Dragoon Compromise
By the year 3000, the Great Debate had been raging amongst the Clans for twenty years, with no solution in sight. On 11 November of that year, Ghost Bear Khan Nadia Winson, a Crusader abtakha from Clan Wolf, reopened the issue before the Grand Council. Wolf Khan Kerlin Ward, a fierce proponent of the Warden cause, feared that this time the vote to invade the Inner Sphere would pass and, desperate to prevent this course of action, he came up with an inspired stalling tactic. Khan Ward argued to the Grand Council that due to the separation of the Clans from the Inner Sphere for over two hundred years, they had little information about the state of affairs back in the Successor States. Before the Clans decided to invade, he argued, they should gather intelligence on the foes they would face. Accordingly, he proposed a scouting mission that would infiltrate the Inner Sphere disguised as a group of mercenaries and would report back to the Clans on what they learned about the status of those the Clans had left behind.
With support from the Goliath Scorpions, Khan Ward's proposal passed a Council vote and the Wolves were given the honor of outfitting the mission. However, the Dragoon Compromise, as Khan Ward's proposal came to be called, was not without its detractors. In particular, the Nova Cat and Smoke Jaguar Khans attempted to lessen the glory attached to the mission by demanding that it be staffed mostly with freeborn troops, reasoning that what basically amounted to a spying mission was an unworthy application of trueborn abilities. This restriction suited Khan Ward just fine, however. In the back of his mind, he realized that the Compromise was nothing more than a stalling tactic, and one that would only work for a limited time. So, he used this chance to institute a long range plan to prepare the Inner Sphere for the inevitable Clan invasion, filling the ranks of the newly-formed Wolf Dragoons with freeborns, iconoclasts, and ardent Warden trueborns. Leadership of the mission fell to two freeborn brothers, Jaime and Joshua Wolf, who were promised that the name Wolf would be elevated to the status of a Bloodname should they perform well in their duties. Among the freeborn rank and file was one warrior named Cranston, who insisted on bringing his infant daughter, Rhonda, successfully arguing that if the Dragoons meant to masquerade as a mercenary unit, they would need dependents for added credibility. Of the trueborns who decided to accompany the Dragoons, Natasha Kerensky, long-time friend of the Wolf brothers, was the ranking officer. A notorious troublemaker yet also a gifted warrior, she felt that an extended mission in the Inner Sphere would be a marvelous way for her to gain glory.
The troops of the Wolf Dragoons were trained for several years in the tactics and methods of Inner Sphere warriors. In this task, they were guided by the elite Heartvenom Cluster of Clan Goliath Scorpion, which the Scorpion Khan had pledged in support of Khan Ward's plan. The fledgling Dragoons so impressed their trainers that several Goliath Scorpion warriors elected to accompany them to the Inner Sphere. Finally, in 3004, the Dragoons were declared ready for action. They left the Clan homeworlds and travelled to the Inner Sphere by a circuitous route in order to disguise their point of origin. After a year of travel, they arrived in the spinward Periphery regions of the Federated Suns. Before they made their first appearance, however, it was decided that a small scouting party should enter the Inner Sphere surreptitiously as a preliminary safeguard. What they found startled the Dragoon leadership. The Successor States were in much worse condition than the Clans had believed, with technology levels that had fallen far below that of the Star League. Suddenly, the Dragoons had to worry about the quality and quantity of their materiel, lest they arouse suspicions about their origins. It was decided to create a cache around an uninhabited Periphery world designated Bristol. Here, the Dragoons mothballed their warships and other vessels, along with much of their advanced Clan technology. Even so, when they entered Federated Suns space and appeared over the world of Delos on 11 April 3005, they caused quite a stir.
For nearly fifteen years Wolf's Dragoons, as they came to be known in the Inner Sphere, faithfully conducted their mission for the Clans, reporting back in 3009 and 3019 on the military preparedness and strengths of the various Successor States. However, in 3019 Jaime Wolf and Natasha Kerensky met with Khan Kerlin Ward and his designated successor Ulric Kerensky. Khan Ward informed the two Dragoons that, in his opinion, the Clan invasion would come sooner than he had hoped and that he didn't think he could delay it much longer. As a result, he issued secret orders to the two, including the command to obey no other Khan than himself. Jaime and Natasha were to shift the focus of their mission from gathering intelligence to actively preparing the Inner Sphere for the coming invasion. To this end, he presented them with blueprints and manufacturing specifications for Clan OmniMechs and other technology, the equipment necessary to begin their own Clan-like breeding program, and archival information on the world of Outreach, which had once been home to the Star League's Martial Olympiads and possibly still contained advanced manufacturing capabilities. With that, Jaime and Natasha severed the Dragoons from their parent Clan and began preparing for the invasion.
By the time the Clan invasion arrived, in 3049, the Dragoons were ready. Once word of the invasion reached Jaime Wolf, he recalled all of his Dragoons to Outreach, where they debated on what course of action they should take. It was decided that the Dragoons were now a part of the Inner Sphere rather than the Clans and that they should join the fight against their former brethren. To this end, Wolf used the opportunity provided by the sudden death of the Clan ilKhan and the subsequent lull in the invasion to gather the rulers of the Successor States on Outreach, where he revealed the origin of the Dragoons and pledged their assistance against the Clans. This occasion was only marred by the absence of Natasha Kerensky, who had heeded the recall of all Clan Bloodnamed warriors in the wake of ilKhan Showers' death and returned to Clan Wolf, where she hoped to strengthen the Warden cause and work against the invasion from within. One of her first acts was to defend the right of the Dragoons to have their genetic legacies inducted into the Clan breeding program, as had long ago been promised as a reward for undertaking the Dragoon mission. During her defense of the Dragoons, Natasha reported the secret instructions given by Khan Kerlin Ward in 3019, finally revealing the hidden agenda of the original Compromise nearly half a century before.
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