BattleTech: Star-Crossed Warriors:

by Bryan Young

WAKE NOT THE SLEEPING BEAR…

During the chaotic late years of the Dark Age, two Ghost Bear cadets find each other as conflicting loyalties threaten to drive them apart.

Freeborn Strider has fought to become a MechWarrior for most of his life, and now stands on the precipice of making his dream come true.

Trueborn Vespertine is a true product of Clan Ghost Bear, and also hopes to graduate into the exalted ranks of the MechWarriors.

But simmering tensions between the Ghost Bears and the civilians of the Rasalhague Dominion—the only successful merging of a Clan with an Inner Sphere faction—are rising in intensity, threatening to tear the nearly century-old alliance asunder. Along with that comes the invitation from the new ilKhan to join the reborn Star League, causing further division among the populace.

And with Strider and Vespertine also embracing different views of the conflict, will they fight each other if the disagreements erupt into all-out war?

135 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 20, 2026

About the author

Bryan Young (he/they) works across many different media. His work as a writer and producer has been called "filmmaking gold" by The New York Times. He's also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He's been a regular contributor for the Huffington Post, StarWars.com, Star Wars Insider magazine, SYFY, /Film, and was the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! In 2014, he wrote the critically acclaimed history book, A Children’s Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. He co-authored Robotech: The Macross Saga RPG and has written five books in the BattleTech Universe: Honor's Gauntlet, A Question of Survival, Fox Tales, Without Question, and the forthcoming VoidBreaker. His latest non-fiction tie-in book, The Big Bang Theory Book of Lists is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon. His work has won two Diamond Quill awards and in 2023 he was named Writer of the Year by the League of Utah Writers. He teaches writing for Writer’s Digest, Script Magazine, and at the University of Utah. Follow him across social media @swankmotron or visit swankmotron.com.

Support Bryan on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/swankmotron

Reviews

[Brody Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling look into the build up of a civil war, from the point of view of a Freeborn who is torn between two cultures. The depictions of arguing with family and co-workers about the state of the world and upcoming elections actually made me feel a little perturbed, how eerily similar to situations I myself have been in.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a badly written YA novel with some weird ideas of how the World functions that constantly leaves me scratching my head.

Simple prose, reductive assumptions and a whole other bunch of issues result in a story that has some weird "uncanny valley" aspect to its writing.

It was so offputting that I acutally got a refund after a few chapters.

This novella is far too short, yet it wastes it's word count on irrelevant topics that clearly were meant to contribute to "World Building", yet only result in a mundane, and ironically under developed story.

While the author is clearly not an experienced one and some leeway should be given, I cannot in good conscience recommend that people spend their money to essentially help an author experiment while he learns how to write a proper story.