The Kerensky Miracle (part two)

A continued investigation into the Clans of BattleTech/MechWarrior

Last week we started critically reading a key section of BattleTech and MechWarrior history. Following our three somewhat unreliable sources – the old general Focht, the former mercenary Kell, and the naïve Dr. Paliwoda – we started trying to sift the story of the Clans into more and less reliable claims. While the details of the story in our sources were hard to nail down, it’s clear that General Aleksandr Kerensky led millions of his Star League Defense Force (SLDF) soldiers, along with millions more of their dependents, on a difficult journey hundreds of lightyears away from the heavily-settled systems of the Inner Sphere.

Founding Day Problems

Thankfully, the end of the Exodus fleet’s journey is a bit more certain. All three sources agree that Kerensky’s followers reached a cluster of stars, five of which were orbited by the habitable planets later to be known as the Pentagon Worlds, on the 24^th of August 2786 – just over a year after the date given for the Prinz Eugen incident we looked at last time. As the Clans are almost certainly as the heirs of the SLDF exiles, this must be at least approximately true. Members of Paliwoda’s team visited the Pentagon worlds themselves, while Kell at least set foot on nearby planets. There is little reason to doubt the presence of Clan settlements on these worlds or that these worlds were colonized a few years after Kerensky’s departure from the Inner Sphere.

Still, the details are muddy. None of the sources so much as name which system was reached on the 24^th, not even making the reasonable guess that out of five worlds named Arcadia, Babylon, Circe, Dagda, and Eden, it’s likely that Arcadia was the first identified. Focht, mainly concerned with describing Clan beliefs, seems content to merely pass on that the Clan holiday “Founding Day”, celebrated on the 24^th, commemorates the day when Kerensky’s followers are said to have reached the Pentagon worlds. This is useful enough for his intended readership, though those looking for the historical record will be left unsatisfied.

Sadly, Kell has little more to offer. Despite claiming at other points to have access to the journals of Aleksandr’s oldest son, Nicholas Kerensky, Kell settles for saying that the Exodus fleet simply arrived at the Pentagon worlds in general. Even if the younger Kerensky was indifferent at the time, it would be surprising if he never mentioned which system was reached first at some later point. It might be that the records that Kell was accessing are incomplete – indeed, he never quotes from the Nicholas Kerensky journals at length – but if this is so Kell neither owns up to it nor gives any indication of why there are details missing. We are left to speculate on accidental damage to the source, redaction, or even outright forgery.

Paliwoda seems more promising with her pledge to give the reader a “complete picture”. She has a number of quotes that she insists are drawn from the private journals of Kerensky’s followers and these seem impressive at first. Still, that impression doesn’t last long. Paliwoda only improves on Kell by saying that the Exodus fleet reached one of the Pentagon world systems on Founding Day. She quotes a letter dated August 25^th from Major General Gunther von Kluge, supposedly to his unnamed wife, that describes General Kerensky announcing to the fleet that a “new home” has been discovered with habitable planets in four nearby systems. The letter itself is hard to understand, as von Kluge’s spouse would either be with the fleet herself (and need no such information) or have little chance of reading his message. Perhaps von Kluge was unusually prone to explaining the obvious to his wife, or else coping badly with her recent demise? It is strange that Paliwoda doesn’t give context here. Further, while the von Kluge letter might seem to represent a general lack of clarity in the sources about which of the Pentagon worlds was the first, it is astonishing that this was the best her team could find – especially as she later quotes from the journals of SLDF warship officers summarizing exploration efforts in other systems. (Notably, she rarely quotes civilian documents, and this may reflect unacknowledged barriers to Paliwoda’s research.) Unlike with Kell’s reliance on a single primary source, accidental loss is not a promising explanation of silence here, and redaction of what seems to be an innocent detail would raise serious questions. Even if we suppose that the prestige of a “Founding World” was something that needed to be deleted from the record, there’s no trace of why this would have mattered either. There is a distinct possibility that Paliwoda relied on some significantly altered documents – or even inauthentic ones – when constructing her narrative.

An aside: the Excuse of Last Resort

Let’s take a step back from the narrative for a moment because there is an obvious objection that needs to be addressed. Some people might be tempted to answer these concerns with a shrug and say that the sourcebooks simply have inconsistencies because they’re badly written or not fact-checked enough. The fault isn’t with the fictional Focht, Kell, and Paliwoda, but with the real human beings who created them. This approach, what one might call “Murder of the Author”, is as impolite as it is ineffective. If one buys the idea that the sourcebooks are just badly written, we go from having cryptic texts that are open to interpretation to poorly-expressed ones which basically can’t be interpreted – the problem of uncertainty is still there, but worse.

Demobilisation and division

Returning to the story, all three sources agree that the colonisation of the Pentagon worlds involved significant demoblisation of the SLDF. Kell and Paliwoda, having given a figure of two million SLDF personnel among the six million souls of the Exodus fleet, also agree that roughly three-quarters of this force was disbanded into the civilian workforce. That would still be an extraordinarily high level of mobilisation for a society hundreds of lightyears away from the rest of humanity. Paliwoda offers the explanation that the soldiers who remained in uniform still spent significant amounts of their time on construction and colonisation efforts. All of our sources generally point to this demobilisation as an anticipation of what would become a chief divide in Clan society: the division between the militarized Warrior Caste and the four civilian castes.

But Focht has a very surprising story to add to the mix. He passes on a tale that in early 2787, the exiled SLDF’s spaceships intercepted a “Rim World” merchant spaceship that had wandered far, far off-course. The unfortunate crew were interrogated, bringing news of war gripping the Inner Sphere, and assigned to forced labour that would in time ease into membership in the civilian castes. It’s not entirely clear, but “Rim World” likely picks out the ship as originating in the worlds of the Rim Worlds Republic (destroyed in 2775). This has no small significance. The Rim Worlds Republic was the power base of the Amaris Dynasty that usurped the throne of the Star League and was later defeated by Aleksandr Kerensky’s SLDF. Kell recounts a somewhat similar, though less colourful, story that Kerensky had coerced skilled workers into joining the Exodus before departure. Paliwoda, who had access to both the Focht and Kell accounts, decided to include neither tale in her history.

What can we make of these tales? Some might be inclined to see Paliwoda as the “last word” and simply dismiss the earlier accounts – but this seems to ignore the evolving context. Focht would have heard his tale around 3051, when he was an ambassador to the Clans invading the Inner Sphere. Kell’s version almost certainly comes from his time in the service of Clan Wolf (one of the invading Clans). By 3062, when Paliwoda’s team began their work, one of the other invading Clans – Clan Smoke Jaguar – had been destroyed, which strongly suggests that they were the bearers of the story Focht heard. It’s less clear why Paliwoda found no trace of Kell’s tale, though Kell seems to base himself on “secret sources” that might not have been made available to an outsider.

Regardless, if we indulge the possibility that Focht’s tale was a Smoke Jaguar oral tradition, some sense starts to emerge. Clan Smoke Jaguar had notoriously tense relations between its Warrior Caste and its civilian castes. An oral tradition that gives the civilians an outside origin probably would have been appealing to this Clan’s warriors. Kell’s tale also suggests a fundamental division between the Warriors who chose to join Kerensky and the civilians who needed to be “persuaded”.

A Kernel of Truth?

The origin of Focht’s tale is less clear. It’s remotely possible that the captured spaceship arrived in the neighbourhood of the Pentagon worlds as a result of misjump – a drastic malfunctioning of the craft’s faster-than-light engine – but this would be a stunning coincidence. However, it is much more plausible that refugees from the Rim Worlds made up a significant part of the original Exodus fleet. After all, the trans-stellar empire that had at least moderated violence in their home region had recently disintegrated, leaving the Rim as a patchwork of warlord and pirate realms. Compared to the bleak prospects in the former Republic, General Kerensky’s journey into the void might not have seemed too bad.

In addition to the surface plausibility, there is evidence of a significant Rim Worlder presence among Kerensky’s people. Paliwoda provides thirty brief biographies of prominent military leaders (but no civilians – again, her “complete picture” is surprisingly incomplete). Of these, nine were from the Star League’s heartland (the Terran Hegemony), while a tenth was the child of Terran parents. Three of the remainder have an unclear background. The remaining sixteen are split fairly evenly between the five realms of the Successor Lords and the Rim Worlds – four of these leaders are of Rim extraction, though the two Polczyk brothers might be reasonably be considered a single data point. While we have no way of knowing how representative Paliwoda’s list is of the broader population, it certainly indicates that a background in the Rim Worlds was no barrier to joining the Exodus fleet.