The Wreckoning - Russell Zimmerman: Another outing by the Merlin crew, a fun sounding arena engagement format, and lots of technical detail for those who like to see every element of the TRO on the page. Focusing on the advantages of the Merlin's versatility made for a fun story. Good art piece for the final swarm battle, too. Would've been perfect if there'd been a "Mercer Ravannion Was Right!" banner in the crowd.
Thanks! I'm glad you dug it! I was
this close to putting in some sort of joke or other name-drop about Ravannion, but I couldn't figure out a way to wedge it in there gracefully. I felt like the latter half of the story already had enough moving parts and people/organizations/etc getting named, in the end I didn't want to wing one more curveball into the mix.
The story is, in large part, a love letter to the
Merlin, who I've been making
myself learn to love. They're not a 'Mech I've ever particularly liked in the past, but (a) I'm writing about Mountain Wolf a lot, (b) for about half a century they're all Mountain Wolf makes, and (c) I think part of the job is to
make 'Mechs in my stories sound cool, so I've (d)
got to make myself find what to appreciate about them. And...this is what I landed on, after some gameplay. It really
is the jack of all trades ability (which is nominally what I hate about it, I tend to prefer a jack of all trades
lance but specialized individual 'Mechs) that makes them work. A gaggle of
Merlins can put down more long-range fire than a pair of
Warhammers. A gaggle of
Merlins spams the joint up with
eight medium lasers during the plentiful mid-range fight phases of a game. An individual
Merlin has the same anti-infantry firepower as a
Vulcan does, nominally a dedicated anti-infantry 'Mech. A
Merlin can take a lot of hits, and those jump jets push it from thoroughly mediocre movement to mildly above average, again, it can handle rough terrain albeit unremarkably.
And...that's not bad, y'know? It's not sexy. It's not a badass flashy one-on-one 'Mech you'd ever catch Phelan Kell or Natasha Kerensky in. But it
does what it's supposed to do, which is provide an affordable Heavy 'Mech option to factions that otherwise don't have a lot of affordable Heavy 'Mech options, and, working together,
Merlins can do most battlefield jobs well enough. Maybe not well, but well enough.
And as
I slowly grew to love the dumb things through gameplay, Megamek play, and diving into this ~250k words of Mountain-Wolf-centric fiction (where, yes, the main protagonist pilots a stock
Merlin throughout), I thought it would be fun to show that love in a short story, too. I wanted a nice 'in between' story as Mountain Wolf evolved, I wanted to show how they got an influx of money after scraping by for so long, and I wanted to write a Solaris yarn. Everything fell into place nicely. :D
