Status Updates From The Gray Death Legion Trilo...

Grayson rolled over, looking up at death. The Thunderbolt’s fire was almost out now, and there were no more inferno rounds coming in. Bullets whanged and keened off the armor from the south as soldiers tried futilely to turn the machine. It took another step, towering into the night, machine guns leveling for a second, final burst.

The silence that followed was as cold as the glacial ice on the mountaintops of Helm. The behavior of the Marik BattleMech forces on that planet had been explained at last. The Conventions of War dictated certain formal ways for troops to behave toward one another during combat, but renegades—city killers—were beyond the pale of even unspoken and unwritten laws.

Grayson knew little about classical statuary, though these looked like something he’d once heard referred to as Rim Worlds Neo-Realist. The forms seemed to represent either nude women or dying warriors, and they must once have been colored in realistic tones. That would have been in the days when the garden had first been opened, long before the nuclear death of Freeport and so much more of this world.

It had been Grayson Carlyle and his men who had liberated the captive women. From that day on, Janice Taylor had become a member of Sergeant Ramage’s Special Ops Force, and had participated in the last, wild battle to free Verthandi’s capital from the Kuritans. When victory and independence had been won, she chose to follow the Gray Death Legion elsewhere among the stars.

Somehow, that small movement was just too much for him. He could see his hands dimly through sweat and blurring vision and blood and smoke…but he just couldn’t make them do what he wanted. Then it no longer mattered, for he couldn’t see anything at all.

He had pulled off his neurohelmet and replaced it with a combat helmet. Dressed only in shorts and combat boots. Gordon’s only body protection was the dark visor that would shield his eyes on a battlefield where stray laser beams were still flashing low across the ground. Anxious to find that sapper, eager to kill, he climbed out of his crippled machine while cradling his Rugan subgun.

I gave up

Though the jamming put the Gray Death at a disadvantage, the attackers were operating at a handicap as well. With no way to issue new orders, they would be slow and cumbersome in reacting to the unexpected.
And Grayson Death Carlyle was a master of doing the unexpected in battle.

In almost three centuries, there had been various incidents of one or another of the Successor Houses attacking ComStar facilities, however. ComStar’s inevitable retribution was to cut off all interstellar communications services to the world or worlds involved until the offender inevitably decided that it was better to respect ComStar’s neutrality.

The anger that had been boiling somewhere deep within him came rushing out now, a roaring in his ears and a quickening of his heart.
Murderers! The Gray Death would sweep down on them like avenging angels, angels of death.
“We’ll take them,” he said over the command circuit. “Lances…weapons up! Arm! Deploy!”

The arrangement worked to the benefit of both parties: Carlyle and his people had a home, and Janos Marik had a new combined arms regiment. The Legion’s standard was to be raised above the long-vacant fortress above Durandel. It was understood that other men-at-arms would eventually be granted holds of their own elsewhere on the planet, but for now, Helm belonged to Grayson Carlyle.

Things had not worked out that way. The betrayal at Trellwan and the death of Durant Carlyle had left Grayson Carlyle on his own. From the ashes of that loss and defeat, he had forged the Legion almost through sheer will. In the fire and blood of shared combat, he had found a kind of family to replace the one that had been destroyed.
For him, home had always been the regiment.