Achernar Militia Command

Achernar

26 February 3133

“Ortega!”

The corridors at Achernar’s command post bustled with activity as aides and junior officers swept in and out of offices, running errands and putting on their best show of martial diligence for the visiting Knight Errant. Raul was still trying to wake up after a short night of restless sleep, debating between coffee versus the pair of caff-tabs in his pocket, when his former roommate called to him.

Raul Ortega waited outside the briefing room door for Captain Jeffrey McDaniels to catch up. The newly promoted armor officer had opted for dress uniform, making Raul’s utility greens look shabby by comparison. The other man tsked at Raul’s casual dress, brushed some imaginary lint off his own shoulder. Raul smiled and gave his friend a familiar wave—having been recently promoted himself.

“They don’t enforce much discipline among you ’Mech-jocks, do they?” McDaniels had an easy smile and a sharp tongue, two traits that complemented his thick shock of red hair. His pale blue eyes were shot through with red, evidence of another hard night out with the guys. When the going got tough, the Irish went drinking. “Colonel’s pet.”

The wintergreen scent of several breath mints barely covered the whiskey-tinge on McDaniel’s breath. Raul smiled thinly, and then nodded at the other man’s captain’s bars. “Is that what Colonel Blaire told you at the O-club last night? You’re only one step out from major, gotta start showing time with the old man, right?”

McDaniels nodded, but slowly. “Yeah. We’re making new officers pretty fast out there.”

The thought sobered both men; each had moved up—Raul from the reserves, in fact—due to battlefield attrition. The MechWarrior ushered his friend into the briefing room ahead of him, trailing after with an additional concern on his mind this morning. If rumors were to be believed Raul might actually be on his way back down, and he wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about that. If they were true.

They were.

Or, at least, partly true. Halfway to the bank of coffee urns, the silver-armored sentinels standing guard over trays of morning pastries, Raul saw that Charal DePriest had indeed returned to active duty. She sat at the round table on Colonel Blaire’s left, shuffling some papers into order. Her once long brown hair had been cut back during her sickbed time, and a shorn patch behind her left temple still did not hide the suture scars. Charal had the same gray hospital pallor Raul had seen on her during a visit while she was still unconscious. Her sapphire eyes looked a bit unfocused, but she nodded with confidence when Colonel Blaire turned to her for a question.

“Ouch,” McDaniels offered in sympathy as he grabbed a glazed doughnut. “Hope they left a chair for you.” He slipped away to find his spot next to Major Chautec, Achernar’s ranking officer for conventional forces.

Raul had already begun a survey of the room. After Charal DePriest, and the possible demotion waiting for him, Sir Kyle Powers drew his gaze next. He sat next to Colonel Blaire. A bona fide Knight of the Sphere, Powers was tall, pushing one hundred eighty centimeters but slender with wiry strength. There was a kind of intensity about him, too, about how he wore a Knight’s white uniform with religious attention to sharp military creases and the set of his cape of rank, the crisp edges to his platinum flattop, and the way he focused himself forward as if alert for the slightest detail which might escape him.

Powers sat in serious conversation with Legate Brion Stempres on his right and Erik Sandoval-Groell one seat further down. Stempres had pushed his own chair back so the three men could talk evenly. Following the table around Raul found Captain Norgales, Major Chautec and Jeffrey McDaniels, what looked like two empty seats and then MechWarriors Clark Diago and Charal DePriest and finally Colonel Blaire on Powers’ left.

Raul peeled a caff-tab out of its protective shell, then swallowed it down with a jolt of bitter coffee. Carrying a refilled mug to the table, he slipped in next to Captain Diago, leaving a single open seat in between himself and McDaniels.

He had wanted to be unobtrusive—an errant student slipping in late for his lessons—but as he took his seat Raul saw two pairs of eyes glance his direction. The first was Erik Sandoval, his amber gaze registering Raul’s arrival with a touch of recognition and confusion. The other glance belonged to Kyle Powers, whose piercing, flinty gray eyes stared out from beneath sharp, platinum brows. They held Raul for a long second, measuring him. The Knight-Errant allowed him a single nod of greeting, as if Raul had passed some kind of test, and slipped back into his conversation with Stempres and Sandoval as though nothing had ever distracted him.

Raul had time for half his coffee and a few whispered words with Clark Diago before the room’s clock finally ticked its way up to seven a.m. and Kyle Powers’ immediate transformation from private conversation to command of the morning briefing. It was nothing more than laying his hands flat on the table and slowly pushing himself into an easy stance. Other talk died away and a corporal who had slipped into the room to refill the urns finished with haste and shut the door behind him as he left. The room suddenly felt a great deal closer to Raul, who realized that it was Sir Powers who simply took up more of the space now.

“Thank you all for being here. We’re short one person, though. Does anyone know when we can expect MechWarrior Tassa Kay?”

Raul hadn’t even known that she’d been invited. Talking to the civilian MechWarrior had apparently fallen to Diago, who nodded. “No offense, Sir Powers, but Tassa Kay claimed to have better things to do this morning than rehash old news. If we want to find her later, she said that she’d be seeing after repairs to her Ryoken II or interrogating her prisoner.”

Her prisoner. That would be the Blackhawk pilot recovered from the wreckage of his BattleMech.

Kyle Powers took Diago’s news with a raised eyebrow and a tight smile. Raul thought that he read more than professional courtesy there. Amusement? Powers had been on-planet less than four hours, and already he seemed to know something more of Tassa Kay than Raul himself.

“Well. I’m certain that we’ll bump into her sooner or later.” Powers’ voice was dry, but in no way suggested insult. He retook his seat with the same, slow grace in which he had stood. “In the meantime, let’s get started.

“First, let me say that my presence in no way reflects poorly on your performance. You have all done an incredible job, given the situation you were handed. Working together, True Republic and Swordsworn, in the face of the Steel Wolf assault shows a remarkable depth of duty in all of you. If the sporadic fighting on Ronel hadn’t looked to be tapering off, and if Lady Lakewood had not been inbound, I would still be there, in fact, counseling you via the HPG. And we all know how reliable that is now considered.”

Powers left the opening, and Brion Stempres stepped in with the question. “Has there been any confirmation yet about the Blackout? How far it reaches, and to what extent we’ve lost the hyperpulse web?”

“ComStar is researching the problem.” A venerable agency, with its founding at the fall of the original Star League, ComStar was responsible for the majority of HPG operations within The Republic, although they quite often relied on private subcontractors. “The latest reports I’ve seen show better than eighty-five percent blackout. Not just within The Republic, but reaching into every Inner Sphere nation around us. Some cases look like sabotage. Others like hard-wired viruses that didn’t get purged after the Jihad. And then there are stations which appear to be working fine, but simply cannot bridge space as they once did.”