Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs
Scavenged Restoration
Epilogue (Or is it?)
-VB-
It took time to get anything done.
Anyone who said otherwise either already had their preparations or were outright lying.
This went doubly for leaders of any kind. A local baron should not make promises he cannot keep. A planetary governor or duke should be prepared for disasters for that was the entire point of having a noble. A commonality’s circle of nobles should handle their own internal matters to such a degree that should their actions and results be audited, they would not be found wanting.
And this applied to her father as well.
Her father began preparing a navy right after the end of the Fourth Succession War, and the result of that preparation was the fleet that she had used to take the fight to the Clans and bring home an invaluable memory core.
But now, those preparations were spent, and she began to realize just how much of her father’s preparation she had burned through.
And nothing made that clear than the construction of a warship.
The hull of the ship had to be made in a drydock in orbit. If there are no nearby resources to supply the ship for its hull, then those resources need to be shipped. If there are no refineries and manufacturing factories to make the exact parts of the hull, then those resources would need to be routed to those locations first. There, it would take time to turn raw materials into usable parts. It would be further processed as many times it took to make the final part needed. Those parts would then be shipped.
In the hull’s case, the drydock was on Necromo and the hull itself was made out of aluminum alloys. However, there was no significant source of aluminum within three jumps of Necromo. At least, not significant enough to justify the costs of extractions. When she’d asked one of her father’s aide about this, she was shown a chart.
And the chart said extracting aluminum from non-ore sources would cost the state anywhere from 10,000 C-Bills to 15,000 C-Bills per ton of pure aluminum while extracting aluminum from proper ores like bauxite would cost the state 400 C-Bills to 600 C-Bills.
The difference was staggering.
And considering that the hull of a warship took up close to a third of its mass if not more, that was a lot of money.
For a Vincent-class, the lightest warship currently used by the confederation, the chart stated outright that the hull of the ship had a net weight of 150,000 tons. Even if the alloys used to make those hulls only used aluminums in half of the weight, that was 75,000 tons of aluminum that had to be extracted, purified, and shipped. And the rest of the tonnage was sure to include other minerals like iron, tungsten, and more.
Which meant that the absolute lowest cost for just the aluminum’s part in the hull of the Vincent-class corvette was 30 million C-Bills… before shipping, secondary manufacturing into alloys, second shipping to drydocks themselves, and the cost of construction. Never mind the component failure rates, defect rates, and workplace accidents.
And the shipping.
The goddamned shipping.
Even though the confederation was using in-house logistics for warship related shipping, the cost of operating the dropships and jumpships was in the hundreds of thousands per month for just one jumpship and its dropships. On average. Bigger jumpships and their dropships could cost up to a million C-Bills in operating fees. That had to be included in the cost as well.
What about the refineries? The reports she read stated that most refineries needed anywhere from 5 to 7 tons of raw ores to churn out a single ton of aluminum, and that wouldn’t be a perfectly pure aluminum because it needed to go through multiple steps. Further processing was necessary to turn bauxite into alumina and turn alumina into pure aluminum metal, which took up time, opportunity cost, and use of the refinery’s limited processing capacity. To process 75,000 tons of aluminum so that the warship could be made within a five year time limit, the entire part had to be completed within three months while processing a single ton required anywhere from two to four days to reach purity needed for aerospace alloy manufacturing.
Unfortunately, the base industries of the Capellan Confederation had been slow to take advantage of the returning technological progression, and many refineries still used older technology comparable to the 21st century’s. Meaning that a dedicated aluminum megacorporation’s biggest aluminum refinery that was a mile long and wide needed to work every single shift (sans night) full time without stopping for three months to meet a single warship’s aluminum needs. For the hull. Not the armor, other components, weapons, ammunition, and any other war materials the confederation needed.
Just the hull.
But to produce 75,000 tons, that refinery would need anywhere from 400,000 tons to 550,000 tons of bauxite ores. Which meant either mining up those bauxite locally (local as in local to the refinery’s location) or shipped in. And considering that the core of the Inner Sphere only had depleted mines, that meant worlds closer to the periphery.
Which meant shipping 550,000 tons of raw ores.
That’s 67 Mules worth of barely worthwhile raw ores.
The cost of shipping. The fuel cost. The crew pay. Component and module repairs. For the dropships, jumpships, spaceports, on-ground transportations -.
And once the metal was made, it would have to be shipped to their next manufacturing site for the production of precursor alloys. And then processed further either at the same place or the next site into the actual aerospace alloy needed for the hull. The alloy would then have to be processed or shipped elsewhere again to be turned into hull panels. And those panels would finally be shipped to Necromo drydocks.
Overall, the cost fluctuated between 100 million to 175 million depending on too many factors to list.
Just for the hull.
It… it unnerved her that her father took charge of this project in secret while also steering the confederation out of the slump it had been in.
Just looking at the flowchart made her feel small, and she was goddamned crown princess of the Capellan Confederation.
‘It’s so much bigger than me.’
She thought she understood what her father did everyday. She was proven wrong.
And now, she was tasked with modernizing this process - from aluminum ore extraction to final hull panel shipping - using the new technology found in the Jaguar Memory Core.
Oh, of course, there were people underneath her to go through with the actual engineering, logistics, and other details that she didn’t understand. But she still needed to oversee it all, which meant meetings with the engineers, meetings with logisticians, meetings with accountants, meetings with father to relay the progress, meetings with educators to get them to help her understand what she read, meetings with -.
Everything blended in together.
But doing this also showed her something crucial about rulership. There were things she could delegate, but there were other things that she couldn’t hand off to someone else.
And her work didn’t even include listening to nobles squawking over useless shit!
“... sister?”
Anastasia groaned as she pulled her head out of the piles of paper among the noteputers and datapads strewn about her desk.
She blearily blinked as she focused on the person who’d just called her.
“... Is that you, Maria?” she mumbled out.
“It is. Ana… you look terrible.”
Anastasia opened her mouth, smacked her lips multiple times, and groaned as she pushed herself up. She looked around until she found a mirror to look at herself from afar… and damn, she looked bad.
Disheveled hair, bags underneath her eyes, slightly pallor, and -.
Ugh. She stunk. Just a little.
She looked out of the window and -.
“Ah. It’s dark.”
“You didn’t come to dinner,” Maria said as she walked into the room with a servant behind her. The servant came in with a rolling cart and food trays on top. “Dad said to leave you alone, but I came anyway because, well, everyone else is worried.”
She wondered if she should be thankful her father let her sleep after she passed out from overwork or blame him for the overwork. And then she grimaced as she realized that this was what her father did everyday while still making time to see the rest of the family.
‘Father has to live until he is a hundred years old,’ she thought haggardly. ‘If he dies or retires, then this will be my life until the day I die.’
The thought sent a shiver down her spine.
Before her work here, it had been a more distant thing, seeing her father stuck behind a desk for most of the waking hours.
Now?
Now, it was visceral. An experienced determination to ensure that she stayed the fuck away from the throne for as long as possible.
She cleared the desk tiredly and the servant set her food tray down. Then when the servant lifted the dome lid …
Her nose scrunched.
“Rock salmon.”
The biggest dish in front of her was the fried rock salmon, expertly decorated and measured for a royal tongue. Except said tongue did not like fish.
“Mom said you needed good food and proper nutrition,” Maria said haughtily but not unkindly. “And dad said proper nutrition was part of being the chancellor. Your body -.”
“-is the confederation and as such, ignoring my body is not allowed,” Anastasia finished for her sister. “But I’m not even the chancellor yet!” she whined.
“Dad doesn’t care. He said ‘I am the dictator, and the dictator dictates you eat healthy.’”
“This is tyranny.”
“I say it’s comedy.”
She mock-glared at her sister before sighing. She picked up her chopstick and started to dig in.
-VB-
Melissa Steiner stared at the holographic map of the Lyran Commonwealth, and though she may not be a military commander with decades of experience, she understood the current situation on the ground.
The Lyran Commonwealth was losing.
It was only the effort of her cousin, General Frederick Steiner, and a few others that kept the Clans from overrunning the frontlines and burn their way across the Commonwealth in their bid to reach Terra.
It was just her luck that the Capellans had decided to help the Draconis Combine, which eliminated one of the Clans and sent their leaders back home to elect a new leader instead of pushing on.
But now, the Clans had returned and they came in numbers that FedCom could not defeat alone.
The initial reports from the frontlines suggested that the Clans had come back with at least a hundred warships and four times that in dropships. This massive fleet had split almost evenly; the slightly smaller of the two halves came for her Commonwealth while the bigger half went for the Draconis Combine.
Her soldiers were entirely new Clan as well. If the reports didn’t exaggerate the situation on the ground, then the new Clan, Clan Steel Viper, was both worse and better than Clan Jade Falcon and Clan Wolf that AFFC had fought up to this point. Clan Wolf was undoubtedly the overwhelming force while Jade Falcon showed themselves to be individually capable, Clan Steel Viper lacked the other Clan’s martial prowess but made up for it with raw cruelty and cunning. Worse, they were the most desperate of the Clans. They didn’t hesitate to threaten to use their warships - most of which were corvettes, a few destroyers, and a single frigate - for orbital bombardment on Lyran worlds, though they have yet to carry it out and didn’t need to because many weaker worlds surrendered once warships entered their orbit. Jade Falcon and Wolf did not do this but did bring their warships into occupied zones. And sometimes used their warships on each other and Clan Steel Viper.
She didn’t know or understand how these Clans operated, especially considering that outside of the very few Clan warriors they caught and interrogated, the Clans still refused to explain themselves, but she was just relieved that the Clan’s combined might wasn’t bearing down on her all at once.
Did it make the situation tenable?
Hell no.
FedCom was losing at least one world per month, often more than that, and the rate of loss steadily increased as more Clanners joined the frontlines. This was devastating, especially since Clan Steel Viper was moving away from the invasion corridor to strike at the core-antispinward worlds along where the Rim Worlds Republic used to be.
She and Hanse needed to make a choice. Either abandon the periphery to focus the defense along the coreward border with the Combine -.
Melissa saw an officer hurriedly walking toward her. He stopped just outside of where her bodyguards were, waiting for her permission to approach. She gestured for him to approach. He did and brought with him a noteputer. He unlocked the computer for her and placed it on the edge of the holographic table.
It was a video message.
And as a message played, her eyes widened.
ComStar?
A catchy tune and the ComStar logo spun slowly at the start of the video.
“This important message comes to you from ComStar. Please pause your activities to listen to the message.”
And the screen slowly faded to show a man standing on a stage with ComStar’s logo behind him.
“People of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery,” a man she was familiar with spoke up on the screen. “I am Primus Timothy Monroe of ComStar, and I come to you to bring a grave message about the state of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery.”
This … was going to be interesting.
“We at ComStar believe that it is our duty to Saint Jerome Blake and wider humanity to safeguard the knowledge and technologies that much of humanity has lost over the years. Indeed, even with the spread of the Helm Memory Core’s contents from the Capellan Confederation and the discovery of smaller but no less important Star League memory cores over the decades since, I can guarantee with surety that ComStar’s caches of knowledge remain even greater and more bountiful.”
“Why are you admitting this, Monroe…?” she muttered to herself as she and everyone else in the command room looked at the video.
“And I and the Precentors of the First Circuit … have decided that perhaps it is now time for us to open the vaults of this knowledge. Because the Inner Sphere is now under threat by the very people who once pledged to return to its defense. I speak to you now about the threat the Clans pose to the Inner Sphere! ComStar, still serving as the caretakers of the HPG stations, has found a horrifying truth: not only are the Clans enslaving the populace on the worlds that they occupy, they now bring warships by the hundreds to the Inner Sphere!”
That … wasn’t true. Melissa knew from enough reports that the state of the people varied among the Clans but enslavement was limited to very few worlds. And the Clans were bringing a hundred warships. Did they see something that she, LIC, and MIIO haven’t seen yet?
“They have already threatened and used orbital bombardment on the civilized worlds of the Inner Sphere!”
They … Oh, she saw what he was doing.
He was creating a rally point.
“They seek to butcher all that is good and warp everything to fit their primitive animalistic ways! And we have found numerous evidence of their misdeeds that span a hundred worlds! ComStar - and thus Com Guard - cannot in good conscious simply standby as the people of the Inner Sphere suffer at the hands of the deep periphery barbarians that dare sully the name of the Star League! So I stand here today to call upon all of the Inner Sphere to a holy crusade!
“Let us raise our rifles!
“Let us bear our battlemechs and fighters!
“Let our warships be the bulwark!
“And when we meet the Clans in battle, let us show them why they should have stayed away from the Inner Sphere, why they should have never left their forgotten corner of the galaxy!
“Com Guard vows to make the Clans regret raising their arms against all that is good and just!”
And then the video cut out to show the ComStar logo. But now, there was a new phrase blinking below the logo.
[Join ComGuard and play your part in saving humanity!]
Melissa leaned back.
“... It seems that ComStar has finally done away with the facade of not being the Hegemony.”
-VB-
Primus Timothy Monroe looked at the map of the Inner Sphere and the coreward Periphery.
His eyes roamed across the holographic map, which depicted the Z-axis as well, and noted all of the locations that the Com Guard found as well as those they found and destroyed.
The Clans retained most of their Inner Sphere conquests, but the Com Guard had destroyed every single Clan logistics hub within five jumps of the Inner Sphere. The problem here was the fact that the Clans had come back with enough warships to prevent Com Guard from repeating the sweep.
But the damage had been done. The Clans’ logistics line had to be reconstructed, and their supplies - what they couldn’t produce here - were limited.
However, there were limitations on what Com Guard could do, which was why he had that message recorded for all of the Inner Sphere to hear.
He also knew that he was taking sides, which wasn’t what ComStar was supposed to do. ComStar needed to keep its neutrality, yes, but the Clans were coming here specifically for Terra. In that, all of the First Circuit and most of the Precentors (that they were able to reach out to and who responded back) agreed with him that it could not be allowed.
The Clans needed to go.
Which tied into the very public message.
Com Guard, in its current state, could not do this by themselves, and the other five Great Houses would be too paranoid (or most likely, too busy trying to infiltrate and steal what ComStar had) to be of help.
Except maybe the Capellan Confederation. They took their pound of flesh from the Clans, reducing “Clan Smoke Jaguar” to nothing as well as destroying the logistics hub that the Jaguars had set up on occupied Combine worlds. But they had fallen back and there was very little coming from them about a second expedition. It would make sense, considering that they lost one of three precious new prototype cruisers. Even by ComStar’s standard (which was the Star League standard if Monroe had anything to say about it), those cruisers weren’t cheap to make.
It made him wonder why the Chancellor sent them out in the first place. To test them? Maybe. To show off? Unlikely; ComStar knew of his new Firebee FRB-3S, which was basically the best possible version of the Firebee that could exist. Those could even be called “Royal Firebees,” but Chancellor William … didn’t announce them. Even though he had close to a regiment’s number of them.
… Bah, whatever. Trying to understand that man’s thoughts was like trying to guess the lottery number. The Capellans might, however, use their early participation to say that they didn’t have to participate in future wars against the Clans, which would be a problem. But even if that was the aim, they didn’t have to go so far in the defense of their ally against the Clans. Their initial success in halting Smoke Jaguar’s spinward expansion alone would have sufficed.
He and the rest of the Inner Sphere will have to wait and see.
In the meantime, Com Guard recruitment was up for both infantry and mechwarriors.
Good. They would be needed for the future battles.
-VB-
Roy took a sip of green tea.
It was the cheapest option there was, and despite the fact that he and his household had grown richer over the years, he still drank this specific brand of green tea.
Why wouldn’t he? It was the brand of green tea that the current chancellor helped found. It was … jeez, it was over four decades ago at this point, wasn’t it? He remembered how the chancellor, then just a prince, had come out and declared that he found the unemployment situation in Sian to be unacceptable. So he went and created the People’s Casual Green Tea (the then prince and now chancellor was not good with names; the second prince, Dae, was just the latest victim), and used it to hire as many vagrants and homeless who had wanted work. Younger and stronger women and men worked the fields and the older and sicker folks worked inside the warehouses. The price of the tea was also subsidized by the state, which made it very cheap for most people.
The subsidies continued even when the then prince had disappeared for a decade and continued after the prince became the chancellor.
That decade was … it was a dark decade. People were shown who their next ruler was and how great he could be.
And he was snatched away.
Even if the nobles might not know it or think it, that disappearance plunged the people into despair unlike anything Roy had seen before.
… Then he returned after his father died.
And day after day, month after month, year after year, the chancellor showed why he had always been the best choice for the chancellorship, not that bitch Romano or any of their siblings.
Corruption was at its lowest point, people no longer feared for the future of the confederation, trade was at an all time high, and people felt confident that, if they tried and put real work and effort, they could climb higher than ever before.
Like Roy himself.
He used to be a man who had once tittered on the edge of becoming a servitor when he was a child. He was physically weak and sickly. He barely made it to becoming a common citizen, and even then, he had a hard time keeping his job because of his sickness.
And then the chancellor came out and distributed precious medical knowledge!
It was because of that he was able to be treated by doctors for his condition.
All around him in his life, everyone’s life, if they worked for it, improved.
And Roy… Roy only felt thankful that the Chancellor cared so much about them.
He was old enough to have lived through all of three previous chancellor’s rules, and none of them were good for regular people like him. It was always necessary for someone to suffer. It was always a point of pride that someone’s family member died. It was …
Life was better.
And Roy could only pray to God for the chancellor’s health and continued wise rule.
-VB-
I stared out of my private office window and stared down at the Forbidden City below.
It hasn't changed much since when I first laid eyes on it.
I first saw Sian when I was a few years old. The memory was hazy, but mother was walking me around the palace, and we came upon a window. There, I saw the city for the first time.
I had been aware of myself even then, and even then I saw that Sian was the biggest city I had ever seen.
It was beautiful. It struck me in a way that very few things had. It wasn’t like the compact city of Tokyo or the high rises of New York City, the wealth and fame of Los Angeles, the pride of San Antonio, the smugness of London.
Sian sat there in my vision, and told all who saw it to acknowledge its beauty.
I think that’s why the Liaos, my family, chose Sian as the capital instead of our homeworld of Liao. Get away from our capital at the time, Capella, that was invaded? Definitely. Get away from the encroaching Hegemony, the Free Worlds League, and the Federated Suns? Sure, but why choose Sian then when it was equally close to the Free Worlds League border? It was closer to the “center” of the Capellan Confederation, so that was possibly why.
The Forbidden City was not planned out in a grid but in circles. It had to because of the hills and mountains on either side of the city. Half-circles, quarter circles, third circles, full circles… Oh, and all of those circles made navigation of the Forbidden City for non-natives - including invaders - an absolute hell. The only straight road was the Chancellor Road that ran down the middle of the entire city from north to south.
And in this city, millions of people worked to keep their lives and the confederation happy and prosperous.
When I was a child, I imagined that there was this … network of people. I imagined millions of people who raised me up so that I can lead them. And I think that’s when my budding sense of obligation started growing. The idea that there were so many people who were indirectly and directly that I was responsible for…
I took a deep breath in.
… A sense of duty doesn't just come to people. It’s a number of factors that lead someone to look at where they were and decide to become dutiful. A sense of belonging, irrational attachment, love, hate, envy, competitiveness… whatever the combination of reasons were, it wasn’t just one thing.
What was it for me?
I supposed that there was a definite sense of possessiveness. Capellans were my people. The confederation was my nation.
There was also a small iota of competitiveness. Why should my people be poorer than the Fedrats? Why should they suffer more than the Leaguers who fought more among themselves than anyone else?
I knew that I also had a sense of what was right and wrong. Not “justice” but what I considered right and wrong. It was wrong to have so many servitors. It was right for my people to be prosperous, even if it came at the expense of others.
I can’t say that I became what I am today because I was completely fit for the job. After all, if I truly cared about the people above myself, then I would have told father - or even Romano - about the Helm Memory Core before my arrest.
I supposed that I could be a bit vindictive and selfish; I would rather let people suffer a few more years than release my own advantages.
But I guessed that that was simply what a ruler - a king - had to be for the sake of his people and himself.
Possessive. Greedy. Competitive. Disciplined. Selfish.
I took a sip of the People’s Tea.
Yes, a ruler had to be many things if he wanted to get something done. It wasn’t enough for a ruler to be a genius or upright. Such one dimensional rulers, like Romano and Ian Davion, could never make their people prosperous.
I snorted.
‘I guess I am a bit proud of my own accomplishments.’
The Capellan Confederation was no longer the Old Man of the Inner Sphere. We sat indisputably at the top. The rest of the Inner Sphere hungered for what we had but could not - and dared not - fight us for it. I have set up the institutions necessary for the confederation to continue to grow even if something were to happen to me. My heir, my daughter, would do well because that’s who she was and that’s how I raised her.
Honestly, I did a great fucking job.
Sighing, I turned around and sat back down in front of the desk.
Time to get back to work.
-VB-
A/N: Here we are, ladies and gentlemen. The end of Scavenged Restoration. First off, I would like to thank RoyalTwinFangs for having commissioned an entire story. He was unerring in its completion and worked with me all throughout its writing. Second, I would like to thank all of my supporters at Patreon and Ko-Fi. You all keep me fed and watered so that I didn’t become a withered writer. Third, I would like to thank all of my readers across various websites (Spacebattles, QuestionableQuesting, and AO3). You threw me ideas, corrections, praises, and support.
… But this doesn’t have to be the end of Scavenged Restoration. Though we have completed the main story and RoyalTwinFangs will be commissioning a new story, Scavenged Restoration itself is not coming to an end.
Because it is now available to be voted weekly on Patreon and Ko-Fi for new future chapters.
But that’s for the future.
Here and now, I and William Liao give you our final bow as the curtains draw close.
Until next time.
Vagabond - and William Liao - signing out.