BattleTech: The Mercenary Life: A BattleTech Anthology
About this ebook
Nikolai Reed is a trader on a Lyran JumpShip plying the space lanes…
Chloe Mason is a hot-shot tech with the Hsien Hotheads mercenaries…
Leaving the Northwind Highlanders, MechWarrior Ryana Nikol fills a billet with the Eridani Light Horse…
Disparate lives, but a unified dream that will bring them all together on a fateful course that will span decades, cover hundreds of light years, and involve love, friendship, and loss across a dozen worlds. Each will pay a price along the way, as a cost always comes due.
The Mercenary Life anthology is a compilation of stories written by Randall N. Bills. Including tales from several different characters as they cross paths, and the dream to found a new mercenary command is born. Their unique lives showcase the struggles and trials of the men and women who take up the mercenary mantle from a variety of angles, all bound around that central vision.
The first eight stories of this anthology were originally posted for free alongside the release of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, acting as the origin stories for the mercenary command within that computer game. This is the first time they have been compiled into a single volume to allow for a Print on Demand physical copy.
Additionally, an all-new ninth story has been added—The Sun Will Rise—along with postscripts for every story that gives the reader insight into how stories are crafted within a shared universe between tabletop, computer games, and fiction that spans more than thirty years and tens of millions of words.
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About the author
Randall N. Bills began his writing career in the adventure-gaming industry, where he has worked full-time for over two decades. He’s led the publication of literally hundreds of sourcebooks, rulebooks, boxed games, and more. This includes instrumental work on the seminal BattleTech and Shadowrun game lines; he was lore advisor on Harebrained Schemes’s BattleTech computer game, and was a co-story developer for Piranha Games’s MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries computer game. His most recent game publications include the Dungeons & Dragons Dragonfire deckbuilder.
His hobbies include music, gaming, reading (fantasy to history, theology to science), and spending time with his family. He currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he continues to work full-time (and then some) in the adventure-gaming industry while pursuing his fiction writing—Randall has published eight novels, two Star Trek novellas, and a host of short stories.
He lives with his wife, Tara, and children—Bryn Kevin, Ryana Nikol and Kenyon Aleksandr—as well as a neurotic German Shepherd named Ecko.
