BattleTech: Shrapnel, Issue #3 (BattleTech Magazine) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2020-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

VI

FIRST URSA MAJOR MILITIA BASE

AK-DEUCE, DUBHE

SILVER HAWKS COALITION

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

15 MAY 3010, 0900 HOURS, WESTERN COASTAL TIME

Patrick Kell looked at his noteputer. “No, Morgan, nothing yet.”

Morgan hung his hands over the back of his neck. “There’s something not right. You don’t think they worded anything in this message to tip him off, do you?”

“No, I’m sure of it.” Patrick forced a smile for his brother. “He might be distracted by God alone knows what. Remember, he’s an hour ahead of us, and still likely hasn’t risen yet. When he gets his messages, we’ll be notified.”

“And you’re ready to go.”

“I could be in the air now, Morgan, and hit the second we’re in and have scoped the defenses.”

“No, we can’t take the chance that he gets spooked and runs.”

When Patrick and Morgan had taken up the issue of trying to find Veronica Matova, they agreed on a couple of working assumptions. The first was that she’d be in the company of one of the Ion Knights, or that the Ion Knights would know where she had gone. They based this on the fact that the traffic leaving Zavijava during the time of her disappearance had a lot of Ion Knights going along with it. Thus tracking the Knights would be the best way to find her.

Doing that would be looking for the proverbial white dwarf in a galaxy, and made more difficult by the white dwarf not wanting to be found. While Constantine Fisk was more than happy to give up as many names as he could remember, the Ion Knights would be irredeemably stupid if they didn’t create new identities and flee to a variety of worlds. The brothers realized that while the Knights had no intention of being tracked, they had to find a way to make the Knights want to be tracked.

An old Terran saying had been “The most plentiful things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.” The Kells knew that third on that list was ego. Morgan had found and hired a hack writer on Zavijava to create an overnight history of the Ion Knights and their raid, titled Twilight of the Ion Knights. They’d published the book immediately—having deliberately included errors to be corrected in updates and crafting a mystery around the identity of the anonymous author. They left breadcrumb clues indicating that the writer had to be Constantine Fisk, and had many quotes from Fisk in the book. He’d even actually said a few of them. And then every two weeks or so they published a revised version of the work, and those who had purchased it could download the amended version for free.

The Kells had no intelligence agency like the LIC to actually trace every copy. That would have required a network of spies on countless planets. The only organization which could boast of such an operation was ComStar, but they never would have undertaken espionage like that. It would have violated some sacred dictum uttered by Jerome Blake and exposed them to accusations of dabbling in politics.

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