The Mech Touch novel Chapter 672

On their way back to the shuttle bay, they encountered several dangerous situations. Most of the time, Ves and his group only reached the aftermath of a violent incident. People as well-armed as them gunned down the pirates that were stupid enough to get in their way.

Different gangs clashed against each other over when one gang revealed they supported the Hellvoice. Fights between these gangs lasted the longest and led to the most frigid butchering.

Overworked cleaning bots worked overtime to haul away the bodies and clean up the blood. It didn’t help that their programming malfunctioned a few times due to the sheer amount of bodies in the way.

Sometimes, the larger cleaning bots mistook living people as corpses, brutally grabbing onto their bodies with razor-sharp pincers and lifting them off in the air as their very living bodies floundered in pain!

The smaller bots on the other hand swarmed by the dozens! They converged at the ankles of people who had waded through the pools of blood and aggressively wiped or sucked away the traces, not even caring if their cleaning routines penetrated straight through the clothes and broke through human skin!

Something very horrendous ensued at that point. The wounds inevitably started to bleed, which put the stupid bots into a supercharged cleaning mode. They intensified their cleaning routines and practically bore through the ankles until the hapless victims couldn’t stand any longer!

Upon falling, the bots kept chewing away at their unprotected flesh, their simple artificial minds only fixated on cleaning blood, no matter if it came from a dead or living source!

"What the hell?!" Ketis stammered as her armored foot kicked a pair of small cleaning bots down the corridor. Her sights firmly fixated on the runaway bots and their misguided attempt to clean the space station by cleaning the blood-soaked humans that polluted the the place. "This.. someone should shut them off!"

"It won’t work." Nolsen said. "I’ve already ran my military-grade automatic hacking module on them. Though they look rather cheap, their security suites are impenetrable to me. My guess is that the Boseys were tired of script kiddies hacking the bots to change their programming so they can pull off a prank. They invested heavily in upgrading their software security."

"This doesn’t look like a normal malfunction." Ves observed with suspicion. "Any manufacturer of cleaning bots will program their products to ignore living humans. In fact, they should go out of their way to avoid them in the first place to prevent any harm!"

"Well, unless I’m mistaken, these bots have become man eaters now. Look at how they’re dissolving that poor guy in highly-acidic cleaning solution!"

Unless a skilled professional hacker was around, these bots would continue to follow their faulty programming!

Ves truly had no clue what was going on. Did some malfunction cause the bots to get stuck in a faulty logic loop, or had some nefarious super hacker twist the programming of the bots as a deliberate attempt at sabotage?

Personally, he leaned towards a case of vandalism gone deadly. Perhaps some juvenile trickster had introduced a tiny error in their programming regarding their treatment of living humans and kept it buried there for some time.

Whatever the case, they needed to be destroyed before they could do more damage! The horrified screams of hapless station visitors already seared his mind with nightmares.

"Nolsen, take down the bots if you can! If we can’t hack them, we can kill them instead!"

The security officers didn’t argue and immediately opened fire. They mainly fired penetrative kinetic rounds in order to pierce through the tough exterior that protected the bots from kicking and other acts of vandalism.

Sometimes, the projectiles overpenetrated the bots and hit the humans cowering behind, but the Vandals took little mind of these slip ups. They already did their best trying to minimize the collateral damage.

Half a minute later, their weapons ceased firing. Around forty bots lay prone and steaming with several new holes decorating their shells.

They conveniently ignored the dying and the wounded. In any case, it was up to the Boseys to provide medical help.

"There are no more obstacles in the way. Let’s continue moving."

They stepped past the dead, dying and wounded as if it didn’t concern them at all. Ves had long lost his empathy for random strangers, let alone the folk who frequented the Independent Harbor.

Anyone willing to visit a hive of scum and villainy was either a scum or a villain!

A part of him felt bad for generalizing the entire population of the space station this way, but Ves really couldn’t bring himself to care. His mind had already been doused in the blood of the frontier, changing his perspective closer to the standard of the frontier.

Amidst the untamed stars, there wasn’t any distinguishment between the guilty and the innocent! The only difference that mattered was whether someone was strong or weak!

As they stepped past hordes of bots that ran out of control, the Vandals destroyed them all with extreme prejudice. Ves and Ketis didn’t even have the opportunity to bring their own weapons to bear, as the exoskeleton soldiers proved to be brutally efficient at wiping out the erratic bots.

As they rounded the corner of another street, they inadvertently stumbled upon a pacification attempt by the Boseys!

Armed with exoskeleton armor that was just as deadly as those worn by the Vandal security officers, they fired off their electrorods with casual disregard, as if they didn’t care if their electric weapons misfired and arced towards a bystander to the side!

Their rifles and wrist-mounted gun barrels blasted the rioting crowd of pirates with a variety of ballistic projectiles and laser beams. One powerful laser cannon raked half of the crowd with a saber-like beam!

The weapon immediately overheated, but the shock it gave to the survivors had been enough to break their drunken and drug-fueled courage!

"Run! The Boseys are gonna kill us all!"

"Ravienne will hear about this, Bosey dogs! She’ll come down on your stupid space station like the wrath of a battleship!"

None of the wailings of the pirates mattered. By now, the only people on the street consisted of trouble makers aiming to force the Boseys into reversing their gambling losses. After losing their entire savings, they pretty much had nothing to lose!

The saner and more careful pirates as well as the treasure hunters and the other visitors all scurried off into one of the many shops and venues before they all barricaded up their entrances.

Naturally, Ves and his escorts formed the exception, because they really needed to return to their shuttle. Whatever the case, the odds were high that the Boseys might paint everyone on the streets with the same brush.