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Jozef Poniatowski is the heir to a small collection of bandit worlds in the former territory of the now defunct Rim Worlds Republic loosely held together by his dead father's connections and companies. However, with knowlege of what's to come, the location of a major SLDF Depot, and a mandate to resist the clan invasion, can he build a state worthy of the task? Will he even be able to do so with so many Bandit Kingdoms about? And what of his father's probable death by ROM?

I awoke to a pounding headache, the buzzing of my noteputer ringing in my ears, and a massive hangover that made it seem as if a dozen assault mechs were marching across my skull. I had such a vivid dream last night, the same sort that I'd been having off and on for months. One where I'd lived a whole other life in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Terra, or Earth as it had been called back then. One where the Sphere and all it contained was one of a dozen fictional worlds my Dream Self followed as a hobby. It was so vivid, too, I almost could believe it had actually happened, but that was just the sort of thing that you dealt with after getting completely shitfaced. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd had a mild case of Alcohol poisoning, but that's just how things wound up.

Fortunately, drunk me had managed to set aside some expensive detox drugs from the Magistracy of Canopus for just this sort of occasion. That was a thing I could afford now, it turned out, thanks to my inheritance. My father, Magnus Poniatowski, had been something of a Renaissance man, with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, with the right resources or skills to benefit from events. It was almost as if he could foresee the future before it happened, and if I were feeling uncharitable, I'd even go so far as to call him a Mary Sue. That was a term the other me I saw in my dreams had known. Yet for all of his skills and his reputed prescience, for all of the fortune and connections he'd amassed on his adventures through the periphery, he didn't outlive two years as Redjack Ryan's newest subordinate. 

Maybe the Dracs talk of Karma had something to it, and it'd finally caught up with my old man for being willing to work for a glorified pirate. Maybe he'd pissed off a group of Redjack Ryan's other flunkies, one's who'd broken from the Oberon Confederation with him and didn't have control of an Independent World like my father did with Butte Hold. Maybe Redjack Ryan thought the deal my father had struck to become his vassal was too generous and decided to renegotiate in a permanent way. Hell, maybe it was just plain bad luck. Either way, some spacer had lost control of a hover forklift while my dad had been inspecting a new Dropship acquisition at the Butte Hold Spaceport. The Hover Forklift had careened into my dad and Magnus Poniatowski found his chest sporting a new metallic limb as the fork portion of the Hover Forklift gored him from behind. It was a pretty awful way to go, and stupid for such an accomplished person, but the Sphere was funny like that.

I'd only gotten the notification last night, along with a number of encrypted files on a datachip sent to me by courier. It was spectacularly poor timing. Last night was the night after my Graduation from the Blackjack School of Conflict in the Lyran Commonwealth and the night before my twentieth birthday. It was a lot of information to take in all at once and I'd only un-encrypted the details of the sizable account of C-Bills left to me before I'd given up on the whole thing, decided to head to the Nightlife District in Lott's Revenge, the system Capital, and get utterly and completely wasted. Drunk Me had then promptly decided that dealing with everything else would be a problem for Sober Me. I was just surprised that I'd managed to get back to the flat I was staying in while attending the Academy without any shenanigans. Most of the tail end of last night was a blur for some reason.

I grabbed the hypo-injector of Canopian Hangover Cure and put it against my arm, injecting the expensive, but fast-acting drugs directly into my bloodstream. As I felt the massive headache begin to subside, my stomach rumbled warningly, giving me just enough time to bolt out of my bed for the en suite bathroom. I just barely got myself over the toilet before the rumbling turned into a lurch and I puked up my guts. Around five minutes went by of just me horking up a lung into the toilet before everything subsided. I did feel better afterward, but a little warning that the Canopian Detoxers I'd bought should've been taken in the bathroom would've been nice. Drunk Me hadn't even left a note for Sober Me, the asshole.

"Damn it, Drunk Me. . ." I grumbled, heading to the sink to rinse the taste of bile out of my mouth.

As I straightened, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. Broad shoulders narrowed to a slimmer waist like an inverse triangle built out of lithe muscle. My father's brown hair and square jaw, covered in a thin beard, stared back at me, paired with my mother's broad nose and blue eyes. I had a single scar from a duel with Johan Friedrich von Truder, son of Baron Truder of Waldorff during my second year of the academy. He'd been an accomplished duellist, but my dad had taught me several dirty tricks and I'd beaten him, though he'd given me the line of scar tissue that went across my right pectoral in the process. The whole thing had been stupid and precipitated by Drunk Me rising to Johan Friedrich's bait.

All told, you could tell just by looking at me that my parents had roots in the lands of the Former Principality of Rasalhague, with my father being the son of minor nobility from Predlitz and my mother being the daughter of a Militia Captain from New Bergen. I grew up speaking Polish, Norwegian, and Swedenese, in addition to the Star League English used by ComStar and thus, Mercenaries and Traders the Sphere over. My father had also drilled in me a number of basic skills before sending me off to Blackjack, not just the Martial Arts and Swordsmanship that were necessary for dueling the nobility of the inner sphere, but also basic skills for infantry, technical ability, tactics, organization, and half a dozen other things that would give me a leg up on others at Blackjack. It was almost like he'd been grooming me to become a mercenary commander instead of taking over his spot as one of Redjack Ryan's Lieutenants. 

"I suppose I should decrypt the rest of these files and see what else I was left with." I sighed, my head and stomach having settled back into their normal, non-hungover, states.

I padded over to the bedroom and fired up my noteputer. The files were encrypted on datachips rather than sent over HPGs, some of which were even only decryptable with my blood. Had I been the version of me I had dreamed about, the version that knew of the Sphere as a series of games and novels, I would have suspected the reason was to avoid ComStar Interception of HPG messages. The Dream Version of me had seen a version of the Sphere that had cast ComStar as secretly plotting to destroy technology and utilize nefarious means to keep the Great Houses at odds and unstable, all because of some religious imperative to convert the Sphere to Blakism. Personally, I felt that was absurd, ComStar tightly controlled people who attempted to join. The idea that they would just try to mass convert the entire Sphere like that was ludicrous to anyone who knew how they worked.

"Next you'll tell me that Kerensky's Exodus Fleet actually did wind up as a group of Genetically Engineered Super-Mechwarriors plotting to invade the Sphere?" I chuckled as I gave the first datachip the blood drop it needed to start the decryption process. As my noteputer beeped to signal the datachip's decryption, I began to read through my father's files. After ten minutes, my chuckling died down to a small smirk. Twenty minutes after that, my smirk vanished. A half an hour after that, it had turned into a grimace. The information I was reading was the worst possible thing I could think of.

It turned out that my father had been having similar dreams of another life, though he'd been having them for far longer than the past few months on and off like I had. He'd had these dreams since childhood and had acted to confirm them with happenings in the Sphere. It wasn't any one thing that had convinced him. It was a number of factors, the Deep Raid of twenty-nine-eighty-seven going as it was supposed to according to my father's dreams was a big indication, but several smaller indications, such as the on-schedule birth of Theodore Kurita or the Capellan Surprise reconquest of Tsinghai working out as planned all added into the mix. By the time that my father had finished his Academy Instruction and built his initial Mercenary Unit, he'd long been convinced that his dreams were accurate. It was those dreams that had guided his actions, never truly getting involved in major events, but always benefiting from them in some way to help build his fortune.

He'd managed to scoop up remnants of various shattered mercenary forces for his own force, making sure to keep an eye on the various battles that his dreams told him were coming up. It certainly explained how he'd seemingly always be the first on the scene to recruit newly dispossessed mechwarriors and units from recently disbanded companies. Furthermore, he'd made several, high-profile wagers on outcomes of various events with a number of gaming parlors and bookies, from the Solaris Games to the outcomes of battles in the ongoing succession wars. He'd been proven right time and again, and lost rarely enough, that he'd amassed a fortune far in excess of his station as Minor Nobility. He'd used that fortune to develop mines and set up factories on various worlds in the periphery, and even bought out Butte Hold outright from the minor Periphery Baron that had controlled it. Time and again the dreams had led him to riches and victory. It had almost been like he could see the future. Which was what had made his death by Hover Forklift Accident so absurd.

Regardless, his testament to me was a sign that I ought to heed the same dreams, though just in case, the second datachip contained a file with the entire timeline of events he had seen play out in his dreams up until the end of something called the Jihad in thirty-eighty-one. I hadn't gotten to that part of the dreams yet, but my dad had decades of dreams whereas I only had a few months on and off. He also warned me to keep an eye on ComStar, since he believed they would be after him soon enough. Apparently, his reputed prescience may have earned him a Deathmark from ComStar's Intelligence Service, ROM. He'd been doing a little too well for himself and would likely be taken care of soon. It made a certain amount of sense if the dreams were actually right about things and ComStar really were a bunch of religious zealots dragging the Sphere down.

The next encrypted datachip had a list of all my father's assets that would be going to me. Butte Hold had already been repossessed by Redjack Ryan, but I was now the Free Baron of the Independent Worlds of New Ålborg and Zertarum, which had been resettled as part of my father's ventures and boasted populations of over a hundred-fifty-thousand people each. I also gained control of mines and factories on those worlds, my father's Mercenary Group, the Jomsborg Hussars, and his LosTech Prospecting Firm, Past Prologue Ltd. The greater part of his assets were still on Butte Hold and being controlled by a combination of less powerful Lieutenants than my father had been. He'd managed to will me control of what he could, though.

As it turned out, what he could included a third, hidden, colony on the world of Iron Land. The colony was small, with only around fifty thousand people servicing a few small mining facilities, a mercenary base, and a depot for Past Prologue Ltd on the world. The reason why it was hidden, however soon became clear when I slotted in the final datachip that required my blood for decryption. On the planet itself, the wreckage of a crashed Star League Era Pentagon Dropship was uncovered by one of my father's mineral exploration teams diving under the surface of Kingston Bay. My father had ordered the Dropship secured by a team from the Jomsborg Hussars and what they found was quite a story. Much of the dropship was junked by centuries underwater. The Jomsborg Hussar team was only able to get a partial data dump from the single functioning terminal before that too failed. What they found justified keeping the whole colony off the maps, even though it had finally reached the sustainability threshold to be put back on the maps.

The large, Class-M Asteroid that orbited Iron Land was more than it appeared. Apparently, it housed a Star League Era Depot and Military Research Facility that had been locked down remotely during the Amaris Coup to deny Stefan Amaris access to the facility. Only General Tomino and Admiral Straczynski had the access codes and both had been killed in the opening hours of the Amaris Coup. By a stroke of luck however, Admiral Straczynski had been aboard the crashed Pentagon Dropship, having been shot down flying away from the depot. My father had his access code. He'd sent it to me as part of the collection of datachips in case something happened to him before he could put together an expedition to the Iron Land Depot.

The next datachip had a video message from my father. I decrypted it with a drop of my blood and watched the screen of my noteputer as my father's bearded, rugged, face stared back at me from beyond the grave. I blinked a tear out of my eye as Magnus Poniatowski spoke to me for the last time.

"Jozef, by now you've probably read through all the encrypted files on the datachips I've sent you by courier. You'll know that the dreams you've told me you've been having in the past few months are more than they appear to be. That I've had them too. I know you're a clever boy, you've probably put together what I've been trying to do by founding so many colonies on dwindling or depopulated worlds. It's true that I was attempting to build a strong Periphery Realm on the sly and had been doing so for years. What you might not have known is why I chose this area." Began my Father, taking a breath before continuing.

"You've read the generalities about the Clan Invasion from the Brief I gave you, but not the specifics, that comes in the more detailed overview of that and the Jihad that I've put on the final two encrypted datachips. If you're decrypting these datachips in sequence, you'll see what I mean. Suffice to say, this whole area, Redjack Ryan, the Oberon Confederation, Morgraine's Valkyriate, which won't be founded until thirty-twenty-one, Santander's World, and Star's End, they all amounted to nothing in the face of the Clans and became a major corridor for the invasion of the Inner Sphere Proper." He continued.

"You were trying to build up a tripwire to catch the Clans in when they invaded." I whispered, grasping what exactly my Father had been trying to accomplish.

"You're clever enough to see what I was trying to do here. You've no doubt figured it out by now. If I hadn't been assassinated, I would have used Rejack Ryan, bolstered by the Jomsborg Hussars, to overthrow Hedrik Grimm on Oberon. Then Maria Morgraine and Redjack Ryan would marry and I would direct them at Santander's World and Star's End. With the Star League Era technology from the Iron Land Depot and twenty-one populated systems, the resulting Periphery Realm would have been in a good position to resist this prong of the Clan Invasion." Informed my Father.

"Possibly, but the Lyrans might not let things play out that easily." I muttered.

"It may have stoked fears about a second Rim World's Republic, but that was why I had so many contacts in Lyran Space working so hard to promote friendly attitudes toward my ventures. It wasn't just so I could send you to Blackjack in Lyran Space for your formal education. As it stands, however, my death alters the timetable. You will have to do what I couldn't and in more difficult circumstances than I could have. Redjack Ryan has likely repossessed Butte Hold fully, leaving you with only two small colonies and one, hidden, even smaller colony. Thankfully, you have the Hussars, Past Prologue Ltd, and my contacts in Lyran Space to help you. If you received this message, the Jumpship Cardenia Claremont should only be a few days out from Blackjack. Captain Gomez is a good officer and her crew and attendant craft are loyal to Past Prologue Ltd, which means they are yours. Take them to the Iron Land Depot, retrieve everything you can, and get to work. You'll likely have to reconquer Butte Hold by force from Redjack Ryan, which may sour Morgraine on you." Frowned my father, taking a deep breath.

"You are a clever boy, skilled, athletic. Your mother, may she rest in peace, and I raised you the best we could for the challenges ahead. I know you can do this. Remember, Jozef, I am proud of you and I love you." Finished my Father.

As the image of Magnus Poniatowski faded from the screen of my noteputer, tears fell from my eyes. I'd known my father had been proud of me, but somehow it hit closer to home knowing I'd never hear him say it in person again. After a few minutes of shedding tears and grieving, I had to will myself to blink the tears away and get to work. My ride was only three days away and I still had two more encrypted datachips and the unencrypted datachips of estate paperwork to read and process, after all. It wasn't a lot of time to get a head start on saving the Sphere from the Clans, but I was confident I'd rise to the challenge. My father had faith in me, after all, and Magnus Poniatowski had never been wrong about an important matter before. I would accomplish this quest for the memory of my father, or my name wasn't Jozef Poniatowski. Turning to the next encrypted datachip, I fed it blood and it decrypted.

Slotting it into my noteputer, I got to work. . .

XXXX

AN: This is a different spin on the Battletech CYOA v1.1 than usual, but when one of the choices for your dead parent was literally called Mary Sue, why not also have him have SI dreams? At the very least it's a twist I don't see done often. As to the setup, this isn't a straightforward SI fic. The main character is firmly in the driver's seat and only sees the life of the SI as dreams when he's asleep.

This fic was inspired by the various CYOA fics that always seem to go Mercenary and play ball with the crapsack nature of the Sphere. Instead, Jozef will be nation-building and generally trying to build up a state that can deal with the Clans when they attack. Mostly, that's Clan Jade Falcon he'll be dealing with when the time comes. 

Can he do it? Who knows? He has around thirty years to get a head start, though.

I'll be updating this probably less frequently than other fics, depending on my muse. I do have a lot of stories already after all.

At any rate, the next chapter will be the start of the quest for the Depot. I'll have a CYOA build up soon too.

Stay tuned. . .