Chapter Ten: Second Verse Same as the First
Well, after six hours of going over the last Aerodyne I found what I was looking for. I had also discovered an HPG in one of the side areas along with what looked like a dedicated computer center. The codes and ID needed to access the ship were located in the Captains quarters and after I had access to his personal log I discovered why.
The captain of the SLIC Pueblo class dropship The Messenger was a minor noble named Phillip Williams, who while capable enough, was not very good with electronics or computers and often had to get his devices looked at due to him going to "questionable" sources for his personal entertainment. This had led to him hiding the fact he couldn't memorize his passwords by taping a laminated card with his credentials on it to the bottom of his bed frame to look at every day before having to access said systems.
"Never attribute to Malice what can be instead be done by ignorance or stupidity." I muttered as I access The Messenger's systems. And began to finish setting everything up. Now that I had access I could begin to go over ships logs and the star systems and potential secrets that had been kept in the logs and computer systems. Some of those would probably be kept in known locations just because of the fact that this ship had primarily plied the Davion/Marik trade routes via Terra. The Captain, while idiotic insofar as computers were concerned was actually quite good at maintaining the image of a minor Noble who doubled as a merchant. His notes detailed every trade and account that the King Henry V had kept on every world they visited. Williams was also the one in charge of the whole intelligence operation.
Williams had account numbers, savings funds, companies, everything that they had invested in as part of their cover had also been used to fund the ship and continue the operation. And he was apparently really good at making investments. They had more than tripled the funds given to them in the first two years of operations and if the savings accounts and other things had interest accumulated I would be a very wealthy man when I made it to Davion or Marik space.
I had also taken breaks and gone through the cargo manifests of the Buccaneer class dropships and found that they had been transporting a massive load of IndustrialMechs. And on top of that, all of the Industrial mechs were Fusion powered and would be worth their weight in Gold when I made it to the Sphere. If I went to the Taurian Concordat, I would be able to sell these for a fantastic deal and probably recruit a crew. Or alternatively, I could make my way to the Federated Suns and try and access those accounts as well as sell off the Mechs. It would take some thought though.
Now that I had inventoried and gotten my cover story up and running, I moved to get things prepared and ready to move into the Inner Sphere and try and build a Mercenary company. If I did it right, I could remove some of the IndustrialMechs and replace them with a lance or two of the Mechs onboard the Confederates. I could then sell the two Buccaneer class ships and buy a Leopard or something to start with and after building trust, bring a crew back to the locations that I now had stored in my Iphone under a six digit code for safekeeping.
Personal Log June 30th 3001. Man, Kerensky wasn't playing around when he ordered all of the blueprints on the Caspar and SDS systems destroyed. There were no logs at all on the Manassas aside from what was done to automate for longevity purposes. Luckily, the Depot and Age of Discovery were abandoned before that was put into practice and while the Potemkin only had partial records, the Repair depot had extremely detailed reports and documents on the computer systems. They were dryer than British comedy ever dreamed it could be, but the team that had been taking apart the lone Caspar was actually experimenting with it to see if they could get around or get rid of the insane AI problem entirely by setting it up so that you could operate it with one person. Their notes actually showed that they had gotten past the point of testing before they had to leave and head to Terra. Then, they had left detailed notes of what went wrong and potential fixes. I had been hard at work after looking through those notes getting the Manassas fully automated (This included the internal magazines) and the King Henry V to the point of being able to be taken out and jumped to the Inner Sphere by myself. It had Taken me two weeks of setting up computers, and programming and in the end looked like something out of the Matrix but I had a Jumpship, Three dropships loaded with cargo, (I transferred almost all of the uniforms over to one of the less full cargo bays. I left some out for personal use and some in the repair bay as well for any Mechwarriors I recruited.) And a lance of 'Mechs loaded into The Messenger. I even practiced my cover story over the past few weeks and had made things look like they had happened the way that I said it had. I kept parts of the Caspar and moved them into the King Henry V's storage bay so that it would look like a salvage run that partially failed due to greed.
"Well, if this doesn't work I won't know about it." I said as I climbed into the navigation chair on the King Henry V. I maneuvered out of the depot and set a course for the Zenith point, and once I had reached it; I opened the Solar Sail in order to begin charging the K-F drive.
Authors note: Thanks to Vianca for input and additional ideas. I appreciate the help. I don't always use them, but I do like having people point out some options. Now, I'm probably going to head over to Davion Space in order to get those accounts settled and to try and get set up on the beginnings of a crew that I can trust. Then I might hang around the Periphery doing small time contracts until Katrina shows up. Or I might hit the Argo. I'm honestly not that impressed by the Argo but I understand that there's an appeal to the Lostech that it possesses. I'm also going to put a map up in a couple of days charting the general course of the Manassas and where this storage depot is generally speaking. It's literally just a set of coordinates in most House navigation charts. I think the SLDF operated a bunch of off the books stuff around the periphery and the main Houses as well. The problem is, there's no set list of Lostech Caches. There's the few that everyone knows about, but the SLDF had a problem with Hoarding so who knows what is all out there