BattleTech: Redemption Rites, page 1
BATTLETECH: REDEMPTION RITES
A WOLF’S DRAGOON’S NOVEL
JASON SCHMETZER
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Interlude
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Interlude
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Interlude
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Notable BattleMechs
More BattleTech Fiction by Jason Schmetzer
Battletech Glossary
BattleTech Eras
The BattleTech Fiction Series
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
–Horace Mann
* * *
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
—Sun-Tzu
PROLOGUE
NADIR RECHARGE STATION
SAVANNAH
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
3 JUNE 3151
It hadn’t taken much. Just money.
Once they were paid, the station authorities had been all too happy to clear the shuttle docking terminal and seal the hatch to the main station promenade.
Colonel Henry Kincaid—Hack, to almost everyone—had let others handle that. He had stood, back straight, hands clasped firmly behind him, boots locked to the deck, and watched, waiting. The transpex viewport was three meters tall, scuffed with centuries of use, but the holo overlay still worked. By his knees were the icons of the flotilla of JumpShips and DropShips his own forces had arrived in.
Above him, a new cluster of icons floated. Alphanumerics trailed off the lower-right corner of each caret, showing transponder IDs. The names were familiar to Hack. He’d know them all his life. Sendalor. Talbot. Hammer. Chieftain. Orion’s Sword. They’d been there for two days, transmitting reports and requests under Dragoons encryption.
The reports had been incredible. Horrifying. Hack would have said beyond belief, but he’d never been a man who refused the evidence of his own eyes when he was competent to judge. He could read an after-action report as well as anyone. In the history of Wolf’s Dragoons, no battle had ever shattered the mercenary unit’s ranks so badly.
A new caret appeared, about head-height. The signal read for a shuttle, inbound. Hack swallowed. That meant General Brubaker had agreed to meet him with just the command council, first.
“Nate,” he said. A moment later, Major Nathan Castle, veteran commander of the Wolfsbane striker battalion, clomped up next to him. “Stand by the hatch. No one gets in from the station, no matter what happens.”
“Done,” Castle said, and clomped away. The other man’s voice was flat. Dead. Like everyone’s. Hack listened to the click-clomp of the officer’s magnetic boots detaching while he thought. The shuttle would arrive in a few minutes.
Behind his back, his hand clenched into a fist and relaxed. Clenched and relaxed. He’d always had Nina Slade for things like this, but she was gone, killed on New Avalon.
The hand clenched into a fist and squeezed, squeezed so hard he felt the tingling where the muscles had contracted so tightly they’d cut off their own blood supply.
Another few minutes.
The first man out of the docking tunnel was Thomas Brubaker, general of Wolf’s Dragoons. He walked with a limp, and looked like he’d aged twenty years since Hack had last seen him. Behind him came every Dragoons officer who’d gone to Terra of field-grade rank or higher. Those still alive, anyway. Despite knowing the truth, Hack counted every person who came through the door, praying to gods he didn’t believe in the reports had been wrong.
The reports were right.
Dozens of people he’d expected—prayed—to see weren’t there.
Two people with the three stars of Dragoons colonels: Nicholas Crews, walking with a cane and an obvious prosthetic leg that hadn’t been fully fitted yet, and Colonel Lyons, with a truly livid burn still healing on her face.
Andrew Krull, from Crews’ Gamma Regiment, followed the colonels. Two other majors followed them out, but Hack bit back a curse. Both of those majors, with two stars on their collar flashes, had worn the single star of captains the last time he’d seen them.
“Hack,” Brubaker said, when he came close enough. “It’s good to see you.”
“Tom,” Hack said. He nodded past the general at the others.
“We need to make plans,” Brubaker said, looking guardedly around the room.
Hack nodded. He looked at each of the officers in turn, and drew back his shoulders a bit more. His hands had never come out from behind his back. “I’ve already made the necessary plans,” he said. He looked past the new arrivals and nodded again. Major Castle nodded back and spoke into a wall panel.
“Alaric Ward screwed us over,” Colonel Crews muttered. He glanced behind them, where a final man had stepped out of the shuttle docking tunnel. This one wore gray Clan Wolf leathers. Hack ground his teeth, but not in further anger.
A part of him wished he was wrong. That his plan for the future was the wrong one, that the general and these officers had a better explanation. Some secret stratagem that would explain why these people he’d respected his entire life had followed a Clan Khan to Terra and killed eight out of ten of the best mercenary soldiers the Inner Sphere had ever seen.
But the presence of the Wolf Clan warrior could only mean he was right.
“We need—” Brubaker started, but Hack spoke over him.
“You are all relieved of command,” he said. “You will be held over for court-martial by the combined Dragoons in conclave. These court-martials will begin in two days.”
Brubaker looked at the floor. “I don’t think—”
“You don’t have the authority, Hack!” Colonel Crews shouted. Hack looked at him, gripping his hands tightly behind his back. “It takes a quorum—”
“Which I had,” Hack said. “You murdered enough Dragoons that my battalions and crews are a quorum. You are under arrest, Crews. The charge is mutiny. I don’t know how you thought you’d hide the fact you killed Dragoons to set this whole charade in motion, but you will answer for that.” He tried to speak again, but his voice broke. “On the souls of every Dragoons man and woman you killed on Terra, you will answer.”
“Hack,” Brubaker said. “We’ve all suffered, but let’s not be hasty.”
“Hasty?” Hack stepped forward, clenched hands at his sides. “You left us behind, Tom.” He raised his right hand, and knifed it into Brubaker’s chest. “You listened to this traitor and that whelp—” he pointed to Marotta Kerensky, still at the back of the group, “—about some fantasy of rejoining a people we left behind more than a century ago.”
“We had to stop Malvina Hazen from taking Terra,” Brubaker ground out. “We did that.”
“Congratulations,” Hack said. “Now go tell it to all the spouses, partners, and children I had to bring here. Tell them how you sacrificed their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers on the altar of defeating one woman.”
He stepped even closer.
“Go tell them!” he roared.
“That’s not fair,” Major Krull said into the silence.
“Whoever told you life was fair?” Hack looked at each to them, daring them to argue. The way forward was set, now. All of his hopes for a different way were moot; these men and women had done the things he’d feared they had. It didn’t matter that years of friendship raged at the way he was treating them.
At the very center of Hack Kincaid was a diamond-hard core of discipline. Of duty. It had defined his life. He ground the betrayed feelings against that, grinding them to dust. All he had left was duty.
Duty.
And vendetta.
CHAPTER 1
PROVING GROUND EPSILON FOUR
GIENAH
WOLF EMPIRE
4 JUNE 3151
In the rear with the gear.
Star Colonel Othar sat in a small anteroom outside the review tank, on an uncomfortable chair that dug into the small of his back and the edges of his backside, and couldn’t get that phrase out of his head. He turned a message folio over and over in his hands. His eyes stared at a spot on the floor, but he wasn’t seeing it.
He’d just read the message every Clan warrior decanted from an iron womb for the last 150 years or so had dreamed of reading: his Clan had done it. The verigraph carried all the right genetic markers, and the encryption was secure. The message was for his eyes only. To do with what he wished. It had come hand-delivered along one of the Wolf Clan’s last remaining command circuits of JumpShips to let Othar know the raison d'être of his culture had been fulfilled.
Terra had fallen to Clan Wolf.
Clan Wolf was now and forever the ilClan.
Othar’s fingers squeezed the folio so tightly his knuckles went white. Alaric Ward, Khan of the Wolves—no, ilKhan of the Clans, now—had done it. Had done what no other Clan, no other warrior, had been able to do in a century of crusade.
“And I was here,” Othar whispered to the silence. He ground his teeth, feeling his nose twitch with the beginnings of a snarl. In the quiet he heard his pulse pounding in his ears. “I was here.”
A knock interrupted his isolation. He twisted in the chair, looking at the door.
“Forgive me, Star Colonel, but the Trial is about to begin,” the old solahma trainer said. Star Captain Ricard knew better than to step fully into the room; he spoke through a crack in the door.
“I will be right there,” Othar said.
The door closed. He lurched to his feet, breathed in and out, deeply, searching for his center. The message folio he slid into his belt at the small of his back. It didn’t matter that the world had just fundamentally changed. He still had his duty.
Don’t I?
Outside the anteroom, Othar knew, a group of Clan Wolf warriors waited for him to oversee a Trial of Position. In the martial culture of the Clans, the Trial of Position was the ultimate coming-of-age ritual. A warrior-caste Trueborn trained their entire life to be the best warrior. Each generation was successively bred to be better than its predecessor, using only the genes of their successful forebears.
In a Wolf Clan Trial of Position, a challenging warrior faced a succession of three of their peers in armored combat, normally in concert with a fellow aspirant. Today, a MechWarrior candidate would fight in a real OmniMech against three combat-tested opponents, with real weapons and the very real chance of death. Success meant entry into the warrior caste and touman of Clan Wolf.
Failure meant a life apart from the warrior caste—or death.
For centuries, this method had produced the most skilled duelists the galaxy had ever seen. It was guaranteed, they were promised as children, to eventually produce the generation of warriors elite enough to retake Terra and rebuild the lost Star League. For the Trueborn of the Clans, there was no higher purpose. It was sacred. Even the Ghost Bears, who’d sacrificed most of what made them Clan in Othar’s eyes, recognized the ilClan had been named.
Othar gripped the handle of the door, steadying his nerves and getting his breathing under control. He smoothed his leathers, closed his eyes for a moment, and forced his will onto his body.
You are the senior warrior left in the whole of the Empire, he told himself. This is your duty. He jerked the door open and stepped through, face composed, nodding at the collection of junior officers and trainers waiting for him.
“Star Colonel, it is good of you to come,” Star Captain Ricard said. Ricard was a huge man, a former Elemental who stood nearly three meters tall. His entire left side was horribly scarred and stiff. Clan medical science could work miracles, but the wounds he’d taken during the Clan’s conquering of Gienah all those years ago had stripped him of the delicate motor function required to pilot an Elemental battlesuit to its fullest potential. He had transferred his dedication to the Clan’s cause away from combat and into the training of young pups with a passion Othar didn’t know if he could match, were their roles reversed.
“It is my duty,” Othar said. “Nothing more.” He stepped to the front of the holotank, back straight, hands clasped behind him. “Has the Trial begun?”
Ricard came to stand beside him. He touched a control on the communicator in his right hand. “It has now,” he said. As trainer, it was his right and duty to begin the Trial. He towered over Othar, a product of his genes. He was eleven years older than Othar’s own thirty-four standard years. Two Clan generations. By the rede of the scientist caste, Othar should be two generations more genetically improved.
But right now, with the verigraph he felt beneath his hands, he envied the old, scarred Elemental his certainty. One had only to look for the spark in Ricard’s eyes to see the dedication he had to his Clan, a dedication he practiced through training. He had failed to win a Bloodname. His genes would not continue. Othar wondered if Ricard had decided this was another way to live on, by ensuring the young warriors of the Clan were as well-trained as possible, that they may avoid his fate.
That is immortality, after a fashion, Othar reasoned.
To Othar’s left in the tank appeared a meter-tall BattleMech, a 75-ton Timber Wolf. He hid his incipient frown. That was an old and tired machine, and not even the Khan’s—ilKhan’s, he corrected himself—admiration for it could convince him otherwise. He looked to his right. A trio of ’Mechs appeared: a light Wulfen, a Vulture Mk IV, and an aggressive-looking Warwolf.
He turned enough to grin at Ricard. “You must think highly of this pup.” All the opponents were advanced machines, when the pup’s ’Mech could be a century old or more.
“As the Star Colonel says.” Ricard didn’t look away from the tank.
“And his Trial mate?”
Ricard frowned. “Injured yesterday,” he said. “None of the others are ready to test. And the Clan needs every warrior, so I chose not to wait.”
Othar grunted. Trials of Position were routinely fought in pairs: two young pups against two pairs of three opponents in live-fire combat. Defeating one opposing ’Mech meant the pup would enter the touman as a MechWarrior; two, an officer at Star Commander rank. Defeating all three earned the rank of Star Captain, and such victories were rare.
But not impossible. Othar had tested to Star Captain when he fought his own Trial of Position on Tamar with his sib brother Gaulder. His brother had defeated only one of his opponents. Othar half-closed his eyes at the memory. He had felt invulnerable that day.
In the rear with the gear.
Othar’s eyes snapped open. His hands clenched to fists, willing his temper down. If Ricard noticed the flinch, he gave no sign. In the tank before them, the small holographic ’Mechs began moving. Othar knew he could leave this room, climb some stairs to the building roof, and watch the combat with his own eyes. The Trial area was barely two kilometers away. But the tank would tell him much more than his eyes would.
In the real world, the war machines would tower twelve meters over the battlefield. Ever since its invention, the BattleMech had been the preeminent engine of ground warfare. Massing anywhere from 20 to more than 100 tons, fusion-powered, armed with missiles, lasers and particle projector cannons, a ’Mech feared no opponent except another ’Mech. Fighters might own the sky, WarShips space, but ’Mechs and the MechWarriors who piloted them were the legendary knights of old in the modern galaxy.
MechWarriors like Othar of the Shaws. And possibly, in the next little while, a new pup from a Clan Wolf sibko. “Their name?”
“Radu, Star Colonel.”
“Radu,” Othar said. “A good name. His Bloodhouse?”
“Ward.” Othar looked, hearing a hesitation in the Elemental’s voice. Ricard met his stare, but his brow was furrowed. “Sir.”
It was Othar’s turn to frown. “And?”
“This sibko descends from Vlad Ward,” Ricard said.
Othar raised his eyebrows. “Ah.”
Vlad Ward, Khan of the Wolf Clan in the prior century, was still regarded by many as a hero of the Clan. His exploits had been legendary, and Khan—ilKhan, Othar’s stubborn mind corrected—Alaric Ward himself was descended from him. Vlad’s genes were used sparingly; Othar could count on one hand the number of sibkos he knew of. He looked back toward the holotank. Radu. “Ah,” he repeated. That explained the choice of such powerful opponents. The product of Vlad’s genes should be held to a higher standard.
