BattleTech Legends: Decision at Thunder Rift (The Gray Death Legion Trilogy, Book One) - BattleTech Legends, #1

THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE EPIC SAGA OF FUTURE WAR!THE BEGINNING OF A LEGEND... Thirty meters tall, seventy tons of quick-striding death and destruction, the armored war machines called BattleMechs are the front line 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. With his friends and family dead and his father's regiment destroyed, young Grayson finds himself stranded on a world turned hostile. Now he must learn the hardest lesson of all: it takes more than a BattleMech to make a MechWarrior... But to claim that title, all Grayson has to do is go out and capture one of those giant killing machines...if it doesn't kill him first.