Heir Apparent
Copyright © 2016 by Harebrained Schemes, LLC
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Heir Apparent is produced by Harebrained Schemes
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Chapter One
Rivergaard House, Rivergaard
Maldives
15 October 3000
Walter de Mesnil paused in the doorway of his boss’s suite and rapped a knuckle on the doorjamb. “We have a problem, Captain.”
“What we, Lieutenant?” Hake Angleton, leader of the Angleton’s Angels mercenary company, looked up from the ancient desk behind which he sat. “We’ve only been here a day. Is this the previous problem, or a new one?”
“Previous, and it’s not aging well.” To Walter’s eye, the man likely was as old as the desk had been recreated to appear. No way that’s an original antique from Terra. Still, it fits this place. Walter, half his boss’s age, and his black hair lacking any of the gray Hake had in abundance, stepped into the room. “I’ve looked over the new gun-camera files you sent me.”
Hake leaned back and the chair protested sharply. “Awful damned pretty, ain’t it?”
“Did you actually watch them?”
“Lieutenant?”
“Oh, you mean the Trebuchet?” Walter couldn’t help but smile. Among the files had been a portion of a local public-relations piece commissioned by the marketing department at Litzau Enterprises. It recounted the history of the BattleMech known as Destrier, which had been owned by the Litzau corporation since before the Concordat-Magistracy War. Chairman Augustine Litzau had used it to fend off salvage raiders during the war, and was credited with saving Rivergaard. He’d had the tall, humanoid machine painted as if it were a suit of armor, but in gunmetal blue, with his corporate logo added on shoulder and breast. “I liked the looks of it from the outside, and you know I’m a sucker for history, but . . .”
“The corporate branding takes a bit to get used to. To your point, however . . .” Hake shifted his shoulders. “The diagnostics and the films from the exercises were underwhelming.”
“To put it mildly.” Walter shook his head. “I don’t know why you took this job, Hake, and I don’t know why you’re making Ivan Litzau my problem.”
“I seem to recall your predecessor saying that very same thing to me. About you!” Hake hauled his bulk out of the chintz-covered, spindly legged chair and waved Walter to follow him. The mercenary leader’s heels clicked on the oak parquet as he crossed to a pair of glass doors and flung them open. Walter followed him onto the stone balcony, crushed stone crunching beneath his feet.
The balcony overlooked a valley running from the savannah of the central highlands south to the more temperate equatorial zone. The broad, azure Nyqvist River flowed lazily on, and lush green crops carpeted its shores as far as the eye could see. The river flowed onto a broad delta, and its controlled flooding annually reinvigorated the fields with silt from the distant highlands.
Several kilometers north of the Litzau corporate compound, the city of Rivergaard thrived. From that distance, it appeared to be little more than a village of huts fashioned from mud bricks. The Dhivi had learned well the lessons of the wars that had despoiled much of the Inner Sphere. They built their capital down deep and strong, creating fantastic galleries in caverns. Those caverns—which were wholly man-made—had been styled to look as if they had been carved out over millennia by the river’s gentle caress.
Hake leaned on the stone balustrade, his scarred hands flat on the rock. “I’ll answer your questions about this mission in the order you asked. I took this job because Acting Director Alexandra was willing to pay us well above scale. Despite the world’s axial tilt and elliptical orbit, much of this world is beautiful—no one has been complaining about the duty station. It’s green, you can breathe the air down here, it’s got water and in the valley it’s not too hot. Long as you’ve been an Angel, I don’t think you’ve seen a better posting.”
My whole life I’ve not seen better. Walter half smiled. “I don’t recall my pay packet getting all that much thicker.”
“But your Blackjack’s arm actuator is getting fixed.”
“Point.”
Hake turned toward him and sighed. “Look, Walter, I ain’t getting any younger. There’s no one left in the Angels that I started out with. They’re all dead or proto-walking dead.”
Walter frowned. “Is this you telling me you’re thinking of retiring?”
The older MechWarrior faced the river again. “Wouldn’t be hard to get used to seeing this with your morning coffee every day.”
“But, Hake, there’s a reason you call retired guys ‘walking dead.’ You always said you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.”
Hake laughed, then coughed. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “I decided that when I was a kid. Maybe your age. Hanging on to that idea, that was me trying not to think about getting old. So this job here, it’s a way to get some money, and not just for me. Your Blackjack, Eck’s Jenner—I got MacDonald banging dents out of the Vulture’s Egg. This job is going to make the unit healthy.”
“Be a bad time to retire, Hake.”
“But not a bad place.” The older man’s expression grew wistful. “Wanna know why I never wanted to retire? God’s honest truth?”
Walter nodded and joined his commander at the stone railing. “Sure.”
“I always wanted the Angels to continue after me, you know. I didn’t think they would, that they could, without me.” The older man patted Walter on the shoulder. “But you know, kid, you ain’t half bad. They like you, the others.”
“Half of them are too young to know any better, and the vets are too tired to think for themselves.” Walter snorted. “You trying to tell me you’re going to turn the Angels over to me?”
“You see anyone better out there?”
“There has to be, Hake.” Walter shook his head. “Look, we do this job, we go to Galatea. There are blue bloods all over the Inner Sphere with stupid money, wanting to buy a mercenary company and promote themselves to Field Marshal High Mucky-muck Potentate. You cash out, they return home, parade us a couple of times, then let us take some contracts so they earn on their investment.”
“Nah.” Hake waved that idea away. “They wouldn’t be the Angels no more.”
“But that would be good for you, Hake.” The subordinate officer sighed. “As honored as I am—and I am honored—I can’t afford to buy chewing gum, much less this unit.”
“I’d be giving it to you.” The older man grinned. “Well, you’d be earning it.”
Walter turned, leaned back against the balustrade, and closed his eyes. “By dealing with the situation behind my other question.”
“See, you’re command material.”
Walter covered his eyes with a hand. “Hake, did you watch those videos? Really study the numbers? The kid—Vice Chairman or Chairman Presumptive or whatever weird title the corporations have given Ivan—he’s not hopeless, Hake, he’s worse. He’s hopeful. He brims over with hope. His comments recorded when he reviews the vids, they’re polite, and he promises to do better. But as a pilot, he is atrocious, with a capital A and a capital Trocious. And I have three weeks to do something about that? It can’t be done.”
“But it must be done, Lieutenant de Mesnil.”
The woman’s words dropped Walter’s hand from over his eyes. That’s— “I beg yo
ur pardon, Chairperson.”
“For what?” Her gray eyes ran a shade lighter than her hair, but the seamlessness of Acting Director Alexandra Litzau’s skin gave her back the years her hair sought to steal. Trim and barely a hair over 1.4 meters tall, she stood with her hands clasped at the small of her back, her chin up and eyes narrowing. “Is it for speaking the truth, or the lack of wit to realize you can and will do your duty?”
Hake had dropped respectfully to a knee and Walter followed his example after Hake’s slap to his stomach. “More the former, ma’am, I should hope.”
“And all of Maldives shares that hope.” Alexandra waved them to their feet with the flick of a gloved hand. “There are things for you to understand, Lieutenant. Your review of my son’s performance is not inaccurate—nor is your assessment of his character. My son is not suited to the life of a MechWarrior. He takes after his late father, Thomas, in that way. I would change that in neither either of them. What I will do, however, is change this world.”
She came to stand between them. “Maldives is dying. It has been for nearly two centuries—because the Federated Suns and the Capellan Confederation see worlds like ours as pawns in their political games. You look out here and see beauty, but you should know that once this world was home to a billion people. Now, less than a third of that. Those who remain, no matter how impoverished, pride themselves on our history and our traditions. They hold stakes in the fate of the world, and cut fierce deals to maintain and expand their holdings.
“My dear, late husband realized that those traditions were killing us—one above all others. Primogeniture. Do you know it?”
Walter nodded. “The right of corporate succession and inheritance passing to the first-born child.”
She smiled. “In its earliest form, that would be the eldest male child. Executive positions are handed down along familial lines, always from father to son. In turn, the corporations remain in the hands of the First Families that founded them.”
“Interesting way to run a business.”
“Primogeniture is an old practice. The Dhivi revived it during colonization, to keep from subdividing their lands and wealth between children. They intensified their love for it after the war. This resulted in a complex network of arranged marriages to create joint ventures and mergers between families. A fertile child, male or female, would be bartered to other families in Byzantine schemes to acquire lands or controlling interests in various projects. The Exodus of Dhivi to other worlds, like Itrom, for example, did not dissolve property ties. Each year young men and women are married off to families throughout the Inner Sphere just to secure stock in our various holdings.”
Walter arched an eyebrow at Hake. “You came from Itrom, right? So you know all this?”
Hake nodded. “I could of had me a Dhivi wife. But I decided being king of some boardroom was nothing compared to being king on a battlefield.”
The acting Litzau CEO spread her hands. “My husband understood that making our children into commodities did them a disservice. Shipping them away robbed the world of talent. For us to rebuild the world, we would need to get our people invested in the future. We would need to make them part of Maldives, and that would include expanding property rights and the right of inheritance.”
Hake ran a hand over his chin. “Give them a stake, and they stick around.”
“Exactly. And we would provide you all with the same stake if our venture here is successful.” She glanced down at her hands. “Those who have successfully concentrated power to themselves are against any revision or revocation of this Common Law tradition. My husband felt the sting of their opposition severely, as our first two children are female. This did not decide him on his course of action, however; it just provided impetus to realize his dream even more swiftly. He did know the work would take time, and he thought Ivan’s birth had bought him that time. Unfortunately, he would not live long enough to see his son reach his fifth birthday.”
Walter grew solemn. “My condolences.”
“Appreciated, Lieutenant.” The corner of Alexandra’s mouth twitched. “I’ll save you soliciting gossip: my husband died of rare lymphoma. He likely was not murdered, but that tale will be bruited about and I’m am most often the culprit.”
Hake nibbled at a thumbnail. “No other suspects?”
“Countless. Minor executives. The pirates who raid throughout the Periphery. Outsiders who wish to offer their daughters as brides so their grandchildren will have claim to ventures here.” She shrugged. “The list is endless. I count his death as natural, lest I go insane contemplating the identity of prospective guilty parties.
“To the point, however; my son—for whom I have been acting as surrogate—will be invested with my husband’s board position, holdings and duties—not just in Litzau Enterprises, but the Maldives Corporation. Because of other traditions tracing back to Augustine Litzau himself, my son will first have to prove he is the master of Destrier via an ordeal—the Final Vetting.”
Walt looked over at Hake. “The exercise plan you sent over . . . this Final Vetting is really just a nature walk and some target practice for Ivan and his Companion, isn’t it? We go from point A to point B and burn holes in a few slag heaps while the First Families watch. It isn’t much of an ordeal.”
“In the past it was more of a martial exercise. Military discipline was once the bedrock of our corporate culture, Lieutenant; Litzau Enterprises was founded by a retired MechWarrior. He used his earnings from the field as seed capital to launch his business.” She locked eyes with Walter. “In the early days, we were staffed almost entirely by veteran soldiers. Many of our senior executives are holdovers from that period—men who view competence in a BattleMech as a basic life skill.”
“Ah. And so if the Chairman Presumptive is going to earn their respect, he has to prove that he can handle himself.”
“Yes.” Alexandra nodded. “My husband suffered through the old Vetting ritual, but he changed it going forward. Ivan will still have to exhibit mastery of Destrier, but the Final Vetting is now less a trial by combat than it is a symbolic tour of corporate holdings—a way for the Chairman Presumptive to demonstrate that he truly knows what he’s going to be responsible for. As his Companion, you have two tasks: prepare him, then guide him.”
Walter frowned. “Why not just use corporate security for the Final Vetting? One of the Litzau Lancers would do just fine. Why involve mercenaries at all?”
“Loyal the Lancers may be, but they are drawn from the First Families and are steeped in Dhivi politics.” Alexandra smiled indulgently. “Using mercenaries will curb temptation, and having you as his Companion will ensure loyalty.”
“Don’t worry. When bought, I stay bought.” Walter sighed. “And you don’t want the job for yourself, Hake?”
“Nope. I wouldn’t mind the actual hike, but I don’t want to put Ivan through his paces before that. And when it comes to the Final Vetting, I’m going to enjoy watching from the corporate headquarters. Cushy chairs and beer—but I’ll be there for you, Walt.”
“That makes me feel so much better.” Walter’s brown eyes tightened. “If this is just a formality, why are the exercises and the Vetting going to be with full ammo loads? Powered-down weapons and training protocols would reduce the chances of an accident.”
“That would alter the tradition too much and undermine Ivan.” Alexandra returned her hands to the small of her back. “The results will be taken as a sign of Ivan’s strength. My husband thought the Final Vetting a barbaric practice, though he concluded his ordeal in a most unorthodox manner. For Ivan, the Vetting is a hurdle he must clear to be able to continue my husband’s work.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am, Walter here will do everything that needs to be done.”
Walter frowned. “I have to tell you, ma’am, that going full live-fire for the training is dangerous. Accidents
happen.”
“That, Lieutenant, cannot be helped.” She shook her head. “I have no desire to see my son die. I don’t want to see anyone die or bleed or get hurt at all; but if he fails at mastering Destrier, the company’s confidence in him will die. That will just hasten Maldives’s death. Thus, what I require of you is that you help him succeed in this exercise. Work with him. Learn what he can do, then make him better.”
“What will determine if he’s good enough?”
Alexandra smiled easily. “We have always held our Chairmen to the Star League basic competencies.”
“Indig militia, House troops or SLDF?”
“Militia will suffice.”
Hake punched his arm. “See, Walt, that’s why I picked you to train him up. That’s the kind of thing you do better than anyone.”
“Three weeks, Hake.”
“Not a moment to lose, then.”
Walter exhaled loudly. “Where is he, then, your son? We can start right now.”
Alexandra shook her head firmly. “That is impossible.”
“I don’t understand.”
Ivan’s mother smiled in a way that sent a shiver clawing its way up Walter’s spine. “You, Lieutenant, are due for the final fitting of your dress uniform.”
“My what now?”
Hake laughed. “It’s got braid and we made up a few medals for you. I sent them your measurements as soon as we got into communications range. The Angels got some fancy dress clothes coming. You’re the first. You’ll need them for the reception tonight.”
Walter rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Reception?”
“My son’s coming of age is a bit more elaborate than finding a seedy bar and drinking alcohol that you hope won’t leave you blind. There is a reception tonight, here, for the Preferred, other Stakeholders and a few extra-planetary representatives. There will be more fetes and parades as part of the Investiture ceremonies, but you’ll find time to train with Ivan.” She raised an eyebrow. “You do know how to dance, yes?”
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