Debauchery x Division 13

Commissioned

Debauchery x Division

Chapter 13

-VB-

Alan Marris (clone)

Eustitius III, FS

3021.02.22

The Islamabad Crucis March Militia, 2nd Company, landed on Olindo close to where we have been pillaging. To my surprise, they ignored the Kraken in orbit of the Eustatius III (which was far away) in favor of dropping down and striking at my raiders. 

… And it was the right choice. Had they engaged my Kraken in orbit with the Union-class dropship that they came in, then they would have been forced to fight an overwhelming number of fighters. The Union-class dropship could field two aerospace fighters against the Kraken’s six fighters and its capital-grade laser turret, and in that fight, it would lose horribly. So yes, whoever the commander was, he made the right choice in landing his dropship to fight us. 

And it was a single company that had come to defend the planet. 

Unfortunately for them, I also had a dozen Clovers on the ground, so unless his company was made up of mostly heavy or assault mechs, this was not going to end well for them. 

After a full day of positioning and scouting, my clones found the scouting elements of the march militia’s 2nd Company. 

It was a lance made out of a Locust, two Wasps, and one Phoenix Hawk. 

It was … pitifully weak. Standard for a scouting lance, yes, but still pitifully weak compared to what I had. But they were problematic for me because the area around the germanium mine was pretty flat, which favored 

So instead of sending in the entire company of Clovers, I sent just two. 

The plan was simple. 

---

Corporal Sarah Lorgen, callsign Palm-3

“... Where the fuck are they?” she muttered to herself. Her Locust creaked and stomped as she drove it forward. The barely acceptable sensor suite worked overtime to analyze everything that she saw and passed by. 

Except there wasn’t anything here but a huge flat plain. 

She and the rest of her scout lance were rapidly approaching the only germanium mine on this world, which was where the pirates were sighted to be raiding. She was the one far up front of her lance in her Locust. 

Just as she was about to radio in, she spotted something on her radar. 

She immediately went to focus all of her sensors to it. Thermal, EM, radar, and LIDAR flared to life on her console and she watched intently as she brought her Locust to a standstill, ready to turn around at a moment to run back.

And that’s when the thermals spiked. 

Her eyes widened and she dove sideways. Like a gymnast, her Locust jumped off of one leg with so much force that the ground underneath the foot shattered. And just as she managed the jump, she saw and heard it. 

Hissing wheezes that passed by where she’d just been standing. 

Then she heard explosions behind her. 

She didn’t stop to look. She turned and booked it.

Her Locust rattled and jumped up and down as she pushed it to run as fast it was capable. It sprinted across the flat plains as even more shells began to land all around her. 

Her radar then chose that moment to tell her of a bigger problem: two mechs were closing in on her while she was in a sprinting Locust, the fastest fucking mech in the universe.

She dared to turn her mech’s torso slightly sideways and what she saw confused her. 

Her warbook also got confused. It was switching between a number of light mechs but kept on coming back to Wasp and Stinger, but ultimately failed to ID the attackers. But what confused her was their legs; their legs were vibrating and occasionally rising up minutely as if to adjust for something but they weren’t running.

No, something else was making plumes of dust, dirt, and mud behind them. 

“Holy shit,” she muttered. “Those are new mechs.”

As if to agree with her, the universe stopped exploding around her. 

Then the firing began again. 

One struck her. 

Then two.

She knew the feel of these shells. AC/2s! But they were firing like they were machineguns! 

She screamed as her Locust lurched again. She immediately pressed her radio. “This is Palm-3 to Palm-1! This is Palm-3 to Palm-1! I’m getting hammered by UM mechs that shoot AC/2s like machineguns at LRM ranges! And it’s gaining on my sprinting Locust! I repeat I am getting hammered by something ridiculous, over!” 

But before she heard a reply, she felt it more than she heard it. 

An explosive boom.

A squealing snap.

And her mech losing balance. 

“No, fuck -!” she hissed as her Locust nosedove forward as one of the legs gave out under her. “Fuckkkkk…!” she hissed out as the nose of her Locust slammed into the dirt and then started barrelrolling. 

Her cockpit glass cracked as her mech frontrolled exactly twice before coming to a stop. 

With everything spinning around her, Sarah reached out to pop the cockpit open. Instead she found that it wouldn’t engage. As the spinning subsided and she felt uncomfortable, she realized her situation. 

Her mech was upside down.

Fuck.

Then she heard a growing rumble.

Double fuck. 

She tried to find a way to get out of her mech… Or actually, should she? If she somehow broke the mech grade cockpit glass no matter how cracked it was, then she would be out in the open for those two impossible mechs to see her. Even if she tried to use her mech as a cover, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t be find. 

Instead, the best thing she could do was stay inside and make it appear like she was unconscious.

She quickly limited her movement and stayed still. 

The mechs drove by … 

“Palm-3, we’re getting close to your position! Do you read, over?”

Shit. 

If she moved now when they were so close, then they might spot her.

She closed her eyes and stayed still, making herself appear as if she was dangling from her seat belt. 

The two mechs circled around her once and then twice - and she did see that they were using odd attachments on their feet instead of moving their legs - before they sped off… toward where she’d come from. 

Double shit. 

They moved quickly, leaving behind a plume of more dust and dirt that obscured her vision of them.

She used this chance to quickly reach for her radio.

“This is Palm-3, Palm-1. I’m down. I repeat, I am down and out. The two enemy mechs are heading toward you. I repeat, the enemy mechs, two of them, are heading toward you, over.”

---

Leftenant Rosari Kamdani, call sign Palm-1

She frowned when she heard Corporal Lorgen’s report. 

“Looks like our girl is down,” she transmitted from within her Phoenix Hawk over to her lancemates. “And the enemy is coming our way. Two light mechs but with some kind of enhanced movement and rapid firing AC/2s.”

“Bah, we can take them,” Sergent Kolla grunted from inside his Wasp. “But you’re gonna have to frontline, leftenant.”

“I know,” she grunted. 

If there truly were rapid firing AC/2 totting light mechs that were as fast as or faster than Locusts, then they were all in for a very rough time. 

“We’ve got incoming,” she called out as her Phoenix Hawk caught thermal and radar signatures on the horizon. 

And then those thermal signatures bloomed. Idiots were firing their guns from too far away. 

“Incoming,” she grunted. 

What she did not expect, however, was to be struck.

Her center and left torso squealed as their armor took the brunt of the exploding shells, and she quickly raised her mech’s arms up in alarm. She staggered back as even more shells struck her, and realized that less than a third of the shells coming at them was missing.

“F-Fuck, I ca-!” 

Corporal Jygels didn’t last in his Locust. He took six hits to his mech before something punched through and lit his fusion engine up. His mech exploded on the spot and sent parts and shrapnels everywhere. 

“I don’t think we can take whatever is shooting at us, leu!” Kolla shouted over the radio as he dove behind her Phoenix Hawk. 

“I know! Radio it in!” 

---

Oh? Their main force was moving.

But they weren’t going to get here on time. 

I watched my clones and their mechs as the Auto-Aim continued to pummel the Davion mechs from beyond the Davion’s range of fire. They tried to retreat, but my faster Clovers kept pace and then started to circle them like nipping wolves. 

It wasn’t long before the Phoenix Hawk’s arms blasted away and then its center torso blew out from too many hits. 

The Wasp didn’t last long after that. 

The loss of their scouting lance got the Davions to push, which was the wrong move for them to make.

---

Reisen, in orbit

Even though he was in orbit, he got live feed of the battles below. 

And he whistled. 

Last time, he had been too busy doing his own raiding to know exactly how great those Clovers were. But now that he was seeing the skirmishes and battles from above with nothing else to be 

Those Davions had no idea what they were about to be up against.

And it showed and resulted in horrific losses. 

Their scouting lance got gutted when the Clovers started their attacks from ridiculous ranges. LRMs were the most common long range weapons, but those only struck target up to a kilometer, not the two kilometers that the Clovers were shooting their guns from. This kept them out of visual sight but not out of sensors, but they were too small of a target for anything to lock onto for the Davions to fire at. 

This meant that the Davions only had two choices: advance to get a lock or retreat.

They tried both.

They failed at both. 

Because whenever they advanced, the Clovers would back off with their superior speed. Whenever they retreated, the Clovers followed with their superior speed. 

It didn’t matter what they did because every movement that they made was accompanied by the constant barrage of explosive shells from the Clovers. 

Their only assault mech, a Battlemaster, tried to shield the lighter mechs with its heavier armor and bulkier frame, but even it couldn’t last long against the constant onslaught of shells fired by an entire company of Clovers.

And after enough damage and losses, the Davions eventually decided to fully retreat off-world. 

When the Crucis Militia’s Union dropship took off in a hurry as their very dropship began to get peppered by the Clovers, they’d lost two-thirds of their mechs, turning the company into a lance. 

Reisen whistled at how powerful those Clovers were, and he desperately wanted some for himself. 

-VB-

The Raid of Eustitius III was the first raid in a series of raids conducted by House Marris against the Federated Suns as well as their first official assault on the Successor State. 

House Marris, under its founder and leader Alan Marris, used its natively designed Clover mechs in these raids, and they became infamous for being mech killers. While Clovers themselves possessed different mech design philosophies that deviated from standard mech designs of the era, they weren’t the highlight of these raids; that was the germanium mines. 

Germanium was and continues to be a critical mineral in interstellar empires for what they are used in: jumpship’s KF Drives. It was for this reason that many currencies are backed by germanium along with other precious metals like gold.

However, pirates normally did not raid germanium mines for several reasons. The greatest of these reasons was the fact that no germanium mines produced finished germanium products; almost all germanium was shipped as ores across multiple stars to the refineries at their destination. Processed germanium also interfered with jumpships’ KF Drives, which had a core made out of a germanium alloy. Because of this, pirates ignored germanium more often than not because there was a fear that taking on too many germanium ores onto a jumpship might cause a misjump. House Marris, however, specifically went after the germanium mines, destroyed the mine infrastructure, and made off with the mined germanium ores, even if there was a chance that those ores might interfere with their jumpship’s KF Drive and cause a misjump. At the same time, Marris’s raiders rarely attacked civilian population centers. These two characteristics were what differentiated the Marris Raids from normal pirate or enemy state raids. 

In total, they struck over thirty germanium mines of various sizes and productivitiy in and around the Outbacks and caused the Germanium Shortage of 3021.

As a result of these raids, Universal Air, the manufacturers who made a Star Lord jumpship every few years alongside their Invader-class jumpships, needed to make a choice after the Marris Raids plunged their germanium shipment to near zero. Forced to choose between their reliable Invader jumpship production and the unprofitable Star Lord line, they chose to focus their all into the Invader production and allowed Federated Suns’ native Star Lord production to die.

If Universal Air had it hard, then this germanium shortage and loss of germanium mines devastated the barely standing Challenger Systems, formerly the only producer of Monolith-class jumpships within the Federated Suns but who since lost that capability during the Succession Wars and only hung on as a jumpship repair and maintenance company. Challenger Systems essentially threw in the towel and went into their final bankruptcy, prompting First Prince Hanse Davion to use his house’s personal finance to buy out the company (and its Panpour shipyard) in the hopes that when times got better, he will be able to restructure and return the company back into shape. 

Similarly, Federated-Boeing Interstellar, the biggest  jumpship producer of the Federated Suns, also had to scale back on their jumpship production of Invader-class jumpships. Had it not been for their own stock of germanium ores and private germanium mines closer to the core of the nation, then there was a distinct possibility that they too would have had to do the same. 

House Marris, as the perpetrator of the Germanium Shortage of 3021 via their raids, earned the ire of the entire Federated Suns, and particularly First Prince Hanse Davion. This would be the spark that would light the Periphery War of 3023, and the introduction of House Marris to the Inner Sphere and the periphery as a major player.