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Nice story.

Entry #10
Lagrange Jump Point
Zebebelgenubi, Terran Hegemony
12:00 30 December 2766

I’d hit two of the deep space recharge stations that the SLDF had set up for moving their ships around without being spotted by civilian traffic. There weren’t many of them and probably the Republican navy would take out as many as they could with data captured on Terra, but getting charges from them meant I could race from Terra to the borders of the Hegemony in two days. That was particularly useful since my escorting Caspars didn’t have lithium fusion batteries.

I could have gone faster but the First Royal Swiss Cavalry needed the time to carry out repairs to their equipment, finish integrating the Sandhurst cadets into their ranks and to plan for the coming operation. Taylor Corvus, their former senior battalion commander and now in charge of the whole regiment via dead men’s shoes, had offered to have her techs don vac-suits and try to patch up some of the rents in my armour, but it would have taken too long. They didn’t really have the equipment to work with the lamellor ferro-carbide plating either.

“You know we usually have more to work with, intelligence wise,” she warns me as the dropships detach. The Caspars are already rebooting after the jump, their scratch crews running for the shuttles that they’ll be using to get clear.

I consider pointing out that at least we have maps of our target region of the planet below us, something that’s not usually available when hitting pirate bases in the deep periphery – that having been the SLDF’s major activity before the Periphery Uprising. Still, even then there would be a forces estimate. “I can tell you what I’m going to be fighting,” I advise her instead, giving her dropship a shot of four of the Republican Essex-class destroyers escorting an Avatar-class cruiser whose transponder suggested it ought to be in a boneyard somewhere.

Corvus nodded. “That shouldn’t be a problem for you, I take it?”

“Not if everything goes to plan. Then again…”

“When do things ever go to plan?” she asks ruefully. “I’ll put my faith in you.”

“I’ll do my part, Major.” Actually, I don’t plan to directly involve myself at all unless things go wrong. It may be a little cowardly to send the M-5 drones forwards to do the main fighting, but since destroying me would neutralise them anyway, it’s nothing less than good sense.

The Swiss’ three dropships tuck in against me and launch their fighters. My own remaining drones will be covering the Caspars so I’ll be depending on the single squadron for close air protection. In the same spirit of mutual dependence, for the first time since I awoke I open up my hatches and let human beings in – as far as the shuttle bay anyway. “You’ll excuse me for not letting you further,” I advise the crews aboard the shuttles. “Stretch your legs if you want, but I don’t have any escape pods so you probably don’t want to be far from the shuttles if things go badly.”

The M-5s rush forwards, pushing three gravities of acceleration, spreading out to flank them from five angles. Faced with the unexpected, the defenders try to focus on one side of the circle. Not a bad decision: if they tried to punch through the hole they would have been caught in a crossfire. This way, they can concentrate their fire on one drone and… the other drones can take targeting data from it and rip two destroyers apart, well outside the effective range of the Republican’s weapons.

The damaged drone accelerates towards the cruiser, which has enough warning to get out of its path but that takes it out of supporting range of the remaining two destroyers, who promptly become the proud recipients of laser fire and particle beams from the other four drones.

The captain of the cruiser apparently decides that discretion is the better part of valour and breaks away to shadow us from a distance. I’m happy enough to accept that – for now. The priority is to get the Swiss Cavalry down to the surface, not driving off a voyeur. I post the damaged Caspar to keep an eye on it – if it turns and resumes the battle one M-5 won’t last long, but it can soak up a little damage while the others blow the cruiser to atoms.

The Swiss Cavalry - it’s increasingly hard not to call them the Swiss Guards but they might take offense if I do that – may be short on aerospace but they’ve managed to patch up three battalions with the replacements. And while their transports are a mis-matched set – one Overlord, one Dictator and one Colossus that has the infantry and armour that are semi-officially attached to them – they all work. This isn’t the Third Succession War, after all.

More than a hundred BattleMechs rain down over Zebebelgenubi and I’m damn glad that it’s not heavily fortified. Actually, given that it’s under joint-control with the Lyran Commonwealth, the planet’s in a fairly strategic position with a couple of Castles Brian to ensure that the SLDF maintained a stranglehold. Of course, with the garrison thinned and mostly replaced by Rim Worlders there had probably been rumbling about calling in LCAF for months now.

Just rumbling… but now with the Rim Worlds in sole control that rumbling might be fanned into something stronger. Maybe. Just maybe.

The important thing is that while Castles Brian are too tough a nut to crack with a battle group that might barely count as half a brigade, that’s not what I’m aiming to do. If the Rimjobs want to fortify themselves up inside those meaty fortifications then that’s just fine for now. Well, it’d be better if they were out in the open like that mechanized battalion that’s… Uh-oh. Right outside my target. And that’s just the vehicles.

“First Swiss Actual, I have a battalion’s worth of APCs in your target area along with a company or so of Hipparchs.”

“That’s not much of a military threat,” Corvus replies. “But it might take a while to root them out if they go to ground and that could be rough on the people around them.”

“Particularly when your infantry are coming down the slow way. Would you like some fire support?” I ease power, letting myself lag a little so that I have a clear path of fire past the dropping ‘Mechs.

“And make this even more unfair? Be my guest.”

In the interest of precision only my first shot is from a particle beam turret – after that the atmospheric after-effects of the shot will make punching a shot through it a little chancier than I like – it might cause problems as it did over London. The four beams smash into the centre of the hover tank company that are parked in a sprawling parking lot and the blast radius of the impacts flips, crumples and melts through the rest of the unit. Along with everything else in an area about a third of a kilometer across. Quite a lot of people’s cars just go slagged but the buildings nearby don’t appear to have more than cosmetic damage – fortunate that they have such a huge parking zone.

For the APCs I use railguns – half-ton slugs of nickel-iron aren’t going to be quite as disturbed by the suddenly heated and ionized air – to pick off parked units. They’re not so conveniently out and away from nearby buildings so I crack a lot of windows and take the pillared front porch off what I’m fairly sure is the town hall, taking out a third of them with six slugs before I decide that that’s enough. It’s far from impossible I’ve hurt civilian bystanders already – I’m certainly not going to try this with residential regions.

A couple of questions:
- First Swiss Cavalry? Who are they?

I introduced them in Entry #4

- no repair drones/robots inside the Praetorian?

Only to a very limited degree. I don't believe that they're canonical.

- how can it know about the Succession Wars and the 3rd one?

I'm afraid this is a self-insertion.

- stranglehold: isn't it stronghold?

While I'm perfectly capable of erring, in this case I did indeed mean stranglehold.

The First Royal Swiss Cavalry are the SLDF regiment that was posted in Geneva at the time of the Coup. It's likely they're part of the 48th Royal BattleMech division although that's not specified in canon.

---

Entry #11
Low Orbit, Zebebelgenubi,
Terran Hegemony
15:00 30 December 2766

“Scratch the tanks and a dozen APCs. No numbers on the infantry,” I warn Corvus.

“It’s still an improvement,” she concludes, reassuringly. “Don’t worry about the infantry, that’s what the Vulcans are for. I’d take it as a personal favour if you’d keep the garrison from sending in heavy reinforcements.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I agree, scanning my maps of the area and singling out bottlenecks in the transport network that I can cut off. Bridges and tunnels are fairly fragile things all things considered.

One of my intact M-5s moves over the horizon for the nearest Castle Brian and more importantly, to its sally ports. One opens to send out a handful of scout tanks – most likely testing the waters before sending out a serious force. Since I’d rather that they didn’t, low angle lasers bore in and pulversize half the lance.

At the same time, I have to keep my eyes open. If the ‘Mechs were already deployed then they could pop up anywhere on the planet and that’s a lot of landmass – not to mention shallow water – to search.

Down below the first battalion of the First Swiss Cavalry hit the dirt and start fanning out. The landing zone is a semi-military drop-port that doubles as shipping out smaller products of local manufacture and also fits out military dropships like the Model-96 variants below. Fortunately it seems that the Hipparchs and an platoon’s worth of APCs I’d taken out were the only heavy weapons on site, but the ‘Mechs machineguns are soon in play against dismounted infantry and the battle for Ulsop Robotics and the company town that surrounded the factory was underway.

Equipped as a Hussar regiment, the Swiss’ use their first battalion as heavy scouts – two companies of Royal Phoenix Hawks and one of Vulcans, now with Chameleon training ‘Mechs from Sandhurst filling gaps in their ranks. All had integral jumpjets and make relatively soft landings, letting them rally quickly to provide a perimeter for the other two battalions’ Royal Warhammers (the older of the two variants with that distinction), Guillotines, Champions and Shadow Hawks – intermixed with occasional oddities like three Crocketts from Sandhurst and the regimental Gunslinger’s Griffin - to come down in.

I wince as one of the Champions suffers a malfunction of some kind. The Mechwarrior keeps his head and ejects the drop cocoon before ejecting himself. The heavy ‘Mech splashes into a river and comes apart, which will probably preclude any investigation of the cause. One of the Guillotines is less fortunate – half of the jump-jets cut out far too low for any reaction but horrified recognition as seventy tons of BattleMech hits the ground spinning. A leg somehow ends up caving in a house on the edge of drop-port.

Statistically this is a high-average level of casualties for executing a regimental drop under combat conditions.

The losses don’t make much difference to the ‘Mechs – a Shadow Hawk lance detaches to check the house for survivors and recover the Mechwarrior’s body if possible. Otherwise the heavies fan out to cover the landing zone, freeing first battalion to move out into the town towards the factory.

They seem to know what they were doing and I doubt that they’ll want some naval type jogging their elbows so I resolve not to do that thing. Instead I look at the local media. Wow, someone’s making waves. Oh yes… that would be us.

Since I’m not terribly busy right now – oh, that looks like a Rampage down there leading a lance back towards the Castle Brian, well we know who uses those, smite! – I scan a few dozen local media forums. Martial law, RWR troops in the planetary capital and the major cities, Castles Brian sealed up more than usual… oh look at that. The Fat Man made a speech. Looks like he got the HPG working again. I check the location of the local transmitter. A good chunk of the way around the planet. Now this is where I could detach one of the Caspars to take it out on a more permanent basis if it wasn’t for the fact that that cruiser might take the opportunity to come back and pick it off…

Maybe I should have killed the ship earlier. It doesn’t have the engines to get away… should have followed through. I break off two M-5s. If it decides to come in after those… well, two to one odds should counter the tonnage advantage of the Avatar. If he thinks he can get to me, with my own armament plus three… well, two and a half Caspars. It’d be the smart play, I’d give him about a one in six chance of causing me serious damage. The cruiser wouldn’t survive but somewhat abashedly I think that would count as a win for the Republic right now.

Creating a few dozen profiles on several political forums doesn’t take any longer than finding the ones that catered to pro-Lyran and pro-Skye sentiments. It’s not exactly subtle but I seed them all with suggestions that an appeal be smuggled to the Lyran Commonwealth – to the Archon and to anyone else that might be listening – asking for the liberation of Lyran worlds like Zebebelgenubi.

It won’t accomplish anything much right now, I don’t even know how they might send that message… but people are inventive. And greedy. They’ll find a way. And in the meantime the pro-Lyran elements among the population will be that much more opposed to the Rim Worlders. Maybe it would have happened anyway

Okay. Public opinion gone. Now to start covering tracks: tax records and census data for the entire region around Ulsop Robotics. We can’t get all of those people out but I can do as much as possible to prevent them from being identified.

“Praetorian, this is First Swiss Actual. We’ve reached the factory and our infantry are down.”

“Excellent news, well done.”

I could detect a degree of amusement in her voice. “Oh, the man in charge would like to talk to you.”

“Splendid.” I made a bet with myself. Outrage at my invading his factory?

“Who is this!?”

I award myself victory in the bet. “My name is Praetorian. Right now I’m all that stands between you and your people becoming slave labour for Amaris and your families being hostages to keep you in line. Can I help you in any other way?”

That took the wind out of his sails. “W-what?”

“It’s been a rough couple of days, hasn’t it? You must have heard of the Coup? You must realise that General Kerensky will return here, in time, with the SLDF to oust Amaris.”

“Well, yes…”

“And all that stands in his way are the SDS systems that the Usurper had to decapitate for the Coup to succeed. Which means his forces here were to ensure your compliance with his demands in restoring them.”

The factory manager isn’t a stupid man. “What do you want?”

“I want the factory destroyed and the workers hidden or evacuated.” I pause. “And I could do with your help.”

This is a fun story

So I've been advised. My bad.

---

Entry #12
Low Orbit, Zebebelgenubi,
Terran Hegemony
23:30 31 December 2766

New Year’s Eve is usually a festival, across all of humanity. Most of them still have no reason not to celebrate it.

I, on the other hand, am about to undergo brain surgery.

“You realise that this will place exceptional strain on your processing power?” the rather worried young man inside the hardware of my tactical computer warns. “I’ve no experience of your computer core but I’d be hesitant to consider this with the systems of an M-5C.”

“These aren’t ideal circumstances,” I agree. “But they are the circumstances that we have.”

Given the terrible circumstances I’d warned the Ulsop management of, they’d been more than happy to provide me with access to their equipment and technical staff while families were streaming out of the area – either to hide on other parts of Zebebelgenubi or onto a small flotilla of dropships. As you might imagine, I was abusing this recklessly.

“It’s your funeral if this goes wrong, Mr Praetorian,” the engineer says with a shrug. “Quite literally,” he adds under his breath.

One thing that the engineers had been able to do was unlock the controls of the M-5s with me so that I could give them orders without having to stay around. That meant that I could delegate escorting the dropships to the jump point – fortunately the Republican ships that had seized the jump point on the day of the coup had moved on and not yet returned but if they did, the Caspars would hopefully be enough protection.

That wasn’t the main thing that I wanted from them though. You see, I have more than one tactical computer aboard: the one that I could use to group M-5 and M-3 drones into a network with me and a separate one that handled my Strikers and shuttles.

My thinking had been to work out how to use the latter to control capital drones like the first one. Suborning dozens of Caspars at once could neutralise the entire SDS drone fleet over a world or jump point. It would also enable me to handle fleet engagements almost unaided. The engineers had shaken their heads at that – they’d have to pull the whole system and probably expand it beyond the available space in my hull to do that.

But that wasn’t enough to make them give up. After all, if I can mount two tactical computers… why not more?

And if there isn’t sufficient space inside my hull then what about outside it?

Inventive devils. I’m glad they’re on my side. At least I hope they are. Letting them in at my computer core means that if they aren’t then I probably won’t survive the surgery.

Among the dropships being fitted out at the drop-port were four M-96C dropships, a class commonly known as the Howdah. Each comes fitted with a tactical computer capable of directing twenty drones – usually Voidseeker drones like my Strikers, but in practise they’d been sufficient to control M-3 drones in the past. Ulsop engineers were crawling over them at this moment, some of them upgrading the hardware to handle larger drones using parts from tactical computers being prepared for M-5C drones, others tearing away life support to make room for the computers and placing the armour-clad structural members that were needed to hold the dropships permanently in my four aft drop-collars.

I’d be giving up most of my primary tactical computer to link through to these tactical computers – another reason to be glad that my immediate escorts could now operate without constant supervision – but the potential trade off was mouth-watering. If I had a mouth, that was. The potential to control as many as eighty capital drones without losing my fighter cover?

“Well, ready when you are.”

Making the changes meant shutting down the tactical computer, which isn’t neatly differentiated from what’s notionally my core processors as the terms might suggest. To all practical purposes I was closing off part of my brain temporarily.

“Let’s do this thing.”

I flip the ‘switch’.

Well that doesn’t feel too bad. A little like being sat in the dentist’s chair as the tactical feeds are disconnected from their transmission nodes and connected to the cables leading into the Howdahs.

I’m… human again?

Heh. Howdahs are those things on the backs of Elephants that people sit in. Kind of silly to call a variant on the Elephant-class dropships that, but now they’re being carried by something larger it makes perfect sense.

Standing in a perfectly ordinary street. Looks like a fairly major city’s business district. Grand stone buildings set a metre or so back from street by black-painted railings and a moat-like arrangment that allows the basement to have windows. Reflected a window is the face I’d chosen for myself.

Of course, adding another sixty thousand tons to me isn’t going to do my acceleration any favours, but it’s only 4% of my mass and they still have their engines so that adds enough thrust to offset it.

What’s going on? No one else on the street seems surprised by my presence, or even particularly interested in me. Clothing styles aren’t all that familiar… is this still the 28th century?

Battle damage feels like pain. Having parts of my systems disconnected feels numb in places. Weird.

There’s one man looking at me. It takes me a moment to recognise the face as familiar… He grins and gestures for me to look up.

This is actually kind of tedious. Then again, I suppose I should expect that: warfare’s usually mostly waiting.

There’s a shadow in the sky. Impossibly clear, the silhouette of a warship. Texas-class.

It’s a shame there’s no dock here that can patch up the holes in my armour. Perhaps at my next destination…

Part of me recognises that this is impossible. A ship that low would be in terminal descent, certainly not simply hanging in the sky. That part of me is by far subordinate to portion that’s frantically looking for a street sign.

There’s a pins and needles sensation as the tactical computers boot up, one at a time.

Temple Avenue. I’m in London? There’s the briefest sense of lightning and then all is fire.

What the fuck was that?

Entry #13
Low Orbit, Zebebelgenubi,
Terran Hegemony
09:30 1 January 2767

Okay, apparently warships do not dream of electric sheep.

Either that or BROB is fucking with me. The face I saw suggests that, but it might be my own psyche messing me up. It was a dream, after all.

I hope that won’t happen again, next time I get fixed up. I’m going to need some dock time sooner or later, unless I get unlucky and someone gets a kill-shot in. But if that happens next time too then I’m going to have to keep shutting down to the absolute minimum.

I mean… part of me was fine. I was humming along, happily oblivious to the fact that other parts of me were hallucinating. And that’s good because if it had gone the other way then I’d probably have made a hideous mess. A warship that can’t tell what it’s doing is a warship that is not safe to be around.

Or is it a good thing? What if another part of me is going through something similar right now? I run diagnostics, comparing to activity while I was napping. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong, which wasn’t entirely comforting. Or perhaps it was. After all, I don’t recall any brain surgeons having located the part of the human brain that contains the soul.

“Everything okay, sir?”

“Nothing seems to be damaged,” I assure the nervous engineer. “Let’s see how the new systems are integrating…”

Two of the links are successful and I am able to connect to my remaining escorts with ease – although there’s a notable lag for those boosting towards the jump point. The other two, it seems, will need a little adjustment.

“Do you want to shut down the main computer again?”

“No,” I decide. “That won’t be necessary – now that the main links are in place it will be more productive for me to give feedback as they’re adjusted.”

“I guess so,” he agrees and starts wriggling out of the crawlway he’d been working in.

Had I been too firm about that? Did he guess how nervous the idea of rebooting that part of me made me?

Probably not, but it’d be a good idea to think before speaking in the future. That’d be a change, really.

“Major Corvus?”

“Praetorian?” she greets me. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem. The main changes have been made and there’s some fine-tuning to do. I’m just checking your status.”

“No sign of the Republicans – I think they’ve figured out we’re not going anywhere and they’re just going to wait us out. We are getting invaded though.”

“What?” I checked my scanners. No sign of troop movements down there.

“Nothing like that,” Corvus explains quickly. “There are quite a lot of reservists in this area though. We keep getting people coming up to our lines." She pauses, irritated. “In a couple of cases getting past our lines – and volunteering their services.”

“Do you have room for them?”

“Not all of them. I feel like the biblical Gideon since I’ve only got room for three hundred. So far I’m sending them home if they have families. At the current rate that won’t be enough soon though.”

“Tell them that we need them to stay her and defend their people against Amaris. The more resistance movements there are bothering him, the less he can focus on the rest of the war.”

“Yeah… I used that excuse when the family men don’t take no for an answer. I don’t like to think about how an angry young man might take it though. Amaris’ troops are used to suppressing resistance.”

“If they were that good at it,” I point out, “They wouldn’t have to keep doing it. It’s going to be pretty rough on Zebebelgenubi but the things are going to be rough all over.”

“General Stefannson was right. You are a cold-blooded son of a bitch.” There was no anger in her voice though.

“I don’t have blood and I’m fairly sure I have no canines in my ancestry.” I pause. “It’s a good image though. The implacable warship that will do anything to complete the mission. Let them believe that.”

“So it’s not true?”

“It’s easier to fight for Amanda Cameron, who is more or less an innocent and whose life depends on my doing so than it would be to fight for Richard Cameron, a petty tyrant. Of course Amanda may not turn out any better but at least there’s some hope.”

There’s a long pause.

“Major? Are you alright?”

“Who built you, Praetorian? Why are you this smart?”

Well it started with a Random Omnipotent Being who got bored… “I don’t have that information. I suspect that I was an experiment. It’s very likely that I am not my creator’s intended goal. Most SLDF officers I’ve encountered don’t seem too happy about me.”

“Well I appreciate you. You might want to work on your manners though.”

“I don’t really think that’s the problem. I am a tool. A weapon. Who trusts a weapon that wields itself?”

“It used to be – before the SLDF – an age-old problem. ‘It’s Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy go away’.”

“Kipling. However, Major, the band is playing and the drums have begun to roll. Tommy ain’t a blooming fool. Trust, in me, requires me to be predictable to the SLDF, and obedient to their Generals. Yet predictability is no virtue in our current campaign. It is very unlikely that the SLDF will allow me to survive this war. Then again, I may simply die of self-pity.”

She laughs at the deadpan last sentence. It helps to have someone I can tell a joke to.