Oh, it definitely refers to the Battle of Blood River.
When I originally wrote "A Cover of Paint," introducing the Commandos, the first draft was a mess. There were too many perspectives being crammed into too few words and the result was kind of disjointed. Now I had elaborate backstories and characterization for every important officer in the unit and wanted to show those off. But Jason came back to me and gave me a rather solid critique with his rejection. As has been the case with most of what I've had published, I polished that story up, severely changing the focus and pacing, incorporating all of the criticism I'd received. The next draft was better still and after some more iterations was accepted. I think it was a good luck at the very average mercenary company, not too successful, but not yet on the road to piracy, a good model for how a 3025 player company should look like. I certainly intended to tell more stories with the unit but things intervened and my attention shifted elsewhere.
Many, many months later the Unit Digests were debuted and I looked at the submissions guidelines to see what I could do with it. Revisiting the Commandos was an obvious step for a trial run. And it turned out pretty well. Well enough to be worth publishing, anyway. And it helped me get a better grip on the RPG rules. I was able to use all of that background I had originally worked out and lay some plot seeds for anyone who actually wanted to use the unit. I did a couple of others in the same period; the Jihad-era "Wasat Avengers" have also been posted, I'm not sure if the third one has or hasn't. But in any case the Commandos Digest attracted some favorable comments and attention, and from them I could see there was still interest in a gritty Third Succession War small merc band. Having finished work on one of the first post-Jihad short fiction pieces previously, I decided it was a good change of pace to revisit the Commandos and the earlier universe.
I had always intended to write this as the next piece of the Commandos story. Luys Claessens originally had a prominent role in the first story and his backstory let me run a bit wild with worldbuilding. New Capetown was kind of a stereotypical "South Africa in Space of the 1980s," referenced in the old Steiner sourcebook briefly and which then had its racial problems solved overnight by Katrina Steiner in the FedCom era. Then they transferred all that pent up hate to the Clans. Well, meh. In any case I could go back and look at what a deliberately backward, reactionary racist society would entail in the universe, drawing on some actual South African background rather than the NBC nightly news version. (For example, a society of reactionary Boer extremists would never name their planet "New Capetown" but there are some things that one is just stuck with). The idea of Claessens stealing his 'Mech back from his white relatives had been with me since the beginning since it played on the great theme of Dispossession, and the unique legal dynamics of New Capetown provided a venue where he could do that and still be completely justified in doing so. It took me a little work out exactly how the LCAF would tell the local government to "stuff it" at the climax, but I think I worked out a rather reasonable outcome.
Aside from that I wanted to show who Claessens was and how his environment had shaped him. His mother was white, his father was black. I didn't detail the specifics of his birth, or why his mother stayed on New Capetown, so people could leave that to their imagination. His years in-between, caught between a mother he loved and honored and a broader society that rejected him (and her) over his skin color, shaped him into a somewhat cynical and bitter person. With the death of his mother he believes that the only person he can really trust is himself. Others are too feckless, or not motivated enough, or are actively hostiles. And his pride and dignity have been wounded badly enough that he is prepared to take extreme risks to get off the world, buttressed by his certainty that he is doing the right thing. The 'Mech belonged to his mother, she wanted him to have, his uncle had no right to take it - so getting it back by any means necessary is appropriate and justified. And those risks would have killed him absent Killian's intervention, and he recognizes it, but at the same time that 'Mech is his lifeline to freedom and he has to protect his liberty at all costs. Now the reader can see where some of his hotheaded and confrontational attitude in "A Cover of Paint" comes from, though it's not necessary to go back and reference that story (or the Unit Digest) to enjoy this one; they just expand on the experience.
Anyway this story was pretty fun to write. It flowed really well and Jason required only token continuity edits to accept it. I like to think it's one of my better works on a technical level and at capturing the essence of the universe, even if it doesn't have the more complex themes of several other stories. I'll probably be writing more stories in this vein, including some with the Commandos.
