commonwealth’s Aerospace Corps: Once approved at the beginning of a tour of duty, upkeep of the designated ASF is the responsibility of the assigned unit’s technicians. Any repairs necessitated by required training or combat duties are to return the ASF to it’s starting configuration. Any alterations to the configuration of a privately owned ASF must be approved by the Quartermaster’s Corp, the Wing Commander, and the ASF’s owner,’” he quoted, glad one of his instructors had forced him to memorize the regs dealing with family Battlemechs and ASFs being used in LCAF and LCN service.
Hauptman Keller seemed almost flabbergasted at his single most problem-child pilot quoting The Book at him, chapter and verse.
Did he seriously not even check to make sure this was covered by the regs? Fredrick wondered. He’d come out the far side of his fury now, and like usual he was regretting his outburst. Should have calmed down before I confronted him, he admitted, but I’m so damn tired of being stuck in this chicken-shit outfit. He paused for a moment as a thought came to him, then spoke.
“Hauptman, I apologize for this mess. I came in here thinking that you’d set out to fuck with me deliberately, not that the Brass were trying to pull a fast one,” he admitted.
“But I’m still not going to approve the refit. An AC-5 in the nose is just going to make the stress on the airframe worse, rather than better, and I’ve got to both protect my family’s investment, and insure that Bobtail is in good condition to blow Dracs out of the black for years to come. Your only recourse at this point is to formally inform me, in writing, that the LCAF no longer considers my Stingray’s configuration fieldable,” he asserted.
Hauptman Keller grimaced at that.
“Shit,” he said with less than eloquence, then read through a file on his computer, probably checking the regulations in question. A few minutes and a series of clicks later, he printed out the appropriate form and filled it out.
“I’ve a feeling I know which option you’re going to take,” he said. “You’re a good pilot, even if you are a pain in the ass.”
It was as close as he figured he was going to get. Once he selected the box for an immediate discharge, signed his name, and as he returned the form, he rendered a parade-ground-worthy salute. If the Aerospace Corps didn’t want him, he’d find someone who did.
XXXXX
Olivetti Weaponry Campus, Hamarr, Sudeten
Tamar Domains, Tamar Pact, Lyran Commonwealth
November 7th, 3010
“I heard through the grapevine that you’ve been looking for pilots.”
It had taken the rest of that first day to handle out-processing, and it had taken all of yesterday to get Bobtail, his Stingray, relocated to the civilian facilities at Hamarr’s Spaceport. That had left him looking for either more permanent living arrangements than the cheap hotel room he’d rented, or gainful employment.
He’d picked looking for work. If he was lucky, either he wouldn’t need to find an apartment or at least the nature of the job would dictate his options.
The Olivetti representative appeared to have finally gathered his wits and made to respond.
“Uh, yes, we have been,” the man behind the desk said, then belatedly began to fiddle with his computer. After a moment, he continued, “Um, I have an application printing for you now. But, uh, unless you’ve got your own Aerospace Fighter, I have to tell you the positions have been pretty well filled at this point.”
“Then I suppose I’m fortunate,” the former Leutnant responded.
XXXXX
November 24th, 3010
He’d been expecting the position at Olivetti to be on Sudeten. He thought he could be forgiven for that, since so far as anyone knew, Olivetti only had the one production site.
Seemed ‘anyone’ was wrong. As usual.With a sigh, he put the manual he’d been reading to kill time aside.
The Centurion was an interesting bird. It needed some tweaks, some updated electronics for sure, but it was, in his opinion, a better Interceptor than either the Saber or the Seydlitz, if only because it could take a hit or two from the tail guns of heavier fighters without turning into an expanding cloud of debris. The relatively beefy seven and a half tons of armor meant that his Stingray only carried about fifty percent more than the Centurion, a fighter half its size.
Heavier armor meant fewer casualties and more surviving airframes. That in turn meant less expense involved in buying and training replacements. It also meant that pilots would tend to survive and accrue experience. It made a lot of sense to field.
So of course the Aerospace Corps isn’t interested, he shook his head in disgust at the thought. What the hell was the point of picking up the design from the Feddies if you weren’t going to use it?
He was reaching for the manual again when the interview room’s door slid open.
The first thing he noticed about the blonde that entered was that her bust preceded the rest of her by several inches. Trying not to stare, he took in the short hair and military bearing that marked her as either an ASF pilot or a Mechwarrior, noting in passing that she was damn good looking for a woman in her forties before he remembered to get to his feet.
He opened his mouth to introduce himself, but she beat him to the punch.
“You Fredrick Richthofen?” she asked.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he responded, not sure if he should be saluting or not.
Before he could decide, she stepped forward and offered her hand.
“Geraldine Kowalski, good to meet you,” she introduced herself as they shook. She had a solid grip, but not a crushing one. “Have a seat.”
He sat back down, trying to figure out what unit she was with. Must have been Mercenaries of some sort. LCAF Mechwarrior types were usually more formal, but he thought he’d remember a unit run by a woman who looked like the one across from him. That was about the time he noticed her noticing his reading material.
“I thought you flew a Stingray?” she asked.
“I do,” he confirmed, “but the rest of the unit is going to be in Centurions, so I need to know their birds as well as I know mine.”
“Ha!” the woman let out a bark of laughter.
“I just won a bet,” she explained a moment later. “You were bored as fuck with the Regulars, weren’t you?”
“Pretty much, Ma’am,” he answered, setting aside the temptation to say something pithy instead.
“Figured. And call me Comet; we’re going to be working together, after all.”
“Then it’s nice to meet you, Comet,” he replied, not sure where she was going with this interview.
She seemed to sense it, or maybe she was finally ready to get down to business herself, because her next statement changed the subject.
“So, you’ve had a couple weeks longer than me to check out the rest of the pilots. They as green as their dossiers say they are?” she inquired.
He grimaced.
“Yeah. At least,” he said. “Haven’t seen them in the air yet, but they’re all former militia pilots. Don’t get me wrong,” he hastened to add, “they’ve got the basics, but flying is about all they’re good for. Any Drac Regulars squadron would take them out like shooting skeet.”
Comet nodded, a grim expression on her face.
“I was afraid of that,” she admitted before again changing gears. “You familiar with how to run training?”
That caught him a bit off guard.
“Well, yeah. Don’t really have NCOs to foist it off on with pilots.”
“Alright, then. Contingent on the boss’s approval when we get back home and good performance in the meantime, you’re squadron leader,” she announced. Before he had a chance to switch his brain back into gear, she continued, “We’ve got a bunch of kids who want to be ASF pilots back home. Mostly they’re fighting over flight hours in shuttles, but we’ll want double crews for every ASF except your personal bird, eventually. On the other hand, we ordered a bunch of spares and we’ve got enough fuel that even a squadron of thirsty Interceptors couldn’t drink us dry anytime soon.”
He nodded along, even surprised by the abruptness of her statement.
“You’ll be a bit restricted on the trip back to the Holdfast, even an Overlord can only carry so much fuel, but once we make it back to base,” she smiled, “don’t expect to have any time to be bored.”
XXXXX
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Is that five Centurions and a Stingray, or is it six Centurions and Stingry as supernumerary?
Speaker4thesilent
Crazed Deplorable
The latter. One Centurion will be going back as cargo.
PeaceMaker 03
Well-known member
Upgrades for Catachan ASF forces,
2 for Stingray, 1 for Centurion.
Stingray F-90JC 1 JUNGLE CAC Mk I
Base Tech Level: Standard (IS)
Weight: 60 tons
BV: 1,721
Cost: 7,158,580 C-bills
Source: TRO 3039 - Star League
Movement: 6/9
Engine: 240 XL
Heat Sinks: 20 [40]
Fuel Points: 400 (5.0 tons)
Structural Integrity: 6
Armor: 272
Armor | ||
| Nose | 82 | |
| Left Wing | 68 | |
| Right Wing | 68 | |
| Aft | 54 |
| Weapons | Loc | Heat | |
| PPC | NOS | 10 | |
| ER Large Laser | RWG | 12 | |
| Medium Laser | RWG | 3 | |
| Medium Laser | LWG | 3 | |
| ER Large Laser | LWG | 12 |
Upgraded XL engine in Stingray to close match Squadron Leader private ASF to Centurion ASF.
Not Sure if SI found any Fero-Aluminum
Stingray F-90JC2 JUNGLE CAC Mk II
Base Tech Level: Standard (IS)
Weight: 60 tons
BV: 1,785
Cost: 8,601,580 C-bills
Source: TRO 3039 - Star League
Movement: 7/11
Engine: 300 XL
Heat Sinks: 20 [40]
Fuel Points: 400 (5.0 tons)
Structural Integrity: 7
Armor: 241 (Ferro-Aluminum)
Armor | ||
| Nose | 73 | |
| Left Wing | 58 | |
| Right Wing | 58 | |
| Aft | 52 |
| Weapons | Loc | Heat | |
| PPC | NOS | 10 | |
| ER Large Laser | RWG | 12 | |
| Medium Laser | RWG | 3 | |
| Medium Laser | LWG | 3 | |
| ER Large Laser | LWG | 12 |
Centurion with XL engine and ER Large Laser, uses Ferro-Aluminum armor.
Drop 2 MED Laser from wings and roughly same armor coat with Standard Armor.
Centurion CNT-1 JUNGLE CAC Mk II
Base Tech Level: Standard (IS)
Weight: 30 tons
BV: 1,197
Cost: 3,813,745 C-bills
Source: TRO 3075 - Age of War
Movement: 10/15
Engine: 240 XL
Heat Sinks: 10 [20]
Fuel Points: 400 (5.0 tons)
Structural Integrity: 10
Armor: 125 (Ferro-Aluminum)
Armor | ||
| Nose | 38 | |
| Left Wing | 31 | |
| Right Wing | 31 | |
| Aft | 25 |
| Weapons | Loc | Heat | |
| ER Large Laser | NOS | 12 | |
| Medium Laser | RWG | 3 | |
| Medium Laser | RWG | 3 | |
| Medium Laser | LWG | 3 | |
| Medium Laser | LWG | 3 |
paulobrito
Well-known member
Ooooh, ASF porn. 👻
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
A bit much for their current technical capabilities.
PeaceMaker 03
Well-known member
Can not disagree about the tech limit. This is more my head cannon of the AeroBoss Fredrick Richthofen doing a backside of a napkin technofile wish list for his Stingray, and the squadrons Centurions.
That is once he finds out the extent of losttech on Catachan. ( After he stops touching himself inappropriately) Manic laughter erupting randomly while drawing on said napkins these designs are what he would produce In my head cannon.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
While he will be 1 in the flight and not 2, the song still holds true especially when he finds himself in trouble, Johnny Danger style.
Interlude 2-J
Speaker4thesilent
Crazed Deplorable
Interlude 2-J
Station Tug Hub, Catachan Orbit, Catachan System
Former Apollo Province, Unclaimed Territory
June 18th, 3011
I was hoping for something more interesting for my first big assignment. Sam Jones knew he was just a glorified manager, but he’d hoped that his promotion to run the newly repaired and rechristened Tug Hub would be the start of a run of good luck.
Reading centuries old flight logs is not my idea of fun. On the other hand, they were probably the best chance the Company had to figure out where the Rimjobs had hidden the EndoSteel, Ferro-Fibrous plate, Ferro-Aluminum plate, and Freezer factories. A planet was a big damn place even when it wasn’t lousy with megafauna that were perfectly willing to put BattleMechs on the menu.
He shook his head and shrugged off the creeping feeling of futility. The logs were sorted by date, so that meant all he had to do was read through them. With the lack of food production capability on the surface, deliberate on the part of the Amaris government so as to keep control of their slaves, the factories would only have had the food on hand that was transported down to them. The shuttles were pretty large, but they still could only carry so much, and more importantly, the Rimjobs would have only been willing to leave so much on the ground.
His best guess was around a standard month’s supply at a time. Only have to read a month’s worth of these things. Maybe less if I get lucky he assured himself and got started.
XXXXX
The first month’s reports had been a bust, as had the second. He’d gone through every single one and found nothing about unloading finished product into the station’s third bay. His first assumption was that it had already been full, so instead of reading the more recent reports, he jumped back three months and ran through that, but there was still nothing. Every single flight log down to the planet was accounted for, and none of them seemed to indicate any more hidden factories.
Mines? Yes. He’d been able to locate the Germanium mine and about a dozen others to within approximately half a square kilometer.
Favored spots to drop off particularly inconvenient political prisoners and giggle over what killed them? Also yes. Amaris’s governor really had been a sick fuck.
Factories outside the Holdfast? Bupkis.
Maybe the logs were deleted? he wondered.
Frustration was definitely setting in, but he was not about to admit failure on his first assignment following his promotion.
Okay, why would they delete these logs instead of any of the rest? The ones bragging about commiting murder by wildlife would seem to be a more likely place to start, if only because the SLDF would have invented something special for the fuckers responsible after reading half of them.
So, maybe they aren’t gone, just hidden? there was something nagging at him. What was it that Old Man Ewing used to say?
After a minute of trying to come up with it, he gave up in disgust and resigned himself to brute-forcing the process. If he was stuck reading all of these damn reports, he wasn’t going to be the only one.
XXXXX
Three months later, after another fruitless day reading through summaries that boiled down to, ‘nothing here, Sir,’ it finally came to him.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained equally well by stupidity.
What if some overworked clerk had filed the flights he was looking for in the wrong place? After all, they were bringing cargo to the station, not just transporting stuff to the ground. With that in mind, he immediately called a halt to the unpopular and fruitless sifting through the ground transport reports and reassigned the limited administrative staff to reading through the space to space reports.
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Dropship Implacable, Orbit of Unnamed Gas Giant, Catachan System
Former Apollo Province, Unclaimed Territory
October 23rd, 3011
Even looking at them, Sam could hardly credit what he was seeing. Each was massive, the sort of construct that only the Star League’s nearly unlimited resources could have created. Four massive stations floating within the rings of the gas giant.
Each a factory for technology that hadn’t been seen since the First Succession War, armored against impacts from the cosmic debris that made up the rings even as it was concealed from notice by that same debris cloud. And each holding production facilities capable of working in zero gravity.
That was the secret of manufacturing for much of the advanced armor and structural technology used by the Star League, and seemingly the reason why attempts to recreate it had failed.
“So you’re satisfied that we’ll be able to get them working again?” he asked the head of the survey crew.
“Yeah,” Linda Hopton, agreed before pointing to the Freezer production facility, “This one will need the most work, the Ferro-Carbide armor reflects an impact with a fairly substantial planetesimal, and the station-keeping thrusters are about bingo on fuel, but those Amaris fuckers took measures to preserve the stations beyond dealing with the workers when they tried whatever they tried.”
Discovering that everything but the administrative sections of the factories were at death pressure had been a bit unpleasant. Discovering that the Rimjob managers had simply vented the workers’ quarters and the production areas themselves to vacuum to prevent their rebellious slaves from damaging the workings had been worse. Still, there was nothing they could do at this point. Even the bodies appeared to have been drawn down into the gas giant over the centuries since that atrocity.
Hauling canned atmosphere out here was going to be a pain, though. As would finding people willing to run extended shifts or even live full time out away from what little civilization was developing on Catachan.
And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to be my problem, too, he thought before shaking it off.
“Alright,” he acknowledged Miss Hopton, “We’ll plan on starting there, but what about the EndoSteel Station? The Olivettis are going to be sending us the specs on the internal structure of the limbs for their Thunderbolt variant. We’re going to need time to adjust production to be able to form the structures they’ll need.”
Dale Reeves, the damage control chief, winced.
“We’re going to lose efficiency, but if we just stick new armor on it and refill the tanks, we can let Facility One,” the Freezer factory, “just keep on keeping on until we’re ready to fully reactivate it,” he said.
“The problem with that is that we either need to haul enough atmosphere out to be able to work in normal uniform, or we need to do all the work in suits, and filling those fuel tanks isn’t the easiest thing to do in suits. Those are tight quarters, and it was all meant to be done station side from a central storage tank. We can fill that fairly easily, but just mapping the system enough to use the automatics will take enough time that we might as well just use the manual systems.”
“And the automatics switched to manual mode, why again?” he demanded.
“Because the burn to get the station stable again after the Big One dropped the levels in the main tank below ten percent. Looks like that tripped some automatic cutoff. That’s our best guess anyway.”
“All right,” Sam told his people as he gathered his thoughts, “here’s how we’re going to start …”
XXXXX
Station Tug Hub, Catachan Orbit, Catachan System
Former Apollo Province, Unclaimed Territory
August 5th, 3013
“Huh, well that answers some things,” Sam commented, looking over the information that the Company’s IT geeks had finally teased out of the station’s computers.
“Yeah,” one of junior ones -Rob maybe?- agreed, “it seemed weird that they’d be building 380 XLFEs out here when the Rimjobs didn’t field a 95-tonner that anyone knew about.”
The designation for the ASF was ORC-4R Orca, a 95-ton ASF seemingly intended to hunt SLDF Heavyweights like the Royal Stuka. The design summary indicated that it had been intended to carry a pair of Gauss Rifles, five tons of ammo for them, and an entire light ASF’s mass in armor. Twenty-four and a half tons. Almost the full weight of a Sabre devoted to turning the ASF into a Strike Fighter killer.
‘Seemingly,’ however, was the key word.
“And this is all that you could get?” he all but pleaded, hoping he’d misunderstood the technobabble.
“It sucks, but the partition this points to is unrecoverable. Data’s totally trashed. Looks like somebody ran it through a bit-shredding program at least a half-dozen times,” Andrew, the Geek-in-Chief replied.
“Damn,” Sam cursed and shook his head. Full blueprints for a never-before-seen ASF? The company could have made a fortune selling something like that to LockheedCBM or one of the Commonwealth’s other ASF manufacturers.
But if the Geek Squad said there was nothing to do, then there was nothing to do. With all the experience they’d been getting, they were the closest thing to experts in Star League Era computers that existed outside a major university or ComStar.
“Well, if that’s all?” he asked, prepared to get back to handling the paperwork for shuttle operations and the almost-continuous ASF training flights.
“Ugh, no. That was just the bad news,” Andrew replied.
“I thought the fact that you solved the mystery was the good news?” Sam asked.
“Ah, no, sorry,” the group of Geeks were grinning now even if their leader seemed abashed. “That was just a consolation prize for the bad news. The good news is that they had a second, lower security partition that didn’t get trashed.” The chief Computer Tech was so caught up in his explanation that he would have been drifting away from the deck thanks to the enthusiastic gestures he was making if they weren’t under gravity in the administrative section.
“According to the message traffic, because Orca production was stalled, they decided to do an upgrade to the Vulcan, a Rimjob 80-ton ASF, instead. And get this, they attached the data for the -5N and the upgrade, the -6N!”
“Everything?” Sam demanded.
“Everything! Full schematics. Every last byte of information. Once we were able to translate the password hash we recovered into readable data, all we did was input it, and it decrypted itself cleanly!” he had no idea what that meant, but since they’d gotten results, he’d take it.
“Excellent job,” he congratulated them. “Was that the last of it, or …” he trailed off, not conversant enough with the computer systems to even really know what to ask.
“Major Weber wants us to do one last sweep for any ghost drives or hidden directories, but that shouldn’t take too long,” Andrew responded to the unasked question. “Once we’re done, I’ll give you a summary, but we don’t anticipate finding anything else. We’ve checked the physical storage media, and there just isn’t room for much more.”
“Alright, thanks for the update, and,” he paused and made eye contact with each of the computer Techs and Astechs before continuing, “This was very well done. This is an official Attaboy or Attagirl,” he nodded to the single female member of the team, “from me. And I know the Boss’ll have something more substantial to offer when he hears about it.”
The cheers from the usually unnoticed group were fairly deafening.
XXXXX
Thanks again to Yellowhammer, LordsFire, and Seraviel for beta reading, idea bouncing, and canon compliance checking.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
An excellent haul, but no freezers any time soon 
. Well can't have everything. And Vulcan 6N would be a real murderbird in this age, I would only move the forward firing medium to the aft.
. Well can't have everything. And Vulcan 6N would be a real murderbird in this age, I would only move the forward firing medium to the aft.