There isn't really enough here to do a full "review" (not a criticism in and of itself, it's a nice little bonus thing) but I just got a chance to read this last night and figured I'd post a few thoughts since I hadn't seen anyone else do it here.
First of all, it warms the cockles of my heart to see Willian H. Keith's name on BT fiction again. I'd be the first to admit I'm not the Gray Death Legion's foremost fan, but Keith was the author for so much of the early fiction (about half of the 3025-era canon, really) that having him at helm here feels right, like coming full circle.
I do have to remark upon the cover art, which depicts a
Commando in front of some sort of elaborate fantasy gothic spire-ish buildings. Unless I missed something this doesn't seem to fit the setting of the actual story, so I am assuming this artwork was reused from somewhere else, but I don't recognize it.
The story follows Colby's Commandos (the merc unit that became Carlyle's Commandos, which gets wiped out at the beginning of Decision at Thunder Rift) and the protagonist is Durant Carlyle, Grayson's daddy. They take a contract to put down a pirate band on a near-Periphery world, and wouldn't ya know it, turns out there was more going on than they were told. Spoiler alert: as is
so often always the case in the early GDL stories, it was
the Combine all along! There's a shady employer in a seedy bar, some pre-battle MechWarrior banter, some 'Mech combat, all the stuff you'd expect. The story is supposed to be continued in the pack-in with the AGoAC set, which I have not had a chance to read yet.
Some stray observations:
-One thing I have to give Keith credit for is that he always went to way more effort into making the worlds his stories take place on "exotic" than most BT authors do. The average BT novel might say a planet is "desert" and make one passing reference to its day cycle being at most a couple hours off from Earth's, Keith gives us a planet tidally locked to a red dwarf where one half is baked and the other half is ice and all human habitation is on the narrow strip in between under a perpetual almost-dawn that never comes.
-It's mentioned that by this point (2990) there's apparently a sort of urban legend among mechtechs that once upon a time it was possible to control a 'Mech entirely with one's thoughts through the neurohelmet, which is kind of funny.
-Is it me or do BattleTech writers all really have a hard on for the
Shadow Hawk? Durant pilots one here just like his progeny did/will for a couple of books 30 years before/later, and there's a whole paragraph singing its praises. On the other hand Keith goes out of his way to slag the
Whitworth, although based on the established fluff for the WTH you can't blame him much.
-Such are the merits of the
Shadow Hawk in the eyes of Colby's Commandos that they detach their pair to conduct recon together ahead of the rest of the unit, even though they're in different lances. I have to admit this bugged me a bit. Why not put them both in the same lance if they're going to operate together?
-There's an interesting description of an automated mobile mining refinery, said to be probably a Star League relic, which sounds a bit like a not-quite-as-colossal cousin of the motorized steampunk cities from Mortal Engines, or maybe Piper Ninety from The Gone-Away World if anybody has read that.
-The twist/conclusion at the end really raises the elephant-in-the-room question about mercenary units in the Inner Sphere, which is why more of them don't just retire rich after one big score. Of course since the real answer is we want to read stories and play games about big stompy robots that go pew-pew, I don't expect much of an answer to be provided in the narrative.
Overall, the story itself is frankly nothing special but it does what I think it "needed" to do to serve its purpose giving some flavor of the universe for the uninitiated and has some sentimental value maybe to long-time fans.
