THEN
I was in a merc bar on Weldry when I met Darius. Tall and slim, with a demeanor warmer than his analytical face, I had him pegged for a recruiter as soon as he sat down, and he knew it. Still, we did the dance, smalltalk about the Solaris bout on the holo above the bar, an anecdote here, a feeler question there. I kept waiting for the offer to come, but it didn't. Usually, those types decide if they want you pretty quick. They know what skills they need and what liabilities they can justify. If you're not worth their time, they extract and move on.
"Let's cut to it," I finally said. "If you're looking for a mech pilot, my rate and resume are on the board. If you're looking for something else, we've been talking a few hours, and you oughta know if you've found it or not. If you're just bored, well, I'm getting tired, and the room is full of more entertaining folks than me."
Darius smiled, the first real grin I'd seen from him that wasn't just polite or bemused or wry. He invited me back to his Leopard to meet his boss. That was weird, and I started to suspect they wanted me as something other than a pilot. Command staff, maybe, someone with plenty of field experience they could pay a pilot's rate and mold to their needs. That would explain the extended interview, but it made me nervous that they weren't promoting from within. Maybe it was a startup.
Darius introduced me to one of the plainest, most unassuming people I've ever met. That is, unless you were living in certain parts of the Reach at any point in the last few years. In that case, you'd know about Kamea Arano's personal grim reapers. A mercenary unit that came out of nowhere and tore through the Aurigan Directorate over the course of a year and then, when the civil war was over, blasted their way from one end of the Periphery to the other racking up one of the best MBRC scores on record. That's who Darius worked for.
The two of them laid all that out for me. How some lucky favors among higher ups landed them with a lostech ark called the Argo, how they'd managed to avoid too much entanglement with the great houses by keeping their operational strength low, only ever fielding a single lance for high-value, precision work. They were exclusive, elite, they would have been legendary if they were a bigger unit; hell, they were legendary in Aurigan space. And they were disbanding.
"Honestly, we've all gotten very rich, and we just don't much care for the danger anymore," Darius told me. "We've helped all our personnel secure plum positions with other companies, governments, academies. A couple pilots are starting a Solaris stable. A lot of folks are retiring. And," he looked at the Commander and took a deep breath. "We want to pass the torch."
That took some processing. I laughed. When they didn't, I tried to protest. I was not the person to be handed a ship worth more than some worlds and told to start a mercenary company. But they insisted. They'd worked up a profile, and I checked every box. They wanted someone to grow into the role as they had had to, someone who would remake their own image in the halls of the Argo rather than try to bend the legacy to fit them.
"Look, I'm a freelance mech jockey," I said. "I've got field command experience, but nothing like a whole merc company. That's a business."
"The business part is what XOs are for," the Commander said.
Darius rolled his eyes. "Look, we're not giving you our business. We stopped being Markham's Marauders the second the Argo tore free from Axylus. We're giving you the means to remake yourself the way we did. There's not a mercenary pilot in the galaxy that doesn't dream of having their own company, run how they want. This is your chance."
Every argument I tried had already been considered with a rebuttal prepared. I didn't have a crew or command staff. Darius handed me a huge dossier of vetted applicants. I didn't have money. They would bankroll hiring costs, and the company would be self-sustaining after that, barring a catastrophe. The Argo was too valuable. The Commander smirked at that.
"Not as much as you'd think," Darius said, and I got the first hint that they'd left out some details. "To start, it's lostech, sure, but it's a civilian vessel. Other than its size, it doesn't offer much that current technology can't do. Farah has made detailed specs available to anyone who might be interested, so there shouldn't be any treasure hunters coming for it. Aside from that, though, it's beat to hell."
"You mean it's a money pit," I said. I was long past sold at that point, grasping for any excuse not to buy in.
"Maintenance might be an issue," Darius admitted. "We got ambushed at a jump point by former Directorate loyalists. Aerospace fighters shot us all to hell. We had to deploy mechs in vacuum. By pure chance, a Coalition ship jumped in right after us and helped fight them off. We lost some people, mostly support. Gamma pod was shredded, Alpha and Beta took some nasty hits, and there wasn't a subsystem aboard that didn't sustain some kind of damage. Don't get me wrong, it's in better shape than when we got it—"
"But when we got it, it had been crashed into a moon for a few centuries," the Commander said. "Look, if you're not in, no hard feelings. We realize it's a lot at once, and it's not as turnkey as we might have made it sound. If you can't commit to it, we understand. We wouldn't have committed to it back then if we'd had any other options, which I'm sure you do. So consider them. We'll consider our other prospects, and you'll have first refusal. If we don't hear from you by this time tomorrow, we'll assume you've exercised that right."
I shook their hands and went home to my place in the spaceport's short-term housing complex. The sky was just beginning to lighten. I'd spent most of the night in that Leopard's briefing room. I was twitching with nerves and thought I would never fall asleep. I opened the dossier Darius had given me, and when I woke up it was still on the first page.
Evening rush hour was in full swing when I got back to the bar. Out of habit, I checked for messages on the board, but no bites. That would have made things too easy, I guess. Sorry, it's a great offer, but I've got a six-month security position lined up with a big combat bonus, so I'll have to decline. I got a glass of Timbiqui and found a seat on the back wall to look over the dossier.
It was big. It started with command staff recommendations. Executive officer, chief mech tech, chief engineer, navigator. Then mechwarriors, over a dozen to choose from, although the hiring budget only accounted for five or six. Then page after page after page of support staff, from mech techs to ship maintenance to medical personnel. A full roster. Well over a hundred people who would all be dependent on me for their lives and livelihoods.
A voice caught my ear, and I looked up to see Darius across the room, chatting up a couple mechwarriors. I didn't recognize either of them from the dossier. He had to have seen me when he came in. Was he giving me space before the deadline? Or trying to coerce me somehow? How could he be so relaxed when he and his boss were in the process of handing over their entire storied legacy, not to mention an irreplaceable spaceship and a fortune in cash, to a stranger? Screw it.
"I'll see you at the Leopard tonight, Darius," I said as I passed him, giving a quick nod to the two mechwarriors. I went home. Let him read that how he wanted.
A few hours later, I was signing papers in the Leopard's briefing room. I was surprised my signature came out right, but my hand was steady. The nerves were gone. Darius explained that a skeleton crew would be retained for another month to help onboard the new hires. Most of the incoming crew were local. The ones that weren't had been sent priority HPG messages to get to Weldry immediately.
I was given a full inventory of company property. It was surprisingly little. A lot had been given away as severance or sold to reduce expenses when the decision to disband was made. A good chunk of the remainder had been damaged or destroyed in the attack at the jump point. But, at the heart, I had a ship that could do all a merc startup needed it to, even if it couldn't yet do all it was capable of. Most importantly, there were BattleMechs. An Assassin, a Commando, a Panther, a Blackjack, and a Shadow Hawk. Nothing heavy, and all in various stages of repair or refit. Spare parts were sparse. Ammo would last one or two engagements, three at most. It would do. It was mine.