BattleTech: Legacy: A BattleTech Anthology by John Helfers

Author:John Helfers [Helfers, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2018-09-17T05:00:00+00:00

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CAIRO, TSINGTAO

CAPELLA COMMONALITY, CAPELLAN CONFEDERATION

22 JANUARY 3058, 1425 HOURS

Hauptmann Philip Giacomo, commander of Tsingtao’s remaining Federated Commonwealth defenders and soon-to-be bank robbers, stretched in the cockpit of his Grasshopper.

Loaned Grasshopper, he corrected, looking around. For hundreds of years, each pilot had signed on the upper bulkhead their name and the dates they’d piloted this particular ’Mech. Some end-dates were written in a different handwriting, testimony to a life violently led, and probably violently ended. Some had written notes to their children; some had written notes about long-since repaired quirks.

He was surprised when he got it: he’d been piloting a unit-owned Griffin when he received word his aunt had passed on the Falcon front. He’d been surprised for a number of reasons when the Grasshopper arrived on a DropShip, along with his aunt’s will.

He knew that side of the family came from money, but he never knew she’d had enough socked away to buy a BattleMech from “a discreet merchant,” as she’d described it. He was also surprised that she hadn’t put it into storage, waiting for his niece to graduate from the Nagelring. She’d said she trusted him to maintain it and care for it more than she trusted a storage facility—but he doubted she’d anticipated a war with the Capellan Confederation. When he wrote his name on the cockpit bulkhead, he’d solemnly listed his aunt’s date of death under her name. Since then, he’d nearly lost his niece’s inheritance a number of times during his long guerrilla operation.

Months ago, the Captain-General Thomas Marik of the Free Worlds League had revealed to the rest of the Inner Sphere that Archon-Prince Victor Steiner-Davion—Giacomo’s liege lord—had substituted a duplicate for his son undergoing medical treatment in the Federated Commonwealth. The Captain-General declared war to avenge his son, joined by his tenuous ally, the Capellan Confederation.

Immediately following the declaration of war, Victor’s sister, Archon-Princess Katherine Steiner-Davion, separated her half of the Federated Commonwealth in protest of her brother’s actions. She then issued a come-home order to any unit with historical ties to her rechristened Lyran Alliance.

Giacomo’s unit, the Thirty-sixth Lyran Guards, had been split almost fifty-fifty between MechWarriors that wanted to remain in Federated Commonwealth space and those wanting to return to its traditional home in the Lyran Alliance. However, of the fifty-plus pilots that had elected to remain, only thirteen owned their BattleMechs: a baker’s dozen out of a full regiment, a near unfathomable ratio just a decade before.

BattleMechs like the Grasshopper had been passed down in families for centuries, the physical act of ownership conveying a near-noble privilege. But everything had changed when the descendants of the original Star League Army returned to the Inner Sphere: known as “the Clans,” they had continued advancing their technology while the Inner Sphere’s had stagnated. Intent on recapturing Terra, they had been stopped at great cost in men and materiel.

Regiments once consisting almost entirely of owner-operators—with just a leavening of “federal” BattleMechs—now found their ratios reversed, the Great Houses providing new BattleMechs to their pilots in exchange for continued service against the Clans.

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