The Mech Touch novel Chapter 492

As someone who made use of a really great stealth system from the System, Ves knew all about their strengths and weaknesses. Though he had no clue how the stealth system prevented any signals from leaking out of a bubble of space and covered all of his tracks, it still wouldn’t be able to deal with something as simple as a cloud of particles or other junk.

Though the particle canisters offered the rebels on the field with a ready-made solution to sniff out anyone under stealth, before the invention of canisters, humans improvised many other means.

"Wait a moment." Ves interjected. "You still have a lot of missiles left, right?"

Breskin immediately knew what he was thinking. "Slaying Lord Javier is out of the question. We can’t afford to pulverize him with a blanket missile bombardment!"

That sounded really strange to Ves. Weren’t they out to kill Lord Javier? What did it matter if he died on the battlefield, when they would just kill him in their custody? Ves set the matter aside and focused on persuading the commander before Javier flew away.

"You don’t have to set the missiles to maximum lethality. Make them explode above the altitude that Javier is probably trying to reach and saturate the surroundings in a dome of explosions. The smoke and shockwaves will be sufficient to disturb his stealth even if he’s well outside the blast zone of the payloads."

"I understand what you’re saying, but it’s an enormous risk."

"It frees up your particle canisters." Ves pointed out. "This way, you don’t have to decide between spreading your particles at ground level or in the air. Your infantrymen can keep sweeping the streets while letting your missiles take care of whatever might be floating above.

Breskin needed to decide quickly, because with each second, Javier would slip further and further away.

"Let’s do it." Addy said. "The missiles are meant to be used, and if we accidentally kill the bastard, then it’s still better than letting him get away scott-free."

They ultimately bowed down to necessity. As much as they evidently wanted to keep the little bastard alive, they couldn’t afford to lose in front of everyone that paid attention. Their prestige didn’t allow them to fail at the cusp of victory.

The rebels moved quickly. They still possessed a decent stock of missiles, enough to blanket a wide dome around the abandoned cockpit for ten or so minutes. Ves helped tweak the programming of some of the missiles to limit their lethality and disperse their emissions.

His shallow familiarity with missile weapons left out any drastic modifications. While low-tech explosive missiles weren’t very sophisticated, it still took an expert to optimize them to achieve a specific outcome.

Dedicated missile developers and mech designers specialized in missiles could do a much better job than Ves, but he made do regardless by tweaking the easiest settings. Since time was of the issue, he only spent thirty seconds at most.

"Launch them now!"

The operators in Breskin’s mobile command center planned out the missile launches in the time that Ves tweaked the missiles. This didn’t take a lot of time, since they instructed AIs to calculate an optimum spread of missiles above the streets. They spent more time in double-checking the results to insure the missiles didn’t detonate next to one of their men or something.

"Three, two, one, launch!"

Over a hundred missiles launched in the air from various points. Most of them consisted of smaller shoulder-launched warheads. Only a small amount of vehicle-launched missiles joined the fray. While larger missiles blanketed a much larger area, their lethality encompassed a much wider zone. The AIs calculated that it was better to saturate the airspace with lots of smaller missiles than a smaller number of larger ones.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Deep thrums shook the ground as the explosions in the air kicked up a lot of air. The airspace above everyone’s head whipped up violently as multiple shockwaves from near-simultaneous explosions overlapped with each other.

In the meantime, all sorts of sensors focused in the air. They tried to pick up any disturbance they could pick up. Inside the rebel base, processors worked to interpret any anomalies in the sensor data, dismissing most of them as artifacts or erroneous readings.

One anomaly quickly stood out. A small, indeterminate mass hovered a small distance away from the Raphael’s cockpit. The moment the shockwaves from the nearest explosions blanketed the coordinates of the mass, some of the winds swept around the mass instead of going through it. Though the signs were subtle to the naked eye, it might as well be in plain sight to the cold hard electronics that made up the sensors and the processors.

"There! Throw up a smaller range of explosions around that area!"

A small number of shoulder-launched missiles flew into the air and detonated in a smaller dome around the anomalous location. This time, the explosions happened a little bit closer. The closer range and the higher concentration of missiles whipped up a lot more air than last time. This only made it more obvious that an invisible object displaced some of the winds around its form.

"It’s definitely a stealthed object!"

Though they only established that they found a stealthed object, the shape and dimensions of the object looked suspiciously like a man-sized stealth suit.

The Detemen League moved quickly upon confirmation that something invisible hung in the air. A pair of armored shuttles flew from the distance and halted in mid-air in the region around the invisible object. Hatches slid open, enabling the infantrymen inside to throw out a bunch of particle canisters.

Particles spread out in a large and hazy cloud around the shuttles. Almost immediately, a very obvious deformation stood out in the even spread of particles. "Over there!"

One of the infantrymen in the shuttles stepped forward. Unlike the other men, this soldier carried a man-sized fluid projector borrowed from the local Planetary Guard. After a brief windup, a brown slurry of slime propelled from the nozzle of the projector.

Under the onslaught of the sticky slime, the stealthed shape could no longer maintain its invisible state. A skintight suit enveloped in increasing amounts of slime appeared in the air.

"UGH! Disgusting!" Lord Javier’s voice sounded out from the helmet. "Ah! Help! I can’t maintain altitude!"