personal6

19

August 3, 3002

Federated Suns

Draconis March

Neubenn

New Harkington

Niles Sharki was a businessman. He owned seven different retail stores in three cities on Neubenn and lived a very nice lifestyle while being lost in the crowd. The planet was so large and highly populated, even a rich man like Niles didn't attract attention outside his circle of friends and business associates. He was well placed, visible, and essentially anonymous.

He was also a Lyran intelligence agent.

He knew he wasn't exactly hiding. On Neubenn the various players from all the Great Houses knew where the others were located…unofficially, of course. It was common practice to have eyes and ears on all the major worlds, but on Neubenn there was a much more good-natured attitude towards the affair. They were welcome to look and listen as much as they wanted, just not take any interfering action. Even the Dracon Combine had a semi-public standing here in lieu of an actual embassy, in another city on the other side of the planet, but Niles knew who to contact if he needed to interact with them, and the same was true of the other powers.

So when his security team informed him there was a man here that wanted to talk to him about non-business affairs, it didn't surprise him. What did surprise him was that he was claiming to be a representative of the former Duke of Neubenn.

"Send him in," Niles said into his desktop microphone, then leaned back in his chair wondering what sort of trouble had just ended up in his lap. For the past two years House Morten had become verboten on Neubenn…which was a very hard thing to accomplish given their lengthy rule here, which was made even the more iconic every time House Derren changed something for the worse. People wanted the Mortens back, but most of them had believed the story of the young Duke dying out on the edge of the Federated Suns to save another Duke from a raider attack that had wiped out the entire colony.

It was utter garbage. The Lyran Commonwealth had already determined House Morten was still there and now in complete control of the world they had previously been denizens of. What they hadn't figured out was why the Federated Suns had abandoned it and put forth this sham. Anyone even professionally asking about the Mortens was blacklisted on Neubenn, and he'd been told it was the same everywhere else in the Federated Suns. It was so bad here historical records were actually replacing Morten rule with House Derren. They were not just pretending they no longer existed, but that they had never existed. Whatever was going on it was unprecedented, and it looked like it was about to be dropped right into his lap.

A fit and trim young man was shown in, with two of his bodyguards staying in his office and flanking the door as it was shut behind them, just in case they would be needed.

"I have a letter from Stephan Morten that needs to be hand delivered to your Archon under maximum security," Shani Klean said bluntly, for he was originally from Neubenn and knew his way around the planet. The First Lord had also told him where to find the Lyran agent and what to expect, so he saw no point in pleasantries.

"You're risking your future even speaking that name here," Niles deflected.

"So I've noticed."

"How did you get here?"

"The slow way. By the time I get back, I'll have given up a year of my life to this mission. So please don't underestimate the importance of this. Secrecy must be maintained, and if Comstar knew of the letter I hold, they would try to kill me or anyone else holding it. That is why I had to come in person and could not send a message through them."

"Comstar?" Niles said, frowning. "What do they have to do with this?"

"A great many things. We've been unofficially at war with them for the past two years. They keep sending mercenaries to break us, but we keep holding our worlds. Not one has fallen."

Niles leaned forward. "Tell me more."

"I have been given a letter," Shani said, carefully pulling it out of a vest pocket so not to be construed as a weapon. "It is meant to be hand delivered to your Archon with no one knowing of its existence before, during, or after arrival. It has been left unsealed so you can read it and realize its importance. I ask that after you do, you seal it and send it on its way by whatever means appropriate. It is not time sensitive, but it is critical that it reaches your Archon anonymously. You will understand when you read it."

"Give it to me," Niles said, with the Morten agent slowly handing it over as if it were a bomb about to go off.

He pulled four pieces of paper out of the pliable brown envelop and started reading. His interest was caught immediately by a wealth of information about what was happening out there, including the reason for the societal whitewash of any information about House Morten.

By the time he got to the second page, his jaw nearly hit the floor.

He read on, finishing all four pages, then, as calmly as possible, placed them back inside the envelope, though all four men in the room could see his hands shaking slightly.

"I trust you understand now?"

"I do," Niles said, pulling out a small rollbar from his desk. He pulled the plastic off the adhesive envelope strip and used the rollbar to smash it flat. No one could open it now without having to tear open the envelope. "I cannot promise you when it will arrive, but we will make sure it does."

"No one can know of this," Shani reiterated. "Comstar has people in every Great House. If this goes through channels, they will find out. It must be placed directly into the Archon's hands without him or anyone else knowing its origin."

"I know what is required. You can be assured it will reach him quietly."

"Then my task is done. Good day."

"Good day," Niles said reflexively as the man turned around. He waved at his guards to show him out, but when they shut the door behind him he just stared at the envelope.

This was no bomb. It was a supernova that was about to go off.

He took the envelope and opened the bottom drawer of his desk, slid it in, then pretended like it didn't even exist. He couldn't do anything about it today, or the next. Anything to link the arrival of this man, who could have been noticed, to the movement of the envelope could tip off some as to its importance.

No, he had to move this slowly, which meant it wouldn't leave his office for some time. It would have to be smuggled from one side of the Inner Sphere to the other. Tharkad was so far away, and without Comstar he'd have to send this via courier, but he didn't dare risk their usual diplomatic pouches…nor could he route this through any of their other field offices in the Federated Suns. This had to go straight to the Archon, and thankfully there was an existing procedure to do just that. One that he'd never had cause to use before.

It was called ACN, and if one used it they were risking their career if the Archon didn't feel it was justified. There was also BLOT and HANDS for ultra-secret information, and he'd only used the third tier HANDS once…but this letter was, without a doubt, worthy of ACN. It was the kind of mission a lazy agent like him had only dreamed about. Something that could reshape the face of the Inner Sphere…or be lost in some alley if not properly handled.

His greatest moment, and he had to pretend nothing of importance had happened in this brief meeting. Not to any surveillance on this building, not to even his own staff. His guards knew that anything said in this office when they were present never happened, but there were some 18 other personnel here that were also on the Lyran payroll, and he couldn't risk informing any of them except the one needed to activate ACN.

He'd do that in…three days from now, just to be safe. Until then he had to sit on this and pray that the Morten agent hadn't been followed. He thought about sleeping in his office, then nixed the idea as another indicator that something unusual had happened. He'd lock his desk as usual…but do nothing out of the ordinary just in case someone had some unlikely links into this building, technological or otherwise. They swept it constantly to prevent such things, but there was always the possibility of a mole fouling things up…but then again, why bother with one on Neubenn? It was almost in the Crucis March and far too big to be conceivably hit by the Draconis Combine. The distance made it unavailable to the Capellans as well. It was a major world, but a boring one as far as Inner Sphere politics went, so it was unlikely to have any serious foreign power players present.

Which was probably why Stephan Morten had sent this here. Nobody would expect him to return, and as it was, it was out of the way if you were going to take a direct line from the Periphery to Tharkad. It would have made more sense to send a jumpship around the edge of the Inner Sphere and deliver it personally…but he knew why they couldn't, and he agreed this was by far the best way to handle matters, despite the process being painfully tedious.

Niles tried to push the subject out of his mind in time for his business meeting 23 minutes later, but he was sure he did a poor job of acting, for even his associate said something about his maybe not feeling well. He'd smiled and waved it off as a lack of proper sleep, but he knew he'd have to do better over the coming days.

Whether by skill or luck, the three days passed without incident, then a drop was schedule for 8 days later, passing through the home of one of his staff, then moved by a sleeper agent with the morning garbage pickup to a park and left unattended under a rock by a lake for two days in a sealed plastic bag.

Nobody found it, for it was the kind of place nobody actually stepped and completely out in the open…but at night it was practically invisible from the busy walkways some 42 meters to the south. And it was there that the envelope was quietly collected and put into a foldout picture frame almost too big to carry.

The man who lugged it around became obvious to the crowd once he emerged into the night street lights again, hiding his prize in the open beneath a cheap movie poster that nobody would bother trying to steal from him.

He got into a car some 8 minutes later and drove for 6 hours before handing off the picture frame to a pawn shop. And from that pawn shop a courier agent collected it another 3 days later…absent the picture frame, for it was now inside a vase destined for an art gallery on New Avalon.

And from there the letter went, from one journey to the other, bouncing its way clandestinely across the Federated Suns, then cutting through the Capellan Confederation before a lengthy zig zag crossing of the Free Worlds League. After that it entered Lyran territory, but the same methods were used to safeguard it all the way to its destination in the palace.

There it bypassed the normal security that would have demanded it be opened and scanned. Very few people in the Lyran Intelligence Corps even knew of this backdoor way of getting messages to the Archon, and it was so rare that if it was ever used the agents inside the palace moved it along without question, fearing for either the life of the Archon or the life of the Lyran Commonwealth with regards to whatever information was in the message.

Alessandro Steiner was given the letter in his office bathroom of all places, for the agents could not delay once being handed it, not knowing if it was time sensitive.

The man in question waited outside while the miffed, half-naked Archon read it with half his face covered in shaving cream. He had a high level meeting with House Duron's matriarch in less than an hour and was intent on looking his best…with this interruption being the sort of thing he'd fire a servant for if he was in a bad mood, but the look on the agent's face told him of the importance of the message.

He tore open the folder and began reading the letter.

"Cameron's bones," he cursed in a whisper, a shiver running down his body. A dollop of shaving cream fell on the letter and he swiped it off, not caring where it landed. He read it through not once, but three times, trying to get a handle on this and how to proceed.

He stepped out of the bathroom and caught the eye of the guard. "Find Harkov and tell him to meet me in the tower in twenty minutes."

"Yes, your excellency," the agent said politely, then removed himself from the office as smooth as a gentle breeze.

Alessandro went back into the bathroom still holding the letter. He only reluctantly put it down on a nearby shelf as he grabbed a towel and cleaned the shaving cream off his now uneven stubble, but that didn't matter. He got dressed and hurried out of his office, informing his staff waiting outside that he'd been called away on urgent military affairs and that the Duron matriarch would have to wait.

There was always some military affair going on in the Inner Sphere, so it was an easy lie to make when he needed to disappear somewhere without letting anyone know why.

He passed through several hallways, giving his retainers the slip with a single glance they'd learned to interpret as 'don't bother me' and ended up in one of the palace's five small libraries that doubled as impromptu meeting centers. The one he entered was reserved for his personal use so no one was ever in it without his permission.

He pulled out a particularly dusty volume and the nearby bookcase moved out, revealing a hidden door that he slid through quickly before it automatically closed. Then the Archon took a flight of tight, twisting stairs up to a tower at the palace that appeared on none of the blueprints. It had no windows, and no visual outline against the sky, wedged between other actual towers, with this one being a secret from most of the security staff in the building.

Alessandro got there first, with his most trusted agent arriving two minutes later from a different entrance, with the two men taking up most of the air in the small room that could have fit four comfortably if needed, but no more.

The Archon handed him the letter and let the agent read it. To his satisfaction the man's always neutral eyes widened considerably. When he looked up at the ruler of the Lyran Commonwealth, Alessandro knew he also understood the implications of this.

"Tell them yes," he ordered.

"We won't be able to arrange this within the year," Harkov warned. "Not if we do it properly. It will probably have to be scheduled for at least 14 months from now."

"That long?"

Harkov nodded. "If we can't use Comstar, we'll have to travel all the way to the far Periphery to schedule this, then get the messenger back with the confirmation before one of your associates leaves. You can't go yourself, you know that?"

"I need to, but you're right. We'll have to arrange some excuse for another Steiner to go. I won't let anyone else handle this for us."

"If you'll allow me, I'll make this work quietly. You needn't be involved until I let you know what's required."

"Do what's necessary, but I don't want to lose this opportunity if Comstar or the Davions destroy them before we can get it!"

"I will move as fast as reasonable, but we can't risk tipping either of them off either."

"True, true. What do you need from me today?"

"Go back to your normal schedule before people start to notice something going on. I'll handle everything."

Alessandro grabbed Harkov by the right shoulder. "Don't mess this up."

"We won't," he promised, then the Archon left the tower by his stairs and Harkov via his ladder holding the letter as he climbed down into the bowels of the palace that few outside the upper intelligence community even knew existed.

Rannel Morten had never been so busy in her life. In total, there were 16 new technologies discovered on the now renamed Morten Sword that her research division had to reverse engineer. Most were small stuff, but useful, in the jumpship's systems. The two big ones were the Black Box project and the HPG.

She'd been working on everything in bits and pieces, but Stephan had made the Black Box her top priority. She'd finished with it some 8 months ago, knowing it still needed improvements made, but it was functional. Rannel left the tinkering up to others and had fully devoted herself to the HPG…which was by far the biggest, most dangerous project she'd ever been a part of.

And also the most frustrating, because the technology, as it turned out, was based off a jumpship's jump drive…something that House Morten wasn't currently set up to manufacture.

So she had to create her own little tech division to start building them, in prototypes anyway, just so they knew what the hell it was they were doing. Fortunately they had blueprints for jump drives, but the manufacturing process was something else entirely. Doing this had already been on her department's to-do list for the future, but without a shipyard there was no point in building jump drives yet…until now when they needed that expertise.

Rannel's team had produced 13 different jumpship drives…all of which were junk except for the last two, having broken or melted down during testing. It was very expensive junk, but thankfully her Doorbell project had got them producing small amounts of Zanxite and they had gradually been collecting via market buys or, in the case of one small mine on Bahab, Germanium and Titanium to build a stockpile for down the road when they had planned on starting to build jumpships.

Those small stockpiles were what Rannel's techs were using to build the prototypes, then recycled the damaged materials to try again. Thankfully Neubenn had extensive recycling facilities given its population size, otherwise they'd have never been able to keep up with material demand, and that knowledge House Morten had brought with them for many high-end technologies that others would typically just dump into a hole in the ground then go buy new ones.

So much had been done over the past 2 years that Rannel's research division had mushroomed to 19 times its original size, and when it came to the HPG project, she had a section procuring or fabricating exotic materials like Zanxite, another fabricating components, a third recycling materials from trashed components, a fourth doing the actual experimentation of the jump drives trying to make a hop from System X's Nadir jump point to its Zenith one, and fifth one trying to put together what pieces of an HPG they could without the main components that they were waiting to construct after they understood how to build a basic jump drive, let alone the tiny one in the HPG that sent a radiation wave through hyperspace instead of a large chunk of matter.

So in essence, each HPG created an artificial jump point wherever it wanted, and sent a signal through to a regular jump point elsewhere, or another artificial one. The signal would pop back into realspace at that location and spread out just the same as it would from an antenna, meaning the Comstar Compounds were probably getting signals right inside their own artificial jump points and shielding those signals from anyone else receiving them…or getting them from the star for incoming transmissions while they were able to send out signals directly from their compound into a brief artificial jump point.

Those artificial jump points took a lot of power to maintain, though it was possible to keep one open momentarily to receive a direct signal if you knew when it was coming. How the Comstar Compounds were operating she didn't know, and furthermore, creating artificial jump points was a science above and beyond jump drives that Rannel wasn't going to try to copy anytime soon.

Strangely enough, the Morten Sword did have that capability despite the fact that it would never fly to anywhere other than a jump point. She expected the design of the HPG was standard enough they'd just copied it into the ship rather than making a scaled down model, but that scaled down model was exactly what she was going for. If they could 'jump out' a signal instead of a ship it would take far, far less energy to do it. And they could do so from one of their own ships, or even a space station situated in a jump point and achieve the same effect as doing it on a planet, plus the few minutes of time lag going out from the planet to the star and back again, but that was insignificant given the amount of data that could be passed through these HPG mini-jumps.

Her two prototypes of regular jump engines had both been tested successfully…in that they worked, but the first had suffered such damage in the process that a second had been built to try and mitigate the effects of impurities in the forging of certain alloys. The second did work, twice, before starting to have issues. Rannel had personally assigned herself to that part of the work crew, and was down in one of the zero g work areas of the Morten Sword as it sat in an uninhabited system known as 'System X' along with a few dropships left behind for her purposes. Those were being reconfigured into mobile factories, warehouses, and whatever else she needed to quietly work on this where no one would be the wiser.

"Message from Cholis," Lilly Nostrum said gently from behind Rannel, who looked up from the scope on a microanalyzer and the Titanium-Germanium alloy sample that was giving them so many problems.

She blinked twice, adjusting her eyes to a normal range of vision, and saw her assistant holding a printout. Rannel drifted away from the workstation and took it, then read the brief text message.

"Finally," she said, handing the paper back to Lilly. After an extensive search, Sarah had finally managed to recruit a senior engineer from Ioto Galactic Enterprises, one of the few corporations that produced the Kearny-Fuchida drives for the Merchant-class jumpships. She'd been asking for some experts to be hired so her team wouldn't have to learn this all from blueprints and trial and error. And the message said that Jernor Bilbring had just arrived on Cholis and would be getting to in System X within the next 4 weeks.

"I hope he knows something of value," Lilly said, taking the paper back from the Lord of Technology.

"He better," Rannel growled, heading back to her analyzer, "for what we're paying him."

"More than me?" the 5-foot nothing woman with arms the size of toothpicks joked.

"If you want a raise, figure out something I haven't yet."

"What if he can't?"

"Then you're going to see what I'm like when I get grumpy. Do you have any more irrelevant questions to ask, or are you building up to something else?"

"We need a planet," she said flatly.

"I know," Rannel agreed, adjusting the zoom function on her scope. "But we can make do without one for a while longer."

"No, Rannel," she said firmly. "You need to get us into real gravity now. We can't keep working in 0g and sleeping on a gravity disc. It's wearing everyone down, including you. We need a proper research base. We needed one 6 months ago."

"I didn't anticipate this many problems with the Germanium. I thought the Zanxite would be the limiting factor."

"We can't wait until we work it out," Lilly pressed. "You've got tunnel vision."

"When have I not?" Rannel countered, turning away from her work for a moment. "Do you have any idea how important this is?"

"Black box was important. This can wait a bit."

The older woman was going to argue that automatically, but then her voice caught in her throat. "We need every advantage we can get. And until we can get the HPG in the Morten Tech Tree we risk losing it all if this ship is destroyed or captured. We're not safe until then."

"Then get us an airless planet with 1g of gravity to work on it," she countered. "Some of the components need more room to be fabricated than a dropship can offer anyway. You're holding those people back by keeping us here, you know?"

Rannel held up a hand. "Fine. You're right. Send a message to Stephan that we need to advance to phase 3 as soon as possible. That way it's out of my distracted hands."

Lilly smiled. "Does that count as something you didn't know?"

Rannel scrunched up her face in a mocking way that wiggled her nose slightly. "Get out of here, child…"