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Chapter 20: Last Stand (House Morten Book 2) Ch 1

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May 2, 2999

Federated Suns

Crusis March

Cholis

Morten Estate

It had been eleven years since House Morten had been dispossessed of their duchy on Neubenn and sent out to Cholis to begin creating a periphery realm, and the last four years after annexing the planet of Foniss and the abnormally high industry there, including a full blown mech factory, things had gotten even more hectic for the First Lord.

Stephan sat in his office, going over stacks of paperwork that he had opted for instead of always reading off a glowing screen, whether it be holo or a touchpad. Too much eye strain added up, and he'd even had to request off-white paper to reduce the lesser eye strain of reading it as he and the other 7 Lords of House Morten had more and more work thrust upon them as the Morten Protectorate expanded by leaps and bounds.

They were never fully ready for it, and despite the urge to just turtle up and stop tapping into their warchest so heavily…for it was now under 40 billion after starting out at 158 when he left New Avalon…he knew opportunities and people's lives hung in the balance, and he didn't like the idea of either being wasted by being too conservative.

But what had really put him in a pinch was the taking of Foniss…and not because of that planet's 17 million population. It was the deal he had struck with the Red Baron's subordinates to split up the rest of the holdings. He'd deliberately chosen the smallest of them, but there were 5 more systems that were supposed to be his that he wasn't ready to annex.

In the months after peace had finally settled on Cholis, he'd had jumpships sent out with armed emissaries on them to survey the situation as well as inform the local Red Baron units of the new order of things. Stephan hadn't gone personally, but he'd heard the results were a mixed bag of some people wanting to accept the new leadership of House Morten and others that had to be either physically removed or shot dead when they found out they were no longer going to be able to abuse, rape, and rob the local population.

It had been messy, but over with quickly once the emissaries arrived, with the rest of the locals falling into line as they always had under the Red Barron's people. But garrisoning those worlds meant him devoting a Company of mechs to each, which he wasn't ready to do. So the 5 systems hung out there exposed for a quite a while before House Morten officially annexed them.

Fortunately no one knew of the lapse, or no one was brave enough to exploit it, and those systems kept operating as if nothing had happened.

The first of them didn't actually require Stephen to send any mechs, because the planets there were lifeless. The colony of 80,000 people was in the system's asteroid belt, carved into a series of the larger rocks as they were gradually hollowed out over more than 160 years of operation, and the field was so dense with resources that they had barely been able to scratch at it all that time, and during the negotiations with the two Red Barron lieutenants who had unwittingly revealed its location as well as several other worlds when they were divvying up the holdings, Stephan had held his poker face well, allowing the two largest planets to go to the others while his first pick was this asteroid field base, for he knew based on even the limited system data he had seen before him that it was quite lucrative as is.

Let House Morten get to it with a proper mining team and Inner Sphere top of the line equipment, and it would become even more so.

And he didn't have to defend it with a mech Company, because there was no ground to walk on. The planetoids that the colonial bays had been built into barely counted as that, and while gravitationally rounded in the slightest, their surface gravity had been less than 0.08g…and that was before the largest of them been hollowed out, lowering it even further.

What Stephan needed was a pocket warship to guard the asteroid field and/or the jump points. Rannel had come through with her amazing group of techs that she'd cobbled together from hires across the Inner Sphere, and they'd retrofitted one of the captured Mules with a small gravity disc where the cargo bay used to be. That would allow the crew to remain in it for months on end without having to deal with the withering effects of weightlessness.

Dropships didn't have a gravity disc because they were almost always under thrust, accelerating away from an arrival point or flipping over and decelerating, so they had a gravity-like effect from the constant acceleration. Jumpships, warships, space tugs, etc did not have that luxury, so all of the responsibly built ones had at least a small area that spun to create artificial gravity that the crew could at least sleep and eat inside, even if they worked in 0g.

The problem with this colony was they had no gravity discs, and the people living here were in 0g constantly…including some children that had been born here.

He couldn't take them away and put them on a planet. It would literally crush them. So he'd had to dip into the Morten warchest again, on top of the dropship conversion, to retrofit one of the big hollow asteroids with a prefab gravity disc hauled out there in pieces, then installed in a hangar bay the miners didn't want to lose…but House Morten was not going to allow the 0g conditions to stand, and everyone was going to be using it for at least an hour a day as they gradually got their bodies reaccustomed to the gravity crush, with their muscles and bones adapting by adding strength and more materials due to the stress.

Take someone who had lived their entire life in a 0g environment and put them on a thrusting dropship and their bones would literally snap for lack of structural strength.

Thankfully that nightmare had come and past within the first two years, and now the Webo colony had two pocket warships of House Morten manufacture guarding it, along with some new mining tugs that had been hauled in by some jumpship hires that were larger than anything Stephen currently possessed. For you had to have a larger jump field to carry ships that couldn't be fit inside a hangar bay, and mining tugs usually qualified in that regard.

But that colony in the renamed Kilo system was living up to the inference and delivering not just kilos, but tons of valuable raw materials…however, the region around the Webo 6 habitat was a field that contained deposits of uranium that had long ago been stabilized by bleeding out the excess radiation gradually over time. The entire field barely registered anything on a radiation meter, which had made it hard to find in the first place.

But when it came to depleted uranium, it was the go-to material for constructing armor-piercing warheads for autocannons of all sizes and was more valuable than gold per kilogram in the war-heavy Inner Sphere always needing to replenish their supplies.

The Kilo Mining Corporation…which House Morten had rebranded the company that they now owned…had been doing good before, and while it had initially been a money pit to get it refurbished up to his family's minimal standards, it was now the most lucrative business asset within the Morten Protectorate and the pocket warships had already been needed, turning off no less than 6 unwanted dropship arrivals that had attempted to strongarm their way into the asteroid field.

The thing was, a pocket warship wasn't designed to carry cargo, and even with a gravity disc eating up a lot of that cargo space, the rest was used for more fuel capacity, some additional engines, more weapons, and a lot more armor plating that the additional engines easily compensated for.

That meant while they looked like regular dropships from the outside, they could easily take on four times their number and end up the victor, which two of the interlopers made them prove. House Morten had picked up the remnants of three broken dropships after those battles, though with only a fraction of the crews still alive.

Stephan and Vander had talked about adding at least a small detachment of aerospace fighters there, perhaps along with another pocket warship conversion, but nothing was planned as yet. Their resources were being stretched between not just these 5 new acquisitions, but to 7 other planets they'd picked up in the past four years, and there weren't nearly enough aerospace fighter squadrons available to garrison a fifth of their worlds, let alone all of them.

Part of the problem was the Federated Suns markets didn't have enough fighters available for sale, and rather than start looking at other models from other realms, they'd been having the consolidated and rebranded 'Morten Arms Consortium' start an aerospace figher line from scratch.

That new Consortium included the mech factory, the vtol and tank factories, plus 5 others that the Red Barron had picked up from his victims that produced either components of weapon systems or things that were needed, like small personnel weapons or shock absorbers for wheeled vehicles. Now all of the various military or military-related industries were under the same name and management, and were completely owned by House Morten.

Since Stephan already had the blueprints to the Centurion, Sparrowhawk, and Stuka that the Federated Suns exclusively used they had what they needed, but getting a production line up and running was a pain in the ass even for the mechs, let alone an entirely different type of product.

Sarah was ambitious though, and in addition to her overseeing the Morten Arms Consortium, she had also started 'Flight Systems Unlimited' on Drymo, which was their attempt to step up from dropship conversions and start building them from scratch as well, and Stephan had more than 40 different blueprints to work with ranging from the smaller, aero-like dropships to the largest possible monstrosities capable of landing on a planet and taking off again.

But they didn't all use the same parts, so Flight Systems Unlimited was going to have to buy, or eventually make, everything needed, and with Drymo producing a lot of raw materials for export it made sense to put the new factory there to save on shipping costs.

That factory had cost them just shy of 3 billion to get up and running, but Stephan had agreed that it was necessary to their long term ambitions of not having to rely on the Inner Sphere markets having what they needed available for sale…though at the moment those markets were what was sustaining them.

The other four planets House Morten had got from the Red Barron organization were a mix. Two were simply colony worlds that had 300,000 and 450,000 people on them respectively, 'Lopo' and 'Gromo,' and there were no exports coming out of them except those people. The Red Barron had been harvesting them slowly to put into the local slave markets, which House Morten put a stop to immediately, and the next planet he sent Grady to invade had been the location of the slave market the Red Barron had been selling his 'produce' in.

It hadn't belong to him, and now 'Bahab' belong to House Morten with a population of 3.8 million of its own and a lot of wrecked buildings that housed industries far more grotesque than slavery. Vander had gone on that particular expedition to deal with things, and he'd reported back to Stephan that it made Foniss look like paradise in comparison.

Still, the majority of the unsavory industries had been shut down and others seized by House Morten when they were owned by the same bad characters…who had either fled, been killed, or captured. Stephen had had to authorize a dip into the warchest again to build a full-fledged prison there to handle all the riffraff they were collecting, but at present Viceroy Stan, one of his younger brothers, had the planet and system under nominal control and each updated report he was getting from him showed things gradually improving.

Grady hadn't stayed with the full Battalion garrison force Vander had stationed there, but rather was kept on Cholis until there was a need for another invasion. Stephan didn't want to waste him on garrison duty, but as it was he was rarely at the Estate, for the more their map of the region expanded the more pirates, bandits, warlords, and other scumbags they found that needed dealt with immediately…though in truth there were far more than House Morten could deal with immediately, so Stephen now kept a waiting list titled 'TBI' which stood for 'To Be Invaded,' and even today he'd added another system to the list after getting back a report from one of their scouting jumpships that were continuing to confirm map locations or exploring new stars to see what was in between the ones they already held.

That left two more planets from the Red Barron to deal with, though in truth it was actually 3, because one of the two systems had two inhabited worlds in it. That system, which Stephan didn't rename, was called Tronkiss, and the two worlds out of the 19 present around the massive blue star that were inhabited had been renamed to Insen and Prolit after two very famous fictional dogs from Neubenn literature.

Insen had a population of 120,000 centered around a fishing industry on the edge of a series of large lakes, but the planet had no actual oceans. Dealing with that was a challenge Stephan had decided to take on during the meeting with the Red Barron lieutenants, because none of the Morten Protectorate worlds were going to be selling or eating meat once they got the food markets reworked, and Insen was entirely based on meat production, albeit that from fish rather than land animals.

But the seas there were also high in deuterium…which was what basic fusion reactors used as fuel. The more advanced ones could make it work with regular water, but they were far and few between in the Inner Sphere. Almost every mech fusion reactor ran on deuterium, which was an isotope of hydrogen…which was most easily available from water. Any body of water would usually have molecules in it that had an extra neutron, which is what created an isotope. For some reason Insen had a higher concentration than others, and there was already a small deuterium extraction facility nestled in with the fishing communities that Stephen wanted to grab immediately.

When he'd showed Sarah she had actually patted him on the back for that find…then punched him in the side when she realized it was some 6 jumps away from Foniss and that was going to overextend their already overextended supply lines, for while they now had a total of 23 jumpships to their name…not counting the Stars' Herald…keeping people and cargo moving between their worlds was not possible without the addition of hired contracts and merchants passing through for their own business endeavors.

The last of the 5 planets he'd picked up in that meeting had been a volcanic world with a tiny colony on it. It was a hazardous atmosphere, which meant you couldn't go outside without wearing a full space suit…and one rated for high heat at that. But on that world was another lucrative pickup he'd grabbed…also because it had such a low population and he didn't want to overextend to too many mouths to feed during that selection meeting…but the lucrative part came from the mining of things that originated very deep in a planet's molten layers…such as diamonds.

It was a diamond mine, primarily, along with a few other oddities, and Stephan didn't want it for the jewelry market. Diamonds were used to make drill heads because the drill head had to be harder than the rock it was drilling into or it wouldn't work. Diamond was about as hard as it got, and Sarah was going to couple this mine with another money pit of a brand new drill bit factory located elsewhere, but she hadn't gotten around to it yet. Right now they were selling the diamonds and had already recouped their investment on the renamed 'Hotspot' to bring its facilities up to safety and living standards.

It was one of the few acquisitions that was now paying for itself. Everything else was either breaking even…if they were lucky…or continuing to drain the warchest.

The other planets they'd picked up had all been conquests, the largest of which had a population that dwarfed Foniss's 17 million. The warlord by the name of King Cobra had been ruling over the planet, and was in fact a lineage…but his military forces were ones that were out and about causing all kinds of havoc further away from the Federated Suns' border. The King Cobra didn't take other worlds, only raided them to bring back valuable goods and slaves to a world now renamed 'Coden' that had a total population of 327 million…of which, 47 million were slaves.

His military forces had been pathetic, though, as most of the so-called warlords' were. Coden was a large agricultural exporter and roundly a primitive planet save for Cobra City where his family and cohorts lived. Everything else was tropical or savannah subsistence towns. They kept the planet poor and uneducated, taking most of the harvests and selling them to other planets that unfortunately sent their own jumpships and dropships to Coden to pick up the cargos, for House Morten had only 'inherited' two jumpships when they had taken the planet 7 months ago.

Grady had just gotten back from that mission to spend a few months here, retooling his existing mech force with new purchases and a few new mechs to come off their own production lines…which currently included the original Wasps, two converted lines of Phoenix Hawks, and a brand new line of the assault-class Victor mechs.

Stephan had a stack of requests on his desk for that new mech variant alone, for as soon as word got around that the Morten Arms Consortium had started to produce assault mechs, new customers arrived by the dozens and all wanted to get pre-orders in no matter if they had to wait years to get delivery.

He hadn't agreed to any yet, and instead had been auctioning off the first few Victors to come off that line…aside from the ones he gave to Grady…and each of them was starting off at what would have been normal sale price back in the Inner Sphere. By the time each auction was over, they would end up selling for 5-12 times that price.

Stephan had been kicking Sarah in the butt to expand those damn factories as fast as possible, for he had no idea how much more interest there would be in the assault mechs. He'd expected less customers, given that most of the Wasps were going out to planets and organizations that were on small budgets. Now they had somehow started to attract interested parties with a lot more money to spend, and Stephan wanted to rake that in as much as possible to start refilling the warchest as it continued to get sucked lower and lower with new projects.

The other 5 worlds they'd picked up from the scallywags out here were Yennwen, Venso, Chitti, Alar, and Hoppenstop, ranging from 6 million in the case of Venso to 98 million at Alar. All together now, the Morten Protectorate had a combined population of 538 million…about 1/6th of what the planet Neubann had…at least when House Morten had been running it. He tried not to keep tabs on it, but news kept reaching him about the state of affairs back there, recently with an economic recession due to House Derren's meddling. What the population was now he didn't know, but he wouldn't be surprised to start seeing its 3.2 billion slowly tick downward.

His planets here were in far worse shape though, but on the upswing. The saving grace of these largest acquisitions had been some intelligence gathering beforehand. There were other worlds out there with larger populations than Foniss that needed rescuing, but their economies were so bad it would bankrupt House Morten if they tried. Stephen hated doing it, but he had to pass those over and only pick on the bandits that had planets that could sustain themselves, as these five all could. That's the only reason why the First Lord's population explosion had been possible.

All of those worlds would eventually contribute to the warchest and numerous other attributes of their brand new realm, but it would be a long time in coming. Right now he just needed them to self-sustain while their Viceroys and Counts began making small changes. That was part of the bluff of it all. He could take worlds, but not rework them very fast unless he had a large amount of C-bills to infuse into them…and when it came to a world with a population of 50,000 he could do that. But the larger worlds were an entirely different matter, and those would have to slowly progress the way House Morten had slowly built up their former duchy of Neubenn long ago.

The main focus now was securing the worlds and holding them, after which every day that passed would see progress rather than regression, and Stephan was just glad they were able to procure enough mechs to field a combined army of 528 at last count, though they were all spread across the 17 star systems they now possessed (counting Cholis)…with Grady having left three weeks ago to go potentially add number 18 from a pirate's den they'd finally been able to approximate the location of.

Tracking jumpships was thought to be impossible, but in truth if you were close enough in your own jumpship when someone else jumped, your own jump drive would get hit with hyperspace 'waves' for a few seconds. A savvy engineer could work out from those waves which general direction the other jumpship had traveled, but only if you were at the same jump point. If you were at the Zenith jump point atop a star and they were at the Nadir below it, you wouldn't be able to pick up anything without special sensors that Stephan hadn't even known existed. Due to the lostech blueprints he'd gotten from the First Prince, he now knew that the Star League apparently could track jumpships from further away, and with more accuracy.

Rannel had told him the designs were so advanced she couldn't promise to figure out how to build them if he gave her 50 years to work on it, but she did offer him some basic understanding of how they worked. And from that they were able to put some basic sensors on a few of their own jumpships as prototypes that would help narrow down the direction-finding effect that most of the Inner Sphere didn't even know existed.

His noble family had not, and he wondered just how many others in the Federated Suns knew about it…though from his growing Periphery sources, and documentation taken from the bandits he was capturing…some of them did know and used the effect to follow ships they intended to hit. If those ships were only going to inhabited systems, that narrowed down the possibilities greatly from the roughly 30% possibility the jump waves gave those savvy engineers who knew how to look for it.

Within a 30 lightyear radius, you would have hundreds, if not thousands of possible stars to jump to…but if only 4 or 5 of those were inhabited, well, the regular cargo traffic was always going to those, so if a pirate jumpship saw which direction you were jumping and could narrow it down further, he'd know exactly which 1 or 2 you were headed to…while at the same time, after hitting that jumpship, the pirate could jump out to any of the uninhabited systems and essentially get lost in the haystack.

Rannel's basic sensors had reduced that 30% field down to about 18%...which meant if you had 1000 stars in jumping range and the pirate jumped out of the same jump point your ship was sitting at, you had a cone of probability that would include about 180 stars.

That was nowhere near good enough to actually track someone with, but from what Rannel had told him, if one of the Star League's jumpships with the best sensors had been in the same jump point, they could have actually detected the entrywaves at the other end of the journey, knowing which system the other jumpship had came out of…though not which jumppoint.

Stephen really wanted one of those sensors, but if anyone in the Inner Sphere had them, they weren't bragging about it, and they couldn't replicate them. As it was, most jumpships operating today had been built during the Star League, and none of them had the sensor package, advanced or limited, so he wondered what special operations the Star League had reserved them for…and how exactly had House Davion come across the ancient blueprints for them when they didn't have any for the HPG network that Stephen also really wanted for his realm.

But right now, he was having to rely on couriers for all his information…and despite that, some of the pirate raids had been near jumpships that Stephen had begged or bribed for their engineering logs. He didn't tell them why, but he had gathered enough information to do some guesswork as to where this particular pirate, known as Captain Sheridan, was operating out of.

Had Captain Sheridan been making a double jump to his destination House Morten never would have a chance of finding him, but he'd been hitting shipping within a 30 lightyear radius frequently, which had led some people to believe he was in a particular area anyway, but there were far too many systems to search and too few people with jumpships that would actually incur the expense of such an expedition.

Stephen probably wouldn't have to worry about incorporating another big population this time, if Grady was able to find him, for all the known inhabited systems to traders in that area had already been searched. That suggested a hide-away somewhere, or maybe even a planetless system where the pirate kept his ship. Either way, it was one problem spot on the map that needed to be eliminated, and Stephan was glad he had the resources to even mount an operation like this because they were the dominate power in the region. Back in the Federated Suns, House Morten had been one of the smaller big dogs, while the Davions were always the dominant one in the pack and no one could really do anything without their say so.

But today…or more accurately April 5th, with the news only arriving out on Cholis now…that pack had lost its leader. Word had reached the news service here an hour ago that First Prince Andrew Davion had died of 'natural causes'…which could mean anything from a heart attack to an accident or an assassination that the Davion's didn't want to admit to. But regardless, the man with whom he had struck the deal with to bring his family out here…the very same man that had also dispossessed him…was now dead and his 18 year old son Ian Davion was now the ruler of the Federated Suns' over 500 star systems and hundreds of billions of people.

There was no way he was ready for it. Stephen remembered what it had been like taking over when his own father unexpectedly died…and that was only one world, a large one at that, but far less than the entire Federated Suns. He hadn't expected Andrew to die this soon, and doubted anyone else had. This was a shock to everyone, and hopefully Ian would be so busy he wouldn't have a chance to rethink his father's deal with Stephan.

With any luck he'd not even notice any of Carroll Davion's reports passing across his proverbial desk…but his advisors would, and what would they counsel him to do? Honor the deal? Sever the trade route that had organically grown to some 12 jumpships from the original 3, for he knew House Davion was making money on each one they commissioned to run the line from New Avalon out to Foniss. Would they throw that away to sever ties? Would they deny any economic link to the Federated Suns or try and kick him off Cholis entirely? Would Ian send an army of mechs out here to conquer the Morten Protectorate and make it a new addition to the Federated Suns?

Some of those things seemed wild, and the most probably outcome was that the status quo would remain, but even Andrew Davion had warned him that his heirs might not follow the deal he'd made with House Morten, so Stephen didn't honesty know what to expect. Whatever the case was, they'd just entered a new era for the Federated Suns.

The rule of First Prince Ian Davion…and whether that was going to be good news or bad Stephen didn't know, but his gut told him it would be a problem eventually. Hopefully not right now with his forces and resources so extended across this piece of the Periphery.

He also wondered what the Draconis Combine would do, given that their arch nemesis was now being led by an 18 year old.

Stephen was just glad he was on the other side of the Federated Suns and away from whatever 'testing' of the new leader's reign might be forthcoming.

The door to his office swung open without a knock, and he turned to see his sister standing there, but not Sarah. It was Susan.

"What does this mean for us?" she asked pointedly, still wearing what looked like a costume from one of her theatrical performances in Cholis's growing arts community.

"Nothing right now," Stephan said, taking a break from the paperwork for a moment and sighing. "Could be trouble later, but right now Ian has so much in the Federated Suns to worry about he probably doesn't even realize we exist."

"What happens if he cancels the deal?"

"He can't cancel it, only renege."

"Can he make us go back?" she asked bluntly.

"No," he told his sister, who was a passive member of the family and not knowledgeable about matters of state. "He can't make us do anything short of sending an army of battlemechs larger than ours. And if he did that he'd have to pull them out of somewhere else and that would cause trouble there."

"What about mercenaries? Could he send them against us?" she asked a far more adroit question than he'd expected of his baby sister that was only last month 19.

"Possibly," he admitted. "Don't worry about it too much. Vander and I have us well protected here."

"I didn't expect him to die so soon," she said, visibly flustered. "How does this change our status?"

"At the moment, it changes nothing," he said, standing up and placing his hands on her shoulders as he looked into her dark green eyes. "If he wants to cause some trouble later, we'll be ready for it."

"Is Carroll going to be called back?"

"I don't know," he said, knowing the two of them had actually become close friends ever since Stephan had given Carroll permission to move about the Estate…just not any of her guards. "She can stay here if she wants, but she's a Davion. This isn't her home, and if Ian wants to replace her, that's up to him."

"Can't you make her stay?" Susan demanded.

Stephan smiled. "I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, Suzy. They're still the dominant House, and we don't have much leverage left in the Inner Sphere. We've got way more than they do in the Periphery, but not back home."

"This is home," she reminded him, and to be fair she'd lived here longer than on Neubenn. "Please find a way for her to stay. She likes it here too."

"Why don't you ask her about it. She'd know better than me. She probably already knew Andrew died before the media got wind of it."

"If she did she didn't tell me."

"She's not going to tell you everything," Stephan said as his sister's face scrunched up uncomfortably.

"She tells me more than you."

"I doubt that. Most of what she has to say is business related, and I'm pretty sure you don't talk about that stuff."

"There's more than business," she reminded him.

"You can keep the gossip. I don't want it," he said, steering her towards the door.

"You're kicking me out?" Susan objected.

"Did you come here for something other than Carroll?"

She spun around and faced him, though she had to look up a good five inches to do it. "What happens to this family is my business too."

"Carroll isn't part of this family."

"Well…she feels like it. You could marry her, then she could stay," Susan pointed out with eager eyes.

Stephan laughed once. "In your dreams."

"Why not? You've already got all the kids you want, and she does like you," his sister said, referencing Stephan's 12 children. Given that the dating scene on Cholis was but a mere drop in the bucket compared to what it had been on Neubenn, he didn't really have many options, nor did the rest of his family for that matter. And knowing that they were going to need a lot more Mortens going forward to administer all of their growing list of planets, he'd opted to use surrogates.

He'd actually held a public competition in the form of physical fitness and skill games, with the winner being granted the surrogacy. They'd get a one night stand with him, carry his child through birth, then their job would be done. A group of nannies would raise the child and the mother would have nothing to do with them from there on. They would not become part of House Morten, but they would be financially taken care of for the rest of their life…amicably so.

The competition he'd expected to be mainly from women on Cholis, but it had attracted enough attention to draw in many others from the Morten Protectorate and beyond. There'd been women who had traveled here to compete from more than 8 different worlds in the Federated Suns and even a few from other Periphery states.

But rather than reward one winner, he'd chosen the top 10 and over the course of a month had impregnated them all. Two of them ended up with twins, so as of 3 months ago, he'd gone from having no children to 12 over the course of 17 days as they were all born almost simultaneously. He'd held all of them before turning them over to the nannies, but in truth he wouldn't have much contact with them until they were old enough to talk…though Susan and several other family members were already making themselves better acquainted with his children than he was.

He'd chosen the letter 'T' for his children, and since they had all been born so close together he wasn't considering any of them to be the eldest the way Sarah was in his family, a good two years older than him. His new lot of Mortens were Travis, Tina, Tom, Trip, Taryn, Tam, Tim, Tovi, Tiki, Theresa, Tony, and Thad…and they wouldn't be contributing to the active ranks for at least another 15 years, but one had to get started early on such things, and he'd preferred to just get it out of the way all at once, because it didn't look like he was going to be falling in love anytime soon.

Some of his family members who were also having trouble finding dates had ended up getting some of the lucky losers, and as a result another five babies had been born into House Morten in the past months. Cory, Dan, Erin, Matt, and Kim, all from his various cousins. His own brother Sam had actually started dating one of the contestants and ended up marrying her 5 months ago. So Bri Morten was now part of the family…a passive part…while the 'winner' was only a surrogate and now a past memory for Stephan.

She was nice, as were the others, but he didn't click with any of them other than in the biological sense. It was a way for them to gain some fame and be set for life financially, and they all knew that. Still, they'd opted for a one night stand rather than artificial insemination, for it was their own genetics being used rather than someone else's, and apparently Stephan was handsome enough to be a prize in his own right…or maybe they'd been hoping for more than a one night stand.

Either way, it had worked for him and some of his family members, despite the dating situation being so grim here, and ever since the competition both he and other eligible bachelors were receiving a lot of solicitations from other noble families' single daughters, celebrities, and whatnot from across the Federated Suns. So others were hopeful that the promise of finding that significant someone wasn't a doomed cause out here, and weren't quite ready to start marrying second cousins yet.

But according to Susan, she had plenty of attention from the local men, though he'd heard different from the other single House Morten women…all due to the fact of the small planet and their limited ability to comingle with others out here in the Estate far away from the city. His mother had appointed herself queen of matchmaking long ago, but even she was finding it difficult to find good lifelong pairings rather than the typical marriage of political convenience most noble houses utilized far too often.

"I don't care if Ian granted me Neubenn as a wedding gift," Stephan said firmly. "There is no way in hell I'd ever marry a Davion."

"Because they took Neubenn from us?"

"That's at the top of a very long list of reasons."

"But wouldn't giving it back negate that point?"

Stephan frowned at her. "Will you please pick either the smart little sister or the little ditzy know-nothing? You keep bouncing back and forth between them and I have trouble knowing which I'm talking to."

She punched him in the gut with all the force of leaf, then stared up at him defiantly. "Carroll is nice."

"I'm glad you're friends with her, but forget the marriage thing. It'll never happen with me. Try one of your other brothers."

"But wouldn't that stop any problems with Ian?" she said, back to the smart little sister.

Stephan held silent for a minute. "Have you ever heard the story of the scorpion and the wolf?"

"Many times," she said, rolling her eyes. "Carroll is not a scorpion going to sting you."

"House Davion is. You can never fully trust them. I know you were probably too young to understand when we lost Neubenn, and while I do like Carroll better than the rest of them, she's going to look out for the best interests of her House over our own. That could mean one day we wake up and suddenly we're not friendly neighbors, but enemies."

"She wouldn't do that."

"What if she was ordered to?"

Susan considered that for a moment. "She'd be conflicted, but she wouldn't stab us in the back."

"She may be picking up some of our good habits living out here, but don't assume it carries back to New Avalon."

"I want her to stay and I want this new Ian guy to be a friend. Why is that so hard to achieve?"

"Because other people don't want to be reasonable."

"An alliance should be in their best economic interest."

"True," he gave her credit, "but a lot of times noble families don't know how to do basic math, and they're more concerned with public appearance and ego. A lot of families have been destroyed that way."

"What do you mean, 'destroyed?'"

"I mean they don't just lose their duchy, but their money and all their possessions. They cease to be a noble family, or even a rich family, if they don't manage their holdings well. You don't have to worry about that with us anymore."

"And what about Ian Davion?"

"I'll deal with him when the time arrives. Right now he's going to be far too busy to worry about the Periphery with the other Great Houses breathing down his neck."

"Do you think we're in the clear then?"

Stephan considered for a moment. "I don't know. We'll have to play it by ear…and by we, I mean those of us who actually work rather than play dress-up."

"This is why you can't find a date," she said, poking him in the chest. "You never let anybody get to know you with all your constant work."

"That comes with being the First Lord. There's never a time I'm not working."

"Father managed somehow."

"I know. But we're not on Neubenn anymore and all my previous prospects are now out of reach. I have my heirs now, so there's no need to look for love."

"You'd rather look at mechs."

"They are a lot more faithful."

Susan made a rude sound, as if her teenage self was somehow an expert on such matters. "Boys and their toys."

"That's why boys make the best mechwarriors," he said, spinning her around and gently shoving her out of his office and closing the door before she could respond…