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  No surrender.

  There was no way back to the Compact. A single communication from House Hiritsu had made it clear that the Warrior House would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. Major Smithson thought to relocate what was left of the Lancers and their mercenary support to the mountains, the better to remain isolated until Duchess Liao negotiated for their return or possibly sent a retrieval force. But after four attempts, Doles doubted they would ever make it out of Qingliu.

  A Gauss slug slammed into his right arm at the wrist, crushing the medium laser and ripping the Grasshopper's right hand clean off. Two Hiritsu BattleMechs pressed forward, identified by his computer as a Yu Huang assault 'Mech and a medium-weight Huron Warrior. His HUD showed that the Wraith had joined with two other 'Mechs to now threaten Major Smithson's Victor.

  That Yu Huang will eat me alive, he thought. . . .

  BATTLETECH

  LE5744

  Threads of Ambition

  Book One of The Capellan Solution

  Loren L. Coleman

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First Printing, May, 1999 10 987654321

  Copyright ©FASA Corporation, 1999 All rights reserved

  Series Editor: Donna Ippolito

  Mechanical Drawings: Duane Loose and the FASA art department Cover art by Bruce Jensen

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGJSTRADA

  BATTLETECH, FASA, and the distinctive BATTLETECH and FASA logos are trademarks of the FASA Corporation, 1100 W. Cermak, Suite B305, Chicago, IL 60608.

  Printed in the United States of America

  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.

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  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  This book is dedicated to Mike Stackpole

  —one of my Sifu, and a good friend.

  I would like to offer my appreciation to the following people who, each in their own way, made this novel possible.

  Jim LeMonds, for his teaching and continued friendship. My parents, who have (more or less) stopped asking me to get a "real job." The Orlando Group—with special notice to Matt and Tim, computer gurus, and Russell Loveday, resident expert on weapons of mass destruction.

  Mike Stackpole, who helped me realize the scope of the story I wanted to tell here, and has helped to keep me sane during my exile. Or relatively so.

  Always, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose continued support and friendship mean so much.

  The FASA BattleTech team of Bryan Nystul and Randall Bills, who continue to guide the universe forward. Chris Hartford, Chris Hussey, Chris Trossen—for their comments. The FASA editorial staff—especially Donna Ippolito, who lets me get away with murder. Literally, that is.

  BattleTech fans Maurice Fitagerald and Warner Doles, who contributed to charity for their appearances.

  My agent, Don Maass, for taking a chance.

  My family—Heather, Talon, Conner, and our newest addition, Alexia Joy, without whom this all would mean nothing.

  Prologue

  Celestial Palace

  Zi-jin Cheng (Forbidden City), Sian

  Sian Commonality, Capellan Confederation

  3 March 3060

  The elevator doors opened onto the palace's Strategic Command Center with barely a sound. Sun-Tzu Liao, Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation and current First Lord of the resurrected Star League, stepped into his war room, the folds of his dark green, heavy silk robes whispering softly. Despite his quiet entrance all activity ceased. His three top advisors turned and stood waiting attentively, among the computers and holographic maps. Not one of them would expect to enjoy the Chancellor's good will. Not today.

  One of them, Sun-Tzu felt sure, expects to be shot.

  Sun-Tzu stared back, saying nothing. Behind him the elevator doors, disguised to seem part of the room's teakwood paneling, slid shut. He slowly ran one hand down his robe to straighten the deep collar with its fine embroidery—black-threaded tigers chasing golden darndao swords—and permitted himself to enjoy the smooth touch of the silk. He managed a very thin smile that he knew would only heighten the tension in the room. The Liao family was not known for its humor.

  The rage his aides would be expecting was there, to be sure, and it burned down in the core of his being, warming him. But to blind rage he refused to succumb. His grandfather, even before Hanse Davion drove him insane, might have indulged in such rages. His mother, Romano Liao, in her time as Chancellor, certainly had; the purges had been frequent and bloody. Sun-Tzu refused to be his mother. He controlled his emotions, studied them, then directed any anger toward more constructive ends.

  "Six months," he said, voice barely a whisper. "Victor Davion has been absent from the Inner Sphere for six months, and I am just informed today?"

  He stalked forward, angling to the left of the small group to see what they had been studying on his arrival. A two-dimensional holographic projection stretched floor to ceiling in the middle of the room, but arriving from the elevator had placed him end-on to it. Sun-Tzu noted the light sweat beading the forehead of Sasha Wanli, the aging Maskirovka Intelligence Director, who stepped back a nervous pace to allow him an unobstructed view.

  The Inner Sphere, a globular area roughly a thousand light years in diameter, was displayed in its common, compressed two-dimensional format but at only half the size capable by the projection field. Still, large enough to make out the outlines of the various Great Houses that controlled most of the star systems humanity had come to occupy since leaving the safety of Terra so many centuries ago. At this scale Sun-Tzu's Capellan Confederation looked a thin, truncated slice of space. Tiny next to the mammoth Federated Commonwealth, which bordered the Confederation on one side, or Thomas Marik's Free Worlds League, which flanked the other. Even the wedge of space conquered by the Clans, carved from the Lyran Alliance and the Draconis Combine, occupied more space.

  And the Clans were the reason for the shrunken scale of the map, as well as the absence of Sun-Tzu's most dangerous enemy, Victor Steiner-Davion. "So where is he?" he demanded.

  Not needing to be told who he was, Sasha Wanli stepped forward nervously and brushed her hand over the long trail of stars known as the Exodus Road. "We assume Victor Davion's task force is within this area. Not quite to the Clan home-worlds, but close." The Exodus Road was a chain of stars hooking out spinward and coreward from the Draconis Combine border. The path by which Alexandr Kerensky had originally led the ancient Star League Defense Force to a new home, three centuries prior, and the path that had brought them back just ten ye
ars ago as the invading Clans.

  Sun-Tzu estimated the distance remaining to Victor. "It was to take Morgan Hasek-Davion nine months to a year to make that trip with Task Force Serpent. How does Victor do it in seven?"

  Colonel Talon Zahn, Strategic Director of the Confederation Armed Forces, calmly took the question. The man's cold, dark eyes belied his youth, revealing a shrewdness far beyond his years. "Serpent moved on a course parallel to and longer than the Exodus Road, approaching Clan Smoke Jaguar's home-world unawares."

  With a laser-pointer, he flashed an arc over the map to indicate a rough course. "But no one expected the Jaguars' Inner Sphere occupation force to be routed so easily." Zahn gave his master a steady gaze, showing respect but no fear. "Victor moves quickly because he now chases the remnants of that occupation force along the shortest distance to their homeworld."

  "Which means he can return just as quickly," Sun-Tzu said, his voice hard as he considered the time lost to faulty intelligence. He watched Sasha Wanli pale. Compared to Zahn, her incompetence is as obvious as her age. "Victor has Star League units under his command, " Sun-Tzu said. "As First Lord I should have been informed of their departure for the Clan homeworlds, not fed the public story about clean-up operations in the nearby Periphery. Can he justify that?"

  "Almost certainly," Zahn said. "As I read the Maskirovka reports, everyone expects the First Lord position to be largely ceremonial." Slight pause there, which Sun-Tzu read as being more for emphasis than nervousness. Zahn's blunt, straight-forward style was a quality Sun-Tzu tolerated, even appreciated at times, and was what had originally drawn the man to his attention. So long as the senior colonel continued to operate at a high level of competency.

  "Though you officially bestowed the SLDF colors on every participating unit," Zahn was saying, "all units were then given into the command of Victor, who apparently made the decision to pursue based on operational security." Zahn glanced over to Sasha Wanli, who reluctantly nodded agreement.

  Sun-Tzu didn't like what he was hearing, but he also needed to get the whole story. He glared at Wanli to remind her that he hadn't forgotten her, then turned back to Zahn. "You have estimated Victor's chances for surviving this trip to Clan space?" The question was unanswerable and he knew it. But he wasn't yet ready to deal with the Maskirovka failure, and he wished to gauge his Strategic Director's response.

  Talon Zahn never missed a beat. "It would be foolish, for me, to assume anything less than one hundred percent, Chancellor. Victor Davion has shown himself tenacious in the most extreme circumstances. He has survived a decade of battle with the Clans, and now has driven the Smoke Jaguars from the Inner Sphere."

  Sun-Tzu nodded curtly, impressed by the quick response but feeling his anger threatening to explode. Zahn was young for his post, barely thirty-six, but he possessed one of the sharpest military minds in the Confederation. Though his appointment to the realm's highest military position threatened older, more complacent colonels, no one dared comment on his age, with Sun-Tzu himself just twenty-nine. Of the Inner Sphere royals, only Katrina Steiner-Davion was younger.

  Of course, Yvonne Steiner-Davion was even younger, but Sun-Tzu didn't count her, for Yvonne only sat on the throne of the Federated Commonwealth as Victor's regent. And Arthur, youngest of the Steiner-Davion brood, was four times removed from power by older siblings so he hardly mattered at all. Katrina, though, deserved recognition as a near equal. Three years ago she had wrested the Lyran Commonwealth away from her brother—half his realm, which she blithely announced would henceforth be known as the Lyran Alliance under her rule. Yes, Katrina had proved herself a force to be reckoned with.

  "And what of your thoughts, Ion?" Sun-Tzu turned to the final member present. Ion Rush, Master of Warrior House Imarra and Grand Master of all eight Warrior Houses, stood behind Zahn, arms clasped behind his back and affecting an air of stoic acceptance. A large man with Slavic features, he wore a simple field uniform of ivory and what was commonly called Liao green. Sun-Tzu valued the man's counsel, though it often had to be solicited. As with his loyalty, Sun-Tzu thought.

  "You have been very quiet, Master Rush."

  "Dui, Chancellor," the large man said, "I have." Rush frowned slightly in concentration, as if evaluating which of his recent thoughts were worth bringing to the attention of his Chancellor, and then merely shrugged. "There is nothing more to add."

  "Ah, but there is." Sun-Tzu rounded on his Maskirovka Directress, narrowing his jade green eyes. "A matter of six months during which the implied threat of Victor Davion in command of a multi-national army should not have been looming over my head."

  Sasha clasped age-wrinkled hands together behind her back. She had assumed command of the Maskirovka upon the death of Tsen Shang, Sun-Tzu's father who had died alongside Romano. Health reasons had forced her to retire once, but Sun-Tzu had called her back when the interim director had proven intractable to the point of meriting execution for conducting rogue operations. Sun-Tzu knew Sasha would be considering the fact that few were the Maskirovka directors who died of natural causes, and wondering if her time had finally come.

  "As I attempted to explain earlier, Celestial Wisdom, the secrecy that shielded Victor's movements in the Draconis Combine from the Clans also hid him from our surveillance. The Mask has few highly placed agents anywhere near the Combine's upper political levels. And when Victor set out after the fleeing Jaguar forces, Theodore Kurita's security net prevented our agents learning of it until just recently when one of them managed to infiltrate the lower levels of the Combine's ISF."

  Sun-Tzu resisted the urge to lash out at his intelligence director. Physical violence will not give me back the six months we've lost. He worked through a relaxation technique, calming his tight muscles. "So what can be done, now that we do know?"

  Sasha answered quickly, no doubt in an attempt to mirror Zahn's earlier decisiveness. "I have orders drawn up for the termination of the field agents who failed to discover Victor's absence. They only require—"

  Now Sun-Tzu did strike her. His left arm flashed out in a vicious backhand slap. The last three fingernails on each hand had been grown out ten centimeters in an affectation favored by his father, carbon-reinforced and razor sharp. They left three bloody slices across Sasha's cheek. Not a disabling blow, though he certainly could have killed her, and not out of rage for her earlier failure. It was a stinging slap, meant to chastise and shame her.

  "You tell me of our depleted intelligence sources in the Combine, and now you want to kill those we do have?" he hissed in a mocking whisper. "Did you learn nothing from my father?"

  To her credit, Sasha stood mute and did not raise a hand to wipe away the blood that beaded and ran down her neck. Sun-Tzu's green eyes flashed as he took in all three of his advisors. "I want to know what we do now to take advantage of Victor's absence."

  Talon Zahn spoke first, always ready. "We have plans underway for reclaiming much of the Disputed Territories." He reached down to punch up a request on a nearby console. The holographic map changed to display only the Capellan Confederation and its immediately surrounding space. The two worlds that remained of the old Sarna Supremacy nestled against the Confederation's coreward border, and beyond that lay the unclaimed but pro-Liao region of the Chaos March to which Zahn referred. Hanse Davion had taken those systems and many more during the Fourth Succession War over thirty years ago. Sun-Tzu's efforts in the Marik-Liao offensive of 3057 had freed them from the Federated Commonwealth but failed to bring them completely back into the Confederation. The situation worsened where the map stretched up toward the ceiling, displaying the Chaos March proper, where dominance by any Great House had been thrown off, and the planets themselves claiming complete independence.

  "If we rely on mercenaries," Zahn continued, "and perhaps Magistracy troops, we can step up our operations there. Nothing major, but a place to start and easily incorporated into your Xin Sheng efforts."

  The Chancellor nodded. Wringing the First Lord offic
e for every ounce of prestige, Sun-Tzu had instigated sweeping economic, social, and military reforms within the Confederation under the call of Xin Sheng. Meaning rebirth or new birth, it was nothing less than a renewed Capellan effort to rebuild the internal strength of the realm. Most significant among the reforms had been the strengthening of the fledging alliance with the Magistracy of Canopus, begun just before his election to the post of First Lord.

  Sun-Tzu traced the edge of his chin with his right forefinger. "How are the Magistracy units doing?" he asked. In return for technological aid, the Magistracy provided military support in a relationship very similar to the Confederation's Warrior Houses. The Magestrix' two eldest daughters currently commanded several regiments' worth of BattleMechs and infantry either within Confederation borders or as part of Sun-Tzu's contribution to the Star League forces.

  "No major incidents to report," Sasha said in a subdued voice, obviously choosing her words with great care. "Danai Centrella has apparently accompanied Prince Victor's task force to Clan space. Naomi Centrella, commanding the bulk of the Magistracy forces, is working very hard to help integrate her troops with yours." This news was significant; Danai was the Magestrix' eldest daughter and heir.

  "They are enthusiastic," Colonel Zahn said. "I would not mind testing them."

  Sun-Tzu was thinking of doing just that. "What of the Detroit Conference? Can we move that up?"

  The world of Detroit lay near the floor of the holographic map. Located in the New Colony Region between the Magistracy and the Taurian Concordat, just rimward of the Confederation border, it was the site of a minor 'Mech production facility that Capellan engineers were renovating to incorporate newer technology. BattleMechs, two-story war machines often constructed on a humanoid model, might reign supreme on the field in general, but the Periphery still lacked much of the rediscovered technology. Again, Sasha Wanli answered carefully. "Not if you want the factory back on-line for the public relations boost that would give you, Chancellor Liao. My analysts recommend you allow it to produce at least one full company of 'Mechs before you travel there to meet with Emma Centrella and Jeffrey Calderon."