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  THE PRICE OF PEACE . . .

  The Raging Bears have begun their occupation of the planet Vega with the hope of restoring order on a planet beset by violence and civil ruin. But their bold move to stabilize Prefecture I for The Republic of the Sphere may prove to be the chance their enemies have waited for....

  While the military takeover of Vega was no great challenge, setting up a new planetary government and restoring the infrastructure of civilization have proven to be far more difficult for the peacekeeping forces of the Rasalhague Dominion. There remains an underground resistance that refuses to cease fire, and the Bears suspect that the Draconis Combine is secretly supporting the rebellion. As the Combine threatens them from without, the Bears also find themselves plagued by betrayal and deception from within. Unless they can expose the rival elements in their clan, they may end up as fodder for destruction....

  Trial by Chaos

  Conner Hall throttled back his ‘Mech and prepared to turn back to the base.

  As he checked the rearview image in his HUD before turning, he saw Jorgen's 'Mech, following at the end of the formation, disappear as the ground gave way beneath it.

  The 'Mech dropped into a deep pit, until only the cockpit and superstructure could be seen aboveground. A large cloud of dust fountained up from the hole, momentarily clouding his visuals. As the dust cleared, Conner could see the 'Mech slumped unmoving against the side of the pit. Even with the 'Mech's suspension and a cockpit crash couch to cushion the fall, fifteen meters was still fifteen meters.

  "Jorgen! Can you hear me? Jorgen."

  There was no answer. If the man was still alive, he was unconscious.

  Conner's mind raced as he threw the safeties off all his weapon systems.

  It could be an accident. The city was centuries old and the veteran of many wars; it was riddled with unmarked tunnels, pipes and underground structures.

  It could be an accident, but he didn't think so. "Formation! Spread out! Be ready for—"

  There was a shout of alarm on the command circuit. Duncan Huntsig, third in the formation, yelled, "ConstructionMechs! They were playing possum!"

  TRIAL BY CHAOS

  A BATTLETECH NOVEL

  J. Steven York

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc..

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  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2006 10 987654321

  Copyright © WizKids, Inc., 2006 All rights reserved

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  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  Dedicated to my uncle, Gary Jones, for being a fan when it wasn't a familial requirement.

  Acknowledgments

  With special thanks to my editor, Sharon Turner Mulvihill, for her patience as I finished the last leg of a long marathon.

  1

  From the Great Work of Galaxy Commander Isis Bekker

  That day is like a dream to me now: distant and surreal, yet vividly clear. I can see the dark clouds, as much smoke as water, hanging low in the sky, turning day into night. I can see lightning streaking down, turning the landscape into snapshots of chaos and destruction, punctuating a darkness full of small fires burning like stars fallen from the sky. Quilting it all together were stitches of death: lasers flashing through the smoke, the burning trails of missiles, jagged lines of tracers like incendiary swarms of hornets.

  In this darkness things stirred like maggots in rotting flesh; soldiers in armor, tanks and, striding above it all, the gigantic forms of BattleMechs, unstoppable titans by whose force planets trembled, and wars were won and lost.

  The place was Vega, a world of considerable strategic importance, once a center of commerce and political power for all of Prefecture I. We, the Omega Galaxy of Clan Ghost Bear, had been dispatched here with the mission to restore order and stability. That was our mission.

  As for the real reason we were sent, I suspect it was a good deal more byzantine. But at that time I only suspected the complexity of our situation, and I had no time to ruminate on politics and hidden motives.

  We knew our duty, my Galaxy and I, and we did not hesitate. We found a broken world, hanging on the ragged edge of a precipice, at the bottom of which waited only savagery. We waded into the chaos, identified the cancer that seemed to be the cause of it, and set about cutting out that cancer.

  Never have I seen such a terrible thing, and I swear on my dying breath, I will never see it again. I am a soldier, first and foremost, and I think myself hardened to war and battle. War is one thing. War is terrible, and the Inner Sphere is no stranger to war.

  Again and again, after the fighting is done, civilized men and women crawl from the rubble and rebuild. It was always so. Or so I had believed.

  But this, this was the end of civilization, the end of the thing I had always imagined to be universal and invincible. Factions might battle, ideologies might clash, but always, no matter its color, no matter its flag, civilization would rise from the ashes. And where there was civilization, even if it was the home of the enemy, there was hope of redemption, of revolution, of reconciliation.

  This was a world that, in a single year, fell into chaos and civil war. In a single night, an insane act of terror wiped out its government and unleashed the festering conflicts of a dozen internal factions. Great buildings were blown t
o rubble. The factories ceased to run. Water stopped flowing from the taps and power stopped coming through the wires. Medicine ran short and sickness spread through the squalid cities.

  The only order, if you could call it that, came from bandits and warlords. They battled each other through the bones of the cities, costing countless innocents their lives, until only a few remained and they all deferred to one man: Jedra Kean, self-styled Lord of Vega.

  We came to make war in a place that looked as though it had already lost the war. And in a way it had.

  We came because no one else would.

  We came, I believe, because civilization needs its champions, and that has ever been the purpose of the Clans, to restore civilization. Not merely to make it whole, but to restore it to a state of purity and enlightenment not seen since the fall of the fabled Star League. And that is part of what made this so terrible in my mind, that caused me to reexamine everything I am, and everything I believe. Just more than five centuries earlier, Vega was where the Star League had been born. If Vega fell, in my mind, there was no hope for any of us. Our dream would be shattered, our Clan history a joke. It could not be. I could not let it be. Yet in those grim, early days on Vega, I stood at the edge of the abyss and saw only blackness below.

  I can tell you now, to stand on the edge of oblivion is a kind of gift. In a universe of uncertainty, you at least know where you are, and you know the way you must go. Faced with the abyss, you achieve a kind of certainty.

  If you ask now, why have the Raging Bears gone the way they have gone? If you ask how our path strayed so far from the ancient ways of the Clans, or even of our own Clan, I tell you this: we went the only way we could.

  Around us. The Republic had crumbled, the prefecture government had withdrawn, and the rest of the Inner Sphere had turned its back on Vega. It was hardly alone in the growing chaos; only the worst example. Around it, other worlds were falling to fragmentation and old rivalries long held in check by The Republic. Each world held tightly to what it had, and left its poorer neighbors to fend for themselves.

  To restore the glory that was the Star League is our very reason for existing. In the Great Father Kerensky's hand, we are a message from the past, sent forward to some unknown but hopefully deserving future. We arrive in great ships descending from the sky on fusion fire. But now as then, we do not fight for Vega.

  We fight for tomorrow.

  Nasew (provisional capital), North Central District

  North Nanturo continent, Vega

  21 November 3136

  The sixty-five-ton 'Mech called the Karhu walked through the narrow streets of the city like thunder, like a storm funneled into a narrow canyon, black clouds boiling in frustration against unyielding cliffs. In the 'Mech's tiny cockpit, Star Colonel Conner Hall felt more acutely confined by those streets and buildings than by the alloy-steel cockpit bulkheads that were only slightly farther apart than the width of his broad shoulders.

  He clutched the 'Mech's throttle in his hand, wishing more than anything to slam it against the stops and simply cut loose his mechanical beast. It wasn't to be.

  It had been ten minutes since they'd received the scramble from their improvised base near the spaceport. The water-pumping station at the near end of the LincolnPass was under attack by insurgent forces.

  Labor Separatists, remnants of the old warlord gangs, anti-Clan rioters—it didn't matter, really. His forces should have been there by now, instead of tiptoeing through the streets dodging traffic. On any other world, in any other situation, they would have been there. But nothing on Vega was war as usual. In fact, they said it wasn't a war at all.

  Conner Hall knew better.

  With a grunt of frustration, he toggled his radio to the city control channel. "City Control, this is Star Colonel Hall. We are responding to an attack at the Lincoln pumping complex. My 'Mechs are tripping over buses here—literally. Get this traffic clear!"

  The hated voice responded immediately. Despite many requests, Hall had never met any of the handful of controllers who manned this channel, or even learned their names. His warriors had given the voices names, so they could identify one or another as they traded horror stories between missions. They called this one "Fred."

  Fred's voice was high and slightly nasal, always tinged with a kind of bored, bureaucratic annoyance. He never got excited, never seemed to care that his city was under siege by terrorists and revolutionaries, that his fellow Vegans were in danger. To Fred, it all seemed to be business as usual.

  Traffic jams, terrorists bombs, or the MechWarriors of the Rasalhague Dominion rushing to respond—it was all the same to Fred. They were all sources of annoyance to one degree or another, and little more.

  "It's a weekday rush hour. You have to expect traffic."

  "You have control of every traffic signal and police officer in the city. Open a route for us."

  "This is a city of almost a million people. Star Colonel. It can't just spin on its heel like one of your 'Mechs."

  "To be technical, nothing spins on its heel, man or 'Mech. You turn on the ball of the foot, or you fall over."

  "Then, Star Colonel, you understand that some things have to be done a certain way. I'm doing all I can to clear the expressway for you, but all lanes are jammed."

  Hall grimaced. Their formation consisted of three Karhus and three modified AgroMechs. The bigger 'Mechs had jump jets, plasma rockets that would have let them speed to their target in 150-meter leaps, but that would have left the slower AgroMechs far behind. In any case, use of jump jets within the city was also forbidden except in the most dire of emergencies, because of the damage they would cause.

  Another transmission cut in on his command channel. It was the voice of Jorgen, a green warrior seeing his first combat here on Vega. Jorgen was assigned as his wingman, the sort of adaptation of Inner Sphere tactics for which the Omega Galaxy, the Raging Bears, were famous among the other Galaxies.

  Or perhaps more properly, infamous.

  In combat, Jorgen's job was to watch Hall's back while Hall acted as the aggressor on attacks. It was a very un-Clannish approach to combat. Clan MechWarriors were supposed to crawl all over each other to get the first kill and the most kills. To wait passively while another warrior took the kills should have been unthinkable. But the tactic had cut the Raging Bears' combat losses by fifteen percent without affecting their overall kill rate.

  The key to making this tactic palatable was to frequently rotate each MechWarrior from leader to wing, in order to give everyone ample opportunity for action. But there were other ways to use the wing position. In this case, it let Hall work closely with his new man, simultaneously keeping an eye on him and showing him how things worked in the unusual theater of operations that was occupied Vega.

  Trouble was, at the moment, Jorgen was not watching his back, he was watching everyone's back. Jorgen was bringing up the rear of their formation, since MechWarrior Duncan Huntsig had balked at taking the trailing position.

  Huntsig's continued challenges to his authority were becoming an issue. Hall had considered making the positioning of the formation a direct order, just to see what would come of it, but Huntsig was a good warrior and he didn't want to lose him to an unnecessary trial. The Clan had ways of settling such minor disputes quickly and efficiently, but given the urgency of their mission it had been faster to flip the formation than force the issue with Huntsig.

  Now, his decision seemed to be working to their advantage. Huntsig didn't care much for the locals or even the First Vega Regulars MechWarriors who were their comrades in arms, and he paid little attention to how things worked in their society. Conner doubted that Huntsig would have spotted the skyway access, had he been in the position to see it.

  Jorgen continued. "Star Colonel. There's an overturned truck on the skyway. Northbound traffic is stopped, and southbound has been detoured off the road somewhere back up the line. It's wide open. We could be through town in no time."

  "Good eye.
Jorgen. I will check on it." He switched channels again. "City Control, what about the skyway?"

  "The skyway is closed. We've got an overturned—"

  "I know what you have got! 'Mechs can just jump over the accident, or step over it. Permission to divert."

  There was a pause. "Negative! No! The road deck isn't reinforced to handle your 'Mechs."

  "I am willing to chance it."

  "Star Colonel! This is vital city infrastructure we're talking about here!"

  Hall cringed. Infrastructure was a word he was coming to hate more with each passing day. "I remind you that the pumping station is vital infrastructure too. That pipeline supplies water for the entire Northgate Plateau industrial region."

  "And if I let you use that road, it will be closed six months for repairs, instead of just long enough to clear a wrecked truck. We lost half our major roads in the Warlord Massacres, and the Median Interway is still closed because of those bridge bombings last month. If you people had stopped those—"

  Conner slapped the mute button and slammed his stick hard right, swerving his 'Mech to avoid a construction vehicle stuck halfway across a gridlocked intersection. Startled commuters gawked as three Clan OmniMechs and three local AgroMechs filed past them like a parade of giants, moving rapidly north.

  The AgroMechs looked out of place in the city, but they had never actually seen farm duty. They'd been built just across the pass in Northgate, shipped here factory-new, and modified for combat duty. Though Vega was a major producer of IndustrialMechs, or had been before the planet's recent troubles, there were no BattleMechs available with which to outfit the volunteer First Vega Regulars. When the decision had been made to incorporate the local militia into the Ghost Bear security forces, they'd been equipped with the best the planet had to offer: modified AgroMechs.

  Using AgroMechs had been a controversial decision; one about which Hall still had mixed feelings. Shortly after the fall of the HPG network and during the early troubles in The Republic, IndustrialMechs had seen much use on the battlefields of the Inner Sphere. But they'd always been a desperate compromise while nations rearmed, and now 'Mechs and heavy conventional arms had largely supplanted their use on most worlds.