Scavenged Restoration 40

Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs

Scavenged Restoration

Chapter 40

-VB-

“Explain to me,” Janos Marik - the Head of House Marik, Captain-General of the Free Worlds League, and once commander of the 1st Atrean Hussars - ground out as he looked upon his so-called allies who had done worse than nothing in his absence. “How an entire duchy just … got up and walked away and none of us did anything to stop them?”

None of the people in this small room were dumb so they didn’t offer stupid excuses.

“... some of my colleagues and I wanted to see how the Capellans would handle the situation,” Countess Montcalm of Kendall spoke up when it seemed like no one else would. 

While not a fervent Marik loyalist or supporter, she had voted along Marik lines for long enough that she was included in the Marik’s outer circle members. Most of those individuals and the Marik’s inner circle was here, and it looked distressingly like they were about to be dressed down like they were children.

After the unexpected and disastrous fiasco that was the Andurien Secession, they might have deserved it. 

“And how exactly was allowing the Anduriens to rampage without oversight going to help?” 

“It would have been a test of the Capellan military power projection,” she replied. “I speak for only some of us, however, but in our minds, the Capellans are currently our allies, because of the looming threat of the Lyran Commonwealth and the Federated Suns, but they have been our longest historical and bitter enemy. They may have taken damage in the most recent war, but this was a chance for us to see if we could finally turn them into something useful for the greater Free Worlds League, if only because a compliant and subservient Capellan Confederation was a border that we would not have to send our children to.”

Janos Marik gestured for her to continue. 

“To that end, when the Anduriens broke away, we chose to… not necessarily delay the decision-making process within the Parliament but we certainly chose not to help expedite it. We wanted to watch how the Anduriens, Canopians, and Capellans handled their latest feud.”

“And the Capellans outperformed.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. They outperformed everyone’s expectations with things that no one ever thought of. Stealth techniques, new and experimental battlemechs, changes in military doctrine across all service branches, and … more.”

“You mean how fervent the individuals of the former ‘servitor’ class would react.”

“Yes. We did not recognize the level of fanaticism the Capellans would show.”

“I could have told you that without the League needing to lose an entire duchy…!” he hissed and she backed down. 

Janos took a deep breath in and looked around, finally drawing his eyes off of her, and allowing her to let out a sigh of relief. 

“Had we gone to subjugate the Anduriens before the Capellans revealed their warship, then I would have been able to negotiate a return of the majority of worlds if not the entire thing. I would have been able to leverage our standing alliance as a foundation to prevent a change in who owns what world along our border,” the captain-general remarked. “But no. The parliament chose not to intervene. We watched from the sidelines and allowed a whole duchy to break away and declare war on our ally. And our ally utterly and thoroughly dominated them before we could even think to intervene belatedly.” He sighed. “This has changed the balance of power. With the reveal of their warship, the Free Worlds League is no longer the bigger and stronger partner in this alliance. We are now at an equal footing. No, we are on the back footing.”

“Why would that be, captain-general?” someone else from the other side of the room asked. 

He turned to look at them. 

“Because the Capellans have been in possession of a Star League Memory Core for the past half decade.”

Countess Montcalm froze.

What?

“Don’t you understand? They aren’t forcing people to work in new factories with horrible conditions and massive levels of waste. The reason why they can afford to produce new experimental mechs and mass produce those Firebees is because they have been using their Star League era knowledge to revamp and upgrade everything!” 

He looked ready to throw something. 

“And fucking reason I even participated in this war by sending the Marik Guards was to earn that damned chancellor’s favor and gain a portion of the core. Which I fucking did.”

What?!

“... Then what do we do?” a stupid fucker asked. And unlike last time, this idiot was close to her. 

Janos turned to glare. 

“I’ll have to go negotiate with the chancellor. I don’t trust anyone to do the deal justice, but I doubt I’ll be able to get the duchy back in one piece. The warship was both a warning and an invitation. Anyone who dares to dictate to the Capellans will have a warship over their worlds, and they have been building warships for the past half decade in secret!” 

This time, he threw a chair in rage. It was away from the people but the old man managed to make the chair bounce off the floor and the walls in loud crashes and clanks. 

“If I demand that they return the Andurien worlds, then the Capellans will call off the alliance. They don’t need it like they did before. Their borders, as reduced as it is, are far more secure. They have a warship to use in leverage with many more surely to come. Our mechwarriors and soldiers are completely unprepared for the new Capellan doctrine if how quickly the Anduriens folded are any indication! But while they have been advancing, we have been actively losing our own worlds due to our negligence!” 

The captain-general was ranting. 

Montcalm thought that she might do that as well if she went into a coma one day and woke up to losing one of the continents on her planet to some corporate interest, but the said corporate interest is too important to Kendall for her to just kick them out by force. Or that she couldn’t even be certain that she could even succeed with violence.

She would be livid, too. 

“... I want the Parliament locked down,” he finally said after a while. “I want the Parliament to agree to whatever I have to do to get the duchy back into the League. I will not be making concessions or compensations. They should have solved this in my absence. They will agree or they can live with the fact that I will be pulling out the Marik Guards from their worlds. Is that understood?” 

Everyone in the room - statesmen from all over the League - nodded and agreed like whipped children.

“Then go.” 

Once they left, he turned to his majordomo. 

“Get me the Liao ambassador.”

-VB-

The news spread quickly and far.

Within a week, almost all worlds within the Capellan Confederation heard the Duchy of Andurien’s surrender. 

It was joyous news for a people that had just been beaten up by two peer powers. Celebrations broke out everywhere. The news had reached far wide… and had also reached the ears of diplomats who’d come to Sian from the rimward periphery.

“It is true then,” High Lady Kamea Arano muttered with her head resting on her hands and her elbows on her knees while sitting on a couch within an opulent residence provided by House Liao. 

When she announced herself at the border worlds of the confederation, she expected to be turned aside… but instead, she was told that the chancellor had been expecting her and allowed to travel within the confederation.

She had traveled across the entirety of the confederation through the latter half of the Andurien Secession, which the media was calling the Capellan Counterstrike, and arrived in Sian just in time to hear the Andurien’s surrender before her first meeting with the chancellor. 

“Yes, Lady Arano. The Capellans have a warship,” Major Darius Oliveira of Markham’s Marauders confirmed from where he stood to her left. 

This news was … rough.

Not only was the Aurigan Coalition no longer even a minor periphery power, the existence of a warship meant that whatever bargaining power she had was now close to zero. The only thing she could hope to accomplish successfully was to get some kind of a non-aggression pact by banking on the current chancellor’s publicly known generosity.

In the worst case scenario, he forces her to become a concubine and the Coalition is absorbed into the confederation without being able to fight back. 

She hated being this powerless. 

It was the rebellion all over again, but unlike the rebellion, there was no chance of victory. 

‘Look at the Duchy of Andurien,’ a traitorous corner of her mind prodded. ‘They had over two dozen regiments. The Capellans swept those away in weeks, conquered worlds in less than a month, and then forced them to capitulate before the year was over.’

The Aurigian Coalition, after the Directorate and restoration’s civil war, didn’t even have three regiments left across its fourteen worlds.*

… Even if the Aurigan Coalition was weak and small, House Liao thought about them enough to offer this residence for the duration of her stay. That meant that she and the Coalition was valuable enough to put in some effort. 

She had to hope that her people had enough things to offer - or not enough of it - to keep the Capellans from attacking or annexing them. 

-VB-

Magistrix Kyalla Centrella stared down at the copy of the treaty that her court was calling “The Andurien Surrender,” and the document spelled the end of House Humphreys as a power broker within the Free Worlds League. 

No, they weren’t just dethroned.

They were shattered.

One of the great houses of the Free Worlds League hadn’t just been damaged nor barred but outright mutilated and house arrested. There was no way to recover from this, especially not with the Capellans in charge of the Duchy of Andurien.

The news only grew worse from there. 

The Capellan Confederation had a warship.

They barely lost two regiments worth of mechs.

The Capellans were turning their military around towards the Magistracy.

There was … Her chances of victory were slim to none when there was a warship in play. Even without it, the Capellans now outnumbered her five to one in mech regiment count. They outnumbered her fifty to one in conventional military arms.

She gulped. 

“... Steward.”

Her advisor stepped up. “Yes, Magistrix?”

“Send for Diplomat Harriet Henderson. I have a mission for her.”

There was no way to win this militarily, but if she could blame everything on the Catherine and the Anduriens, then she might be able to pull out without suffering too much damage. 

“Hurry!” 

---

“We’re doomed.”

Major Emma Centrella of 2nd Canopian Cuirassiers and the daughter of Magistrix Kyalla Centrella bemoaned her people’s fate from within her Vulcan’s cockpit. 

Being within her cockpit was the only way for her to lament in private. 

Because all she could do was lament. 

Currently stationed on Fanardir along with her 2nd Canopian Cuirassiers, she was on the frontlines for the wave of Capellan regiments that were sure to sweep into the magistracy. This world was only two jumps away from Villanueva, an Andurien world which was now under the control of the Capellans, assuming that they didn’t even bother going through the League. The Capellans could use the same route they took through the mostly abandoned stars between their two nations. 

It would be silent and surprise them as no one would report if the Capellans were coming through that way. It was why they used it to attack Capellan Confederation.

Except the Capellans had been ready for her people.

And far away from the courts, she was powerless to stop her mother. 

-VB-

Myndo Waterly seethed. 

The Capellans were upsetting everything. 

“We had zero idea about this?” she demanded as she looked around the table. “Zero?”

The reappearance of a warship in the hands of a Successor Lord was the greatest failure of ComStar to date. 

“Precenter Sian?” 

“We have combed through everything on our end,” he replied evenly. “We’ve actually spent more manpower combing through their messages that our services are lagging behind.”

“Then obviously you haven’t been doing your job,” Waterly spat. 

“Ask ROM why they missed this. I have nothing more to say.”

Demanding answers didn’t get her anywhere. No one knew how ComStar missed the development of a warship. Or the existence of a shipyard capable of building a warship. The only clue they had was the fact that no one noticed the Capellan warship until it was flying in the Andurien System itself. 

‘There are traitors among the precentors in Capellan space…!’ Waterly concluded quickly. How else could they not see a fucking warship gallivanting across the entire confederation?! 

No… 

There were traitors among ComStar’s highest members. They needed to be purged.

-VB-

tl;dr

Janos Marik ranting. 

Kamea Arano planning. 

Kyalla Centrella panicking. 

Emma Centrella fearing. 

Myndo Waterly scheming. 

A/N:

This was a collection of brief thoughts and 

*As previously mentioned in chapter 26, the “eastern” and “northern” regions of the Aurigan Coalition had, more or less, disappeared or broken away. This left only Fjaldr, Wesley, and Ryans Fate as the worlds bordering the confederation.