40

The return to New Vandenberg went without incident.

Almost two years had passed since the last time I had been in the system and some changes were evident. The shipyard was in operation, with the first JumpShip, called New Life a few days away from officially entering service, a ceremony was even planned.

By now six Snowdens were already in operation with two more almost ready. Although only one slip of the shipyard was used to build new JumpShips, two more were in operation, maintaining JumpShips. Curiously, one of them belonged to a Federated Suns company.

While the mainframe was decoding the data cores, I was upgraded to the latest news. The technicians from VMI and V4RUhad finally reached a final prototype for the Concordat version of the Marauder II and it was ready to enter production.

Using the latest available technologies, it packed an Extended-Range PPC and a Medium Laser in each arm, a Medium Pulse Laser in the center torso and an LRM10 with a ton of ammunition in each torso. 20 Double Heat Sinks cooled it with the rest being equal. The production of ER PPC had started three months ago although at a limited speed.

For the launch of the New Life, which was the first JumpShip built in the Concordat but also in the whole Periphery, in the last hundreds of years, Edward had come.

'Edward, tell me how did the negotiations with Hanse and Katrina go?' I asked him as soon as I had a chance to be alone with him, in a place protected from wiretapping.

'It is true that you weren't in the area in the last months. What I can tell you is that I arrived in New Avalon when the ban was already doing a lot of damage to the economy, so our proposal to provide a HPG class A SLDF with full blueprints, manuals and tech specs couldn't have come at a better time, as you had anticipated. The possibility of both kingdoms being free from Comstar control in the future led to very interesting concessions being extracted'.

'And can you specify them, or is it a secret I don't have access to?' I asked, because he hadn't gone into details, just put on an air of satisfaction.

'Well, normally the details would be secret, but my father gave me the permission to let you know because of your involvement. We got a credit of one trillion kroner, available over the next 10 years, full access to NAIS, various business concepts and production licenses and access to markets. In both nations, or if you want in the new Federated Commonwealth. And finally a better relationship on the military side'.

'Not bad, not bad at all. And by the way, what's a Davion JumpShip doing in our brand-new shipyard?

'Oh that? Part of the deal included maintaining House Davion's JumpShips, they were put under a lot of pressure with his little war.'

'Very cute. And where are ours repaired? They need a lot of maintenance too, as you know.

"Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc, you're forgetting that our shipyard on Taurus is also operational, even though it won't be capable of built new JumpShips until the end of the year, for now it can only do maintenance. And we're investing in Mechdur in your wife's kingdom. I'm sure we can maintain some there too, which will help both nations businesses,' replied Edward with a calm and satisfied air.

'Since we are talking about the kingdom of Kamea, we found in Detroit an old Earthwerks factory, that is repairable, with very interesting capabilities. If someone brings the money, I can get the technicians to repair it. Do you happen to know anyone who might be looking for a good investment?' I quietly counter.

"Jean-Luc, you know perfectly well that this money is to improve Concordat not other nations..." replied Edward with an exasperated look.

"Come on Edward. We both know your father's idea is that in the next generation, if not before, we will merge both kingdoms as Davion and Steiner did. If I'm not wrong, we tried to sell that before to the Centrellas, but they didn't buy it. I'm just looking after your interests for when you will be Lord Protector. '

After a quiet pause, Edward answered.

'Perhaps something can be arranged, but I must speak to my father first.' Edward replied with a thoughtful look and not denying my statement.

Since I had his attention, I asked one last question

'And what about the long range expedition to the SLDF Navy test base? Have they returned?'

'God, you are relentless!' said Edward with a laugh. 'Yes, they have returned, three months ago, to be precise. They returned with a modified Soyal Heavy Cruiser. The SLDF was apparently experimenting with sub-capital weapons and this cruiser had some installed. And we also found a partly disassembled advanced dockyard that we took with us and we decided to use it to repair the one in Bolthole. And before you ask, we found enough hardware to create at least two regiments of 'Mechs, several regiments of armor, mechanized infantry and diverse support units from the various caches along the way.'

With a laugh he added

'That is if you want to use hardware from the Time of War. We also got about a company of late Star League 'Mechs and lots of spares for army and navy.'

After the ceremony was over and Edward had returned to Taurus, I was able to analyze the data cores obtained from Baumann's base and to do this alone

They were in pretty bad shape and much of the information was not recoverable, but they included part of the captain's logs of a JumpShip, the SLS Dobrev and parts of the route to a destination, which looked like the Pentagon worlds with a return route from there to this side of Periphery. Unfortunately the maps were all badly damaged and it was impossible to establish the exact location of the Clans worlds or the exact route to there. The logs included pieces of the history of the Wolverines, which were similar to what I knew from the Betrayal of Ideals novel and with talks about a destination beyond Periphery on this side. Unfortunately it contained no details and the maps were not usable or complete missing a lot of information.

For VMI the last two years had been very good. All the production had been sold, Andurien had been added to the list of clients, meaning probably that the Concordat government wanted to weaken the Capellans as much as possible as several other military industries in the Concordat were also selling their production to both the Magistracy and the Andurien military, providing both forces with more options than in the story I remembered and allowing them to be in much better shape while making the Concordat and my companies richer.