And yet, after centuries of warfare, no clear gains have been made by any single House, no fatal flaw uncovered. War continues, with the giants struggling among the ruins of what once had been a proud, galactic civilization. Like well-matched BattleMechs, the forces seemed too evenly balanced for any one to gain that vital, decisive edge.
But the powers behind the war understood a maxim of war as old as war itself. What cannot be won by force of arms can often be achieved through cunning, deceit, or by a concealed blade slipped into an enemy's back.
Nicolai Aristobulus Terror's Balance: A History of the Succession Wars
BOOK 1
1
The traitor slid out from under the tangle of cables and hard-wired circuit boards, wiping grease-stained fingers across the front of his coveralls. The watch officer behind the console above him frowned. "Aren't you done in there yet?"
"It's a peripheral circuit, boss," the traitor said. "I can't get it from here. I'll have to check the cameras down in the Repair Bay." He reached back into the circuitry access and flicked a row of switches from on to off with precise deliberation. "Your monitors'll be down for a bit."
"How long?"
"Oh, not long." He began gathering his tools and stuffing them into his canvas shoulder bag. "Fifteen minutes."
The watch officer glanced at his wristcom. "Make it fast," he said, penning a notation on the clipboard in his hand.
"Don't worry," the other man replied. "It will be."
The traitor was an astech and a native Trell, his sharp-chiseled features and black, curly hair typical of Trellwan's small native population, his complexion extraordinarily pale due to the world's UV-poor sun. The watchstation door passed the man at a touch of his fingertips to the security scanner plate, then hissed shut at his back. As he moved down the stone-walled passageway, the clatter of his footsteps echoed hollowly.
Cold stone steps led down and down, through deserted corridors and past rooms guarded by grey uniformed sentries. Twice, the Trell had to show his pass, a holographic ID pinned high on his shoulder. Other astechs passed him in stony silence or with nodded greeting. His coveralls and heavy toolbag were pass enough to get him through most doorways, as there were few areas in the Castle where a native as tech could not
go.
The Repair Bay was part artifice and part natural cavern, a high-valuted room whose lingering gloom was broken by isolated pools of light One wall was brown-rusted and corroded with age. At the Bay's center, crisscrossed by spotlight pools and the snaking coils of power feeds and compressor lines, the 55-ton hulk of a partly disassembled 'Mech lay sprawled across an elevated rack. A Tech bawled orders and gestured from the deck at a pair of astechs working on the behemoth's chest. Wearily, they stooped above the actinic flare of a wielding laser. Armor plates weighing half a ton apiece dangled above in a tangled web work of lines and scaffolding.
The traitor looked around at the four 'Mechs that were the heart and soul of Carlyle's Commandos. Armored, ten-meter monsters, BattleMechs were all but invincible against troops or conventional armor, so powerful that only another 'Mech of equal or greater firepower had any chance at all of bringing one down. The Trell smiled to himself, thinking how he had accomplished just that with merely a forged maintenance order and fifteen minutes work.
Disabling the Lance's Shadow Hawk had been the first part of his two-pronged mission. He had been given explicit instructions and training, as well as a replacement circuit board to be slipped into a 'Mech's servoelectronics control nexus if he got the chance. He'd found that chance and the board had crippled every power feed in the 'Mech's leg servoactuator series before melting itself into an anonymous lump of slag, all traces of sabotage erased. Now the Lance had but three 'Mechs the Captain's Phoenix Hawk and the two 20-ton Wasps. Without the Shadow Hawk's particular balance of heavy firepower and maneuverability, the garrison would be crippled if it found itself in an all-out fight.
The Trell clutched his tool bag tighter under his arm, and hurried past to the rattletrap metal steps that led in dizzying zigzags to the Bay Control Center, a windowed booth suspended from the back wall fifteen meters above the stone floor.
The Repair Bay Officer of the Watch looked up from the glow of a monitor, lowered his feet from the console, and set his mug of chava aside. "Yes?"
"Maintenance, sir," said the small, dark man, turning his shoulder so that the officer could see his astech's card without rising from his chair. "They sent me down from Central Control to find a fault in the security camera circuitry. I think it's a bad line in here somewhere."
The officer nodded. "Damn junk," he said. "Like everything else on this sand-rotten ..." Realizing too late that he talking to a Trell, he bit off whatever else he'd been about to say and pointed at a row of dead monitors, "Access is back here," he said, then propped his feet back up and returned to the single live monitor on the console. The traitor glanced over the officer's shoulder, and noted that the monitor showed the spaceport, empty ferrocrete broken by overlapping patches of shadow and light under a chill, starry sky.