Family Matters

[Cyrus Tregessar]

He still remembered his first interdiction. A trade deal had gone badly. The buyer, a minor house which was trying to build its prestige, had declined to pay, and instead attempted to murder the smuggler who was bringing weapons and narcotics. The smuggler objected, and the ensuing firefight had left seven bodies, all of which belonged to the house militia, and one of whom was the second son and heir to the house.

Justice on Axxila was harsh and unforgiving for those without patronage. Smuggling weapons and narcotics were extreme crimes, but corruption was the heart of the Axxilan aristocracy, and money made good of all evils, all but one.

By the time the system defense force got the call, the smuggler's ship was in the process of launching. It was a hazardous 11 minute ascent from the dock to break atmosphere, weaving between the twisted maze of the Axxilan concrete jungle. Then it was a 16 minute straight shot to escape the gravity well before you could hyperspace out. Cyrus' team had been the emergency crew, and launched in four minutes, a full minute less than the prescribed timeline. That gave them 23 minutes to intercept and apprehend the target.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Things went poorly from the start. The tangled mess of the Axxilan ecumonopolis proved as difficult for the interdiction pilot to navigate as it did for the smuggler, and they overshot the target by several miles on the first pass. The pilot had attempted to call it off, and just pass it off to the patrol forces, but Cyrus had insisted.

Oddly, he didn't recall having been angry at that point. Even as he recalled the event he felt the rage creep into his mind, but the Cyrus of all those years ago didn't have that particular... 'problem.' No, he had used a rational argument, a brief analysis of the benefits of a successful interception. It had worked, won the pilot over and emboldened his team.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

So they continued the pursuit, against a demonstrably superior pilot. It took 11 more minutes to catch up, and they pulled up underneath the target just as both ships were breaching the atmosphere. This was always the trickiest part of an interdiction. First, one had to identify a spot where you could feasibly break into the other ship. Then you had to steady your vessel, and fire breaching probes. The probes stuck to the enemy hull, then blew a hole in the door. Finally you fired a cable across, and then each trooper went across the cable with a hitch that propelled them across at a high speed. Just like fast-roping from a dropship, except you were going up.

It worked, the pilot held position in spite of the smuggler's maneuvers, and the probes hit the right spots, right on the cargo bay doors. Cyrus was the first across, followed by four more of his twelve person team. For the moment, at least, everything seemed to be going right. 'Just like training' one of the troopers had said.

You couldn't have made up more ironic last words.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Everything went to hell all at once. A ring of charges around the cargo bay doors fired, blowing the breaching probes apart and sending the boarding cable coiling back towards the interdiction shuttle with a vengeance. Half a dozen troopers were sent tumbling into space, their panicked screams filling the radio nets. The cable struck a seventh trooper in the chest, and horrifically ripped him apart like his armor and hardsuit meant nothing. The gore splattered across the last of the team, who fell backwards in horror only to see the cargo bay doors, launched by the charges, slam into the interdictor shuttle. The soldier was pulverized and impact blew through bulkheads and blast doors with ease.

Cyrus remembered looking on in awe and horror, but from across even a narrow stretch of space there was nothing to be done.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The shuttle staggered under the impact and was sent spinning back into the atmosphere. For a moment, Cyrus stood mute, shocked, with no idea how to proceed. Then a volley of blasterfire dropped two of his team and forced action.

He had only a vague recollection of how things went after that. There were seven of them, and three of the interdiction team left, including Cyrus. Somehow it ended in his favor, but only for him. Leaving the corpses of his team behind, he remembered stalking the passageways of the small freighter, hunting the smuggler. He cornered him in command cabin. The smuggler was a fast draw, and fired once with a blaster pistol. With a wince, Cyrus remembered how the wound had burned, and he massaged his shoulder as if he could still feel the ache. He hadn't flinched then, his mind had been focused on only one goal.

The smuggler didn't get a second shot off, Cyrus had closed and knocked the weapon out of his hand, then laid the man out with a solid punch to his jaw, and then...

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

He had come to in a daze, listening to the harsh cry of a patrol ship demanding that the freighter turn to and stop engines. It took only a moment to throttle down and send a message over to the patrol ship that the freighter was secure, and only then did Cyrus bother to look at the smuggler, or whatever was left of him.

A boarding team met him at the cargo bay, and without a word they made way as he walked calmly to the patrol ship. It was only later, as he stripped off his armor and gear, all of which was covered in layers of blood and gore, that he understood why.

Later they would say his face was like something from a nightmare, devoid of emotion or thought, like a mask of iron. The nickname, and the reputation, stuck.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Cyrus rolled out of bed. The memory had come unbidden, and he was surprised at how clear it had all been. Another person might have called it a nightmare, and it dawned on Cyrus that he was covered in sweat, and the bed soaked. But the nature of a nightmare implied fear of the dream or something in it, and fear was not an emotion Cyrus was very familiar with.

A large window in the room gave a clear view of the Axxilan sun as it rose for the morning. He was only dimly aware of how unusual that view was, the vast majority of Axxila's population might go their entire lives without seeing their sun crest the horizon, trapped as they were beneath the globe-spanning urban sprawl.

The ruling families of Axxila dominated the planet not just economically and militarily, but also on a sociological level. They lived in great spires that rose above the ecumenopolis proper, reaching for the sky. The largest were tethered to low-orbiting stations, or acted as mooring points for floating sky palaces. In every possible way, the aristocracy towered above the billions on the planet below.

Cyrus looked out at the chaotic swirl of existence were hundreds of billions of creatures eked out a living for the benefit of a privileged few and found, as he had always found, that he simply didn't care. How useless it was, how pointless. Life was fleeting, worthless unless one made themselves worthy. Let someone else deal with the trivialities. Katharine was the one who cared about how the fortune of the House, how it gained power and prestige in Axxila and as a subject of the Mandalorian clans.

He was here to make war.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Katharine met him in the elevator. He gave a curt nod, but she smiled warmly and embraced him.

“Welcome back, brother.”

Cyrus said nothing. Her affection, genuine or not, had always been part of a larger game. Ever a schemer, his sister, the truest scion of the house among his siblings.

“Father will want to see you.”

Cyrus raised an eyebrow, but maintained his silence.

“He talks about you a lot, or at least the going-on's of the Sith. It's tough for the old bastard, he chafes under Mandalorian rule, still has dreams of becoming a Moff or something under the old empire. He was never one to temper his ambition, for himself or for any of us.”

“I can't imagine the Mandalorians interfere much with Axxila,” Cyrus replied, allowing himself to be drawn into the conversation.

“They don't really. That's the problem. Under the Sith we could play politics an curry favor here and there, grow our power and support in the administration and make something of ourselves. Now, unless we try and learn their bizarre customs we're basically ignored and stuck on-planet. We've ruled here before, his designs have always been bigger than that.”

Cyrus nodded. “Regardless, you don't have to lie that he has any intention of even acknowledging my existence.”

She just shrugged. “You might be surprised, he tends to flip between admiration and loathing for my little coup. Catch him going off on one of his tantrums and he might well offer you your birthright again.”

“Like it's his to give anymore.”

“You're right, and you can't have it back.”

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The elevator came to a stop, and the two stepped out into one of the lower levels of the Citadel. These floors included the main factories, depots, storage sites and research and development cells for Shadowline. A neat little pet project it had become, they had nearly a full brigade of infantry, and enough aircraft to support and transport almost all of them. But something was missing, and Katharine had started a number of R&D projects to round out the Helldiver inventory.

The projects had run into complications, Cyrus had been called in to assist. Even with the understanding that it was only for business, it had taken some serious convincing on Katharine's part to get him to show back up on Axxila.

But here he was, and there was work to do.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

"There's two main projects I'm working on right now, plus I've got some feelers out to get a contract or two for some shipbuilding. Having the Helldiver's be assault infantry for the Sith might work fine for you, but it doesn't exactly put money into the House's coffers at the rate I'd like. Your sorcerer overlords can be stingy, you know."

Cyrus nodded. He knew better than most the potential complications that came when dealing with Sith. At least they paid you on time, and frankly he couldn't exactly complain about his pension. A Fleet Admiral's check was rather substantial, not that he ever had anything to spend it on. You couldn't yet just buy a Dark Blade, unfortunately.

"I envision an entirely self-sufficient organization. The foremost mercenary unit in the galaxy, able to lead assaults from space all the way down to the ground. We aren't there yet, not even close. As things stand, we require control of the air, which means relying on the employer for both space and aerospace support. That's all well and good if we get hired out by the Sith or Republic or something, but suppose it's some planetary warlord having a feud with his neighbor? I didn't invest everything the House owns to see it evaporate because of some old nerf herder's hubris."

"I thought you were the one criticizing Michael for not checking his ambition."

"You're the one to talk, already the top Admiral for the Sith. What else do you want to do with your life?"

Cyrus laughed. "There are others, and besides, they're not the best in the galaxy yet. I mean to make them that."

Katharine rolled her eyes. "It seems we Tregessar's share that flaw. And what then?"

"War. They'd be the perfect enemy, the perfect match, and I'd crush them like bugs simply for the satisfaction."

Katharine stopped mid step, staring at Cyrus with a mix of confusion and amusement. "Davith was right, you are fucking crazy."

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

They walked in silence for a while, before eventually reaching a pair of sliding glass doors with opened to reveal a neatly furnished office with several computer terminals and walls full of technical manuals, research papers, and what looked like historical records. This was Katharine's office in the R&D facilities, the heart of everything innovative at Shadowline.

Katharine retrieved a datapad and handed it to Cyrus, then took a seat behind a long wooden desk (worth a fortune on an ecumenopolis like Axxila) and waited while Cyrus read.

There were two files. The first appeared to be a large fighter/bomber, codename 'Aries.' The second was a hovertank of some sort, code name 'Hetairoi.' Cyrus opened the second file. For several minutes, he was silent. Finally he looked up, a scowl on his face.

"I recommend you fire your engineers."

Katharine looked up. "Oh? I was thinking of having them shot, then tossing the man who recommended their department from the top of the Citadel. I suppose I can be lenient, strange to hear that sentiment from you, though."

Cyrus waved the joke away. He'd deserved the jab, assuming she hadn't realized the design was garbage. Never underestimate family, especially if their last name is 'Tregessar.'

"The current design has merits, but is asking too much. You want a fast tank, fine. You want a flying tank, fine. You want a heavy gun and heavy armor, fine. You want all of that together, you're out of luck. Warships are the same way, you can't ever get everything you want, there's always going to be a flaw or some risk you have to accept. Anyway we don't need a flying tank, the Thunderbird and Hellhawk can provide that well enough as is."

He continued to review the notes, and stumbled upon an interesting bit. "You have prototypes?"

Katharine nodded glumly. "Yes, two. They cost a fortune, but the engineers wanted to see what they could do with the oversized turrets. Most of the team called it a failure, but there's a few who think it gives us room to be versatile. Several different variants, filling different roles on the battlefield, that sort of thing. Lets go see them."

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

As they made their way to the hanger with the two prototypes, Cyrus continued to review the file. He saw a hundred problems to fix, and mentally tallied the problems. There seemed to be a core group of designers who wanted the tank to fly, but that was pointless. They had airspeeders to fly, the only merit in the concept was allowing the vehicle to be deployed from high altitude. That could be dealt with using regular repuslors with power boosters, though. There was even technological precedent, some archaic tank designs were known for being able to 'jump' around the battlefield.

Speed was another issue. One designer in particular kept citing the ancient Imperial Repulsortank 1-H, and all but insisting that a speed of 300 km/h was possible. Reality was a queen, though, and however the Galactic Empire of hundreds of years ago had managed was lost during the Gulag Plague. They were limited, but you could always stack some extra repulsor ski's on and still manage a respectable, say, 150 or so.

It would take some very clever engineering, there weren't a lot of medium tanks that could go that fast out there, but it was doable. It was all very doable.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Armoring was the next problem. You simply could not have both speed and heavy armor. But this was a Helldiver tank, it wouldn't be designed for the the grueling tank battles that were waged across planets during invasions. It was designed to hit hard and fade, and old doctrine. Speed is armor, they said, and called it a cruiser, so a Cruiser Tank it would be. All it needed was to be able to take a few hits until it could clear the line of fire. Shields could do that, shields and a layer of armor just tough enough to deflect the first volley of what would otherwise be a kill shot. There were plenty of materials that could do that. Shadowline had a good line on Turadium, but that was heavy, probably too much so.

There were other ways to make tank armor count. The design as it stood struck Cyrus as unnecessarily roomy. Increase automation, drop the crew to a bare minimum, and you could decrease the profile of the tank. A good slope could give 15mm of armor two or three times the effectiveness, and on a repulsortank...

Cyrus began to make notes on the file. It didn't take long before it was covered in seemingly unintelligible red markings, but study it long enough and the details began to emerge.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Shielding would also require some out-of-the-box thinking. The original design had a pair of conventional generators, but field testing with other units had shown those didn't stand up well to heavy firepower consistently, and could be overcharged and forced to shut off by a single shot. A tertiary suggestion advocated for a set of four smaller generators, each providing a layer of defense. Individually they were somewhat weaker, but they had a higher chance of stopping a single heavy laser blast or railgun shot. Additionally, if you were facing small arms, you could cycle generators on and off, allowing them time to recharge.

They were somewhat volatile, prone to overheating and burning out the components, but that was an acceptable cost. They'd made the tank fast for a reason, after all.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The main issue now was armament. Cyrus did a quick review of the various weapon systems proposed. Several struck him as useless, or redundant. One design envisioned the tank as an MLRS platform with defensive lasers. That was dumb, if they wanted artillery they could make it, but artillery implied traditional warfare, not the sort of thing the Helldiver's excelled at. Besides they had Hellhawk's to provide missile support.

No, this would be a tank designed to kill other tanks first and foremost. Cyrus had seen firsthand the durability of certain forms of armor when confronted with energy weapons, so he had little faith in those. You wanted to punch through armor, you got a small projectile and you made it move FAST. That meant a railgun, for which the technology not only existed but was commonplace. The trick was to fit it in a relatively compact package.

There were several workable designs, and Cyrus made a note to review them later. He was intrigued, however, by the versatility of the turret. It was a bit large, bigger than required, but if you had the opportunity why not take advantage of it. He pulled up a dozen other designs, and tagged several of them to review again in more detail later. The first was a conventional mass driver, as close to a regular tank cannon as you got without the waste and inefficiency of an actual shell-firing weapon. The second was based off the Umbaran Electromagnetic Plasma Cannon, with a devastating area of effect and good power. The last was essentially a large gatling gun. Not exactly an anti-armor weapon, but it would be just the thing to clear a city block of, well, just about anything.

Slowly but surely his image of the tank began to come together.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

They reached the hanger, and entered through a small door into a large chamber where two vehicles almost entirely unlike what Cyrus had drawn up sat on struts. Obvious gaps in the hull indicated where the repulsor skis were supposed to go. Either they hadn't been installed yet, or someone didn't trust the design to work properly and didn't want to risk it. Making an operational landspeeder was one thing, making an operational repulsortank was another entirely. Balance things poorly and you could have a start up that ended on its side.

Cyrus pointed at the dormant 'tanks' and raised one eyebrow. Katharine shook her head softly in response. "There were enough engineers concerned about the weight distribution that I put the operational test on hold, just in case."

"Giving in to what others think? How unlike you."

She scoffed. "More like protecting my investment. Not something you would understand."

With almost anyone else, the remark would have caused his rage to well up inside him, but Katharine was one of the few who inspired no such ire. It was almost disconcerting, he was so used to holding back that when he didn't need to, it felt unnatural. It wasn't just that she was family, his father, Davith, even his mother had all faced his anger in some shape or form. He wasn't the black sheep of the family for no reason.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

Without another word, Cyrus tossed the datapad at Katharine. Just as quickly, she snatched it out of the air. House Tregessar did not breed incompetents, or at least they tweaked their genes so much that you couldn't have figured out the difference. She pulled up the files on the tank and began to read.

"There's your tank. Now I recommend you get some techs out here to install the repulsor skis and start weight testing the platform. You've still got some challenges to deal with, of course. We'll need a source of Quadanium Steel, which isn't very easy to come by, and probably a significantly more advanced foundry than we have on site, and I figure-"

"Cy," she cut him off. "Stop talking like you understand economics. I've already factored for the resources we need, that was never a concern, not until we try and make a tank out of besker or something." She pulled a holo-display of the updated design out of the screen, and it hovered above both of them, projected from the datapad. "And thanks, these notes are exactly what I needed. I knew there was some reason I didn't hate you."

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

After several minutes of silence, Cyrus spoke up again. "Well, what is it?"

Katharine looked up. "Well it's not done, obviously. You've got things started, but there's a lot more to do. You've got a bunch of main guns and you figured out armoring and movement. That's what, half the problem? What about secondary weapons, I see an empty hull. What about sensors, communications, internal designs. So we want four different turret configurations, now we have to account for different munitions, power supplies, gas for the plasma cannon, and so on. What about crew survivability? You're not leading Imperial Stormtroopers here, you're leading mercenaries, veteran ones, at that. They follow for pay and glory, they're not going to charge out in a deathtrap. Come on Cy, you design starships, don't get cocky on me because I'm your little sister."

Cyrus laughed. "I've killed officers who've said as much to me before, you know, but you're right."

She gave him the strange look again. "Yeah, I bet you have. Lets stick to work, okay?"

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

The next several hours were spent reworking and tweaking the design, over and over and over. It was almost worse than designing a ship, because Cyrus had never bothered with the little details before. He was vaguely aware that there were engineers in and out installing the repulsor ski's, and at one point they had to interrupt their work as one of the tanks was activated and went careening around the hanger for a bit before the test pilot managed to regain control. It went out for it's maiden flight, the second prototype was moved up to where it had been, and where Cyrus and Katharine had been working a small office began to emerge.

By the end of the day they had a nearly complete working concept model that could be built on top of one of the prototypes for testing. It would be several weeks to manufacture and actually op-test, of course, but the basic design was more or less complete. They'd thrown in a pack of versatile concussion missiles, which Cyrus had picked over what would have been a larger amount of anti-armor TOW missiles because of their anti-air capability. A pair of multipurpose launchers, which could be configured for assault, or even point defense, were added to either side of the main weapon emplacement. Finally a repeating blaster was affixed to the top, remote controlled or automated, of course, since they didn't have crew for it.

The most interesting feature by far was a network of camera's and backup sensors of Katharine's devising. Arguing that anything it couldn't shoot it could run from, the obvious next step was to make sure that it could see everything that got close. All in all, not a bad defensive suite for a cruiser tank.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

It was nearly fourteen hours later before they finished. Katharine finally tossed a pair of tech manuals and a datapad onto the floor and stood up with a mumbled 'I'm done.' Cyrus watched her walk off and reviewed the nearly finalized design. He kept seeing flaws, little issues that on their own weren't so bad, but taken as a whole showed horrible weakness and easily exploitable vulnerabilities. Maybe he was overthinking it, the tank didn't need to fit every role. It was designed to back up and support the Helldivers, soldiers fighting on picked ground at a time of their choosing. So what if it was weak to dedicated anti-armor weapons? Did it need to be able to face down an MBT and win? Ideally, it wouldn't be facing down an MBT at all, but whipping around it and firing at the vulnerable rear.

Besides, at the end of the day at least it could kick the karing hell out of the Canderous Assault Tank. Mission fething accomplished, as far as he was concerned.

He got up and began to walk towards the elevator. It was still a 20 minute trip to the top of the spire.