15

After raiding local cities, to both hide our true target and impress the Aurigans, we returned home, without problems.

The mission had been a complete success from several angles.

The Concordat had shown to the Aurigan Coalition that if the Concordat decided to invade or even simply raid them, they were defenseless putting a lot more pressure in the negotiations.

It also had validated the quality of my list of potential targets in the Concordat minds.

Even if I didn't get access to one of the mainframes or to a copy of the files inside, we had received a lot of valuable loots, including 'Mechs, ASFs and vehicles, lots of ammo and spares that would let the Revenants operate the advanced models for a while.

Heck, they had even paid us a nice bonus, a first one for the Exchequer.

This was also the first time that people had died because of me and that hit me hard. I wanted to write letters to the families of the fallen but Vasseur said as the operational commander, it was his job and I let him do it.

After war, it was time again to focus on business. I sold both K-1 DropShuttles to a transport company as they were useless to me and I got a nice price for them. When I was sure that Lise had finished improving our security and that it could deal with anything except a raid by a Steiner Recon Company ('MechWarriors and their jokes), I contacted several companies, like VMI, Sterope Defense Industries and O-P Electronics and for a nice amount of cash, I provided them access to the Royal toys ('Mechs, ASFs, vehicles and spare parts/ammo) for exhaustive analysis but on my terms: in our installations, accompanied by our techs and under a very close surveillance by Lise people. I also sold them some samples of our loot.

From the first analysis made by V4RU, and as I had suspected, the Artemis IV FCS equipped launchers could use normal ammo. That's good, because everybody said that producing new ammo with these kinds of seekers was going to be very difficult in the next years. Gauss ammo was no problem and cluster ammo was also not complicated to manufacture, only expensive. As could be expected, the Double Heat Sinks were one of the most sought after items to study and I sold some for a lot of cash to each company for research. Unfortunately the Streak launchers only worked with Streak ammo, so until I could secure a reliable source of supply, we needed to replace then with normal ones.

In the end, I got more than 25 million C-bills from these operations, including the sell of the K-1s. And valuable contacts and favors from big companies, which was nice.

While I wasn't exactly the owner of the rediscovered techs-, after several reunions from both sides legal teams we agreed that I was also entitled to a small fee for the use by others of these pieces of technology, not exactly royalties, but close. . The Taurian Government, that had access to same items didn't for some reason seem to do anything with it. At least, nothing that I or my associates knew about.

Leloup and his people were in heaven poking every inch of the advanced Royal equipment we had acquired in this mission. But, at same time they were furious with me because we had sold our "toys" and they were being destroyed by strangers or at least it was what they said. I am sure that deep in himself, he agreed with my ideas.

The extensive research done by Suchet and Leloup gave us access to several designs that had been produced by now defunct companies. With a bit of cosmetic changes maybe some could be produced in the Concordat if I was able to negotiate a deal with some companies that I had good relations with now...

While at first I wanted to simply start production of these civilian 'Mechs inside V4RU, the reality was that the company was not capable of that, lacking the industrial might necessary, so I needed to make agreements. In cooperation with other companies, I spent a lot of money and VMI opened some production lines for civilian 'Mechs (industrial, agro, cargo and security), which also turned me into one of the main shareholders of the company. V4RU got several contracts with special conditions with VMI and the Revenants even got a piece of the security contracts. Thank God, the unit had expanded because I still needed a substantial force for the expedition missions. Even after detaching forces for securing V4RU and VMI, I still had about a combined arms battalion to use for whatever I wanted with about a company of 'Mechs at its core.

After our success, the Navy was preparing for the long range mission and some of my forces would go with them. However, I wasn't going to spend two years or more in space, so I decided that for the time being I would stay on Vandenberg, letting Vasseur lead our part in this long raid. After having recovering from his wounds, he was more than happy to go and do something