The Bureau of Statistics was, in many ways, the greatest of the Commonwealth's spies. It was not, if we are being honest, a very exciting career.
At least in comparison to actual special operations operatives.
Angel Messervy had, after all, been shot at before. Granted, that was because he has been dressed in a suit with a briefcase on a planet that had just been raided by the Combine.
Apparently, they had thought him a speculator there to buy the ruins of their generational home.
In any case, he was here now, dressed appropriately for this environment that would, God willing, prevent him being shot at.
A basic jumpsuit made of tough anti-static materials, a bright white stripe that ran down his side and front which indicated his status as a visitor. A clipboard in one hand. A pen in the other.
He, of course, had a hard hat. Graf Vu was very very specific on the matter actually, nobody was allowed inside without a hardhat.
The entire room was filled with the members of the Jumpship consortium.
A few more days and the month would be finished, and, well, everyone in the room had seen just how quickly the factories had been put together, the workers being sourced from across the Commonwealth through an esoteric number of calls, and, well, the Consortium members had been slackjawed through the entire process.
Angel would admit that he too was a bit slackjawed.
It was one thing to hear that the man could build faster than anyone had ever built before, it was another thing to see more than 45 Jumpship slipways built simultaneously.
He closed the door behind him as he entered.
"Greetings. I am Auditor Angel Messervy of the Commonwealth's Bureau of Statistics." He said to the men and women in the room.
They were the representatives of the various firms that had thrown their lot in with Graf Vu. Those that were looking a little worried now since he had pulled them all into a single room with a request for them to, answer some pointed questions.
"I would like to start this inquest-" The word caused those in the room to jump in their seats, some turning their eyes to the exits of the room in reflexive panic.
He didn't react, letting the word hang in the air.
"Please." His words caused the room to go quiet.
He let out an internal sigh, this was how things were meant to be. If he had tried that with Graf Vu, the man would have said 'after you,' and been confused when Angel didn't follow him or something.
The words 'please' from a Bureau of Statistics Auditor were a threat, the fool man thought he was asking a question.
"This is in relation to the lack of technological development of the Lyran Commonwealth's stellar arms since the Succession Wars began. While we at the Bureau of Statistics understands that there was a great deal of damage to infrastructure due to the conflicts in the last century and a half. We do have to question why it took only one individual to start rebuilding the Commonwealth's Jumpship infrastructure." He said, still standing as he looked at those in the room.
A few of the gathered representatives looked shamefaced at that.
They should.
If one person, working on a planet that was not even worthy of having the title of 'Minor World' before 2990 managed to do it, why couldn't their worlds and corporations have done the same? What excuse did they have other than the fact that they were useless?
Pathetic even?
Stagnant?
Lacking in vision.
Ha.
Graf Vu had been rather profuse in the reasons why they might not have managed this, actually, if he had to be honest with himself, Angel would note that the man was generous with his reasons while Angel was the pessimistic one.
The man nearly said unpleasant things a few times but caught himself, looking almost ashamed as he did so. As if he couldn't believe that he wanted to say something impolite about someone else.
Graf Vu was a better person that Angel, that much was for certain.
"Do we have a reason?" He finally asked after the silence dragged on.
"The Primitive Jumpships aren't as capable as the modern Jumpships. We just didn't think to look back instead of forward." Nashsan's representative spoke, her voice calm, her face being the only one that wasn't worried. Which made sense given how many audits Nashsan had been through.
"That lack of a want to look backwards has a cost. There has been an increase in the rate of death across the Commonwealth since the First Succession War. Not from the direct effects of war, but from the standard of living decreasing as medical availability decreased, as quality of materials decreased, as some worlds, in the Commonwealth mind you, suffered from famine. Famine. There is a non-insignificant decrease in the overall life quality of all people in the Commonwealth, predominately caused by the lack of Jumpship capacity in the economy." His words kept hammering into those seated, their eyes turning away from his.
"The Bureau of Statistics has been working to track these numbers, I can, if you need, quote just how many people died because a hospital lacked the capacity to do an MRI scan on a patient and had to watch as they died from cranial traumas, I have, with me right now, the number of suicides from patients due to chronic pains that the hospitals on Tetersen could not diagnose due to lack of tooling to do so. I can quote so much more to you my representatives from any world you wish to name in the Commonwealth. The question then, is why have you allowed this to happen." He continued, glaring at them.
His words backed by the fury of the Bureau of Statistics as they too glanced at the skies above Tetersen and saw just how easy it was to rebuild Jumpship production. And they too were enraged at this corporations who had sat there and just watched as the Commonwealth's bones were devoured by the cancer that was the Succession Wars and industrial decline. Watched and did nothing.
"We did invest in Utility Corporation though. When there was a path forward that we could see, we invested! Straight away!" The voice that meekly answered him was from one of the agricultural corporations.
"Yes. You did. That buys you leniency. Your peers in the other corporations with capacity in the Commonwealth are undergoing their own audits now."
A few gulped at this.
A great many corporations were very likely to have discrepancies uncovered.
"The tax money from those audits will be sent to Tetersen. There is a new Primitive Jumpship design that Graf Vu has designed. This one is not for combat deployment like the DC3 and others, this one will be used within the Commonwealth to rebuild the transport capacity that was lost due to the inaction of the corporations of the Inner Sphere in the last 150 years. You have been pardoned some of your inaction, but you are still guilty of inaction while your fellow citizens suffered."
He pushed forward the design so that it would appear on the holotable for the rest of the room to see no matter where they sat.
The thing was so new that there was still plastic covering some of the buttons.
"This is the Revival Jumpship. Graf Vu has made a commitment to build at least 10 factories of these in the next 'turn' as he calls it. The Commonwealth's bones will be rebuilt. You are being offered an investment opportunity to build these for the good of the Commonwealth."
The fear changed to interest.
And desire.
Money.
Threats could not move corporations, they could get them to jump of course, but if you wanted them to actually move, you needed incentives.
Money, naturally, was the greatest of incentives for those such as they.
He had made the threats, he had used the stick. He was now offering them the incentives, the carrot.
There was no room for subtlety here, the Commonwealth had no room for subtlety if they were to jumpstart the redevelopment of industry and technology that was percolating in the Commonwealth.
Do this correctly and it would take 10 years off the projected timeline for redevelopment.
+Break+
Grandma Varmit glared at him.
Jeremey could feel it in the back of his head.
"I don't trust this damned machine. Why the hell did that bitch of a daughter of mine force me onto this? I could have walked you know. I walked to deliver your damned fool of a mother! One hundred kilometres to the doctor, delivered her, then walked her one hundred kilometres back! All on my own two feet!"
He tuned out her complaints as his hands turned the wheel of the Ute, the machine worth every kroner that she had spent on it.
The treads gripped the dirt beneath the truck as it plowed through the unpaved road. The fusion engine buzzing gently beneath his buttocks as his jeans gently marinated in his sweat. His first time driving Grandma, his first time driving the Ute without someone else in the passenger seat guiding him along.
Driving with Grandma in the back had that effect on him.
Stupid Greg, tricking him into picking the short straw.
"And then I told him that I wasn't going to drive in any new fangled machine. Don't even know who this Utility Corporation is! Are they like Defiance? I'm not going to sit in some kind of war machine, what if I get shot at? Like that time I walked myself to the spaceport when I was 23. Just-"
He tuned her out again, thinking that yes, things were different in Grandma's time. But that didn't mean that it was better.
Ah, there it was.
The clinic was right in front of him.
The sea of tents with medical crosses on all of them, dozens, maybe hundreds of Utes around them.
A health checkup for Grandma was as difficult as bringing in the harvest while it was raining and thundering and there was a breakdown in the harvester, at the same time.
"We're here Grandma!" He called out as he reversed parked into the bay marked for Utes under the large sigh 'Doctor Richards'. Fumbling with his seatbelt, he carefully ignored her complaints about his interrupting her stream of words, opened his door and stepped out, shutting the door behind him.
Taking a deep breath in the silence he walked to her door, pulled it open and then helped her down.
"-in my day children were more respectful!"
Walking her to the door, arm carefully positioned to prevent her from falling down, Jeremey sighed.
Right, that was…
"Hello Doctor Richards! Ha, should have seen the face on sonny boy out there, talked his ear off I did. Serves him right for ignoring me. Funny boys, they really know how to play with their little initiation game." The tent flap shut behind her as she went into the tent.
His face dropped.
Was she… was she fucking with him the entire drive down?
Seriously?
Did… did his brothers know? Was that why they tricked him into getting the short straw?
Did they have to do this on their first trip with her as well?
The bastards!
He continued to grumble as he walked around the back of the Ute, pulled the plug from inside the bed out and then connected it to the powerbank running along the side of the tent.
From there it would help power the rest of the portable clinic, the power joining that of the many other Utes that were parked around the various tents.
Roaming doctors here to help the different communities of Tetersen, too spread out to benefit from a set hospital.
The tents flapped gently in the wind as he pondered how he was going to get revenge on his brothers when he got home.
The cable slipped out of his hands as he tried to plug it in. The auto-withdraw function caused it to slap him on the nose as it made a 'vwwwip' noise.
You know what?
Fuck this, he was going to join the LCAF.
+Break+
Christine looked at the flowers on her desk. Wild flowers from the way their stems were uneven and some of them even had lumps on them. The flowers were all of different sizes, colours and patterns.
Even so, she couldn't help but smile. They weren't perfect but they were perfect. Picking them up she took a deep inhale. Smelling the wild pollen and being incredibly glad that the Clan had purged allergies from their bloodlines long ago.
"Do you like them?" The tentative voice of her fiance cut into her thoughts. Like a swimmer who belly bombed into the pool and soaked everyone around him. Disrupting everything that had been in her mind prior.
"I love it," she said honestly, turning to smile at him.
He was cute in a giant overbearing puppy kind of way.
Ugh.
Dammit, Alexander was behind him.
"Where did you get them?" She asked, pointedly ignoring her cousin who was grinning widely behind Huu, where he couldn't see the idiot behind him.
"I was walking and when I saw them I thought of you," he said with a bashful smile.
"He got them from that path between the Ute and 20 Ton factories." Alexander unhelpfully added.
"Huu! You shouldn't have, the gardener's will be furious." Christine admonished, ugh, was that why they were hunting around with shears over the last few days?
"We have gardeners?" He asked looking bewildered.
"Yes, wait, did you not know?"
"No? We have gardeners? And I just picked some of their flowers? Fuck. I'm an asshole." His face turned downcast.
Christine felt her mouth move to say 'thank you for the thought,' when he turned and started jogging.
"I'm going to find them and apologise!" He called out.
"What a minute! What do you mean you're going to go and find them?" She called out.
"What I said! Destroying another man's life's work is the worst thing you can do. If you can't respect effort, what can you respect?" He shouted as he jogged off.
Christine sighed, held the flowers and took another deep breath.
"I love them anyway!" She yelled at his retreating back.
He turned, grinned at her, gave her two thumbs up, and turned again to keep jogging away, shouting, "Angelica! Where do I find the gardeners!? I need to apologise!"
Dammit.
She looked up, Alexander had a shit eating grin as he swaggered in closer. His uniform jingling as various trinkets bounced against each other.
"He didn't even know that the gardeners existed before this moment and now he's running off to apologise to them." Alexander said, a grin on his face.
"It's the principle of the matter to him. He knows that there's something wrong with him, that he can't care about people in the same way that everyone else can. So he has his principles that he stands by to make sure that he treats everyone around him the right way. If he has to run off to apologise to a gardener even though he's probably going to be made a duke soon, he will." Christine said, feeling the need to justify Huu's behaviour.
Alexander just looked at her with a knowing smile, "well, what is his principle then?"
"To be a man for others." She muttered, knowing that he knew that she knew and just wanted to needle her over it. Especially with how much she was hiding from him, Huu not even knowing about the Clan. Something that wouldn't change until they were married and the elders could agree on his induction. She hid her face behind the flowers as she said it.
She glared at him.
"Right, why are you here?" She said, eyes narrowed.
"Well, partly here to fuck with you. Mainly here to let you know that the Clan is finally moving forward with the Rebirth Proposal."
Christine's eyes widened.
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. Haha, they forgot that their blood is the blood of warriors. Took me a bit to remind them haha. Are we going to just sit and let this new age of war pass us by, or are we going to take the lead and prove all the genetics that we've collected are worth something? We collect the blood of warriors to let it waste away. Or we prove to everyone else that we know how to wage war properly. Us and only us." He muttered, turning his head to stare at the wall.
Buried under the mountain, they were safe here, or, at least, safe from anything that could bury through millions of tons of rock without notice.
"So they're restarting the Iron Wombs?" She asked, thinking that things were indeed going to be escalating.
"Yup. They're restarting the Iron Wombs. If I have the numbers right, we're looking at a few dozen sibkos in the first batch. That's a lot of warm bodies being decanted every month in 9 months time. And since we're actually competent, we're not going to be pitting them against each other in death matches. More bodies to handle the lack of manpower we're facing right now. Otherwise we're going to have less Clan members on Tetersen than foreign tourists. "
Christine wondered when the Clan would escalate matters. The answer to that question was now.
"Ready to meet your kids?" He asked.
Christine froze.
"No… isn't there a procedure about who…"
There was a laugh.
"I'm fucking with you haha. They aren't ready to talk about that until you're married to him. Then you're going to have 50 kids with your DNA running around."
She froze again.
"50?" she muttered.
Alexander grinned at her.
"Well, maybe you could negotiate them down. But we do need more bodies. Or did you forget why we're doing this?"
"Well, I thought we would… just… do it naturally? He's not a Clan member, why would he be part of the program?"
"We take our genes from anyone of that matters. Your family is focused on administrators and industrialists, why wouldn't they be interested in his genetics. But, you know how it works. They're going to check that you're both okay with it before they do anything, at least while you're alive. Nobody needs their gene-donors hating them after all."
He shrugged at that and patted her on the head.
Christine moved her teeth to bite his hand but missed.
Dammit, there was so much that she needed to tell him, this secret, she was sure, was so much larger than anything he might be hiding.
"Why are you so happy?" She asked, wondering why Alexander was so giddy about this, it would take at least 20 years before the new births were ready to fight.
"Because it shows the Clan is ready for the long term. It means that even after I am gone, the Great Father will be avenged. We will annihilate the Combine for what they did alongside Amaris. It has been a long time coming indeed." His grin was bloodthirsty.
Christine wondered exactly what Nicholas Kerensky had been thinking when he had created the Clans and allowed one to be named for the Wolverine. A creature known for holding grudges and being completely unafraid of death.
But, well, forward thinking was not exactly part of that man's repertoire.
Still, carrying a grudge for nearly 3 centuries, that was impressive.
+Break+
Total RP Turn 10 2991 + 1 Year 2 Months
36 RP 12×3 Ute Factory - 3x1.5 Regiments per Factory per Turn (108 vehicles)
24 RP 12×2 20 Ton Utility Truck Factory - 2x1.5 Regiments per Factory per Turn (108 vehicles)
32 RP 16×2 Commando 1B Factory - 2x7.5 Battlemechs per turn
24 RP 12×2 Griffin 1S Factory - Newly Built - 2×5 Battlemechs per turn
~12 RP 12×1 Eagle R6 Factory - Being Built~
~12 RP 12×1 Irrawaddy Factory - Being Built~
~12 RP 12×1 Margaret Factory - Being Built~
~12 RP 12×1 Una Factory - Being Built~
~24 RP 12×2 DC3 Factory - Being Built~
RP Bonus Calculation = 0.8 (Indytech 3) + 0.3 (Lyran Bonus) + 4.4 (Economic Treaty) = 5.6
Total RP = 116×1.2 = 139.2