35

Thomas gave me a team of civilian servants to help me take control of New Vandenberg. The catch was that they were loyal to Thomas and not to me personally, but those were the rules of the game. After taking control of the system, the ex-ruler and his loyalists had already departed, not even waiting for the formal ceremony, and gaining some knowledge of the ongoing activities, which took about a month (thank God the team Thomas provided me with was made of people with former experience in system government), it was time to have a talk with Dr. Murad. One of the interesting differences in government from what I knew was that in reality the noble that received the control of a system didn't need to do much as most of the time, they had a team that did all the work, some nobles went as far as no even providing general guidelines, enjoying a life of relative privilege (as long as they paid the bills and were able to more or less defend their holdings).

Running her usual magic, she had managed to make the operations on the shipyard in orbit of Lompoc (New Vandenberg IX) move ahead of schedule and at a lower cost than projected. According to her estimate, it would be fully operational in the middle of 3030, starting to build one Invader per year and in 3035, it would be able to produce 2 Invaders per year as more and more parts of the old shipyard would be restored. No stranger to this ambitious goal was the discovery of a big asteroid extremely rich in Germanium coupled to the almost finished unit that would process that ore and produce K-F cores. As far as I understood, that was the real bottleneck for the production of new JumpShips and before the people in charge of that area gained enough experience (and expanded the hardware) the number of cores per year was going to be small.

The construction of Snowden L was also running at full speed, at this time two were in activity and two others in an advanced stage of construction, which improved the availability of resources. Rebuilding the old shipyard had taken a lot of time, the central part was very complicated to restore and running. Now that that area and one of the slips were finally operational, rebuilding other slips was relatively easy and fast, but without the industrial infrastructure to feed them, everything was useless. And building that industrial infrastructure would take time as was of the needed training of the staff needed to operate the various elements. While everything was not ready, the slips could be used to provide maintenance to the aging commercial fleet operating inside the Concordat.

Part of our conversation had to do with the only structure in Arano Restoration capable of performing maintenance on JumpShips, which was in orbit around Mechdur. At the moment, according to the data I had and that Farah was reading, they were only able to perform their operations on one JumpShip at a time, with an efficiency of about 60%. After reviewing the data, Farad said that with our support and with what she and her team had learned in Lompoc, it would be possible to update the dockyard for greater efficiency but that it should also be possible to expand it to work on up to 2 JumpShips simultaneously. Of course, this would only be possible with great support from Concordat, and only after Lompoc was finished, which meant probably around 3035, although preliminary work could start as soon as Lompoc was up and running, i.e. after 3030. But for that, I needed Thomas to accept to provide the necessary support. Maybe, he would be inclined to do so because it would also give the Concordat an extra capability maintaining/repairing its JumpShips.

Saying goodbye to Dr. Murad, I took a look at the reports on the Revenants and Grey Death. After a somewhat troubled beginning, they had created a good relationship and everything indicated that the efficiency of my forces had increased considerably. Because I was now the ruler of the system I opened to both units all the training areas that the local militia and TDF forces had access to since until now they only had access to about half of them with the most remote and most diversified biomes being unavailable for them. It was not difficult to extend the contract with GDL to training the militias and the regular TDF forces in the system as for them it only meant being paid for the same job. For me, I was using the planetary defense funds to improve the capacity of the local forces, a move supported by both the TDF and the local militia commanders.

The analysis report for the BSK-MAZ Bull Shark Assault 'Mech had proved that its technology was actually superior to the latest Royal 'Mech to which I had access, which it had probably been created by the Clans and possibly by Clan Wolverine, because of the markings on the 'Mech. What the hell was this technology doing on this side of the Periphery? As far as I knew the Clans were on the other side of IS…

On the positive side, my technicians were confident that with the technology provided by both data cores and the ER Medium Lasers models found on that 'Mech, they could recreate those advanced weapons as long as enough money was available. Which, of course, wasn't in the years to come.

What was really interesting was written in a confidential memo saying that Argo could reproduce all the advanced laser types we had obtained in the operation against Baumann: ER Large, Medium and Small and also Pulse Large and Medium. We only had blueprints of ER Large and all the pulse ones, but extensive analysis of the ER Medium and Small allowed my experts to learn how to scale down the advanced lenses used in the ER Large to create the same effect in the Medium and small models. Obviously in limited quantities and at a high cost but still. At the moment they were not able to reproduce other types of weapons, but ongoing investigations were taking place. One of the first 'Mechs to receive these upgrades was the Highlander 732b of Vasseur, with the switch of its three Medium Lasers for extended range versions. The decision was taken to upgrade the 'Mechs of the Revenant's but with maximum secrecy.

Meetings with leaders of various companies in all branches, universities, and hospitals led to the distribution of selected parts of both data cores in accordance with the Calderon's directives to disseminate the technology, advising everyone to invest in security so as not to avoid taking unnecessary risks. I took the opportunity to inform those present that similar initiatives were taking place on other planets, the impact of such initiatives being depend on the money others companies were investing. One of the companies that would gain substantially from this was Pinard-Dicolais Electronics, which in addition to building a subsidiary in New Vandenberg, was producing to the maximum of its capacity advanced security and surveillance systems, models I had provided them with previously. Without forgetting that during my visit to Pinard, during the alarm caused by the Galahad 3026 exercises, I had obtained a stake in the company. Another pleasant news from P-DE was that they were planning to start limited (and expensive) production of Artemis IV warheads in mid 3030 followed by the guidance systems by late 3030 or early 3031.

The reunion with the Board of Directors of VMI went rather well. After all, since I had begun to lead it, the company had grown a lot, adding several new lines to its production capacities, ranging from vehicles to 'Mechs and ASFs and was right now the biggest military company in the Periphery and not bad when compared to those of the Inner Sphere. The latest report from the VMI R&D team was also interesting. After years of work on the samples of Ferro-Fibrous, Streak launchers and ammo provided by the Celano operation and with the help of the data cores, they were finally confident that they could start the production of these advanced items. Once more if the budget was there. Unfortunately, there was for now no available budget to start these projects.