The Mech Touch novel Chapter 280

His interaction with the crew of the Happy Jelly and exploring its compartments gave Ves a decent impression of Walter’s Whalers.

Put simply, they lacked discipline and professionalism.

If Ves wanted to be blunt, he’d use the words lazy and stupid to describe their motley crew. While the Whalers at least invested a little in their mech crews in order to make sure they functioned normally, their ship crews left a lot to be desired.

Severely undermanned, the crew of the Happy Jelly only had the manpower to spare on maintaining the bare essentials of the ship.

They kept the atmospherics going so they wouldn’t be freezing and choking from a lack of oxygen.

They kept the aging bridge and engineering running past their prime with a mix of ad-hoc solutions.

Sometimes, they replaced faulty parts with illegally fabricated copies of dubious quality.

It all looked ugly to Ves. Having seen a professional combat crew at work with his stint on Ark Horizon, the Whalers should be thanking their lucky stars the carrier hadn’t blown up yet.

Even the aging complement of bots had been affected by the lethargy around them. All of them looked old enough to be present on the Jelly when she started off as a brand new cargo hauler. Lack of attention had degraded at least half of them into scrap, which forced the remainder of the bots to pull double duty to clean the ship and take care of smaller duties.

They obviously failed in that. Many low-priority corridors and compartments featured a build-up of grime and crusted vomit. If the Jelly had any cleaners on her crew, they obviously didn’t bother cleaning these sections.

Right now, Ves had to pass by some of those filthy corridors in order to reach a rarely-used conference. Walter summoned everyone important on the ship to attend a briefing.

Around thirty old Whalers seated themselves on the hard, cheap chairs.

"I think everyone’s here now, so let’s get this started." Walter announced and turned on a flickering projection of the Glowing Zone. "The Blood Claws have been scouting ahead and made some plans. This is how it’s going to look like."

The Whaler fleet would emerge at the edge of the Glowing Zone and make its way inwards until they reached the position of the Blood Claws. Once every outfit with a connection to Monty gathered in a massive fleet, they resumed their journey towards the deepest part of the Glowing Zone, eventually approaching the outer edge of an enormous armada made up out of several divisions of the Mech Corps.

"As you know, the Glowing Planet has landed within the borders of the Republic. The Mech Corps, in all of its wisdom, figured that since the Vesians and all kinds of scum will arrive in a couple of days, it’s best to set aside our rivalries and form a common pact."

"Does that mean the Three Tyrants of Bentheim won’t be duking it out?"

"Of course not, you dummy!"

The old chap wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that Monty the Beheader might chose to attack his other rivals. They constantly warred against each other in the shadows.

"The Glowing Planet is big enough for everyone, at least in the first couple of days. The Mech Corps has mapped out the planet from orbit and carved a generous slice of territory for each of the major players to claim as their own."

A map of the planet showed up on the projection. Much of its intricate and dangerous terrain features remained unknown, but the Mech Corps somehow determined that the areas with the highest level of fluctuations probably contained deposits of the most valuable exotics the planet had on offer.

"These red areas are first-grade danger zones. They’re extremely dangerous, as all of those wild exotic minerals are constantly changing the laws of physics around them. Time might stop, gravity might reverse, in short, all kinds of freaky stuff will happen around them. We can forget about mining those deposits ourselves. Only the Mech Corps has the means to extract those juicy exotics."

"What about us?"

"I’m getting to that. Around the red zones are the orange zones, which consists of the second-grade danger zones. The exotics there are much less destructive on their environment, but there’s a lot of them so the entire area will be blanketed in a low level freaky effect. These are great places to mine junk exotics in bulk, and that’s where the major powers of the Republic have divvied up for themselves."

The area allocated to Monty the Betrayer sat far away from any other claimed areas, and took up as much space as Dorum, Bentheim’s capital city.

"That’s kind of small. There’s lots of free space on the planet."

"This is only the first phase. Do you really think the Blood Claws will be able to protect this stretch of territory once the Ducal Legions of the Vesians make landfall? Even a fraction of a legion is enough to wipe the floor with Monty and his men!"

The map changed now. Before, all of the Republican’s powers had spread out over the planet. Now, they concentrated around the red zone occupied by the Mech Corps.

"In the second phase, every force from the Republic will work together to present a united front. Every major outfit like the Three Tyrants of Bentheim will be placed at the edge of the red zone occupied by the Mech Corps."

"It kind of looks like we’ll be placed at the frontlines."

"They’re using us as shields!"

"It’s true." Walter said. "The Mech Corps isn’t hiding the fact that they want us to be placed at the perimeter of their territory. Anyone who wants to attack the Mech Corps has to go through the Blood Claws or some other outfit depending on the direction of the attack."

"Seems like a crappy deal. What do we get out of it?"