The Mech Touch novel Chapter 289

Ghanso Larkinson suffered from an unlucky sequence of events. The Vesians hadn’t been able to get past Alex’s space knight, so they turned their firepower to an unprotected mech from a nearby squad.

The Starhawk mech in question hadn’t expected to be targeted by an entire Vesian squad. The knight in his squad was already shielding another squad mate, so the targeted mech lacked any form of support.

The mech blew up as soon as its pilot ejected into the distance. Some of the shards of the exploded mech happened to have hit Ghanso’s mech from behind, thereby dealing significant damage to its fragile flight system

The damage hadn’t been extensive, but it took a long time for the flight system to regain its functionality. As Ghanso halted the uncontrolled spin, he looked back to the Starhawk formation to see how well they fared.

"Overall, they held up better than the Grand Chasers. The Starhawks suffered relatively few casualties, but most of the affected mechs had to be written off due to the intensive amount of firepower they sustained.

Even Alex’s space knight had its shield chewed up at the end, causing his mech to endure the final volleys on its frontal armor.

"Don’t look at me. I’m fine. This is all in a day’s work for a space knight."

As the Grand Chasers arced their way back to their own fleet, the Volari Starhawks started to police the battlefield. They turned their formation around and methodically recovered the wrecks while rescuing mech pilots from both sides. _{ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com}

No matter how heated the war between the Vesians and the Brighters got, they quietly maintained a couple of basic rules of conduct. The most important of which was to take prisoners whenever they could and exchange them with each other at a later date.

It helped the two sides conserve their most precious and limited resources, which were trained and capable mech pilots. Such agreements hadn’t always been the norm, but after several generations of endless rivalry, both sides saw the need to civilize their conflict in order to prevent their neighbors from casting their aspirations upon them once they exhausted most of their manpower at the end of another war.

Eventually, Ghanso’s Vhendra-S had to be hauled back to the fleet carrier. Her hangars had become stuffed with mechs as she welcomed an influx of homeless mechs who lost their original berths aboard the ships targeted by the torpedoes.

Ghanso felt a little bad about the engagement. Any excitement about being a part of the first formal action between the Bright Republic and the Vesia kingdom had disappeared.

"Did we lose the battle?"

"It’s hard to say." Old Man Alex replied as he zipped down from the cockpit of his beaten mech.The space knight looked like it had taken a stroll through a micrometeor storm. Its frame showed off lots of smaller impact marks. "The Grand Chasers underestimated us. We took out more mechs from our firing pass, and we’ve been able to capture every living Vesian trapped alive in their cockpits."

"Yeah, but we lost so many ships."

"It could have been worse. Twelve-hundred torpedoes is nothing special. Wait until they gather an entire division and throw out a wave of ten-thousand torpedoes. You’ll really taste despair at that point."

In terms of war materiel, the Vesians clearly won the exchange. They took out seventeen ships at the cost of a lot of expensive but ultimately disposable torpedoes.

Yet all was not in vain. The Grand Chasers ships and mechs had to extend past the Vesian lines in order to perform their attack, which made them vulnerable to pursuit. After expending so much torpedoes and mechs, the exhausted Chasers had suddenly become the prey as another regiment of the 4th division initiated pursuit.

Both sides started to maneuver for control over orbit. Regiments shifted around like chess pieces across a large and intricate three-dimensional chess board.

Orbital mechanics played a critical role in the defense of the Glowing Planet. The 4th division took advantage of their proximity to the gravity well by slingshotting their fleet elements to hasten their maneuvers over the Glowing Planet’s orbit.

The battle turned into a murky slog. Its outcome still remained in question.

Down on the surface, Ves didn’t know one of his cousins experienced combat against the Vesians for the first time. The lack of bandwidth of their ground-side camps limited communication between the forces on the ground and the forces in space to a handful of often-repeated codes. Personal correspondence had no chance of making it through.

Right now, Ves oversaw the final adjustments to the mechs that enabled them to operate despite carrying bundles of bombs inside their frames. The last batch of normal energy cells had fully turned into overcharged ones by the capricious energy field emitted by the Glowing Planet.

After their initial horror passed, a sense of resignation overtook the Whalers. They pretty much accepted that they had to continue piloting their mechs and hope nothing struck their energy cells.

One of the mechs that had been affected happened to be Melkor’s Stanislaw. Melkor hadn’t made much waves ever since he touched down on the surface. Rather than enter the cockpit, Melkor instead aided the Whalers by shoring up their feeble electronic systems against enemy intrusion.

"How’s their information security coming along?"

"Well enough that they’ll hold against pirates." Melkor replied as he leaned against the foot of his Stanislaw. "I don’t think it’ll last more than a second against any Vesian hacking attempts. The Whalers are better off pulling the plugs from their connected systems."

"Sounds awful, but not unexpected. If you’ve seen the kind of mechs the Whalers are using, you’ll realize that the Vesians don’t even need to bother with hacking their systems. They can just overrun the entire base."

It felt refreshing for Ves to talk with someone other than a Whaler. Every member of the gang somehow fell into the delusion that they could put up a decent fight against a trained military mech force.

"So what did you do to my Stanislaw?"

"I added some compartments to the Stanislaw’s internal architecture. Your energy cells are placed in a seperate box, as it were. It won’t prevent your mech from being wrecked if they happened to blow up, but it will increase the odds you’ll survive. I’ve beefed up the armor of your cockpit to make sure you’ll make it out alive."

Melkor nodded in satisfaction. "That sounds good, but I know my Stanislaw. It doesn’t have much space for all of those things you mentioned."

"That’s right. I opted to remove a couple of energy cells and some redundant components. Your Stanislaw won’t last as long in the field and it’s also a little more fragile to being crippled. Regardless, I think it’s better to trade these off in exchange for not getting killed in an instant if an enemy happens to hit your energy cells."

Ves only had time to modify one mech at once. The mech technicians lacked the extensive body of knowledge to develop their own modifications. A few of them had already tried to do so behind his back, and every mech that suffered from their ministrations had turned into safety hazards.

When Walter demanded that Ves modify the Whaler mechs to be less susceptible to abrupt explosions, he demanded he start first with his cousin’s mech. At the very least, he wouldn’t be worrying about Melkor while he sat in the makeshift workshop trying to turn a bunch of rotten ingredients into serviceable meals.

"You know, you told me once that you entered into the Mech Corps after graduating from an advanced academy. Why did you leave?"

"I didn’t leave. I was forced out of their rolls at the end of my orientation."

Melkor’s tone made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it, but the issue had always been nagging at Ves.

"Did you get into a fight, or did you piss off a superior or something?"

"Let’s just say I found out something I shouldn’t have when I took my hacking hobby a little too far."

Melkor could have uncovered anything from classified documents to illicit dealings from his superiors. Ves had an imaginative mind and ran through dozens of possibilities in quick succession.

"Well, you didn’t get killed or anything, so it must not have been something critical enough to earn the ire of the Larkinsons."