FOREWORD
by Loren L. Coleman
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
~Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi
Forgive me. I can’t help quoting from dead Russians these days.
Occupational hazard.
Before you begin to think that writing (or editing) somehow requires a degree in foreign literature, I should try to explain.
You see, the anthology you hold in your hands right now is just the latest link in a long chain of events that stretches back over four years. Longer, really, if you start at the point where my writing career and the BattleTech fictional universe collided. Not quite the Big Bang, but at least a medium-sized one.
We met. We fell in love. We enjoyed a lot of fights together.
Well, wars, actually. Planets were invaded,. Military forces hammered at each other. Empires rose and fell. It was a lot like high school dating.
At that time (four years ago) I was presiding over what felt like the end days of BattleTech fiction. FASA Corporation had closed its doors, and my final hurrah was to wrap up twenty-plus years of fiction novels with a final trilogy. The year was 3067 (by the BattleTech timeline). I barely managed to bring to a close the Steiner-Davion civil war, tying up as many loose ends as possible. I typed “THE END” and sent off the file.
But we weren’t finished.
The creative people in charge of BattleTech—and I was privileged enough to be considered one of them—had set up so much more. There was the Word of Blake Jihad about to kick off, which would have included nuclear holocaust, ravaged star systems, assassinations, and the dissolution of the Free Worlds League just to name a few highlights.
Happy times.
Alas, it seemed not to be. WizKids had already put into place their time jump to the Dark Ages era. The publisher (Roc Books) voiced no interest in continuing a “Classic” line. Everyone seemed content to burn out the Civil War, and let wounded princes lie.
It was frustrating, and I complained (albeit softly) to those who would (and were forced to) listen. There just didn’t seem to be an answer. So I let it rest. Though I did keep thinking about it, certain that there had to be something more. I stewed. I planned. I waited.
Patience.
And time.
Because then something strange happened on the way back from New Avalon. I came up with an idea. The idea, as it turned out. And, with some friends, I started up a small internet venture known as BattleCorps.com.
BattleCorps.com became the home for the “Classic” fiction universe. A way to get out those final (important!) stories, and to keep playing in the world where I had spent a great part of my career. It took over a year to fully launch the site, going live in the fall of the year 2003 (by the real world timeline).
Those first months were full of battles won and lost. Fortunately, I did find other writers who were just as devoted to the new campaign.
Our early stories roamed the entire timeline, the breadth of the Inner Sphere, and even managed a quick detour to the Clan Homeworlds. We explored the boundaries of loyalty and treachery. Of personal honor and cowardice. Of military excellence and political subterfuge. Enlisting soldiers, civilians, politicians, pirates.
Warriors, all.
These are the stories you will read in this anthology.
A collection from our starting months. Beginning with a handful of abandoned warriors, embroiled in the desperation which surrounded the forming Chaos March. Ending with a new, never-before-published story in the ongoing tale of one of the Inner Sphere’s most beloved characters, Aleksandr Kerensky.
The warrior who taught me to love (and quote) dead Russians.
Like I said. An occupational hazard. And as such, let me leave you with one final thought:
Upon the brink of the wild stream
He stood, and dreamt a mighty dream…
~Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
A RACE TO THE END
by Loren L. Coleman
Gan Singh, Chaos March
12 October 3057
It might be the last DropShip on Gan Singh.
Their final chance.
Wrenching at the controls of her JagerMech, Leftenant Kelly Van Lou struggled forward against the tangled jungle that covered most of the continent of Pandora. Shrill alarms wailed in her ears. Broken fronds streaked her ferroglass shield with green smears as sporadic laserfire burned through the leafy canopy around her.
Ruby-bright energy splashed armor from her BattleMech’s shoulders, its arms, its chest.
She tasted the warm, dank air, poorly filtered by her cockpit’s life support system.
Missiles corkscrewed in from her right, slamming into a palisade of majestic cypress and thick-boled banyon strung with creeping vines. A few warheads dropped low against her legs, shredding the angular guards that protected her knee joints and lower actuators.
Her stride hitched, stumbled, and then caught up as she shouldered her way into a marshy glade. Planting her spade-shaped feet into the loamy, black soil, Kelly checked her HUD and found Hauptmann Roland Mills—her company commander in the Third Donegal Guards, and her friend—still limping along half a klick behind. Well out of danger. Tightening up on her triggers, she snapped up both long-barreled arms and went looking for trouble.
Long licks of bright yellow-flame flashed out of her Jag’s autocannon as she spent hundreds of rounds into the greenery, implementing her own plan of deforestation. Twenty-mills riding over powerful, ultra-class Nova fifties, the hot metal chewed through thick vines, splintered tree branches into kindling, and rained pieces of shredded fronds over the ground. The powerful, cutting streams walked destructive lines in a narrow arc, reaching out, searching for either of the two ’Mechs in between her and the DropShip.
She found the missile-casting Dervish when a leafy screen of branches exploded under her devastating assault. Autocannon slugs hammered in against its chest, as if drawn by the gauntlet and sword set over a Davion sunburst. The insignia was one Kelly knew well—had called an ally only a few days before, but none of that mattered now. In scant seconds the proud crest of the FedCom Corps had been chiseled away to a battered ghost of its former glory.
Too late to stop.
The Dervish’s chest caved inward over the fusion reactor. Golden fire blossomed inside the mangled cavity. It spread quickly. The ’Mech’s head split open as the warrior ejected, rocketing up and away from the dying machine.
It was the last thing Kelly saw before the fusion-bright flare consumed the BattleMech. The force of the explosion blasted apart trees and scorched a great deal of underbrush to instant cinders. It rocked her JagerMech back on its heels as the ground trembled violently.
“Kelly!” Roland’s voice crackled to life over her comms system. “Flash and smoke near your position. Can you see it?”
“Not anymore,” she said, voice-activated mic picking up her reply.
Spots swam before her eyes, and she blinked away the aftereffects of the glare. A few curly strands of her platinum-blond hair tickled along the side of her face. No reaching them through the heavy neurohelmet she wore, but a practiced head shake matted them against the sheen of sweat on her forehead.
Whatever had been sniping at her with lasers had taken off. The Dervish was also gone except for pieces and parts scattered around a smoking crater. A leg, severed mid-femur, leaned up against a bamboo thicket. There was a titanium strut impaled through a nearby banyon. A few determined licks of flame crawled along the scorched trunks of some ironwood, but she doubted it would go much farther. The jungle was far too wet from the recent days of rain.
Kelly throttled forward, cautiously. Suddenly, new warnings screamed for attention as a rust-painted Vindicator shoved its way through the bamboo, ste
pping out into the hole in the jungle cleared by the explosion. She brought up her autocannon, but the wailing cut off as the other ’Mech dropped its targeting lock and paused, ready but waiting. An orange and black tiger striping covered half of the BattleMech’s chest, like a pelt draped over one shoulder, but no insignia that she could see.
Kelly paused, fingers caressing her triggers. The Vindicator took advantage of her hesitation and dove back into the jungle thicket. Northeast. Toward the DropShip.
The last one.
Roland had given her a moment to collect herself. “One of ours, or one of theirs?” he asked now.
“Ran across one of both,” she said. Then sighed. “It was a Guardian,” she admitted, swallowing against a sour taste. “First FedCom.”
“Damn it, K.” He didn’t sound mad at her, but at the Fates in general. They had tried so hard not to engage the Guardians. “Well, that tears it.”
It was Roland’s one fault, Kelly thought. Holding onto an idea of “us” versus “them,” or Federated Commonwealth versus the Marik-Liao alliance. That might have been true six months ago, or even six weeks, when the alliance offensive was chewing through the Sarna March. But Katrina-verdammt-Steiner tanked that idea when she called home all Lyran commands and the local defensive network fell completely apart. So bad, in fact, that a few stragglers got left behind in the confusion, including seventh company of the Third Donegal Guards.
Roland’s company had been deployed to Gan Singh, to try and coordinate with the First FedCom RCT. Only the Guardians were already gone. All they found were a few forgotten warriors—cast-offs or AWOL, didn’t matter—butting heads with local militia-turned-mercenary.
The Donegal Guards company either missed the recall order, or it had never been sent once General Hammerskjold decided to cut his losses and return to Lyran space.
Kelly could only wish him a prime location in the deepest circle of hell.
A new silhouette flashed across her tactical screen as Roland limped his Penetrator up from behind. It looked quite a mess with its right leg fused into an awkward steel crutch and several lengths of mossy vines draped over its ruined arms.
“What are we waiting for?” he asked. “Let’s go, K.”
She very nearly smiled at his forced esprit de corps. But six dead friends and four MIA in the last five days was enough to sour anyone’s mood. From city to spaceport to remote landing zone, Seventh Company had tried to make rendezvous with any number of outbound DropShips. Always too late. Always forced back by Capellan or mercenary outfits with greater firepower or a larger expense account.
But not this time, she promised herself. Please.
Throttling forward into an easy walk, she took the lead against his best speed of thirty kilometers per hour. They struck along the trail blazed by the fleeing Vindicator, and crossed their fingers.
For the next ten minutes their luck held. No weapons sniped at them from the dense jungle. Roland pushed his Penetrator up toward forty kph as the trail made for easier travel. Kelly began to hope.
“Think we can afford passage?” she asked. Neither of them speculated the DropShip captain might call allegiance to any one faction of Gan Singh’s three-sided battle. These days it seemed “every man for himself” was a predictable situation.
“We can barter against any ransom paid by the Third Donegal. We can deal away what’s left of the Penetrator.”
He’d never once threatened to put a debt against her JagerMech. The Penetrator was a newer and much more valuable machine, but hers had been in the Van Lou family for three generations. Leased into Lyran service, but still hers. Roland would rather give up a piece of Lyran state property, and suffer the reprisals, than divorce her from a piece of family heritage.
It was the kind of thing he did without thinking, and for that if nothing else Kelly would stick by her hauptmann’s side no matter what.
That’s what kept her anchored at his side when the sky fell in on them a moment later.
There was very little warning. A glimpse of smoke through the tree canopy from one of the Pandora jungle’s many logging slash burns. A tremble in the ground that might have been artillery fire, might have been the first powerful flare of a DropShip’s fusion drives lighting off. A screen of ironwood bounced back their active sensors until the last moment. Then they pushed through, and into the chaos of battle.
The DropShip was there all right, ninety meters high, its drive flare washing its underside in white-hot fire. It squatted on the blackened fields of a deforested plateau. Seeker-class, and painted a familiar blue-gray. Kelly Van Lou needed only the briefest glance to recognize the shamrock crest of the Donegal Guards and the scales of justice that were the personal insignia of Third regiment.
A good thing, because a brief glance was all she got before a crossfire of lasers and autocannon converged on her location. The lasers scorched the soil at her feet while hard-hitting slugs beat a damaging tattoo across her Jag’s lower waist. The fire had come from two machines painted the blue and gold of Federated Commonwealth RCTs. A Behemoth assault tank and an Enforcer.
Their second salvoes went after a Panther painted dark, cerulean blue. Nothing she recognized. Another mercenary, or a wayward Capellan perhaps.
All told there seemed to be about a dozen ’Mechs and half that number in vehicles jousting over the black-scorched ground. The DropShip laid out suppression fire from its upper weapons bays. PPCs stabbed down at the non-allied BattleMechs. They left the FedCom warriors alone. Wave after wave of long range missiles pounded machines into scrap and battered the ground into ruin. More than a few, Kelly felt certain, would spread Thunder munitions out into an ad hoc minefield.
Kelly stepped in front of Roland’s Penetrator, protecting it while holding her fire. FedCom RCT forces had the advantage on the field. And so long as a mercenary did not target her, she would not target them. Dialing over to the protected frequencies of the Third Donegal, she waited to see what sense her captain could make of the situation, listening in as he identified himself.
“Captain Mills?” The reply washed out in static as the lightning blasts of several PPCs ionized the local atmosphere, one from a nearby Caesar. It made communications difficult. “We…no Mills listed…deployed to Gan Singh.”
Deployed or not, Roland’s name should be on the Guards TO&E. And Kelly recognized the voice, even through the communications haze. “Jollena?” First mate Jollena Marksower, from the Lamprey. “Jolly, it’s K. Kelly! And Roland. You have two tired Guardsmen here looking for evac.”
Only one of the Lamprey’s ramps was still down. Secondary bay. Big enough to hold a couple of BattleMechs, if they could get them aboard.
“K?” There was a pause. The nearby Caesar turned its weapons toward the Guardsmen, and Kelly drilled out return fire with her autocannon as a way to shove it back. “Kelly Van Lou, what in the Archon’s name are you doing out here?”
“Taking a sightseeing tour! What the hell does it look like?” Kelly had heard the shock in the veteran spacer’s voice. How badly had wires been crossed if their own DropShip crew did not know what forces were on planet? And where was the captain? “We need a safe route to board, and good covering fire.”
The same Vindicator from earlier dodged out of a tight situation and ran back toward Kelly’s position. It hesitated as she drew her crosshairs over it, lighting it up, then deliberately turned its back on her to challenge a pursuing Jenner. Over an open channel, an accented voice let them know “If you want a piece of the DropShip, form up southwest and get ready to cover our drive.”
“We’re getting more than a piece of it,” Roland said coldly. “Stay out of our way and we may find room for you.”
It wasn’t exactly their call to make, of course, but Kelly approved. A tentative agreement was better than nothing. The DropShip crew had already made some kind of pact with the FedCom, after all.
“Suit yourself, then.” It sounded more like a threat than an allowance.
Then a
gain, a hot battlefield was not the best place to make new friends.
“K,” Jollena finally returned, “pull up northwest and come straight in at the ramp. We’re out of here in five, so move it now.”
“Straight at the ramp?” she double-checked.
“Move it!”
The Caesar and a blue-and-gold painted Rommel also shifted in that direction, but not so close to prevent the Guardsmen from moving. Roland led. Kelly stalked at his side, uneasy.
“It would be a lot easier if you brokered a truce between the FedComs and the mercs,” she said over an unsecured channel. She warned off a too-close Panther with a quick stream of light autocannon fire digging in at its feet. “Make a second trip. Offer to send back a larger DropShip.”
“Not happening, Kelly. Way too much bad blood now.”
Kelly nodded. “Captain feel the same way?” she asked.
“Just get up here,” Jollena ordered. “We’ll deal with the mercs next.”
It all hung on one word. Next. Not later or eventually. Also with the obvious cease-fire arranged between the Lamprey and the Guardians, and the way in which the mercs had tried to warn them. It all added up.
After a week of non-stop fighting and several days of only being able to trust the men and women at her side, Kelly’s paranoia had grown acute. Sharp enough to recognize the trap being laid out for them as they moved into range of the DropShip’s weapons. The last DropShip on Gan Singh.
Every man for himself.
“Roland. Roland, fall back now!” The dry, metallic taste of fear crept into her mouth. Slamming her throttles against their reverse stops, she backpedaled the JagerMech.
Almost too late. The DropShip’s weapons hammered down around their position as the Caesar and its support tank pushed forward. A pair of PPCs slashed at the legs of Kelly’s ’Mech. Aligned crystal steel melted and splattered over the already-scorched earth of Gan Singh.
Missiles hammered around the Penetrator, but not so bad as the Thunder-deployed minefield would have been had they walked into the Lamprey’s waiting embrace.
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