Barret, Faro, Flannery, Gizmo, and Hotdog enter the CIC and lay out a set of surveillance photos of the area around the listening post. Barret points out the battlemech hidden among the peaks that was responsible for shooting down Mitch, and gives Flannery credit for her quick thinking in capturing the surveillance footage before escaping. Faro volunteers to take a platoon of reinforcements up a treacherous gorge in a troop transport. Becker grudgingly approves the operation.
In the listening post, the team prepares to enter a large set of doors, when they are blown off their hinges by a massive battlemech parked in the garage behind them. As the team approaches, another squad of Clan marines attempts to flank the unit. A pitched firefight ensues, during which, Rance is seriously wounded. Eventually, the team manages to kill the pilot of the battlemech as well as the marines.
After a brief encounter with a handful of technicians, the facility is secured. In the control room, the team finds the source of the broad-spectrum jamming, as well as the device that seems to be causing the gravitational anomalies in orbit. The devices, the cloning tanks, and all the other bits of Clan tech that can be found are recovered.
Two dropships arrive, sent by Black to relieve the Agamemnon. Cottle dissects one of the green warriors and discovers him to be an extremely genetically-enhanced human. The green color is due to chlorophyll in the skin, the grey blood is rich in a form of nanites, and each of the warriors has a small computer implanted in their brain.
Agamemnon sets sail for Cerberus to meet with Black and collect payment for the service.
3011-01-02:
We lost too many people, and too many ships. We gained a gunship, a gravitation device, the jamming equipment, and a bunch of green kids in tubes.
The gravitation device is interesting. Very much so. And it is technology we cannot match. In fact, the technology is beyond what I would have expected, even from two centuries of development. So either they have some amazing scientists, or they found something out there. The second alternative has implications I don’t really want to think about.