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Battletech - Legend of the Jade Phoenix Volume 1
WAY of the CLANS

by Robert Thurston

[There is a glossary at the end of the e-book for anyone unfamiliar with Battletech Terms]

*** HIGH-TECH BARBARIANS ***
In the 31st century, the BattleMech is the ultimate war machine.
Thirty meters tall, and vaguely, menacingly man-shaped,
it is an unstoppable engine of destruction.
In the 31st century, the Clans are the ultimate warriors.
The result of generations of controlled breeding, Clan
Warriors pilot their BattleMechs like no others.
In the 31st century, Aidan aspires to be a Warrior of Clan Jade Falcon.
To win the right to join his Clan in battle, he must succeed in trials that
will forge him into one of the best warriors in the galaxy, or break him completely.
In the 31st century, Aidan discovers that the toughest
battle is not in the field, but in his head Чwhere failure
will cost him the ultimate price: his humanity.



Prologue

A Kind of Fate

At different momentsЧsay, the night before a battle begins or the night after a love affair endsЧthe Commander usually seeks a quiet place. Unlike most Clan warriors, he looks for isolation rather than camaraderie when in the grip of an emotion. This time he does not choose the cockpit of his 'Mech or a dark place in a forest. This time he goes to the inlet of a quiet lake with an abbreviated beach whose quietly lapping water is only four or five steps from the edge of the woods. He sits, back against the stump of a tree (burn marks and missing bark suggesting that the tree had once, like him, been a battle victimЧexcept he had survived). He watches moonlight sketching intermittent highlights on the few ripples in the water, listens to the weak breeze almost shyly send ripples of sound through the woods behind him.
In a book that had been burned in battle, a book that the Commander had carried with him into the cockpit of a 'Mech whose shards had been scattered across the landscape of some embattled planet he no longer recalled, he had read a story that he wished he had memorized. In it a father mourned a son killed in battle. The battle had been primitive, a war over some nonsense about which side possessed some valued object, the death the kind of tragedy that was not quite a tragedy (no falls from great heights, no individual ravaged by a single, identifiable character flaw). The war had been a thousand accumulations of sorrow, a thousand rewardings of honor. Like most wars. The boy had died because someone else had made a mistake. After the boy had saved someoneЧ a friend, a lover, a child, an enemy (there were so many stories, the Commander thought, how could puny be remembered?Чhe had been killed by a projectile from whatever weapon belonged to that era. His rather dug him out of a battlefield pile of corpses, the smell of blood not yet become the stench of decay.
The father looked at the tortured race of the boy. His eyes still seemed to stare with life, but now they gazed at some point just past the father's shoulder and not into his eyes. A thousand memories, a thousand fragments of the boy's life, rushed into the father's mind. The moments went from the cradle and childhood frolics to the important experiences of growing up, through all the choices that seemed to lead directly to this pile of corpses, in a straight line of events with a strange sort of inevitability to them, a kind of rate. And of course, in the world of the father and his son, it was fate that had guided them. Fate was the point. Fate was the last remaining expression in the boy's eyes, which the rather now shut with gentle urges of his fingertips.
That was not the end of the story. Events had propelled the father into a deeply complicated plot where in some ways he redeemed himself from a taint and in some other ways reconciled himself to his son's death. Whether or not the rather survived, the Commander could not recall.
His Commander, however, had survived. His special talent, survival.
His Clan upbringing had long interfered with his understanding of the story and, for that matter, many other stories in many other books from among the volumes he had so long ago discovered in that Brian Cache where he had done such dreadful and enervating duty. The concept of rather had initially troubled him. What was a rather? Naturally, he understood the technical meaning of the word, but what did it really mean? What had it meant for the devoted father of the story?
The Commander, the offspring of genetic engineering, of genes from a sacred gene pool, had several father figures but only knowledge without awareness of his actual father. All he could fall back on was imagination to understand any concepts about natural parents in the books he had read. He had been raised with others also genetically matched, in a sibling company, a sibko. He had a fine understanding of what siblings felt, but how could he have really comprehended the sorrow of a parent over details a lost son or daughter? At least back then, the concept had puzzled him. Now he understood it better. Now it was easier even to feel. Now it was his own private sorrow, not only previously unknown but forbidden to be known.
The idea of fete was easier to comprehend. The Clans had a notion of fate, though it differed from the fate portrayed in the story. A Clansman tried to control his rate, measuring it methodically against the vagaries of chance. Everything in life required a bid. If a man was good at bidding, he controlled his fete. A successful bid in war-rare meant he led his warriors into battle, planned the execution of their maneuvers, planned the battle itself, reacted to chance interferences with the skill of a battle-worthy strategist, beat chance with the action of his adept-at-strategy mind, overwhelmed what rate appeared to have in store. Of course, for the other warrior, the pilot in the cockpit who saw rate rushing right at him, the outcome of the engagement, the loss, undoubtedly seemed like rate.
Clan officers met before a battle and bid for the honor of fighting it. It was an intricate and complex procedure. The first officer to bid removed one or more of his units from the battle strategy. The next bidder had to duplicate that move, then up the ante by eliminating a unit or more of his own or by replacing a strong unit with one ranked below it. A 'Mech could be substituted for an aerospace fighter or five Elementals, the Clan's genetically bred, battle-suited infantry. Bids flew back and forth until one commanding officer was left with low bid, the bid below which no fellow officer could commit personnel and materiel. But a bidder could not hold back a low bid for too long. An opponent might beat him to it, making the winning bid he had intended and leaving him back on a DropShip, watching his rival lead his forces into battle. There was no position so uncomfortable as sitting in a plush DropShip chair observing the military triumphs of the officer who had beaten you bidding.
All Clan men and women took delight in the victories of others, but no success was more satisfying man that of the warrior doing the winning. A certain regret inevitably crept into one's praise for others. It was not envy that fueled it, nor was it loss of race. Every Clansman respected the wagering skills of a good officer, and there was no shame attached to losing a bid. But there was another kind of loss of face, a kind the Commander well understood. It was the loss of face within oneself: the realization that one had not quite made the grade. That was the true loss of face, when you gazed at yourself in the mirror of your mind and had to look away.
The Commander remembered a fellow warrior who had graduated from all levels of training spectacularly, had risen through the ranks rapidly, had become one of the youngest Star Captains in the history of Clan Jade Falcon. But he had proved to be inept in the prebattle ritual of bidding. Too often he gave away too much manpower in his desperate attempt to gain the bid. Undermanned, he fought too many losing battles or marginal victories, endangering his troops and materiel. Though one of the fiercest warriors ever to charge an enemy, the man's bidding deficiencies finally cost him his command, even lost him his 'Mech. When he finally met his death in battle, he was not a victim of fate but of destiny. The Captain's genes were not passed on in the gene pool so sacred to all warriors. But what point was there in a warrior's living and dying if his genes were not judged worthy of the gene pool?
The Commander knew that when one controlled the key aspects of his destiny, fate did not matter. There was no fear of fate among the Clans. As he had read in a Clan saga, in a passage he could not quite remember accurately:
Fate sits high in the bidder's chair
Trying to subdue the Wolf Clan
And failing;
Trying to outbid the Ghost Bears
And losing;
Trying to make the Jade Falcons listen to reason
And listening instead.
What was he doing, thinking about fate at all? He always tended to become dangerously reflective before battle, allowing his mind to wander around his past. Too many books, too many stories with unsettling doubts in them, too much reflection altogether. His life had been difficult, much of it, with failure, shame, loss, hard success. But he had struggled through it all. Survived.
Some people said they would change nothing if they had their lives to live over. As for the Commander, he would not repeat a moment of itЧwell, maybe a moment here and thereЧeven if it meant forsaking his present high position in the Jade Falcon chain of command. Too many events had warped his thinking, too much hardship had made him the perpetual outsider. Of the Clan, yet outside of it.
I have read too many books, he thought. I am beginning to think like one. And we cannot have that.
Still I would like to go back in time, confront myself at the moment I began training, tell myself the mistakes to avoid. I could bargain for myself a more ordered life, bid for the kind of existence I should have had.