The Mech Touch

While the Combat Trauma Stabilizer forcefully boosted his body, Ves did his best to make the most of his hyperactive state.

After Lucky confirmed that he cleaned up the mech workshop compartment, Ves only hesitated for a moment before entering it through another entrance.

The original one he approached had long been blasted apart by the missile detonation. The entire deck along with the surrounding compartments sustained substantial damage!

Ves winced when he saw the damage. The structure of the Scarlet Rose was very resilient, but it fell short of matching the resilience of mechs!

Only the CFA invested a huge amount of high-grade exotics to construct their warships!

While a state like the Friday Coalition was quite prosperous, it made no sense to allocate too many resources towards strengthening ships.

In its war against the Hexadric Hegemony, the quality and quantity of their mechs decided the outcome!

This was the reason why Ves became very apprehensive about the state of the mech workshop and the mechs or parts stored within.

What else had Aisling and Patricia done when they became aware that the ship was under attack?

Just like how Ves rigged some of the ordnance stored in the armory to explode, the two Fridayman mech designers could have done the same to mech-sized ammunition!

His first priority was to inspect the ammunition stores and make sure that none of them had been tampered with in any way!

For this reason, he hobbled into the mech nursery despite knowing the risks.

No attacks greeted his arrival. When Ves stepped into the large compartment, he looked around and saw a handful of corpses leaking blood on the deck.

Lucky managed to kill each of them without giving them a chance to counterattack. The bodies of two armored guards along with several mech technicians accounted for the remainder of the crew.

Ves was pretty sure that aside from Aisling and Patricia, no one else managed to survive!

”Where are they?” He frowned in puzzlement.

He felt oddly disappointed by the lack of opposition. When he formulated his plan, he expected to confront the mastermind of his kidnapping.

Instead, she ran away after preparing one last surprise!

”Well, not everyone is like me, I guess.” He couldnʼt help but shrug.

He had forgotten that Aisling was just a civilian.

Mech designers werenʼt combatants by nature. There was no reason for her to hole herself up in the mech workshop and fight for the faint chance of defeating the ʼteam of commandosʼ that expertly cleansed the ship of opposition!

Even Ves would not hesitate to abandon everyone else and flee the ship as fast as possible!

”Well, she certainly made the wisest choice if she decided to abandon ship.” He muttered.

Knowing that he couldnʼt sustain his active state for much longer, Ves hastily picked up a multiscanner and began to scan and inspect any equipment and ordnance that posed a potential threat.

Aisling hadnʼt been building any mechs recently. He encountered various supplies and parts that corresponded to the four mechs standing by in the mech hanger.

Evidently, the mech technicians used the mech workshop to service and maintain the stationed mechs.

One of them employed a missile launcher system, which was the reason why the Scarlet Rose carried a batch of missiles in her ammunition stores.

As Ves swept over the remaining missiles, he found to his relief that they hadnʼt been tampered with. It was actually quite hard to access them in person. Due to their potential threat to the ship, the Scarlet Rose stored them in shielded containers meant to expose them to as little external influences as possible!

After he finished sweeping over the missiles, he inspected some of the other parts and gear that could pose a very significant threat if Aisling and Patricia rigged them to blow.

Fortunately, second-class states generally did not make use of ballistic weapons. While it was possible to scale up their lethality by lacing their warheads with volatile exotics, most states prefer to invest in other weapon systems!

The limitations of ballistic weapons made them very unattractive to states that could afford better. Missile weapons scaled much better with increased investment.

This saved him the trouble of inspecting thousands of ballistic shells. The rest of the mechs stationed on the Scarlet Rose made use of other weapon systems such as laser weaponry and particle beam weaponry.

The mech workshop was directly connected to the mech hangar, so Ves easily limped over to the mechs and beheld them for a moment.

He only admired these machines from the scans that Lucky had made. Seeing them for real made him feel encouraged.

”Hahaha!”

All of the mechs looked ready to deploy. When Ves launched his attack, he knew for certain that the mech pilots attempted to activate their mechs and launch them into space!

Whether to defend the Scarlet Rose against stealthed enemies or put the ship at gunpoint in order to force the hijackers into a compromise, the mechs served as a vital source of strength for the crew!

Yet none of the four mechs succeeded in deploying!

Although he couldnʼt see anything from the outside, he knew for certain that each of their cockpits contained the bodies of dead or dying mech pilots!

Ves had taken advantage of Luckyʼs ability to phase into the mechs to sabotage one crucial component: the neural interface!

As an amateur in neural interfaces, Ves was not very good at modifying them to perform better or safer.

However, it was no problem for him to make things worse!

He employed some of the lessons he learned from leading the beast rider project back at Aeon Corona VII to turn the neural interfaces into killer weapons!

He already became curious whether his tampering resulted in exploded heads!

”Well, I can research that later!”

As he started feeling his body losing its stimulant effect, Ves quickly made use of the scanners and equipment at hand to inspect the permanent mechs. While he couldnʼt investigate them thoroughly, he found nothing else worth noting at this time.

”I should complete the takeover of the ship and get myself some treatment!”

Fatigue already started to creep up on him by the time Lucky returned.

”Meow.”

”Are you sure?”

”Meow!”

Through their spiritual communication, Ves found out that Lucky had gone over the entire ship for signs of life.

Despite his best efforts, his cat failed to find the mech designers he was looking for. The trail that Lucky followed ended abruptly at one of the exterior compartments close to the mech workshop.

”Take me there.”

Ves wearily followed Lucky to a compartment that held a number of cylindrical escape pods.

He was very familiar with escape pods as he made use of one in the Detemen System some years ago.

However, the escape pod model employed by the Flagrant Vandals was a lot more basic than the ones before him! Not only were they more advanced, a handful of them clearly didnʼt look standard issue!

”Did Aisling bring these escape pods to the ship?”

Two of the slots next to the special escape pods were empty. Ves had no doubt that Aisling and Patricia had already slipped away from here! Perhaps the captainʼs warnings had already caused them to flee far away!

The Scarlet Rose used to carry four special escape pods. They must have been prepared for Aisling, Patricia, the female Benny and Ves!

Ves approached one of the special escape pods and booted it up in order to call up their specs.

”These escape pods are almost as good as shuttles!”

Their speed, armor, endurance and other parameters were very good! They also contained a powerful communication array that was very useful in calling for help.

Even if help was slow in coming, the escape pods carried enough food, water and oxygen to last for at least a year by virtue of its excellent recycling system!

However, the feature that Ves feared the most was that the high-quality escape pods also came with a stealth system!

Although activating stealth consumed a lot of energy, it was no problem for the escape pods to remain hidden from most second-class sensors for a couple of weeks!

”Fine then! Iʼll let you go for now!”

Ves had precious little mercy left in his bones when the missile almost killed him! If Aisling hadnʼt made the right choice and fled before it was too late, he would have certainly killed her for taking him away from home!

If Ves was in a better shape, he might have tried to track her down one way or another.

As it was, his mounting headache and weariness prevented him from doing anything strenuous!

Right now, his own safety and security mattered more than his desire to take revenge!

He reluctantly gave up this impulse and tried to recall the latter steps of his plan.

After he finished removing all of the opposition, Ves had to take complete control over the ship by usurping her command authority!

If he didnʼt do so, the ship would continue to drift in a star system that was right next to the border of the Friday Coalition!

Ves was sure that the captain or Aisling already notified the Coalition Reserve Corps of what transpired!

”The Fridaymen will definitely be mad for losing one of their official ships!”

A monitor represented an entire state! Attacking one of their ships would definitely put a target on his back!

If not for the urgency of the situation and the Komodo War consuming most of the attention of the Friday Coalition, Ves wouldnʼt have been so bold to challenge the CRCʼs prestige!

”I canʼt waste anymore time!”

He headed back to the mech workshop and hastily fabricated some parts from a small 3D printer.

By now, his Combat Trauma Stabilizer already started wearing off. Mental and physical fatigue threatened to overwhelm his consciousness!

In order to stave off the inevitable crash, Ves decided to expend his spiritual energy!

He felt as if he was burning his mind as he kept his mind in a highly active state! He would definitely pay the price by entering a lengthy low period afterwards, but right now he didnʼt care about the consequences!

It didnʼt take long for Ves to produce his desired parts. He placed them on a floater platform and sat down on it while instructing it to move to the bridge.

The floater platform took a few minutes to exit the mech workshop, navigate the corridors and ascend a few decks.

As soon as the floater platform reached the bridge, Ves hopped off and began to install some of the parts.

Once he did so, he activated his comm and managed to connect to the bridge system!

”Yes! Lucky! Help me take control!”

It took fifteen minutes of fiddling with the software and hardware to gain rudimentary control over the ship.

Not only did he have to hack the bridge systems, he also had to undo some of his tampering! Otherwise, the bridge systems wouldnʼt be able to control the rest of the ship!

Since Ves already prepared these steps beforehand, he soon managed to achieve some results with the help of Luckyʼs fantastic hacking capabilities.

While he failed to gain as much authority over the ship as her captain, he acquired enough control to access the navigation and communication systems!

The first thing he did was to lock down the shipʼs quantum entanglement node.

Ves did not want the Scarlet Rose to broadcast her location and route to the Friday Coalition! With all of that information, the Fridaymen could easily prepare an ambush at his next destination!

Due to the security risk posed by an active quantum entanglement node, every ship came with the capability to isolate them completely!

After Ves verified that the ship network disconnected entirely from the quantum entanglement node, he turned to the navigation system and started to activate the autopilot.

He instructed it to follow a route that brought the Scarlet Rose away from the Friday Coalition!

As long as the FTL drive finished cycling, the ship would immediately transition back into FTL, giving Ves some much-needed reprieve!

”Finally!” He sighed.

He practically collapsed on the floater platform. He instructed it to take him to the infirmary. Right now, he desperately needed treatment!