BattleTech Legends: Operation Excalibur by William H. Keith Jr

Author:William H. Keith Jr. [Keith Jr., William H.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2017-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Alex Carlyle no longer knew his father.

The change that had come over him recently was inexplicable. For as long as Alex had been able to remember, the Gray Death Legion had been Grayson Carlyle’s passion, his whole reason for life, a love surpassed only by what he felt for his own family—and even there, in terms of demonstrativeness, the Legion had often taken precedence. Alex had grown up in the Legion, playing in the shadow of ten-meter-tall war machines locked in their access gantries. When kids his age outside the Legion compound were playing sag or touchball, he’d been running miniatures simulations on a discarded BattleTech holotac board McCall had scrounged up for him. He’d piloted a ‘Mech for the first time at age twelve, sitting in his father’s lap inside the close, oil-and-hot-metal-smelling complexity of a Marauder’s cockpit.

From the beginning, Alex, along with everyone else he knew, had assumed that he would continue with the Legion, that he would even go on to command it someday. After all, where else would he go? Oh, there’d been some doubt in his own mind a year or two ago; he’d been worried for a time by the natural question of whether or not he owed his promotion to captain and his assignment as company commander to his father instead of to his own abilities.

Well, that was all changed now, that was for damned sure.

The toughest part, though, would be breaking this to Caitlin. He’d been trying to think of a good way to go about it, until finally he’d just plain run out of time. There’d been no place at Asgard where they could talk, and no time, either. The Legion officers—all save Grayson—had been rounded up early that morning by their Lyran hosts and hustled off to the spaceport with an almost indecent haste. They’d spent the time since in the spaceport terminal, waiting as the Orion was readied for boost.

They’d been kept together by a half dozen armed guards, escorted to meals and washrooms as though they were dangerous prisoners. Perhaps their hosts were afraid they would try to strike back somehow. To Alex, it felt as though the fight had drained out of all of them, even McCall, even his mother.

And what he had to do now would just make it harder. On all of them.

Leaning back in one of the seats in the spaceport terminal lounge, he eyed the trooper in charge of the guard detail. He was an older man, forty, Alex guessed, maybe forty-five, and he wore the rank of leutnant.

Many leutnants, Alex knew, never advanced beyond that twilight rank between commissioned and noncommissioned officers within the Lyran military structure. Those who had no ambition to reach a higher rank, or those who for one reason or another were simply passed over for promotion or a chance at command, could remain leutnants for their entire careers.

This one wasn’t young, which meant he wouldn’t be as stiff or as scared of the system as a newbie might be.

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