The Mech Touch novel Chapter 339

The seriousness in which the MTA and CFA enforced the laws on taboo weapons frightened all of human space. Practically no one except the lawless dared to cross the two biggest organizations that collectively guarded over humanity.

It was for their own protection. During the Age of Conquest, the humans who conquered the galaxy star by star possessed no bottom line. With their awesome capital ships, they showed no remorse in bombing highly populated alien planets to glass.

Saturating a planet with thousands of nuclear missiles proved to be the quickest, easiest and dirtiest method to wipe out an entire planet’s worth of aliens.

Over time, humanity began to be more creative as they sometimes wished to occupy a planet instead of turning it into a lifeless radioactive rock. They experimented with biological diseases and chemicals as well as radiation as a way to cleanse a planet without rendering it uninhabitable.

The results were decidedly mixed, but that didn’t lessen humanity’s enthusiasm for these destructive toys.

At the tail end of the Age of Conquest, humanity ceased to expand outwards and started to focus inwards. Internal contradictions constantly flared up and the stagnant Terrans faced a revolt among their own ranks, which ultimately led to the birth of the New Rubarth Empire.

These intense and highly destructive wars mainly happened in space. Warships ruled the void. Sending out ground forces to invade a planet proved to be a laborious operation. Seizing control of a foreign planet’s population and assets often cost too much time and effort.

The invaders found it more convenient if they rained down mass destruction and wipe out a quarter to half the planet’s population.

Humanity began to turn their weapons of mass destruction to their own race.

The tragedies that ensued could not be counted even to this day. Too many atrocities happened in this period to keep track of. Once a state began flinging weapons of mass destruction against another state, the enmity that emerged between the two became irreconcilable.

"You hit me, I hit you back!"

The victims lashed out twice as hard and wiped out every inhabited planet they could reach. Historians had projected that humanity spread out over half the galaxy lost more than ten percent of its total population in a span of fifty years!

Ten percent might not sound so much, but this amounted to many trillions of wasted lives. The sheer amount of death and destruction changed the course of history and threatened to become a man-made plague.

It was easy to start a fight. It was impossible to stop it once the cycle of revenge began to revolve.

The emergence of the first mech piloted by the legendary Mack Liu ended it all. His emergence along with some other factors led to the formation of the Mech Trade Association and the Common Fleet Alliance.

The two organizations heralded the Age of Mechs. Their strength awed the fractious states and suppressed the unruly parties that wanted to keep using their weapons of mass destruction. Human space quickly found out that it was not a good idea to incur their wrath.

Two important changes happened at the start of the Age of Mechs besides the ban on weapons of mass destruction. First, CFA assumed sole responsibility for defending human space against the alien empires that pressured it from every direction.

They straightforwardly confiscated every warship and formed their own defense fleet crewed by a variety of humans across the galaxy. States lost the right to wage their internal wars with ships armed to the teeth with colossal weaponry. It was too expensive to replace the fallen ships, especially since each of them cost a substantial fortune.

Capital ships took up an extravagant amount of manpower and resources to produce. The destruction and loss of each major warship weakened humanity’s ability to withstand alien incursions. Therefore, the CFA had been tasked with preserving these assets as much as possible.

The second change revolved around promoting the use of mechs as the main mode for war. No longer would capital ships be allowed to orbit a planet and bombard it into oblivion with huge cannons or destructive lasers.

The transition to mechs turned out to be very bumpy. Besides the immature technology that underpinned workings, states also found the mech to be a lackluster weapon platform. Compared to the destructive power of a capital ship, a single mech was an ant.

The MTA overthrew a lot of states before humanity learned their lesson.

Ves recalled the last couple of hundred years and sighed. "Right now, we live in the Age of Mechs."

There was no place for a forbidden weapon like a gamma laser rifle in today’s society. Only the most depraved and degenerate pirates used such a thing, and they never lasted very long.

In truth, the destructiveness of gamma lasers or grasers couldn’t quite compare against the might of a nuclear bomb. The weapon type worked best in space where it could only threaten spaceships or space station.

For various reasons, the MTA and CFA added any laser weapon that weaponized some of the higher frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum to the list of taboo weapons.

Ves had to accept their stance without question. What could he do on his own? Should he visit the MTA’s branch on Cloudy Curtain and ask for an exception to create a weapon of mass destruction because of a mission?

"They’ll shoot me to pieces before I can even get another word in." Ves shook his head. "That is if they don’t capture me and torture me to death."

This thorny upgrade mission compelled Ves to work alone. He absolutely could not trust a single person except for Lucky. Even his most trusted technicians such as Carlos or Chief Cyril would turn on him in a heartbeat if he showed any interest at all in producing a forbidden weapon.

The fear of the taboo had set in deep nowadays.

A plan formed in his mind. In order to design and fabricate a graser rifle in peace, he planned to bring the second-hand printer along with a number of supplies and raw materials and move out to a remote planet, moon or asteroid and work alone from there. _{freёwebnovel.com}