Turn 76 - Victory is Near
You read the reports about how Siriwan and the Takeda kid handle the Otomo and have to laugh, turning their own Mechwarrior Mafia arrogance against them… The kid insisted on personally inspecting the Otomo’s current mechs, then declared them to be unsuitable mounts for ‘noble Samurai’. Therefore he ordered them to leave them behind while accompanying him back to Kuroisora where, supposedly, ‘more suitable’ mechs would be provided for them.
On the trip he took the time to personally meet with each of the Otomo, on the grounds of wishing to get to know his new loyal retainers as a proper Tenno should. In doing so he sorted out the actual psychopaths who had eagerly engaged in actual atrocities and those men who had managed to avoid doing so. The kid is brilliant, intimating to the former that they will receive ‘great honor’ upon their arrival on Kuroisora, and the suckers believe it.
Upon landing he formed them up and marched them to the palace compound where Siriwan ran the TTP for you. The psychopaths who were to be ‘honored’ were in the front, and upon arrival he made a great show of personally presenting each of them with a brand new shiny, and ultra sharp, tanto from his own hands. He then had all of them swear themselves to his service in the presence of Siriwan, followed by engaging in a dialogue with the leaders of the psychopaths, in which he got them to repeat the Bushido mantra about death being the ultimate means of cleansing one's honor.
At which point he graciously permitted them all to use his gardens for their traditional purpose.
The expressions on their faces when they realized what had just happened? Priceless. To their credit, once they realized just how thoroughly they were trapped none of them backed away from it. Say what you will about their evil, say nothing about their courage.
Of course, you are very certain that they would have been mortally offended that, once they’d departed to the garden, the whelp had then passed out proper daisho sets to the rest of the Otomo and thanked them for upholding the actual tenets of Bushido in trying times and charging them to serve not simply as his physical bodyguards, but as living examples of how to serve with actual honor and embody the virtues of true Bushido.
Well played, well played.
Even with the Otomo now completely out of the picture the situation on Okusawa is extremely unsettled. Rashes of suicides are becoming common, along with random attacks on patrolling troops by the dwindling cadres of ISF fanatics. Unlike on Nowa Warszawa there don’t seem to be any ‘friendly’ authority figures willing to step forward to cooperate with your forces. Your troops have had to step in multiple times simply to prevent parents from conducting murder-suicides on their own children. Those times when they weren’t in time are heart wrenching. The population has been so thoroughly indoctrinated, and the purges of those who’d resisted the indoctrination so complete, that it is an all around ugly situation.
Not that there aren’t glimmers of some hope, the occupying forces are systematically disarming the populace, getting military grade weapons and equipment out of circulation. Shipments of food and medicine are getting through, and it is hoped that simply treating the civilians decently might eventually help break the indoctrination. The ISF fanatics are dwindling in numbers, and there have been one or two instances of civilians revealing their presence to your forces before they can strike. Your troops managing to protect those who cooperated from retribution will, again, hopefully inspire this to spread.
The civilian dropship yard owners are petitioning you to either be contracted to build a second tranche of
Trentons under the same terms, three hundred million for a hundred hulls, or release them to return to civilian production. You know from experience managing logistics that you can literally never have too many transports, and even a hundred of them are insufficient spacelift to move your entire force at once. On the other hand, the production pause for civilian use is preventing the economy from growing as much as it could and is starting to irritate parts of the business community who are waiting for their orders to be completed.
| [] | Contract for 100 more Trentons |
- Cost - $300,000,000.00
- Gain 100 Regular quality Trenton transport dropships
|
| [] | Release the civilian yards from emergency order |
- Economy shifts back to a more normal footing
|
You get the first reports from the Olympics. The early events have been almost uniformly disastrous for Team Griffon and triumphant for the Romans. You expected not to do well in gymnastics, but the performance of the athletics teams, decathlon teams, swimming and shooting teams are generally disappointing as well. In the first eleven events, Team Griffon brings home only a pair of golds. Sure, they also bring home a good number of silvers, but things are not looking that good for you.
To be fair, beating the NRI at Team Gymnastics is a bit of a big deal, and the women’s swim team manages to outlast the Rasalhaguians, but at this point in the games the Romans are clearly winning the medal race.
Somewhat to your surprise, considering you really don’t care much for this whole thing, the ratings for the games are far higher than expected. Looks like people really do appreciate the distraction from the tension and fear of possible additional attacks. You try and watch more of the games, mostly due to not wanting your granddaughter to become even more like you and therefore trying to keep things as ‘normal’ and ‘happy’ as you can, even while inside you are screaming at the waste of time and resources on such ‘frivolous’ things.
You still have no word on the fate of your wife and those of your kids and nieces/nephews who were with her on Sukiashi. The area around the deep shelter had been hit with multiple extremely ‘dirty’ high yield devices during the attack and the radiation counts are still too high at this time. Estimates are that by next year you might have word, either good or bad.
Parliament is fairly quiet, with no ground breaking legislation coming to your desk. The sheer banality of it all is almost depressing. Perhaps the most involved is legislation to clarify the delineation of incoming and outgoing traffic lane regulations for commercial jumpship and dropship traffic at the jump points. Contentious in some ways, yes, important, of course, but hardly something that would have a major visible effect on things.
Of course, you still have to handle it, boring as it is. And wonder of wonders, there are massive disagreements about the best response. You are so surprised. Not.
One faction, centered in the Imperial Senate, wants to strictly define the traffic regulations, deploy monitoring satellites to ensure compliance, and set each of the proposed lanes based on a formula derived from the amount of traffic at the subject jump point. The Chamber, in contrast, is fine with the definitions and monitoring methods, but wants each lane individually determined by working groups of stakeholders in order to better reflect actual local conditions.
As far as you are concerned one side is shouting PO-TAY-TOE and the other is shouting PO-TAH-TOE and trying to convince you that it is TOTALLY DIFFERENT.
| [] | Support the Senate |
- Senate Support remains maxed
- Chamber of Delegates - -1 support
- +1 Politics
|
| [] | Support the Chamber |
- Senate Support - -1
- Chamber of Delegates Support - +1
- +1 Approval Change
|
| [] | Screw ‘em both, come up with something yourself |
- Senate Support - -1
- Chamber of Delegates Support - -1
- +1 Politics
- +1 Approval Change
|
