Scavenged Restoration 58 (Patreon)

Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs

Scavenged Restoration

Chapter 58

-VB-

Two days after her birth, I was back in the hospital room. 

I stared down at my sleeping daughter. 

My daughter! 

The thought and reality still made my head light and my body shudder in fear of how fragile she was.

And then I heard a chuckle. 

Still in her hospital bed was none other than my concubine and mother of my first child, Allison. 

I smiled at her, but it was a brittle smile that a man in his late 40’s shouldn’t be making. 

“You are way too terrified of your baby girl,” she grinned. “I guess that doesn’t change no matter where you go.”

I laughed nervously. “I guess I’m scared of dropping her…?”

“Don’t you dare to joke about that,” she hissed.

“I’m not!” 

Aunt Chandra Ling rolled her eyes and stood up from her chair at the foot of Allison’s bed and walked up to me. “Give her here.”

I hesitated before doing so.

And Chandra, with probably years of experience, held Anastasia aptly with a hand supporting my daughter’s head and using the whole forearm as the firm support and had her firmly between her arm and her chest. 

“This is how you hold a baby, chancellor,” she said with a deadpan. “If you place your hand on her neck or upper back instead of the head, then the head is going to flop around.”

Then one of the nurses cleared his throat. 

I turned to look at the nurse in question. He was … I forgot his name, even though I personally looked at his file before hiring him for the birthing. I did remember that he was a twenty-something veteran Supporter caste and had come highly recommended. And from the review of the Supporter-familiar Maskirovka agent who had been in the labor room to observe the situation, he had done very well on his job. 

“What is it, nurse?”

The man swallowed before speaking up. “It’s time for us to get the princess’s vital signs, chancellor.”

“Oh, right,” I muttered as I gestured for Chandra to help the nurse. “There’s … nothing wrong with her, right?” 

“No, chancellor. She’s in fact very healthy! I’ve seen many babies who need immediate nasal cannula to keep their oxygen levels up, but Princess Anastasia is healthy enough to not need it.”

I knew that they liked to keep track of vital signs - blood pressure, oxygen levels, heart rate, temperature, and breath rate - because it told them what my daughter might need. I watched them wrap a “cuff” around her leg, took her temperature with a thermometer, and slipped another cuff around her feet to read her heart rate and oxygen level.

As I watched the nurse work, I wondered if this kind of scene was repeated elsewhere across the Capellan Confederation, especially in poorer worlds. I knew that economic reforms were always slow to take full effect, but I hoped that outside of my military reforms, they have had time to take full effect now. 

Because it really felt good knowing that there was someone else here to help me just like how I have helped others. 

Then there was a knock on the door. 

“Come in,” Allison said and a bureaucrat walked in.

“Chancellor, we’ve received multiple messages from across the Inner Sphere, including from the Heir Apparent of the Draconis Combine, Archon Steiner, First Prince Davion, and Captain-General Marik. Would you like them for your perusal?” 

“... Yes, actually.”

I wondered what they had to say. 

And it turned out, they were all rather congratulatory. Even Hanse. 

I guessed that even the self-righteous prick wasn’t petty enough to insult me on a day  - week - like this. 

As Allison took Anatasia back to hold her against her chest, I couldn’t help but smile at the sheer satisfaction I was feeling. 

It felt calm. 

It was love. 

There was another knock, and this time, it was both of my siblings coming to visit! 

-VB-

The Capellan Ascendency: Away from the Star League

By Jeanne de Martuie-Nol, Professor of Sociology at the Anastasia University of Wisdom, 3100

Chapter 5: Changing of the Era

While most of us would presume that such a momentous occasion as the chapter’s title would come as a result of some peace treaty or a revolutionary discovery like the KF Drive. The last changing of an era happened with the bang of the first shot fired to herald the start of the First Succession War. 

And, ironically, or befitting as someone would say, the era of decay that were the Succession
Wars ended with the birth cry of a princess.

The birth of Anastasia Liao, eldest child of Chancellor William Liao (30th c) and Countess Allison Mambalay (31st c) marked a clear change of era from the Succession Wars to its successor, the Recovery Era. There are four factors publicly accepted by all five Great Houses of the Inner Sphere and two more factors popular in the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation. 

The first of the four accepted factors of change was the dissemination of once-lost technologies. Starting in the early 3031, all Great Houses began to luckily find, painfully rediscover, outright steal, or “mysteriously” receive technologies as was the case with the Lyran Commonwealth and the now infamous Katherine-William Medical Core, a “gift” from the Capellan chancellor. Even ComStar began to dig into its archives to find pieces and parts of the once lost Lostech, which begged the question from many why they hadn’t dug into their libraries and archives before if such Lostech was so easy to find? 

Which leads us to the second accepted factor: ComStar. Or as some across the galaxy liked to call them, the Second Terran Hegemony. The Terran Trade Corridor allowed all of the Inner Sphere states to allocate their troops elsewhere after a devastating war that had reduced their military by at least 10%. In the case of the Federated Suns and the Capellans, they had each lost 17% and 22% by the latest estimates. The same treaty then forced ComStar, who signed the treaty themselves, to secure all of the star systems in a 2 jump radius centering on Terra just when piracy began to pick up. Whether or not these pirates were sanctioned by their states or not is not part of the discussion. What is part of the discussion is that ComStar chose to expand their security force into a proper military. ComGuard, which were known prior to the Fourth Succession War as nothing more than security guards of HPG stations, quickly gained access to jumpships, dropships, and mechs alike, and many of those mechs given to commanding officers were suspiciously free of damages like they just rolled out of the factory or were stored right after rolling out of the factory. Factories that were, as you are all aware, destroyed during the Succession Wars. And before any of the other states sans Capellan Confederation made their own warship as a counter to the aforementioned confederation’s warship, which was revealed during the Andurien Crisis, ComStar made their own warship, the Dante-class Frigate, a ship suspiciously designed to fight and win against dropships, aerospace fighters, and lower weight warships - like the Fox-class corvettes made and employed by the Federated Suns. Regardless of how their military came to be, their role in securing the core of human civilization against pirates and raiders alike showed that there could be some form of international cooperation, which hadn’t been done before since the Star League during the Succession Wars, even if this cooperation came in the form of delegating responsibilities.

The third factor is the Capellan Rimward Expansion, or more romantically called the Great Southern Expansion by Capellans. After having established themselves by annexing the Aurigan Coalition and the New Abilene Province from Magistracy of Canopus, Chancellor William Liao did what no other Great House had done: he instituted on 3033 an official start to a renewed effort to expand the Capellan Confederation not through conquest but through colonization.

The final factor is the resurgence of warships. As stated before, both ComStar and Capellan Confederation possessed warships by the mid of 3030’s, but by the start of 3040’s, all states within the Inner Sphere possessed at least one functioning warship. The resurrection of warships demanded social, political, and military paradigm shifts from all states in both the Inner Sphere and the Periphery. 

But here in the Capellan Confederation, there are two more factors that we believe contributed to the changing of the era. 

The first of these is the confederation’s cooperation with the periphery. Not conquest and annexation beyond Aurigans and New Abilene but actual cooperation as seen in the Capellan-****** Trade Compact and Capellan-**** Mutual Defense Treaty. Make no mistake; at the time the signatures were put on, the Capellan Confederation was more than capable of taking on any of the periphery powers and come out of it victorious like it did against the combined might of the Duchy of Andurien and the Magistracy of Canopus. It didn’t need to choose to cooperate. It chose to cooperate because it was a signal that the Capellan Confederation was looking for neighbors, not enemies. While independent worlds did not get as great of a treaty like the periphery powers did, they still did receive some leniency from the Capellan Confederation that, under normal circumstances, they would have never received.  

But this was not because the Capellan Confederation was being nice. It was a cold calculus of the confederation’s expansion rimward. Why bother conquering a few worlds with population less than the average Capellan world in the Inner Sphere? Once the confederation surrounded them, they will more or less work for the confederation anyway, and as time passed, they will come to see that the Capellan way of life was the better way forward, especially considering how sick and corrupt most periphery worlds’ elites were compared to Capellan elites. 

The second factor was the disconnect between the Capellan Confederation and the rest of the Inner Sphere. The Capellan Confederation lost our Terran Hegemony worlds. This is a fact. What this did for the Capellan Confederation along with Chancellor William Liao’s declaration that repeated his ancestor’s claims was a complete affirmation that the Capellan Confederation did not care about the affairs of the Inner Sphere if the Inner Sphere left it alone. Unlike before where the Capellan Confederation did not have a choice but to take part in the Inner Sphere’s thunderdome as the smallest and weakest Great House, the Anastasian Era, as some have begun to call the current era, had the confederation as not only a giant matching any other Great House but a growing giant that the other Great Houses still failed to emulate. Because the rest of the Inner Sphere, after decades of watching the Capellan Confederation expanding through colonization and integration of the rimward periphery, still failed to launch expansion programs of their own. 

The change from the Succession Wars to the Anastasian Era is not just a paradigm shift but a a show of what life could be like outside of the constant wars that the rest of the Inner Sphere insisted on subjecting themselves to. 

And it was the Capellan people who showed that to humanity, not the self-righteous Davions, bickering Mariks, weak Peripherals, honorbound Kuritans, or materially wealthy but head empty Steiners. 

And, of course, the clanners are utterly incapable of thinking of progress. We don’t even have to consider them as a leader of humanity. They are just the latest in the long line of raiders and pirates that have plagued humanity.

They, just like the other Great Houses, still want to burn each other to the ground. 

Let them.

We, the Capellan people, will be watching with samovar tea in one hand and a plate of prawn spring roll in the other hand.

-VB-

A/N: And this marks the end of the third arc of this story, the Andurien Crisis. Or as you lot might call it: Andurien Fuck-Up. 

I’d like for yall to try to guess who the defense treaty will be with and who the trade compact will be with. 

Expect a little time skip the next time you see SR.