Mechwarrior - Dark Age 15 - Sword of Sedition by Sword of Sedition

Author:Sword of Sedition
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-04-12T23:04:31+00:00

“Is the boy mad?”

Jonah Levin stomped through the Chamber of Paladins, eschewing his high seat and circling the array of monitors where the paladins often met, discussed, voted and planned. His footsteps echoed back from the empty corners of the grand room. All but four stations were dark at the moment. At the manned consoles, only one face looked up from her work to answer what should have been a rhetorical question.

“Angry, yes,” Heather GioAvanti said. Her voice was calm, but far from soothing. “But not insane.That we could deal with far more effectively.”

David McKinnon never bothered to look up, but his weathered voice carried through the room easily enough. “We can handle this. I can haul the Seventh Hastati Sentinels back to Terra within the month.”

Escalating the struggle quickly past a point the nobles could not match. That was always McKinnon’s advice. Victory at any cost. The Founder’s Movement—of which the venerable paladin was an open supporter—did not hold with half measures.

Ad Securitus Per Unitas. Through security, freedom. The Republic motto taken to its extreme conclusion.

Even in the face of the attempted assassination against him, Jonah had refused such a solution. Disbanding the Senate had edged The Republic right up to the brink of disaster, where the exarch had hoped to bring his fracturing realm back under control. The only other option had been to accept a decentralized government with no clear voice or direction, at a time when outside forces threatened The Republic of the Sphere with invasion and conquest. Ten individual Prefectures, governed by the greediest nobles, looking out for themselves rather than the common good. That way lay disaster. That much he recognized.

To paraphrase Victor Steiner-Davion: The Prefectures must hang together, or they would certainly hang separately.

So Jonah continued to ground his frustration into shards and splinters beneath the heels of his dress boots. He felt the crushing weight of so many troubles and so little sleep riding on his back, adding to each heavy footfall until they might have been the thunderous, mechanical steps of a BattleMech. A wounded one. One day he’d simply stop; his feet welded to the floor wherever he had finally come to rest.

They could winch him out into Magnum Park and set him as a statue. A warning for future exarchs.

Beware an excess of optimism. No good deed goes unpunished.

Having stormed quickly through the dregs of anger and self-pity, Jonah was finally able to thrust aside his black musings for a clearness of thought. He needed those dark moments, at times. They reminded him of his own weaknesses, but also his strengths. They made him think about the kind of damage another paladin, one with less pure designs on The Republic, might have wrought.

Not that they wouldn’t have all likely ended up in the same place anyway.

“All right,” he conceded. “We’ve already lost or are likely to lose . . . what? Half of the Tenth Triarii and nearly the same from the Principes Guards? And ten . . . fifteen percent of the Tenth Hastati?”

“Twenty,” McKinnon promised.

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