For Peter and Cathryn Orullian.
Rén bú huì tài duōháo you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One year of Mech Warrior Dark Age books behind us, I look at the storyline and the way it is developing and see so many new possibilities I’m really not certain where we will end up. I feel I can safely say, however, that Battle Tech lives on through the Mech Warrior line, and that these novels have a long future ahead of them. Here’s to another decade of good fiction, and to the people who help make that all possible for me:
The WizKids themselves: Jordan and Dawne Weisman, Mort Weisman, Maya Smith, Mike and Sharon Mulvihill, Scott Hungerford, and everyone at the company who continues to work very hard on such dynamic and growing universes. And certainly Janna Silverstein, who continues to push me into being a better writer. Thank you.
My agent, Don Maass, and his office staff, for their hard work on my behalf. Also Laura Anne Gillman and Jennifer Heddle at Roc. Anyone who thinks too many editors spoil the book have never worked with these very excellent people.
Allen and Amy Mattila, for their longtime friendship. Randall and Tara Bills, Bryn and Rhianna, who have also made themselves such a large part of our lives. Kelle Vozka, Erik and Alex, who are always welcome at our home. Phil “Skippy” Deluca, who really should come over more often.
The gang of usual suspects: Mike Stackpole, Herb Beas, Chris Hartford, Chris Trossen, and the mapmaker Oystein Tvedten. Special thanks to Team Battle Tech members Pete Smith, Chas Borner, and Warner Doles who gave so freely of their time this last year. Special acknowledgements for “JT” Yeo Jia Tian and also for Howard Liu for their help with Chinese translations.
For my loving wife, Heather Joy, who makes everything worthwhile. To my children, Talon, Conner, and Alexia, who get more interesting (and more frightening) with each year. Okay, and the cats. Chaos, Rumor and Ranger. What would I do without them? (Probably much better. I hope they didn’t hear that.) And Loki, who, like all dogs, is happy just to be here.
Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war…
PROLOG
A Dark Night on Liao
This use of the Emergency Communications System is to inform all citizens and residents of Liao that the local ComStar network has suffered a loss of systems coordination. Precentor Rayburne Belzer, citing last week’s three-day interruption, promises to have the HPG back up as soon as possible. “Disruption will be kept to a minimum.”
Outside Lianyungang
Qinghai Province, Liao
Prefecture V, The Republic
11 August 3132
Twilight had come and gone on Liao, and that wasn’t good.
Evan Kurst paced a tight box around his small moving van, one of four haulers parked in a staggered line atop an isolated bluff overlooking the Cavalry River. He kept to himself, as he’d been taught to do. Kicking gravel against the van’s oversize tires, Evan divided his time between watching the narrow access road that had brought the small cadre of Ijori Dè Guāng members here, and looking at the jewel-studded blanket of velvet sky. Not a trace of sunset’s color bled over the western horizon, and the sky remained crystal clear with visibility at twenty kilometers or better. The worst possible conditions for a clandestine operation.
“Drive flare!” someone shouted from behind another of the dark-painted vehicles. Evan winced, wondering—worried—how far the shout would carry in the still night. “DropShip.”
The flare was little more than a bright star moving across the heavens, a thin dagger of hard, white light. Too small for the merchant-converted Union they were expecting. Too high for any kind of approach to the bluff. And actually, wasn’t it close to—
“Twenty-one hundred hours.” Evan glanced at his watch. “That is the ballistic shuttle from Nánlù.” Liao’s southern continent. “Not our DropShip,” he said softly, to himself.
It wasn’t coming. Something had gone wrong, again. He dried his palms against his jeans. Evan knew only one of the other six recruits. Mai Wa wasn’t here, the needler pistol weighed his hip down awkwardly, and they were fifteen kilometers outside of Lianyungang—the city’s lights were a muted glow above the forest to the northeast—with no good safe house to run for should the local constabulary swoop down.
“And I have a military history test on Monday.”
That bothered him more than it probably should have. A member of the budding Ijori Dè Guāng, Liao’s newest band of self-proclaimed freedom fighters, should not be worried about his position within The Republic’s militia. But he was. Evan had worked too long and hard for this chance to become a MechWarrior. With his recent transfer to the prestigious Liao Conservatory of Military Arts, his personal honor demanded that he make his mark above the line set by any citizen student.
It almost made him laugh. “What I could tell them now about the end of the Capellan invasion in 3112 would qualify as Master’s level work.” Doctorate, even. A few history books would have to be rewritten.
But he wouldn’t tell. The secret he’d been entrusted with was too big to share with anyone save Mai Uhn Wa, Evan’s sifu in all things seditious. Mai would know what to do with such a secret.
If Mai ever arrived.
If the DropShip came.
Too many ifs.
A warm breeze smelling of pine trees, wildflowers, and the day’s moist heat ruffled Evan’s mop of dark hair. The warm, wet climate made Qinghai Province one of the planet’s best agricultural centers. Rice, peppers, sweet naranji: everything grew well here. Nánlù and the once-more inhabitable regions of Anderia were Liao’s industrial heart, but Beilù, the northern continent, was Liao’s breadbasket.
It was also the seat of occupation by The Republic of the Sphere, and the very heart of all resistance to Devlin Stone’s “benevolent” despotism.
Devlin Stone. The “devil” Stone. Evan Kurst looked up into the starry heavens, found the suns of Nanking, Tigress, and there, on the horizon, valiant Tikonov. Capellan systems, all, and along with Liao once belonging to the mighty Capellan Confederation, one of the Inner Sphere’s five Great Houses.
In the local constellation of Qu Yuan, the poet, Evan located the sun that looked down upon Terra. It was from that cursed star system sixty-five years before that the Word of Blake launched its Jihad against civilization, bringing the Inner Sphere to its knees in ten brutal years of scorched-earth warfare. Devlin Stone led the resistance that finally cast down the Armageddon worshippers. Then liberator turned conqueror as Stone bargained for a new realm centered around Terra, taking as spoils of victory a territory spanning a hundred-and-twenty-light-year radius around mankind’s birthworld. Which was how Liao and over fifty other Capellan worlds became part of the new Republic of the Sphere.
Whether they wanted to or not.
“You see somethin’ up there, Kurst?”
Whit Greggor stepped up next to Evan. Greggor was the one Ijori Dè Guāng member present tonight that Evan knew. The large man had a voice that rumbled up from deep within his chest, broad, Slavic features, and crew-cut reddish-brown hair turning premature gray. Too old to be a student, full of ideals. Too young to remember life under the Confederation, fifty-some years before. Evan pegged him as a thug. Mai Wa probably recruited the tough out of a dark alley somewhere.