Chapter 12

We spent five weeks on Tortuga before the Colonel returned. He seemed pleased with himself so I guess everything went off well. That evening he called a meeting of all the officers.

"Well, this is how it is. They were very pleased with our fight at Port Krin and even more so with the defeat of the Pirates here and the end of Paula Travelina. There was a bounty on her head of one megacredits."

"Now the real news. I turned the treasure trove over to them with us getting a finder's fee. They can handle the headaches of who gets what and how much is charged for the recovery. We get a flat 25 percent of the Recovery Fee. I think that's fair as they handle all the hassles and any legal action that arises. We'll start packing the stuff up tomorrow and as soon as they arrive to transport it we'll get rid of it. We'll keep a careful inventory of everything that we package so that none of our fees get 'lost' in the paperwork."

"Last but not least, I renegotiated our contract. We are now a light Regiment and are being paid as such. I didn't tell them that not all of the Mech's have pilots. I just reported the number of Mechs that we had and that we should be paid accordingly. We got a raise in pay by the way. We are no longer Veteran forces, we are Elite." He was smiling as he reported this to us.

The Finder's Fee would give Shadow enough capital to purchase the Mechs we needed to become a full Regiment, not just a Light. It would also afford us the credits to purchase additional Dropships or Jumpships. We were becoming more and more self contained.

It took us five weeks to properly package the items that Travelina had hidden away. Much of it we removed from files and simply stored in boxes. Paintings and Statues we had to build special crates for. In moving all of this stuff I managed to 'lose' one item. I found a hand written book of poetry by Robert Burns, the Poet Laureate of Scotland. We, the Leofas, are of Scottish decent and this was very special to us. I am sure that was not the only thing that was 'lost'. I know that several interesting Military Antiquities were claimed by the Colonel and will be placed on permanent display at Shadow Headquarters.

When the forces showed up to receive the recovered treasure they came loaded for Big Bears. They had an Invader class Jumpship and dropped a Mule and two Overlords, fully loaded. I had never seen an Overlord before on actual duty. They're rare even in the Inner Spheres and out here they're even more rare.

The two Battalions of Mechs were from the Taurian Guard and the Taurian Velites. They are some of the best that the Concordat has. They lined the way between the Castle and the spaceport. They sent vehicles into the basement and we loaded them. When the vehicles were outside the building they took over the responsibility and escorted the vehicles from there. They broke the convoy into twelve vehicles each and there were twenty-two convoys. We packaged things so that each cubical went into one vehicle. When they took off we all breathed a sigh of relief!

When we got back to Providence we had been gone for nearly four months on a trip that we thought would only be five weeks at the most. We were all glad to be back.

The stay on Tortuga had allowed Rachel and her crew of techs to go over two of the three captured Dropships. Once back on Providence they started to go over the Leopard. It was in as horrible condition as the Union had been. The one redeeming grace is that there is also a company in the Concordat that produces Leopards so the parts should not be that hard to obtain. One of the TTI plants on Taurus. TTI, where we had purchased the Union parts, is a government sponsored Defense Industry and right now we are in very good odor with the Concordat Government.

I took a week's leave to catch up on things at home. Dad has been going great guns with the trading. He has been purchasing Jump Jets and Engine Shielding from several Federated Suns planets and selling them to the Mech industries here. He has also been buying up the harder to get weapons systems that the Concordat needed. Without saying a word Fed Suns were of the impression that he is shipping them back to Liao where they are much more expensive. The Concordat Industries think it is a great joke. Fed Suns doesn't sell much to the Concordat as there is still a lot of animosity between them. He has been selling them for 150 to 200 percent of the purchase price which is still a savings for the Industries. He has purchased a second Mule and it is presently being overhauled and he has his eye out for an Invader class Jumpship. This will increase our overhead a bit but will eliminate the jump cost so should save us credits.

He has one refinery up and running, with a Rolling Mill being constructed also. We are now producing the steel we need for building right here on Providence. We are also sending out small quantities of Platinum as well as a limited shipment of a very rare and special timber we have found here.

We purchased the lands where the major forests for this wood are located. As it's rare we will only harvest a limited amount each year to allow the forests to replenish itself. This also keeps the price up on what we sell.

The one area he is having trouble with is finding the necessary farmers to settle on the agricultural lands we purchased. We have some and have set up a market for the produce. We, here on Providence, are pretty much self-sufficient. Our other sawmill site produces enough lumber to keep up with the building that is going on and the cement factory that was already here has enlarged its work force to produce the increased demand for concrete. The population is rapidly approaching 100,000 up from a little over 10,000 when we arrived. Many of us from Shadow have brought in family and friends to help us start to settle our homesteads, set up businesses and such.

Sean has become familiar with the Highland Lass and agrees with me now that he has tried out the new weapons configuration. He is even thinking of returning to the Academy. He had completed his first year when Dad brought him out here. While it won't be the St. Ives Academy there's an Army Academy located on Taurus. It's the Taurian Ecole Militaire and has an excellent reputation. As we're making our home here it wouldn't hurt to have him making contacts with the up and coming young military leaders. We think that we can get him enrolled without too much hassle. I think the Government will look favorably on such a request because it shows we're becoming more involved with the Taurian Concordat from a personal standpoint not just a business standpoint.

Dad did accept the Mitilia Company command and is now the BARON Ian Leofa. This title will pass to me upon his death unless I take one of my own upon retiring. If I do that then I'll let the title pass to Sean. With the challenge that he's now facing Dad has a new lease on life. He looks younger than he did when he first came here. He is active, planning, conferring, working and training. He has a reason to be alive again and it agrees with him.

Upon returning to the Brigade I found out several items of note. Research and Development has been working on a project of Karuska's. He has come up with a way to make the heat sinks work more efficiently. He has increased the number of fins and changed the material they are constructed from and they wick away even more heat than before. Two heat sinks now do the work that three did before. They have been working to produce the new sinks while we were away and have enough to replace the sinks in the Mechs of the Lance leaders, Company officers, Battalion officers as well as the Regimental officers. I cheated and had the sinks changed in the Highland Lass as well as the Wild Haggis. As more of the sinks are produced we will be changing over all the other Mechs. Karuska thinks that shortly he can beat even that. He has been working on a new alloy that, if it does all that he claims, will wick heat away even better than these. Each heat sink will do the work of TWO.

The second thing is a discovery that Gregorio Karuska made while going through some of the recovered data chips from the Castle. Travelina and her people had found the long lost Lyran Jump Battlecruiser Invincible. There was a holochip showing her, her location and her present status. The Invincible was an 800,000 ton Black Lion class Star League Warship. It was thought by most military historians that she had been lost in an Aerospace fighter assault near Hesperus II back in the twenty-fifth century. Now Karuska thinks she made a misjump some how. That was some misjump. A Jumpship can make a maximum jump of about 30 light years, that is a little over nine parsecs. This jump was nearly one hundred and eighty parsecs. Nearly twenty times normal. The thing is, she is less than two jumps from us!

Colonel Jones has allowed Karuska to take a crew of techs and engineers from the Dropships and jump out to the location to see if the information is correct. Round trip should take a little over three weeks and he can then inform us as to what is needed for us to salvage her or if she can't be salvaged as a ship then what we could salvage from her as useful parts. The techs and engineers should be able to give him an accurate picture of the repairs that will be necessary to jump her back here if she didn't totally wreck her engines during the misjump.

The next thing is that Lt. Col Rock McKinnon has been sent back to Galatea to see about hiring the necessary men and Mechs to fill the vacant positions we have. He was also going to try to hire more Infantry for us. As we have grown so has our need for the Infantry. For the time being I am acting Executive Officer. (That was how I got the heat sinks for the Highland Lass!) J.J. has taken over Phantom during my absence. I thought that I would be able to return to my company and allow him some time off but that is not the case.

One other thing of note that I don't particularly like is that Phantom has inherited a trouble maker. One of the new people is an ex-Pirate, ex-Free World Leaguer named Alister Clark. He's a good fighter, handling himself and his Mech very well, he just likes to argue about his orders. He knows better than anyone else how things should be done and always argues that the commander doesn't know the correct way to do things. He's had run ins with Jones, McKinnon, Schultz and Jacobs. This is his last chance. I really hope we can salvage him because he IS a good pilot. If he'd just do as he's told! It doesn't help that he's older than most of us and has the Marik Black Eagle tattooed across his entire forehead.

I'm not sure if he's pulling our legs and having fun with us all or if Dirk has sniffed too much burnt cannon powder. With Milt Jacobs tied up on Tortuga Dirk Gentry was breveted to Captain and has been running the Night Creatures Company. He's been going on about his invisible partner, Harvey. He insist that Harvey is a Providence native life form. A large (190 centimeter) intelligent, white rabbit. He has been bugging the techs to install another seat in his Longrifle as Harvey's getting tired of standing up all the time. Rumor has it that some of the guys are beginning to consider Harvey the new commander of the Night Creatures not Gentry. They credit him with the tactical acumen that has seen the Night Creatures come out ahead on some of the mixed training missions we've run lately. A few of them are even suggesting that Harvey's Regimental Command material, don't know how that'll go over with Colonel Jones. It's gotten so bad that others are getting into it. We have a guest, a visiting retired Officer from another Battalion, Leftenant Randolph Hathaway who was recently victimized. Rabbit Trayee sent him to find Harvey, saying that I needed to speak to him. Of course everyone else immediately fell in with the hunt. The poor guy was gone for five hours and returned all apologetic because he could not find Harvey. "I can't understand it sir, he was always just ahead of me but would always be gone when I got to where he was supposed to be. Everyone was very helpful and kept reporting seeing him but I'm sorry Captain, I couldn't find him for you." The latest rumor has it that Harvey is now demanding shares, voting rights and a Battlemech. Says he has earned them if for no other reason than he has put up with Gentry all this time. I will agree with the latter part. Gentry can be a trial. The rumor mill also insists that Doc J.J. Ravenhawk would like to see Harvey, preferably in a good rabbit stew! If nothing else it has been good fun.

Speaking about being victimized, the Kiddy Company got Alister Clark the other evening. He had been at the club running down a long list of all the things that we Commanders did wrong while sopping up quite a few shots of booze. He was soon asleep at his table when the Kiddy Company struck. Several of them and the major credit is being given to Heidi Steiner, glued a dayglow orange mop head to his bald pate. It covered not only his shiny head but that tatoo.

One duty that Lt. Colonel McKinnon had that I don't particularly like is interviewing teachers for our schools. We have had to set up several schools as many of the pilots, techs and astechs have brought in their families and children as well as for the children of the families of all the settlers who have arrived. The children need the proper schools to attend. I know a good teacher when I attended the classroom. How do you look at a resume and talk to a person and find out if they can teach? What I have done is bring in the woman who was appointed as the Superintendent of the Schools to sit with me while this is going on. She asks most of the questions and I nod a lot. The Taurian Concordat has sent us some fine teacher and some that aren't so fine. Them we'll let go at the end of this school year. We will soon be constructing a college as higher education is also needed. Who knows we might even start our own Mech Academy. It would be helpful. We could train the Pilots like we wanted right from the start.