The hangar on Outreach had the kind of light that made every stain look like it had a story.
Fluorescents buzzed overhead, tired and mean. They painted the concrete in a sickly pallor—oil slicks, coolant trails, old scorch marks shaped like kneeling shadows. The air smelled of myomer lubricant and burned insulation, with a chemical sweetness that clung to the back of the throat like guilt.
Dack Jarn stood under all of it and tried not to breathe too deep.
He was eighteen, average height, lean in the way people got when they lived on ration bars and stubbornness. His face didn't demand attention: plain jawline, straight nose, dark eyes that didn't sparkle so much as measure. The kind of face that disappeared in a crowd—until it turned toward you and you realized it had already decided what you were.
His hands were the only thing about him that looked like they belonged to a legend.
They hovered near the access ladder as if they knew the rungs by muscle memory. Fingers flexed once, twice—subtle, controlled. A pilot's hands. Not the manic fidgeting of someone afraid. The quiet calibration of someone making sure the tool still fits.
Above him, occupying the bay like a sleeping god, stood the reason the dock workers had been whispering his name with a mixture of envy and prayer.
A Dire Wolf.
Not a holovid image. Not a tabletop miniature. Not a half-remembered nightmare from the Clan Invasion broadcasts.
A real Daishi, one hundred tons of Clan engineering and murder doctrine, its broad shoulders and heavy torso hung with armor like layered slabs of midnight. The torso had that unmistakable OmniMech silhouette—built to accept pods, built to be reconfigured, built to be adaptable without ever becoming merciful.
It looked too big for the hangar. Like the station had built the bay around it and then regretted the decision.
The armor wasn't clean.
It had been repainted—badly—over old insignia that still ghosted through in certain light. Under the matte charcoal topcoat, you could see the faint outline of a wolf-head crest someone had tried to sand down and failed. There were repair plates that didn't match the rest of the frame—patchwork from field welds, salvage yards, desperate nights. The left torso wore a long gouge where something had peeled through outer armor, leaving a scar that no cosmetic job could hide.
Dack knew every mark. He'd traced them with his eyes as a kid when his father was still alive and still telling him stories that sounded like lies until the day they weren't.
Daishi, the criminal underworld of the Combine had called it—Great Death—and the name had stuck because it felt true.
Dack didn't call it that.
He called it what his father had called it, quietly, when the cockpit sealed and the outside world stopped mattering:
"Wolf."
A boot scraped behind him.
Dack didn't turn. He didn't need to.
"Jarn." The voice belonged to Ivo Kess, the kind of man who had never met a tragedy he couldn't invoice. Outreach had plenty of his type—quartermasters, fixers, small-time sharks with station authority stamps. Kess wore a jacket with too many pockets and a smile that came and went like a bad signal.
"You're late," Kess said.
Dack kept staring up at the cockpit hatch. "I'm on time."
Kess snorted like he'd heard that before. "Funny. You got your father's mouth."
That landed and didn't. Dack had run out of places to store insults.
Kess stepped closer, craning his neck to look up at the Dire Wolf the way a man might look up at a cathedral—if he planned to strip the copper from its roof.
"Dock fees," Kess said. "Storage. Security. Power draw—those double heat sinks don't run themselves, kid." He let his gaze travel over the machine like a hand. "Insurance—"
"You never insured it," Dack said.
Kess blinked, then smiled wider, unoffended. "We can talk about terms."
"We can talk about the will," Dack replied, and this time he turned enough that Kess caught the full weight of his eyes.
Kess's smile faltered for half a second. He didn't look afraid of Dack.
He looked afraid of what Dack sat under.
Kess cleared his throat and produced a datapad, holding it out like a priest offering scripture. "Transfer papers. MRBC filed. Almost clean."
Dack took it with one hand. The screen displayed a basic inheritance transfer: chassis ID, registration, salvage rights, and the kind of legal boilerplate that always sounded like it was written by someone who'd never been shot at.
Then the last line.
A personal note embedded in the file—his father's handwriting digitized, jagged and sharp:
*If you're reading this, I didn't make it back. Don't sell the Wolf for scraps. Don't let a House put a leash on you. A leash becomes a chain. Fly free or die tired.*
Dack's thumb hovered over the signature.
For a moment, his hand shook—just once, a tremor that wasn't fear.
It was anger looking for a target and finding only ghosts.
Kess watched him like a man watching a safe crack.
"You know," Kess said softly, too softly, "people are asking. About the way your father died."
Dack's jaw tightened. "People can ask."
"They're saying it was a Trial," Kess continued, tasting the word like it was exotic. "Some Clan ritual nonsense. They're saying a real Clan ace challenged him for the machine. Saying your old man—"
"Enough," Dack said.
Not loud. Just flat.
The kind of tone you used when you'd already chosen where you were going to aim.
Kess lifted both hands, palms out. "Alright, alright. I'm just telling you what the docks say."
Dack handed the pad back. "Put the bay lease in my name."
Kess hesitated. "And the fees—"
"I'll pay," Dack said. "After I take a contract."
Kess's eyes glittered like he'd been waiting for that sentence. "I might have something. Quick. Clean. Pays well."
Nothing that paid well was quick or clean. Not in the Inner Sphere, and definitely not in a place like Outreach where mercenary dreams came to die and get sold for parts.
But Dack listened.
Kess flicked his finger and a contract packet projected in the air: orbital plot, target silhouette, escrow terms.
**CONTRACT TITLE:** *BONE PICKER*
**EMPLOYER:** Anonymous escrow
**LOCATION:** Periphery edge of the **Garnet Gate debris field**
**OBJECTIVE:** Recover cargo from derelict tender *Sable Skiff*
**OPPOSITION:** Unconfirmed
**PAYMENT:** High (hard currency + salvage claim)
Dack's eyes moved fast. He didn't read like normal people read; he scanned like a targeting computer acquiring lock.
Anonymous. Debris field. "Unconfirmed" opposition.
A contract written in the language of plausible deniability.
"Why me?" Dack asked.
Kess didn't even pretend. He tilted his head toward the Dire Wolf. "Because you have a Daishi."
The word sat heavy between them, half reverent, half greedy.
Dack stared at the orbital plot. Garnet Gate was a graveyard: the shattered bones of ships caught in slow, eternal spin. Derelicts collected there, and so did ambushes.
He knew what Kess meant, even if Kess didn't.
A Dire Wolf wasn't just a 'Mech.
It was a problem that made powerful people nervous.
It was the kind of machine that had been designed by Clans to be the "ultimate assault OmniMech"—a rumor so loud even rival Clans fought Trials over production rights.
It was also the kind of machine that attracted attention like blood in water.
Dack's throat felt tight. He kept his voice calm anyway.
"Prep the doors," he said.
Kess blinked. "You're taking it out now?"
"Yes."
"To where?"
Dack looked up at the Dire Wolf's cockpit, black and waiting. He imagined the harness closing. The neurohelmet settling against his skull. The way a neuro-link could feel like a second heartbeat if you weren't afraid of it.
"To get paid," he said.
---
The dropship was small, ugly, and honest about it.
A patched-together Leopard-class knockoff—what mercs called a "loaner cat"—with a cargo bay barely big enough to cradle an assault OmniMech without scraping plating. Its thrusters pushed it toward the Garnet Gate debris field on a low-heat approach, because broadcasting your engine signature out here was the same as shouting *rob me* over open comms.
Dack sat strapped into the dropship's pilot seat, jaw clenched against the vibration. The Dire Wolf stood behind him in the cradle, mag-clamps biting into its ankles like iron teeth.
He didn't feel safe until his hands were on controls.
Then he felt dangerous.
The debris field appeared as a glittering smear against the dark—starlight catching on fractured hull plates and spinning engine bells. It was beautiful in the way fires were beautiful: bright, lethal, indifferent.
Then his sensors caught the derelict.
Sable Skiff floated dead, its hull torn open along the port side like something had clawed it. No running lights. No transponder. Minimal power signature—either a dying heartbeat, or a whisper meant to lure.
Dack's internal clock slowed.
A comm ping hit his headset—automated, neutral.
"Unidentified vessel. State your claim."
He didn't answer.
Instead, he killed his transponder entirely.
Silence was a statement in the Periphery.
Another ping—this one not automated.
Three new contacts bloomed on his tactical display.
Small. Fast.
Closing.
Dack exhaled through his nose. "So that's it."
The contract's "unconfirmed opposition" had just confirmed itself.
He rolled the dropship behind a slab of shattered armor plating the size of a building. Autocannon rounds stitched across the debris, throwing off sparks that looked like tiny suns.
Alarms screamed.
Dack's hands stayed steady.
He opened the cargo bay doors.
Vacuum rushed in with a violent fog of condensation that vanished as quickly as it formed. The Dire Wolf stood at the edge of the ramp like a statue that had decided to become a god.
Dack toggled control transfer.
The cockpit around him didn't physically change—but his *awareness* did. He felt the Dire Wolf's mass the way you felt your own limbs, scaled up into something monstrous. Gyro stabilization. Myomer tension. Reactor hum. Heat sinks primed and hungry.
A line of text flashed across his HUD: a pilot profile.
JARN, HALVEC — STATUS: DECEASED
OVERRIDE: HEIR ACCESS GRANTED
Dack's throat tightened.
Then the fighters came around the debris, and grief didn't matter anymore.
One interceptor screamed past the open bay, so close his external camera caught a glint off its canopy. Dack raised the Dire Wolf's right arm.
He didn't fire right away.
He felt the machine—its tiny gyro drift his father had always warned him about. The Daishi wasn't clumsy. It was just… *honest*. It demanded you respect momentum and timing.
Dack compensated without thinking.
Then he fired.
A stream of rounds tore through the void, and the interceptor tried to juke—too late. The first impacts ripped through its wing root. The second volley punched into its fuselage.
The craft disintegrated.
And because space didn't care about dignity, the pilot's body—suit compromised—spun out trailing a brief, pink mist that crystallized into glittering red ice.
Dack's stomach clenched.
He didn't look away.
The other two fighters broke formation, suddenly cautious.
They hadn't expected the kid in the hand-me-down Daishi to hit like an executioner.
Good.
Let them learn.
Dack stepped the Dire Wolf off the ramp into open space, maneuver thrusters pulsing in short controlled bursts. The Daishi drifted through the debris field like a black tower learning to swim, torso rotating, weapons tracking.
A fighter swung wide, trying to get behind him.
Dack charged the left-arm energy weapon pod—Clan-grade, long-range, brutal. He let the capacitors build. He let the enemy commit.
Then he lanced the void.
A hard line of light stitched across the fighter's midsection. The interceptor split in half. For a moment it held together purely out of momentum—then the halves drifted apart, atmosphere venting in a white jet like a wounded animal bleeding air.
The third fighter didn't press.
It ran.
Dack tracked it until it vanished behind debris.
He could chase.
He didn't.
Chasing got you killed by the second threat you hadn't seen yet.
He turned the Dire Wolf toward the derelict tender, *Sable Skiff*, floating silent and waiting like bait.
And as his heat warnings stabilized—those double heat sinks working hard under the armor—Dack felt something settle inside him. ([Sarna.net BattleTech Wiki][1])
Not triumph.
Not satisfaction.
Just clarity.
This wasn't a simple salvage job.
This was a test.
Or an attempted execution.
Either way, someone had put money into the idea of Dack Jarn dying before he became his father.
Dack's voice came out quiet in the sealed cockpit.
"Alright," he murmured. "Let's meet the one who paid for this."
He nudged the Dire Wolf forward into the derelict's shadow—into darkness thick with twisted metal and the promise of something worse than interceptors.
Because fighters were just the outer teeth.
The real predator was always inside.