The True History of the Not-Named Clan?
Do we really know what happened to BattleTech's Clan Wolverine?
For an outfit that has been extinct for hundreds of years, Clan Wolverine is remarkably popular among BattleTech fans. Plenty will name them as “the good Clan” or praise them for standing up to Nicholas Kerensky. It’s a strange take, because no part of the BattleTech canon is particularly sympathetic to the Wolverines. In early sources on the Clans they’re boogeymen, gradually getting warmer treatments in The Clans: Warriors of Kerensky and Operation: KLONDIKE. But even those sources are fairly uncertain about the facts of the matter, sketching out the Wolverines as one of the original twenty Clans, founded in 2807, before coming into conflict with their brethren and getting exterminated and/or expelled from Clan space in 2824 – just two years after the Clan victory over the societies of the Pentagon Worlds.
Then there’s Betrayal of Ideals. While I normally think that BattleTech novels are stories that people in the BattleTech universe tell, this one’s influential enough that a lot of the plot is labeled “True History” on Sarna.net articles. It also provides a much deeper account than the outlines and question marks in the sourcebooks. So let’s talk about it. (Spoiler warning for a work that’s pushing twenty years old, I guess.)
Betrayal was first written in 2006 by Blaine Pardoe and expanded into a novel in 2016. Pardoe doesn’t have the best name in the BattleTech community but this isn’t really the place to get into real-life personalities. The text is what matters today. All we really need to know about Pardoe is that his author’s note insists that the Wolverines and their Khan Sarah McEvedy were on the right side of history – which is odd in light of the novel itself.
Timeline problems
Before getting into the narrative, it’s worth pointing out that Betrayal does not fit very well with the rest of BattleTech. There are some trivial differences (Nicholas Kerensky piloting a Highlander instead of an Atlas), but it’s the timeline that creates the biggest issues. Clan Wolverine is portrayed as having been around for quite a long time, with Sarah McEvedy in charge long enough to be a formative influence on the generation of young warriors under her command - but Betrayal picks up in 2822, only fifteen years after the Clan’s founding. In the same vein, at one point in the novel it’s suggested that genetics are being used to enhance Wolverine warriors and their sibkos are being advanced – and maybe those are accusations that would fly around, but elsewhere we’re told that the Clans’ trademark “Iron Womb” technology was in its infancy when the novel takes place.
In fairness, one of the apparent timeline issues isn’t troubling at all. The second Wolverine saKhan, Franklin Hallis, is described as a warrior who had won his bloodname and he talks about McEvedy having been Khan for his whole life. Even when the latter remark is read as “his whole life as a warrior” to make Franklin a grown man, this worries some fans because Franklin Hallis is elsewhere described as the founder of the Hallis bloodname. The way out here is to simply believe that there were two Franklins Hallis – an older one who left with Aleksandr Kerensky in the Exodus (and presumably died off-screen, perhaps in the heavy fighting of Operation KLONDIKE), and a younger freeborn warrior who won the right to the Hallis name and went on to be Sarah McEvedy’s assistant.
Sarah McEvedy’s failings
The novel largely follows events from the perspective of the Wolverine Khan and we get plenty of her thoughts about what’s going on. There are two other Wolverine characters – the younger Franklin Hallis and Trish Ebon – but these young people are completely devoted to McEvedy, seeing her as their faultless leader and “mother” of the Clan. The Khan herself had a similar outlook. McEvedy seemed to think that she never did anything wrong and that every setback for the Wolverines was the result of other people’s failings. But despite being from her perspective and full of her thoughts about how right she was, the novel is not kind to McEvedy.
If that seems hard to believe, we should start with something objective: Betrayal trashes the Wolverine Khan as an awful tactician. In a Trial against two Clan Widowmaker warriors in King Crabs, McEvedy took her Guillotine and a Black Knight piloted by her saKhan Dwight Robertson into close quarters and got chewed up by the assault ‘mechs’ massive autocannons. This would be embarrassing for any ‘mech commander, but McEvedy followed up by hastily opening the range while her saKhan was overwhelmed and killed. Her own Guillotine went down shortly after, though her life was saved by the direct intervention of the Clans’ ilKhan, Nicholas Kerensky. You might think she would have been grateful for that, but instead McEvedy blamed the ilKhan for her defeat. There was no way the loss could have been her fault, so Nicholas got the blame without even a scrap of evidence.
That kind of outlook was the rule for McEvedy in Betrayal. She was ready to betray the ilKhan from the start of the novel, thinking to herself that Nicholas was the problem even in the book’s prologue (set during Operation KLONDIKE). Her rebellion began by “reforming” the Caste System. Now this is normally seen as a mark in the Wolverine’s favour, but it’s worth taking in the details. According to her own perspective, the Wolverine Khan “allowed” more civilians into her Laborer Caste as a way to increase crop yields. Does that need to be unpacked? Maybe you think that the Caste System should at least allow for more mobility between the castes, but was moving more people into the Laborer Caste to ensure economic outputs what you had in mind?
Regardless, when Nicholas called the Wolverine Khan for a “please explain” meeting on the 12th June 2822, McEvedy insisted that she was under the impression that the Caste System was a temporary expedient that would be done away with once Operation KLONDIKE concluded. The harvest she had overseen was a proof that the reforms were successful, but if Nicholas really wanted Castes to be permanent she would play ball and change course. This might sound good, but in reality she was telling a stupid, obvious lie straight to his face. KLONDIKE ended two weeks before that meeting. Anyone who knows anything about plants knows that two weeks isn’t enough time for tinkering with the workforce to produce any positive results. She was clearly unwinding the Clans long before that and seemed to think that Nicholas would be easily fooled. Despite the provocation, the ilKhan responded fairly mildly. He explained that the Caste System was permanent and intended to prevent the re-emergence of social tensions which had led to the apocalyptic Pentagon Civil War. He only grew passionate when insisting that the horrors of the Civil War are not to be repeated, and rounded out their conversation amiably enough.
In general, McEvedy thought the worst of Nicholas throughout the novel and repeatedly told herself that he was a volatile, tantrum-prone leader who was out to get her. Meanwhile the Nicholas Kerensky that the novel shows was fairly calm – more of a cool, calculating leader than the man-child of McEvedy’s imagination. Nicholas did insist that his course was the right one, but he was willing to accept a reconciliation (on his terms) for quite some time. McEvedy not only refused to compromise, she looked for new ways to provoke him. After being pushed for months, Nicholas changed course and decided to make an example of the Wolverines – and his speeches to that end do hit some chilling notes. Still, if Betrayal was meant to make Sarah McEvedy the hero to Nicholas Kerensky’s villain, it did a pretty bad job of it.
On the bright side?
Betrayal did give Sarah McEvedy a scheming villain in the form of Widowmaker Khan Jason Karrige. He had some unspecified grudge against the Wolverines and spent most of the novel turning people against them, though McEvedy made it easy for him by treating the other Clans with disdain. Karrige even tried to get the ilKhan to support sanctions against Clan Wolverine - but Nicholas had none of it. The Widowmaker appeal was rebuffed and Karrige was told to settle the matter on the field of battle through formal Trials. Karrige ends up taking this way beyond the ilKhan’s limits, using weapons of mass destruction and finally showing that he was the bad guy. Even then, I can’t help wondering if Karrige might be sympathetic if we knew why he hated the Wolverines.
The novel also shows some of McEvedy’s strengths. She was clearly a superb military planner, putting together a logistical masterpiece for the Wolverines’ flight from Clan space. Her leadership of her Clan generated intense, even fanatical loyalty – to the dismay of other Clans, Wolverine civilians referred to their capital city as “McEvedy”. Still, I can’t help wondering about her methods. She’s shown directing a vicious “counter-espionage” operation that relies on confessions extracted under torture to implicate civilians in leaking information about the Wolverines to the other Clans. McEvedy even gets paranoid enough to purge every civilian who is not of “Wolverine blood”. I have no idea what counts as Wolverine blood when the Clan is so young, but it’s clear that McEvedy was engaged in a far-reaching action to remove everyone who was so much as suspected of disloyalty. The purged civilians (most of them guilty of nothing more than having the wrong blood) were dumped into the Bandit Caste, an act that calls to mind some vile episodes from Earth’s history.
Nicholas has the same muck on him. At the novel’s conclusion, he instructed his loyal Clans to end the Wolverine bloodlines, killing every Wolverine warrior that they encountered while sterilizing the civilians. It’s a ghastly, indefensible decision – though I would caution those who want to side with the Wolverines as a result. McEvedy was every bit as obsessed with bloodlines as Nicholas, every bit as willing to deem people guilty because of who they are regardless of what they’d done. If the novel has a message worth passing on, it’s not “Nicky bad, Wolverines good,” but a more complex warning that not every enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Postscript: the Dehra Dun Disaster
Perhaps you’re starting to think that you don’t want to hold up Betrayal of Ideals as the real story? The good news is that there’s one big event in the novel that comes across as so implausible that it calls the whole thing into question. According to Betrayal, on the 22nd of October 2823 the Snow Raven Sovetskii Soyuz-class warship Avalanche launched a fighter, callsign Angel One, carrying a nuclear missile (likely an Alamo class device or similar) to attack Wolverine ground units. While Angel One was in atmospheric flight, the Texas-class warship Bismark (a mothballed ship boarded by Clan Wolverine fourteen days earlier and hurriedly reactivated) jumped in at a pirate point 12 kilometers away from Avalanche and began to attack Angel One. The Snow Raven fighter began evasive action, but a salvo from Bismark’s naval lasers damaged it and a follow-up attack from the ship’s naval PPCs finished the job. As a result of Angel One’s destruction, the nuclear device detonated above the Snow Raven city of Dehra Dun, killing tens of thousands.
Even after shrugging at the improbability of the timing, this is pretty much impossible. In terms of BattleTech rules, believing in the Bismark’s attack on Angel One requires some very generous assumptions about the condition of the Wolverine’s ship and crew. Bismark was described as fairly well-maintained despite her age, but the Wolverine crew could hardly have been familiar with their prize, much less experts in operating her. Even a very skilled crew would have had trouble using capital-scale weapons against an evading aerospace fighter in a planet’s atmosphere. (The shot’s at about +10 to hit, too difficult for gunners of less than elite quality.)
If you’re happy to grant that the Wolverines were just that good and just that lucky, Angel One’s destruction still shouldn’t have resulted in anything other than a “dirty bomb” situation with radioactive material being scattered over the region. Nuclear weapons from the late 20th century were too precise to be detonated by an external explosion. A device from the Star League might not have been better than that, but as BattleTech rules for nuclear devices don’t have any provision for this kind of accidental nuclear detonation, they probably weren’t worse.
All this makes the event as described in Betrayal of Ideals vanishingly unlikely. It’s generally agreed that something terrible did happen to Dehra Dun, but there are plenty of alternative explanations. Maybe Angel One was sabotaged by dastardly Wolverines or dastardly Widowmakers. Maybe the nuclear atrocity was more like the official version, a deliberate attack by the Wolverines, or maybe it was a cover story for some horrible deed done by Nicholas Kerensky. Finally – and I really think this is most likely – the disaster had something to do with lingering resistance to the Clans after Operation KLONDIKE.
Conclusions: The Truth or a truth?
Betrayal of Ideals puts us in a strange place. For people who want to see the novel as the true story, we’re shown a Sarah McEvedy who is at least as morally objectionable as Nicholas Kerensky and rather less effective than him, too. If that’s not OK and folks want to hold up McEvedy and her Wolverines as freedom-fighting heroes, the novel probably has to be thrown out in favor of some other real story. Personally, I favor the third route. Let’s accept that there is no real story. The Wolverines are a mystery. Their descendants (if any) could be the better angels of the SLDF legacy, the heirs to a legacy of black betrayal, or anything in-between.
Next week: the Minnesota Tribe.