Work Text:
Fort Lambourne, Altoona
Milligan PDZ, Woodbine Operational Area,
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
2nd February, 3064
2000 hours
Beneath a great oak, a row of men and women stood gingerly on unstable stools. The rope nooses about their necks ran up to where the ropes were fastened to the outspreading branch above; most were silent, and glared sullenly at their captors. From where Hawise watched, the tall shape of the tree silhouetted against the sun on the horizon, the lowest the sun would go before it rose again due to Altoona’s unusual astrogeography.
Robben was the first in the row, glaring, his lips moving as he mouthed curses at her. A sign hung around each bandit’s neck, written in charcoal on a board: ROBBER. MURDERER. Robben had all that, with additions: RAPIST, CHILD STEALER. Robben was a Dark Caste bandit leader who had thought them easy pickings after Jeine Elam had passed through.
Apparently, they had tacked on her trail all the way from the Clan Homeworlds and decided to make an easy living marauding the poorly defended worlds of the Periphery and the Outback, especially after the Absorption of Clan Burrock and the loss of easy pickings via that fallen clan.
They would have gotten away with most of it too, especially since the bandits had clan-spec weapons and knew how to utilise them to maximum advantage. Too bad for them they just had to attack the one place in the Trivet most prepared for their attack.
The civilians from Fort Lambourne watched silently, their eyes cold and vengeful as they awaited the demise of the bandits.
“Any last words?” Hawise drawled, “I’d rather get on with this, myself, but final courtesies are always to be followed.”
“Yeah, I got something to say,” Robben spat, his eyes full of hatred. “None of you are better than me. Y’all just have bigger gangs. I was just unlucky, and one day the same thing will happen to you!”
She nodded in acknowledgment. “Perhaps, but not today.”
He snarled, then kicked off the stool below him by himself. His body twitched and kicked briefly, then hung limp as it swayed gently back and forth; the bandit’s heavy frame had given him a quick death.
Hawise watched as an ashen-faced Eric Lottrey took over, asking each of the surviving bandits the same question. Most of them had nothing to say, resigned to their fate and from what she could see, just plain tired of running. Doing evil deeds weighs down the soul, and what these bandits did was undeniably evil.
The bandits had come in hot and confident, thinking that their three mechs, outfitted with clan-spec weaponry, would easily overpower the defenders, probably damaged and trying to recover after tangling with Jeine Elam. A smattering of technicals carrying armed bandits had held station at a distance, waiting for the mechs to destroy the heavy defenses before going in.
Normally their tactics would have worked, but Anastasia Kalinska had left behind Pence Lamongue’s Banshee and assigned it to Hawise as her command mech to ensure a strong defense for Altoona. And the issue with Jeine Elam had been settled quickly anyway, so her local militia was at full readiness when the bandits arrived.
Yona, a solahma who said she was far too old and decrepit for sustained frontline combat, operated the Kalinska heirloom Valkyrie, while two fresh cadets in training drove the Jenner and Harvester.
The bandits dropped with three mechs, a Stinger C, a Clint IIC, and most surprisingly, a Woodsman, an old omnimech design that had stopped production a century ago.
Armed with a clan-spec ER PPC and other weapons in an eclectic configuration that was probably a result of outfitting the omnimech with whatever parts they could acquire, the bandits were well-equipped to take on most militia setups in this part of the Inner Sphere and Periphery. Their tactics were simple: keep the Woodsman at range and pick off targets with the clan-spec ER PPC. If the defenders sally forth, the Clint IIC can quickly score mobility kills on vehicles with its autocannon, while the Stinger C took care of infantry.
They just could not have expected the presence of the deadly and powerful Banshee. While Yona occupied the Clint IIC, Hawise pummeled the Woodsman at long range with her own ERPPCs and gauss rifle, blowing off limbs before closing for the coup de grace. Likewise, the cadets distracted the Stinger C with baiting runs before the bandits eventually succumbed to her Banshee.
Captain Craig Wurtz also ably marshalled his militia troops to launch a preemptive flanking attack on the bandit technicals, inflicting heavy losses and forcing a rout, then moved to secure the bandit mechwarriors before they could escape.
Their determined counterattack soon overran the bandits’ landing zone and forced a surrender from the bandit dropship.
All three bandit mechs were salvageable, and Hawise already eyed the Woodsman, with its close similarity to the Warhammer, as her preferred ride. While the Banshee packed more weaponry than the Woodsman or Warhammer, all of its biggest guns were located in the torsos and she just did not feel comfortable with their more limited field of fire. Having the main guns in the arms was much more to her preference.
And best of all, it was an omnimech!
The only problem was patching the almost completely crippled Woodsman up, and while the bandits’ battered Union-C had enough endo steel on hand to repair its internal structure, getting the omnimech back into shape would be a long and arduous process taking several months. They also lacked sufficient weaponry to properly outfit the Woodsman, since almost all their spares went with TERF.
They had even managed to capture the bandits’ decrepit and nearly non-functional Merchant jumpship at the L1 pirate point, thanks to their prototype Elcano jumpship which made an in-system jump along with a deployed security detachment to capture the Merchant. Hawise did not want to think about how the security troopers had traversed the space between the two jumpships to enact their capture. She just knew that these troopers, professionals hired by REAPER, deserved a hefty bonus for their crazy boarding action.
There were casualties though. Some of Wurtz’s infantry were killed in action, and REAPER’s security force had also taken heavy losses when they boarded the bandit jumpship. Still, it was a clear win for the local forces, and she now had three more mechs to add to its defense, if they could be brought back into combat condition.
The last bandit’s body jerked, then hung limp. Other than the civilians of Fort Lambourne, the bandits' former slaves and captives also looked on, wearing expressions of vindicated satisfaction. They were a mixture of clan and Periphery civilians taken from their homes and forced to serve the bandits. Lacking the ability to repatriate them back to their homeworlds, Viscount Strong had offered them jobs on Altoona or anywhere else in the Trivet. Most of them chose to settle on Altoona, though some of the clanners chose to go to Delacambre, and a tiny minority of the freed captives chose Inman.
As for the bandits’ dependents, they would be dispersed to various farms and closely monitored. If they could be rehabilitated, great. If not, frontier justice, even on relatively more structured and civilised worlds like the ones of the Trivet, could be swift and brutal.
Thankfully, the bandit attack came at just the right time. Baroness Anastasia Kalinska was due to arrive next week, after she had been removed from frontline duty and had spent as long as she could organising the logistics for TERF on Woodbine.
By the time Hawise got back to her family suite in Fort Lambourne, Winston had already tucked the kids in. She spent a few minutes by their bedsides, before going to the shower to wash up.
She emerged from the shower to find Winston in a rare state of agitation, papers strewn all over his work desk. Surprised, she asked, “Did anything happen?”
He threw his hands up in frustration. “The data is wrong! Or the equations are wrong! Gah!”
She walked to him and slowly ran her hands down his back, trying to calm him down. “Okay okay. Take deep breaths, you’re not going to think straight when you’re this worked up. I don’t know how you were able to get the kids sleeping if you’re like this.”
“I got them into their beds before I got the data from the Elcano’s latest jump.” He seemed to have calmed down a bit, and pointed to his noteputer. “That’s when all the trouble started.”
“So?”
“The data from the Elcano’s jump, it’s wrong!” He started to get agitated again.
She decided to just try to help him work through whatever was wrong. “How could data be wrong, quiaff? It’s data.”
He glared at his noteputer again. “The numbers for the jump duration, energy output, energy expenditure… they’re all off.”
She could only understand about one word in three, but she figured she could keep going with simple questions. “What do you mean by ‘off’?
“On the surface, everything’s fine, until you get to the sixth significant figure thereabouts, then there’s a discrepancy between the actual data and the numbers predicted by the KF equations. Oh, the earlier jump showed it too, but I thought it was a one off. But if it’s repeatedly off…” Before its daring jump to the L1 pirate point, the barebones Elcano prototype had already conducted an earlier in-system jump from the zenith to nadir jump points, just for them to check that the drive worked properly.
Her head was starting to ache a bit, she was a mechwarrior and a tech for a while, not a damn scientist! But she knew this was important to Winston, so she persevered. “So what’s the big deal? The instruments were wrong?”
“Neg, Fisch handled the instruments and data collection, and he is utterly reliable.”
“Well, there’s usually some difference between theory and actual data…”
“Neg. The jumps we do with the usual drives, their data is completely in line with the KF theory predictions. Even misjumps, at least the ones we do know of, align with the theory, and it’s usually some problem with the controller or core dumping or restricting the energy flow wrongly. But the Elcano’s twenty-five light year drive… there’s a problem with the data. But then again, similar discrepancies should have already been noticed back when the first KF drives were built… no wait… that’s not correct…” his voice trailed off.
“Hmmm?” She was struggling now. She understood most of the words on their own, but not how they were put together!
He was talking to himself now. “Earliest expansion phase instruments lacked the sensitivity to measure to this level of precision, so they could not have detected it. We’re using clan-spec instruments, post-3000 models for better sensitivity. But by then all KF drives were thirty light years… and since they adhered to the KF equations as the maximum, the theory and data lined up…”
He had really lost her now. Hawise just looked at him worriedly.
“But if the discrepancy really is there… and the data can’t be wrong, then the KF equations are wrong! Or perhaps…” he paused in mid thought. “...the KF equations are a specific series of functions with certain parameters within a more generalised form!”
She stared at him in utter incomprehension.
He looked in her general direction, his eyes glassy and unfocused, as though he was actually looking and talking at somebody else. “Remember your quadratic equations? Y equals a-x-squared plus b-x plus c?”
“Uhhh, aff?” Actually, she didn’t, but she just played along. She vaguely remembered learning this in the sibko, but it was more than twenty years ago. How in the Founder’s name would she remember that?
“That’s the general form. If we set the constants b, and c as zero, and a as 1, it gives y equals x-squared as one specific function! So something similar might be in play here.”
“Ooookaaaayyy…” Hawise said, slowly backing off. He seemed calmer now, but there was a disturbing fire in his eyes, and he was starting to giggle. She was a mechwarrior, but his behaviour really creeped her out.
He held his noteputer up triumphantly. “Hehehe… it’s time… to science!”
16th May, 3064
1000 hours
Everything is so peaceful here, it’s almost unimaginable that a huge civil war is raging out there, Anastasia mused as she sipped from her cup of tea, looking out through the window at the fields just outside Fort Lambourne, seated at an alcove along one of the Fort’s many corridors. She missed Ziduka’s macarons, but the former Ghost Bear was apparently having the time of her life battling Loyalists on Tsamma.
News from the front came in about once a week, relayed to them from the Class B HPG at Inman. Baron Tancred Sandoval led his forces to Tsamma, where he managed to score a quick victory over the Tsamma CMM. The Jaguar’s Mists were instrumental in stymieing a key part of the Tsamma CMM plan when they conducted a close quarters ambush in tight terrain that decimated the CMM’s mobile wing, while the rest of the Baron’s troops savaged their line.
However, the battles for that world were not finished, as a new unit the Archon-Princess had raised, the First Royal Cavaliers, had landed to try to take down the Baron. However, with the surrender of the Tsamma CMM, Sandoval held a clear numerical superiority and victory was a foregone conclusion. The Jaguar’s Mists, now recognised as an elite formation, served as Baron Sandoval’s personal troubleshooters, sent in to destroy strongpoints and shatter key enemy formations.
Anastasia had managed to weave the relentless fighting style of the clans into the logistical and operational demands of the Inner Sphere, and the end result was, according to Tierle, similar to what the Wolves-in-Exile practiced. The old Avryl Showers would have balked at the comparison, but now Anastasia simply accepted it as a better way of doing things. The end result was stunning, a string of battlefield victories and dozens of enemy units shattered, their opponents unable to deal with the implementation of clan doctrine tied to higher skill levels and superior weapons technology, backed by Spheroid understanding of logistics and utilising modern tactics.
She was a bit worried about Finn though. He had become one of Baron Sandoval’s key advisors and his unofficial second-in-command of the task force. Between commanding TERF and his new duties, he had his hands full. Thankfully, Seran Chrisholm would be returning to TERF and that should remove a lot of the load off his shoulders.
Back in December, when news arrived of the destruction of the 1st Davion Guards on New Avalon, Finn suffered an emotional breakdown. He wept into her arms, muttering the names of his former comrades. She did her best to console him, swearing that she would help him gain his vengeance on those who had hunted his friends down. Katrina Steiner-Davion would have to be brought to justice. At that moment, she knew that the war was no longer simply about honour and duty for Finn.
It was now personal.
She stayed long enough to check that everything was in order before leaving for Altoona, and by then Finn was almost back to his old self. He had been anxious for her and their unborn child too, and had been torn between abandoning his duties and following her back to the Trivet, or continuing with the mission. In the end, his trust in her won, and he left with Baron Sandoval’s task force in January, while she tarried a bit longer on Woodbine to ensure the logistical support was securely in place before returning to Altoona.
She had been stunned upon arriving back in Altoona. The shipyard around Red Eagle was already operational, the bones of another jumpship already in construction while the core forge was getting ready for another casting.
The prototype Elcano was being put through its paces, although it had already gone through a trial by fire during the bandit incursion. REAPER was currently testing the KF Boom and checking that the KF field extension still worked properly even with the shorter maximum jump range and smaller KF drive.
She had wanted to get involved in anything, everything, but Sir Matthew, Hawise, and even her maids exerted their collective authority to disabuse her of the notion that she had work to do. She was officially on maternity leave, and they were going to ensure that she really was on leave! To ensure the safety of her pregnancy, they had restricted her to an oxygen-enriched wing of Fort Lambourne, which also meant her freedom of movement was very constrained.
It seemed like pregnancy and motherhood had relegated her to the level of an invalid!
Thankfully Venice had came through with a large shipment of books and novels, so she could keep herself occupied, if nothing else. Hawise also managed to find a whole series of holo-documentaries for her to watch, along with the Solaris Grand Tournament highlights for the past twenty years.
There were only a few things they allowed her to do, and she found herself looking forward to these few activities when once upon a time, she would never have deigned to do so.
She checked her watch again. She still had another thirty minutes before reading time with the sibko. She mentally corrected herself. Not a sibko, but a childcare creche. There were several levels, but she tended to spend the most time with the children below seven years old. She somehow just gravitated to them. Hawise had told her it was the hormones at work, preparing her for motherhood.
She looked over to the small crib where her baby girl, little Varia, was swaddled snugly and sleeping soundly. An indescribable wave of emotion welled up within her.
She would never have imagined this when she first woke up in the body of Anastasia Kalinska. The whole childbirth thing, she thought she was not ready, but somehow she actually did it, and her heart had never felt so full afterwards.
The only downside was that Finn wasn’t there with her, and despite her own brain insisting on the importance of his duty, her own emotionally compromised heart just refused to accept it. Thankfully, she had a strong support system behind her.
Even Madame Iris had made the journey to Altoona at Anastasia’s invitation, where she would take up a permanent position as the local headmistress, in charge of the schooling of the young children at Fort Lambourne.
Her peripheral vision picked up a petite form opening the door at one end of the corridor, and she tensed for a split second before forcing herself to relax.
A woman hopped in, a wide grin on her face as she greeted, “Good morning, Miss K!”
Anastasia lifted her tea cup in acknowledgment. “Good morning Andrea. Please be careful when you go down the corridor.”
“Yes, Miss K!” The woman continued hopping on one leg across the corridor, holding a large stuffed rabbit in her arms and singing a cheery children’s song as she headed for the childcare. She would have been considered beautiful, almost on Anastasia’s level, but the incongruity of her behaving like a child was just too disconcerting.
Andrea Sarti had been a jumpship engineer with the Lionhearts, but suffered a serious head injury when they were working with ComStar. She was in a coma for several weeks, and when she emerged from it, her mind had regressed to that of a child’s, and remained stuck there ever since. The sheer guilt that would appear on the faces of the former Lionhearts whenever her name was mentioned was a testament to how badly they felt for her.
Even from her scant conversations with some of the Lionhearts, Anastasia suspected there was something else the former Lionhearts were not willing to say. Furthermore, she vaguely remembered that the Lionhearts were an actual historical unit during the Amaris Civil War, commanded by one of the most infamous war criminals in the service of the Star League, Captain James Cromwell.
Just out of curiosity, she once mentioned his name in front of one of the former Lionhearts who stayed behind to help with REAPER’s manufacturing efforts. When the technician paled and started stammering, she made a mental note of it. She had no idea why his name would disturb these people, but given her personal experiences, it was probably something weird. She did not dig any further, respecting their privacy and trusting Gunthar Voss that they were no threat to the Trivet.
The only people who did not react at all to the name James Cromwell were their children and Andrea, which lent credence to the claim that she had really regressed mentally.
Just as Andrea was eagerly hopping across the corridor, Hawise’s husband Winston came around a corner, and the two collided, the stuffed doll flying out of Andrea’s arms, while they were both engulfed in a cloud of papers that scattered to the floor.
Anastasia hurriedly got up from her seat and walked over. “Are you both all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks for the concern.” Winston acknowledged, already busy collecting his scattered papers.
“I’m really sorry, Miss K. You told me to be careful.” Andrea seemed to have suddenly lost all her exuberance as she quietly helped Winston gather up his notes.
Anastasia crouched down to help. The papers were so full of equations that she did not bother to take a closer look. She had heard from Hawise that her husband was working on something crazy, but then again, scientists, particularly the physicists studying the Kearny-Fuchida equations, tended to be an eccentric lot.
She looked at Andrea, the woman was slowly picking up the papers, her eyes curiously scanning the papers. Between the three of them, they soon gathered all the papers into a tidy stack. Winston nodded his thanks to them before trotting off with the stack.
Anastasia said sternly, “Andrea, you need to be more careful. What if it was something hot, or dangerous?”
“Yes, Miss K. I’m sorry.” Andrea bowed to her, hugged the stuffed rabbit and slowly shuffled down the corridor.
Varia was starting to stir from her sleep, presumably hungry for milk. Anastasia looked at her watch again. There was still more than twenty minutes left before the reading session at the creche. Varia was a fast drinker, and burping her could always be delegated to one of the maids.
She cooed gently to her infant as she picked Varia up and brought her to a private room nearby, before sitting down to position her baby properly to her own breast, another thing she had never expected herself to be doing. Before this, the knowledge of breastfeeding was an academic exercise, and clan trueborns all drank formula in their first years anyway.
As Varia latched on greedily, Anastasia thought about the small incident just now. She was sure something had happened, but she could not figure out what it was.
6th June, 3064
1400 hours
Winston sighed, blue marker in one hand, as he looked over the huge whiteboard, crammed full of equations. “No, no, this doesn’t quite work. The logic doesn’t map.”
The meeting room was empty, and the staff of Fort Lambourne had long ago assigned it to him permanently as ‘his research room’. Papers were stacked neatly on the conference table, while several noteputers took up a fair bit of the remaining table space.
He kept the chairs around. Sometimes the people from REAPER would come in for a chat, and he was glad to have the company. It was just too bad that none of their staff had sufficient grounding in theoretical KF physics to help him, and no time to try to pick it up. He really needed somebody to bounce ideas off, and there was nobody else.
No, that was not quite correct. He looked back at the room. There was one occupant, the disturbed woman with the mind of a child. Since running into him a few weeks ago, Andrea had started turning up in the research room, stuffed rabbit doll by her side, and then just sat in a corner of the table, staring at the board. All he knew about her was that she had suffered a serious head injury that regressed her mental age to that of a child. The people who had previously taken care of her either joined TERF or REAPER, and she was left to the care of Fort Lambourne’s household.
Since she did not disturb him, he allowed her to stay. She might be silent, but some human company still made the room less cold, less impersonal.
Winston continued talking to himself as he wrote on the whiteboard, more to fill the empty space with words than to actually communicate, “My community creche was won in some trial by the Nova Cats from the Snow Ravens. In fact,” he paused, “Almost my entire creche ended up in the scientist caste. I ended up studying theoretical physics, but my tutors wanted to deny my request because they thought it was useless. Gah, this symmetry doesn’t work. Let’s try it again.”
He scoffed while using the duster to wipe away an equation, “But they allowed it eventually, some ‘vision’ one of the warriors had, although we were supposed to be men of logic, not superstition! But that’s the Nova Cats for you. I spent the next ten years delving into the intricacies of the KF equations, and they still thought me useless when I wanted to push the boundaries of the equations. And then I managed to figure out a way to simplify the jump calculations within a significant gravity well, shaving a few minutes off. I didn’t think it was much, but they felt it was such a big deal they gave me a labname after that! Hmmm…” He glared at an equation. “Behave, or I will renormalise you.”
Winston chuckled at the memory. The granted labname of Dirac was voted on by his peers within the Nova Cat scientist caste, and it was a high honour, since Paul Dirac had been a giant in physics in the twentieth century. Scientist-General David Newton had been his mentor and had similar high hopes for him.
He wrote another series of expressions. “I thought I would go on to greater things, but in the end, I got caught up in another Trial of Possession and ended up with the Jags, and they dumped me into an jump drive optimisation programme at Schuyler. Nope, this isn’t it, the terms are nonassociative, not alternative either. Come on, do I really have to go into the sedenions and Lie groups?”
He stayed silent for the next few minutes, trying out several permutations before sitting back in defeat. He grabbed his bottle of water and sipped from it, staring at the whiteboard.
The woman with the mind of a child stood up, placed her stuffed rabbit toy on the table, and walked up to the whiteboard, taking the duster and a marker. Winston waved a hand. “Go ahead, have fun with the crazy scribbles. If I cannot retrace my workings, it probably wasn’t correct anyway.”
She quietly used the duster to wipe away several terms, then wrote in a few more. Water flowed out of Winston’s open mouth when his jaw dropped open in shock. Her corrections made complete sense.
Andrea Sarti turned around, and gave him a sad and knowing smile.