When it’s finally all over, despite everything, the FedCom is still
tenuously united. The shared struggle against the WoB has restored some of the sense of solidarity between its two halves that was lost back when the Steiner half felt it had been left to suffer through the Clan Invasion alone. Also important, few of the leading financial movers and shakers are willing to advocate incurring the additional economic pain that would result from dissolving it any time soon. Having led his people to a hard-won victory, Victor is still popular with a majority of the population, much to the frustration of the likes of the Haseks and the Kelswa-Steiners.
Helen Trempeleau never
quite musters the resolve to create a breakaway state of her own in the Outback region of the FedCom, but she does do everything she can to prevent the worlds under her control being left completely defenceless against bandits because of the withdrawal of garrison troops to fight on the front lines against the WoB, CC and TC. She doesn’t actually
achieve all that much in this regard, but her unstinting efforts greatly endear her to her people. With the end of hostilities, Victor is finally able to spare some thought for the increasingly widespread dissatisfaction now making itself felt among the people of the Outback. He finally attempts to defuse it by re-creating the old Outer March of centuries before, with its regional capital once again on Filtvelt, promoting Trempeleau to Duchess and naming her hereditary Minister of the Outer March. He privately warns her that any suspicion of her putting her own agenda before the welfare of the FedCom as a whole will result in the harshest of punishments.
The final defeat of the WoB compels Sun-Tzu to at last sue for peace with Candace before Victor can redirect all his efforts against him. The Junta headed by Boris Tharn refuse to formally do the same, but both sides in the Taurian conflict call ceasefires and these eventually become permanent.
The net gains the CC has made at the expense of the SIC are fairly modest. The worlds of Genoa, Zurich, Tall Trees, Aldebaran, Menkalinan, Saiph, New Canton, Liao, Ningpo, Gan Singh, Pleione, Poznan, Styk, Shensi, St. Andre, Hunan and Tsitsang have been returned to the Capellan fold, but it’s decidedly questionable whether they’re enough to make it all have been worthwhile. (Tao ‘MechWorks on Styk is the only prize of much material value.) The worlds of Minnacora, New Sagan and Capricorn III were seized back during the course of the struggle, but were eventually lost again. Still, at least Sun-Tzu now finally rules the ancestral family homeworld of Liao, which may matter a great deal more in terms of symbolic value. But his failure to permanently retake other important worlds, in particular the shipyards of Necromo and Bergan Industries on Ares, is a bitter pill to have to swallow. The annexation of Detroit along the way hasn’t done much to sweeten it.
At the height of the struggle, Kali Liao sacrificed her own life to kill the "Dancing Joker" before he could assassinate Sun-Tzu, having been hired by Tormana in his last attempt at reasserting himself as a player. Tormana was then killed in turn by Thuggee cultists in suitably gruesome fashion.
All in all, Sun-Tzu will ultimately go down in Capellan history as only a "qualified success" rather than being semi-deified as in the canon timeline. (The phrase
Xin Sheng will be one that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth all around after he’s gone.) Their long suffering at his hands has made the people of the SIC fanatical in their determination never again to be part of the CC. The people of the CC (or at least all those who consider themselves truly patriotic) have meanwhile come to regard the SIC as a loathsome nest of traitors and Davion puppets who deserve nothing better than death or enslavement, rather than the "estranged brothers and sisters" they were before. Any prospect of the two states ever being reunited one day now seems impossibly remote.
The MoC has lost the lives of many of its soldiers, but otherwise come through fairly well. The former New Colony Region worlds of Joppa and Úr Cruinne have been annexed (the latter at its own request) in an attempt to convince the people that they’ve gotten something concrete as a reward for all their labours. The rest of the NCR has broken away to become the Fronc Reaches, largely unnoticed by anyone else.
Meanwhile, the TC is a complete shambles. The worlds of Amber Grove, Perdition, Logan’s Land, Norman’s World, Celentaro, Organo and Cynon have been occupied by the AFFC and proclaimed an independent Perdition Union under FedCom military protection. What they actually are, of course, is a satellite state with a puppet government on Perdition going through the motions of administration but having no real power at all. Victor has no enthusiasm whatsoever for this setup, but his own people want to feel they’ve gained something as recompense for their long ordeal at the hands of the "Taurian barbarians" and there’ll be an outcry if he attempts to withdraw from the occupied worlds anytime soon. It’ll be at least a generation before any kind of diplomatic settlement can even be contemplated and even then only if the ruling military Junta on Taurus (currently headed by Boris Tharn) has been overthrown in the meantime. Meanwhile, all of the newer worlds settled in recent decades by the Far Looker movement have rebelled against the authority of the Junta and pledged allegiance to Erik Martens-Calderon (and Cham Kithong). An increasingly brutal police state is taking shape in the remaining older worlds and there’s no obvious end in sight to the sufferings of their people.
The FWL is a shambles too. Corrine is forced to sit out much of the conflict in "protective custody" on Tharkad. When a revolt against Blakist domination in the Marik Commonwealth overthrows the illegal rule of her father Paul, Corrine is able to persuade Victor to set her free and provide her with transportation home. She makes valiant attempts to re-establish herself as Captain-General, but to no avail. All the old troublemakers (Regulus, Andurien, the Rim Commonality, the Silver Hawks, Ohren and Zion) refuse outright to acknowledge her authority and continue to effectively function as independent powers. Eventually the FWL is formally dissolved as in the canon timeline.
The liberation of Terra from the WoB is compared in triumphalist propaganda to its liberation from Stefan Amaris by Aleksandr Kerensky three centuries before. It’s hailed as a victory for the Star League… but this is a claim that soon starts to ring somewhat hollow when people stop to realize that the membership of the SL now effectively consists of just the FedCom, the DC, the FRR, the SIC and ComStar. None of the fragments of the disintegrating FWL has ever formally withdrawn from the SL, but none of them has any representation in it either because there’s no Captain-General to act as Star League Council Lord for them all. Corrine argues that since she previously filled that role, her newly-formed Marik-Stewart Commonwealth should inherit the SL membership formerly belonging to the FWL as a whole, but this is seen by the remaining Council Lords as primarily a stratagem to enhance her own status… and in any case the entire region is still tainted with the stigma of Blakism in the minds of many people in the rest of the Inner Sphere. Corinne is turned down… and both she and the other leaders of the former FWL are privately informed that none of their states will be considered for membership while any leader who held power during the conflict still remains in power, or in any case until at least a generation has passed. This snub will be remembered for a long time to come… and none of these leaders or their heirs will be applying for SL membership in the foreseeable future. The CC has formally pulled out and the MoC has yet again followed its lead. There are now effectively two Taurian Concordats and neither of them is prepared to participate either. Without a full two-thirds of the previous membership still being prepared to formally subscribe to the idea of the SL, in legal terms it should technically cease to exist by default. When the Sixth Whitting Conference is convened on Terra in 3079 (nine years after the last one), the victorious powers amend the SL constitution to keep it in being, in name at least. The DC is conscious of the need to preserve it in order to enable the Nova Cats to continue to regard themselves as serving the SL rather than just the DC alone. The exhausted Candace (who has remained acting First Lord throughout the conflict because of the impossibility of formally convening to elect another while it was still raging) is finally able to formally relinquish power and Mänsdottir is elected the sixth First Lord of the Second Star League. Candace also abdicates as Duchess of St. Ives and Prime Minister of the SIC in favour of Kai. An attempt is made to reinvigorate popular support for the SL by allowing the current holder of the rotating office of First Lord to convene future Whitting Conferences at the original Court of the Star League on Terra, but the effect is limited at best.
- - - - - -
As the Conference is drawing to a close, the assembled House Lords and Clan Khans are stunned when the false Thomas Marik shows up out of the blue after nine years of being believed dead. He reveals to them everything he knows about the Five Hidden Worlds and informs them of how he finally discovered the location of Jardine, after years of searching, only to find it uninhabited and in the midst of being devastated by a traps volcano. He warns them that there are three more Hidden Worlds still unaccounted for. This news is certainly unsettling enough, but there’s general agreement that they’re probably no great threat all in all. Thomas reveals his decades of imposture to the Star League Council and announces his withdrawal from public life before heading off to Oriente to be reunited with his family. Tragically, shortly afterwards a WoB ROM operative at the Ducal Court of Christopher Halas, cast adrift by the failure of his cause, tries to assassinate him in revenge for his "betrayal" and ends up killing his two eldest children instead. Thomas is left a broken man, held partly to blame for the deaths by his wife and his father-in-law and likewise blaming himself. He lives out his remaining days as a virtual hermit and his eventual death will scarcely be noticed by the Inner Sphere at large.
- - - - - -
Word eventually filters through to the Inner Sphere via the Diamond Sharks that the remnants of the Homeworld Clans have finally prevailed over the Manei Domini. The cost has been horrific: Arcadia, Circe, Eden, Albion, Atreus, Barcella, Brim, Foster, Hector, Homer, Ironhold, Kirin, Lum, Marshall, New Kent, Niles, Priori, Shadow, Strana Mechty, Tamaron, Tokasha, Tranquil and York have all been nuked or bio-bombed into oblivion or have sustained such severe ecological damage that they’ve begun a rapid and irreversible slide into uninhabitability. The only Homeworlds left are Babylon, Dagda, Bearclaw, Delios, Gatekeeper, Glory, Grant’s Station, Hellgate, Paxon, Roche, Sheridan, Strato Domingo, Tathis, Tiber and Vinton. Of those Clans still based primarily in the Homeworlds which existed at the start of the conflict, the only ones still surviving in name when it’s finally over are the Star Adders, Cloud Cobras, Goliath Scorpions, Coyotes and Blood Spirits (the latter having survived only because the Manei Domini never found their hidden redoubt in the Colleen system). Remnants of the others have been Absorbed by one or another of these.
[Another idle aside… would it be a little too over the top to have Precentor Apollyon and Khan Brett Andrews kill each other in single combat?]By contrast, another Clan which was officially dead at the start of the conflict has risen from its grave. The Manei Domini made no move to assault the worlds of the Tanis system in the early stages of the conflict, correctly guessing that the restive former Burrocks who’d been reshuffled there in the years following their Absorption by the Star Adders would seize their opportunity to throw off the Adder yoke and proclaim the rebirth of their Clan. They assumed they’d be able to lure the Burrocks into adopting a policy of effective neutrality by continuing to refrain from attacking them until the rest of the Clans had been smashed, after which they’d naturally have turned on the Burrocks without warning and destroyed them too. In the event, the Burrocks proved less gullible than they’d hoped, patiently waiting until the struggle between the Manei Domini and their fellow Clans was at the stage where everything hung in the balance and then attacking the MD from behind with savage ferocity. This had ultimately tipped the balance in favour of the Clans and made their final victory possible. The bloodied Burrocks then demanded recognition of their reclaimed independence and sole possession of the Tanite Worlds as a just reward for their efforts. The Star Adders and Cloud Cobras were doubly enraged at this: not only were the Burrocks and Tanites refusing to render proper submission to their Adder conquerors in a legitimate Trial of Absorption now some two decades past, but without the Tanite Worlds the Cobras themselves would have no planetary holdings left other than their surviving enclaves on Babylon. The Adders and Cobras sought to brand the Burrocks as
dezgra,
chalcas, cowardly opportunists deserving of nothing less than a Trial of Annihilation, but the Goliath Scorpions and Coyotes absolutely refused to go along with this. They pragmatically felt that the Clans as a whole had lost so much of their total population and resource base already that it was little short of criminal folly to even contemplate adding even more wholesale slaughter to the tally. The Blood Spirits did a great deal of soul-searching and eventually decided that they had to come down against the idea too. Although the Spirits had an enmity towards the Burrocks going back two and a half centuries, the Adders had done far more to deserve their hatred in recent times. And if the Adders and the Cobras were allowed to declare a Trial of Annihilation against the Burrocks for deviating from their ideas of proper Clan behavior, wouldn't the Spirits (long criticized on similar grounds by other Clans) soon be next on their hit list? So the Scorpions, Coyotes and Spirits eventually forced the Adders, Cobras and Burrocks into agreeing to fight a kind of combined "Trial of Reabsorption" by the Adders against the Burrocks, Trial of Refusal against their original Absorption by the Burrocks against the Adders and Trial of Possession between the Cobras and Adders and the Burrocks for control of the entire Tanis system. (In other words, might makes right and winner takes all in the usual Clan way.) The conflict that followed was absolutely brutal and saw countless individual breaches of
zellbrigen, but by a very narrow margin the Burrocks won (only because the Adders and Cobras were already so badly weakened by their prior losses at the hands of the Manei Domini). The Adders and Cobras were apoplectic with rage, but the Scorpions, the Coyotes and (especially) the Spirits collectively demanded that they accept the result of the Trial with what semblance of good grace they could muster and move on… for the time being anyway.
Within a matter of months, the Cobra leadership had decided that their position in the Homeworlds was becoming untenable. The Coyotes were now openly gearing up to challenge them for possession of their Babylon holdings and their supposed allies the Adders had begun privately sounding them out about the prospect of an essentially unopposed Absorption. They decided to gamble their all on a bold plan to pack up and leave the Homeworlds and then throw everything they had left into an all-or-nothing effort to conquer the worlds of Nueva Castile. They reached an agreement to cede their Babylon holdings to the Coyotes upon their departure in return for not being subjected to any disruptions to their preparations for said departure in the form of Trials of Possession for specific objectives beforehand. They also renounced all their residual claims to any share of the Tanis system in favour of the Adders in return for some transport JumpShips. Their bold gamble ultimately paid off: the Castilians and Umayyads were swiftly conquered and the creation of the Cobra Imperio proclaimed.
At the height of the desperate struggle against the Manei Domini, when the Clans had teetered on the brink of total extinction, the remaining Diamond Sharks, Snow Ravens and Hell’s Horses had all taken the grim decision to cut and run. The Sharks fled to the refuge of the Attenbrooks system, roughly midway between the Clan Homeworlds and the Inner Sphere. The Ravens predictably fled to rhe Outworlds Alliance. The Horses took advantage of the preparations made for their derailed plan to migrate to the Inner Sphere in force and fled to the haven of their forward base on Nouveaux Paris. Meanwhile, the ragged remnants of the Jade Falcons, accompanied by the handful of surviving diehard Crusader Wolves, compelled by their devastating prior losses to sit out the struggle and search for a safe place in which to lie low until it should end, had found a short-term refuge in their Deep Periphery holding of the Khwarazm Empire. The Wolves eventually agreed to an essentially unopposed Absorption by the Jade Falcons, a condition of which was the election of Quinn Kerensky as JF Khan. Soon afterwards, a ragtag fleet of transport JumpShips laden with passenger and cargo DropShips arrived at the Khwarazm worlds escorted by two severely damaged WarShips (the
Congress-class
Kerensky's Pride and the
Whirlwind-class
Emerald Tornado), carrying the few Jade Falcon warriors and civilians who'd succeeded in escaping the apocalyptic bloodbath that was ravaging the Homeworlds. Their arrival gave the morale of the earlier arrivals a desperately-needed boost and, more importantly, the two additional WarShips gave them a significantly better chance of surviving in the long run when they were combined with the only three WarShips to (barely) survive their initial expulsion from the Inner Sphere (the
Black Lion II-class
Jade Aerie and the
Aegis II-class
Jade Talon and
Red Talon).
The existence of the Society (AKA the Scientists’ Cabal) has never been exposed to the rest of what remains of the Clans as a whole. The loss of Strana Mechty (nuked and bio-bombed) and Ironhold (nuked) has deprived them of their secret OmniMech and ProtoMech factories, but they still have hidden stockpiles which they may be able to retrieve one day (using IndustrialMechs with Environmental Sealing and protective suits to let them operate on poisoned worlds where necessary). The importance of the Scientist Caste to the eugenics program is greater than ever following the loss of the Master Genetic Repository on Strana Mechty and those of them who survived the general carnage are well-placed for a future takeover bid. The availability of Manei Domini salvage for study and perhaps reverse-engineering may well make them even more powerful. (If the Genecaste don’t really exist yet… they may one day.) And the chances are that Etienne (Balzac) will have been left to his own devices on his private world of Etienne’s Sanctuary after the JFs fled from the Inner Sphere and the Near Periphery, since it seems unlikely that they’d have bothered to detour to pick him up. Who knows what he might have gotten up to in the years since… ?
History is written by the winners and so the WoB will still go down in the official histories of what the Sucessor States will call the Blakist War or Second Star League Civil War (the Clans will call it the Genocide War) as madmen, but not as monsters like in the canon timeline because the worst of their atrocities were "only" perpetrated against the "barbarian" Clans and not against "civilized" fellow Spheroids. This will make the lot of would-be apologists and revisionists in future decades much easier. (And there
will be some of those over the coming years.)
Another major difference from the canon timeline in terms of the overall picture of the post-war galaxy is (as I mentioned before) the survival of a greater proportion of IS WarShips and enough shipyard capacity to eventually start building more again. The way the canon timeline has relentlessly contrived throughout to render them virtually extinct has annoyed me no end and I’ve deliberately done everything I could to avoid paralleling it in this regard.
Nobody knows about the many arms caches and other secret facilities the WoB constructed on the worlds they’d controlled.
Nobody knows about the many leading figures on those worlds secretly brainwashed into devotion to the Blakist cause.
Nobody knows that many of the rank-and-file former members of the WoB who’ve "seen the error of their ways" and re-joined ComStar are inwardly committed to gradually subverting it back onto the path of secrecy, lies and manipulation that served it so well in the past.
Nobody knows what became of the WOBS
Erinyes.
Nobody knows the locations of the three remaining Hidden Worlds.
And few people outside his family really noticed when, at the height of the war, Leftenant General Arthur Steiner-Davion was reported killed in action… but his body was never found.
- - - - - -
Twenty years pass.
The Seventh Whitting Conference is held on a still-rebuilding Terra in 3082. Mänsdottir chooses this moment to announce his abdication as Elected Prince Regent of the FRR in favour of Ragnar. Victor is elected to serve a second term as First Lord and the Star League Constitution is further amended so that Hohiro will automatically be the next First Lord, followed by Ragnar, followed by Kai… and then the cycle will begin again. The Khans of Clan Wolf, Clan Ghost Bear and Clan Nova Cat are given the right to sit and speak in the Star League Council, but not to vote or be eligible for election as First Lord. (Much the same as with the Primus of ComStar.) The only noteworthy achievement of the Conference is an agreement to impose a moratorium on all offensive military operations (attempted conquest or raiding) in the Terran Corridor/Core Worlds region of the Inner Sphere for 20 years, to allow the region to recover further. Sun-Tzu is of course not a signatory to this, but he privately judges it best to voluntarily abide by it. Corrine (allowed as a courtesy to attend the Conference as a foreign observer) does sign up, but the other leaders of the former FWL states (the Silver Hawks in particular) refuse to be bound by this.
The next noteworthy event during this period is a foolhardy attempt by the Silver Hawks to retake worlds in the Terran Corridor from the FedCom in 3083, in defiance of the 20-year moratorium on such actions. They get slaughtered by a furious AFFC and the morale of the few survivors is further shaken by the hatred their actions earn them from the war-weary populations of those worlds, who had been expected to welcome them as liberators. With their own forces largely destroyed, the Silver Hawks are left with little choice but to accept military protection from (and eventually political absorption by) the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth.
Another noteworthy event is the return of the Jade Falcons to the borders of the Inner Sphere, accompanied by the Hell’s Horses, in 3086. The JFs reoccupy their former holdings of Von Strang’s World, Botany Bay and Gotterdammerung and add to them Placidia, Sigurd, Blackstone, Oberon VI and Butte Hold. The HHs take control of Manaringaine, Ferris, The Rock, Nyserta, Drask’s Den, Paulus Prime, Elissa, Crellacor, Gustrell, Star’s End, Santander V and Porthos. Both are gambling heavily that the IS powers will tolerate their presence rather than fight another war. For the next five years they keep a very low profile, not even raiding into the FedCom, FRR or DC. Then they start carrying out brief, small-scale raids which are conducted essentially as Trials of Possession for specific objectives, making it clear that they aren’t planning to permanently occupy any of the worlds that they hit. The Successor States decide that tolerating this comparatively civilized form of raiding is decidedly preferable to allowing new Pirate Kingdoms to take root in the area and make no move to dislodge them: lingering compassion over what the Clans endured at the hands of the WoB (on the part of sentimental types like Victor anyway) doubtless plays a part in this calculation too. Nobody seriously expects the Falcons and Horses to feel the slightest gratitude for this, though. And, of course, you can be sure that they
don't.
The Diamond Sharks establish themselves in the Chainelane Isles and gradually carve out an economic empire across the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery, much as in the canon timeline.
The most noteworthy event of all during this period is the
Misogi (Purification) War. This is essentially just a delayed version of the conflict or the same name in the canon timeline, erupting in 3089 and lasting until 3094. Eventually Hohiro and Ninyu Kerai-Indrahar prevail. The Black Dragons (including
Tai-shu Kiyamori Minamoto and the entire Council of Gems) are mercilessly purged.
Few people outside ComStar even notice when Gavin Dow dies in 3091 and is succeeded as Primus by Lisa Koenigs-Cober.
The last decades of the 31st Century and the first decades of the 32nd see intermittent campaigns waged by the leading states of the former FWL to expand through the annexation of newly-independent worlds, accompanied by some predation upon the latter by the CC and the FedCom. Victor wants no part of this, but local commanders in the Tamarind March keep finding contrived justifications for snapping up a planet or two here, a planet or two there… over time, it all mounts up. OTOH, Victor, Hohiro and Corrine do continue to observe the prohibition on military action in the Terran Corridor/Core Worlds region by unspoken agreement even after the formal 20-year moratorium expires in 3102.
Also of some note during this time is the growth of a shadowy but seemingly widespread political movement on all the worlds that had formerly made up the WoB Core Protectorate, which, although it denies any Blakist agenda, asserts the desirability of a permanent reunification of the Core Worlds of the Inner Sphere under some kind of revived Terran Hegemony in all but name, free of the "oppressive" and "exploitative" rule of the Successor States. Attempts by the House intelligence agencies to infiltrate the movement meet with little success, although they do uncover the name of its reputed leader: a mysterious individual named Devlin Stone. Over time the movement begins to win converts on many more worlds that had once belonged to or bordered the TH.
In addition to all these significant events, there are a couple of significant non-events, namely the complete absence of any formal disarmament and demobilization treaties because there’s no RotS in existence to play the role of honest broker to the other Successor States. There
is an informal agreement to go slowly with replacing combat units destroyed in the recent gruelling wars against first the Clans and then the WoB, but nobody is actually scrapping still-usable war machines, or going around retooling or mothballing arms factories or reducing RCTs to LCTs, and eventually every major power will even start allocating resources for the construction of at least a few new WarShips too - because they're all secretly deeply worried that the surviving Homeworld Clans will eventually come looking to exact a terrible revenge on the Inner Sphere for spawning the WoB by unleashing their own fleets without restraint. (So that’s a great big "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah" to all of you WarShip-haters out there!
[Perhaps I should state for the record at this point that I personally have no sympathy at all with the people who liked the way that the Republic Era in the canon timeline had supposedly made BattleMechs “rare and precious” again as of 3132 or thereabouts, because they’d previously considered that having all factories back to churning out ‘Mechs at more or less full capacity again from around 3060 or thereabouts (especially by comparison with the bare trickle they could manage during the Succession Wars) constituted “cheapening” them. Personally 3060 or thereabouts is my favourite era for playing in. If you want an unrealistic game where a single company of ‘Mechs can determine the fate of an entire planet, can’t you just play as mercs under contract to a Great House in either the 3025 or the 3039 era? Please don’t keep trying to inflict your preferences on those of us who don’t share them by forever egging TPTB at CGL on to use bloodbaths like the Jihad or contrived developments like the Republic Disarmament Treaties to reduce the size of the House militaries. When star empires go to war on the grand scale, I don’t want the fighting to involve big armies. I want it to involve huge armies, on the scale of the Napoleonic Era at least, along with WarShip battles and orbital bombardment. Anything less is totally unrealistic IMO.]3100A new century dawns. The Thirteenth Whitting Conference is held on Terra. At its conclusion the Council Members issue a joint statement to the assembled media expressing optimism that the new century will be far more peaceful than the old one.
Author
Topic: Victor Victorious (Redux) (Read 27129 times)