The Diaspora, Part Three
While the fighting was going on in the Inner Sphere, the Colonist Clans were increasingly desperate. This fear was expanded on when Cloud Cobra scientists determined that the Tanite Worlds were not in fact sufficently screened by the Veil of the Protector to be safe from the Hypernova. This meant that the Burrock and Cloud Cobra refugees there would eventually have to be relocated, although fortunately not for almost two decades.
In 3025 the Star Adders recommended to the other Colonists that they seize control of Nueva Castile. Although the Periphery state was a considerable distance away, the seven hundred light years would ensure that they were safe and unlike the Tanite Worlds they could be sure that the Veil of the Protector would shield them from the Gamma Rays. The disappointed Cloud Cobras and Burrocks agreed to a joint invasion to depart in 3030 after all that could be salvaged from Brim and Babylon was removed.
In the meantime the Diamond Sharks had learned from contacts in the Jade Falcon merchant caste of a small colony that the Invasion force had come across roughly halfway to the Inner Sphere. Although the Jade Falcons were using St-Jean as a waypoint, there was plenty of room. The Sharks shared the information with their Snow Raven allies and the Ravens with their long term allies in Clan Ghost Bear.
The Snow Ravens approached Blood Spirits and offered them a trade of resources from Priori, one of the few remaining enclaves they had, in exchange for more ships. While the Blood Spirits had few ships to give, they were willing to trade a number for the Snow Raven enclave and began building undeground shelters there. The Diamond Sharks were more successful, contacting the Goliath Scorpions. In exchange for aiding in the consolidation of the modest Goliath Scorpion holdings to Roche and Dagda, the Scorpions would hand over all their ships: their plans for the future did not include space travel.
In 3026 Clan Goliath Scorpion announced their division, assigning all personnel and assets on Dadga to a newly formed Clan, the Ocean Crabs. This caught the attention of the rest of the Clan Council, who found that like the Blood Spirits, the Scorpions were establishing shelters against the radiation. However, where the Blood Spirits were digging underground shelters, the Scorpions were instead establishing underground cities and counting on the oceans of Dagda and Roche to provide both shelter from radiation and a source of food since life beneath the waves would survive far better than that above it. The division was due to the undeniable difficulty in maintaining contact between two parts of the Clan that would be so geographically removed. (In fact, the Scorpions and Crabs would retain minimal spaceflight capacity with a handful of dropships based on small islands. Underground docks for submersible transports to connect to underground hangers were under construction).
Clan Nova Cat and Clan Coyote were also retreating into shelters. Where the Scorpions had looked to the seas, the Nova Cats were instead looking to space, perhaps inspired by the correlation between their name and the calamity that was upon the Clans. Spacecraft, by their very nature, must be screened against radiation and therefore were unthreatened by the gamma rays. The Nova Cats had therefore elected to construct large space stations to house as much of their population as possible. Although vast, it was obvious that not all the Nova Cat population would be housed in the stations, but they had also begun quietly sterilizing the majority of their labourer caste and up to half of all the other civilian castes. As much as possible they would allow the population decrease to be natural.
In the Inner Sphere, the fighting on Terra had diminished as the Wolves, Smoke Jaguars and Steel Vipers dug in. Elements of Clan Hells Horses were arriving to reinforce the Wolves but they still lacked the ability to push the Smoke Jaguars out of Asia. The evident divisions between the Invaders had given the Inner Sphere some hope of playing them against each other but their own rifts were a serious obstacle. For example, Hanse Davion might have been inclined to agree to a suggestion by Takashi Kurita (who was well known to be fascinated by the Fox) to reduce garrisons along their shared border so that the DCMS could more effectively fight the Ice Hellions but this would leave the DCMS focused on the Rasalhague region, positioned to threaten Hanse's Lyran ally and leave the AFFS with a chance of liberating New Earth or even Terra (whose SDS was known to be badly damaged by two successive invasions), giving it a great advantage. And of course, neither Janos Marik nor Maximilian Liao wanted that either.
In the event, modest forces were withdrawn and seven AFFS regiments - mostly mercenaries - were sent to support the LCAF fighting the Jade Falcons, while five DCMS regiments were moved to Rasalhague. The entire matter was against a backdrop of economic crisis: interstellar finance had been highly dependent upon HPG communication and Terran banks had taken advantage of being at the hub of affairs. The Lyran economy was wealthy enough to only be moderately damaged and the austere Draconian economy was less interconnected and thus less affected, although the needs of being on the frontlines against the Clans more than made up the difference.
Some attempt was made at diplomacy: Janos Marik and Hanse Davion both made approaches to Clan Wolf by using the Wolf Dragoons as intermediaries. This gave them their first insights over what had sparked the invasion. Marik even indicated that he might be willing to cede certain worlds (such as the troublesome Sirian region) to the Steel Viper's proposed Clan Hegemony. This was mis-interpreted as encouragement and Khan Chapman launched a sudden invasion that crushed a regiment of the Sirian Lancers and very nearly overran Sirius entirely before reinforcements arrived.
Not that reinforcements did much except increase casualties. By 3026 not only Sirius but also Procyon and Graham IV had fallen to the Steel Vipers. The Draconis Combine had managed to take an advantageous position in Rasalhague by offering substantial concessions to the local population. While the Ice Hellions had not been driven off, they had been pushed back to Rasahague itself, having lost hundreds of warriors. DCMS losses however were believed to be five to ten times as high and most successes had been managed by 'low war'. The one good note was that the heir, Theodore Kurita, had proven himself as a military leader and by mobilising every part of Combine society against the Clans. Of course, for Takashi Kurita this was a mixed blessing.
The Jade Falcons were experiencing runaway success against the Lyran Commonwealth. They had completely stripped the defenses of Ironhold and Eden enclaves, reasoning that anyone who wanted territory on those doomed worlds was welcome to them. On their other main holding, their Tokasha enclave, they had unwittingly followed the example of the Nova Cats and ordered the mass sterilization of more than half the civilian population (which had swollen with refugees from other holdings). Their actions came to light when they extended the practise to Strana Mechty and riots by their civilians in Katyusha came close to damaging some genechapels before being put down.
The reward for having essentially all their warriors in the Inner Sphere had allowed them to overrun Trellshire and Chahar Province and were beginning to expand beyond it. Of course, with only five million clansmen in the Inner Sphere, they were a drop in a well. While the Clan's warriors stormed deeper and deeper into the Lyran Commonwealth, crushing all in their path, their civilians were abandoned to the temptations of the liberal society around them - something that shocked the conservative Jade Falcons but inevitably lured some astray as well.
Four years were long enough to let some forget the fires awaiting the Clan homeworlds but in 3028 Brim burned - literally, for the atmosphere literally ignited under the radiation it was now exposed to. Though the modest population had been entirely evacuated the images exemplified the scale of the catastrophe for the Clans and sparked panic on Babylon, which was next to go. There, the Coyotes had dug themselves deep beneath the Snaefell mountains while the Cloud Cobras and Diamond Sharks had managed by herculean efforts to each removed more than ten million civilians.
What had not been addressed was the Ice Hellion population. In 3028 a blazing row in the Grand Council broke out between the Diamond Shark Khans and those of the Ice Hellions, violence averted only by the fact that the Hellions were attending via HPG relays from the Inner Sphere and out or reach. As far as the Hellions were concerned, they had taken everyone they were concerned with out of the Clan Homeworlds - less than two million souls - and considered the others, including ten million on Babylon, to be dispensable given the demands of fighting against the Combine.
It was of course far too late to do anything and almost all of those ten million died. In response, other Clans swept across the Ice Hellion enclaves, stripping them of anything and anyone they considered of value. Many of those not taken away were sterilized or executed outright (considered an act of mercy under the circumstances). The exception was the Ice Hellion capital of Kirin, which Clan Coyote seized with most of their touman. Resistance to this was negligible since the Hellion civilians were willing to accept anyone who would save them, something the Coyotes promised readily. Within weeks work was underway on several massive shelters.
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Topic: The Clan Hegemony: An Alternate AU for the Invasion (Read 9260 times)