Scavenged Restoration 61 (Patreon)

After 3 rewrites, here it is. I'm sleeping now.

Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs

Scavenged Restoration

Chapter 61

-VB-

Frederick lifted the cup and drank deeply from the cup. The cheap beer inside might have once pissed him off for the lack of quality but he didn’t feel that these days. 

No, until he recovered his honor and fame, eating and drinking cheap food was all he deserved even if he still had money to live the high life for the rest of his life. 

No…

He was still a soldier of the Lyran Commonwealth, and the losses he’d suffered wasn’t just his loss but that of the Commonwealth. 

“Frederick, are you drinking again?” 

He looked up and saw Aldo Lestrade. His friend shouldn’t be here on Tharkad, though. Last he heard, he was dealing with another Free Skye rebellion back home. 

“Aldo? What are you doing here?” he asked as he set his cup down.

“Oh, you know, just talking with people in the Estates General.”

Frederick scowled at the mention of the utter idiots who were clamoring for even more stupidity. Just talking to the idiots in that crowd made him want to hurl because he most definitely was getting some of their stupidity by osmosis or something. 

Because everyone they talked to seemed to get stupid if they weren’t prepared for it. 

“Please don’t tell me you are also for the war?” 

“... If I am?”

Frederick groaned. “Okay, sit down. Let me tell you the exact situation the commonwealth is in and why we will be fucked if we declare war with what we have.”

Aldo raised an eyebrow before he walked over and sat down. “Alright. Regale me with what you believe.”

“... How familiar are you with the current military tech development?” Frederick asked as an opener. 

Aldo hummed. “I am familiar enough. I know that ‘pocket warships’ are a thing, even while we are building actual warships.”

“Okay, so you know how we are focusing on our warships and pocket warships in a bid to match the League’s warship development.”

“Of course.”

“Then do you know about the Combine’s current focus on aerospace fighters?”

The duke blinked. “The combine … are building ASF? Not warships?”

“They are building warships. Don’t mistake that. They see it as a symbol of their power just as we do. The problem is that they aren’t focusing on it like we are. In fact, they are more focused on making as many aerospace bombers and fighters as they can, especially those capable of carrying powerful missiles or many missiles. This is because they are trying to counter our warships, but their focus inadvertently also put our pocket warships on the crosshairs. If we engage them in war right now, then maybe we will get a few victories here and there because he have pocket warships to surprise them, especially because pocket warships can be geared toward heavy point defense load outs, but sooner or later, we will lose and lose fast once they get their aerospace fighter fleet moving together.”

Aldo nodded slowly. “I see where you are coming from. But do we not have our own aerospace fighters to counter them?”

“We do, but we also have the worst ASF in the entire Inner Sphere taking up a huge portion of our aerospace fighter fleet. Ever heard of Lucifer?”

“Of course, I have! I don’t live under a rock!”

“Did you know that Lucifers make up a whole tenth of our entire ASF?”

Aldo opened his mouth and then closed it. “That is a lot,” he muttered after a while. 

“And they aren’t improved fighters like the ones the Capellans are mass manufacturing or the ones that the Combine are refitting. Because of our current focus on warships, we haven’t properly refit or upgraded our aerospace fighters in numbers needed to hold off the Combine’s own refitted and upgraded aerospace fighters. It would be like putting a lance of mechs against a lance of mechs in battle, but our mechs are a Shadow Hawk, an AC/10 Hunchback, a Commando, and a Locust to the enemy’s Marauder, an AC/20 Hunchback, an Archer, and one of those Ravens the Capellans field. There is no victory there, only a painful and inevitable loss.”

“What about the Federated Suns?” 

“They have been building aerospace fighters, but they will have to contend with the Capellans and their fleet of warships. LIC is also saying that the Capellans have made a better version of anti-warship missiles than the ones Star League used, which means fielding our warships there will be asking not death by a thousand cuts like it would be against the Combine but colorful and spectacularly quick and explosive deaths and billions of C-Bills wasted for nothing.”

“But we have a chance of winning?”

“About as much chance as I did when I landed on Sian,” Frederick snorted. “On top of that, our social generals are even further behind in doctrine than where we were during the end of the Third Succession War, and this is despite the fact that both the Archon and I have been pushing for reforms. 

“Even if we set aside our military competence, we will be waging a war outside of our realm, unlike before. The massive movement of troops, artillery, mechs, and supplies will strain our logistics even worse than it did in the Fourth Succession War. The Davions are worse off than we are when it comes to logistics, and won’t be able to support us. I’ll be surprised if they can support their own war efforts!

“And if we set logistics aside, then the Estates General forgot that we are in an alliance. We can’t simply declare war out of the blue because we feel like it. We have to coordinate with the Federated Suns and their AFFS. As much as I don’t like them, AFFS tacticians and strategists are at least competent compared to our social generals. But their problem is that they aren’t industrious enough to replace their losses in a timely manner. Their new mass manufacturing spree is helping, but they were so behind us and the League that it’ll take them another half a century just to catch up to where we were at the end of the third succession War.”

When he finally ended, he settled down.

“Got that out of your system?”

“... Yeah. People just … don’t understand that we aren’t in a position to fight.”

And he knew first hand what happened. His philosophy of warfare and everything else didn’t matter if he didn’t have everything needed to ensure “an overwhelming firepower” could be delivered. 

And neither the Lyran Commonwealth or the Federated Suns were ready just yet. If they only fought against the Draconis Combine? Maybe. Against the Combine and their allies? 

No. They would lose more than they gained. 

“... But that is not what you have told the Estates General.”

“The leaders of each faction within the Estates General already know how of this information on both our capabilities as well as those of the Combine. A very few have failed to imagine what the situation will be like in the League… or, you know, the Capellan Confederation, who is the most technologically advanced out of all Great Houses. This is also completely disregarding the fact that ComStar and their ComGuard has warships on full display to ward off pirates.” He paused as he stood up with his hands on the table and looked down at Aldo with wide eyes begging him to connect the points. 

“... We have foreign warships operating in the middle of our territory,” Aldo wisely commented. 

Frederick took a deep breath in and sat back down.

“And we have no idea how ComStar will react to our aggression.”

“... But you and I know that people won’t see that. All they see is that we have been on the rise.”

“On the rise?!” Frederick laughed. “We are playing catch up!” he hissed out, abruptly cutting off the laugh and snarling like a wounded lion. 

Because he was. 

The humiliation he suffered at the hands of the Liao’s and then the slow and almost casual ransoming of his self by Archon Katrina as if he was no better than some lowborn noble…! 

Oh, he understood why it took time. 

He didn’t care. 

He was loyal to the Lyran Commonwealth, yes, and there were lines that he would not cross, yes, but he came very close to shooting a few people the moment he landed back on Tharkad. 

But it had given him a lot of time to talk with Chancellor William Liao. To see the man’s works on Sian and abroad. To see … how far his people were behind. 

For the first time since he knew what a king was, he began to question the Lyran model of governance. If Chancellor Liao could achieve so much with so little, then why were the Lyrans who had the superior industrial might, the superior military, and the superior … everything… lagging behind the smaller, weaker, and more fragile confederation?

The answer he came to?

The social generals.

The rich and fat nobles. 

The Estates General.

The very culture of the Lyran Commonwealth’s morbidly obese and incompetent elite. 

Lyran Commonwealth was superior, but even superiority can only handle so much fat before it needed trimming. 

“... Are you sure that you are not overestimating the dangers of the next war?” his friend asked worriedly. 

“Overestimating?” Frederick asked incredulously. “If anything, then I am generalizing and simplifying. Did you know that the Free Worlds League produced over two hundred jumpships in the past decade while we made only one hundred?”

Aldo blinked.

And slowly shook his head. 

“Did you know that the Capellans made five shipyards while we made, in that same period of time… also five shipyards?”

Aldo shook his head again. 

This time, Frederick could see that his words were finally and truly settling into his friend’s mind and heart. 

“Did you know that the Federated Suns barely made fifty jumpships in the same time period?” 

“... Oh.”

“And the fucking Draconis Combine made eighty…?!” 

“Oh, we are not in a good position, are we?”

“The only reason,” Frederick nodded as he calmed himself. “That they haven’t gone to war against us is because of the Capellan Confederation.”

“... Why would they not want to go to war when they are better prepared?”

“Because their chancellor is insane as the rest of his family is in a whole different way. Did you know, my friend, that whenever the Liaos declared that they didn’t care for the throne of the Star League, that they renounced their claim, we all assumed it was just a PR move?” 

Aldo stared at him.

“No, you’re not suggesting…?”

“We’ve been making assumptions of the Liaos, and thus have made an ass out of ourselves. With themselves so disconnected from Terra now, the Capellans have dug in. They don’t need to guard giant borders anymore, only their border with the Federated Suns and our new territory in their former Tikonov Commonality. At this point, the LIC has made the estimation that the Liao borders are now ‘impenetrable’ by any single one of the Great Houses. Their free floating warship fleets whose positions we don’t know, the number of jumpships available in how small their territories are in the Inner Sphere compared to the rest of us, and how much more upgraded and better their equipment are compared to us… It would require double what the Federated Suns threw at them during the Fourth Succession War… to maintain a stalemate. And can the Federated Suns help us against the Combine and the League if they are tied down merely holding back the Capellans?” 

Aldo paled. 

“Oh dear…”

“Yes-.”

“No, I mean that I may have come to learn about plans among some of the social generals… to incite a war… Which was why I was here in the first place.”

Frederick stared at his friend.

“What?”

-VB-

Thomas Calderon stared at the slowly mending hull of the ship before him. 

“When the chancellor offered to help as a show of sincerity, I didn’t think it would even get this far, you know?” he spoke up as he turned around to look at the man the Capellans had sent to oversee the reconstruction of a … particularly historical piece of equipment near and dear to the Taurian people’s heart.

“But of course. What the chancellor puts his mind to, he will achieve,” the chancellor’s brother and the new Minister of Foreign Relations, Tormano Liao, smiled. Dressed not in the traditional Liao hanfu, tangzhuang, or changshan but in a dark green business suit and tie embroidered with golden phoenixes, the Liao statesman cut a dashing figure, and he was accompanied by a much shorter, slightly plump, and not as beautiful woman who was his wife, Hanya No Cha. She wore a dark yellow cheongsam with silver flower embroidery. The two were almost like polar opposites of each other, but the way they interacted with each other seemed to warm up everyone around them.

It made Thomas question how these two came about to be in the den of snakes that was the Sian Court. 

… Well, he knew how. His spies dug up information where they could, and it was not hard to find them about Minister Tormano. Once the disgraced youngest of the current Liao generation, he was now an integral part of the confederation’s ruling class. 

Why was he disgraced? 

Because he married a lowborn and told his father, Chancellor Maximilian Liao, “no” when the former chancellor told him to annul the marriage.

Thomas respected the man’s balls for that alone. 

“I hope this is a sign enough that the confederation truly wants to maintain a good relationship with the Taurian Concordat?” 

Thomas turned away from the duo to look at the ship being fixed.

TCW Vandenberg, the ship that the concordat had been saving for centuries to fix, no longer looked like a wreck.

“Yes,” he said, though it came out a little hoarse. “I can… as the Protector of the Realm … accept that the Capellan Confederation wants friendship, and we will reciprocate it.”

“That is wonderful to hear,” the Liao smiled, though Thomas more heard it than saw it. “My Wise Brother will be happy to hear it. And perhaps a future toast to an amenable future?” 

Thomas turned and looked at the foreign minister. 

“To a bright future.”

“To a bright future.”

Clink.