The Mech Touch novel Chapter 729

The fact that the Flagrant Swordmaidens entered the deep frontier hit home among the rank-and-file. The Vandals may be a lot less familiar with the frontier than the Swordmaidens, but once they heard the stories, they started developing nightmares about entire sandstorms engulfing their fleet.

Trespassing sandmen space was as perilous as their run through Vesian space! Danger lurked in every star system, and the main form of protection they relied on consisted of some inscrutable religious blessing by a bunch of whack jobs who worshipped some alien entity named Haatumak.

The lack of understanding and the difficulty of comprehending their circumstances led a lot of Vandals to grumble about their mission. Had the Starlight Megalodon really crash-landed in the middle of sandmen space? How come the CFA battleship hadn’t been chewed into bits by the sandmen that reigned over this territory?

To the chief engineer, it made more sense that the Starlight Megalodon would be found in such an out-of-the-way location.

As Ves and Chief Avanaeon gathered together in the corner of the shuttle bay of the Shield of Hispania, they tinkered with the salvaged fragments of the stealth shuttles from the battle against the Masters of Combat.

So far, they hadn’t achieved much progress, but Ves hadn’t been able to put his full attention to this side project until now.

With a new pair of high-powered gadgets hanging from his toolbelt, he completed one of his necessary preparations to survive the oncoming storm.

Now, he just needed to figure out how stealth tech work and reconstruct a working stealth shuttle in order to finish the other vital component of his contingency plan.

As Ves and Avanaeon comfortably collaborated on figuring out the inner workings of the stealth shuttle, they chatted about many different topics.

"What do you think about the deep frontier and the fact that our objective might be there?" The chief engineer. _{frёewebnoѵēl.com}

Currently, the pair performed some targeted scans on outer hull fragments with a specialized scanner they cobbled up just for this purpose. The previous scanners hadn’t been able to pick up the special internal structure of the wondrously crafted stealth plating. Their quality exceeded anything the both of them had seen before, but the problem that came with it was that they needed better equipment to behold their full majesty.

Ves slid his fingers in his air as if he turned an invisible knob, causing the resolution of the scanner to adjust by a minute proportion. "I think that the Starlight Megalodon won’t be easy to reach. You know the sandmen love to suck the juice out of high-energy objects. A batteship is one of the most pinnacle inventions of the human race. There’s hardly a higher concentration of energy to be found among our massive works besides the dyson swarms that surround the suns of highly developed star systems."

The strength and development of the human race or any alien race rested on their ability to harvest and harness energy.

While humans needed to invent a lot of technology to interact with energy through the medium of machines, the sandmen interacted a lot more directly with energy.

The sandmen race never made any use of machines or any external objects for that matter. Their houses and colonies consisted of large agglomerations of their own race akin to sandcastles. Their ships consisted of their own bodies shaped in balls, ovals, cubes or any other geometric shape their slightly smarter sandmen leader preferred.

In other words, the sandmen didn’t make use of technology. They embodied itt! As a strange race that resembles bots and whose bodies consisted of sand grain-like material, they animated themselves through extremely obscure means. Even if their entire race resembled something magical, they couldn’t escape the fundamental requirement that all races hungered for: energy.

Both Ves and Chief Avanaeon knew this fundamental truth.

"I’ve developed a theory why the Starlight Megalodon somehow manages to stay intact after being stranded for several hundred years in sandmen space." The chief engineer began. "You heard about how the Starlight Megalodon originally led a starship into alien space for some subjugation mission or something, right?"

Ves nodded. "Now that I think about it, the CFA likely sent out the subjugation fleet to teach the sandmen race a lesson."

"Well, while the rest of the fleet emerged out of FTL intact, their flagship inexplicably went missing. Since they knew that the Megalodon transitioned into FTL but didn’t come out, the CFA thought that it encountered some kind of freak accident related to the higher dimensions."

"I’ve already heard that theory. What’s your point?"

"My point is that whatever anomaly gripped the the Starlight Megalodon out of place may still be active until today. The vagaries of spacetime and what happens in the higher dimensions are poorly understood even now. Take it from me. Even though I’m a chief engineer, I barely understand what goes on inside an FTL drive! And that’s only the more basic models that is sufficient to propel a combat carrier. The FTL drive of a battleship is hundreds of times more powerful and complex! I’ve even heard that capital ships activate multiple FTL drives in conjunction! Think of the complexity involved with such a technical feat!"

Ves shuddered at the thought. He had come into touch with FTL drives several times, and while he didn’t had the pleasure of tinkering with them or understanding how they worked, he knew that they worked on incredibly mind-boggling principles.

"So you think the Starlight Megalodon is still caught in some kind of.. multidimensional pothole? A spacetime ditch?"

"Something like that. I heard you took part in the Glowing Planet campaign on behalf of some private outfit. Did you experience what happened at the end?"

Avanaeon’s words immediately made Ves recall the temporal anomaly that emerged as the Mech Corps and the Mech Legion slugged it out with each other. He remembered the moment when one of the transports carrying a dimensional smoother loaned by the MTA got blown up by a misdirected missile!

The bizarre time loop that centered around the impact site scared the wits out of the hardened Brighter and Vesian soldiers! The two forces immediately ended their battle without a clear winner or loser in their desperation to escape the strange phenomenon that resulted out of their negligent actions.