Leading the newly-formed Gray Death Legion has been challenging for Grayson Death Carlyle, so when a job comes their way, he’s only too happy to take it. The mission: train the local resistance on the planet Verthandi to resist their Draconis Combine masters. But things do not go well almost from the moment the Legion arrives. Trapped on Verthandi and facing a superior force and a fractured populace, the men and women of the Legion find themselves in a situation that makes the campaign on Trellwan look like a walk in the park. 

A PACK DIVIDED… The Succession Wars... The Marik Civil War... The War of 3039... The Clan Invasion... Wolf's Dragoons were victorious in them all. For fifty years, the five mercenary regiments of Wolf's Dragoons have been the toughest MechWarriors in the Inner Sphere. Whatever the job...

Thirty meters tall, 70 tons of quick-striding death and destruction, the armored war machines called BattleMechs are the frontline forces of the crumbling star empire locked in the horror of the endless Succession Wars. Their pilots are MechWarriors, 31st-century knights riding armored machines powerful enough to take a city apart. Grayson Death Carlyle had been training to be a MechWarrior since he was 10 years old, but his graduation came sooner than expected. 

Bushido is the warrior code that governs all these concepts. As a MechWarrior of the Draconis Combine, Minobu Tetsuhara is bound by it, a code that demands loyal service to the devious Warlord Grieg Samsonov. When Minobu came upon a strange blue and gold Archer, the field littered with its vanquished opponents, and its weapons empty, bushido dictated that he not destroy an honorable but helpless warrior. For that, he became Dispossessed, stripped of his BattleMech—and his honor.

The Gray Death Legion is in the employ of the Free Worlds League and has even been given a landhold on the planet Helm. But dark forces conspire against them, and the Legion soon finds themselves declared renegade war criminals, fair game for anyone to attack. Now, they are on the run on their home planet, trying desperately to reach safety before the might of House Marik falls upon them. They are about to discover the true motives of those who engineered their downfall. And what they discover will change the Inner Sphere forever....

Resourceful, ruthless, beautiful, apparently without fear, Scout Lieutenant Cassie Suthorn of Camacho's Caballeros is as consummately lethal as the giant BattleMechs she lives to hunt. Only one other person in the freewheeling mercenary regiment has a hint of the demons which drive her.