Drop Zone Alpha,

Einstein, Deep Periphery

7^th March 3068

 

Frank did not know how he should feel. Standing in the shadow of Deserk's Black Hawk as the gathered mercenaries laid their dead to rest, he spoke words of condolence to those who had lost close friends and comrades, trying to assuage their pain.

But he was so new to the unit, and he hadn't gotten to know the other Raiders well, much less the warriors of the tankers and the Dragoons. He could only utter words of comfort here and there, but he had no emotional stake in the first place, and this made him feel superficial, unneeded.

Useless.

He had not wanted to be head honcho for the whole stinking mess they were now in, but there was simply no one else suitable, with all their officers killed or in a coma. Well, except Deserk, but even he wasn’t an officer, and the trueborn warrior had firmly refused to lead, pushing the responsibility onto Frank.

News of leadership was the last thing Frank needed when he woke up, trying to coax Captain Sheik back to life. He had succeeded, but she was still unconscious, and his last prognosis was not encouraging, with all signs indicating a long coma. Even in the 31st century, medical science had not progressed far enough to explain fully the intricacies of the human brain and the effects of damage on it.

Now, as the last taps of a tune of mourning played through a mech's speakers faded away, Frank walked up to Kily. The younger merc's eyes were a bit red and teary, and he held his head low. He had been very quiet the last few days, obviously shell shocked from the losses they had sustained.

"Kily, I'm sorry. You want to talk about it?" Frank was trying to get the Commando pilot talking, get it all out of his system. Frank felt that as a veteran of the Fed Com Civil War, having seen countless friends die in combat, he had a much better handle on this sort of thing.

Kily glanced up to look at Frank before drooping his head down again. "Not your fault. Nothing we could do anyway.” He sighed. “Before, all those missions in the Chaos March, they were fun, if not always as easy as we thought. But we came through more times I could remember without losing anyone. Now, now, in just a few days, we've lost so many! Captain Vansen always treated me well, although he regards me as a kid at times. Lieutenant Jenny looked after the entire recon lance like a big sister. Sure, she wasn't the best or the brightest, but she was still better than any of us. Falks was an asshole, but he was our asshole. Deris, Patrick, I remember all the good times we spent together. It's all gone now, and we're gonna die on this freaking rock!"

Pursing his lips once, Frank then said, “Kily, I can’t promise you anything. Heck, I don’t think I’m even cut out for command in the first place. But I’m gonna do my best to get us out of here, so get your butt up and running again! Remember, we’re mechwarriors. Soldiers. It’s time for you to know that war has never been about fun and games. It’s all about killing the enemy. Sitting in a mech, fighting against other mechs, it was easy to lose sight of that fact. But for the clanners, they have never forgotten it. And now you’re going to do the same.” He stared at Kily, silently challenging him to rise to the task at hand.

“Yeah, that’s what war is all about, huh? Guess you’re right. But I don’t have to like it. The sooner we get off, the better.” He started for the dropship. “Well, I’d check on the mechs now. You coming?”

Frank nodded encouragingly. “You go on ahead. I still have some people to talk to.”

Predictably, Deserk was with the other Dragoons, standing at parade rest as they watched Frank approach. Dressed in mechwarrior attire, Deserk had been on guard duty for the last four hours, but did not seem tired at all.

“Sir.” Deserk gave a sharp salute as Frank walked up to him. By silent consensus, he had become the representative for the Dragoon contingent and Frank’s right hand man. Frank certainly wondered why the vastly more experienced warrior had passed up the chance for command. With everything that was going on, there had not been enough time for him to discuss the issue with Deserk.

There was enough time now.

“Deserk, there’s no need for you to salute me. Hell, I’m not really an officer anyway. Never gone through an academy, never been through OCS, etc, etc. Right now, I’m just in temporary command till Captain Sheik wakes up. Everybody else is doing okay. I have to say this is about the best place to get injured. No chance of septic wounds here.”

One good thing that Frank had realized when treating the wounded was that the special circumstances of the environment had actually been a boon to medical care. The lack of local pathogens meant that there was no danger of wounds getting infected. This also enabled the mercs to save up on the use of antibiotics and drugs that might have further hurt the injured. Splints and bandages were all that were required. There were not that many injured in the first place, Frank reminded himself. Most of the casualties were dead.

“You might not have received any official training, but nonetheless you acquitted yourself well. When Captain Vansen went down, you managed to come up with a plan to defeat the enemy in just a few moments. Even better, you had the will to give the orders and convince the others to follow the plan. Let me ask you. Did you worry about whether the orders you gave will be followed?”

“Uh, no.”

“Did you even think about it?”

Frank scratched one arm distractedly. “No.”

“In other words, it was instinctive, quiaff?”

Raising an eyebrow, Frank asked, “Was it really instinct? I thought it was more fear and adrenaline…”

“Mere fear and adrenaline would not have allowed you to think clearly. It was something else, and that something else is what defines leaders and followers.”

Frank paused, his brows arching towards each other. “If you know so much, why didn’t you take command?”

Deserk sighed. “I may know about command, but knowing and doing are two very different things. I was briefly a Star Commander in the Nova Cats before I was taken as a bondsman, and in truth my performance then was abysmal. That convinced me to remain as a common warrior. I do not have the ability to lead, but you do.”

“And that’s why you refused the job. Ok, so I know why you refused, but still, at this moment I can’t think of our next step. What sort of leader is the sort who can’t come up with a plan?”

“You need time to plan. And you have to relax. At this moment, I can tell you that I have absolutely no idea of what to do next, so I’m afraid you’ll have to figure this one out on your own.”

 

In the medical lab that served as his makeshift office, Frank assessed his options. After talking with Deserk, he had a short meeting with Forsen Mandela. The transport owner had been adamant that some way of getting past the Warship be found. This made Frank a bit suspicious.

Forsen had never mentioned the number of jumpships that had been captured, nor did he state where the remainder was. As Frank mused over this lack of information, it did not take him long to realize the truth.

The jumpship owner wanted to get past the Warships so he could get to his remaining jumpships, which are probably in a secure location somewhere in system. He had wanted the mercs to engage the Falcons just to buy time for his ships to recharge their drives.

He was buying his escape with their lives.

Frank felt his anger rising as he considered his conclusion. That bastard had fooled the mercs into fighting just so he could escape later!

It was all he could do just to hold himself in place and not run off to place a few well-aimed laser blasts into Forsen’s head. Deep down, Frank knew that he would have done the same, if he had been in the merchant’s shoes. But it did not make him feel any better.

It was a moot point anyway. The warship in orbit effectively isolated the mercenaries from reaching deep space. According to the unit records they received from the batchall, the Falcons had more than a hundred omnifighters in reserve, making off planet movement impossible.

Concentrate on the ground battles, Frank. The Falcon troops are the most immediate threat. We can win this. But it was going to be tough. He knew the Falcons were going to send another detachment against them soon, possibly in two days time. In fact, the latest challenge from the Falcons had said so.

Looking at his battered force, Frank had serious doubts about the combined Dragoon/Raider unit’s chances of holding out successfully against another frontline binary, this time from the 7th Falcon Regulars.

There were some encouraging signs, though. The recovery of some clan mechs would enable them to fight the clanners on a more even footing.

Without a doubt, the prize of the salvage was the 75 ton Night Gyr, which he would probably claim as his command mech, replacing his wrecked Grasshopper. After all, it was one of his missiles that opened a breach in the cockpit for the napalm of the inferno missiles to get through and fry the pilot. And the crew of the SRM carrier that fired the infernos were not going to dispute his claim for one simple reason: they were dead. Still, Frank shuddered when he thought of how the clan pilot and his killers had died, as they were burned alive by hot napalm.

Next was a 80 ton Man O’ War. Its legs had been shot off by the Dragoons, but had since been recovered and reattached. Armed with dual PPCs and lasers, it offered great promise as an extended combat mech.

The 45 ton Fenris was yet another excellent piece of salvage. The techs had to cannibalize leg actuators from the Phoenix Hawk to restore the mech back to combat status, but Frank had felt it was worth the cost.

Finally there was the 35 ton Puma. It had been a simple matter for the techs to retrofit a new cockpit using materials from the other fallen omnimechs. With a deadly clan targeting computer paired with PPCs, it packed the punch of a medium mech in a light mech chassis.

Running his eyes over the personnel lists, Frank tried to reorganize his forces as best he could. One luxury he had over other commanders on planet was the sheer surplus of mechs available. With 13 mechwarriors and 19 mechs, Frank was tempted to just shift every warrior into the heaviest mechs available.

Problem was, pilots would take time to adjust to new mechs. No one in his right mind would expect a mechwarrior used to jockeying assaults to suddenly dart around in a light with equal skill.

Yet another problem was that many of the mechs were actually in bad condition. The Enforcer III especially, and some other mechs, were more spare parts than combat machines.

Frank decided to start from scratch. First, the recon lance.

Who to put in charge? Frank wondered. It was down to Kily and two Dragoon warriors, Patrice and Bryan Dunn. Patrice pilots a Talon, while Bryan’s Uller was destroyed in the battle. Judging from the records, Bryan’s experience in scouting made him the best choice to command the recon lance. Accordingly, the Fenris should go to him. Frank decided to replace Pash’s Wasp with the Puma, simply to add more survivability to the overall force and because he wanted the Puma in the battle lance.

The final reconstituted recon lance consisted of Bryan’s Fenris, Kily’s Commando, Patrice’s Talon, and Lee’s Spider. To Frank, with both speed and firepower, it was a virtual quantum upgrade from the old Raider recon lance.

Next came the battle lance. With 13 warriors available, Frank opted for a 4-5-4 company mix, with the battle lance having an extra mech to give it greater punch in battle. Putting Tim Fowler in Jadine’s repaired Gunslinger and Gerhard Kahn in the salvaged Man O’War, Frank wanted the battle lance to take the brunt of any action against the clans and minimize the command lance’s vulnerability to first strikes. The other members were Geenan in a battered Vindicator, lance commander Kety in his Gallowglas, and Pash in the Puma. The biggest problem Frank could see with his setup was whether Tim and Gerhard could adjust to the cutting edge assault machines in time. These were far cries from the 3025 mediums they had used for years in the Chaos March.

The command lance would have the remaining warriors. Frank had to stop himself from drooling whenever he thought of the Night Gyr. It was the finest war machine he had ever laid his eyes on. It was a bit slow for a modern heavy mech, but it had massive amounts of firepower.

Deserk would effectively act as his second in his Black Hawk, while Liase and Qing retained their postings and their mechs.

The end result was what Frank hoped would enable them to hold out against the Falcons. The inclusion of clan mechs was easily the best thing that could have happened to the mercs. Frank was sure that even with 13 upgraded or new designs, they would have gotten thrashed by the clans. The clan mechs will make all the difference.

Well, what next? Looking at his list of ‘things to do’, a post-it stuck on a nearby wall, Frank sighed. Figuring out the order of battle was a cakewalk compared to trying to worm out the location of the alien base.

According to the information in the databases that had not been wiped from the records, the most probable spots for the base was somewhere in the mountains. After all, the Star League itself had a tendency to place its own depots in places that were hard to get at, and that often meant deserts and mountains.

Glancing at his own topographic maps from the dropship scanners, Frank carefully marked out areas of high elevation, including two areas where there were ground at sea level but surrounded by lower ground. To him, they looked like craters with a plateau in the middle.

Even with the relative lack of elevated areas compared to say, Terra, Frank still ended up with twenty possible areas for the location of the alien base. Checking each site out was, in the current situation, simply impossible.

Of course, Frank could inform the other merc leaders, but he was sure that they were in deep trouble themselves and were concentrating hard on the clan threat. The fact was that even if they found the base, they had no way of getting in without figuring out how the six ‘key’ machines worked.

Frank prided himself on being a scientist, but the technology and science involved was clearly out of his field. Possibly a jumpship engineer or a physicist could decipher its function, but there weren’t any with them right now.

And probably not until we can get rid of that warship in orbit. Frank though grumpily. It seemed to him that most of his problems were tied to one another, resulting in a jumbled mess that he had no way of disentangling.

Only two other merc groups had won their engagements of the day before, and on this very day, at this very moment, fifteen lance or dual lance sized units were fighting against two, three or even a star of clan mechs. Frank did not fancy their chances.

The one bright spot was that the Falcons would not be able to get their hands on any of the ‘key’ machines as well, which are in the possession of the larger and better armed units.

Which led Frank to worry about the ‘key’ machines. So far, none of them had fallen into the Falcons’ hands, but their luck was not likely to hold for much longer. It was becoming clear to Frank that the best chance of ensuring that they retain possession of the devices was to get the best merc groups together.

Linking up was going to be a problem here. The Falcons were controlling the aerospace envelope, and any dropship movement was likely to be contested by their fighters. The captain of the Nile had explained that low atmospheric movement was the best they could do at the moment, and even then they would be opposed by Falcon fighters.

But these fighters weren’t part of the batchall… It suddenly occurred to Frank that he could legitimately claim movement to another part of the planet to link up with other merc units. After all, it should not matter to the Falcons where the mercs are, because they would have to be dealt with sooner or later anyway. Getting them into fewer large groups might even be advantageous to the clanners instead.

If Frank could convince the Falcon commanders to allow him to relocate, his very first choice for a linkup would be Rasouf's Rangers. They had won their battle, but were left more scrap machines than mechs. The Falcons had apparently decided that the Rangers were no longer a threat with their heavy losses, and thus did not bother to issue another challenge. By getting to the Rangers and resupplying them with his surplus functional mechs, not only would the Rangers be grateful to him, he would also strengthen the overall mercenary position on planet by making them a threat to the Falcons again.

Most importantly, he could secure a second ‘key’ machine, which he planned to demand from Captain Rasouf in exchange for the mechs.

After that, he planned to meet up with the Arch Lancers. The Lancers had apparently beaten off the Falcons easily, which meant to Frank that they were in good shape and probably had ended up with some good salvage of their own. Frank hoped to get Major Ian Dorlacen on his side, and also to scout out the possible alien base sites.

All this was dependent, however, on the two groups surviving their battles with the Falcons in two days time.

 

The alien intelligence at the bottom of the ocean was intrigued. Yes, much intrigued by the sprawling conflict occuring on the surface. It could identify two factions, but the deployment and forces used made no sense to it. Even more incredibly, they belonged to the same species!

To the AI, there seemed to be no apparent move by any of the forces involved to locate the hidden depot, all seemingly more interested in destroying each other instead. It was clear, however, that the devices used to open the doors have been claimed by the combatants, though they were currently all held by the first faction.

This was very disappointing to the AI. It had hoped that the newcomers would be able to decipher the technique to open the depot doors like those three hundred years ago, and allow it to get inside and plunder its riches, as laid down by its constructors millenia ago.

The AI knew some of the components needed to open the doors, but not all of it. Even after scrutinizing the remnants of the first human colonies on the world, it was unable to formulate a way to open the door.

It had its chance three hundred years ago, but it had failed miserably. The humans had fought tenaciously then, just denying its own forces access to the depot doors. It had then settled for destroying and occupying their bases, hoping this would lure out those inside the depot to come out to rescue their comrades.

After several revolutions of waiting, there was no response from the base at all. The AI concluded the entry team must have been wiped out by internal defenses inside the depot.

It was not about to repeat the same mistake of three hundred years ago again. Giving orders to some of its vassal ships near the depot, it moved them to near the depot. This time, if the humans managed to open the doors, it would not hesitate to attack with overwhelming force to force an entry into the depot.

In addition, it sent out a tachyon signal out into space, where it had forces ready to deal with the human vessels in space.

It then settled down to wait. It had already waited for a long time. It could afford to wait some more. Patience came easily to a machine…