The Mech Touch novel Chapter 717

Ves saw no reason why the Flagrant Vandals should involve themselves into a dispute between two fairly strong outfits in the middle of nowhere. The sandmen presence further added to the danger.

While it appeared that none of the three forces possessed the strength to defeat the Flagrant Swordmaidens, they could still inflict a significant amount of damage if they fought to the death.

As far as Ves and most Vandals were concerned, they were merely bystanders on their way to another destination. The incidents that happened along their route shouldn’t concern them at all.

Yet curiosity tickled at them. What made these two forces venture so far out into the frontier? They had long reached past the point where regular pirate outfits roamed. This was because pirates earned their living by robbing other ships or settlements, and those mostly popped up in civilized space or just beyond its borders.

The further someone ventured into the frontier, the fewer signs of human presence they encountered. How could pirates ever earn a living in such a desolate place?

Therefore, those who tended to venture this far out either sought out a specific treasure or attempted to flee from some pervasive threat.

The odds were high that the two warring outfits in the interior of the so-called Ermeghast System possessed peculiar backgrounds. _{ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com}

The possibility that the two outfits might be hunting for the same objective as the Flagrant Swordmaidens hadn’t been lost on their commanding officers. Both Commander Lydia and Major Verle grew suspicious at encountering two strong forces on their route towards the Starlight Megalodon.

While the sensor operators busied themselves with figuring out the providence of the two separate outfits in the inner system, the tactical officer provided a preliminary report on the composition of the sandmen fleet.

The Flagrant Vandals didn’t know much about the sandmen. To be honest, the tactical officer borrowed heavily from the intelligence provided by Lydia’s Swordmaidens. As a pirate gang that roamed the frontier for decades, they had their fair share of encounters against the sentient sand-like race.

"Sir, our preliminary estimates suggest that the medium-sized sandmen fleet is led by an inexperienced sand admiral. The leading sandman doesn’t show a lot of imagination in the deployment of its fleet elements."

"What is their concrete fleet strength?"

"If they aren’t hiding any other assets, then we’ve pegged their fleet composition at one sandman mothership and twelve sandmen escort ships, sir. After analyzing their sizes and comparing them to historical data, we’ve also estimated the effective strengths of their ’ships’. The effective combat strength of the sandmen mothership is analogous to a combat carrier with a full complement of spaceborn mechs, while the strength of the escort ships is comparable to a converted carrier and its complement."

This sounded formidable to any medium-sized mech outfit, but the Flagrant Swordmaidens had little to fear from such a force.

Due to the decentralized leadership structure of the sandmen race, every sandman leader expressed themselves differently. However, almost all of the sandmen leaders who brought their forces into space tended to start from the same default template.

The template of a sandman fleet always consisted of a ’mothership’ housing the sandman admiral and a number of uniform escort ’ships’ in multiples of six.

Some exoanthropologists asserted that the sandmen operated on a base-six numeral system. Put simply, it was as if the sandmen counted with the help of a pair of hands with three fingers each.

A handful of conspiracy theorists even speculated whether the sandmen and the Hexadric Hegemony were one and the same! After all, they both worshipped the number six! Of course, the Hegemony always lashed out violently when somebody tied them to an alien race that just happened to share a love for the same number.

In any case, calling the clumps of sand-like agglomerations of semi-sentient materials a ’ship’ was something of a human misnomer. The sandmen might not consider them ships at all. They could be their homes, their hives, their slave pens or whatever else. The point was that treating sandmen ’ships’ as ships imposed human qualities on them that didn’t exist.

Case in point, one of the favored ways a sandman ship employed against a human ship was the sandstorm attack. A sandman escort vessel broke apart into streams of sand and attempted to engulf or run through a vulnerable enemy ship in a cataclysmic flood of living particles!

The best way to fight against a sandmen fleet was to bombard it at long range, preferably with kinetic or explosive weapons. Energy weapons such as lasers hardly scratched them, and in certain cases even replenished their energy reserves!

Naturally, melee mechs only brought brought themselves to their deaths if they approached a sandman ship. The living sand would instantly turn into a huge mouth that engulfed these metallic morsels as soon as they got close!

Everyone in the command center had already been briefed in basic sandmen naval doctrine. They also knew that the sandmen tended to become smarter in larger groups.

A single fleet composed of a mothership and twelve escorts should be capable of some imagination, but more often than not made a couple of dumb decisions.

"Sir, the sandmen are currently prioritizing energy capture. They have chosen to sit on the debris field near the asteroid belt rather than to chase after the two human fleets. This indicates that they are rather starved and desperate to gain more energy."

Major Verle nodded in acknowledgement. "This far out in the frontier aren’t very good hunting grounds for sandmen. All of the sandmen governors have already laid claim to promising colony sites, so they’re forced to roam the stars in search of prey or to passively absorb heat from the local stars."