Interlude 1-G
Catachan, Unnamed System
Former Apollo Province, Unclaimed Territory
February 28th, 3010
Geraldine looked at the surface of the desk she was sitting at with an odd combination of bemusement and dismay. For more than twenty years, she'd seen it from the other side, first as a junior Mechwarrior, hat in hand under Alistair's old man, then as a colleague to Alistair himself.
Now she was sitting behind it, acting as his son's second while he was away.
Not bad for the girl who flunked out of Sanglamore after only completing one semester. 'Cheating,' the evaluation had said. Interesting how her grades weren't an issue before she dethroned a duke's son for first place in her class after midterms two-thirds of the way through her second semester.
She'd had some bad days in the year after that. Thankfully Old James Weber knew a frame-up when he saw one, and had no particular liking for the Old Men's Club in Skye. He'd given her a chance, and she'd made the most of it.
Still, she considered as she poured herself a small cup of sake, never thought I'd make Captain. Or near enough, at least. Once they got all the dispossessed remounted and the kids around the twins' and Junior's age in 'Mechs, they'd be back to a size where they needed officers again.
She knew she had the experience for it; she'd led a Lance whenever the Company split up for exercises. She was a bit worried about the education though. Her eyes glanced from the reports on the desk over to the empty bookcases in the corner of the room and the boxes of books stacked around them. The old Amaris Dragoon's barracks had held up like most Star League structures did, absent considerable bombing or shelling.
They'd really only had to throw out the moldering remains of the previous occupants' possessions and do some basic servicing of the machinery before they could start moving themselves in. For the moment, everyone, even the camp followers, would be living in the various associated barracks. Even with all that, they still rattled around in the massive facility like a handful of peas in a number ten can.
Not surprising, the place was built for a regiment with supports and families to live inside the walls; they'd apparently been hated enough to need the defenses. The main gate was a splintered wreck, and one of the 'Mech hangers had some craters in its face. They'd also needed to patch some tarmac with instant road, and a dining hall would need to be gutted and refurbished before it could be used. That might have been a galley fire that got out of control or someone being petulant with a flamer, hard to say either way.
Geraldine took another sip of her sake and refocused her wandering thoughts. Alistair and his old man had maintained a large collection of both physical and digital books, and she was likely to have some ti-
A knock on the door drew her attention. "It's open!" She called as she looked back down at the paper on the top of the stack in front of her just a touch guiltily. She hadn't made much progress on the pile. As Slim wandered in the door, she realized she probably wasn't going to be making any more progress for a while either. "Since when do you knock?"
"Since you're sitting behind that desk. Wouldn't do to develop any bad habits," he fired back with a grin and flopped down in one of the chairs in front of the wooden monstrosity, smile fading. When he didn't speak up immediately, Geraldine raised an eyebrow, but he waved her off.
With her distraction being less distracting than expected, she went back to the report on top of the pile. Thankfully, they'd found a warehouse with a couple tons of printer paper. With the Techs needing manuals, and any existing ones destroyed, printing out copies of what was on the Data Core was really the only option, but it had really chewed through what they'd brought with them. Even printing off multiple copies of manuals for nineteen variants of 'Mechs wasn't going to run through everything they now had in inventory, but they were making a solid effort. Though, if the manuals for the 'Mechs are this bad, I'm not sure I even want to consider what it's going to be like when they start running off copies of the manuals associated with the lines we need to get restarted.
Thankfully that whole project was outside her responsibilities. She was going to have her hands full just getting municipal power, water, sewer, and communications restored. That and having buildings prepped for the new arrivals while maintaining patrols in case any more armor-plated superpredators were lurking ab-
"Did we do the right thing?" Slim asked, derailing her train of thought.
For a second she tried to link his question to what she'd been thinking about before she realized what he was talking about. "It's what we all agreed to do," she responded once her brain caught up. Then she emptied her cup. This probably wasn't a conversation she wanted to have entirely sober. "We agreed that if he was going to lead a company of mercenaries, even a small one, that he had to be the leader," she said and tapped the desktop for emphasis, then leaned over to dig through the desk drawers for another cup.
"And that was before we knew how he was gonna handle losin' his dad on top of his first battle, and … just everything," she rambled as she found what she was looking for and waggled the bottle of sake at Sammy. He nodded and she poured for the both of them.
"He could have done something a lot less productive than spontaneously grow up in the space of twenty-four hours," she asserted as she sipped.
"Yeah, he could," her fellow Mechwarrior admitted after taking a rather larger drink of the alcohol than she had. "Just, shouldn't we have said something? Isn't he moving too fast? I mean, just getting one factory up and running first would seem more sensible. We've eyeballed everything, and it all looks intact, but none of us are exactly experts," he said, waving his hands, and only barely managing not to make a mess with his sake.
"First, don't spill my booze. I've only got so much of it until Junior gets back in four months," she ordered, and Sammy had the grace to look a bit embarrassed as he made another chunk of the cup's contents disappear. "But, to address your concerns … The more I think about it, the more I think he had a point. Security through obscurity only works for so long. The Rimjobs did a solid job of camouflaging this whole system. Every atlas we've got just lists it by a catalog number, and nothing in any of the documentation we saw suggested it had a habitable planet, much less one that's both reasonably pleasant and resource-rich."
"But no matter how well we try to hide, something is going to slip eventually, or someone will get lucky and stumble on us." Geraldine continued. "If we're lucky, it'll just be LIC and they'll infiltrate us only to discover that our super-secret plan is to sell military tech to the Commonwealth and get rich enough to never have to worry about money again. If we're not lucky?"
She let the question hang for a long moment. "We're sitting on something amazing here. According to the Core, they were building shit here that only Royal Command was supposed to have access to, but that also means we've got a time-bomb ticking down, and we don't know how long the timer is. Because while nobody should be paying us much attention at first, you can be damn sure that eventually they're gonna start connecting the dots. And then they'll pay us a whole hell of a lot of attention." Realizing her mouth was getting awful dry from flapping her gums, she drained some more of her sake.
"He's really won you over, hasn't he?" Sammy asked, calm and serious before he drained his glass.
Geraldine opened her mouth to throw back a sarcastic reply, then stopped to consider. Finally she shrugged. "I was sure he was gonna bust me after Uniontown," she admitted. "I had the second heaviest 'Mech in our entire force, and lost to a 'Mech ten tons lighter than mine." Sammy opened his mouth, but she waved him off and continued.
"Yeah, that pilot was damn good, and I cost him enough armor that Rowdy was able to take him down in a flash, but he was good and lucky enough to core out one of our last two Mediums. Don't tell me that the kid we all knew before that fight wouldn't have blamed me for it," This time she gave him a chance to rebut her."
The resulting silence was deafening.
"Like I said: he grew up. You can tell he's actually using that brain of his for something other than just cramming full of 'Mech statistics," she paused to take a breath, then motioned down at her cup. "You'll also note he hasn't touched a drop of alcohol either, and you know what he and Rowdy used to get up to whenever they could finagle time off.
"And he hasn't bitched about the TDS," she said, counting points off on her fingers, "or when the overgrown lizard chewed up his Commando. He didn't brag over scoring three kills in his first real fight. He didn't even hint that he should get one of the Cache machines before the dispossessed." She was running out of fingers on that hand, so she shrugged instead.
"He might not be perfect, but no one is. Not even his dad was. His grandfather certainly wasn't."
Sammy grimaced, "Alright, alright, you've convinced me. I just-" he paused before continuing. "I'm outside my comfort zone, here. I'm a damn good pilot, and I fit in a Wasp's cockpit. Those are really the only things I've ever had going for me, and here I am trying to figure out what to say to help advise my old boss's kid to try to keep the Warriors a going concern." He shrugged helplessly.
"Yeah, well, at least you had formal training. I'm the one who got kicked out of Slangmore," Geraldine tossed out the unflattering nickname for her old school before redirecting the conversation, realizing she'd wandered rather far from her original point, "Anyway, y'know what he did instead of sacking me? He just casually calls me his second, and asks my advice on what we should spend all that money the Duke really ought to have paid us." Geraldine paused to refresh both their glasses. "I think that's when I realized something about the kid had changed.
"He didn't even seem to think twice about it. Didn't blame me for not winning. Not being there to save Alistair. Not …" she trailed off, working her jaw.
"He just … extended his trust. Hell, he did the same thing here, leaving us to mind the landhold even after finding out firsthand just how dangerous what we're sharing this planet with is."
"Aye. Aye, I guess he did, didn't he?" Sammy asked and shook his head, then finished his cup, grimacing as his watch's alarm went off. "Ah, hell. I've got to get back to the hangers; I told Mace I'd help check that Icarus II over," he said, and levered himself to his feet. He was lucky he could hold his liquor well, especially for a guy with a light frame.
Geraldine smiled crookedly. "Don't let me hold you up," she commented as the younger man departed.
Once he was gone, she looked back down at the stack of papers, then at the sake bottle and sighed. She probably shouldn't have had that last cup, and definitely shouldn't try to read reports when she was buzzed.
Instead her eyes drifted over to the empty bookcases again.
She got up from her borrowed desk to start putting books on shelves, deliberately leaving one shelf empty, and setting aside books with authors from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz to Kerensky with which to fill it. She had four months to cover some of the stuff she'd missed out on at Sanglamore. Best take advantage of them.