GblaRCS Chpt 55

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 55 -==
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"No, the Blackjack's autocannons aren't going to explode when you fire them. That's just an unfounded rumor."Battlemech Training Instructor to a MechWarrior recruit with the Copernicus Militia - 2850CE
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===After Action Report===
Illyria III – Illyrian Palatinate – 2843
People hailing from Niops were well-known for wearing sunglasses a lot when visiting other places. The dim red dwarf star, they lived beneath made them sensitive to the much brighter daylight to be seen on most colony worlds, but they didn't usually wear them inside and the fact that Wilhem Sampson, AKA 'Henry McCarty' was only made him look like even more of a douche.
This was of course by design. Leaning back in his chair at the front of the press room facing the various journalists and camera crews, hands cupped behind his head, fingers meshed to cradle it and with a smug expression on his face he very much looked the part of the underhanded ****** the crowd had booed out of the arena.
In some ways Sampson's entire life up to now had been a rehearsal for this performance, the Stanislavski acting method taken to its ultimate level. If you want to look like a real jerkass then actually being one helped a lot.
Sat beside him, looking suitably bitter and annoyed, two-time Solaris Grand Champion Peter Grigg would have happily swapped his prized gilded laurel wreath, the one that he had been handed twenty years ago as the trophy from his first ever championship victory, for the chance to go back in time a few hours and double-tap the sonofabitch when he had faked his mech being crippled.
Behind them on the wall a large vid-screen was displaying the match earlier in looping repeat, several points in the action being shown in slow-motion including when Sampson had faked being disabled and Grigg fell for it.
"Mister McCarty, are you aware that tricks such as the one you pulled are heavily frowned upon in arena competition?" a sports journalist asked, not bothering to disguise his own feelings on the matter judging by his expression of distaste.
"Yeah, that's why I thought it would work" Sampson replied, smirking.
"Then perhaps you are unaware of why it's frowned upon?" the journalist persisted.
"Nah, it's to try and keep down the number of schmucks that get killed to a minimum" Sampson replied. "It stops guys in crippled mechs getting finished off with an unnecessary coup de grace."
The journalist now visibly glared at him, so much for giving the benefit of the doubt. "So, despite knowing that you still went ahead with such a ruse?" he asked rhetorically, tone dripping with contempt.
"Right, because it's not technically against the rules, more like just a suggestion or guideline" Sampson replied, leaning even further back in his chair causing Grigg to offer a silent prayer he would topple back and hurt himself. "Once I realized what he was trying to do from his shot placement, worked out that his game-plan was to try and take out my engine, keep hitting my mech in the left torso where my autocannon was to try and set off the ammunition there to make it a slam-dunk, I just let him think he'd done it" Sampson explained his thought process. "Because he wanted his plan to work, he naturally assumed that it had when I made my mech looked like it had powered down. Basic human psychology."
Grigg's narrowed his eyes. He was a consistent, cerebral MechWarrior the kind that won matches as much in their head as they did with their marksmanship, reflexes and piloting skill. That was how he had managed to win the Grand Championship at Solaris two years running, he didn't just rely on luck and raw skill. He liked to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent compared to his own, and if you've got an AC/20 and the other guy is using long-ranger weaponry and has a mech with a fragile XL engine the smart move is get close as fast as you can and keep smacking rounds into that torso until you've totaled that engine. That was especially true if there's ammunition stored in the same location that'll give you a sweet secondary explosion when you hit it.
It frankly annoyed the crap out of Grigg that the bastard had used his logical approach against him.
"And what would you have done if your opponent had decided to finish you off, instead of showing mercy?" the journalist wanted to know.
"Not let him" Sampson replied. "Even with the autocannon knocked out I still had two working gauss rifles and my pulse lasers. At that range I had a more than decent chance of making a head-shot, the only reason I didn't is because I wasn't trying to kill the guy, just win the match, but if he just tried to kill me then the rules would have changed."
Grigg's rolled his eyes. "Man, seriously overestimates his skills." he observed. "Faking being crippled was the best piece of piloting I saw you make all match" he told Sampson.
"Can't argue with the last part" Sampson responded, not that the match up until that point had really given him a chance to show what he could do. He had been following a script, of sorts, which severely impinged on his style. 
That said, and although you'd never get him to admit it out loud, Wilhelm Sampson himself now judged that Grigg was probably better than he was by some margin. That this was the case even now with Grigg a decade past his prime certainly surprised him and indicated just how good the top Solaris jocks actually were. Having had the chance to watch the match in slow-motion from several camera angles it was clear that Grigg's maneuvering, use of cover and particularly his shot placement, was truly outstanding given he was piloting a lumbering Atlas. If many more of the LRMs or SRMs had gotten through, if those pulse lasers the Atlas was packing instead of its regular armament had seared off more armor, then Sampson knew would have had to take it all very seriously to win despite his tech advantage, giving up on the little piece of chicanery he had planned to employ if the opportunity arose. 
Not that the chicanery hadn't come good in the end, if not in the way almost everybody thought it had, not being cognizant of all the relevant facts for a very good reason. 
"You should have made a lot more hits, what with that fancy targeting system in that Nightstar doing a lot of the work for you" Grigg belittled the other MechWarrior's skills.
If Sampson had been doing his best he would have made more hits, and would have used cover and terrain better as well to limit how much damage he took in return too, but he wasn't really competing so much as acting, so the accusation of ineptitude didn't have too much sting to it. As it was he just shrugged in response to Grigg's criticism. "I won didn't I?" he replied conceitedly. "Even if I hadn't pulled the trick you were only one or gauss rifle slugs away from losing by the time my ammo exploded, and if I'd been luckier with the cluster rounds you'd have lost before then."
Rory Fallstaff's ham-fisted attempt to motivating Sampson into handling his mech in a certain way at a level below his actual abilities with the challenge 'Well if you don't think you're good enough to convincingly fake it…' hadn't worked quite as well as the colonel still thought it had. Sampson had let him think it did, but in reality his main to playing along with the ruse de guerre was something else.
Wilhelm Sampson was actually more of a team player than he let on, though if you ever accused him of not being an entirely egocentric, self-absorbed, jerk he would vociferously deny it to his dying breath. His entire persona was built around being a rebel, the MechWarrior savant captured by Clan Wolverine when they defeated the Rasmussen Elite, the prisoner who railed against being turned into a bondsman then being forced to join the clan's laborer caste, only to be put back into a cockpit a couple of years later when Khan Hallis found himself with more BattleMechs on his hands than skilled and experienced MechWarriors to pilot them.
As a teenage wunderkind with the Rasmussen Elite Sampson had been a thug in a Thug. His comrades there had been violent ****** that ruled their territory like the Bandit Kingdom it was, with Gustav Kran as their king and the warriors like Sampson living the high life on the backs of the serfs that did all the work. After that subsequently finding himself one of the people at the bottom of the ladder doing unskilled manual work had been quite the comedown, and his reaction to that was the genesis of the 'Laborer Caste Hero' schtick he still played to on occasion.
Even once he was back doing what he was best at, piloting a BattleMech, Sampson liked to push the boundaries. Seeing how far he could go in annoying his superiors without risking getting court-martialled, kicked out of the army and made to get a real job, while all the time feigning to not really give a crap about why his new home on Niops maintained such a large, well-funded and well-equipped military for its size so long as he got to be a part of it.
Sampson knew full well of course, after all he had been one of the people that decent people needed to be protected from. It hadn't been Colonel Fallstaff's appeal to his ego that got him to go along with the misdirection, it had been the logic and aim of the plan itself and the fact that deep-down Sampson knew that his people, and they were his people now, were the good guys. Or at the very worst they were objectively the least bad of the bad guys by a decent margin.
ComStar and the Successor States were watching Niops closely now which made obfuscation ever more important. More concernedly Nicolas Kerensky was himself undoubtedly looking out for signs of Wolverine influence, and at some point Niops would tip its hat that they had weapon's technology more advanced than the Star League had which would trigger alarm bells amongst the clans as to where Franklin Hallis and his people had ended up.
Misdirection was called for, or as General Hallis had put it the waters needed to be muddied a little so when the information inevitably leaked out that there was something just a little screwy about the BattleMechs the Niops Association was producing it wouldn't immediately bring the Great Houses down on them like a ton of bricks, or worse the clans.
That all made sense, and as long as it was made clear to everyone back home that mattered that Billy the Kid had not been doing his best, Sampson was willing to take one for the team.
Just don't ask him to make a habit of it, he had a reputation to maintain after all. 
"Try me again without all the lostech weaponry." Grigg's defended his own reputation in front of the press, regarding Sampson with an expression that made it look like the other MechWarrior was something nasty he had stepped in. 
"A bad workman always blames his tools" Sampson responded, smirking again. "Nothing worse than a bad loser" he opined, wondering if he was going to get punched in the face for that one and knowing full-well he would deserve it if he was.
Peter Grigg's momentarily considered slugging the arrogant prick but decided to keep the moral high ground in front of the media instead. Anyway, he could always beat the tar out of him later without being photographed doing it after all. "Even with CASE protection the only way you could have survived that ammunition explosion is if you weren't using an XL engine" he stated with conviction. Annoyingly enough if he'd known less about the Nightstar before the fight he might have actually been better off. "If I'd realized it would have all gone very differently, chuckles" he said with justified certainty. For that matter, SFE or no it was still practically a miracle that ammo going up hadn't blown the machines arm off at the same time, those kind of internal detonations were almost always catastrophic. 
"We did say it was a custom Nightstar, we just didn't explain in detail how we customized it." Sampson replied. "Maybe you should have considered the possibility that I was rocking a standard fusion engine instead of the one the thing came out of the factory with."
"How could I? I still don't know how the hell you fitted an LB-10X, and AMS and a Guardian ECM in that thing without an XL engine" Grigg's replied suspiciously. It really shouldn't have been possible, that's why he hadn't expected the bastard was faking.
Sampson grinned. "Niops super-science" he replied.
"Are you saying that the Niops Association has advanced beyond the Star League in weapons development?" a reporter asked in shock, the others looking equally astonished.
"Yes" Sampson confirmed truthfully. "But I'm lying" he lied about lying. "Cards on the table, our engineers did mount a lightweight autocannon on the Nightstar, but it's not a new technology."
"Care to explain?" the same reporter queried, looking suitably confused.
"It's really not difficult, anybody could do it, they just don't" Sampson replied, Niops had been keeping this particular cover-story ready for years and this had been deemed a good time to roll it out where it would be guaranteed to reach a wide audience. "The vast majority of the weight in an autocannon is in the barrel and the breach, you can easily shave off a couple of tons or more just by using less material."
"So, you've developed a better alloy?"
"No, we just used less of it" Sampson replied as if that was no big deal.
Given that this was a big deal Grigg's just stared at him. "Are you insane?" he asked reasonably after taking a few seconds to let it sink in. "The breach is the only thing keeping the propellant explosion inside the gun when you fire it, they're not made that thick and heavy for the ****** aesthetics!" he exclaimed. "For that matter have you seen what it looks like when a barrel bursts?" he asked incredulously. "It's like a gigantic pipe-bomb."
"Our guys tested the lightened autocannon to destruction. It wasn't going to fail in a match that only lasted maybe ten minutes" Sampson dismissed the argument.
"Not under ideal test conditions but I was shooting at you, you ****** maniac!" Grigg's pointed out. "There's a reason why nobody does that kind of crap even on Solaris. You might think saving a couple of tons of weight off the gun you can exchange for an extra couple of heatsinks is a good idea, but even if the gun doesn't explode on you when you pull the trigger, you'd still have to replace the entire breach and the barrel after every match. That's got to cost a couple of hundred grand at least for an LB-10X" he assumed. The LB-X autocannon was effectively lostech in the Inner Sphere but not just because nobody knew how to make them anymore, the lightweight alloys required for the weapon had to be make in a freefall environment, making them very expensive after so many orbital manufacturing facilities had been destroyed during the war.
In order to make back all the weight savings lost by swapping an XL engine for a standard one Niops must have used a endo-steel structure too presumably, Grigg's surmised. Given that it was known they had built their own Olympus recharge stations everyone already assumed they had plenty of orbital manufacturing capability though, so that wasn't remotely as surprising as the crazy bastards shaving down an autocannon to save weight was. 
"Meh, isn't me paying for the thing" Sampson responded flippantly.
Grigg's was calculating in his head. "I guessed you saved some weight by not bothering to haul anything like a full load of gauss rifle slugs but even if you shaved some weight off the autocannon I'm still coming up short."
"Think outside the box dude" Sampson replied condescendingly. 
Peter Grigg's really wanted to hit that guy now. "Even if you went with the minimum amount of gauss rifle rounds, the only way you could have possibly made up that much tonnage is if you…" he began to say before trailing off. "Oh, for the love of God" he suddenly started speaking again. "You only armored the front of the mech, that's why you didn't manoeuvre properly, you had to face me straight on" he concluded.
Sampson grinned. "I neither confirm nor deny that particular statement" he replied. "But I will say we did save a little weight by only partially filling the ammo hoppers for the autocannon. If I wasn't going to be maneuvering to keep my distance, I wasn't going to be missing a crapload of shots at max range anyway so I didn't need a whole ton of regular HEAP and another ton of cluster rounds."
"That is just about the stupidest, most reckless ****** game-plan I have ever heard" Grigg's exclaimed, the armor thing was clearly how they did it and that was insane. On the other hand, the partially filled ammo hoppers did help explain why the explosion when they went up wasn't as dramatic as it should have been though, even with CASE.
Sampson shrugged. "Worked, didn't it?" he asked rhetorically.
"If it's stupid but it works it's still stupid" Grigg's retorted. "Being lucky doesn't make it any the less dumb" he added feeling almost personally affronted by the sheer amateurish idiocy of the whole thing, which was presumably done just so Niops could show off some more of their lostech. "If you'd stumbled, or if you'd just guessed wrong where I was heading, I could have gotten a shot into your side or rear and without any armor at that location it would have been Goodnight Vienna" he said flatly. "I wouldn't have even needed my AC/20 to core you, the lasers or missiles would have turned that big, expensive Nightstar to ****** scrap."
"You're just pissed you never thought of it yourself" Sampson suggested, inwardly agreeing with every word. "If you're open minded there's all sorts of ways to do things differently" he maintained.
"Can you provide us with any more examples?" one of the other members of the Press asked, intrigued.
"Okay, so here's an easy one" Sampson responded, nodding. "Neither of us were using a PPC so why not strip out the surge protectors and the Faraday cages around the electronics to save a little more…"
"McCarty shut the hell up right now!" a voice bellowed from the back of the room.
"Oh yeah right, sorry, Sir." Sampson responded sheepishly as if he had gone a little further than he had been authorized to do when explaining. "Guess we can't pull that one again now." he added with an awkward grimace.
"What was that about 'surge protectors' what are they and what do they do?" another journalist less familiar with the inner workings than most of his colleagues in the room asked quickly.
"The electrical charge caused by firing a Particle Projector Cannon, or getting hit by one, plays merry hell with electronics" Grigg's explained himself professionally. "After the PPC was invented BattleMechs had to be modified to protect their circuitry from the side effects of either firing one yourself or having one fired at you" he said. "It's still not completely effective, that's why they have a minimum range below which the safeties in the field inhibitor won't allow you to fire the thing, there's potentially feedback effects at ninety meters or less. Imagine an electrical arc between the mech firing the PPC and the one getting hit by it and just how much that would suck."
"So I'm assuming that removing these surge protectors is considered inadvisable?" the journalist who had asked the question surmised.
"If you're carrying a PPC, or if there's any chance whatsoever of being hit with PPC fire yourself, then yes. It's really inadvisable which is why nobody sane ever does it" Grigg's replied, looking to Sampson then shaking his head sadly. "You'd have to practically the dismantle the entire machine to take out or put back the cages and surge protectors just for the sake of a fraction of a ton of weight and a little more internal volume, and if it turned out that you were wrong about what you were up against and the other guy did have a PPC then you would be more screwed than a five c-bill Solaris whore."
"Yeah, but you didn't." Sampson muttered to himself just loud enough for Grigg's to hear. "A little weight saved here, a little there, and pretty soon you've got a whole extra ton to play with" he said making the Solaris Champion what other ill-advised modifications these munchkins had come up with.
Were they crazy enough to skimp on the endoskeleton frame as well? Maybe use more aluminum and less titanium or something like that? It could be done, people just didn't because it was nuts, any mass or volume you saved wasn't worth the risk of having limbs that were just a little less fragile than they should be. An awful lot of math, engineering and materials science had determined how strong a mech's internal skeleton had to be in order to do its job, when you ignored that math your mech was always one unlucky hit away from getting a limb blown off and you burned through your assigned quotient of luck fast in combat.
Niops was well known to be a scientific research colony, and Grigg was starting to conclude that their scientists had spent too long thinking about whether they could do something and not enough time on whether they should.
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===It's Amateur Hour!===
At the back of the room Colonel Rory Fallstaff, currently operating under the false identity of John Oldcastle, fought back the urge to smile with satisfaction instead of looking deeply annoyed about 'Henry McCarty's' big mouth.
At some point somebody was going to notice that there was something hinky about some of the war machines Niops was producing, the militia Blackjack with AC/5 autocannons instead of AC/2s being considered the most likely to get noticed first. This might naturally lead to questions being asked as to how some of this gear was getting crammed into machines that they really shouldn't be able to carry.
Better for people out there to think that Niops was crazy enough to do things like lighten autocannon in unsafe ways, or reduce armor coverage, or whatever merely to gain a marginal increase in performance than it was for them to know the actual truth.
There was plenty of other misdirection schemes in the pipeline being kept back for future use, fake laser insulators for example to explain why Niops BattleMechs didn't overheat as quickly as they should, but for now just leading everyone wildly astray on the autocannon front was the primary goal.
Winning the match in a dishonourable manner if the opportunity to do so arose was pretty inspired too, Fallstaff had to give Billy the Kid that, although he had admittedly been a tad dubious of the suggestion when it was first made. Even though Clan Wolverine had often played fast-and-loose with clan codes of conduct regarding how you were supposed to fight an actual war, Sarah McEvedy had nonetheless always followed the rules when it came to formal Clan Trials. Niops being more than a little underhanded in an equivalent situation would hopefully help put Nicolas Kerensky off the scent if the clans got to wondering about where Franklin Hallis had ended up.
Sampson being cunning enough to come up with the ploy was surprising, him being confident enough in his own abilities to convincingly pull it off rather less so of course.
Obfuscation was the watchword of the day and it looked like it was going swimmingly so far, Fallstaff decided as everyone in the room started animatedly discussing ill-advised BattleMech modifications.
As Peter Grigg launched into a heartfelt diatribe about idiotic decisions made by other tournament MechWarriors in the past, including the morons who went into the arena packing Inferno rounds for their missile launchers thinking it would give them a huge advantage but who ended up incinerated by their own ammunition when their ammo-hoppers were hit instead, Fallstaff was interrupted in his thoughts by Major Mroczkiewicz who suddenly appeared at his side and handed him a folded piece of paper.
Fallstaff opened the note and read it, raising his eyebrows as he did so.
"Excuse me for interrupting proceedings" someone else said loudly, entering the room. They were wearing one of the jackets worn by the Palatinate officials overseeing the games and a few of the local journalists seemed to recognise them as being in some position of authority judging by the way they stood up when he entered. That sort of deference tended to indicate the man hailed from one of the ruling merchant families that dominated Illyrian politics, as well as business in the Palatinate, and his expensive imported clothing supported that assumption.
"Given all the hubbub and hullabaloo from the fans and officials about the outcome of the match between Peter Grigg's and Henry McCarty the committee overseeing the games has just issued a ruling after being asked by several people to adjudicate" the new arrival announced.
"They're overturning the result?" someone asked, sounding pleased but surprised nonetheless.
"No, the result of the match stands because no actual rules were broken, merely a code-of-conduct traditionally followed by tournament MechWarriors" the official replied sounding apologetic about it. "However, given the circumstances the Illyrian Palatinate understands why so many people are angry about what has happened and proposes a rematch under certain conditions."
"What conditions?" Grigg's wanted to know.
"Assuming they agree both MechWarriors will be loaned a WSP-1A Wasp light mech by the Illyrian militia, both machines identically armed and equipped, and they will face each other again tomorrow night in the same arena they met in before" the official announced. "After some high-priority HPG communication we've had with them regarding the matter, during which the Illyrian Palatinate made its feelings clear that we were not happy at all, the Niops Association has agreed to pay for any repairs needed to the two machines after the rematch and, after some negotiations, they also agreed, eventually, that if Peter Grigg is victorious he will be awarded the prize of lostech he competed for in the original match."
Grigg's laughed. "I don't think I've competed in a stock Wasp in over twenty-five years but I'm game" he said, a few people in the room cheering and giving him some applause. Karma comes around fast this year, he thought to himself happily.
"I'll have to ask my CO" Sampson said for himself, looking across the room to Fallstaff.
"Yeah, I'll bet you're hoping like hell he says no, because that big mouth of yours has written cheques your ass can't cash" Grigg's taunted him. "No lostech, and no tricks means no chance you win. Up for the challenge McCarty?"
"HPG I just got from home says it's your choice whether you do it or not, McCarty" Fallstaff told him, speaking up to be heard from the back.
If Peter Grigg had expected his opponent to be a blowhard that would back out of a fair fight, he was alas mistaken.
Sampson took off his sunglasses but remaining seated turned to look Grigg right in the eyes. "I'm your huckleberry" he replied to Grigg placidly.
Since very few people had spent quite as many hours watching very old westerns as Wilhelm Sampson had over the years nobody present got the reference. They assumed the 'huckleberry' thing was just another example of weird Niops phrasing and slang such as, 'Dude went berserk like a well-oiled Gamma', 'It's all about the Newtons', or 'Smells fishier than a Frobisher phishing scam to me', but they rightly assumed nonetheless that it meant he was accepting the challenge.
Unlike the previous time he entered the arena no music played when Wilhelm Sampson stepped out into the arena the following evening, which he assumed was so that it didn't drown out all the boos and jeers from the audience as the aging Wasp light mech he was piloting strode towards its start position. 
It was quite the audience too, even larger than before and a great deal more animated and invested in the result.
People sure do love watching the villain of the piece get his comeuppance, Sampson thought to himself, grinning as he decided to play up to the role.
Live video cameras projecting the image onto the large vid-screens set up for the crowds, and being recorded both for posterity and so it could be broadcast around the Inner Sphere, Sampson raised the left arm of his mech, the one not equipped with a laser cannon, and he gave the audience the finger.
Given the man's previous dealings with the press back home Rory Fallstaff only sighed. It still wasn't as bad as the time Sampson had jokingly credited his coming first in the Gunslinger rankings to taking drugs and having dropped out of school, the Department of Education and the Niops Parent Teachers Association multiple had gone ballistic.
Great MechWarrior, awful, awful role model. 
Son-of-a-bitch has more fun than the rest of us combined though, Fallstaff concluded, watching with a mixture of jealousy and dismay as Sampson seemed to revel in the massive new wave of boos and jeers his rude gesture had provoked, now using his left hand to beckon the crowd to continue to berate him.
The booing stopped abruptly as Peter Grigg's own Wasp entered the arena and now the audience erupted into cheering as the former Solaris Grand Champion, a man that had always played it clean and had won all his matches fairly stomped into view.
They greeted him with fireworks too, something that had not been accorded to the low-down sneak 'Henry McCarty' who was clearly undeserving of such a warm welcome.
Revelling in his role as the 'man you love to hate' versus the 'white knight' in this performance Wilhelm Sampson decided he should demand a percentage from the ticket sales next time, assuming there was a next time and Grigg wasn't going to kill him before the night was out, that being a distinct possibility because the man was pissed.
Peter Grigg being very angry wouldn't have been quite as big an issue if he wasn't also very good at his job, but Sampson knew he had gotten himself into this situation and it behove him now to metaphorically roll with the punches.
Being punched by the fists of the twenty-ton BattleMech he was facing actually being a distinct possibility in reality as well, although Wasp pilots often preferred to kick instead if they found themselves in melee range.
Sat in the cockpit of his own borrowed machine, identical to the one McCarty was using down to its Illyrian Militia insignia and paint scheme, Peter Grigg paid little attention to the audience. As a younger man starting out as a tournament MechWarrior basking in the the adulation of the crowd had been a major motivation but at that moment he was laser-focused on just winning the bout wiping that smug smirk off that little ******'s face.
Perhaps it would be better to say laser-cannon focused, singular, because the WSP-1A model of the Wasp only mounted one directed-energy-weapon along with a single SRM-2 missile launcher making it a far cry from the Atlas he had taken out last time in raw firepower terms.
It was a great deal smaller and faster too, warranting a very different approach to how he wanted to play the same arena. Hulks of rusting mining machinery littering the disused open-cast mine that weren't nearly big enough to be used as cover or concealment by a thirteen-meter tall, hundred-ton assault mech like the Atlas became a lot more viable in a twenty-ton Wasp, and he also had jump-jets now too that could leap over some obstacles rather than forcing you to move around them.
The medium laser mounted to his mech's right arm couldn't deliver a massive knock-out blow like an AC/20 or a Gauss Rifle could, heck it did barely half the damage of a PPC and had only about half the effective range, but it was reliable and heat-efficient. Anyhow, given that a Wasp only carried three tons of armor it wouldn't require him to make too many hits to strip his opponent's mech right down to its endoskeleton.
The bane of many a WSP-1A operators existence, the poor placement of its SRM-2 launcher on the machine, wasn't so much of a factor if the other guy was also in the same machine with the same problem. However, as Grigg took stock of the height of the obstacles, and weighed up undulations in the terrain left behind by mechanical diggers years before, he was far from the first MechWarrior to consider finding the grave of the long-dead designer of the Wasp and asking his ghost why in the name of Cameron he put the launcher down in the left leg instead of in the upper torso so you could use cover and fire SRM's at the same time.
For that matter if the launcher had been in the torso where some of the heat sinks were you could move those very same heatsinks into the now vacant space in the leg and cool off really fast when you had to by standing waist-deep in a river or deep pond. Overheating wasn't an issue in an intact Wasp of course, but after you lost a few heat-sinks to battle-damage it might be, and lightly-armored light mechs were certainly prone to getting shot to pieces.
As the countdown to the match began Grigg determined where he wanted to go first, that oversized bulldozer over there with all the holes shot through it looked like a good place to stop and take stock of his opponent's initial moves, he decided.
//"THREE, TWO, ONE, GAME ON!"\\ the announcer bellowed into his microphone, loudspeakers set up all around the arena thundering out his words.
Lacking any long-range armament there wouldn't be any shooting until they closed in and Grigg utilized the calm before the storm to analyze his opponent as best he could as he steered his Wasp through the arena.
Yeah, it's amateur hour., Grigg thought to himself with satisfaction as McCarty used his jumpjets to leap over a section of rusty conveyor belt once used to carry away rocks rather than go around it. Every time you used your jumpjets there was a risk of landing badly and damaging your machine so it wasn't something a professional did unless he had too, it might look spectacular and impressive but it was foolhardy.
Inside his own Wasp Sampson grinned, thinking that his showboating with the jumpjets should help cement in Grigg's mind that the jerkass he was up against wasn't half as good as his big mouth purported him to be.
If he was going to win this he not only needed to give it one-hundred-and-ten percent, he would also need Grigg to mess up or badly underestimate him given that any of the usual tricks and fake-outs weren't likely to work. The former Solaris Champion wasn't likely to get suckered again easily, for that matter he might well double-tap this time if he thought his foe was just trying to pull another fast one, so Sampson hoped like hell the ejector seat on this old bucket worked.
Produced in greater numbers than any other Battlemech, mostly because it was cheap and the design was nearly four-hundred years old, the Wasp was one of those machines that almost everybody could recognize and knew something about. Spare parts were relatively inexpensive and widely available to the point that even underfunded Periphery militias might have a few aging WSP-1A's in their inventories that they could keep in working order and Sampson guessed that the one he was in dated from before the Reunification War judging by how worn it looked.
Fortunately Niops had reconditioned a fair few machines for the Illyrian Palatinate, including this one, so while it looked a touch decrepit it was mechanically sound and its legs weren't going to buckle under it from a hard landing which was why Sampson used the jumpjets again to quickly close into weapon range.
They wanted a show, so he was going to give them a show.
One of the problems with fights between mechs armed only with lasers was that they didn't look nearly as spectacular as autocannon tracer or missiles whizzing around, or PPC bolts flashing across an arena, so in order to liven things up for the audience nozzles on some of the obstacles connected to buried piping started to vent clouds of dry ice into the arena just as the two BattleMechs got into effective range for their medium lasers.
Sampson fired first, aiming deliberately wide hoping that Grigg might underestimate his skills some more and get sloppy while Grigg's return fire was aimed much better and barely missed.
Starting to maneuver at high speed, weaving in and out of the old cargo loaders, bulldozers and rock crushers that littered the arena, Sampson and Grigg exchanged laser fire, occasionally sending a couple of SRMs their opponents way when the opportunity presented itself.
Able to reach ninety-five kilometers an hour and also agile, scoring a hit on a wildly maneuvering Wasp was a lot harder than doing so on a lumbering assault mech, especially if you were also in a Wasp pulling the same move. There was certainly a hell of a lot more missing going on than there was scoring hits as the two light mechs dueled each other at relative close range, the clouds of dry ice rendering the bright green beams of light being fired between them easily visible to the audience.
Just barely avoiding a pair of SRMs fired by Grigg that impacted with a rusty bulldozer fifty or so metres behind him with an expensive double-explosion Sampson scored the first hit of the match with his medium laser, his sense of triumph short-lived because Grigg quickly made a hit of his own and then quickly followed it up with a second.
"Gotta give the old guy credit," Sampson muttered to himself, "man really knows how to shoot." he observed with growing irritation that Grigg was also being extremely methodical and not taking risks.
There was an old military dictum that when you're in a bad situation the riskiest moves are often the best choice, because playing safe wasn't going to get you out of it, so Sampson pulled something unorthodox and waiting until Grigg was between cover he used his jets to vault an obstacle firing his SRM launcher as he went. The accuracy was for absolute crap, but the missiles streaking his way did cause Grigg to try to dodge out of reflex and correctly predicting which way he would go to try and avoid the missiles Sampson scored another good solid hit with his laser.
The problem was that Grigg was making his shots more consistently, effectively nickel-and-diming Sampson to death with repeated laser hits, and that damage was starting to build up.
Armor stripped from the left torso of his Wasp, Sampson lost a heat-sink to the next shot, not a catastrophe by any means but no doubt a taste of things to come.
Fortunately for his bank balance Wilhelm Sampson had decided not to wager his substantial winnings from the first match on him winning this one as well, so it could have been a lot worse. It wasn't like he had secretly bet on Grigg instead though, his ego wasn't that under control even if that particular bet wouldn't have been grossly illegal and likely to lead to accusations of match-fixing.
Over the next couple of minutes Grigg continued to wear Sampson down, even managing to score a couple of hits with his missiles when he correctly predicted the younger MechWarrior's next move and clobbered him with SRM's enroute, momentarily staggering his machine before it recovered. 
There was one more move Sampson could pull that might win him the match, even if was risky he knew. The old jump-kick beloved by Wasp drivers that hoped to grow up to ride a Highlander one day and jump on people to finish them off.
Feigning to go one way and then quickly going in the other instead, the move successfully throwing off Grigg's aim, Sampson rapidly closed the distance and swerving to avoid a broken-down earth-mover towards the end of his high-speed run Sampson triggered his jump-jets just at the opportune moment.
The twenty-ton machine arced through the air towards Grigg, intending to kick the other Wasp right in the head like a demented martial-artist clad in medieval full plate armor.
Two-time Solaris Grand Champion Peter Grigg sidestepped, having seen it coming long before it had thanks to decades of experience, and with perfect timing smacked the airborne light 'mech going past him hard to mess up its trajectory and cause it to land again awkwardly and therefore stumble to the ground.
Peter Grigg was just as surprised as his opponent must have been in missing the kick so badly that the other mech didn't stumble when it landed, McCarty's Wasp remaining upright and stable as it tried to turn around to start fighting again.
"Fair's fair, you really know how to drive kid.", Grigg's had to admit out loud as he fired his laser and SRMs into McCarty's back and then side having turned faster than his foe had and already having brought his own weapons to bear on target.
Warning lights flashing on the cockpit controls and alarms ringing in his ears Sampson hit eject because he wasn't getting out of this one alive if he stayed in the cockpit and he knew it. 
"You're still an ****** though" Grigg's said to himself with a sense of satisfaction, watching the ejector seat rocket upwards before deploying a parachute.
Peter Grigg originally had no intention of ever visiting Illyria again after this, although the offer with all the zeroes on it to come back next year for the decider of the 'grudge match' between him and McCarty certainly made him reconsider.
The egotistical prick insisting on top-billing before he would sign up himself wasn't in itself a deal-breaker, even if Peter Grigg judged he probably wouldn't even make the top twenty-five in the Solaris rankings on a good day, although Grigg did say he would only agree to that if there was also a clause in the contract saying he could punch McCarty in the face.
Other than McCarty himself nobody on the Niops side of the negotiations objected to the clause in principle, although they said they would have to check with the lawyers back home before they could sign off on it first. For her part Major Brzęczyszczykiewicz's only comment on the matter when pressed for her opinion was a shrug followed by the honest admission, 'Yeah, we've all wanted to slug him once or twice too.'
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Given that at some point it was going to be noticed that Niops seemed to have battlemechs, aerospace fighters and tanks packing more firepower than they should, a little misdirection was deemed in order. Potential opponents (Successor States and/or Clans) underrating Niops machines because they think they've skimped on armour, or shaved off weight on weapons in an unsafe manner, in order to mount heavier guns or to use lostech equipment where regular gear obfuscates the situation nicely. Billy the Kid wasn't throwing the match in the last part by not operating the Nightstar to its full potential, he was disguising that full potential.For the record, if it's not clear, they didn't really remove a few tons of material from the barrel and breach of the LB-10X on Sampson's Nightstar, and it was in fact fully armored, they just asked him to drive the thing like it wasn't.Battlemechs do need their electronics protected from firing PPC's, or having them fired at you incidentally but it's certainly not somewhere you'd usually look to in order to save weight!The WSP-1A Wasp is a far cry from the assault mechs we saw in the last part. Without the lostech weaponry (and the underhanded trick) Wilhelm Sampson, AKA Billy the Kid, AKA Henry McCarty, isn't as good as Peter Grigg (though he's still much better than you'd think if the only time you'd seen him in action was in the Nightstar/Atlas match).
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Chapter 55