Debauchery Worlds 25 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Southmonk

Debauchery Worlds

Chapter 25

-VB-

Major Michael Anderson

David II

2981.04.03

If the Marris Mercenaries had been half as ruthless as any of the Successor Houses, then Michael and all of his comrades would be dead. His friendship with the commander of the mercenary compnay would have given him, at best, a quick death.

But Marris hadn’t done that, and it made Michael question why that wasn’t so.

Michael saw those portals and pings from ships moving at FTL within the system.

All of this was information that he could take to the First Prince and upset the major balance of power.

So why did Marris let him live? 

‘Because it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things,’ he thought to himself and knew to be true. 

Those portals alone was a strategic tool that all of the Inner Sphere would salivate to get their hands on… and ultimately never be able to replicate for a very simple reason.

Technologies that Marris produced, when they weren’t just “minor” improvements, were outright nonsensical the moment the scientists cracked them open. The shields, the intrasystem FTL drive, and more … they were all useless and incomprehensible unless Marris and his men chose to reveal them.

And Marris knew that. 

On top of that, should things truly become dire, then they could open a portal and just leave.

Yes, they could just leave.

It finally made sense how the commander continued to grow his company’s numbers and build up so quickly. He had some sort of backer (or his own) bring in extra manpower to finish building quickly. 

Which meant that Commander Marris was an even bigger presence than the Federated Suns and the First Prince could have ever imagined. He was like a spider, weaving a shiny and beautiful web that everyone wanted to attach themselves to. But now that they had a taste for it…

Michael was no lord. He was the fourth son of the seventh daughter of a count. He was a mechwarrior first and foremost. And despite only being a mechwarrior with no say in the politics of the state, he knew that the First Prince could not afford to make demands of the Marris Mercenaries. Never mind the energy shields, portals, and alternate FTL drives, the Stomata-class Dropship alone would ensure that the First Prince would benefit by keeping the Marris settled in the Federated Suns. Any foolish endeavor to take what wasn’t theirs would end with no Stomata dropship, no ridiculous defense along the Combine border, and definitely no more advances that the Suns could leech off of. 

If First Prince Andrew Davion fumbled this, then he would be on par with Hohiro Kurita in the running for “the dumbest leader of the Successor State” of this generation. 

Just leave them alone, prevent others in his command from messing with them, and keep buying their stuff. 

But he really wanted that FTL drive. The things an ASF pilot could do with the ability to weave in and out of the entire solar system…

---

Alan Marris

“... So we fried a good half of the emergency quantum drives we installed on all of the mining ships,” I muttered as I looked through the eyes of all of my clones as well as more detailed reports laid out in front of me, both digital and physical.

The quantum drives installed on all of our Crawdad mining ships had been tinker-modified Atlas drives sold by Robert Space Industries over on United Earth Empire-verse. The reason why those drives had been modified to become pseudo-tinkertech was because, well, normal quantum drives had a lot of safeties, including where and when they could be turned on and off. For example, normal quantum drives from the UEE-verse could not be turned off. The ship’s power can be turned off and thus the drive could turn off from a lack of power, but it could not be turned off as a separate component unless, I don’t know, someone decided that pulling out a giant component with stupendous amount of electricity running through it was a good idea. 

One of the changes we made was giving our ships the ability to turn off just the quantum drive, mostly to prevent them from being discovered should someone ever capture our ships and the scuttling component failed to work.

But doing so made the tinkertech quantum drives rather volatile with low but consistent chances of malfunctions and damages. 

And now, I was seeing exactly how high those chances were. 

On average, the Crawdads used quantum drive roughly fifty times before something in the quantum drive broke and shut down completely. The fastest failure happened at thirteen right when the ship with that drive was in the middle of an attack run (subsequently, that Crawdad and all of the clone crew died once the enemies focused their fire on it). There were four Crawdads still running with their quantum drives active, but there were signs of instability that suggested their quantum drives would start breaking down.

Where did that leave me? 

While I could build quantum drives, it would take a lot of time and finely tuned manufacturing. Much more finely tuned than what was normal for my factories and thus there would be a need to retool and then “de”-tool after we made the drives.

Instead of doing that, I spent my clones to go and buy some more quantum drives. Considering that one could buy one at basically most space stations and minor settlements, this shouldn’t take too long. 

What was more problematic was the ongoing salvage of the warships and dropships as well as the interrogation of the few captured crewmen.

Including someone whose uniform basically screamed precentor of ComStar. Unsurprisingly, ComStar expected stellar success from this operation and had not given any means to perform suicide to their soldiers and higher ups. The result of which was two captured precentors, at least a dozen ComGuard, and thrice that many acolytes who were unprepared for boarding action and brutal takedowns. 

Considering that ComStar’s involvement was pretty clear, we decided to not skirt around the issue and asked him directly.

One of my clones walked into the interrogation room and sat down. The precentor tied up in the room glared impotently as us while we stared back coolly. Obviously, everything was being recorded. 

“So why did ComStar attack us?” we asked the precentor. “As far as we know, we never gave reason for ComStar to dislike us. Or bring out weapons that the rest of the Inner Sphere considers extinct. And a rather sizable fleet at that.”

“You are ruining everything!” the precentor spat. 

We gestured for him to continue. But he didn’t. Apparently, talking as far as he had was already too much, so he kept his mouth shut. 

“... Okay, this is how it will go. There are currently five of us operating on Terra at the moment.”

The precentor jolted. 

Yeah, you didn’t imagine that, did you? We had clones there not because we wanted to attack your headquarter there or something. No, we were there because we wanted to access all of the libraries there. Unfortunately, we just arrived there because of how slow travel was, even though those five started heading toward Terra late last year. We wanted access to books and information, not turn ourselves into spotters for bombs from another universe!

“For each question you do not answer, one of those five will target a ComStar facility and blow it up.”

“You wouldn’t,” he sneered. “You wouldn’t dare upset the entire Inner Sphere with those terrorist acts!” 

“Did our technology look like we were from the Inner Sphere?” we asked him and he fell quiet. “If the Inner Sphere wants us gone, then it will be very simple for us. We will pack up and leave. Simple as that. However, this level of attack… it cannot go unanswered.”

Another one of us, armored up with the face covered, walked into the interrogation room and gave a computer pad to the interrogator clone. The interrogator accepted and turned back to the precentor as the delivering clone left the room again. We turned on the computer pad and then showed him a livefeed. “And just as ComStar apparently has means beyond most of the Inner Sphere, we too have means beyond that.” 

We didn’t have the means to livestream something from over a hundred lightyear away. What we did was open up a portal between David II and Terra, keep it open consecutively so that livestream from one of our clones’ helmets on Terra could continuously provide data to the data centers.

(Or more specifically, since the interdimensional portals could not be opened up intradimensionally, we were daisy chaining portals through another verse, which was exactly what we did for the Crawdads when we were doing portal attack runs on ComStar’s fleet. In network terms, we had a smartphone hotspotting in between the router and the computer.) 

We showed the precentor a livefeed of Terra. More specifically, we showed them the facility that supposedly held one of Terra’s HPG station.

“You wouldn’t-”

“Why did you attack us?”

“You wouldn’t dare-!”

In another universe, one of our clones sighed dejectedly at the thought of the lives we were going to take today as we briefly opened up a portal from where he was to where the HPG station was. It wasn’t above it or anything like that. No, we just opened up a portal to a side street next to it, walked on through to a horde of people going about their lives, set a box down, and walked back through before closing the portal.

And then the timer ran down before anyone could do anything about it.

The precentor and I watched from David II as one of the ComStar HPG stations blew up along with a good chunk of the city it was next to. We could have used a nuke but we didn’t; it was just a really powerful explosive. 

He screamed. He raged. The chair shook and bounced as he tried to get out of it to strangle me. 

I looked at him dispassionately as I waited for him to calm down.

Then I slid the livestream to the next to the next target. 

“Why did you attack us?” I asked again.

He looked at me and then the livestream of the city. He didn’t answer.

The second target, some kind of ComStar facility we didn’t care to learn in-depth about, exploded along with another good chunk of the city it was next to.

He caved in when it looked like I was about to explode the third one. 

And he told me everything.

Sufficed to say, what we learned rocked us back… and more so for frothing Major Anderson who had been with two of my clones in the observation room next to the interrogation room. I wanted him to be there as my witness for the assault we suffered, not for him to learn human civilization-breaking conspiracy!

But what’s done was done, and it wasn’t like this was going to impact us more than this assault already did.

“You can’t tell me to keep silent about this,” the major snarled after finally getting some manner of control over himself. 

“I won’t,” we replied with the clones next to him. He still didn’t know that all of the Marris “soldiers” were clones because all of us but I wore helmets to conceal our faces. 

“Good. I need to get a ride to the First Prince as soon as possible. Please.”