No, no news. Bob Carter remains among the missing. It is to be hoped that he did not, as rumor has it, go to spy on Wolf's Dragoons training camp on their world of Outreach. If he did, let us hope that he is in protective custody somewhere. I personally cannot believe that so vital a man can be dead. I've believed that before, it's true. But somehow, this time is different. If he did somehow run afoul of his hero, here in this public forum we remind Col Wolf of the Ares Conventions. Next of kin are to be notified. Our publisher, Arvid Thorkinsson, has asked me to take the position of editor. It is with reluctance that I step into Bob Carter's shoes. But he would agree that BattleTechnology must continue. In its eleven centuries of publishing, BattleTechnology has had four editors die in combat and six by assassination, while eight more have simply disappeared. I hope that Bob will not be the ninth. But we both knew what a dangerous job this could be when we took it. People buy you drinks in bars, then they test their PPCs on your office building because they didn't like the editorial this month. It is traditional for a new editor to make his other background public, so that our biases may be taken into account when you read the magazine. As far as I know, my only biases are for Cobalt Coil stories and PPCs and against spiders in my bedclothes, but here goes: I'm from the world of Poulsbo on the Lyran side of the Marik-Stei ner border. It's a world of surging seas, a world of fishermen. It's a world that was isolated from the Commonwealth for more than two centuries. It has a spaceport base, Bangor, from which many Free Worlds League attacks have been launched -- or repulsed. We're independent, touchy, proud people. Poulsbo people take offense easily and go off to join merc companies. That's why I had a brother on one side and a sister on the other during the Fourth Succession War. That's why I spent the years 3011-3025 serving with Bartolo's Braggarts, piloting an Assassin-D (yes, I caught it myself!). Name the Periphery world from Star's End to the Magistracy of Canopus, we've patrolled its frontier. We got the dirty little jobs, and the jobs where somebody was going to have to look bad to the home folks. At length, the whole of Company B stood its ground on a stupid piece of rock while Company A with Captain Bartolo and the DropShip took off for the Taurian Concordat. I wrote a story about the action which saw me Dispossessed, and sent it to BattleTechnology. They offered me a job. On the whole, people shoot at me less now I'm working for the magazine. And there are those free drinks... In regards to an earlier mystery,l have been given permission to quote from a classifed report the following selected passage: "...with great assurance I can attest that the Nekekami are not out to eliminate the personnel or property of BattleTechnology. The techniques used (on the attacks over the last fifteen years on our offices and our reporters) are atypical of their assassination process. After all, anyone with a modicum of dexterity can create an origami cat. One of the specific grounds for ruling them out are the origami cats you've received. The Nekekami encode messages somewhere upon their cats, usually as dots on the reverse side. Your cats had no messages. I shall expand my operating fields to find out who has actually performed these deeds. For Unity, it is agreed, they must pay..." This issue we've got two big Mechs for you, scenarios from the recent war, a Tale of the Fourth Succession War that proves there are no bad Mechs, there are onl y bad warriors, another selection from the Thornhill Arms Catalog, and a new census. We hope you find it all useful, interesting, instructive... Or whatever you hoped to find in these pages. Back to BattleTechnology 11 Table of Contents Back to BattleTechnology List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1988 by Pacific Rim Publishing. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com