The Mech Touch novel Chapter 434

Ever since he started questioning the motives of the 6th Flagrant Vandals, Ves regarded his posting in a different light. The undercurrent of discontent and the general apathy towards the Mech Corps may not be confined to the lower ranks. What if the underlings merely reflected the honest attitudes of their superiors?

Sitting behind his terminal, Ves turned around his head and regarded Alloc and the Apprentices in a different light. Besides the temp sent from the Rittersberg region, the others all had a couple years of service under their belt.

Curiously, not many mech designers in the design department of the Vandals stuck around for more than half a decade or so. Alloc happened to be one of the few exceptions due to being mentored by Professor Velten. Everyone else seemed to have been sent to the Vandals as punishment or exile.

Could he talk to them about his concerns?

"No."

Ves did not kid himself that he could find a place aboard the Wolf Mother without any form of monitoring. Having left his personal comm with the Privacy Shield behind on Cloudy Curtain, he no longer possessed any means of blocking any electronic ears and eyes pointed in his direction.

"Besides, where do their loyalties lie?"

Not every mech designer entered the private sector and started a business to sell their own mechs. Some wanted an easier path in life, so they applied to established mech manufacturers or design studios to exercise their craft.

Naturally, only those with promise received the best job offerings where they could actually be involved in the design of a mech. Average mech designers stood no chance in obtaining an important position, and would always devolve in a glorified technicians.

In fact, a large number of chief technicians graduated with a degree in mech design, only to be relegated to a job in the mech stables or mech workshops.

The same pattern persisted in the military. The Mech Corps relied on many different mech designs, and they needed a huge number of mech designers to keep their mechs fresh and up to date.

Working in the Mech Corps formed a particularly attractive prospect to most mech designers. They pay was bad, but the benefits were good and every mech designer assigned to a design team received varying levels of access to the central database, which not only contained lots of designs and exclusive technologies, but also contained a library of very valuable textbooks.

All of this made working for the Mech Corps a good starting point for any mech designer that lacked the confidence to dive into the cutthroat competitive private sector. Once they served for twenty years or more and retired from the service, they would be in a much better position to enter the market.

"Since the mech designers in the service value their time here so much, why don’t I see any older ones?"

While the Apprentice Mech Designers aboard the Wolf Mother varied in age, they tended to be in their thirties or younger. What Ves really paid attention to was that none of them had been in the design department for long.

"Where are all the veteran designers?"

Had they been transferred out or cashiered, or did something else happen to them? Ves tried to approach the topic in an oblique manner when he conversed with some of the Apprentices during mealtime.

"Say, our teams are awfully short-handed." He said in a casual manner as he ate his soup next to a colleague. "Why aren’t the higher ups increasing their effort at expanding our teams?"

The tired man munched on a meatpie for a bit before he answered. "No one wants to come and work for the Vandals. We’re the refuse pit of the Vandals. You don’t volunteer to work for us, you get sent here. And while the Mech Corps loves to dump all their problem cases in our laps, they’ll be accused of committing war crimes if they did that to every mech designer they don’t like."

They both chuckled a bit at that.

"It’s not so bad here. Sure, the Vandals are a little shabbier than most, but we still have plenty of room in our three design teams. My question is why are we so chronically undermanned? This isn’t a new phenomenon."

"I don’t know what to say." The other mech designer shrugged, though he seemed a little more reticent this time. "There used to be some mech designers in our team that are senior to me. They served for a couple of years but their exhaustion continued to grow. They would have collapsed sooner or later."

"Did they?"

"Professor Velten approached them before they got to that point. The professor offered to transfer them to a new, exciting and secret design team far away from the Wolf Mother. I don’t know all the details, but from what I’ve seen from the faces of the mech designers who accepted, they all looked ecstatic."

"Did every mech designer accept the transfer?"

"Yup. You’d be a fool not to. While I appreciate the chance to contribute to the Hellcat design, it will ruin you if you try to work with it for more than a handful of years. There’s something very corrosive about this design that grates at your sanity. I don’t know how to describe it. All I know is that I’m already feeling that my limit is within sight."

This sounded very strange to Ves. He put down his spoon and faced his colleague with open eyes. "Why is the Hellcat design so damaging?"

"I asked Alloc one day, and he said that the Hellcat is a design that incorporates transcendent concepts that only Journeyman Mech Designers and higher could handle. It’s always said that Apprentices aren’t mature in the field of mech design, and I guess this is one of the most important reasons why."

Ves believed this statement. It explained much of how the mech industry worked. He only heard an inkling about it during his studies, probably so that the professors could shield them from the truth, but it might indeed be the case that advanced designs possessed such an effect.

He even figured that it might be related to the intangible qualities of a mech, but that shouldn’t be it. Ves did not perceive anything damaging during his own investigation of the Hellcat.

It was likely the other mech designer was right, and that it was a case of overstraining the mind when dealing with concepts beyond the means of understanding. There were plenty of secrets hidden in plain sight, and Ves might eventually go crazy as well if he dove too deep in the design nuances of the Hellcat.