Volume XLI: Destiny Before Honor—The Nova Cats’ Darkest Years

Destiny. Fate. If they exist, is it theoretically possible to know the path laid out before you? But then, if your future is already written, what good would knowing such information beforehand do? These are the kinds of questions philosophers have argued about since the dawning of human consciousness. However, in the case of the Clans—and indeed, many Inner Sphere peoples—the answer is simple: destiny is not written in stone; humankind has the ability to forge its own fate. Even the Nova Cats are not immune to this simple vanity, though their belief in visions might suggest otherwise. In fact, their belief in the Ways of Seeing treads an interesting line between accepting fate and the belief that destiny can be altered. For the Nova Cats, the Rite of Seeing presents but one possible future—the most likely at the time, perhaps. It is then up to the seer to act on their visions, either to change them, or to realize them.

Even in the time of Khan Sandra Rosse, it is said that the future invasion of the Inner Sphere was foretold. Rosse allegedly saw “the cat and the jaguar sharing a kill, under the watchful eye of the wolf,” a reference that later generations ascribed to the invasion itself, when Clans Nova Cat and Smoke Jaguar would share a corridor under the command of ilKhan Ulric Kerensky of Clan Wolf.

Centuries later, when the Clans grew divided along the Warden/Crusader issue, the Nova Cats initially balked at taking up the Crusader side, believing that only a Nova Cat ilKhan could lead such an effort. But, like so many other Clans, the “evidence” of a danger presented when a ComStar JumpShip suddenly appeared in Clan space proved compelling enough to change their minds. Interestingly enough, the Cats’ Oathmaster at the time, Biccon Winters, predicted a disaster even then. In her vision, the wolf, the cat, the falcon, and the bear sliced easily through the Inner Sphere, trailing mists of white that eventually transformed into a roiling cloud that consumed Kerensky’s children. Instead of heeding the warnings, however, the Nova Cat Khans read into the vision what they wished to read: the swift conquest of the Spheroids by Nova Cat forces, and disregarded the ambiguous outcome. Even during the Invasion, when Winters, on a chance meeting with ComStar’s Precentor-Martial Anastasius Focht, went into a frenzy and declared him the “white mist come to destroy” her Clan, the Cat war leaders ignored the signs. In the hindsight of the mid 3050s, after the Clans’ defeat at Tukayyid, many of the Nova Cats considered Biccon Winters’ vision a foretelling of their defeat in that battle. Today, however, this ominous portent has been reinterpreted.

In many ways, Oathmaster [Biccon] Winters’ vision runs analogous to the initial Inner Sphere invasion, of course. The “white mist,” obviously, could have represented ComStar, which at first aided the Clans by administering Clan-conquered worlds, only to turn on the Clans and the Inner Sphere during Operation Scorpion. But the Tukayyid truce did not destroy the Clans, per se, and Operation Scorpion came nowhere near destroying Kerensky’s children. Could it have been a portent, then, of the Nova Cats’ abjuration, when the Inner Sphere reunited the Star League and targeted their nemesis, Clan Smoke Jaguars, for annihilation? This has been proposed, but hardly fits, as ComStar was but a small part of the Inner Sphere coalition there, and again the “destruction” is mitigated by the fact that the Cats and other Clans survived the chaos fairly well in the aftermath. What, then, was the “white mist,” and how did it consume the Clans? Well, now it seems the event foretold in Winters’ vision may have actually been the Jihad. Word of Blake, still clinging to the white colors of pre-reformed ComStar, swirled around the entire Inner Sphere, even in the Clan occupation zones, their war one of terror and chaos. In the midst of this total war, the homeworlds suffered some unimaginable upheaval that actually sundered all connection between them and the invading and encroaching Clans, leaving them marooned within the Inner Sphere. —Dr. Lorenzo Torres, Professor of History, University of Thorin.

The total eradication of the invading Clans still has not happened, but the severing of ties to the homelands has effectively transformed the invaders left among us into states of the Inner Sphere. From the Nova Cats’ point of view, some Clans have transformed even further, in fact. The Diamond Sharks, for instance, have become the Sea Foxes again, a gypsy Clan roving the Sphere for profit. The Ghost Bears have fused their Clan ways with those of the Spheroid populations, even going so far as to accept an often-subservient position in the Rasalhague Dominion. For the Cats, their own Clan has become bereft of worlds to call its own, limited instead to a “reservation” within the heart of the Dragon. Could this have been the vision of death Winters actually saw so long ago? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this vision instead refers to an as-yet-unseen calamity, a greater threat still to come. Perhaps it was a disaster already averted somehow. Or perhaps—just perhaps—it is simply the product of an overactive imagination.

In truth, the Nova Cats’ fortunes both rose and fell with the invasion of the Inner Sphere. Though they were defeated at Tukayyid, forced for years to fend off the Smoke Jaguars, eternal enemies who shared an occupation zone with them, they would play a vital role in the Inner Sphere’s effort to end the Clan Wars. From there, (once more guided by visions) they would join with the Inner Sphere forces and their new Star League, to help smash the Jaguars and end the Invasion for all time. Yet rather than earn glory among their brethren, they would be Abjured, their people slaughtered in the homeworlds as the Clans fell upon one another in the name of greed and power. Their strength decimated, their lower castes nearly wiped out, the Cats would withdraw to their sanctuary, under the wing of the Dragon, there encouraged to live their mystical way of life not in the pursuit of war, but in the hope of peace. Though war would continue to dog them even there, with the brief Ghost Bear–Combine War of the early 3060s, the Nova Cats had at last found some kind of home, and a future of promised prosperity. Their way of life had survived the trials of the past intact, even though they continued to struggle for reconciliation. To many Nova Cats, there was no way to go but up; a spirit of hope—or at least hopeful determination—had begun to glow anew.

And then came the Jihad.

Touched off, ironically enough, by the shattering of their own vision, the Word of Blake, ComStar’s reactionary splinter faction, engulfed the Inner Sphere in a holy war of nuclear weapons, neutron bombs, biochemical weapons, orbital strikes, and fanatical, rampaging armies of BattleMechs. Their assault spared no one, not even those who saw their own visions of peace and prosperity shattered with the death of the new Star League. The Nova Cats, every bit as stunned by the breakdown of the League they had sacrificed so much to join and preserve, were all but lost when Blakist assault forces struck at their enclaves on Itabiana. The strike attempted to fan the flames of the nascent Ghost Bear–Nova Cat feud, but the revelation of the truth came in time to avert a disaster.

In fact, Clan Nova Cat would be the first of Kerensky’s children to see the Jihad for the threat it was, and Nova Cat troops were quickly mobilized to assist the Inner Sphere in the struggle against the zealots. The war would take a heavy toll on the Cats, however; all but shattering the remains of their military forces, while Blakist counterstrikes nearly laid waste to the Combine worlds they called home. Yet, through it all, the Cats fought on. Fulfilling their own destiny, seeking their own honor on the battlegrounds of a hundred worlds, they defended peoples they once viewed as mortal enemies through the darkest years they ever knew.

Next week: The Nova Cats today, closer than ever to the Inner Sphere, yet still undeniably bound to their history and the traditions of the Clans. Come join us as the tour of the stars continues! I’m Bertram Habeas.