Lancer, not a Mechwarrior 9 (Patreon)

Lancer, not a Mechwarrior

Chapter 9

-VB-

If ComStar truly wanted something, then they got it. 

If they wanted the Successor Lords to do something? Pull the right strings to move them with the right incentives, motivations, and enemy actions. If they want Lostech, then they offer the most C-Bills. It wasn’t as if they didn’t print the C-Bills themselves… oh, right, they did. If they want silence, then they had their own intelligence agency. If the situation was iffy to deploy their own agents, then just alert someone who would want the target dead. 

In the case of mercenaries, it was far simpler and more rigid. 

See, all mercenaries operated through the system set up by ComStar’s Mercenary Review Board. It meant that if there was ever a dispute regarding a job that a mercenary took, then the MRB could step in as a mediator and/or adjudicator and look at the mercenaries’ BattleRom recordings. Usually, that was enough to put most cases to rest. 

In the case of the latest mercenary group that had their attention, it was a little trickier but no more troublesome than before. 

See, ComStar wanted to know about Darius von Hohenheim and where he might have come from, so when they recently took a job to clear out pirates, they simply asked the mercenary to submit the BattleROMs of their latest mission for review with the MRB for “rating purposes.”

So.

ComStar - or rather, the First Circuit - got what they wanted by simply asking. 

And now, their underlings in the same intelligence agency reviewed the footage to figure out to glean whatever hint of von Hohenheim’s origin they might find in these footages, which included the audio recordings. 

“... And you are sure that this is a legitimate recording and not some holovid edited high quality sim?” Samuel had been part of Mu/Mu for the last two decades since his inception into the ROM after his final loyalty check. Being Terran born made it easier for him compared to others. 

“For the third time, yes,” Josephine, a fellow Terran born Mu/Mu agent, groaned as she whirled around to face him. Instead of ComStar or ROM’s standard uniform, Mu/Mu was a little different. A lot of it had to do with the fact that they were some of the least staffed of ROM’s many subdivisions and often worked around the clock. At the same time, the First Circuit and ComStar as a whole understood the importance of Mu/Mu. As a result, there was both a boom and bust cycle in both staffing numbers and workload. 

Oh, and not to mention, the dark secrets that they had to keep silent about more than anyone else in ROM. Sure, Rho/Rho may have had their hands in killing a shit ton of people, but it was Mu/Mu who had to watch videos of massacres perpetrated by both ROM and the Successor Lords and keep silent about it. They may be loyal to the ComStar Order, but most Mu/Mu agents were regular people. 

Not only did this make their work life chaotic, it stressed out the older members of Mu/Mu to the point of breaking. How they broke changed their standing in the order, but Mu/Mu was very lax about anything that wasn’t critical or dangerous. 

Which meant that veterans of Mu/Mu could and would do away with a lot of the Order’s more puritan codes, whether that be theological, paradigm, or, well, the dress code. This also made the Mu/Mu veterans least likely to be accepted by other branches of the ROM or ComStar itself, leaving them stuck inside Mu/Mu.

The veterans called “newcomers” who found themselves stuck in Mu/Mu as “fresh comrades.”

And Josephine and Samuel were two such veterans. 

Samuel dressed normally, but whenever he was “analyzing” anything, he would turn on very loud metal music from 20th and 21st century Terra. It became such a problem that he was given his own room for him to work out of, and considering that he rarely went to his actual dorm room on the other side of the station, he fashioned his work room into his work-bedroom. 

Josephine would strip naked down to her underwear. She too was given a similar room for obvious reasons, and they just happened to have been neighbors as “Mu/Mu freak buddies” for the last five years. 

It was better than Francis. Francis was a former precentor of Mu/Mu (one among many Precentors in ROM) who developed a habit of profaning Blake, calling into question anything and everything about the Order. He would have been “silenced” had it not been for his work ethic, lack of a social life outside of the Order, and introverted lifestyle (as in he spent 360 days a year inside his room if he was allowed to). So he got demoted and became a regular analyst like them. He basically lived in solitary isolation except he liked it that way since he broke and continued to work for the same order whose theological sides he denounced. 

Oh, and Samuel went off on a tangent in his head like he had ADHD. 

“...uel. Samuel, you’re fucking drifting again, you dumb bastard. Go take your meds.”

Grumbling, he went over to get his dose of adderall. 

He was never diagnosed with ADHD before he joined Mu/Mu. That’s actually one of the things - mental issues - the order looked for before they admitted anyone into ROM. 

He just happened to break… oddly. 

“So?” he asked again. His eyes didn’t even drift down despite the fact that Josephine could have been a popular model anywhere in the Inner Sphere. Despite the fact that she was in her late 30’s, she was still very fit and beautiful.

And he didn’t care an iota about it since his libido got killed in the same break he got his ADHD (it was actually called something else but he didn’t care; it was close enough to ADHD so that’s what he kept calling it).

Josephine glared at him from her seat and huffed. “It’s not fabricated. It’s real.”

“... But that doesn’t make sense.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” she growled. Obviously, she wasn’t frustrated with him but the bullshit they had been told to analyze. 

She took a deep breath in.

“Okay, let’s go over it together.”

He groaned. “I already went over it five times!” 

“I know. I did, too. But if we individually snet in our analysis that says ‘this has to be bullshit,’ what do you think will happen? But if we sent in a co-signed analysis that says ‘this has to be bullshit,’ it carries more weight. And you know they won’t take any co-signed analysis seriously without us literally reviewing the footage together. After all, who knows if they saw different things and came to a similar conclusion?! as if that entire line of thought is stupidity in and of itself?! The fucking froggies at the top lost all their fucking marbles and we have to deal with this shit -?!” 

Oh yeah, Josephine also shed her inner thoughts like she shed her clothes. 

“Sure. Whatever. Let’s review the footage together.”

-VB-

It wasn’t just Josephine and Samuel who were reviewing the footage. Or that there was just one footage. There were at least a dozen now from how many jobs the new mercenary company had completed them in quick succession.

The footage that frustrated and baffled ROM’s Mu/Mu analysts was the last battle the Hohenheim’s Rangers caused for their latest job dealing with pirates. 

… Krrr…

Clink. Clunk.

BattleROM ID-Za8X23v17-30190519

May 16, 3019

Uncharted Star, Uncharted Planet (Water World)

…

…

The camera shook as the Leopard’s mech bay doors opened, and the mech quickly ran out of the mech bay and into the raining temperate island filled to the brim with twisted pine-like trees. 

The mech turned to look right as another mech stepped out of the Leopard, and this was the mech that frustrated the analysts: the so-called “Raleigh” medium mech. Despite what the rumors and naysayers were saying about the mech (those who knew that it existed anyway), ROM determined very quickly that it was a coherently designed and manufactured battlemech. It was not a Frankenmech. It was not a redesign of an existing mech. It was not an accessorized version of an existing mech. 

The Raleigh was its own thing, and it did not behave as it should.

It landed softly on the ground, and the ground beneath its feet sank less than it should have. Even the Hunchback that this BattleROM was from sank in deeper. The Raleigh carried weapons instead of having the weapons built into the chassis. In fact, it had too many weapons when it was clear that the mech primarily operated its weapons with its hands, meaning extra weapons would only weigh in down.

Including the giant fuck-off cannon of some kind.

Soon, the two more mechs joined the pair, and the four of them were off. 

“You know the plan,” Darius von Hoheheim’s voice echoed through the Hunchback’s audio. “We’re here to take out the pirates using this system as their base of operations. The clients only want us to drive them out, but I’m not satisfied with just that. I want them turned to dust. Understood?”

Various acknowledgements came through the radio. 

“This is going to be a rough day, isn’t it?” the mechwarrior piloting the Hunchback, Jessica Hermen, grunted. 

“Rough or not, we’re getting paid to do community service,” the commander snorted. “As long as we stick to the edge and keep pulling them out of them out of their defenses, we’ll be fine. Don’t get overeager.”

“Got it, got it,” she replied. 

As the lance of mechs moved deeper inland, the dropship took off. Instead of pulling away from the fight, the dropship flew low and provided cover for the lance. This was rare among most mercenary companies, new and old, because a Leopard dropship generally did not have as much armor thickness as some heavy or assault mechs. Hell, some medium mechs had more armor per square inch than the Leopard. And that made the dropship vulnerable to concentrated firepower, and the repair bills would be much higher, if not outright ruinous because a punctured Leopard was not a Leopard that could operate in space for long. 

Unless the commander had done something to the Leopard’s armor just as he had somehow gotten his hands on a mini-naval weapon of unknown design. 

(The current consensus in ROM was that there was a rimward polity beyond the borders of the Outworlds Alliance which either traded/received or salvaged Star League era technology and put them to work for their use without devolving like the Scavenger Lords had.)

(The less well received theory was that Commander von Hohenheim must be in possession of some kind of cerebral implant which allows him to convert, develop, repair, and/or invent new equipment on the fly.)

(Nobody respected the analysts who gave up and shouted “teleportation from across five hundred lightyears.”)

The lance made it deep enough into the forested island until they came across a slightly reinforced structure standing atop a slightly raised hill at the center of the island. There were at least a dozen mechs here, though most of them were bug mechs, and at least three dropships. 

“... Scanners show at least a dozen mechs. Only one heavy. No assault.”

Jessica whistled. “Then it’s gonna be a shooting gallery, eh?” she asked. 

“It will be. John, you have permission to fire. Shoot to disable the dropships but shoot to destroy the mechs.”

“Roger that, commander.”

The Leopard dropship that had been shadowing them rose up above the treelines and high into the air. This immediately set the fortress on edge and klaxons rang out. 

But it didn’t change what happened next. In a move that was quickly becoming a signature for this mercenary company, the Leopard opened fire with its “rotary autocannon” and laid waste to the mechs, pirates, and ships below. Thrusters burst open. Mech chassis punctured and broken. Pirates screaming as shells exploded around them. 

But a single autocannon, no matter how powerful, was not enough to subdue a whole fortress. Surprise them? Yes. Wound them? Yes. Destroy them? Not even close. 

Those same autocannon shells slammed into the makeshift fortifications. They exploded but not much was taken out beyond the surface layers. 

“That has to be an AFFS fortification,” Viper hummed over the radio. “Well, an abandoned one.”

It would explain why the fortification made by pirates survived the devastating volley of shells. 

Instead of charging in, they waited. With the dropships disabled and the fortification under siege, some of the pirates would start to run and the mercenaries would finish them off. 

The Hunchback’s cameras tilted up as the lance waited for the pirates to flee. 

But they didn’t. 

Worse, the fortification held. 

“Well, shit,” the commander chortled. “Your AFFS engineer built them to last, huh?”

“I mean, I guess,” Gunner replied, shifting the Hunchback to a more relaxed stance. She had a begrudgingly proud tone when she said that. 

“Hmm. Plan B, then. John, cut it out.”

The dropship continued to fire for a few more seconds. 

“Sorry, commander. I let Bimbo be the gunner and she was reluctant to stop firing.”

“... Eh.” The commander’s lackadaisical reply belied the fact that this “Bimbo” fired off 20,000 C-Bills worth of ammunition by not listening to command immediately. 

Then the Hunchback’s screen turned to look at the Raleigh as it brought the giant fuck-off cannon to bear. 

“...Boss, is that a shotgun?” 

“Kind of,” Commander von Hohenheim replied as he almost swaggered up to the fortress. “It like to call this one a ‘siegebreaker.’”

He stopped in front of the fortification and placed the tip of the barrel against the armored wall.

And fired. A bright flash erupted against the wall and the gun.

Then he started walking. Every three steps, he fired again. The star shining down on them dimmed slightly every time he fired, and where he fired, he left behind a steaming hole with depths that rapidly cooled down from a bright white-red to a smoldering tinge of red. 

The Raeligh casually walked. Casually fired into the fortification. Casually didn’t explain. 

And when he cleared the entire side of the fort, he finally turned to the rest of the lance. 

“With me.”

They quickly formed up behind him and followed. 

He used the same shotgun-cannon to blast at the front gates’ doorway, strategically firing at even intervals as if he knew where the hidden gate mechanisms were, and the gates fell down into the ground with ease as whatever support holding them up collapsed. 

And what waited on the other side of the gates was a massacre. 

The pirates had expected the Hohenheim’s Rangers to come through the front door, but because they had waited near the walls and the gates, the Raleigh’s cannon’s penetrating rounds had slaughtered them. 

Soldiers lay without half of their bodies. Mechs lay crippled. Combat vehicles had giant pellet holes all over them. 

The lance walked around the fort until they found the pirate captain they were after: he laid on the ground in a shallow pool of his own blood with the lower half of his body missing. 

“I guess that’s the job then…?” Gunner said slowly. 

“Not until we salvage everything useful.”

There were groans over the radio.

“But all of these corpses are gonna stink up the place!”

The commander snorted. “What’s a little stink to several hundred million C-Bills worth of salvage?”

The BattleROM ended there. 

And ROM’s Mu/MU analysts quickly began to argue (again) over the penetrative force of the shotgun-cannon, its Star League analog (if there was one), the Raleigh, the weapons, the supposed scanners, and more. 

Worse, Hohenheim’s Rangers were making their rounds around the rimward edge of the Federated Suns, which was where they had the least number of agents and assets. Mostly because they hadn’t needed them before. 

Which meant that ComStar found itself forced to wait on BattleROMs routed to them from the MRB as they accepted the Rangers’ vids for successfully completed jobs.