To Ride the Chimera Read online

  A MechWarrior without peer, Thaddeus Marik has become the figurehead for a new community of worlds attempting to resurrect the Free Worlds League. After defeating a Lyran invasion on the planet of Savannah and negotiating a successful alliance with the Protectorate Coalition, Marik must now ally himself with Jessica Halas-Hughes Marik if the new league is to have a chance.

  Having Marik and his forces at her side gives Jessica much-needed credibility and greater influence on Oriente. But old hatreds die hard, erupting in a war against enemies who will stop at nothing to destroy the founding of a new league...

  To Ride the Chimera

  “I will not fence with you, Warden.” Jessica’s tone gained an edge. “It is my intention to reunite the Free Worlds League. This is no secret.”

  Thaddeus nodded. One thing the leaders of the three most powerful nations in the region shared was the dream of a unified Free Worlds League. Their differences sprang from mutually exclusive convictions about who should rule.

  “Mine is the greater claim to the captain-generalcy,” Jessica said, echoing his thoughts. “My father fought to save the Free Worlds League when Thomas Marik abandoned it to pursue his own ambitions.”

  Interesting that you feel comfortable saying that to a Marik. Is that the honesty you mentioned or arrogance?

  “Many independent worlds support reunification of the League under my leadership.” Jessica’s eyes held his levelly. “As do the Rim Commonality and the Duchy of Tamarind-Abbey.”

  Thaddeus blinked.

  “However, much of this pledged support is conditional,” Jessica said. “For all my family’s moral claim to the throne, there is a physical requirement we do not possess. One that is meaningless in the context of right or ability to rule, but that weighs heavily on the hearts of many loyal to the Free Worlds League.”

  “You’re not a real Marik.” Thaddeus stated the obvious.

  Jessica did not blink at the adjective.

  “To sit on what is, in the minds of most, the throne of House Marik, I must have a blood connection to the Marik family,” she said.

  Lady Jessica was obviously talking marriage. But just as obviously, she was not envisioning the Free Worlds League unifying under her children or her grandchildren. She meant to hold the throne herself. Impossible, given the conditions stipulated.

  Unless…

  “I see you’ve grasped it,” Philip said.

  Thaddeus looked at the man, not sure he grasped anything at all.

  “Thaddeus Marik,” he said, his formal tone pulling Thaddeus upright in his chair, “will you marry my wife?”

  TO RIDE THE CHIMERA

  A BATTLETECH™ NOVEL

  Kevin Killiany

  ROC

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

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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

  Copyright © WizKids, Inc., 2008

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 9781101418116

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  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.

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  This book is for Valerie,

  who is my wife, my other half,

  and my personal gyroscope.

  Your love keeps me moving forward.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dean Wesley Smith was the first editor to ever personally respond to one of my manuscripts. He rejected it. But he became my mentor and revealed the secret of success in writing: write, mail, repeat. It’s a formula that has not failed me yet. His wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose uncompromising standards as a writer make her the most formidable of instructors, taught me to be unblinkingly honest in my craftsmanship (and thus work a lot harder than I’d ever imagined I would as a writer). I must also thank Loren Coleman, who first introduced me and a few other innocents to the wondrous world of giant walking tanks and human adventure that is BattleTech. That long-ago conversation led to my joining BattleCorps and getting the experience and understanding I needed to become a novelist in the MechWarrior universe. Of course, that knowledge would have done me no good if editor of editors Sharon Turner Mulvihill had not been willing to take a chance on an old man who liked to tell stories. She has always been there, a constant support to me and—I have it on good authority—every one of her writers, as she labors to bring the stories of MechWarrior to life. In fact, the entire MechWarrior/BattleTech community continues to work together. This novel would not have been possible if folks like Herbert Beas, Randall Bills, Jason Hardy, Blaine Pardoe, David Stansel-Garner, Andrew Timson, Øystein Tvedten and others foolish enough to let me know their AIM hadn’t been willing to drop whatever they were doing and answer random questions and offer advice.

  I also would not be here without the members of Soul Saving Station. Once again, they’ve suffered through months of weekly homilies about BattleMechs and been unstinting in their encouragement and support.

  Finally, and most important, my family. The road to this book began over a decade ago when I confessed to my wife that I’d always wanted to be a writer. Valerie said, “It’s your dream; make it work.” Since that time she and our three children—Alethea, Anson and Daya—have been there for me: Understanding that dad staring into space is working, celebrating every sale, plotting vengeance on editors who reject my stories and looking folks square in the eye and telling them I’m a writer with a straight face means more to me than I can ever explain.

  Prologue

  Place, unknown

  Time, unknown

  Where were they?

  They were somewhere; somewhere close. She could sense them.

  Why had
they done this?

  And who were they?

  She shouted again. Or thought she did. She could not feel her jaw open, felt no constriction of her lungs filling with air, no wind rushing through her throat. No sound. But she shouted. She was sure she shouted.

  She had long ago given up on polite inquiry.

  How long ago?

  She floated in darkness. Or perhaps she was sinking? Or lying on a mattress so soft it could not be felt?

  No.

  Floating. The lack of up and down, of forward and back reminded her of the weightlessness of space travel—but without the nausea.

  Floating, then. But not in space.

  She had heard of sensory deprivation tanks—fluid-filled tubes, the occupants of which neither felt nor heard nor saw. But surely she would feel air in her lungs? Hear her own voice as she shouted? Hear her heart beating.

  And her heart was beating. She knew it. She knew it was beating because she was alive to worry about it beating.

  Or was she alive? Her mind was here, was aware, but what of her flesh? She could feel no evidence of anything beyond her thoughts. What of the body that carried her, the face she saw each day in the mirror? Were they still with her? Or had they sloughed away in decay?

  She fought down that thought, tried to stop the tide of images, but they returned. Surging to fill her mind, to drive her cowering spirit down into itself. Was this death? All of life, all of faith, all of ambition, all of striving, all of everything, leading to this? To an eternity without sensation? To nothing?

  No. Worse than nothing.

  Floating forever in darkness was not nothing.

  It was hell.

  And she was not in hell. She was not dead.

  Her spirit, collapsed down into itself under the weight of fear—of terror—shifted. Adjusted. Her soul—shaped through a lifetime of hopes deferred, compressed through decades of suppression, distilled by countless minute acts of discipline, refined through the loveless fire of her mother’s will—confronted cold death in the expanse of a shapeless void.

  And snarled.

  “I am Julietta Marik!” she declared, silent in the soundless dark. “And I still live!”

  1

  Court of Parliament

  Tesla City, Miaplacidus

  Covenant Worlds (Former Prefecture VII)

  23 August 3137

  Warden Thaddeus Marik sat, sipping tea and contemplating his options.

  Thaddeus was aware of Green seated in the comfortable armchair facing Thaddeus’ desk, working on his noteputer even as he studied the hooded monitor of the desk unit, and was glad of his agent’s silent company.

  The Spartan office was soundproofed and the lower two-thirds of the windows turned opaque to restrict his view of the cloudless blue sky—an environment engineered to encourage focused contemplation of the five worlds in his charge, with no distractions.

  The Covenant Worlds.

  Thaddeus liked the layered meanings of the name. Covenant Worlds had a gravitas devoid of threat that evoked a commitment to promises made. Integrity was a scarce commodity in these troubled times.

  Last week’s addition of Connaught and Acubens had doubled the Covenant’s population and industrial capabilities, and its government was still adjusting to its new size. The raised dais of the Counselors’ Chamber, which had been a lecture hall when the Court of Parliament building had been the humanities department of MiaplacidusChristianLiberalCollege, was still tacky with wet paint.

  That the nascent nation needed a parliament amused Thaddeus. Five short months ago, when the Covenant Worlds had been Miaplacidus, Alphard and Nathan, decisions had been made by three men sitting in a conference room in an anonymous office building a dozen blocks from the college.

  Court of Parliament, he corrected himself.

  “My Marik name does not guarantee nobility of character,” he had warned them then, the four of them seated in remarkably comfortable chairs. His personal theory was that the artisans of Miaplacidus were incapable of making uncomfortable furniture. “Nor that I will always act wisely.”

  “If we were offering you this position—this burden—on the basis of your family name, that argument would carry weight,” Governor Tiago Paragon had chuckled. He’d been governor of Miaplacidus under the Republic of the Sphere, and—always minimalists in their social institutions—the Miaplacidians had seen no reason to change that simply because The Republic that appointed him had collapsed. “But we’re basing our assessment on what we have seen of you the man.”

  Sir Kiasok Prusak of Nathan had nodded his agreement with an affected deliberateness, which struck Thaddeus as being at odds with his appearance. No doubt the forest of finger-long braids radiating from the young noble’s scalp reflected the traditions of Nathan, but Thaddeus guessed the moplike effect made dignity difficult.

  Odester Morgan-King had been planetary legate of Alphard before The Republic became FortressRepublic. Now he was vice chancellor of his adopted homeworld and its appointed representative to Miaplacidus. He had couched his approval in ornate language, but in the end communicated no more than Prusak’s nod.

  In that deceptively informal meeting, Thaddeus Marik had become warden of the Covenant Worlds. Commander in chief, under the Council of Parliament, of all military and constabulary forces in a nation of three—now five—worlds.

  Though he had not intended to move into the public eye so soon, once he had assumed the mantle of warden, Thaddeus had felt a sense of inevitability. The very title—harkening back to “warden of the Perimeter Defenses,” the ancient title of the Free Worlds League’s captain-general during peacetime—seemed confirmation that the course he had chosen was the right one.

  And God knew he needed confirmation.

  If Thaddeus’ assumption had been correct—if the Republic of the Sphere had dissolved as a result of civil war—he would have held thirty worlds at this point. Not openly, but a half dozen independent nation-states would have been beholden to him. Unifying those communities—a step still years away—would have formed an arc of worlds stretching from Phecda to New Canton with his native Augustine at its heart. Commercially and strategically vital, his

  Marik Crescent

  would have been the perfect foundation from which to rebuild the Free Worlds League.

  But there had been no civil war. Instead, Exarch Jonah Levin had done the unthinkable: simply abandoned ninety percent of The Republic. The resulting chaos thwarted Thaddeus’ careful plans.

  Of the six pearls he’d planned to string, the six communities he had meant to carve out of the corpse of The Republic, only three remained viable. And only two were within his grasp.

  Riktofven had seized Thaddeus’ homeworld as the capital of the damned Senatorial Alliance. Until he and the remains of his cabal were removed from Augustine, their ill-conceived nation-state separated Thaddeus from the worlds of his Tall Trees Union. Reunification with them was decades away.

  The Protectorate Coalition of Rochelle, Alkes, Kalidasa and New Hope was a different matter—and a testimony to Green’s skills at forging political rivalries into unions. In recent months the Coalition had fended off a grab by the Marik-StewartCommonwealth and a Lyran probe-in-force.

  Though Thaddeus felt an almost parental pride in their independent successes, there was a downside. The Protectorate Coalition would not now meekly accept the leadership of the Covenant Worlds. Nor would they seek to form a larger union unless and until his Covenant Worlds developed into a nation that commanded their respect.

  A process that was taking damnably longer than he had thought possible.

  Nathan and Acubens, both agricultural worlds regarded as the larders of the region, and Miaplacidus, a world of artisans and traders, had been only lightly touched by the devastating Jihad of the Word of Blake against the Inner Sphere. Not so, Connaught and Alphard. The retreating Blakists had killed thousands on Connaught in order to cripple the Kong orbital shipyards and the BattleMech facilities on the surf
ace. They’d been less thorough on Alphard, obviously regarding tanks and communication equipment as less of a prize for their opponents. Seven decades later, both worlds were viable but years from full recovery.

  Now the Parliament, grown from the original three savvy horse traders to three dozen politicians trying to earn their constituents the greatest advantage, was locked in an endless cycle of debate on how to best consolidate the disparate worlds into a unified whole.

  “We need more than just consolidation to make the Covenant Worlds a power in the region,” Thaddeus said, breaking the silence. “We need a vital industrial base to support our military and civilian infrastructure.”

  “Irian is ideal but out of the question.” Green stated the obvious, categorizing their options. “They have made themselves a vital trade partner to a half dozen worlds and communities. Joining the Covenant would actually make them less secure.”

  “And if the enlightened self-interest of their neighbors should fail, the generation-long connection of the Hughes family and Oriente through the marriage of Jessica and Philip should signify,” Thaddeus added. “Captain-General Jessica and her Protectorate make a formidable argument for leaving Irian in peace.”

  “The Oriente Protectorate has established a permanent presence on both Ibstock and

  Park Place

  ,” Green said.

  “By which you mean to imply they decapitated the Senatorial Alliance for trying to conquer Irian,” Thaddeus grunted. “I think they would have taken those worlds no matter who held them. Just as the Marik-StewartCommonwealth gobbled up Avellaneda and Holt.”

  “And Stewart.”

  “ClanSea Fox traded Stewart to the Marik-StewartCommonwealth. And even if they hadn’t, repatriation sentiments ran high in the populace. Given the chance, they might have sued to join the Commonwealth voluntarily.” Thaddeus shook his head. “Hardly a conquest.”