Battletech: The Arano Restoration

"I am Kamea Arano, High Lady of the Aurigan Reach, Protector of Coromodir and the Sword of Restoration. But I am not a hero, no matter what the stories say. A hero would have sacrificed more, compromised less. A hero would have done better.

You know this, of course. You were there.

My father used to tell me stories about the ancient times, about the Star League, a golden age of prosperity upheld by the great MechWarriors of old. Guardians of the innocent. Protectors of the peace. I always dreamed of following in their footsteps.

I was too young to see the truth of things. After all, it wasn't heroism or a noble cause that won me the throne. It was hiring a mercenary skilled enough, or perhaps ruthless enough to carry the day.

Hiring you.

I still don't know if you fought for honor or the thrill of it; for belief in my cause, or just for my money. But whether it was your noble heart or mercenary mind, your actions gave us hope. That makes you a hero in the eyes of history. Whether you believe it? That's up to you.

-Lady Kamea Arano, private correspondence

*heavy sigh*

Kamea, Kamea, Kamea.

I'm so sorry I didn't tell you earlier; I could have spared you all this doubt and pain.

But since you had to write that letter the way you did, here's one back.

*throat clears*

I am Jonathan Blackbow, leader of the mercenary company formerly known as Markham's Marauders, now known as Clan O'Shannon. I am also not a hero; a hero would have saved Raju Montgomery that day the Aurigan Directorate forces ambushed us on our way to Kamea's coronation. Or I would have saved him three years later, when we assaulted Fjaldr and found the concentration camp.

At first, when you hired us, you said that you waited three years to contact us because you had to be sure of our integrity, and you also were involved in rebuilding your armies and political connections. That's fine, as far as it goes. But you knew Raju, and through Raju, you knew me, and you already knew most of Markham's Marauders. You knew that while it's true that evil never thinks of itself as evil, the names people use for themselves end up revealing who they are. Hanse Davion, leader of House Davion, for instance. His name means "merchant" or "merchant fees". That certainly fits with Davion's political leanings, although he might have fit better in the Lyran Commonwealth.

Lyran Commonwealth. Now there's a name that exudes goodness. Common wealth. Almost like they care about their citizens. Contrast that with the Aurigan Directorate. Directorate - that one's awfully close to "dictatorship". Your Uncle Espinosa pretty much gave himself away with that, didn't he? If the ambush the day of your Coronation wasn't enough of a clue that he had no morals, and if the concentration camp on Fjaldr didn't confirm that for you, the word he chose for his coalition of power should have told the entire Inner Sphere that this was a man that would claw his way to power over the bodies of everyone who got in his way.

And so, there we were, beaten, but trying to rebound, just like you. We'd scraped our way back up from the bottom of the barrel, and we were a going concern. But we were also convinced that the Aurigan Directorate was nowhere we wanted to be. But we couldn't get out of Aurigan space; the banks had us locked down because of all the money involved with the Hysteria. Stupid name for a dropship, maybe, but Markham had named her, and she was all we had.

And then Anna Maria Centrella showed up on the Holonet one day. That she knew where to find us should have been our first clue that things were not what they seemed. I talked with her at an astronomical expense for quite awhile about what we were doing and how long we'd been doing it, in the process telling her all about my hopes and dreams for the future, about Clan O'Shannon.

Now, mind you, this was before the Clan Invasion, and the word "Clan" didn't carry the terrible connotation that it does now. It was pretty simple, actually. My friend Kane O'Shannon - turns out he and Raju knew each other pretty well - had been running a mercenary company for awhile, and asked Raju to train me up so that when he brought me into his company nobody would yell about favoritism. Imagine that, me not even twenty years old and already involved in politics.

Well, Kane managed to get himself killed in a hovercar accident not too long after the ambush at your Coronation. He was this massive Hawaiian - Samoan adoptee and I don't know anybody that didn't like him. He was so funny to be around that even if he was making fun of you, you didn't care, because it was funny. And then he'd go out and strap himself into his Battlemaster and walk all over whoever his next contract was. All that, and killed in a hovercar accident. When I put myself back together physically, I had a memorial service for him, which was pretty silly, because the big guy wasn't fond of funerals either. He said "I don't do funerals, I don't do hospitals, and I don't do weddings."

But ever since then, as much as I wanted to be a positive force for change in the universe on my own, it was even more so after he died. Like I had to pick up the pieces and try my best to do what he would have done, if he'd still been around to do it. So when Anna Maria Centrella told us she had a job for us, we went. All five of us. Me, Dekker, Behemoth, Glitch, and Medusa. Of course those aren't their real names; their real names are long and complicated and you can't shout it into a microphone fast enough to make a difference in a firefight.

Why did we go? Simple. I said earlier that while evil never thinks of itself as evil, the names people give themselves are usually a pretty good indicator of who they are. The Magistracy of Canopus had a reputation for decades, centuries, of being the good guys. When we found out you were still alive, Kamea, and that Centrella was assisting you, it was like, I don't know, the sun coming up on the night after a battle, and finding out that you weren't alone and defeated.

So when you publish your memoirs, I don't mind you saying what you said in that opening statement, because you didn't know any better at the time.

I think you know better now. We fought for the Arano Restoration because we wanted to make a positive change in the Universe.

-Commander Jonathan "Blackbow" O'Shannon, private correspondence