The Mech Touch novel Chapter 178

The construction site bloomed into existence as the first shipments arrived. The prefabs took little effort to put together, though they took up a large portion of the cargo. The extremely rigid ground and soil made it highly difficult to dig through, but the construction team achieved some progress with the help of high-powered diggers.

The first wave of mercenary mechs arrived shortly after the shuttles finished hauling the construction materials. Despite the insufficient facilities, the plan called for unpacking them immediately in order to help secure the base.

As expected, a lot of hijinks happened in the process of taking the mechs out of their containers. The partially detached limbs required a bit of finesse to put them back into their sockets. Having to work in the awful conditions outdoors made everything worse.

"No no no, don’t put that back together without cleaning the joints! All of the gunk in the air has fouled the connectors. We’re not working in a modern workshop environment right now!"

"Have you forgotten how much gravity we’re dealing with right now? Those loaders aren’t rated to lift at maximum capacity under our current gravity levels! It’s a wonder they’re even lifting off in the first place!"

"Start with the light mechs first! They’re easier to put together and we need them to scout the perimeter. Doesn’t matter what outfit they’re a part of, start with the lightest mechs and work your way up!"

The heavy workload kept Ves up all night. House Kaine wanted every mercenary mech up and running within three days, which he found utterly unrealistic. Around two hundred different mechs in total joined the operation. If it hadn’t been for the previous battle, that number could have reached as high as four-hundred mechs.

Compared to the mechs belonging to the forces from the Grey Willow Star Sector, the local variants didn’t seem impressive. None of the Komodo mercenaries belonged to the elite. Some mercenaries piloted their mechs so badly that Ves wondered how they graduated from the academy in the first place.

"This is a real mess." Melkor commented in a disdainful voice. "I bet that half of the mercs have embellished their track record. There’s no way that the expedition accepted them otherwise."

The lack of training and professionalism among much of the mercenaries also caused the slowly emerging base camp to be a rowdy site. The security officers keeping the peace had their hands full trying to prevent the various grudges between individual mercenaries to come to blows.

In order to keep the mercs busy, Commander Tregis sent out the mercs to begin their first hunting expedition. Tregis took charge of the entire base as it slowly took shape. Under his leadership, the mercs stopped brawling with each other and cleaned up their act.

Ves found him to be a highly competent leader. As the man in charge of the expedition’s only settlement, Tregis eased into the job like his entire life revolved around the role. The man must have prepared for the job many years ago. It showed when he argued with the civil engineers on how to tweak the existing wall designs to accommodate their current terrain advantages.

The base camp sat on a low hill that overlooked a vast swathe of terrain. The metallic foliage surrounding their site obscured much of the wildlife, but the view afforded them plenty of warning should a hexapod king decide to attack their base.

On the second day, the first team of mercs arrived from their successful hunt. Everyone put down their work and welcomed the squad of mechs that came back with a bunch of scratches on their coating. They dragged over two incredibly formidable corpses of hexapods that instantly attracted everyone’s attention.

Even Ves came over to touch the recently perished hexapod. While they weren’t as impressive as a king-sized beast, the regular adults posed a significant threat against isolated mechs. Only through teamwork could the mercs hunt these beasts without incurring significant losses.

"It’s pretty big." Chief Ramirez remarked as he knocked his armored fist against the dead hexapod’s surface. The beast possessed some kind of palm-sized scales composed of an organic composite. Different hexapods derived the metals from their diet in different proportions, leading to many variations of colors.

Commander Tregis tried to get everyone back to work, but the crowd continued to converge around the carcasses. They waited until a team of exobiologists personally harvested the heat organs.

In order to cut open their extremely tough scales and hides, they employed a specialized surgical mech to make the necessary incisions. The mech’s awesome power easily parted the skins, allowing more delicate tools and bots to sever the heat organ from the bodies and store them into a transparent container.

"Is it me, or are the heat organs glowing?"

"All those exotics packed into a single mass of tissue is bound to act weird."

Everyone returned to work after that. Ves found the hexapods to be remarkable creatures to be able to thrive in these difficult circumstances. The vast galaxy possessed an uncountable amount of stars, but only a handful possessed the right conditions to support a form of life.

Humanity had the misfortune to evolve from a star system devoid of any exotics. This shaped the race in a way that provided them with hardly any innate superiority compared to other forms of life.

As a rule, the most formidable forms of life evolved to make use of the exotics present in their native environment. This granted them many special and even metaphysical capabilities, such as a near-total immunity to heat, a passive form of telepathy that spans the entire race, or an intelligence that mimics quantum computers.

Strangely enough, all of these innate strengths came with a major downside. All of these extremely dangerous aliens were constrained by their dependence on specific types of exotics to procreate. They couldn’t propagate as fast as the human race because they constantly had to seek out star systems that contained deposits of the right types of exotics.