We had the May issue just about ready to go to press when we got notice that a battle had begun on Tukayyid, and that the stakes of the battle were to be Terra itself, or a fifteen year truce for the Inner Sphere. The battle began on May first; it did not end until the twentieth. Most of the planet had been evacuated, so the battle ranged over mountain, plains, seas, beaches, and deserted cities. We held the issue for long enough to bring you the results. As you now know, ComStar won. We have a truce. WE HAVE NOT ACHIEVED PEACE. Please, please, continue efforts to catch up with the Clans. Continue to devise new tactics and training. Keep integrating new technology. Continue to produce all the new weapons, vehicles, and materiel we possibly can. It would be so easy to tell ourselves that the Clan Wars are over. The war is just beginning. If the Clans understood psychological warfare, they might have done this on purpose. Just when the Inner Sphere was beginning to gear up to defeat them, just as Federated Commonwealth units rescued Kuritan prisoners, and Kuritan garrisons were pulled from the Davion border to fight their mutual enemy on the border. The Archon requested of a commercial magazine, Battle Technology, to publish a course of training scenarios so that all Inner Sphere MechWarriors could work through the same problems. Just when we managed to forget our differences, forget our financial problems, and truly commit ourselves to the fight, we are given the enormous and joyous shock of knowing that THEY AREN'T KILLING US TODAY. It would be so easy to relax that effort. It would also be fatal. We have a truce. We have fifteen years until they come at us again. As one of our writers points out, that does not mean fifteen years, plus a month or so. I would expect to see JumpShips poised to strike at midnight, May 20, 3067. The Clans place a high importance on keeping one's word. But they regard us citizens of the Inner Sphere as something akin to vermin who infest the real estate which is their family home. If they were inclined to, mercy, which is dubious, it would not be toward us. Nothing is more certain than that they will come for us again. If we are worthy to be the descendents of our worthy ancestors, we will use these fifteen years. We will be ready to meet them. We will give them a f ight they will never forget. And we will defeat them. Over and over, if we have to. In this issue: One of our more enterprising journalists, Alberich Hoff man, got accredited for this epic campaign by getting on board a ComStar DropShip by delivering a company's worth of free pizza (charged to our account, of course), and then begging. So it is that we have a quick report to file for you (page 3) and an odd side note. Hoff man went to The Nagelring, graduating in 3049. He included a cryptic note. "What would you say if I told you that I'd seen a classmate in Natasha Kerensky's Wolf Spiders Cluster?" We haven't yet had an answer to my challenge to the Clans as to why they don't think the Ares Conventions are binding on them. I am perfectly willing to print any replies we receive. We kept all of the articles on fighting the Clans, the Redcoat Renegades story of raiding the Clans-held world of Bjarred for technological intel, the Snowfire Regiment's Field Task Forces, etc. Enjoy them. And enjoy the breathing space we get before we go again into most deadly battle. Back to BattleTechnology 19 Table of Contents Back to BattleTechnology List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1992 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