Unit:Boondock Highlanders

Comprehensive Unit History Compiled by TheMightyServo, Boondock Highlanders Historian
The Boondock Highlanders trace their lineage back to four distinct units: Murphy's Highlanders, the Boondock Expeditionary Militia, the Argonauts, and recently and oddly so to the 8th Lyran Regulars.

The Boondock Expeditionary Militia
The Boondock Provisional Militia were a relatively average planetary garrison on the far edge of the Draconis March. In the late 28th century, the Boondock Provisional Militia was composed of one reinforced armor batallion, two Mech companies, and possessed a squadron of aerofighter support. In February 2797, word of Jinjiro Kurita's mass murder at the Kentares Massacre spread throughout the Federated Suns, and many units began their own campaigns independent of their own higher chain of command. The Boondock Provisional Militia was one of those units.

Their commander at the time, Baroness Mae Eiser, was in her late 50s and had been slowly dying of a malignant brain tumor for some time. Still fully in control of her faculties, she laid out a plan to her subordinates to skip through Outworlds Alliance space and engage in destructive raiding throughout the center of the Draconis Combine. She expected that at some point, the DCMS would respond to the sporadic unplanned AFFS attacks, and that a campaign through the heart of the Combine would panic their commanders and stall any counter-assault. With the Boondockers' pirate hunting experience, they already had learned several tricks, and expected to be able to get several jumps into Kurita space before encountering significant resistance from any DCMS units.

Most of the Mechwarriors, two companies of armor, and the full aerofighter squadron agreed to the mission, most expecting it to be one way. Within a week, the Boondock Expeditionary Militia had commandeered a dropship and a jumpship, camouflaged themselves as a mercenary unit "The Bug-Eyed Monsters" and were on their way through Outworlds Alliance space. The long haul through several jumps began to temper the crew's rage, and by the time they emerged on Antallos, their last stop before Draconis space, the majority of the unit was solemnly determined to exact revenge and resigned to their choice. Managing to barter on Antallos, the BEM found ample support from the population, who remembered well the Kuritan attacks on their own homeworld and offered some support.

In June of 2797, the BEM hit Land's End, raiding for supplies, looting equipment and materiel and making every appearance of a pirate raid; even going so far as to leave behind clues and broadcast unencrypted communications as disinformation. They left the planet as soon as they could and pushed on to Ningxia, best known for being the picturesque retreat for Kuritan nobles. On Ningxia, the BEM burned large swaths of the countryside, destroyed estates, and encountered their first real resistance in the green 5th Sun Zhang Cadre; green cadets visiting their noble families for parade and ceremonial duties before being sent to combat assignments.

Upon realizing that they were opposed by mostly Draconis nobles, the BEM committed fully to the destruction of the entire Cadre. Combat in an around the capital of New Zephyrus lasted for nearly a week as the cadets who knew the terrain, city, and estates, conducted guerrilla counterattacks against the BEM. The BEM did far more damage to the cadets than they received, but the cadets had stalled for reinforcements. By the end of July, reinforcements from New Samarkand and a dozen noble units were en route, and the BEM made the decision to split.

Half of the unit would remain, the other half would return to Boondock. The half that stayed immediately conducted a hasty raid on the power plant at New Zephyrus and began to set the city ablaze. Cadets who had been in hiding took the bait and came in to counterattack as the other half of the BEM took off unnoticed at full burn, hoping to make it to their jumpship before the DCMS descended on them.

Baroness Eiser and her heavy lance were the last BEM units on the planet alive, and fought for another week after DCMS reinforcements arrived. When it was clear they were outnumbered and doomed, Eiser chose to take to the hills and disappear into abandoned diamond mines, intending to wear down the DCMS units in a long game of mouse-and-cat and keep them off the tail of their dropships. For weeks, they eluded DCMS units until they were tracked back to the mines. In one of the mines, two of the four detonated their mechs, crushing several Draconis mechs. Eiser and the remaining mechwarrior, who were not in the mine, ran further out into the wilderness. It was presumed that Eiser eventually succumbed to her brain tumor. Her mech was not found until 2915, when a lesser noble out for a drive in the country with his new hovercraft set off her mech's proximity sensors that then activated a detonation sequence. The other mechwarrior with her was never found.

The BEM unit that had retreated made its way back to Boondock and found itself on the receiving end of many questions from the AFFS command. AFFS attempted to reintegrate the BEM, with some of the officers promoted and removed to different units.

Eiser's gambit had been successful and pulled some DCMS units off the border. AFFS command was alternatingly upset because the Boondock Militia had gone off on their own, and upset because they had lost a great commander. After some deliberation, AFFS decided that the BEM units would not be able to fully reintegrate, and many of the units were mustered out. Due to immense local support on the otherwise inhospitable world, the AFFS allowed the BEM to continue on as a contracted auxilary of the planetary garrison, leaving Boondock with two militias - one an official rear-guard unit with older equipment and modest experience fighting pirates, the other an unofficial deep raider unit with worn and salvaged equipment from both the AFFS and DCMS, and with greater experience. As years went on, the BEM would be used as a reaction force against pirate raids, though they were kept away from Draconis units for nearly 90 years.

Murphy's Highlanders
Murphy's Highlanders were formed in 2999 by Duke Jack Murphy, a dispossessed Mechwarrior and former Lyran Duke. He was the scion to a minor noble family that nonetheless was of high status due to the land they owned. Duke Murphy was the Duke of Salaam 221, an uninhabitable micro-planetoid in the Zebebelgenubi system near Skye. The planetoid was rich with germanium deposits, necessary for the manufacture of KF drives. During the Star League era, an advanced mining base had been built there, and despite heavy damage during the Succession Wars, it still provided the family with a good income, even if their titles were out of synch with their holdings. In 2996, then-Duke Mike Murphy, Jack's brother, had found a way to reactivate some of the facility, which included a directed drive system that had been intended to push the planetoid into a stable orbit around Zebebelgenubi's moon. The Star League era project had missed its window over 200 years prior, and Mike had found that another launch window was approaching. With most of the mining crew there and several local nobles in attendance, then-Duke Mike Murphy hosted a celebration on a jumpship as they fired up the Star League engines and watched the planetoid push its way safely towards Zebebelgenubi.

Then-Duke Mike Murphy expected the stable planetoid to provide resources starting around 2999, leading into a glorious 31st century for the family, the Isle of Skye, and the entire Lyran Commonwealth. Instead, during calculations about movement of Salaam 221, no one had thought to calculate the planetoid's current mass after 200 more years of low-intensity mining. With many tons of rock removed in mining operations, the planetoid moved significantly faster than expected, and within a day, it latched onto Zebebelgenubi's moon's gravity and then slingshot around the planet and hurtled towards the sun. Then-Duke Mike Murphy engaged in a last-ditch attempt to save the planetoid by putting his own dropship in the way, which would've worked until they discovered that the Star League-era propulsion system also included a defense system against errant asteroids and space debris. The defense system promptly engaged his dropship, crippling it and leaving it on a parallel course. Repeated attempts were made to rescue the dropship, but the Salaam 221 defenses drove off any potential rescuers. Over the next week, Salaam 221 and then-Duke Mike Murphy plunged towards the sun. His last transmission was reportedly, "Well, that figures."

Duke Jack Murphy inherited the title of Duke on Galatea, the Mercenary's Star, upon hearing that his brother had been incinerated. The same day, his mech, a vintage ON1-K Orion, was damaged severely by a fueling truck that was in the wrong hangar bay. The next morning, while surveying the damage to his Orion, he was served with papers from his soon-to-be ex-wife, which having been filed precisely when his brother would've been vaporized by Zebebelgenubi's star and yet just before Salaam-221 would've been vaporized, meant she was demanding in excess of $2.85 trillion C-bills that were half his property at the time they were filed.

Duke Jack Murphy promptly wandered off, sold his Orion for cash, and lived in a bar on Galatea for 3 years, alternating between drinking and drinking more.

In mid-2999, a trio of dispossessed mechwarriors in the bar discussed the idea of stealing a lance of mechs and a Leopard-class dropship from a down-on-their-luck unit called the Brownstone Guards. Murphy bet the other three a drink that they wouldn't, and by that night, the four had stolen a lance of mechs and a Leopard-class dropship, none of which they could pilot. With neural interfaces set for other pilots, none of the mechs could be piloted, and they were locked out to boot. With no dropship pilot, the four were stuck on the tarmac until Murphy, exasperated, slammed a fist on a control panel and activated an auto-launch sequence.

The drunken plan had failed and worked at the same time. With a week to think about what to do when they hit the zenith jump point, the four wandered the ship. Murphy guessed the combination to a battered and partially crippled Quickdraw, and one of the other mechwarriors found a dozen malnourished women in a cargo container - unbeknownst to Murphy and his crew, the Brownstone Guards were doing some slave trading as they moved from planet to planet. Most of the women were Omniss, shell-shocked, traumatized, and spoke only broken dialects of old high German; which was barely comprehensible to Murphy, whose own broken standard German had cost him many deals in Lyran space.

When the Leopard hit the zenith jump point, they were hailed by a Lyran contract jumpship captain, and after frantic quick thinking, Murphy introduced himself as the commander of Murphy's Highlanders and explained that they were on a mission to the Outworlds Alliance to return freed slaves. The Lyran contractor docked with no help from Murphy's crew, and over the next day as the jumpship charged, Murphy's story began to break, but he stuck with the mission. His story of being on a humanitarian mission helped reduce jumpship fees to near hitchhiking over the journey.

The next few months consisted of the Highlanders getting the four mechs functional as they hopped from jump point to jump point, changing ships and stories every few parsecs, skipping down the Draconis March through Federated Suns space and finally arriving in the Outworlds Alliance in November of 2999 and dropping off their freed Omniss captives with Outworlds Alliance authorities. Two of the captives had decided to stay with the mercenaries, and along the way, the mercenaries had acquired a modest dropship crew.

The flat-broke but now equipped Murphy's Highlanders began to search for work. While they were famous on the bucolic Omniss planet of Dante, without an HPG station to relay the news, they were still virtual unknowns in Alliance space. The Highlanders eventually scored a contract from a mercenary aerospace unit called the Argonauts to perform the ground assault portion of an objective raid on the Combine planet of Bad News. The Argonauts, mostly composed of former Alliance personnel, possessed jumpship, dropship, and aerofighter assets, but had never had any organic ground assets.

With much joking about the unit's rough start, Murphy and his crew went with the Argonauts to Bad News, where they performed a surface landing to secure water processing equipment that had just been moved to the planet. The raid was mostly successful, except that they also seized several crates full of fireworks for the millenium eve celebration on Bad News, several of which detonated inside the dropship, injuring crewmembers and damaging much of the water processing gear they had just acquired.

The Argonauts returned Murphy and his crew to Cerberus, at which point their contract ended, and Murphy's Highlanders were once again out on their own, but with slightly better pay.

The next few years saw the Highlanders move across the entire Inner Sphere, doing garrison work in the Federated Suns, including a short stint on Boondock, which they would later revisit.

In 3004 the Highlanders began a contract in Free Worlds League space for Andurien, during which their numbers swelled to two full companies, with an armor company in support. Conflict with the rest of the Free Worlds League and Andurien separatists left Murphy between a rock and hard place as he attempted to not take sides in a brewing conflict.

A quick raid on nearby Capellan Altorra that was intended to take them away from the Free Worlds League conflicts while still maintaining their employ left them stranded as their jumpship left them in-system as Capellan units responded. Murphy attempted to retreat to their dropship, only to find that violent local weather had crippled the dropship's control arrays, leaving the ship blind and unable to guide itself. With little hope of repairing the dropship on their own, the Highlanders began a long march to the spaceport of Farnsdell, intending to appropriate the required repair parts. Upon their arrival, they found that their maps were woefully obsolete and that the entire spaceport had been reduced to rubble during the Second Succession War.

Elements of the Capellan Warrior House Lu Sann, reacting from their home of Grand Base, tracked down Murphy's Highlanders and over several days of indecisive battle, with the Lu Sann units attacking and Murphy's Highlanders covering their own retreat, Murphy attempted to contact the Lu Sann house unit commander and parley, explaining that they had been abandoned by their own forces and that their contract with the FWL should be null and void.

The Lu Sann house unit commander, over a private channel, agreed, and instructed the Highlanders to meet near the agricultural town of Hopson. Murphy collected his units together and they began a slow march to the nearby town, working their way cautiously out into the open.

The Lu Sann house unit commander arrived early at Hopson with his command lance, and seeing the Highlanders approaching with weapons turned away and with cockpits open, opened their own canopies an cockpits.

Hopson is most famous for the honey produced by the Hopson Bee, a honeybee that was successfully modified with local insects by geneticists during the Star League era. While the Terran honeybee is normally fairly docile, many of the modified bees responded differently to different stimuli. Most notably was their reactions to large heat sources, which, presuming them to be native predator life, they would attack. If they found a heat source to be hotter than any fauna could produce, the bees would respond as they would to a wildfire, and they would still remain in an agitated state, looking for anything that would be attacking fauna running from the fire.

The Lu Sann command lance had opened their cockpits in the middle of a field of hives, and bees were already swarming their mechs' heat sinks. The bees, repelled by the heat sinks, but still agitated, swarmed around the mechs until they found open cockpits. The rest of the Lu Sann unit heard their command lance screaming across the radios as they were stung to death and as they arrived, presumed the Highlanders had double-crossed them and began firing.

The Highlanders lost several mechs almost immediately, and lost three mechwarriors to Hopson Bees as they bailed out of their crashing mechs. Murphy, in his Quickdraw, tried to communicate with the new Lu Sann commander while running back into the hills with what remained of his retreating unit. Accidentally crashing through a farmhouse, his Quickdraw's leg actuators seized up and his mech face-planted into a barn, damaging his communications suite and leaving his mech crippled.

The rest of the afternoon, both Lu Sann units and the Highlanders searched for the missing Murphy, who exited his mech only to find himself face-to-face with an infuriated farmer wielding a pitchfork. The Highlanders arrived in time to save their commander from the farmer and drag his Quickdraw into better hiding.

Two days later, the angry farmer managed to contact the Lu Sann and within a week, the Highlanders were surrounded and surrendered. The new Lu Sann commander was eager to avenge his predecessor, but cooler heads managed to prevail and the situation was sorted out, and parley was accepted just as a FWL relief unit jumped in-system.

The Highlanders, then viewed as unreliable mercenaries at best, found themselves in the employ of the Capellan Confederation, assigned to suppress revolts and riots; unsavory and unpleasant duties that wore what remained of the unit's morale thin. In 3011, Murphy managed to break his contract to the Capellan Confederation when they demanded a company of his unit report for a duty; he stated he could not comply with only 10 mechs left in his command, and requested the contract be ended. The Capellans acceded, and Murphy's Highlanders again found themselves without employ.

In 3012, Murphy managed to secure a contract with the Lyran government to provide a basic garrison against pirates near the Circinus Federation. Upon completion of the contract, he found himself presented with a bill for $2,849,999,300,000 from his ex-wife, who had seized much of the unit's payment as part of what she had divorced him for after the Salaam 221 debacle.

Trading parts for passage, they left Lyran space and drifted through the periphery, working for the Taurian Concordat and Magistracy of Canopus for a short time, when finally on a semi-charted swamp world garrisoning a non-functional power plant and swatting mosquitoes, Murphy decided to quit. He told his unit they'd return to Dante and live with the Omniss; and to a man, they agreed.

By 3014, Murphy had managed to hitchhike across space again, planning to sell their mechs as they went, until they could finally arrive on Dante. In 3015, Murphy's Highlanders, nearly space sick, landed on Boondock in the Federated Commonwealth again, intending to trade the last of their mechs for gold and use what remained to pay their way to Dante.

At the spaceport of Coober White on Boondock in July 3015, the Highlanders began to negotiate a sale of their mechs to the Coober White city government, who intended to replace the Boondock Expeditionary Militia's services with their own units. As they had almost settled on the deal, they watched another dropship land and disembark hostile mechs that were almost instantly recognizable as the Toe Cutters, a pirate band that had hit Davion backwater worlds for nearly a decade. Their negotiations were cut short as the Boondock buyers suddenly offered them a contract to repel the pirates, which the Highlanders threw themselves into.

The Toe Cutters possessed several more mechs, but most were of lighter weight classes, and many sported poor or patchwork repairs. Murphy's Highlanders at the time fielded a full heavy lance and two medium lances, which fought to a stalemate at the spaceport with the lighter pirates. The Coober White government contacted their already-contracted defenders, the Boondock Expeditionary Militia, and with the arrival of the militia, the pirate unit was ultimately crushed.

The Boondock Expeditionary Militia commander at the time, Hector Gregorivich, offered the Highlanders a place to stay, and began to suggest creation of what would ultimately become the Boondock Highlanders. Murphy declined the idea and insisted that his unit was ready to retire to the Omniss community. As the two discussed the issue in town that night, the night sky was lit up with what would soon be known as "Murphy's Lump". A few individual pirates as part of an infiltration team had escaped the earlier battle on foot, gotten aboard the Highlander's dropship, and attempted to detonate it. The detonation sequence failed, and instead the dropship began to simply burn up, ultimately leaving several thousand tons of melted dropship across one end of the spaceport.

Murphy agreed to stay on Boondock, and the two merged the units over the next year as the Boondock Highlanders. By 3020, the Boondock Highlanders had begun to secure a reputation as a reliable, if boring, garrison unit and acceptable pirate hunters. It would not be for several years before they engaged in significant combats.