For Janna Silverstein, who immersed herself in the BattleTech universe and helped make a good book better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this novel came as something of a relief. It proved to me (and others) that BattleTech would continue. From the uncertain times when FASA first announced that it would close its doors until now, there was always that fear that the novel Endgame would indeed be the proverbial “it.” Finis. Rest in print.
It’s so great to see that you can’t keep a good universe down. BattleTech’s saga will continue under the MechWarrior title, and it is important to me to note that this novel, A Call To Arms, would never have happened without contributions from the following:
Jordan and Dawne Weisman, Mort Weisman, and Maya Smith, for their support and hard work behind the scenes at WizKids Games. Also Sharon and Mike Mulvihill, Pam, Scott, and others who continue to help take the company and its various universes to new heights.
My agent, Don Maass, who worked very hard with the new company. My editor, Janna Silverstein, who worked very hard with an opinionated author.
Michael Stackpole, who’s always available for brainstorming or answering the odd question and who dispenses his hard-won advice freely. And special thanks to Randall and Tara Bills—Randall for his continued support and friendship, and Tara, for putting up with the two of us in the same room.
Also I’d like to thank Oystein Tvedten, again, for the very cool maps, and Bones, Warner, Chris, and Herb, for their direct contributions.
Love to my family, Heather, Talon, Conner, and Alexia. Your support is still what makes this all worthwhile.
Of course, I have to mention Rumor, Ranger, and Chaos, who help lower my stress level just when I need a good lap-warmer, and then keep me from getting complacent just when I need a hairball on my chair. And now there is the dog, Loki, who still can’t figure out why the other three don’t want to play. They’re cats! Leave them alone.
Prolog
(Two Years Before the Blackout)
Program 12: Highlake Basin
Achernar
Prefecture IV, The Republic
26 October 3130
Sporadic artillery crumped along Raul Ortega’s rearward flank: twenty-pounders. They stomped large craters through the crusted, cracked-mud surface of Achernar’s Highlake Basin, scuffed blackened earth and embers of burning grasses into the air, and occasionally kicked over an infantry position, forcing survivors to scurry like armored ants reforming injured lines.
Those bright, orange-tipped flashes shattered the deepening twilight and cast brief shadows forward of Raul’s Legionnaire as he stalked the fifty-ton BattleMech into the no-man’s-land separating his forces from Charal DePriest’s. From three stories up, his cockpit placed as a head on the humanoid-style war machine, Raul stared out through a ferroglass shield to study the battlefield. Armored vehicles drove and dodged through the killing zone, their autocannons and machine guns stitching the air with white-hot tracers. Ruby laserfire splashed armor into molten puddles. Flights of missiles arced up on fiery plumes, falling over into hard-hitting showers that blasted into the ancient lakebed and ripped open armor and flesh where they found it.
Two gutted APV’s, both of them Charal’s, burned at the edge of the dry lake basin, roiling black, greasy smoke into a charcoal sky.
He felt a loose smile—the one Major Blaire called Raul’s kay-det grin—creep over his face. Those two vehicles didn’t make up for his lost Marksman, a blackened husk left at the foot of the Taibek Hills, but with a bit of luck Charal would have failed to deploy her own battlesuit infantry and that would put the other MechWarrior-cadet at a disadvantage.
After two hours in the hot seat, muscles strained and sore and his hands sweat-slick on the simulator’s well-worn controls, Raul didn’t mind asking for a touch of luck.
“Charlie-one through six: advance and engage,” Raul commanded his carefully hoarded infantry. The Cavalier-suited warriors leapt out of hiding from jagged-edged craters or spilled from his two Saxon transports. A few bounded up on thrusters. Most swarmed forward in short, erratic sprints. Raul could hope that one squad might actually make a battlefield capture, but if nothing else, he decided, they would draw fire away from him.
It wasn’t soon enough, though. A particle projector cannon scorched the air just over his Legionnaire’s left shoulder. Raul ducked away reflexively. He stutter-stepped his BattleMech several cautious paces to the right where a JES Tactical Missile Carrier fell under his sights, branded in enemy-red on the head’s up display.
He checked his ammunition reserves in a glance—down, but not critically low—and set his crosshairs over the Jessie’s dark outline. The Legionnaire’s targeting computer painted a shadow-reticle to the right of the hovercraft, adjusting for relative motion. Raul corrected his aim, swinging over the BattleMech’s arm to lead the JES Carrier by several meters, and then pulled into his only weapons trigger.
His rotary autocannon spit out a long tongue of fire and fifty-mil rounds tipped with depleted uranium. The slugs punched into the hovercraft’s right side missile launcher, chewing through simulated armor as the vehicle slewed sideways. A weakened support arm twisted under the launcher’s weight, buckled, and dropped the boxlike launcher into the full stream of hot, angry metal. Missiles ruptured, their solid fuel boosters catching fire and cooking off several warheads before the tank crew could dump the ruined ammunition, and the launcher disintegrated into a blossom of fire.
The explosion rocked the hovercraft up on its skirt and spilled away the supporting cushion of air. The Jessie tipped up and over, coming down on the overhead launcher, which discharged in a sympathetic detonation. Armor panels bulged on all sides, then burst apart. A gout of fire shot into the sky, thick and tall, glowing yellow-orange at the center and simply darkening to a nimbus of red wisps at the edge. It looked …minimal.
Fake.
Raul’s smile slid away. Cheap fire effects always ruined the explosion in his opinion, reminding him that his battle wasn’t exactly real. Fire should dance and cavort, cheering his temporary victory.
It was one of only a few flaws in the Mark III simulators used by Achernar’s training command. Usually, he lost himself within the simulation without problem. The cockpit swayed with each step his Legionnaire took, hitched hard when a trio of missiles slammed into his left leg, and the simulator threw him forward against the five-point restraining harness every time the BattleMech’s cockpit took a direct hit. It also dumped heat through small vents near his feet when he stressed the fusion reactor. All reinforced the illusion—the lie—that he controlled an actual BattleMech—except for the fire.
Not that he’d let simplified effects distract him from beating Charal DePriest. Charal had more formal training, raised in a family of long military traditions. Raul pushed forward with determination and a measure of raw talent detected in the academy admissions testing. They had long since left the other cadets far behind. Challenging each other for the number-one spot, academic and practical standings too close to call for several months now, their good-natured rivalry had turned serious. It was more than a game today—more than a routine training procedure in Achernar’s Reserve Training Corps. This was his final exam. Graduation.