Scavenged Restoration 68

Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs

Scavenged Restoration

Chapter 68

-VB-

Hanse read the report.

He read it one more time before he just let it drop from his still outstretched hands. 

“...” He pinched the bridge of his nose as he leaned back into his chair and just … felt the headache growing bigger and bigger. 

And he wondered if this was what the rest of high command and his people felt when they first heard the results of the Fourth Succession War. 

In hindsight, he knew that he’d dove into the Fourth with just the bare minimum requirement. And now, he saw the result of another such attempt, though caused by someone else this time. 

Duke Michael Hasek-Davion had ruined the Capellan March.

Fifty-two jump collars. 

Fifty-two motherfucking jump collars.

If his assault on Necromo had been limited to the dropships, pocket warships, the soldiers, mechs, armored vehicles, and other war materials, then he would have just shrugged and moved on as more than half had been mercenaries and the other half had been the duke’s personal military. 

But the jumpships? 

Those weren’t just the duke’s. He knew that House Hasek only had three jumpships to their name. He knew that some of the mercenaries brought theirs along… like the Northwind Highlanders. Those accounted for a dozen. He also knew that the duke hired the service of another dozen or so from independent haulers and jumpship clans. He didn’t know the exact numbers, but Hanse will be generous and say that seven jumpships belonged to all sorts of different people, the duke himself included. 

The rest? 

They were the Capellan March Militia’s.

Nine jumpships belonged to the Capellan March Militia.

This … this stupidly huge loss wasn’t just bad. 

It undid the past decade’s progress. They made fifty fucking jump collars in the past decade since the end of the Fourth Succession War. And now, they lost fifty-two.

Hanse now had a decision to make. 

A big one. 

He could continue to prosecute the war on the Combine front. Continue to pressure the Draconis Combine along with the Lyran Commonwealth. The Combine was still far behind them in combined total jumpship count. They will be able to outwhelm and outmaneuver the snakes. However, this strategy came at the cost of the Capellan March. Depending on William’s mood, it may burn. It may not. Hell, he might do nothing to the Capellan March and instead focus on retaking the Tikonov Commonality. The man may have declared that he didn’t want the throne of the Star League, but he never said anything about retaking the former worlds of the Capellan Confederation. 

If he chose to halt the advance to split the Combine campaign’s jumpships to reinforce the Capellan March, then his role in this war was over. The Lyran Commonwealth will have to fight the entire war by themselves. Doing this would weaken the alliance between their two nations and might even put Melissa’s political foundation at risk. She may be the Steiner heir, yes, but there were plenty of other Steiners in the Commonwealth, and if there was enough political backlash for everything, then the Estates General may demand Katrina choose someone else as her heir instead of Melissa. 

But if he didn’t do this, then it would be his position as the First Prince that would be in danger. The people had already lost too much trust in him, and lost trust in his house to a lesser extent. Right now, he was no more popular than any Mariks were in the Free Worlds League; only those within his house’s strongholds and inner circles continued to give him the unconditional support he used to enjoy before the Fourth Succession War. 

He could only divert some jumpships instead of the entire campaign, but too few would only risk losing them to the Capellans if they decided to invade. Too few would also do very little to help recall the reserves and garrisons who might be needed to pull back rather than stand their ground. Sending too few, thus, would only risk the Capellan March losing worlds not in bursts as the Capellans landed their troops to take fully garrisoned worlds but in waves as they swallowed half-garrisoned or even garrison-less worlds left in the chaotic retreat of limited jumpships. 

Because, apparent-fucking-ly, the Capellans hadn’t just built fifteen warships like the rest of the Inner Sphere had thought. No… Those bastards had built additional ten in secret. 

The fucking Capellans, by themselves, had more warships than the entire FedCom Alliance.

How did they do it? 

It didn’t matter. 

Because those sixteen warships, including the one they revealed during the Andurien Crisis, now had every reason to turn their guns toward the Federated Suns.

And if Hasek had done something stupid like use nukes on a Capellan world instead of losing his fleet pathetically…

Hanse didn’t want to imagine the scenario. 

The worst part about all of this? 

Hasek, instead of fighting with his soldiers, had stayed back with the jumpships and got captured by the Capellans. 

The March Lord of the Capellan March had been captured by the enemy.

There was … there was simply no word to explain the raw wrath he felt.

He couldn’t even get his hands on the duke to vent his anger. 

No… he had to wait for the Capellans to extract whatever information he had before he got back whatever living corpse the duke would be left as. Or worse, he might get another body double.

Hanse took a deep breath in. 

“Thoughts?” he asked the rest of his inner circle.

Melissa was the first to speak up. 

“Get all of the jumpships from the Combine front to bolster the Capellan March.”

That … got looks from the rest of his inner circle. 

“Melissa?” 

She turned to look at him. Her eyes were hard yet soft. 

“My mother will not begrudge you for it, Hanse. This loss… It would be staggering even for the Lyran Commonwealth. I would go so far as to say that whatever gains my mother and my people made in the Combine is nothing compared to what just happened.”

Even with how each Successor State made new jumpships from scratch, jumpships were still sacrosanct and critically vital assets of the state. Hanse knew from his school years about how each jumpship represented one world: loss of a jumpship correlated to any interstellar nation losing a world. Was it hard math? No. Was it close enough? Yes. 

And for the Federated Suns, they were now facing the potential loss of twenty-three worlds from war, disease, and natural entropy. 

“... And if we start trying to take the Combine’s jumpships, then we’ll go right back to the days of the Second Succession War,” someone muttered. 

Hanse grimaced at the reminder. 

Targeted attacks on jumpships were still against the unwritten rules of warfare. If the Federated Suns ignored that rule and attacked, then the Combine could, too. And the Capellans could, too. What they had done was not a targeted attack but one of opportunity. 

“... Personally,” he began. “I would prefer to half the Combine campaign’s jumpships and send them to the Capellan march.”

Ardan Sortek, the new Prince’s Champion, hummed. “That’s around twenty jumpships, isn’t it?” he asked. 

“It is,” Melissa frowned. “Hanse, we need to move as many pocket warships to keep the Capellans in check. We can’t do that with only half of the jumpships.” 

“They have way too many warships for our pocket warships to matter,” he replied with a shake of his head. “And whatever it is that the Capellans used to wipe out Hasek’s fleet is still out there. Space is completely in their ballpark now. The best we can do is prevent them from taking ground.”

DMI Director Yusef Myers, a new face in the inner circle, frowned. “Do we even know their newly revealed warships’ capabilities? Because my department hasn’t been able to find anything out. For all we know, they could be empty shells running on skeleton crews.”

“Knowing the chancellor?” Melissa asked with a raised eyebrow. “One of them might be like that for prisoner transport to give the prisoners false intel.”

Hanse thought the same. 

“And we must make our decision without all of the information,” the young and new Minister of MIIO Alexi Mallory, who worked closely with the previous MIIO Minister Quintus Allard, muttered. 

And there was the second major problem. 

If the first major problem was in determining who to piss off within the FedCom Alliance by choosing what to do with the Combine offensive, then the second major problem was making that decision without even knowing how the Capellans took out Hasek’s fleet and if Hasek even managed to deal any damage to the Capellans. 

Because that was an information blackhole. 

None of MIIO or DMI agents found out anything about Necromo or what happened. The furthest anyone got was finding out that there indeed were more warships, the number of the aforementioned warships that no one else knew about, and that Necromo held CCAF’s secret shipyards.

Which brought them all to another question as well. 

Why had Hasek struck Necromo? On paper, it was not an interesting world. Sure, Necromo officially had enough industrial capacity to be worthy of a multi-regimental raid, but there were other more famous worlds to strike. Hell, he could have gone and struck Victoria, which was even further away from the roaming Capellan warship fleet. In fact, Necromo was only two months away while Victoria would be close to half a year. 

Again. Why Necromo? Did he know about the secret shipyards? If he did know, then why didn’t he inform the AFFS? 

Hanse shook his head. There was no use thinking about why’s and how’s. He needed to make his decision and hope that it was the best one. 

“... Half,” he determined. “Half will remain in the Combine offensive, but the Lyrans will have to carry the war on the ground. All pocket warships will remain there as well.”

-VB-

Captain-General Thomas Marik felt his eyebrows rise up uncomfortably high when he heard the news.

“Fifty-two jump collars?” he asked hoarsely. 

He wasn’t sure how to feel about this. 

On one hand, the loss was suffered by the Federated Suns, not the Lyran Commonwealth. On the other hand, the Lyrans will now have to scramble to prosecute the war on their own or with less support from the Federated Suns. 

This only meant good things for the Free Worlds League. 

‘Perhaps now is the time for the League to put our all into this war,’ he hummed. 

The reason why the League hadn’t been able to participate in the past six months was simply due to one reason: the scattered military of House Marik’s troops needed that much time just to consolidate. Just like the Lyran Commonwealth and the Federated Suns, he had been pushing the Free Worlds League to reindustrialize at a monumental scale, taking over what his father had done and cranking it up to eleven, so to speak. 

Of course, this also meant that people got more weapons and ships around, including for the pirates. Whether the attack came from Circinus Federation or other locations, the Free Worlds League had been suffering from increased pirate raids along the periphery border. So, obviously, it was up to his house to solve it. 

Because of course it was. No one else was fucking doing anything, right? 

Ugh.

But the result of it was that the unexpected war led to House Marik not being prepared.

However, they were now. 

“Let’s see…” he hummed as he looked over the League-Commonwealth border. He ignored the “Sarna March” and looked at the traditional border; he did not want to fight the Capellans for those worlds. And he found what he saw was a good choice for an invasion. “... how the Lyrans will react to this.”

Solaris would be great in the hands of the Free Worlds League. 

-VB-

Coordinator Takashi Kurita… felt joy when he heard the news. 

The war hadn’t been going well for the past six months. Despite the fact that he had to declare war in the aftermath of those nuclear attacks, the Steiners and Davions had put up a good fight and coordinated assaults. As a result of this, he had lost a few border worlds, though most of them weren’t of too much consequence. 

He had waited and demanded the League and the Confederation to do something but they have been faffing around, doing nothing for the past six months. 

Now? 

They were sure to respond to the weakened Federated Suns. The League, and their opportunistic “entrepreneur” nature, wouldn’t be able to hold themselves back. If the Mariks didn’t do it, then the League’s smaller members will. 

What he had to do was hold the line while the Confederation and the League ate away at the FedCom Alliance’s sides.

-VB-

Sixteen warships. 

That was more than enough warships, dropships, and supporting elements to completely wipe out the Wolf’s Dragoons.

And Jaime knew it. 

And he also knew that the Capellan Confederation had ample reasons to come after them. 

Though that wasn’t the reason why they chose to get Outreach as their landhold, that was how the situation was developing. 

“... You think he’ll come after us?” Natasha asked as they read the news together along with a few other colonels of the Dragoons. 

Jaime thought about it. 

He then compared it to the chancellor’s words and actions. 

He shook his head. “No,” he replied. “He’s a man who prefers stability and cold logic over his own emotions. Choosing to send his warships, even one, would be against the cold calculus of this war.”

“Oh? And what would be the calculus?” 

He turned to look at her. 

“Right now, the Federated Suns lost fifty-two jump collars and that many in dropships. Not all of them were destroyed and most of them were captured. While most people will see the Davion loss, they will forget the Liao gains.” He leaned in. “Remember how he took in the Highlanders who stayed? I will bet my liver that he’s going to pull something similar.”

Natasha thought about it. 

And sighed. 

“So he’s not coming after us?” 

“No.” 

The Wolf’s Dragoons, despite being the preeminent mercenary company in the entire Inner Sphere since the fall of Eridani Light Horse at Sian and the split within Northwind Highlanders, remained on Outreach and only performing defensive action within Sarna March and not even within the Terran Corridor. 

Their warships were still outside the Inner Sphere, because the company as a whole decided that it would be wiser to not risk their warships to sabotage and the like. But because of this, they also couldn’t get into action themselves in this war where pocket warships and warships were looking more and more likely to be the mainline units. 

Just like what happened in Necromo.

“So… we’re just going to sit around in Sarna March… and keep doing nothing?”

“... That’s what the Federated Suns and the Lyran Commonwealth want.”

Natasha groaned very loudly before she stomped away.

He prayed for whichever poor fellow got caught in her crosshairs today.

“Colonel.”

He turned to the other side and found himself looking at one of the …

He let out a sigh.

“No.”

“But they have more warships now!” 

“And you think they will fight us on our terms?”

The warship captains were here to try to persuade him. Again.

They were doing this on a monthly basis now. 

-VB-

As I expected, the assault on Necromo came to an end in our favor and without any casualties on our side, too. 

What was even better was that the entire battle took place in orbit in far enough distances that Hasek’s fleet and its soldiers didn’t get to see any incriminating evidence on who the actual defenders of Necromo were. 

From their perspective, they were shot at from a very long distance. Nothing about that screamed artificial intelligence. It was much more likely that they would come to believe - as most would and did even in my court - that I have been hiding pocket warships of my own, secret warships, and capital-grade railguns. Nothing about what happened was truly out of the ordinary, after all. 

Whatever they believed, it didn’t matter. 

The secret … was still a secret. 

I chuckled.

Of course, I now had to strike back. 

It was only natural. 

And the best way to go about that…?

“I think I want to secure Tikonov,” I hummed to myself as I looked at the holographic map of “Sarna March” in front of me. 

“Your Wisdom?”

“Hmm?” I asked as I looked up. “Oh, what is it, Jerald?”

Jerald was one of my many secretaries. He dealt specifically with the Mercenary Review Board, however. 

“An MRB director is here for an audience. I believe he wants to appeal on behalf of the mercenaries and mercenary jumpships who were captured by our forces on Necromo.”

“Send him in,” I replied. “Let’s see what he has to say… and what I can scalp from him.”

Because wouldn’t it be really funny if I used the same mercenaries to, I don’t know, raid as much of the now weakened Capellan March as compensation for their assault on my world?

And the MRB will be sure to make them follow through with the new contract, lest they be labeled as pirates and thieves.