4 - Readiness Check

DropShip Lodestar, Camelot Command (Location Classified)
Dark Nebula, Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
26 November 3053

    “Permission to enter, Captain?”
    Seth Klassen looks up from the repeater displays and grins. “Granted, Major. I haven’t seen you since I got back from looking over those pirate rot-boxes.”
    Brigitte Olafsdottír laughs and shakes her head. “I’ve been too damned busy to come down here.” She pushes off the bulkhead and drifts slowly across the Lodestar’s bridge. As she nears the central well, she reaches out and grabs hold of a safety rail, arresting her flight.
    “I’m guessing this isn’t you being sociable.”
    “You guess right. I’ve been talking things over with Colonel Snord. We’re looking at an objective raid.”
    “Huh. ‘Raid and run’, as my old man used to call it.”
    Brigitte looks around the central well. “Was he the skipper before you?”
    “No, he was the gunner. My mother was the captain.” Seth pats the top of his command console. “Lodestar’s been in our family a long time. She’s gotten us out of some really bad scrapes over the years.”
    “Like the Antares job?”
    Seth’s expression turns sour. “Yeah. A Class-A shitstorm if ever there was. Ben’s lance only made it out of there because the Vipers were too busy killing the bigger, slower ’Mechs. And then the FedCom liaison had the nerve to claim we’d breached our contract… little bastard.” He shakes himself. “What’s the target?”
    “Persistence. It’s only one jump away from here. We’d be hitting a Jade Falcon outpost.”
    “Pirate point insertion, then.” Seth taps a query into the terminal before him, and a file pops up on the holoscreen. “Yeah… I’d say it’s doable. The JumpShip could target the gravity null there, inside the lunar orbit. That’d give us a flight time of maybe… three hours to the surface.”
    “Provided the navigator knows what he’s doing.”
    “There is that.” A thought occurs to Seth. “Did we ever find out what happened to that JumpShip Jacobs’ crew was using?”
    Brigitte shrugs. “Not a clue. It either got the hell out when the Black Raptors showed up… or its drive core sheared. From what I’ve been told, it was in worse shape than their DropShips. A flying death-trap.”
    “If they’d had to hot-load the core to escape, I’d say they’ve bought it. The K-F field probably tore the ship apart. I saw it happen once, back when I was a kid. A free trader ship off of Port Moseby; it took two DropShips with it when the drive field collapsed.”
    Brigitte shudders.

    “Incredible,” The Bomb says as she examines the dismounted arm section meant to fit onto the salvaged Uller. Built into the forearm are two medium pulse lasers. Clan lasers, that is.
    “Once we have replaced the leg, we can fit the arms,” Daniel tells her.
    The Bomb looks up at the OmniMech towering over them. The ruined armour plating on the right torso has been cut away and replaced. Right now, an overhead hoist is manoeuvring a compact short-range missile pod into position. Angelica, secured to the Uller’s upper hull by a safety line, is guiding the weapons module into its torso housing.
    “Isn’t that the Streak launcher from the left arm?”
    “Aff, it is. If there is enough space inside the torso, it will fit.”
    The Bomb shakes her head in awe. The concept is simple enough: an OmniMech is just a framework onto which weapons and equipment can be attached. Even the arms are interchangeable. The amount of work that must have gone into designing the machinery is mind-boggling.
    “Okay, the Streak pod goes in there, and then we’re going to install… what?”
    “A targeting computer, perhaps.”
    “Come again?”
    Daniel points at a blocky component on a trestle nearby. “There. A targeting computer. It works with any kind of direct-fire weapon; lasers, autocannons, you name it. It comes with additional motors and actuator boosters to help adjust the guns it interfaces with.”
    “Wow. I want to have a look at it…”
    “Jacqui, you can’t take it to bed with you. It’d never fit,” Tyler says as he joins the pair of them. He pauses and takes a long hard look at the half-restored Uller. Now he knows why Midge has been so ill at ease lately. The captured Omni is identical to the ’Mechs that led the Falcon forces back on Apollo.
    “Problem? Something else fall off of your Crusader?”
    He blinks, realising that The Bomb’s misread his expression. “Nah. That old heap isn’t acting up for a change. I wanted to know if you can do what you did to Marc’s BattleMaster on another ride.”
    She raises an eyebrow. “Install CASE? Sure. Which one you got in mind?”
    “Midge’s Zeus. I figure you could make up the weight by taking out a heat sink or maybe that flamer.”
    The Bomb shrugs. “Not a problem. Say, why is there a flamer in that thing? Is Midge some kind of closet pyromaniac?”
    Tyler shakes his head. “Nah. It came with the machine. Some meat-headed moron installed it ages back.”
    “Whatever. Okay, I can get that done. I just have to ask Midge if she wants to keep it.”

    The logistics are inescapable. They’re limited to the space they have aboard the DropShips.
    Neither of the pirate boats – okay, former pirate boats – are in any kind of shape for a raiding mission. Just about all they’ll be capable of doing is executing a semi-controlled crash on the surface of Persistence. That leaves them with four operational craft: the Lodestar, the Snow Leopard, the Black Buck, and the Iron Tower. It gives them a maximum ’Mech capacity of… Twenty-seven machines.
    Valentine Tyler thumbs a key on the dataslate and pulls up a brief breakdown on the operating specs of the Iron Tower. It’s an old Lion class vessel, a relic of the long-gone Star League, and it was mothballed at an orbital depot until only very recently. The Clans realised that they needed extra transportation for their ‘glorious crusade’ to return to the Inner Sphere, so they started breaking these DropShips out of storage.
    As with every aspect of the Clans, the Iron Tower has been remodelled to fit in with the ‘rule of five’ set down by Nicholas Kerensky. Its ’Mech bays are now rigged to transport two Stars – or ten BattleMechs. It can also haul a fairly impressive amount of cargo… and that makes its inclusion on any kind of foray a must. The only problem that Tyler can see is the crew.
    They’re Jade Falcons. Or up until very recently they were. Zoë ordered them to stand down, and they’ve done everything and anything the Norns have asked of them. So far. What irritates Tyler is the way the DropShip’s crew bow and scrape around their ‘warrior betters’. In the rigid caste structure of their home culture, they simply don’t see anything wrong with it. More likely, they’ve had obedience beaten into them. From what Juno and Carson have told him, the civilian castes of Falcon society have very little in the way of liberties when compared to most other Clans.
    He’s seen it before with Angelica, Daniel, and the handful of Techs and crew from the Snow Leopard. Granted, they’re Smoke Jaguars, not Falcons, so there are some differences… but not that many.
    How the hell are they supposed to work together? He simply doesn’t know.

    Claire Klassen-Ward closes up the access panel and locks it with one of the keys she wears on her belt ring. Clicking back a couple of steps on the decking, she lifts her noteputer and scribbles in the time and date of her inspection. Even while Lodestar’s docked, the vessel needs maintenance.
    To be honest, the routine of checking the DropShip’s hydraulics and power-distribution systems is just about the only normal part of her day. Running damage-control drills and inspecting the escape pods is a constant reminder that they are all of them a long way from friendly territory.
    She’s heard the rumour that they’re going to carry out a raid, and it makes her uneasy. The last time they had tried something like that was on Antares... and that had been a disaster. She’s just glad that they’re leaving the non-combatants behind at Camelot.

    “The results are in, Adele.”
    Adele Crayford raises an eyebrow at that. “It’s about what we were expecting, isn’t it?”
    Senior Medtech Leonard glances at the hardcopy sheet in his hand and nods. “Unfortunately, it is.” He shrugs. “There is just too much widespread damage. Were we back in the Homeworlds, perhaps something could be done... Here?” Leonard shakes his head. “Kyle will never be able to pilot a ’Mech again.”
    Adele rubs at the back of her neck with both hands. “Huh. I’ll have to tell him. No point in giving the kid false hopes. I just thought that there might have been something we could have done, with all the shiny gear you’ve got here.” She glances around the gleaming, fully stocked interior of Iron Tower’s sickbay.
    “I am sorry.” The former Clanner sighs. “I wish I could have given you a better answer.”
    “Mm. Guess there’s some shit even you guys can’t put right.” Adele turns to leave.
    “Adele?”
    She looks back. “Yeah?”
    Leonard folds the hardcopy up. “I... was assigned to a hospital on Sudeten for a time. To see how your medical procedures work.”
    “Let me guess... You were pretty well horrified at how primitive our healthcare is, compared to yours?”
    “Aff... but, well, that is not the point.” He looks uneasy. “I reviewed a number of cases that were... I am trying to say...”
    “Pointless?” Adele folds her arms across her chest. “I talked about this with Monique a little while ago, so I already know.”
    “You do?”
    She smiles humourlessly. “All part of your upbringing, right? Some lives are worth more than others. For instance, the wounded trueborn warrior always takes precedence over a wounded freebirth, yeah?”
    He nods, not looking her in the eye.
    “So there you were, looking at, oh, dialysis cases or geriatric patients, and part of you was asking, ‘Why bother? What’s the point? They’re just using up valuable resources to no good end’.”
    Leonard has the good grace to look ashamed.
    “That got drummed into you, didn’t it? That’s the way it works back home: the Warrior caste gets preferential treatment, and the lower castes have to be duly grateful they have the honour to fetch and carry for them. You get medical care only for as long as you’re useful.”
    She can see that she has struck a nerve with that.
    “Aff,” he says after a moment or two.
    Adele eases up. It’s not his fault. “There must have been times where it made you angry, surely?”
    “There... have been a few times, I have to admit.”
    “Tell you what. Once we get done with this frozen lump of rock and go somewhere with real air and gravity, we will sit down, talk shop, and get howling drunk. One sawbones to another.”
    “‘Sawbones’?”
    “Figure of speech. Forget it.”

    At least the nausea and vertigo are gone now. Alessandra is thankful for that. She can keep her meals down without the risk they may come bouncing straight back up again. It is one less thing to concern her. She has enough to contend with, trying to remember everything and everyone.
    It does not help that the informal manner of the Spheroids is so… so disconcerting. Take the way that Amber and Cameron banter back and forth, with no visible tension or any sense of a superior and inferior, for example. It is enough to make her catch her breath at times.
    Alessandra scowls as the sleeves of her ill-fitting jumpsuit threaten to trap her hands again. She takes a moment to roll them up above her elbows. The legs of the jumpsuit have been cut down to allow for her smaller size; the Norns did not have any spare clothing that would fit her.
    “You all right?”
    Sharyl’s question makes her start slightly. She had become distracted. “Aff. There is no problem.”
    The other woman nods. “Good. Let’s get the rest of these repair kits stowed.”

    Kathleen lets out a hiss of discomfort from between gritted teeth as she extends her left arm slowly out to the side. There’s visible tension in her body and her eyes are narrowed. Her injured arm wobbles treacherously despite her best effort to keep it steady.
    “Hold it there… just a moment… Okay. Ease it back down, gently.”
    As Kathleen complies, Adele scribbles a few words onto her ’slate’s display surface.
    She cannot help herself. “How am I doing? How well is it healing, Adele?”
    “It’s been all of, what, ten days? Ten days since we dragged you out of that smashed-up ’Mech of yours, Kathleen. You came within an ace of breaking every bone from your wrist to your collar bone.” Adele sighs. “You’re doing fine – a lot better than fine – but it’s still going to take some time.”
    The former Jade Falcon wriggles the fingers of her left hand to overcome the unwelcome tingling she is feeling. “Do I still need to wear that sling?”
    “Yeah, at least for the next day or two. Here,” Adele says. “I’ll help you with it.”
    The trueborn sighs as her arm is immobilised once more. It could be worse, she tells herself. I could have lost the limb. Not really a pleasant idea, that…
    “May I ask you a question?”
    Adele shrugs. “Fire away.”
    “What can I do?” Noticing the bemused look Adele has, she hurries to explain. “I should be doing something, Adele. Something that is useful or constructive. Not just standing or sitting around waiting for this arm to heal.”
    “Kathleen, if Tyler or the Skipper got hurt the same way you have, I’d be treating them the exact same way – and expecting them to have a little bit of sense about taking the time to recover. You go and push that arm too hard; it’ll take even longer to recover. Believe me.”
    Kathleen nods dutifully, but she is unconvinced. Adele notices it.
    “Okay… Come on. You want something to do, you can come with me and start learning where we keep all the emergency gear.”