Probably the single biggest problem the
mercenary trade is suffering from at the moment is the lack of oversight and
regulation. With the MRBC bankrupt, registration of commands has become little
more than an empty formality, which means that a lot of unpleasantness has
gotten through. There are plenty of commands now that are little more than
pirates, or would have been banned years ago that now operate with impunity, simply
because there's no real authority to stop them. As long as employers are
willing to pay them, then they're free to do what they want.
Unfortunately, this problem goes both
ways. As little oversight as there is of Mercenary commands, the employers are
even better off. Questionable terms, withholding payment, out and lying to the Mercenaries
they hire and so much more have become ever increasingly common occurrences as
those employers know there's very little authority to hold them to account. An aggrieved
mercenary command has little recourse for trying to deal with such breaches
beyond word of mouth recounting of what happened. And even then, with the
current state of the Inner Sphere's economy, there are plenty of commands
willing to take a risk in order to simply survive.
Our last contract became a very good
example of these sorts of problems in play. It's not that we didn't get paid or
that the employer tried to twist things to their advantage or abandoned us in
the field. It's that the Employer simply misrepresented themselves as to their
actual identity and motivation, taking advantage of both the collapse of the
MRBC and the inability to run thorough background checks that has come out of
it.
On the surface, we were hired by the
LCAF to raid Kalidasia, a world that is now controlled by the Wolf Empire. The
Lyrans gave us two objectives, ones that were intertwined. The first was that
they wanted us to survey the Kali-Yama factories to see both what facilities were
functional and if the Wovles were making any moves to refit them to produce
Clan technology. The second was then to do as much damage as we could to those facilities
in order to disrupt their production. (While the former might seem redundant in
the face of the latter, the fact is that it's useful to know that your enemy
has the capacity to produce advanced technology, even if you have destroyed
that capacity. Planning for the future and all)
That was rather straightforward, which
was not a problem. And as warren as I was working for the Lyrans (Did I mention
that same lack of oversight id what allowed them to leave the Erandai Light
Horse to their deaths?) the offer of payment in parts and supplies was very
generous, especially as we still needed to repair and rebuild after Fletcher.
For the most part, the raid was
straightforward and pulled off without a hitch. Kaldassia's thin atmosphere
meant that our VTOL force were hampered, so we left them as an emergency
reserve. The primary offensive force of our attack was our (understrength)
BattleMech company which split into two five-man lances in order to hit separate
targets. And while we encountered resistance from the Wovles, we were able to
cripple or drive off their defenders with no losses of our own, allowing us
time to both get a good look at their factory complexes., record a lot of data
on their capabilities (including, yes, lines being refitted to Clan technology)
and then do a considerable amount of damage.
The only complication came when Assault
Lance (Why are those guys such trouble magnets, I ask myself) encountered a prototype
Wolf Empire OmniMech boasting some unusual capabilities. We provisionally
code-named this 'Mech as Ryoken III.
I'll post my thoughts on it separately, however, as it’s largely
incidental to the matter at hand.
After doing the damage we escaped
off-world and made it back to Galatea to hand over all our data accept our
payment, and that's when things got a little odd. Stanley noted that, save for
some proprietary Clantech, all the parts we received were manufactured by
Earthworks, albeit at a number of different facilities. This seemed odd, as
their presence in the Commonwealth is rather limited. A bit of further
investigation, however, revealed the reason for this. Our employer had actually
been from Earthworks, who had concealed their identity.
As to why they had done that, I can only
speculate. While Earthworks is a multinational corporation and thus able to
circumvent a lot of national laws, they're still bound by a number of
restrictions on proprietary technologies. And so while Earthworks-Keystone manufactures
Clan technology (In the form of the monstrous Tomahawk II) for the Wolf Empire, they
can't share the design with, say, Earthworks-Tikonov (Which is good, because I
really don't want the Capellans to have the capacity to manufacture assault
OmniMechs).
Which makes me think that this was all
about Earthworks trying to make some sort of end-run around those restrictions.
By attacking Kalidassia, we deprive the Wolf Empire of one source of Clan
Technology. This in turn forces them to rely on other manufacturers within
their space, such as, say Earthworks-Keystone. At the same time, we were able
to shed some light on a new 'Mech under devleopment by Kali-Yama, again providing
Earthworks with information that they might not have had access to otherwise.
So why pretend to be something that
they're not? Because in the end, the Great Houses are still seen as being more
reliable, stable and dependable employers the corporations. Pretending to be
Lyrans meant that they were able to sell this whole operation as being a lot
more 'above board' and legitimate then it actually turned out to be. In fact,
if not for the slip-up in providing us entirely with parts of their own
manufacture, we probably would have never noticed at all.
With Hansens' Roughriders having
effectively sized control of Galatea through the formation of the Galatean
Defence League, there's been an air of hope that things will change. Unfortunately,
it does seem to be a bit of wishful thinking. The GDL, for all its military capabilities,
are still a collection of mercenary commands. They have very little actual
experience of the sort of management and regulatory oversight that is critically
needed right now. And, to be honest, the Roughriders' approach to 'fixing' a
problem is to reduce it to rubble and turn the offenders into jaunty hats,
something that, while useful against Taurians, doesn't work so well in contract
negotiations.
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