The Mech Touch novel Chapter 533

The Flagrant Vandals used the next few days in FTL travel to pick up the pieces from the previous skirmish. Despite the relatively short and brief engagement, the fight resulted in a lot of material damage.

Fortunately, a lot of mech pilots escaped their crumbling mechs by ejecting in time. Though the task force had lost a fair amount of precious mechs, they could at least rebuild those in time. It was much harder to recruit and train loyal mech pilots. They represented the foundation of a mech regiment.

Ves spent a fair amount of time delegating the repair work. The Vandals recovered many Inheritor wrecks. Some came in incomplete pieces, and ordinarily Ves would have chosen to discard them, but in this time of scarcity they had no choice but to make the best out of what they gathered.

Thus, he formed plans to piece together and repair each Inheritor with minimum resource demands. He tried to puzzle together compatible pieces as best he could and rely on fabricating replacement parts as little as possible.

The repair work became highly complicated due to the inability of the ships in the fleet to exchange parts and resources with each other. They needed to wait until they transitioned out of FTL before they could perform all the queued transfer requests.

Carletta Haine, the chief technician aboard the Shield of Hispania, provided Ves with her own perspective when he dropped by the hangar bays for a visit.

"Kid, this ain’t nothing yet. Back when I was a snot-nosed techie in the previous war, I’ve seen respectable mech companies descend into rags after they barely survived an extended pursuit. It’s not the big battles that breaks their spirit, but rather the little fights here and there. Every battle saps their willpower and resources, and without any chance of replenishing both, they continued to fracture."

Ves frowned at her words. "Do you think we’ll suffer through the same kind of ordeal?"

"I’m counting on it. Our mission is ten times harder than anything else like it. We’re literally in the heart of the Vesia Kingdom. Do you expect us to breeze past the Vesians as if they’re blind? Even if we are taking advantage of rebel help, the most they can do is pull off some tricks. We’re essentially on our own here."

He didn’t wish to argue this point, having heard it many times before, so he quickly changed topics.

"What do you think about Chief Elin’s trial?"

"Ptuh!" The burly female chief spat. A cleaning bot quickly zipped close and cleaned up her mess. "I always knew he couldn’t get his hands clean. It’s no secret that some of us take liberties now and then, but as long as it isn’t worth more than a few hundred credits, every chief wouldn’t look too closely. That is until your new resource management system arrived."

"We need to save every milligram of materials that we can if we want to survive this gauntlet." Ves nodded in tacit acknowledgement to her implied words. "Fun times are over now. I believe that Alloc would choose to do the same if he was in my shoes."

"Mr. Brandstad is a decent man and a damn good mech designer! Chief Elin is the exact opposite! That man saw the Finmoth Regal as his own little kingdom. Nothing about mechs aboard that combat carrier escaped his sight. He was the Regal’s own little shadow captain."

"Wow, if you knew about all that, why didn’t you report it?"

Chief Haine looked at Ves as if he was stupid. "You’re way too fresh to understand. Suffice to say, I’m glad that stain is gone. I can’t wait to see him drift into space!"

Ves wanted to point out the fact that the trial hadn’t come to a verdict yet, but he knew in his heart that the man’s fate was sealed. Major Verle made his opinions on the trial very clear, and combined with the evidence collected over the course of a few days, a guilty verdict was practically guaranteed.

The reason why he left the office was to prepare the means of Chief Elin’s slow execution. After waving goodbye to Chief Haine, Ves entered one of the Shield of Hispania’s machine shop that normally fabricated ship components and utilized it to build up the cold coffin.

A cold burial happened enough times for the Mech Corps to maintain a standardized blueprint in its central database. They even came in many variants. The cheapest ones would crumble after being hit by a small piece of space junk, while others would bounce off and continue to go down their merry way in deep space.

Ves had been ordered to make a robust coffin, so he opted for a middle quality design that ticked all the boxes. Going for something more extravagant and expensive was a massive waste of time and resources.

He felt strange as he fabricated the coffin part by part. His personal involvement in building something which would be someone’s grave forced him to reflect on his decisions as head designer.

He felt a little responsible for the mess that happened on the Finmoth Regal. "If I didn’t caught the anomalies and pointed them out to Major Verle, maybe all of those deaths could have been prevented."

If he saved his suspicions until the battle was over, perhaps the Finmoth Regal’s security department could have tackled the issue with more finesse.

Still, the situation back then demanded an immediate response. The two suspect Inheritor mechs had replaced their ejection systems with hidden transmitters that sent out who-knew-what to the Vesians. By tackling the transmitters the moment they detected them, the Vandals might have avoided greater calamity.

Ves did not feel guilty for reporting the issue. He only felt as if he could have done something more before the battle erupted.

"Since Chief Elin is one of the most prolific embezzlers, I should have done something more than wash my hands of the past."

He could have talked to Elin or check up on his past actions. Now, it was too late to remedy his mistakes. While Chief Elin didn’t fall under his chain of command, he did hold some responsibilities for the low-ranking mech designer that Elin co-opted in his schemes.

Ves hadn’t decided on what to do yet with Loke Vedette. The young mech designer that had been conscripted into the Mech Corps had been too impressionable against Chief Elin’s devilish charisma. _{frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓}