Commissioned
Debauchery x Division
Chapter 16
-VB-
Hanse Davion
New Avalon, Avalon City
3021.05.03
The situation in the Outback grew only worse in the one month since he first received the report.
Not only were more worlds hit by the same pirates, they had struck beyond the unofficial region that was the Outbacks and began to strike heavily fortified worlds even before his own military had the chance to strike back at them.
And the reports he got after those raids hinted at something far more wrong with the situation than he was first led to believe.
In particular, he found himself staring at a video footage of an urban ambush the march militia suffered.
“What the fuck…?” Lieutenant Graham in his family’s Griffin muttered as he stared up.
Because they were going through a tunnel made for mechs, and they only realized that there were enemies in the tunnel because the enemies revealed themselves. He watched as white light mechs with a body plan that looked more like a human anatomically correct than a mech looked down at them from where they hang like lizards or monkeys on the vertical shaft of the tunnel that should have been a shaft up to the center of the city, perpendicular to the shaft that brought the lance there.
And the march militia lance only noticed that there were mechs there because they were about to use the elevator there to go up.
The white mechs - Hanse had to remember that those were called Clovers - looked at them all before jumping down on top of the march militia lance.
Unfortunately for the lance, most of the mechs weren’t made for vertical combat.
So when those Clovers came down, none of them were able to shoot them quickly enough before the Clovers crashed down on them.
And the poor lieutenant as the Clovers tore apart their chosen targets with their hands and knives. Watched as mechwarriors were pulled out of their cockpits… and fed to the open maws of the mechs.
Were those mechs?
Because they didn’t move or behave like battlemechs.
Mechs didn’t hunch.
Mechs didn’t bite.
Mechs didn’t claw.
And then the Clover directly on top of Lieutenant Graham finally pushed his mech down to the ground and tore him out of the Griffin.
Hanse watched as the mech opened its mouth… and ate Lieutenant Graham.
Messily.
The last thing the mech’s black box caught was the lieutenant’s blood dribbling down the side of the Clover’s dog-like jaws and landing on the camera.
Hanse stared at the last image of the blood splotches obscuring the camera’s vision, and couldn’t help but feel … a shiver.
A shiver that ran up his spine made him stare at the image for a bit longer.
“... That is not periphery tech.”
“It isn’t,” Yvonne Davion, the Champion of the Prince and his aunt, replied as she too stared at the last image.
Hanse’s fingers tapped as he tried to think about who this might be.
“It can’t be ComStar.”
He and his inner circle were sure that ComStar were involved in many scandals and disasters that kept the Federated Suns on the back foot throughout history and today, but ComStar was, at the very least, a known entity. They had access to things that Star League had, but they kept all of their best mechs and equipment on Terra. They would never dare to use such things outside of it.
Which left one of two choices.
One, there was a deep periphery nation out there far beyond the Inner Sphere and its Periphery. They sent these raiders out to probe the Inner Sphere.
Two, the descendents of Kerensky had come back, and they were no better than the Inner Sphere.
“We’ll need eyes out there,” Hanse hummed.
“More than just eyes,” Yvonne shook her head. “We’ll need regiments out there to keep our worlds safe.”
“If these mechs were all there were, I would agree,” DMI Director Medina Doger spoke up. “Unfortunately, there is more.” He walked over to the front of the room and switched out the black box for a standard AFFS military memory core. He rewired everything, and a new screen came up. Among the many listed videos, Doger chose the one at the very bottom.
A video began playing, showing the emptiness of space with the right side of the widescreen video showing the round edge of an atmosphere-rich blue and brown planet.
Hanse’s eyes narrowed as the camera zoomed in.
And then the camera caught something.
It zoomed in even further.
And that’s when he and everyone else in the meeting room saw it: a trio of dropships. There was a Leopard flying next to them, which provided a convenient frame of reference. Using it, it was clear to tell that whatever these ships were, they were at least three times as long as a Leopard and twice as wide. Maybe even four times as long as the Leopard.
And stacked on top of those ships were fighters, shuttles, and more.
Doger stopped the video right there in the closest close-up of the ships available.
And Hanse realized that he wasn’t looking at a dropship he recognized.
“... It looks like a wet navy carrier,” someone noted.
“It does. However, we have noted it has six landing pads on top. It can also enter and exit the atmosphere while causing minimal harm to the externals of the ship and fighters it carries. With what we know about the number of Clovers that operated on the ground, we also know that each ship has a minimum of two mech bays.”
“So it is a carrier,” Hanse hummed. “Six ASF and shuttles and two mechs, or four light mechs. It’s almost like an inverse of the Union.”
A Union-class dropship could field twelve battlemechs and two aerospace fighters.
“It is, but it is double the size of a Union,” Doger continued. “What concerned the analysts were what I am highlighting now,” she said as she circled nine weapons that they could barely make out. “Of these nine weapons, one is a capital ship weapon.” Everyone froze at that declaration. “The next four are what my analysts are calling ‘sub-capital’ grade weapons. And the last four are standard size weapons.” She then turned to face them all. “I have been led to believe that this ship, code named ‘GROND,’ was made either as a warship escort or an independent command ship.”
“... So we have warship weapon totting dropships raiding our worlds,” Yvonne frowned.
“Correct,” Doger nodded. “And what you are about to see shows us exactly why we can’t just field regiments to reinforce our worlds.”
She erased the marks she made on the wall and resumed the video.
Hanse watched as the warship weapon turned.
It fired.
Once.
The camera view cut off to the side of the ship (as it was stated on the bottom right as Side 1).
And they watched as a dropship of the AFFS, an Avenger-class dropship, came apart from the inside out as something punched through it from bow to stern. Debris and metal fragments exploded outward in all directions.
Hanse nearly shot up from his seat.
An Avenger had more armor than an Overlord-class dropship.
And a single shot of the warship weapon destroyed it in one hit.
That weapon wasn’t for show. It was a real warship weapon put on a dropship.
“Shit.”
He realized moments later that he had been the one to say it.
Doger paused the video again.
“If our dropships and their regiments are caught out in orbit by any of these,” she said slowly. “We will lose battlemechs and mechwarriors one company per shot. In seconds.”
She played the video, and did not stop it this time.
The weapon fired merely two seconds later.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
After five shots, it stopped while the camera from the start of the video were hurling into the abyss.
The video ended, probably edited to do so, by stopping at a crystal clear shot of whatever had happened.
“This video was recovered from the orbit of Shawnee.”
Hanse’s eyes and face snapped to the DMI director.
Shawnee?
Shawnee?
Shawnee was eight jumps away from Maran, the first world raided by these periphery raiders.
If the raiders had chosen to go deep into the Federated Suns instead, then they would have been halfway to New Avalon instead.
“... NAIS will have to focus on an equivalent capital-class weapon,” he hissed out.
“Is that wise, my Prince?” Yvonne asked with a frown. “While your reaction is understandable, we have not seen a proper orbital fight against these raiders with deployed aerospace fighters involved. I think it would be prudent to not rush into weapons research when it is entirely possible that our aerospace fighters will be able to handle the carrier dropships. We don’t even know the range of those weapons yet.”
“We know that it has a confirmed range of 20 kilometers and that, at least in this instance, the weapon fired something closer to PPC than Gauss,” Doger interjected.
“A Naval PPC?” Hanse hummed. “A light PPC isn’t known to destroy a heavily armored dropship in one attack. It must be at least a medium PPC. Even a Heavy PPC.”
“If it indeed is something like a Heavy PPC, then we are looking at a possible deep periphery nation beyond the Tortuga Dominion that possesses the industrial capacity and knowledge to make warships,” Field Marshal Edward Sanchez of Crucis March frowned. “And the Crucis March is the least fortified out of all of the marches.”
“... Then we know what we must do. We must shore up the defenses,” Hanse narrowed his eyes as he leaned back into his chair with a frown. “But it will take too long to fortify all of the key systems in the Crucis March. It’s not something that will be complete in our lifetimes.”
Yvonne leaned forward as if she was making up for the space he’d pulled back from. “Then we set up an advanced defense. We take the worlds of the Tortuga Dominion and use it as a physical barricade.”
Doger tsk’ed. “You think that’s as simple as you make it sound, champion?” she asked. “Those pirates have hideouts and safe houses everywhere on their worlds. We wouldn’t just be defending against a deep periphery invasion but fighting an actively hostile locale.”
“If we can’t get the locals to join us, you mean,” Yvonne riposted with a frown at the DMI Director’s unprofessional reply. “While it is common and even expected for citizens of the other Great Houses to try and fight off invaders, it is another thing entirely to expect the same from people living under pirate rule. Even pirates know not to cause too much trouble for the locals, lest they find themselves suddenly killed in their sleep or their food supply poisoned.”
Hanse raised his hand up to stop them before they got out of control. Doger and Yvonne never got along, and he was close to retiring the aging DMI Director because of it.
“Regardless of how we will go about dealing with the aftermath of our conquest, we must first conquer them, won’t we?”
He didn’t say liberate or free. That would be a lie, and this Inner Council wasn’t made so that they would have to speak polite language.
“... Yes, my prince,” Doger sighed.
“Good. Then we should at the very least find out where these raiders are coming from and strike them first before moving onto the Tortugans. At the very least, I want those mechs and dropships in our hands for us to reverse engineer. I hope there are no objections to this?” he asked as he looked around, and saw no objections. “Good. Then I suggest we find the right people for this job. It wouldn’t do for us to try to use a scalpel for a job that needs a hammer, would we?”