Scavenged Restoration 35 (Patreon)

Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs

EDIT: added another 400 words at the end for those of you who saw it early.
Who did I add?
Hanse Davion, of course. The lad's feeling a bit of schadenfreude.

Scavenged Restoration

Chapter 35

-VB-

“What do you mean that they got routed?!” Colonel Samuel Shimosa asked from within his Overlord dropship. It was one of eight dropships that had already covered half of the distance between Prix and its star. 

“They jumped out just two days before you jumped in, colonel,” the defending militia commander replied. “Our boys and girls on the ground did the chancellor proud.”

“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” Samuel muttered. “Are you telling me that you routed an entire mercenary regiment? On your own?”

“It wasn’t an entire regiment, fortunately. It was a single battalion.”

“But still…” he felt like a petulant child. Sure, he didn’t want to lose any one of his men and women fighting against some other mercenary company, but that was the job he was in. He was in it to make money and fight. And he would make less money and get into less fights if the enemy mercenary company came and got smashed by militia of all things.

But then again, he knew why that might be the case. The Capellan militias have been getting a lot of equipment upgrades lately, courtesy of their chancellor. Sure, Firebees weren’t the best mechs out there, but the Capellans pumped them out like a rat broodmother spewing out ratlings.

He would know. 

His dropship once had a rat infestation. 

So many rats. Rats in the walls. Rats in the toilet. Rats driving everyone crazy…

“There is a new order for the 15th Dracon,” the colonel on the other side added. “This comes from the Chancellor’s Palace. You are to briefly rest here on Primus before moving onto Betelgeuse, where you will receive further orders. The chancellor expects you to be there on Betelgeuse, ready to deploy, by the end of October.”

October, eh? 

That was a full month away. Travel from their current location to Betelgeuse would take six days, landing on Betelgeuse included. 

And Betelgeuse… 

It was obvious what the chancellor wanted to do. 

His 15th Dracon Regiment would land on Betelgeuse, fuck around for a while as they waited for other state and mercenaries, and then they would all group up and jump into Andurien space. From there, they would fuck up the Anduriens until they surrendered. 

“And what about their other battalions?” he asked. 

“I know that another battalion landed on Prix and was made to retreat as well.”

He grunted. “I guess the Tooth of Ymir ain’t so hot stuff, huh?” he muttered. “Alright. Thanks to letting me know, colonel. Godspeed.”

“Go with the grace of the chancellor.”

And then his Capellan counterpart saluted and cut the feed. 

“‘Go with the grace of the chancellor,’” he scoffed. “These guys are really hamming it up for a guy who hasn’t been in charge of the state for five years.”

… But then again, he might not be being fair to the chancellor in question. After all, who else could raise up a state from rock bottom to survive the kinds of the onslaught that was the Fourth Succession War. Capellan Confederation wasn’t going to survive a two-versus-one scenario, and he knew as well as any other mercenary worth their salt the politics and state of the Kapteyn Accord. The League barely helped. The Combine barely helped.

“Alright,” he muttered as he turned on the intercom for all of the dropships in his regiment. “I just got message from Primus. They’ve got no enemy for us to defeat because they already kicked the asses of the Tooth of Ymir. Apparently, they only brought a battalion, and you know what the Capellan militia are like these days.”

He heard a few radio hoots and catcalls while others denouncing their fellow mercenary company for being stupid. Bad radio discipline.

Whatever. 

“So the new orders are for us to be on Betelgeuse by the end of October. That means we’ve got at least a week of vacation time here! So I’m giving you all just four days of leave.”

Even if there was a war afoot right now, they could afford to relax if this was the kind of pacing the Anduriens were going to put forth.

-VB-

Chandra set her cup of tea down.

And looked up.

She sat in the private office of the chancellor with the three Liao siblings: William Liao, Candace Liao, and Tormano Liao.

It was rare for the entire family to be together, but unlike with any other family reunion that other Liaos might have had to contend with, William, Candace, and Tormano weren’t antagonistic with each other. No, especially with the recent bonding that was the Fourth Succession War, the three siblings were rather amicable with each other. 

“... I am surprised that they underestimated us this much,” Candace muttered as she stared at the computer map between the four of them. 

The map sat centered on Principa, one of the worlds that were hit by the Anduriens, not because it was the center of Andurien push into Capellan Confederation but because it simply sat in the middle of the entire conflict. And all across the Capellan border worlds, there were green circles for successful repulsion of invaders and yellow boxes for ongoing defense. 

Not a single red X marked the map. 

Of course, this would not have been the case if William hadn’t looked forward and shifted nearly all of the garrison from spinward Sian Commonality worlds. That one order, which had confused the hell out of everyone, was proving time and time again to be an incredibly wise move. 

“It’s their loss,” William replied without looking up. “I’m just debating on how quickly I should prosecute this war.”

“Shouldn’t we end it as quickly as we can?” Chandra asked with a raised eyebrow. 

“No. I want to use this war to test out new doctrines for our offensive capabilities. We can’t do that if the war ends before November.”

There was a pause around the room.

“Can we?” Tormano asked. 

“We can,” William replied with absolute certainty. “Outside of extreme circumstances and factors changing the entire scenario on its head, the Anduriens and Canopians simply lack the numbers to run us down. Or even to hold their own capitals.”

“You want to push onto Canopus?” Candace asked with a frown. 

“No. Canopus is too far. It’ll strain our logistics. It’ll be a mistake that can ruin this counter-offensive campaign. No. I’ll only hit Andurien itself. It’ll have to fall before the year ends.”

It was not a ridiculous claim as it sounded. 

The Anduriens alone lost two regiments worth of mechs from their own regiments and mercenary companies. Many of those mercenary companies were now filing for falsified information to the MRB, which was causing the Duchy of Andurien a lot of problems. Canopus, for their part, ruined two of their own regiments.

Which meant that, assuming the mercenaries they hired stayed on, the Andurien-Canopian alliance lost fifteen percent of their total strength in the first two months of the campaign with nothing to show for it. 

Chandra also knew that the Canopians had stripped some of their worlds of their defenses for this push, which meant that, strategically speaking, Canopian worlds would be easier to take. 

However, she knew what William was thinking. 

He wanted to crush the Duchy of Andurien before the Captain-General awoke from his coma (assuming he woke back up). He would obviously demand that they stop their invasion because the League still saw the Anduriens as their worlds. However, the situation would be different if the League couldn’t get their shit together and the war came to an early end. 

And if the confederation conquered all of the Andurien worlds before Janos Marik could wake up or a successor managed to wrangle the League’s Parliament, then it would be a significant leverage that the confederation could use against the Free Worlds League, even if it was to “gift” a few worlds back to them in the guise of peaceful cooperation with their allies. After all, any anti-Capellan sentiment in the Free Worlds League would wither if the news was about the Capellan Confederation returning their wayward worlds. 

But at the same time, the confederation could not afford to return all worlds. 

“What kind of campaign did you have in mind?” she asked her nephew. 

William finally looked up, met her eyes, and then looked back down at the map. Then he moved eighteen mech pieces, each of which represented a single regiment, and divided them. He put two pieces each on Lurgatan, Sadurni, Conquista, Lopez, and Shiro and then put the rest - eight pieces - on Andurien. 

“What does the Maskirovka think about this?” he asked. “In regards to the type of defense and numbers the defenders will have?” 

Two regiments each on worlds that had either one or no garrison mech regiments, which meant they only had militia regiments that generally did not have a full mech battalion of their own. Two regiment was good to contest, but they would not be able to garrison the world effectively. 

Ten regiments against Andurien itself… Andurien would burn, but it would be at a heavy cost to the regiments sent there. 

It wasn’t like William to propose such a weak strategy. This layout was just asking for a surprise attack to ruin the entire campaign. Two or three mercenary regiments would shatter the paired regiments along the border, which would then cut off the ten regiments on Andurien itself. 

… Unless…

“You want to use that this early?” she asked with narrowed eyes.

“I do,” he replied. “It was going to be revealed sooner or later, and I would rather have it over another world than one of our own, ready to consign our own people to a tragic fate.”

She leaned back. 

“You want to scare them into submission after a good beating.”

“Yes.”

“If you use that, then you can do the same with Canopus.”

“No. I want my soldiers to sharpen themselves against Canopus.”

She chuckled. “You’re a cruel man, William.” A pause. “Perhaps I was wrong to look for regular mechwarriors for your bride. Perhaps your own Death Commando commanders would be more up your alley?”

He glared at her and she laughed. 

-VB-

“They lost? All of them?” Duchess Catherine Humphreys asked, horrified by what she was hearing. 

“Yes, Your Grace,” General Michael O’Neil frowned. “All of the mercenaries were repelled, and our own forces suffered significant casualties. The Capellans had changed their doctrine to an unrecognizable degree.”

“How unrecognizable could it be?!” she demanded. 

“From what the reports and debriefings I was able to get my hands on, the Capellans have put an emphasis on overheating all of our mechs with inferno rocket light mechs, but most crucially, their armored combat vehicles and infantry have been given … a lot of leeway. Each battalion and regiment have encountered no less than a few dozen suicide bomb attacks during the offensive.” He grimaced. “Or in the case of 3rd Defenders of Andurien, they lost a whole mech battalion to minefields, suicide car bombs, and aerial suicide runs into dropships.”

That …

What?!

“... Just how different could their change in strategy be that we’ve failed all of our attacks?” she hissed. 

The general grimaced. “They are focusing on combined arms, duchess.”

Combined arms.

Combined arms? 

The doctrine that fell out of favor because of the limitations in interstellar travel. That combined arms? 

“... Something tells me that whatever the Capellans are doing, they are making combined arms work, then?”

“Yes, Your Grace. The biggest change we’ve seen is what our tacticians are calling the fortress world doctrine. All worlds we’ve landed on had thrice more militia defending it than previously reported or estimated. More importantly, the Capellans are putting an emphasis on conventional atmospheric fighters, which can’t hit anything in space or even in orbit of their worlds, but landing means a certain death as each dropship will be swarmed by fighters.”

Then someone barged into the strategy room.

“S-Sorry, duchess, general!” the haggard lieutenant stuttered out, sweating profusely from running. “Urgent news! The Capellans! They’ve landed on all of our border worlds at once!” Then he took a big gulp of air. “And they are sending ten regiments to Andurien!” 

Catherine rose up from her seat.

How? 

How did the Capellans gather so many of their troops so quickly? 

The Fourth Succession War ended just a month before she and the Canopians declared their war. The Capellan forces should have been all the way coreward if not the spinward borders!

How-?

… Spinward borders? 

“General,” she asked as she woodenly turned to her military commander. “Have there been any significant Davion-Liao battles along the confederation’s spinward borders?”

He looked at her and then paled. 

Oh.

Oh, they missed it.

‘William Liao knew we were preparing to invade, so he took a risk and moved troops from the quiet spinward border to the antispinward border.’

It was the only way to make sense of the bolstered militia. Of the lightning response from their mobile regiments. 

And those eighteen regiments they were facing… it was just the start, wasn’t it? 

She gritted her teeth. 

“Kyalla better be doing better than I am,” she muttered. 

She learned later that the Canopians were indeed doing better. Because the Capellans ignored them in favor of bringing down their overwhelming force upon her duchy instead.

-VB-

Hanse Davion looked at the reports streaming in from his spies within the Free Worlds League. 

The Federated Suns hadn’t needed much spies in the Free Worlds League before, so what he got was a little lacking. 

However, the Lyran Commonwealth’s LIC reports bolstered the MIIO’s lackluster reports to create a more complete picture of what the situation was like on the far end of the Capellan Confederation. 

And suffice to say, the Anduriens and Canopians, who declared war on the Capellan Confederation mere weeks after the peace treaty was signed between the five Successor States, were getting their teeth kicked in. 

It was almost exactly like watching what he encountered during Operation RAT. The Capellans had dug in, possessed way more troops and mechs than the MIIO and DMI anticipated, and unleashed their most fanatical and suicidal zealots to make war how they saw fit. 

However, unlike the Federated Suns and the Lyran Commonwealth, neither the Anduriens or the Canopians had the gumption, manpower, mech numbers, or the wealth needed to crush the Capellans like the Federated Suns managed.

Hell, most of their success had to do with manpower and mech numbers than anything else. 

In fact, there were so many soldiers being medically discharged due to the trauma they had to endure on the Capellan fronts that, had it not been for his sweet wife, he might be facing a public backlash of all backlashes. 

So looking at the Anduriens and Canopians getting a boot up their ass was … carthartic. 

It was also something he could point to. 

‘Look at that! The Anduriens and Canopians can’t even put down the Old Man of the Inner Sphere after he’s been butchered! Compared to that, don’t you see how well we’ve done?!’

He really really wanted to shout that from atop the palace. 

But he wouldn’t.

The First Prince of the Federated Suns did not holler with schadenfreude-driven glee.

No, what he did was make sure his wife saw it and direct the information to the relevant public relations departments so that they can play up just how well the Federated Suns and the Lyran Commonwealth did in comparison. 

Because at least his soldiers will be able to say that they weren’t kicked off their objective world in the first week of engagement.