From the personal journal of Irisz Magyari

We're away from Fletcher; I’m writing this while we're accelerating, so my thoughts are probably not at their most rational. I'm tired, I'm worn from the battle and I've got g-forces adding to everything else that's on my mind.

That last fight was a mess, to put it bluntly. The First Liao were dug in hard and were willing to fight to the death to stop us from getting to our objective. They had hardened walls, TAG-guided Arrow missiles, gun turrets, Battle Armour and plenty of top of the line and Stealth armoured 'Mechs to make our lives miserable. We had a few tricks of our own; using Artillery to root our their units and demolish their fortifications, airdropping Battle Armour and the like, but it still hurt hard.

CCAF After Action Report 213143-45

Maskirovka assets have been able to confirm the departure of the Mercenary forces from Fletcher. Based on our estimates of their forces deployed compared to MRBC assessments and verified intel, we can state that the entire force is accounted for and that they have not left any assets in play on-world. With the effective end of raiding operations, we can now take stock of our losses.

1st Liao Guards

Total losses for the 1st Liao amount to two companies of BattleMechs and two platoons of Battle Armour. Of these, 67% are unrecoverable or completely destroyed. Fortunately, losses were entirely confined to II Battalion, limiting the overall damage to command integrity. Significant casualties include Pai-zhangs Alan Weizhe and Jian Xing-Mei, both veteran officers. In addition, Sang-Wei Lo Biao-McTavish is missing in action and assumed to have been extracted for intelligence gathering purposes by the Mercenary or AFFS forces.

Bad Blood: The Roughneck Chronicles

(From Bullets, Books and Bylines: a blog about mercenary literature; Galatea InfoWeb, 3144)

Bad Blood: The Roughneck Chronicles, by Colin Raymond. Red Letter Press, 3108. 307 pages. Non-Fiction (allegedly)

Probably unsurprisingly, there's plenty of (more or less) autobiographical works by mercenaries who fought in the Jihad. With the near death of the industry in its aftermath, making the most of your experiences and trying to earn a few C-Bills off of it would seem to be a good idea. However, this stuff is almost entirely written from the perspective of those who fought against the Word of Blake and their allies. There's very little written from the other side, largely because those mercenaries in the Word's employ tended to end up dead.

So when I found today's book, I was intrigued. Bad Blood: The Roughneck Chronicles bills itself as 'one Mercenary's harrowing tale of the struggles of the Jihad' and 'offering a unique perspective of the conflict from the point of view of a mercenary employed by the Word of Blake." I must admit that I was immediately lured in by said blurb; the fact that I had never once heard of this book before also caught my attention. Oh, and I also fund it at a flea market in a 'three for a C-Bill' box, so if nothing else, it was cheap.

Barrett's Bushrangers

MRBC Update 01-01-3131

(After we hired Ransom, and with the information you gave me, I decided to do some poking around of my own. Let’s be honest; a well-equipped, long-lived, prestigious mercenary command simply vanishing is far from an everyday occurrence, especially when combined with the very conscious timing of that disappearance. In doing such, I found this file in the MRBC’s system which I wouldn’t have given much attention to if not for two things. The first is that it’s regarding another vanished mercenary command who also disappeared close to Grey Monday. The second is that, despite the file being nearly fifteen years old, somebody had recently accessed it and mode some clumsy efforts to alter it. That’s enough to get my attention in and of itself - NK)

History

The exact origins of Barrett’s Bushrangers are unclear. The unit first appeared on Herotitus in 3090 under the command of captain Bruce Barrett as an understrength company of battered BattleMechs with some infantry support. Attempts to investigate the unit's past reached no definitive conclusions, but some evidence suggested that they hailed from the former Circrinus Federation. The unit was almost immediately snapped up by the Taurian Concordat, hired to help bolster its shattered military and protect its worlds from predation.

Several early successful contracts allowed the unit to bring itself up to a modicum of strength and stability, even if its financial state remained precarious like so many other units. The Bushrangers roamed across the near periphery, working principally for various Periphery powers, although the unit also saw some action with the independent worlds of the former Free Worlds League. That aside, however, the Bushrangers generally avoided the Inner Sphere, and never worked out of any Inner Sphere hiring halls such as Galatea.