Fast Travel 7.4
NEW DALLAS
14 SEP 3018
"If Cranston Snord were here," I mused, "he'd say that this stuff belongs in a museum."
Marty Carp grinned. "I'm no Snord, but from where I'm standing… "
"You're standing behind me," I pointed out, turning just enough to glance over my shoulder.
"From where I'm standing," Marty Carp repeated, "I'd think, they will. Ain't worth the trouble to try and press a bunch of Macjobs back into service. Even I'm not that loco. What's the enemy gonna do, if they see a bunch of Macs waddling towards 'em? Fall down laughing?"
"The basic Mackie chassis is sound," Rajeev replied. "The broad torso gives ample room for refitting up-to-date components. The Terran Hegemony was still producing them until the mid twenty-eighth century, just prior to the fall of the Star League."
"Might that not have been a matter of national pride, much as anything else? The Mackie was a symbol for the Hegemony, as the first BattleMech," said Ernest Reid, from further back in the trailer. He had to raise his voice a little to be heard. "The Hegemony continued to procure and fielded them for reasons of image. The same reason they must have kept these."
I raised a hand, moving it back and forth in the air. "Yes and no. I mean, that's true, but when the New Dallas boneyard was created, they anticipated one day needing these BattleMechs. Maybe. I mean, they thought this stuff was obsolete, but they put it in cold storage rather than selling or scrapping it. This place was sealed in… what, something like the twenty-sixth century? By then, the first-gen Mackie was outdated, but not ridiculously so."
None of us were looking at Mackies with our own eyes. Rather, we were all following the feeds from the exploration teams, across a range of monitors.
Most of the feeds were coming from the body and helmet cameras carried by Rohan's troops and Sanren's techs. Some were from the 'Mechs accompanying them, piped in from their sensors. And yes, there were 'Mechs down there, since any facility big enough to store BattleMechs was also designed to walk them in and out, by default.
Although locating the entrance to the bunker and clearing the obstructing rubble had posed a bit of a challenge. That phase of the operation had taken longer than I'd liked, but now the first teams were in.
Technically speaking, I wasn't supposed to be commanding. Not at this hour. We were on shifts, and I should have been asleep. Marty Carp ought to have been stood down, too. Rajeev was the rostered night officer.
But I wasn't about to miss out. Not when our efforts had finally paid off. Well, almost. The job wasn't done yet, and we still didn't have eyes on the main prize.
"Sure, whatever. But old Mackie boy and his kin are outdated now," Marty Carp opined, pointing at the ranks of BattleMechs lined up on the screen. "If I hear you right, we're not looking at late Hegemony ones, they're originals. So far out to pasture that the pasture ain't no pasture, but uncharted wilderness."
On one of the monitors, a technician panned her camera across the bunker chamber, no doubt aware that we were watching. The shapes illuminated by the exploration team's lights were definitely covered and locked-down BattleMechs, partially obscured in some cases, exposed in others. There were definitely Mackie BattleMechs, at least from what was visible, but there were also other models further back in the hangar, the shapes recognisable even in the poor light. Contemporaries of the Mackie, fielded by the Hegemony in early front-line units and then later militia groups.
The motley collection ranged from looming artillery platforms like the Helepolis to first-gen bugs like the Wasp and Stinger. There were early Shadow Hawks, Orions, Banshees, a Rifleman and Archer or two, a few Ostwar precursors to the later Ost-series 'Mechs, and even some Griffin heavies… not even Griffin mediums, but the very early GRF-1A heavy by Maxwell that was five tons more massive than the modern version.
"It is possible to refit the 'Mechs," Rajeev said. "Modernise them, bring them up to current standards. The skeletons, myomers, actuators, weapons, heat sinks, and armour should all be sound."
"But not the cockpits, reactors, and other key components," Reid pointed out. "Those will need to be replaced, unless the Free Worlds League settles for putting subpar primitive machines into service, as-is."
Well… the Free Worlds League, House Marik, and my own Fighting Tigers, anyway. New Dallas was within the Free Worlds League's contemporary borders, but it didn't fall within any extant province and it certainly didn't have a population and its own government. That meant it was federal property, and so was anything recovered from the ruins of New Dallas. The negotiations had been very hastily hashed out, but we were looking at a three-way split between the Free Worlds itself, House Marik's household units, and the Tigers. Typically the Free Worlds League and House Marik were nearly synonyms, but in this case I suspected that Janos and Martin Marik were looking to build up the Atrean Hussars and other formations that owed direct fealty to the Marik family, rather than the Free Worlds.
Of course, the 'Mechs and other fighting platforms that we expected to recover from the New Dallas boneyard were considerably less valuable than the haul from Helm. The SLDF regular and royal 'Mechs from the Helm depot were better than what was widely in service, in the present day. The machines stored on New Dallas were worse. Both Rajeev and Reid were right. Upgrading them would be a labour-intensive and resource-intensive undertaking.
Carp shook his head. "The bugs, the Orions, even the Ostwars and Griffins, sure. Those could be used in a reasonable timeframe. Compatible spares and new insides for those are still in widespread production… heck, a Wasp, you and I could bang the parts together ourselves. Just need some sheet metal and rubber hammers. Be a job and a half to get them all sorted, but it's doable. The Mackies, though? Collector market, gotta be. And what are those things, the ones that look a little like an edgy Centurion, 'xcept with a shoulder missile mount?"
"That's the zero-one Kyudo, I think," I replied, squinting at the screen. "Raj?"
Rajeev made a soft sound of confirmation. "Original Kyudo from Martinson Armaments, correct. Reunification War standard."
"The Kyudo," Carp repeated, shaking his head. "Lord almighty. That's Hegemony? Thought it was Drac. Nah, for 'Mechs like that, we're looking at…museums, private collectors, universities. They'd pay for that. The old Hegemony models are worth more as bits of history than fighting machines, now."
I chuckled. "You really are sounding like Cranston Snord. Careful, there. Whatever he's got, it might be catching."
Carp scratched his chin. "I did spend a lotta time in his holes. Might have, ought to get me tested."
It was a little unfair to Marty Carp, but I honestly hadn't expected his battalion to volunteer for the New Dallas mission, once they'd been sworn to secrecy and the general shape of things explained to them.
Sure, we were digging 'Mechs and some combat vehicles out of a bunker, but they were all ancient machines that had been deemed military surplus centuries ago. This was pre-Star League tech, so there weren't any surprises there. Aside from the 'Mechs, there were also vehicles and fighters, but those were even more ancient. Things like the Hegemony's signature Merkava MBT, Apostle and Reaper Self-Propelled Artillery, a handful of Ballistas, some Asher hover tanks, Dunning and Randolph trucks, LRM and SRM carriers, and even old Hammerhead ground-based fighters hangared alongside DroST IIa and IIb ships - aerodynes that were so old that they were referred to by the now outdated term 'Drop-Ship Tank'. This was the combat equivalent of antiques in an attic. Maybe some could be valuable - we'd uncovered a room full of LTV-4 Hover Tanks, and those were already in service with the Tigers. But a lot might be dubious junk.
Yes, there was also the potential higher-value prize somewhere in the facility… but I hadn't revealed that to all of Marty Carp's people. Carp himself, yes, but not his whole crew.
But they'd volunteered, based on the obsolete machinery alone. I'd figured they wouldn't be interested… but, as it turned out, whoever in the Free Worlds League establishment that had executed Janos Marik's order of finding no-hopers and last-chancers to assemble a bootleg Snord's Irregulars, well, they'd taken the order literally.
Marty Carp's band of misfits didn't have the academic credentials of Cranston Snord's unit. Snord had folks who were acknowledged experts in their fields. Carp's lot were less qualified. But they were still treasure hunters.
Well, maybe more thieves than treasure hunters, but still.
Lieutenant Ernest Reid gave Carp an assessing look, which he tended to do. Reid was a SAFE agent, and both Marty Carp and I knew that. I got the sense that Reid didn't know why to make of Carp, which was likely the case across his agency's upper echelons. I couldn't blame them. Not knowing what to make of Marty Carp was a common condition, one I occasionally suffered from, too.
One of the communications specialists operating the consoles swiveled round, her chair moving. Her name was Lena, Lisa, or something like that. "Uh, ma'am, sirs, you'll want to take a look at this. Um, hold on."
With Rajeev, Reid, Carp and I all inside the trailer, the number of officers present outweighed the actual staff, since the vehicle's command centre could be operated by three people - well, excluding the two up in the cab to drive the thing, but the cab was separated from the compartment we were occupying.
Pressing a few keys, the comms specialist whose name started with an 'L', maybe, brought one particular video feed to the forefront. She threw it up on the largest two-dimensional screen, the big master plot hanging near the map table.
Strictly speaking, what we were doing was a slight waste of the Mobile HQ's capabilities. Our Mobile Headquarters vehicle was capable of pulling down information from satellites and orbiting spacecraft, tracking the status of soldiers up to an entire brigade's scale, and so on. A full seven tons of the vehicle's weight was dedicated just to the communications and tracking systems.
We were using it as a glorified tri-vid room. Hell, not even tri-vid, but two-dimensional, even.
But the Mobile HQ was fully environmentally-sealed and temperature-controlled, which meant it was drastically cooler than anything outside, including the tents that had been pitched as ground facilities, or the long-abandoned buildings that littered the landscape of what had once been Caddo City. New Dallas was a hot world, something that the Terran Hegemony's terraforming efforts had never quite resolved. A fair climate for agriculture, but back in the day, the people of New Dallas had used a lot of air conditioning.
These days, there weren't many intact surface structures, air conditioned or otherwise. The Terran Hegemony's boneyard on New Dallas was basically an extensive underground bunker, and that bunker was… logically enough, located beneath what had once been the main camp of the New Dallas Militia.
The problem with that was, Caddo City had been nuked shortly after the fall of the Star League, and naturally the bombs had targeted key infrastructure and military sites, including the New Dallas Militia's stomping grounds.
It was ironic, really, because while the Free Worlds League had made this job possible, and we were here with authorisation from the Free Worlds League… it was the Free Worlds that had devastated New Dallas, making our work difficult in the first place. Today, New Dallas was within the borders of the Free Worlds League, but it had started life as a Terran Hegemony colony… and it'd been invaded by the Free Worlds after the fall of the Star League and the effective collapse of the Hegemony's government in the post-Amaris years.
Granted, in seizing Terran Hegemony systems that bordered Free Worlds space, Captain-General Kenyon Marik had simply been doing what all his fellow lords were doing. Carving up the Terran Hegemony between them. On the other hand, Kenyon Marik's forces had also nuked the hell out of… what, three hundred thousand people? That was what the history books recorded as the estimated deaths, anyway. When the bombs had fallen, they'd intentionally targeted Caddo City and other settlements on the continent of Trinity, like San Teresa and New Angelo. But the other inhabited land masses like Reunion and Ellum had also been hit. That put the Free Worlds League of the day in the same bracket as people like Minoru Kurita.
Well, to be fair, it was likely that Kenyon Marik hadn't personally nuked the people of New Dallas to oblivion. All the accounts, including surviving Terran Hegemony ones, agreed that the call had been made by the officer on the ground. General Venla Sahin, commander of the Seventh Marik Militia, plus the Third and Fifth Atrean Dragoons, the task force that had been charged with invading New Dallas. With her casualties mounting and her supplies dwindling, General Sahin had gotten… desperate.
Mind you, in objective terms, the loss of three hundred thousand wasn't proportionately crippling, considering the world had been home to a billion or two people at the time. General Sahin hadn't been trying for genocide, she'd been aiming for infrastructure and military resistance. It just happened that all that was, naturally, in cities. As far as nuclear bombardment went, it had been surgical. Though that was an argument that I could make, with centuries of distance and no personal connection to New Dallas. Any citizens of New Dallas alive at the time… well, they would have disagreed.
New Dallas hadn't been in the best of shape, in the late twenty-eighth century. The Free Worlds League invaded the system after the fall of the Star League, and after the Amaris Civil War. But, of course, as one of the better-established Hegemony colonies, New Dallas had also been hit by Stefan Amaris' Rim Worlds Republic, during his whole bid to seize the Terran Hegemony, the war that had ultimately doomed the Star League. All that fighting had already taken a toll on New Dallas. The Free Worlds League and General Sahin had merely finished the job, putting the proverbial last straw on the poor camel's back.
That was why New Dallas was an abandoned world, today. The system was still marked on star charts, but insofar as anyone knew about New Dallas, they probably assumed the atmosphere was poisoned by radioactivity. Or something. That wasn't the case. Background radiation near the ruined cities, sure, that was still high, but not stupidly so. On pure environmental terms, even in the twenty-eighth century, New Dallas could have recovered. But there had been an exodus of people from the world, not because the ecosystem had been destroyed, or infrastructure shattered, but because their collective spirit had been broken.
Helm had fared better, in that regard. The death toll on Helm had been worse, in both absolute and relative terms, but the planet was still inhabited today. Chalk one up for the stubbornness of Stewart natives, I suppose.
But the fact New Dallas was abandoned meant that we didn't have any witnesses to our grave robbing. Well, the boneyard was filled with 'Mechs, not bodies, being a figurative rather than literal boneyard. But a hell of a lot of people had died in Caddo City. That was true.
Although there were no planetside witnesses, and no living human witnesses, there were still potential observers to worry about. Namely, ComStar.
Around the Second Succession War, ComStar had started placing monitoring satellites and the like in abandoned Hegemony systems, basically a set of alarms and tripwires to keep an eye out for looters. Which we were.
However, there were three mitigating factors at play here.
One, and most importantly, ComStar actually knew we were here. I'd actually conveyed word that the Free Worlds League was sending a mission to New Dallas, a system that was within the modern Free Worlds borders.
Two, ComStar didn't care much about New Dallas. They knew about the boneyard, I was sure… but while vast numbers of primitive early BattleMechs and ancient combat vehicles, well, they weren't nothing, it wasn't hardware on the level of an SLDF cache. The stuff was outdated, and the records on Terra would have included all the relevant dates to prove that.
Now, of course… the real value of the New Dallas site wasn't the hardware, but I suspected that fact wasn't readily available in most historical archives.
And finally, three, even if the true nature of the New Dallas bunker was known to some people within ComStar, those people would be ROM. And ROM was currently in the midst of a massive organisational shakeup, following the allegations that Precentor Tojo Jarlath had been plotting against Primus Julian Tiepolo.
A very distracting bit of business, surely. With much of ROM's leadership busy being grilled by stern-faced First Circuit members, in front of formal inquiry panels and emergency committees, there couldn't be many people left minding the store on Hilton Head.
Perfect for my purposes. While I could have figured out some other excuse to explain cracking open the New Dallas bunker, it was also useful to avoid immediate scrutiny, until the deed was done.
The big screen in the Mobile HQ truck was showing part of the underground complex's interior, but a portion which most definitely wasn't a hangar or weapons storage. No, these were human-sized corridors. On the display, the team were carefully moving towards a room that was set up… rather like the now-destroyed field library chamber back on Helm. The reader and terminals arrangement was vaguely similar, though the electronics here looked older.
Reid took a couple of steps forward, moving closer. "Is that it?"
"Hey," Marty Carp retorted, "don't get your hopes up just yet. For all we know, Rohan's just found the desks for the secretarial pool."
I snorted. "And the keyboards are for word processing and data entry?"
Reid eyed Carp. "In a bunker that survived a direct hit from nuclear weapons?"
"Terran Hegemony," Carp said. "Those people were super serious about backing up their paperwork. Wouldn't wanna be caught short when Lord or Lady Cameron wants an audit, now would you?"
"I don't think the Star League was big on audits," I remarked. "They did manage to lose track of entire Castle Brians and supply depots over the years."
"Much of that loss of information was caused by the Amaris coup," Rajeev noted. "A large number of Hegemony officials did not cooperate with the Stefan Amaris regime, and deliberately destroyed or hid records."
"Yeah," Carp said, nodding sagely. He touched the brim of his baseball-style cap. "I've had bosses like that. New supervisor comes in, makes a mess, staff quit playing along with management… "
I smiled, slightly. "You could say Stefan Amaris did get fired. Fired at, anyway, by Kerensky's execution squad."
That was indeed how Amaris had ended up, very briefly tried and then equally quickly disposed of. Legend had it that Amaris' gravesite on New Samarkand tended to stink of piss, since it was allegedly a popular student dare to break in and leave appropriate offerings to the last ruler of the Rim Worlds Republic and Terran Hegemony.
"Colonel," said the technician who was actually running the voice communications. Annoyingly, I couldn't remember his name. "Sharma thinks the library readers are still drawing power from somewhere. He wants to try turning them on."
Marty Carp blinked. "They left 'em on? All this while? Damn, I'd hate to see their meter reading."
Behind Carp, Reid shook his head.
With a more serious expression than Carp's, Rajeev regarded the live video feed from Sharma's group, studying what he could see through their cameras.
"There is some risk," Rajeev warned. "It could damage the core. Unlike the Helm field library in Nagayan Mountain, the Caddo City memory core was not intended to be a long-term apocalypse-proof repository. It was not meant to survive the fall of civilisation, and stay online for centuries."
I considered the matter. "That's true, but the Hegemony Central Intelligence Department did intend for the computers here to stay functional for years and decades at a stretch, just quietly gathering and storing information. With minimal maintenance. Maybe not centuries, but still."
Carp rubbed his jaw, thoughtfully. "Sharma's that electronics specialist from Rohan's old platoon, right? The guy with the hair? I remember that guy, knows his shit, Erin. Knows all the manure, I reckon, alphabetically indexed."
I took a breath. "And he's the one on the ground. Okay. Sure, tell him to go ahead, but be careful."
"Understood," said the comm tech. Then he spoke into his headset, repeating what I'd just said to the group of Tigers somewhere down below.
The memory core on New Dallas wasn't like the one on Helm. The Helm database had been specifically curated as a library, then further stuffed full of scientific and engineering material by the SLDF contingent on Helm, precisely to serve as a how-to guidebook for rebuilding civilisation.
And the New Dallas memory core wasn't like the Halstead Station library in House Davion's possession, either. The Halstead data was a mix of electronic files and even scans of hardcopy books and journals, ones that had been retrieved intact from a defunct Star League university.
No, the New Dallas core was its own beast. It wasn't even Star League, but from the Terran Hegemony's HCID.
The Hegemony's espionage and spook community had set up an autonomous data mining and listening operation on New Dallas, hiding it within the Caddo City boneyard bunker, buried among aging BattleMechs and other combat platforms.
And then they'd forgotten about it.
If the core was still functional, and my memories indicated it should be, the systems on New Dallas had been dutifully trawling local planetary networks, as well as accepting periodic updates from other computers in nearby systems… for at least two centuries, a good two hundred years. Until the planet's HPG station had been destroyed during the fall of New Dallas, and the world subsequently abandoned.
On the main screen, someone from Sharma's group, whoever's viewpoint we were following, tapped the keyboard. It wasn't a standard keyboard layout, I noted, though I didn't recognise the arrangement. That was the Terran Hegemony at work, I supposed.
But unusual keys or not, the act was standard enough - it succeeded in bringing the terminal out of low-power standby. Beneath a fine layer of dust, an ancient viewer lit up, displaying the crest of the Terran Hegemony - a symmetrical Cameron Star rather than the asymmetrical one of the Star League, surrounded by concentric orbital circles and planets. Under the symbol were four letters: 'HCID'.
There was also a login prompt.
Carp leaned forward. "Okay, tell Sharma, first thing, look around and see if there's any sticky notes on the desk… "
