Fortress Republic, page 16
part #18 of BattleTech : Mechwarrior Dark Age Series
“Five,” Julian said. “All staged from the world of Liao?”
“As near as can be determined,” Sir Marcus told them. He looked to Major Daniel Lewandowski, from the Academy Commandant’s office, who had joined the small team for a morning intelligence briefing and for lunch. “The General had the same official news delivered to his office.”
“I heard the list of targets included New Canton,” one of the cadets volunteered from the innermost ring of audience.
“And that Oriente is working with them again. Like they did when they took Ohrensen.” Another eager student.
Crane shook his head. “Unsubstantiated rumors. When the Capellans hit New Canton, believe me, we will hear about it in no uncertain terms.”
When. Not if. Julian took note.
Lars Magnusson leaned back, arched in a hard stretch much like a large cat. Ignored the cadet input. “No one saw this coming?” he asked, in a tone that suggested he would have.
The idea of escaping simulator bays and closed-door briefing rooms for a casual meal and a moment to relax was fast becoming a hindrance. Leaving off the gusting wind that snatched at wrappers and had knocked over Calamity’s styrofoam espresso cup more than once, the questions and the curious who stopped by to meet one of the young royals, or Lady Zou, what Julian wanted more than anything right now was a monitor screen and access to the academy’s online resources.
He stood as Ariana sat back down. Swallowed hard, and washed down the oil-and-vinegar taste of his garden pita with a quick swallow of vanilla-flavored soda. The sandwich tailings went into a nearby trash receptacle, which swallowed more of the meal than Julian had. He kept the paper cup, holding it at his side as he paced a tight line next to the round table his friends and current allies occupied.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Okay. That puts the Liao offensive within one jump . . . two? . . . of our own operations.”
“Two jumps off from Northwind,” a new cadet volunteered. “Liberty, too.”
Who had mentioned Liberty? Was the grapevine solid enough to have winkled out news of Tara Campbell’s mission? Probably.
“Should we have seen this?” he asked Lars. “Maybe. But everyone expected a huge push to come at New Aragon. To silence Prefect Tao once and for all. Now . . . Where is Ningpo? Would that backdoor New Aragon?”
He glanced around the table. Yori Kurita stared back impassively. Callandre gave him an exaggerated shrug that said she neither knew nor particularly cared at the moment. She was still entranced by Julian’s sweeping attack across the chessboard, looking for a way out of the trap he’d laid for her.
Not happening.
Julian snapped fingers next to his ear and found his intelligence analyst for the Davion Guards in the final seat at the round metal table, trying to disappear between Lars Magnusson and Sandra Fenlon. Leftenant Todd Dawkins squirmed, his fingers twitching as if wanting to fasten onto something. A lifeline.
“Todd? Ningpo?”
“I could run grab a noteputer, Sire.”
Of all the . . . Where was that kid? The one who’d known relative distances to Northwind and Liberty? Julian found him at the head of the crowd of students, which numbered close to thirty by now. Bright eyed and a confident smile. The kind of face that encouraged instructors to call on him, no doubt. Head of the class? Blowing the curve for others?
He remembered that smile from many years ago. He’d seen it more than once in a mirror.
“Ningpo?” he asked the cadet. The name tag pinned to the front of his service grays read MacDougal. Red hair and bright freckles on his cheeks. Good Highlander stock.
“Almost directly spinward of Liao,” he said. “One jump coreward from New Aragon.” A pause, then a hesitant, “Sir . . . Lord Davion . . . backdoor?”
So there were a few things left to teach him.
Julian stepped over to the table, where Ariana had been watching him put Callandre into a strategic headlock. He borrowed four white pawns and the bishop he’d already taken from her, plucking them off the side of the wooden board and arranging them on the table in a rough pattern.
“Liao,” he said, tapping the bishop’s head. Arranged the pawns in a broken line next to the bishop as the cadets crowded in around the table. “Arboris. Genoa. Ningpo? New Aragon.”
He looked to the cadet, who managed to look apologetic as he leaned in and broke Julian’s line a bit more by shifting Ningpo further out.
“All right. So The Republic has kept New Aragon well-supplied through Genoa and Ningpo would be my guess. Shortest distance between two points, and all that. They could shift from Genoa and run through Arboris, which is close by. But they still need Ningpo, unless they want to start bending further out towards the border. It can be done, but we’re talking pressure. Constant pressure, leveraged against a world under siege. Any setback will be magnified out of proportion. Instead of attacking New Aragon, the Capellans are slamming the back door on them.”
“Then Genoa and Arboris are feints,” the cadet said.
That made Major Lewandowski and Ariana sit up straighter.
“Why do you say that?” the paladin asked.
The cadet looked about. It was as if a wide gulf had opened between him and the others, cadets who had pressed forward a moment ago putting half a step of distance in between themselves and the man under fire. He hedged, suddenly unsure.
“Lew?” Ariana asked.
Lewandowski leaned forward sharply. “Cadet Corporal MacDougal! Snap to and report!”
The boy recoiled as if slapped. All but jumping to attention. It was a reflexive reaction, sweeping back through the crowd. Authority had spoken. Any one of them could be next.
But MacDougal rebounded quickly. Stepping forward, he pointed to the two pieces Callandre had managed to take away from Julian. Both pawns. “May I?”
In response, Callandre upended the whole board and scattered the pieces into a loose pile. “Please,” she said.
Julian frowned. Looked up into the sky. “I was eight . . . ten . . . twelve moves from checkmate.”
“I guess we’ll never know for certain.”
Using the white pieces, MacDougal quickly built the lower half of Prefecture V—the worlds captured or contested by the Capellan Confederation. With the black, he stationed pieces for worlds of interest. These made up a large part of the upper half of the prefecture, and New Aragon, with placeholders for Northwind, Liberty, Tikonov and New Canton as well.
When finished, it resembled an awkward chessboard, with the black rook (New Aragon) surrounded by a field of white, about to be cut off completely, and the outlaying pieces threatened by a two-prong Liao attack.
“Go, Mac!” The cadet had at least one fan in the crowd.
“If you track everything by thirty light-year jumps,” the cadet said, borrowing a french fry from Lars Magnusson. Not even thinking about it as he nibbled it down to the right length. Held it out to represent the span of distance that was roughly to scale with his map. “New Aragon is nearly cut off as it is. There are two worlds on the Capellan radar, then. Ningpo being first, closest to Liao. But Algol is a close second. With those, they no longer need Genoa or Arboris to close that door. So I’d say that those strikes are to pin troops in place and divert attention.”
“But not Nanking?” Yori asked. She leaned across Lars, pointed out the threatened black knight. The cadet had given Nanking more importance than some other, likelier worlds.
Julian had the answer to that one, and beat the cadet to the punch. “ ’Mech factories. Nanking has industrial facilities Daoshen Liao wants. He’ll throw serious forces at that world. No mistake.” He frowned at the table, the arrayed pieces, and then forced a smile for MacDougal and offered his hand. “Mac? Thank you for the help.” He spent a sidelong glance on Major Lewandowski.
“Everyone back to your own meals and your own classes,” the major said, putting an end to the large gathering. He chased off the junior students with a hard glare.
The senior cadets, MacDougal among them, dragged their feet just enough to see if they’d be asked to remain. When didn’t a senior officer need support staff, after all?
Not this time. Julian waited until they had passed from earshot, drained the last sip from his vanilla soda, then whispered a short laugh down at the table. “Impressive. Reminds me of . . . someone.”
“Yeah,” Callandre said. She ran fingers through her hazelnut hair, the wild tangles highlighted with subtle, golden tips. “I was just thinking he needed serious help as well.”
“Stay away from that boy, Calamity.”
Ariana held up her hand for a moment of peace, then reached out to flick the crown of the black queen. “Liberty,” she said, her thoughts mirroring Julian’s.
“Or Tikonov,” he said. “Given the Chancellor’s preoccupation with old Capellan worlds, perhaps more likely.”
Yori Kurita pushed her rice bowl aside, chopsticks laid across its rim. “What you are saying is that the Liao advance might interfere with your plans to disrupt the alliance of Senators, hai?”
Your plans. For all their training, for all that Yori and Lars volunteered to accompany the Guard on its mission for The Republic, Julian was no further along understanding why, or in making them a strong part of his team.
Sandra missed the underlying tension, but if nothing else she did know Julian very well. She laughed, and all eyes focused on her for a moment. She blushed a light shade of pink.
“I’m sorry. Err . . . sumimassen?” Yori smiled and nodded, and Sandra settled back. “From a political standpoint, I’d say it could disrupt or aid any efforts against this alliance. But if I’m not mistaken, it’s the not knowing that bothers Julian more than anything.” She smiled, a touch sorrowful. “It’s hard to plan for events of which you can never be certain.”
Lars Magnusson sat forward. The winds tossed and toyed with his unruly, ash-white hair. “Always plan with certainty. A definite strategy placed against shifting conditions will always hold stronger over a shifting strategy lost among a hard-line situation.”
Callandre snorted a laugh. “At the Nagelring, we referred to that as a ‘duck your head and charge’ strategy. I look forward to the Lars Magnusson-shaped hole you’re going to leave in a wall somewhere.”
The Ghost Bear warrior grinned, showing his teeth. “And how many extra years did you spend in academy?” he asked. Julian laughed. And Callandre, never one to hide from her own foibles, licked one finger and drew an invisible tally mark in the air.
Then made a gun with that hand, and shot Lars with it.
“Which gets us no further along where we need to be,” Ariana said, wrestling the table back around to the point. “Liberty is in play, now. And we’ll simply have to watch what transpires from the Capellan front. But where does that leave you, Julian?”
He shrugged. “Same place we’ve been for the last two weeks. Working to integrate our supernumerary forces—Yori and Lars, any of the returning Highlanders who can be spared—and waiting for the Senators’ first move. We’ll react to them.”
“Going on the defensive.” Lars all but spat out that last word as if it left a rancid taste in his mouth.
“A modified aggressive posture,” Julian said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we build up our strength and wait to select a target based on accurate and complete intelligence. And when we move, we do so with the express purpose of dealing the alliance a critical blow. This is one time when we do not need to win the war, Lars. Just a few of the opening battles.”
“Rather win the war,” Lars growled.
Ariana shook her head. “We might need to welcome these people back as allies one day. Some of them. Let’s not burn bridges behind us.”
Julian nodded. “Especially,” he said, “when there are so many we’re lighting on fire out in front of us.”
18
Yeah, I hear we have Davion Guards standing in to help on Northwind. And I’m wondering why we need ’em at all? Don’t we have other units pulling back to the world a’ready? Been on the news, ain’t it? Don’t need no FedSun fancy boy thinks hisself a dashing general parading across our worlds. We got paladins for that!
—Call-in listener, “Speak Your Mind,” W7LA, Northwind, 17 August 3135
Northwind Academy, Northwind
Republic of the Sphere
20 August 3135
The secondary Strategy & Tactics Lab at Northwind Academy did not impress Julian Davion. Not with his time at New Avalon’s premiere academy and the New Avalon Institute of Science, and his visiting year at the Nagelring. Without considering the equipment he’d had access to as prince’s champion, the local facilities were . . . lacking would be a fair term.
Antiquated might be another.
Each cadet station was a mid-level computer disguised as a very poor facsimile of a ’Mech’s tactical monitor. Several of the humming screens flickered with static or lost tracking from time to time as stressed electronics did their best to keep up with the heavy class use. The bitter taste of ozone, of slowly frying circuit boards, hung over the room. Not a way to inspire confidence in the equipment, or the instruction for that matter. The only extra step taken was the strip across the top of each screen, programmed to duplicate the readings found on a MechWarrior’s HUD. A cluster of icons and information tags, dialed out of sensor guesswork and the occasional identification transponder. A large monitor took up a good portion of the front wall, where someone might dump large files full of auxiliary information into any of a dozen different “pages,” throwing them up for study.
Cadets usually sat at their stations while an instructor used the front monitor and individual stations to feed strategic overviews or tactical situations from the master computer station at the center of the local network. In this case, however, with Julian commandeering the lab (and co-opting several students) for his personal operations center, he parceled out information on a need to know basis to see what some of Northwind’s best and brightest might do with it. He let them feed final results back to him for review and discussion, and flagged the truly impressive results for later presentation to his motley command team.
James MacDougal set a high bar for others to follow, as Julian had suspected he might. The senior cadet had a head for strategy and tactics, a natural flair that could not be learned. He’d been born with it.
Which was why Julian kept the boy, dismissing all others, when his three o’clock appointment finally caught up with him at the lab.
“You never fail to impress,” Aaron Sandoval said, waiting near the door as the last of the student-cadets filed out.
A few studied the lord governor of Prefecture IV with admiration. Even awe. But Julian saw more than one open glare of suspicion. The Swordsworn did not always receive good press here, on a world known for its devotion to Devlin Stone’s Republic. The Highlanders had bled thick and heavy over the last few years especially, rising to its defense.
“Teaching?” Aaron asked. “Taking time away from your schedule to influence the next crop of Northwind alumni? Be careful. The exarch will disband your Davion Guards and exile you next.”
A poor comparison to the actions of those highly placed nobles within The Republic Senate, and their cabal’s plan to buy off prominent warriors in hopes of someday owning a paladin or three. “As an icebreaker,” Julian said, “you might have done better.”
“Poor taste. I agree.” Aaron seemed genuinely apologetic. He tugged at the cuffs of his jacket. He wore a dark, double-breasted suit with a banded-collar shirt, his blond hair trimmed close and his beard tightened down to a thin mask. He spared a single glance towards MacDougal, then shrugged the lad’s presence aside. “Too much time spent in the company of . . . well, cynicism does seem to run in the Sandoval bloodline, let’s say.”
“Many things run in the Sandoval bloodline.” Julian’s smile was not necessarily kind. “Loyalty and treachery. Bravery and cowardice.” He forestalled any insulted outburst with a raised hand. “Like any,” he said, “House Davion notwithstanding.” Let’s play our game.
Aaron conceded the point with a careful nod.
This was not Julian’s first interview with Duke and Lord Governor Aaron Sandoval. Though one among a handful. And what had colored each meeting before was the cautious, well-hidden play of the duke—the tightrope he walked between ambition and outright treachery against The Republic. Not even Exarch Levin had been able to crack the man’s shell, forcing him down on one side of the line or the other.
At that time, though, Levin had desperately needed the support of men such as Aaron Sandoval, courting him and the Swordsworn as well. There was little doubt that as Aaron leaned, so leaned most of Prefecture IV.
However, something had shifted in that relationship. The exarch seemed less and less concerned with the Swordsworn’s internal politics, even as Aaron Sandoval courted Julian’s favor (and through him, Prince Harrison’s). He had little idea of any contact the lord governor might have made with Caleb Hasek Sandoval Davion, but assumed there were efforts along those lines as well.
Which was why Julian had seized the high ground right away, putting Aaron on his guard and letting him know up front that he would be as quick to lean against him as for him.
“I surrender the point,” Aaron said. “The Sandoval dynasty has no claim to moral superiority.” Though he said that softly, as if worried another family member might overhear. “Shall we say, then, that the Sandovals are instead in a position—as we have been for the better part of two centuries—to wield enormous influence? On either side of the border?”
