Operation Excalibur, page 19
part #31 of BattleTech Series
But the Hesperan environment posed a special consideration for any would-be raiders. Men serving with the 'Mech units stationed there—traditionally the Fifteenth Lyran Guards, and, a more recent addition, the Third Davion Guard—joked that the terrain and the environment were at least as much a threat to invaders as were any defending 'Mechs. Any attempt to land in the immediate area of Maria's Elegy or the main Defiance plant would bring the descending DropShips into the defense batteries' crisscrossing fields of fire; any attempt to land farther off, making an approach out of range, exposed the invaders to the hellish Hesperan terrain. The Russians of Terra had long ago hailed General Winter as their most valuable and implacable defender; on Hesperus II, it was General Heat and General Terrain, the dread twin neme-ses of any who dared attack that world.
And it was a world that Brandal Gareth now virtually controlled. That, and that alone, made him without question the most important man, the most powerful man, in the entire Lyran Alliance, the one man who, at a word, could destroy the Alliance before it was even properly begun.
Turning from the wall screen, he walked back to his desk and read once again the message glowing on the terminal display.
CMSTR HPG TRANS. PRIORITY-COMMERCIAL
CIVIL PRIORITY, CLASS 2
RELAY VIA: THUBAN, TURINGE, CIOTAT, HESPERUS II
DATE: 4 OCT 3057
TO: BRANDAL GARETH, FLDMRSL,
COHESPERAN DEFENSE FORCE,
DEFIANCE INDUSTRIES, HESPERUS II
FROM: CHARLES DILLON, COL, AFFC
ASGARD, THARKAD
MESSAGE:
VERMILLION
SIGNED: DILLON
Regrettably, the message had not read ALIZARIN, which would have indicated that the Kalmar-Carlyle bitch had also been charged and convicted in the hearing on Tharkad. Gareth wondered what had gone wrong merc. Dillon was supposed to have had that fixed.
No matter. The woman was definitely of secondary importance to the plan, and, even now, Gareth could recognize that his desire to drag her down with her husband had been motivated by the petty dictates of revenge; he was still smarting from the mauling she'd given him some four months ago on Glengarry. Besides, with her husband stripped of his title, she wouldn't be in a position to cause trouble any more.
Clearing the computer screen, he began typing rapidly on the work station's keyboard, setting up a list of new orders for electronic routing to Culligan, Samules, and Blaine. With Carlyle and the Gray Death neutralized, it was time to get on with the next phase of Operation Excalibur.
It was, he thought, about scagging time. The Caledonian operation—and the follow-up invasion of Glengarry—should have taken care of that particular problem in short order. That it had not was due mostly, Gareth decided, to plain bad luck, the one thing that had plagued every military leader who'd ever formulated a plan of battle since the time of the ancient Sumerians. He'd considered launching a second assault against Glengarry in order to take advantage of the likely confusion and drop in morale brought on by Carlyle's wounding, but decided against it. The Gray Death Legion could still fight; the last invasion attempt had demonstrated that. If he could have confirmed that the Legion's stores of expendables was as low as it should have been after that campaign, he might have attacked anyway. But through mischance or enemy action—he couldn't tell which—the agents he'd left behind on Glengarry had all stopped reporting within a very few days of the battle. Without reliable intelligence, Gareth wasn't going to take his forces into that hellhole again, especially since he no longer needed to. Within three months, the Legion would be gone from Glengarry; if they refused to leave, they'd have the entire Lyran Alliance to answer to and not just the two regiments now controlled by Brandal Gareth.
A tone sounded from his computer, accompanied by a light winking on the console. Gareth sighed, tapped in a security command to keep the orders locked from anyone save himself, then got up from the desk. The secret suite of rooms adjoining his office was reached through a hidden panel, one keyed to accept only his handprint on the access screen, or the palm print of a handful of others.
The suite was luxuriously furnished, fifteen large rooms trimmed in various hardwoods, as tastefully decorated as the best, most expensive hotel on Tharkad. Brewer was waiting for him in the first room as he came through the door.
"Hey, Brandal!" the young man said, excited. He was holding his violin tucked under his arm, the bow in his right hand. "I was wondering when we could go down to the floor on Bay Seventy."
"Your grace," Gareth said, bowing slightly. "I know I promised, but it's not convenient just now."
The duke's face clouded. "Damn it, Brandal, if I stay cooped up in here much longer, I'm going to rot!"
"I know how you feel, your grace." Gareth gestured at the door behind him, and the office beyond. "Right now, I have work piled up so deep I don't think I'm ever going to see the end of it." He brightened. "You know, your grace, you could help. Maybe with a vidtalk to the workers in Bay Seventy. The new prototype is behind sched and I haven't been able to get things moving. But they'll listen to you."
Daniel Brewer, Duke of Hesperus II, drew himself up a little straighter. "You think so, Brandal?"
"I know so, your grace. They love you, almost as much as they hate your family!"
Daniel smiled. He was a tall, slender, delicate-looking man with ebony-black skin, black hair fashioned into twin braids in the now out-of-date fashion of Lyran MechWarriors, and the long-fingered hands of a musician. He was also young—just twenty-two standard years old—and he still possessed a young man's impatience.
Not that Gareth could blame him. Daniel didn't get out much and had no companions save the servants and bodyguards assigned to his suite. He could see any part of his domain at any time, of course, at the touch of a key; the wall screens in the suite could show both entertainment and real-time displays from cameras, drones, and remotes throughout the vast complex that was Defiance Industries.
But Gareth didn't dare let him venture out. Not yet. Daniel Brewer was the key to everything.
"We will go down to Seventy," Gareth promised him.
"But I'm going to have to arrange special protection for you when we're there. We don't want another attempt like the one four months ago, do we?"
"No, Brandal. And I ... I'm sorry about that."
"It wasn't your fault, your grace."
"Well, it was my family." The young man spoke the final word as though it were a curse. "It cost you some good people."
"But we stopped them. It's just, well, we don't want to invite another ... incident, do we?"
"No, Brandal."
"So. If you help me by delivering that speech—I'll have my staff write it up—we can get Bay Seventy moving again. And then maybe I can arrange for you to make a personal visit down there, let you thank the workers in person for getting back on track."
"I suppose if I went down there now, it would just slow things down more, huh?"
Gareth chuckled. "Well, now that you mention it ..."
The young man looked crushed. "Well, I'm sorry I interrupted you. I know you have better things to do than babysit for me."
"It's always a pleasure talking with you, your grace. But I'd better get back to the old desk before it misses me."
"See you later?"
"Count on it."
Gareth sealed the door behind him, then walked back to his desk. He touched an intercom key.
"Sir?" a woman's voice replied at once.
"Yes, Marta. Have the public relations staff put together a speech. Nothing fancy. Just the usual work-hard-and-prosper drek. Have Jensen approve it, then forward it to the duke."
"Yes, sir."
"And hold further calls."
"Yes, sir."
Keying off the intercom, Gareth walked back to the wall screen, thoughtful. He was going to have to find some way to get the boy out more, or risk losing his affection. The question was ... how, without letting his family get its claws into him again ... or managing to kill him outright?
Daniel Brewer was the seven-times-great grandson of Gerald Brewer, an ex-MechWarrior and the CEO of a BattleMech production plant on Coventry who, shortly after the fall of the Star League, had been named baron and granted the fiefdom of Hesperus II by no less a personage than Archon Jennifer Steiner. The Brewer family had managed Defiance Industries ever since, running everything like a tight little feudal empire, from the main factories here at Maria's Elegy to the fusion plant works out on the Tatyana Archipelago.
The tightness of the Brewer operation, in fact, had given Gareth the wedge he needed to gain de facto control of the world himself. In fact, he never would have been able to carry it off if Defiance Industries had been run with anything like a sensible business hierarchy, with its leadership slots filled by executives chosen for their competence instead of passed on generation to generation as inherited titles.
But then, after three centuries it was unthinkable that anyone but a Brewer could be the company's CEO. When the boy's father, Duke Randolph Brewer, and his mother, the Lady Clarissa, had both died in an unfortunate VTOL accident in the Tatyana Islands, Daniel had been named both CEO and Duke of Hesperus II—even though he'd been only sixteen standard years old at the time.
No one save a few trusted confederates knew that Gareth had been behind the accident, or behind the string of deaths that had led eventually and inevitably to the election of Veronica Kelly to the head of the Hesperan Council, and the appointment of Randolph Chang as Operational Head of the Defiance Board of Directors.
Gareth had been working toward this moment for a long time, for ten years, in fact, since his original assignment to Hesperus II as a military liaison officer from Tharkad. He'd first made Daniel's acquaintance when the boy was just twelve. With Duke Randolph's permission, he'd taken the boy for a ride in his Warhammer, and he'd used that and numerous subsequent opportunities to fill young Daniel's head with glory-stories of 'Mech combat, especially those of his illustrious g'g'g'g'g'g'g'great-grandfather.
Today, Daniel all but worshipped Field Marshal Brandal Gareth, the man who'd been more than a father to him for the past six years, and who'd promised to make him a MechWarrior one day soon. The truth was that Daniel hadn't had much of a childhood—no friends his own age, no trips outside the various family compounds without bodyguards in close attendance, no real life at all save school and the unbearable monotony of knowing that things wouldn't be getting any better. As heir to the Brewer holdings, the future Duke of Hesperus II had had to be sheltered from kidnapping or terrorist assault; as heir, he'd been meticulously groomed for the position he must one day hold, no matter what his personal feelings in the matter might be.
Brandal Gareth had seen the opportunity here ten years ago and taken it, even though it had meant investing the rest of his life in the project. The rewards of that investment were astonishing in scope. Once successful, he would be among the most powerful men of the Inner Sphere and able to write his own ticket to whatever he desired.
All that had really been required was patience and a near-infinite tact.
Getting the young duke's signature and thumbprint on several key sets of legal papers had actually been easy, once Gareth had won his complete trust. The hard part had been dealing with the rest of the Brewer family, which, naturally enough, had seen Gareth as an interloper, a greedy and ambitious outsider trying to split Daniel— and his inheritance—away from the small army of relatives who made up the upper ranks of the Defiance Industries administrative complex.
Old Greydon had been the worst threat of the lot. Daniel's grandfather had tried to come out of retirement after Randolph's tragic accident; it had taken another death in the immediate Brewer family, this one an apparent heart attack, plus several more key deaths among the Defiance Industries Board of Directors, before Daniel could be confirmed as both duke and CEO. After that, well, Gareth had only been forced to play his trump card a single time—in the form of a direct order issued in person by a carefully rehearsed Daniel—to confirm Gareth's position as the real power behind the Brewer throne.
The situation now was somewhat precariously balanced. Some elements within the Brewer family empire still hadn't accepted Gareth's position, operating under the assumption—a correct one, as it happened—that he would eventually find a way to dispense with the entire Brewer management apparatus and install a directorial system of his own. They'd made a number of appeals to the Federated Commonwealth government, and then to the Lyran Alliance, he knew, but he'd expected nothing serious to come from that direction. So long as Hesperus II was turning out BattleMechs, the powers-that-be were happy. Four months ago the Brewer family had actually tried mounting a commando raid aimed at capturing or killing the duke. That had been right after Gareth's return from Glengarry, and he'd been in no mood to put up with what amounted to a minor civil war on his home ground.
The commandos had been freelancers—mercenaries hired by Thadeus Brewer, a cousin who stood to be named CEO if anything happened to Daniel. Gareth had rounded up a handful of Companions, his personal elite guard, and held out for two hours against the commandos as they stormed the command complex in heavy battle armor. The last of the attackers had been gunned down just outside this office; by that time, Gareth's 'Mechs were in the streets of Maria's Elegy, hunting down the mercenary BattleMechs operating in support of the raiders.
Thadeus had been captured at the spaceport trying to escape; Gareth himself had shot the would-be duke after his interrogation was complete. The body had been destroyed, partly to hide the evidence of torture, partly to scare the rest of the family, who would never know for sure what had happened to him. After that, the opposition had gone underground, and Gareth had thought that perhaps he was finally getting the upper hand.
But things were changing now with lightning speed, and maintaining his current advantage had taken formidable powers of manipulation and persuasion. Katrina Steiner's declaration of independence from the Federated Commonwealth raised the possibility that the long list of Brewer family grievances would be addressed. The Brewers had always been among the Steiner family's most ardent supporters. Too, Defiance Industries had offshoots on other worlds than Hesperus II, including Defiance Motors on Tharkad itself. There were plenty of people in the Tharkad Royal Court who had Katrina's ear, who would profit from continued Brewer control of the Defiance empire, and who either owed Gareth nothing, putting them beyond his control, or else hated or feared him for one reason or another, making them enemies.
That was the reason for Gareth's current haste. Naturally, he'd sworn fealty to Katrina in September when she'd made her announcement, and again, a few weeks later when she had named him Baron of Glengarry, but his very next act had been to set Excalibur rolling again at full speed. He had to work fast, and not just because there was a greater danger now of the Steiners intervening in the affairs on Hesperus II. Gareth saw opportunity here, as well as danger. Katrina's succession and the creation of the Lyran Alliance was simply a continuation of the Skye Rebellion on a larger scale—and evidence of a drastic acceleration in the breakup and collapse of the entire Inner Sphere.
A touch of a desk control wiped away the view of the Defiance Industry complex outside. In its place, a star map showed in three dimensions the sweep of space extending for fifty parsecs out from Hesperus II, a scattering of colored points of light, each tagged by glowing alphanumerics identifying that system and its attendant worlds and deep space facilities.
Chaos and anarchy. Those would be the dominant political forces of the future, of that Gareth was convinced. Operation Excalibur was aimed at nothing less than the creation of a new interstellar state, one carved from the dying carcass of the Federated Commonwealth and stretching—initially, at least—from Hesperus and Caledonia all the way to Skye. Another opportunity like this one might never come again, as the old holdings of the Great Houses crumbled. Reportedly, that was happening already in the old Sarna March, where worlds once belonging to the Free Worlds League and the Capellans were being reclaimed or splintering into tiny, war-torn and scattered shards. That was the future of the Inner Sphere.
Except in places where a strong man could seize and hold power now, before the breakup had gone too far.
Lovingly, he studied each point of light, each representing its own set of problems, its own challenges. He'd color-coded them according to their place in Excalibur. Hesperus, for all intents and purposes, was already his and would be his base for further conquests. He'd wanted Glengarry next, some sixteen parsecs distant, partly because it held a strategic location in this stretch of space, partly because it was home base and headquarters for the Gray Death Legion, a mercenary unit with an atypical— and therefore worrisome—loyalty to House Steiner. Laiaka and Alkaid, Gladius and Seginus were the next four systems on the list, lying between the first two and creating a solid base for further operations in several directions.
And beyond—Kochab, Carsphairn, and Chaffee, certainly. Caledonia, lying as close as it did to Hesperus. Lamon and Trent. Possibly several worlds closer to the border with the Draconis Combine, like Alphecca and Skondia. By then, he would be in an excellent position to move against Skye itself, and then the capital of the entire Skye region would be his.
As the Great Houses crumbled, new ones would arise, supplanting them, feeding on their bodies. He clapped his hands together, rubbing them briskly. House Steiner, House Davion, House Marik. They were all old, old and doddering and growing more feeble by the year.
His house, House Gareth, was destined ... yes, destined to be first and greatest of the new, a beacon that would light civilization's way for the next thousand years.
And it was just possible that by eliminating the Gray Death Legion, he'd removed the final barrier to that glorious future.
16
Approaching Morningstar Spaceport Maria's Elegy
Hesperus II, Rahneshire
