Конференция Библиотеки Battletech

The BattleTech Introductory Box Set contains a short story potraying Wolf's Dragoons' attack on Anton Marik's New Delos palace after his betrayal of the mercenaries. To complement the release of the Box Set and that story, BattleCorps has commissioned a separate, more intimate story for BattleCorps subscribers, and present it here.

No one is born a legend.

I got a call a few years ago to write an introductory story for the new Box Set about the New Delos action in 3014. As the so-called Dragoon-boy (it's what I get for "The Last Day of Zeta," "Hector," "Feral," "Night Terrors," and the Black Widows half of Starterbook: Wolf and Blake) I got tapped to write a Natasha Kerensky story.

Which had never been done before.

I mean, everyone knows that Natasha Kerensky is the icon of BattleTech--before Devlin "I walk on water and crap gold" Stone, anyway. If you played Succession Wars-era BattleTech you know Natasha Kerensky. But there are very, very few pages written about her from her point of view. A few pages in The Blood of Kerensky novels, and most of that even from Phelan's point of view.

Which meant I got to put a mind behind the legend. And since the Black Widow of the Succession Wars is the hardest rock of them all, I needed an anvil to temper her against. And what makes a person harden like trauma?

We know now that she was Star Colonel of the 328th Assault Cluster before leaving with the Dragoons. She wasn't a trainee or fresh out of the sibko. But like all the Dragoons, she was an Inner Sphere virgin. So falling in love would have been extreme. She would have converted to it, more or less--and converts don't do anything halfway.

So I wrote "The Memory of Pain." And Loren and Randall said "Wow. That's an awesome story. But it's totally wrong for the Box Set. It's too personal." And they were right. "A Time of Ice and Fire" is much better a story for the Box Set. It's a good BattleTech story, but it still carries a lot of the emotion of the action. That's why its in the rulebook, and "The Memory of Pain" isn't.

But that doesn't mean "The Memory of Pain" isn't a good story. And that doesn't mean it can't have good home here on BattleCorps.