The Mech Touch novel Chapter 807

Once Captain Byrd approved his research proposal, the Vandals moved quickly. They stopped avoiding the tribes and instead tried to seek them out.

The only challenge was trying to identify which wildling possessed the power to interfere with the operation of mechs.

Was every wildling that rode atop a godling a potentate?

Besides offering up their mechs, the Vandals weren’t quite sure. In the end, they decided to kidnap the most formidable-looking dwarf and let someone else sort out the problem!

Of course, the Vandals declined to use their mechs to kidnap the dwarves. Not only was it massive overkill, none of the mech pilots wanted to experience the same humiliation of being defeated by a dirty savage on foot!

The security officers went into action this time. It would have been ideal if they could tranquilize the dwarves and pick up their unconscious bodies, but unfortunately their unnaturally strong physiques made it difficult to sedate them without causing their bodies to fail and die.

Instead, the Vandal armorers fabricated electrorods and net launchers to stun and capture the dwarves. In addition, the engineers developed a robotic crawler that could pick up the immobilized dwarves and place them in the cage on its back.

Armed with all of this gear and aided by the large and formidable-looking crawler, the security officers captured about fifteen ferocious dwarves from several small-scale tribes. Though the remaining dwarves howled in anger or grieved at the loss of their strongest warriors, the Vandals didn’t show any sympathy.

The dwarves were savages! Most Vandals and Swordmaidens didn’t even consider them human anymore.

This was a significant change, because humanity had been brought up with the belief that the human race possessed its own dignity. This belief initially emerged during the Age of Space when a nascent humanity became pressed on all sides by arrogant, old alien civilizations.

It became ingrained in their race once they brutally expanded among the stars during the Age of Conquest. Their constant victories against supposedly superior alien races and their rapid expansion until their race ruled over the largest territory held by any single alien species cemented this manifest destiny.

Humanity was destined to conquer the Milky Way Galaxy!

Technically, no matter how much the genes of the wildlings had diverged from the genes of a baseline human, they should still be counted in the same group. Though it sounded disgusting, these primitive dwarves possessed the ability to interbreed with both the blessed people and any other strains of humanity, including the Vandals and Swordmaidens!

Of course, no one seriously entertained this incredibly repellant act.

Right now, the ground expedition made good progress towards the city of Samar. Fifty kilometers away from the city, the Flagrant Swordmaidens decided to stop and set up another temporary camp at a defensive position.

This also allowed Ves to divert some engineers construct a temporary testing facility. Due to dangers involved with this experiment, the planners placed the testing facility at a fair distance from the main camp. Mechs received clear instructions to avoid the vicinity, which the mech pilots scrupulously obeyed.

No one wanted to lose control over their mechs all of a sudden!

Once the construction bots finished piecing together the prefab testing facility, Ves and Ketis entered the lab.

The interior of the lab incorporated a decent amount of sensors and scanners. It also served as a prison for the dwarf captives. A number of security officers assigned as wardens kept guard over the captured wildlings.

The wardens made sure the dwarf were fed and watered and prevented them from fighting among themselves. The Vandals had to separate the captives in their own holding cells in order to stop them from beating each other up.

As Ves and Ketis stepped into the section housing the holding cells, they came into clear view of the prisoners. The savage dwarves yelled aggressively at their armored forms and spoke in a different incomprehensible language that differed drastically from the tribes they met before.

Each tribe constantly developed their own languages. The dwarves never recorded their knowledge into words, and so their languages remained unmoored. Every hundred years, the language of a tribe shifted so drastically that different generations of tribesmen might not be able to understand each other anymore!

All of the variations made life hell for the translator AIs and prevented Ves from understanding what they said.

He didn’t need to, though. Their angry scowls and their fierce shouting already made it abundantly clear how much they hated their captors.

"They look kind of pitiful." Ketis said. While she didn’t sympathise with the captives, even she thought Ves was going a little too far with his experiment. "Don’t you feel sorry for them sometimes?"

"Human or not, these dwarves are a threat. So long as they are a threat, I can do whatever I want with these prisoners." He replied.

The dumb dwarves still hadn’t learned how to use a toilet. The wardens constantly had to send out cleaning bots in order to clean up after their messes. Worse yet, the dwarves always treated the bots as hostiles and tried to attack them every chance they got, so the only way to clean their cells was to restrain them first.

Still, despite their awful behavior and ugly appearances, these dwarves possessed far more potential than the beautiful but stagnant blessed people who holed themselves up in their cities all the time.

Ves needed to remind himself not to hold these dwarves in contempt. Underestimating them had already taught the Swordmaidens a painful lesson.

Once he became satisfied with the testing facility, he immediately began his first tests. Ves designed and constructed a facsimile of a mech cockpit that was more than just a simulator pod.

The neural interfaces incorporated in a cockpit and a simulator pod differed drastically. In order to obtain the best results, Ves had to replicate the circumstances of piloting a mech as closely as possible. However, Captain Byrd forbid him from using a live mech for his experiments, because if a talented dwarf potentate somehow managed to wrest full control over a mech, then that would be a disaster for them all!

However, a cockpit without a mech wouldn’t do. Without a way to communicate with the dwarves, how would Ves be able to encourage them to use their mind voodoo?

As Ves struggled to come up with a solution to this problem, Ketis came to the rescue with another one of her stupid-but-genius suggestions.

"They’re used to bonding with their godling mounts, right?" She said one day. "Why not create a mech that looks like one of those big lizards and put the test cockpit inside its belly?"

Ves was tempted to smack his face with his gauntlet. "I should have thought of that."

These dwarves may not know what to do when presented with a cockpit or a mech, but they grew up alongside their godling mounts for generations!

Ves quickly designed a godling-like mech that was large enough to accommodate the test cockpit. It didn’t have to be a fully-functional mech. In fact, Ves crippled most of its functions to save time and to prevent anyone controlling it from doing any damage.