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October 19, 2999

Federated Suns

Crucis March

Cholis

Morten Estate

Rannel Morten was over in Prime Valley, which after 10 years of construction was showing less and less forest. One of the buildings that had replaced more land area than the mansion was a new one of hers. It was just a big warehouse inside of which she'd been working on phase 2 of a new prototype. 83% of that warehouse was full of a latticework of equipment she'd never used before…because the material it was made of was something that her department had tried and failed to produce in even limited quantities until 8 months ago.

Nathan Holcomb had actually stumbled onto a backwards ass way to produce one of the materials present in jump drives. It was so inefficient it could never be used in factory production…at least not without some major modification…but it allowed the Lord of Technology to produce a material called Zanxite that was critical for part of the process of breaking through into hyperspace and sending a ship in through that gap.

It couldn't do it on its own, but it was part of 4 components that, when working together, produced the effect. Rannel knew about that only in theory, not application, for they were still so far away from producing jump drives of their own it wanted to make her pull her graying hair out.

Check that. It gave her a second reason to pull her gray hairs out, hoping to give the follicles a reboot when they had to regrow. Sometimes that worked, but she was losing the war and before long was just going to start dying it…and then still plucking some of the ones that showed their malfunctioning roots.

Jump drives were one of the hardest technologies to create, and aside from an elite group of corporations, nobody could do it. They were that close to losing the ability to travel between stars if the existing jumpships broke down or were destroyed. The fact that her department, after some 57 years of existence, still hadn't figured out how to make them was embarrassing…but also a testament to how intricate this technology was.

Created by Stephan's grandfather, the Lord of Technology position had originally been to oversee techs and construction projects, but he wanted a more clandestine second purpose to it, one that was emblazoned on the archway to every lab they possessed, both here and back on Neubenn…assuming those buildings still existed. It read 'Write me a manual so that, with my wits and a sharp knife, I can go out into the forest and recreate civilization.'

Rannel hadn't been there when it had been created, but she'd been involved, if not leading the division of House Morten, for most of its existence. She was 62 years old now, and to her hilarious realization so long ago, that mandate had been taken literally, for within what was called the 'Morten Tech Tree' was many, many pages about how to build basic technology with nothing but a pocketknife and the natural resources found in the forest.

Things like using that knife to cut a branch, then trimming that branch to fit a stone. And wrapping cut vines around that stone to secure it to the branch, making a crude hammer. With that hammer you then could crush things more effectively, such as small rocks into smaller rock. When some of those broke along a jagged edge, you could then create larger, but crude cutting tools than your knife. On and on it went, detailing how to make better and better tools all starting with that pocketknife…which was a Morten production that had a screwdriver, magnifying glass, and several other things built into it, making it a multitool that was in every survival kit their House had ever made.

Nowadays though, her techs didn't work on more primitive stuff. Those pages had already been written and refined pretty well, though someone in their off time may come up with a new wrinkle they'd add later. No, what Rannel was working on, and had been working on back in Neubenn was an insurance policy against another dark age. Her division had been tasked with reverse engineering products available on the free market that were not produced on Neubenn. That way, if the imports suddenly dried up, they'd have the technical knowledge to start new industries there to replace them rather than having to go without.

The Morten Tech Tree was a very long manual at this point, but the number of stuff not in it far eclipsed what was. Her job was to add to it, slow or fast, and let each generation contribute more to the puzzle of how to restart civilization from scratch one day. She'd had no idea how valuable what her family had already created would be in trying to build a realm out here in the Periphery from scratch.

Though they'd had far more than a pocketknife to start with.

Rannel had more than 120 research projects ongoing, with a staff of 88 people doing those full time and another 3,918 techs working on other things, like typical maintenance to forging replacement armor plates for the battlemechs in lieu of a corporate factory to do so. That was one of the things on Sarah's 'to-build' list, but their money only went so far and the Lord of Logistics had to prioritize, so Rannel's people were still forging armor plates for mechs that couldn't get fitted ones over the free or black markets.

So Rannel had her hands in all kinds of things going on constantly, but this building was one of her attempts to add something new to their tech tree. When pirate hunting had started to become a hot topic, as opposed to removing warlords who camped out on planets that did not move, they needed a way to track them. Rannel had researched existing methods, all of which were poor to non-existent, but had helped get their jumpship engineers used to monitoring their drives for the rare opportunity when another ship jumped out of the same jump point as they were at. Studying that data, she could narrow down the possibilities of where they had went, and right now Grady was out on one such hunt, but by taking a group of scout ships with him to search an area that might have a pirate base in it if that pirate was only hitting ships within 30 lightyears of his den.

Assuming he even had a den. If he lived on the jumpship then there would be no way to pin him down.

But there were more pirates out there besides Captain Sheridan, and Rannel wanted to improve on that general direction the engineers could pick up with a sensor. She wasn't hopeful of getting it too precise, but anything better than the current 30% would be worth the effort and dramatically reduce the number of systems they had to search.

She'd accomplished that already, creating a modification attached to the jump engines that could reduce the probable locations down to 18%, but that had given her another idea. This 'static' on the engines was what she'd been working on, and using what little public research was available on the subject, and realized that what was happening was that when a ship torn into or out of hyperspace there was a ripple formed that spread out in all directions, diminishing as it went. That ripple had a tiny effect on the jump drives of nearby ships, hence the momentary static. It was possible if another jumpship entered at the exact same time there might be an issue, but she had no way to test that theory. Regardless, the odds of that happening were almost zero, and the static seemed to have no lingering effect on the drives, and she'd studied several to be sure.

Zanxite was what she'd learned, through process of elimination, was affected by these ripples. So after House Morten had learned to create Zanxite, for you couldn't buy it and they weren't going to strip down an existing jump drive to get some, she'd been able to experiment with building a receiver to detect these waves when they occurred. It was a little more complicated that just hooking up a bunch of Zanxite to a monitor, but not much more than that at present. Her team had successfully created a sensor that could do more than just register static, and when placing it onboard a dropship near the regular traffic going in and out of Cholis, she'd begun to collect data.

She'd moved that dropship further and further out, determining what kind of range it would have…then she had this warehouse built to produce one large enough that she hoped it would be able to detect these faint ripples all the way out at the planet. Producing the Zanxite had taken a lot of effort and resources, but they were getting less inefficient at it as they worked…which was another little addition to the Morten Tech Tree. Every process upgrade they made went into a new page in those volumes for others to use later, but Rannel was more impressed with the results of this building, for when she'd filled up 57% of it with the latticework of Zanxite alloy rods, she'd been able to start picking up the 'static' from jumpships arriving or leaving.

Now they'd gotten it up to 73% full, and she was able to read the jumps as well as if she had the dropship sitting half a light minute out of the jump point. She called this project 'Doorbell,' for now the Morten Estate could learn of any jumpship arrivals without having to rely on orbital satellites, but the size of this sensor was a monstrosity, and while Rannel had no idea how they could shrink the design…well, that's how science worked. You kept fiddling around with stuff until you accidentally made discoveries, and there was no way to know if or when that would happen.

So while she was interested in miniaturizing it to help track pirates, there was no use for that here. They'd have to be sitting at the jump point to get an idea of where they were going. Observing from the planet gave them next to zero clue of a vector. All it did was announce their arrival, but as she'd been studying the effect on the Zanxite latticework, she'd noticed that not every jumpship produced the same effect. Some were more intense waves than others, and Rannel had started collecting data.

Enough data to now be able to guess at what type of jumpship it was, not based on mass or shape, but by what caliber of jump drive it had. The newer models made less of a splash in hyperspace, so based off the intensity and the distance to the jump point…which altered slightly with planetary orbit…she had a better than 50/50 chance at guessing what class they were. And when it came to their own jumpships, she'd been trying to identify individual ones of identical class, working on the theory that the waves might be slightly different with each individual ship.

During all this she'd also noticed that there were variances, not just in intensity, but something else that she called 'flavor' for lack of a better term, and it was with that flavor she was trying to catalog House Morten's various jumpships during their normal transit in and out. Her guessing rate there was only at 23%, but given the number of ships they had of equal class, that was better than statistical average.

But the real quest she was interested in now…or rather, more interested than others, because a lot interested her…was to find a way to produce a ripple without sending a jumpship through hyperspace. After she'd got the warehouse up to 64% full, she'd started picking up a tiny bit of static not associated with jumpship arrivals, and she'd eventually figured out it was from the Cholis HPG terminal. Whenever they sent a message, it disrupted hyperspace…which wasn't unexpected, for the 'H' stood for Hyperspace in HPG, but how they worked was probably the most classified secret in the galaxy, and Comstar alone held that secret.

If any of the Great Houses tried to poke into one of their facilities and have a look around, they'd black out their communications across their realm, and the threat of doing that was what kept their hands off the Comstar facilities. Too much relied on those relays, and Comstar was committed to protecting the technology, and their monopoly. But since there was a station here on Cholis, and now that Rannel had a sensor that could pick up something from it, she was eager to learn all she could.

And if she could somehow find a way to create a pulse rather than just listen in, then at the minimum she could rig up a morse code system for a ship at a jump point to talk to the planet with almost no signal lag. She theorized if you could get a big enough pulse, or a sensitive enough sensor, you might even be able to create a ripple that could travel between stars. She didn't think that was how the Comstar system worked, because the ripples coming off the station in the nearby city were too inconsequential. She figured they were just a side effect, but an interesting one at that.

As she was monitoring the system and reviewing logs of previous recordings trying to piece together patterns, another jumpship arrived. She stopped what she was doing and analyzed the pulse her building-sized sensor had picked up, trying to guess the class.

She was fairly sure it was a Merchant-class jumpship, but as to its 'flavor' it looked like it could be one of theirs, but she couldn't honestly say for sure. Once she'd filled this building with more latticework and got a clearer signal, she hoped she'd be able to differentiate them, but right now all she could make out was the class…and even that she wasn't sure of, so she waited for the signal from the satellites monitoring jump point traffic to send its lightspeed transmission out to Cholis, which would take several minutes.

But after only three she got another pulse on the sensor, meaning a second jumpship had arrived, and it too looked like it was a Merchant. But the third another 3 minutes later was not, and she could tell it was a Liberty-class, for the ripples those old jump drives made were huge in comparison to the newer models.

Two Merchants and a Liberty? That had to be Grady's fleet coming back from pirate hunting. And she hoped he'd had some success. If not, he'd at least have a boatload of data for her to analyze on their own jumpship transitions and maybe something else try to pin down the location even more.

But when they got their first transmission from Grady a few hours later, it said simply to speak to him in person when he got down to the planet and nothing more.

And Rannel knew that could not be good news.

The Lord of Technology waited along with the other Lords for Stephan to arrive. He was more than an hour late at a meeting he had called himself after meeting Grady at the dropship pad. Then he'd stormed off with the Mech Commander in tow and disappeared into his office. A message had told them to meet in the manor's conference room, and the seven Lords were still here wondering what kind of shit had hit the fan this time, for Stephan was rarely so tight-lipped about anything.

When he finally arrived his face was gaunt, and his eyes red, but he moved with his normal grace and most people might not have noticed the difference, but Rannel and the others could tell something was very wrong.

"Sorry I'm late," he said, taking his seat beside the others in the semi-circle of table/desks that allowed them all to see each other's faces along with visitors, but there was no one else here besides the 8 Lords of House Morten. "I had some speed reading to do."

"The mission was a success," Vander said, having already talked to the mechwarriors that had arrived. "Is this about the prisoners?"

"Partially," Stephan said, running his fingers through his short hair slowly. "We have a big problem. And if we were House Davion those prisoners probably would have been spaced on the way back here."

"I thought they were the pirate's prisoners," Sarah said, having been scrounging up as much scuttlebutt from the people coming off the dropships as she could while Stephan and Grady were unavailable.

"They are. All the pirates died fighting or killed themselves to avoid capture. These prisoners were being held for ransom or used as servants in their base…which Grady tells me is more luxurious than anything we've got here, and on an uninhabited moon. He left a couple dropships and a Company of mechs behind not knowing what we'd want to do with it, but that's not the issue. He emptied the treasure rooms of everything he thought was valuable and brought it back, though he could have missed something."

"Spit it out already," Kevin urged.

"Grady, through sheer luck, caught the pirates with their pants down. They'd just come off another successful raid and had landed on their moon with a captured dropship, their two reapers, and all their men save six that they left on their jumpship as a skeleton crew. They were partying hard when Grady found them, and the jumpship was still recharging. It had no chance to jump out before they boarded it, and the six men onboard were either sleeping or drunk, because they weren't even waiting at the airlock when our boarding team cut its way in. There was still a firefight and all six made sure they'd either keep the ship or die trying, but we got it."

"Why isn't it here?" Sarah asked, knowing it hadn't arrived with their flotilla.

"It's parked in M47," he said, referencing the list of explored worlds in their 'zone of influence' that they'd just stared numbering for their own ease based on the order of survey. "Captain Brandi's idea, and a good one. We can't let anyone know we've got it."

"Again, why?" Sarah pressed.

Stephan looked her straight in the eyes, and she could see legitimate fear mixed with anger in his.

"Because it's Comstar."

"What?" Paul asked before the others could say anything.

"Captain Sheridan is Comstar…or was. The ship is an exploration vessel, one of apparently many they've got quietly searching the Periphery and beyond. Grady found a log book the Captain kept for his heirs, detailing everything so when they took over for him they'd know what they were getting into. He and a portion of the explorer ship's crew decided to go pirate and killed the others after successfully finding a Star League research laboratory that they'd been sent to locate and sanitize. Instead, Captain Sheridan…which is not his real name…looted the facility and then told Comstar they'd have to buy the tech back from him, which they did. And then they started a nice little business arrangement between the two of them. Those prisoners are not all Captain Sheridan's prisoners. Some are Comstar political prisoners he has been hiding away for them."

"Holy shit," Bindi Morten said, the new 37 year old Lord of Agriculture that had replaced Jared Morten when he'd decided to take oversight of Coden's massive agricultural resources as his personal project, for its success or failure was going to determine the future of the House's agricultural potential for the next 100 years at the minimum. Bindi now technically oversaw him…though not really…but was in charge of coordinating all agricultural projects across all worlds. All 7 of the secondary Lords were, like the First Lord, multitaskers, just subset into their own divisions.

"What did you mean by 'sanitizing?'" Rannel asked, picking up on his earlier statement.

"Comstar apparently is under standing orders not to let any Star League technology fall into anyone's hands but its own. If they can't recover it, they destroy it. And the Captain's log book includes stories from before his time on the explorer ship, indicating that Comstar has teams that actively sabotage research in the Inner Sphere to prevent anyone from catching up with what Comstar has."

"Pyrotechnics?" Rannel asked, dripping pure hated with each syllable.

Stephen was taken aback for a moment, then nodded. "I hadn't even thought about that, but maybe so."

"What Pyrotechnics?" Vander asked.

"Our failures," Rannel said sharply. "Research projects gone so awry they caught the building on fire. Now I'm wondering how many of those were really our fault."

"I was wondering why you hadn't burned down anything out here yet," Vichni said in an attempt at lightening the mood.

"It gets worse," Stephan interjected. "First, Grady went and checked out the location of this Star League facility on his way back. There's nothing there but an empty building. The explorer ship did a good job scrubbing it clean. But in his log book, the Captain indicates that if Comstar ever catches them, they will kill them at the minimum. Not just because they went rogue, but because they have their ship…and on that ship is a mobile HPG that they cannot let fall into anyone's hands or it will break their monopoly."

"Which we now have?" Vander asked for clarification.

"Yes. And we have a bunch of prisoners that are not supposed to exist. If we return them home, Comstar will know where they came from and they'll know we took down the pirate that has their ship and their HPG. What do you think happens then?"

"We could give it back," Sarah said with a shrug. "Easiest way to get off their shit list, and maybe get a bounty from them while we're at it."

"Or we could sell it to the Davions and let them play with Comstar," Paul added, but Stephan was shaking his head.

"No. I read through the entire log before I came here. That's why I'm so late. You don't understand how Comstar thinks. They're fanatics, according to Sheridan, and highly immoral. If we even got a look at the HPG, what do you think they'd do to Rannel's people? Just let them live with that knowledge?"

"You're saying they'll go scorched earth?" Vander asked.

"They have to, because they already have. I get the impression from the log that the Inner Sphere would have already caught up to Star League technology if not for their quest to hunt all the remaining pieces down and destroy them. It's making me rethink why Andrew Davion gave me the bits and pieces his House had put together over the years. He probably couldn't even research them without Comstar sabotaging his efforts, but we haven't been messed with out here and Rannel has already figured out some of the missing 'screws.'"

"Some small ones," she amended. "But I always wondered why the Federated Suns didn't have a whole division working on this faster than we could."

"And almost nobody has research and development," Vichni added. "When we added it, it was seen as stupid. Whatever the Star League had made was the only way to do it, so everyone just wanted to find bits and pieces of that technology rather than trying to build anything new of their own. Almost no other House has an active research division. It's just taboo thinking, and Comstar may be responsible for that as well."

"Captain Sheridan referred to them as the 6th Great House, because they plan to restart the Star League under their own direction, they're just not using armies of battlemechs to do it, but they do have agents everywhere doing clandestine work. And that's just the part that Sheridan knew about."

"What was his name?" Bindi asked.

"He never gives it, and tells his children not to ask. He wants them aware of the danger they live under day to day and why they can't show themselves around anyone else. It's a moot point now, because his children died alongside him, but he was adamant that Comstar would be out to get them by any means possible, and were only cooperating with him in order to keep him from trying to sell the HPG to one of the Great Houses. And he was milking that blackmail to no end."

"Leave the Davions out of it," Vander suggested. "They'll only find a way to make this worse, and if they've successfully kept the Federated Suns from researching the lostech files they'd picked up before Comstar could get to them, then they probably have the leverage to get Ian Davion to invade us and wipe us off the map for plausibly deniable reasons. There is no way to stop a Great House from pursuing lostech any other way. Do you have any idea how important it is in mech combat? I can't even believe what I'm hearing. Nobody would sit on that unless someone had a gun pointed at their head."

"Blacking out the HPG network is that gun," Paul said, mentally running through the commerce ramifications. "Not just during a war to shift the tide to your enemy, but a total shutdown would ruin every economy in the Inner Sphere. And Comstar is getting filthy wealthy with their monopoly, so they can probably buy as much support within each House as they can blackmail. I agree, leave the Davions out of this."

"Oh, and did I mention," Stephan added with a cruel smile. "That one of the political prisoners is a close friend of Chancellor Maximilian of the Capellan Confederation?"

Everyone's jaw dropped in the intervening silence.

"Yeah, exactly. That alone is going to piss off the Davions if we send him back and get so much as a thank you card from them."

"Does he know who kidnapped him?" Vander asked cautiously.

"Grady doesn't think so, but I've got Roger starting interviews with all of them. Until we decide what to do, they're going to be our prisoners under House arrest, and frankly I don't know how we can dodge this shitstorm unless we do something we'd never do."

"Like kill them all and deny they ever existed," Sarah said, knowing that the Davions might do that, and the Liaos, and Kuritas wouldn't even hesitate.

"Which is not an option," Stephan said unnecessarily just to get it out of the way. "I need options that don't paint a bullseye on us."

"We go loud or we go silent," Vichni argued. "The middle ground doesn't help us."

"If we let Rannel figure out how the HPG works," Sarah said, thinking out loud, and spread those designs to all the Great Houses, they'd be on our side. What would Comstar do then?"

"Captain Sheridan would say they'd get their bloody revenge sooner than yesterday," Stephan said dryly. "They wouldn't just leave us alone."

"And if we stay silent?"

"Comstar will know once we start sending the prisoners home, because they organized some of their captures, if not did the capturing themselves. Comstar was also acting as neutral arbiter between the 'pirate' and the families that were having to pay the ransoms."

"Shit," Vander said, lightly pounding the table with his fist. "They control the Mercenary Review Board too. We're going to have attacks on our worlds as soon as they find out what we've got. If they can't get the HPG eliminated and Rannel's data deleted, they'll just hammer us with anonymous contracts until the Morten Protectorate is eliminated…all with plausible deniability."

"So they do have battlemechs," Stephan said. "Just not ones they're responsible for."

"So this means war," Kevin said evenly.

"It means all kind of nastiness that I can't even guess at," Stephan clarified. "When you read the Captain's log you'll understand. They believe they own Humanity and they're willing to do anything morally objectionable to rule it in order to 'save it,' and maintaining their monopoly over Star League technology is their top priority. They're going to come for us, someway, somehow, and we need to decide how we're going to deal with this before we start releasing those prisoners."

"Can we handle mercenaries?" Kevin asked Vander.

"To a point. But the attrition will wear us down, and if our worlds are plagued with attacks that do damage, even if we win, we're not going to be a friendly business environment and the line of corporations wanting to move in here will dry up in a hurry. But as for keeping worlds, unless they send some heavy hitters, we can hold them off…at a cost."

"If they've got as much influence everywhere as you're suggesting," Sarah added. "They could blacklist us from buying goods in the Federated Suns. We'd still have the black market, but we'd be isolated economically even if Ian doesn't pull the plug on our cross-border traffic. This could get very bad, very fast."

"Which is why we need a plan," Stephan said, leaning forward on his elbows. "The interviews are going to take a few weeks. After that, we need to start arranging for people to return without them sending messages through Comstar. Maybe we'll get lucky and they won't notice them popping back up."

"Fat chance of that," Bindi said after blowing a raspberry on her lips.

"Whatever we do," Rannel said firmly, "I need to get on that ship ASAP to see what we've actually got."

Stephan nodded. "I'll send you and a team out tomorrow."