BattleTech: The Mercenary Life: A BattleTech Anthology by Randall N. Bills

Author:Randall N. Bills
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs

Postscript

I’ve been a fan of the Draconis Combine almost from the very beginning of my BattleTech experience, and the Arkab Legion has always been a wonderful addition, embracing the usual sci-fi tropes of pluralistic societies dealing with millennia of conflicted history as they expand to the stars. However, the Legion had never been center stage in a story before. And so I read up on absolutely everything surrounding the detail of this command, as well as doing research on the actual real-world peoples they were fictionally derived from.

The first scene, then, came about from that research. I had the Handbook: House Kurita PDF open and was just doing various word searches keying off of “Arkab Legion,” “Azami,” and so on. The second paragraph of the write-up on Matamoras came up, and described the planet as the “windiest world in the Combine,” with crazy, dramatic landscapes and shapes, and a cultural destination for Azami artisans. As I mentioned at the beginning, finding those types of details are a gold mine for a writer, and the ideas just sprang from my fingers, creating what I hope is almost a poetic scene. It also let me toss in a pretty hard non sequitur from the previous story, where you suddenly find yourself ten years in the past and wondering what is going on. I’m a very big believer in the power of tangents to snap a student or reader awake with a “Wait, what just happened?”

In the previous story, I mirrored the splitting of the POV characters into their own stories in a microcosm. And in this story, more than any other, I then mirrored the overall longer time frame of the serial, once again in a microcosm. This allowed me to try to capture the tension of centuries between the Arkab Legion and the Draconis Combine, additionally mirrored in the tension between a father and son drifting ever further apart.

The parade-ground scene was designed to counterpoint the grand martial parade of BattleMechs with some of the harsh realities of the Combine, including the internalized racism that is part of its society. That had to be shown, as it’s an important part of Fahad’s background and informs his view of the world and his sense of belonging.

The automated-factory scene was an homage to a completely different kind of writer. A friend of mine tried to get me to read The Hunt for Red October for nearly two years during high school, but it didn’t have BattleMechs or dragons, and so I kept putting it off. My senior year I finally read it and became a big Clancy fan, ultimately reading every novel he wrote. In his novel The Sum of all Fears, he spends pages and pages describing the interactions that occur in a few microseconds of a nuclear device exploding. Some felt it overkill, but I loved it! This was my small homage to Clancy.

A quick pre-final scene for another low-life mercenary command—showcasing both Fahad’s desperate wandering and the racism he constantly must deal with.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.