Date: May 5, 2734
Location: Alpheratz
Title: The Top of the Scrap Heap
Author: Jason Hardy
Type: Short Story (BattleCorps)
Synopsis: Brinson arrives at the prison compound's main entrance, and is surprised to see Velma Crawford, the prosecutor, arriving at the same time. Velma says she has come at Emma's request to discuss a plea deal, which is the opposite of what she told Brinson.
Their conversation is interrupted by Caleb Murphy, who introduces himself as "an associate" of Emma's, and says they will soon see why she asked them to come. Alarms ring out, and seventeen minutes later, an armed man collects them at the prison door and leads them to a vehicle, in which he drives them in a circuit of the prison perimeter until they reach the northern wall. There, he points at something silhouetted in the rising sun and asks them if they can tell him what it is, since its pilot is on their comm channels, and has been asking for them.
The object rockets into the sky and lands two kilometers from them, revealing it to be a humanoid figure wielding an enormous gun, currently pointed at the vehicle. Murphy responds to the pilot's hail, acknowledging that he has the lawyers.
The pilot informs them that they're looking at a Stinger, captured intact from the Federated Suns. He proclaims it as the most powerful weapon in the entire Outworlds Alliance by far, and the sole possession of Emma Jacobs, who can either reverse engineer it for the OAM, or destroy it, at her whim.
Crawford angrily responds that Jacobs can do what she wants for it, but she will not be let out of prison in this manner. She continues protesting for three days, right up until the Alliance government releases Emma Jacobs and reinstates her as the head of Alliance Defenders Limited.
Notes: Similar to Kevin Killiany's "The Emercity of Betrayal," numerous anachronisms make it hard to place when this story could take place. The given date of 2783-2784 makes no sense, since ADL has been making 'Mechs for the OAM since the 2730s, and 11,000 secret army 'Mechs had just been fighting SLDF forces throughout the Alliance during the Periphery Uprising.
The shock and awe with which the Stinger is regarded seem far more appropriate to a story set during the Age of War. However, Alliance Defenders Limited didn't exist until 2730. Also, they mention the Reunification War as being in the past, since they get their 'Mechs from Tortuga, which was founded by troops going AWOL in the Reunification War.
Setting it in the 2730s fits with the chronology of ADL, but doesn't explain why the project seems secret and meeting with government disapproval, since the Hegemony explicitly funded the ADL project to build 'Mechs and parts to ease the logistical strain on SLDF forces stationed in the Alliance. Plus, the pilot's statement that the Stinger represents the most powerful weapon on Alpheratz is nuts, since the OAM has plenty of aerospace fighters and even a small fleet of WarShips. As portrayed, it's as though the pilot assumes the veteran Avellar Guards are mostly armed with slingshots and water balloons. (Not to mention that the entire 287th BattleMech Division is stationed on Alpheratz.)
The best I can think of to shoehorn this somehow into the chronology is that it takes place in the 2730s, once the ADL corporation has been established, but in parallel to the Hegemony-funded parts-production operation. The project involved the director of ADL (who may not be Alliance-born, since she describes it as a backwater) so that she could have the necessary access to hide the operation from Hegemony accountants and overseers (and the SLIC).
Emma's real goal wasn't just to have ADL make Stingers, but to have it develop the capacity to make all the components on its own, rendering the OAM independent of the restrictive SLDF licensing arrangements. (This has undertones of laying the groundwork for passing those designs and tech specs on to secret factories, which is where a lot of those 11,000 Secret Army 'Mechs came from - though many were covertly sourced from Inner Sphere providers as well.)
The Locust that they first reverse engineered was perhaps too damaged to be useful for the program, since its stability was questionable, but the main problem seems to have been that it was built out of scrap metal, and its combat worthiness was in question. The choice of second-rate materials may have been the result of the lack of resources due to the secrecy involved, but if they only have access to lousy materials, why would a reverse engineered Stinger perform any better? (Perhaps the pirate Locust had long since lost all of its layered diamond-steel armor, and been reduced to using salvaged sheet metal, so they couldn't reverse engineer the armor.)
Emma's arrest can be explained as a smokescreen by Emma's supporters in the Alliance government, so that all attention would be focused on her and not on the Stinger-acquisition project. Once that bore fruit, and she proved to the OAM's satisfaction that she could deliver what they wanted, she'd be rewarded with freedom and exoneration. She could then go ahead and oversee the production of Locusts, Wasps, and Stingers in the Hegemony-financed production facility, all the while using what data she could glean to supplement the reverse-engineered Stinger and Locust details, thereby enabling the ADL factory to keep producing once supplies of key parts from the Hegemony were cut off in the 2770s.
(The way the Hegemony set things up in the Periphery was akin to how a Coca-Cola bottling plant works - they get shipments of the syrup, and supply their own water, carbonation, and bottles, but the formula stays in the vault back in Atlanta.)
The remaining question, if this was the OAM's goal, is to what extent they anticipated a Periphery uprising, and whether they had contact with groups like the Taurian Freedom Army at this point. (It's too early for Stefan Amaris to be in the mix...but perhaps his mother Cynthia?)
Short and sweet, this is a troublesome story for the overall continuity. Though it didn't really conflict with anything published at the time, later supplements dealing with the Outworlds Alliance and the Star League era have decisively contradicted this story.