The Mech Touch

Ves looked forward to the visit of an envoy of the Red Association.

The mechers were incredibly busy nowadays, but they had nonetheless confirmed that an inspector was about to drop by the Corellix System to verify the results of the battle and issue a hefty reward for saving the nearby colony settlement.

According to the rules of the game that the Red Two had set, the Golden Skull Alliance was already assured of receiving a huge reward. Being granted a billion MTA merits was not out of the question, but that was not the extent of the boons.

In order to muster more enthusiasm for volunteering to defend human space, the Red Association had also started to hand out other rewards.

From granting limited access to its restricted tech library to other privileges such as promoting one's citizenship tier, the mechers were willing to be uncharacteristically more generous so long as pioneers lifted a weight off their backs!

Although a lot of people would probably greet this development with greater enthusiasm and optimism, Ves had mixed feelings about this recent turn of events.

He was well acquainted with the Mech Trade Association's greed and profit-seeking behavior. The mechers might present themselves as the traditional 'good guys', but they sought to take advantage of every transaction.

For them to begin handing out rewards like candy indicated that the mechers no longer believed in their own ability to resist the incoming tide of aliens.

The Red Two's warfleets were already being pressed to their limits, and the native aliens had yet to bring over the bulk of the warships stationed in the more distant parts of the dwarf galaxy.

Ves recalled that traversing the stars by relying on indigenous warp drives was ten times slower than doing the same with the use of FTL drives.

All of this meant that unless the aliens started to equip their starships with human-style FTL drives en masse, it would probably take years if not a decade for all of those slowpokes to arrive at the edge of the Red Ocean that red humanity claimed.

However, once all of those slow but powerful warships finally arrived, the true test for the isolated red humans would commence!

Realizing this future trend put all of the recent decisions made by the Red Two into perspective. From introducing the Warship Quota Program to fortifying as many border systems as possible, all of these measures were meant to buy time and activate the greater potential of the human race!

Ves had the illusion that a giant clock hung over red humanity's space. The more the time ran down, the closer that everyone came to facing the true native alien offensive!

Not only would they have to resist at least ten times as many warships as now, but there was also a significant chance that phase whales and phase lords might actually enter the field themselves!

Red humanity only had a limited amount of buffer time to gear up and prepare for a crisis that would affect every corner of human-occupied space!

Ves grew concerned about the approximate timing of it all. He had only recently advanced to Senior and still needed to accrue a huge amount of accumulation before he was even remotely qualified to advance to Master.

He had no idea how long that would take. It was unlikely that he could get it done in roughly a decade. The jump from Journeyman to Senior was only a practice run for the true challenge of trying to realize a design philosophy.

"There's a real chance that I will remain stuck as a Senior by the time the true onslaught begins." He guessed.

That was bad news for him on a personal level. The right to speak of a Master was much greater than that of a Senior. It also became a lot easier for him to proliferate his design philosophy and superior solutions. The Red Association might even take the initiative to propagate his innovations if the mechers deem that his work could make a substantial material difference in future battles!

He would miss much of that if he did not make sufficient progress during the coming decade or two. Unless he replicated the Polymath's famous speedrun, there was no way he could become capable enough to have a serious say in how red humanity resisted the war.

Even though Ves had a lot of faith in the power and the potential of living mechs in an age where cultivation made a resurgence, people needed widespread solutions that were effective right away instead of in a distant tomorrow where they may have already become extinct!

"I need to speed up my progress somehow." He concluded.

This might very well turn into a matter of life and death to him. It became clear that following the usual mech designer trajectory was no longer an option for him. It usually took at least half a century to advance by relying on steady accumulation and boring research, and that was in the best case scenario.

If he wanted to make faster progress, then he needed to break the pattern. He already had a pretty good suspicion that delving more into cultivation science and combining it with his mech designs might be a way to accelerate his progress, but he was not too sure whether it could make a substantial enough difference.

The Mech Designer System was another tool that could help him advance to Master within twenty years.

In fact, it had already played a crucial role in enabling him to become a Senior so quickly!

He needed to put more effort into completing its Missions. He disliked a lot of them for making odd demands or forcing him to go through difficult or time-consuming ordeals, but he really needed to get his hands on more Ascension Points so that he could redeem precious enlightenment fruits.

He still yearned to take a bite out of the juicy fruit that contained the Divine Blacksmith Records!

"I'll take a more serious look at what I can do to earn more points after I've come back from the upcoming conference."

Ves returned his attention to the handling of the loot while at the same time preparing for his next two lectures at the Eden Institute.

He curiously used a bot to explore the cramped and confining interior of Stingray 2. He hoped that he would be able to find particularly interesting or powerful exotic technology inside the hull, but none of the R&D projects the resident puelmers worked upon stood out to him. Whether his eyesight was bad or whether he had simply caught the wrong ship, he soon divested his interest from the vessel.

To be fair, the fairly advanced puelmer homeship still possessed a lot of useful tech and design features that possessed great significance to Vivian Tsai and the rest of the Naval Design Department.

If Ves was not already a mech designer afflicted by a busy schedule, he might have been more willing to spend time on delving the ship for interesting secrets.

Instead, he delegated this responsibility to his subordinates and rode the Spirit of Bentheim as the ship utilized her superdrive to quickly link up with the main fleet again.

The factory ship had to return to a central position in the expeditionary fleet as soon as possible because she was far too precious and strategically important to be left alone and without any escorts.

The ship also endured an extensive degree of external damage from the running battle. Stingray 2 and the accompanying yurzen warships frequently managed to break through the transphasic energy shields of the ship and inflicted serious damage onto the hull plating.

Fortunately for the Larkinson Clan, the most recent refit completely replaced all of the old second-class alloys that comprised her hull and internal structure with first-class alloys.

Even if the salvaged and repurposed first-class alloys were not particularly refined, much of the plating possessed at least modest transphasic properties.

The Larkinsons had also purposefully cherry-picked the toughest and most resilient chunks of alien salvage to upgrade the Spirit of Bentheim's physical construction, and that investment clearly paid off. Although the capital ship bore a lot of battle scars that occasionally exposed whole compartments to open space, all of the crucial ship systems were still in working condition.

It was still a good idea to fix her up as soon as possible, though. The longer the factory ship remained in her damaged condition, the greater the chance that other malfunctions and breakdowns would occur.

This was why the Spirit of Bentheim immediately approached the Diligent Ovenbird and carefully docked alongside her Big Oven.

Unlike the Small Oven, the other dock was not completely enclosed. This made it a lot more suitable for the mobile shipyard to work on capital ships, but only when she remained stationary.

When Ves and his guards transferred to the Diligent Ovenbird in order to pay a personal visit to the most valuable piece of spoils of the recent operation, Chief Ship Designer Vivian Tsai dropped by and presented him with the bad news.

"The Spirit of Bentheim is no longer a ship that we can adequately restore with the tools and expertise that we have on hand." She reported to him. "The reality of working on a quasi-first-class hull is that we can do our best to patch up the holes and replace missing and broken components with a lot of improvisation, but it will never bring the ship back to her previous standard. It also takes significantly more time to process all of the tough first-class materials. I estimate that we will remain stuck here for at least two months unless you are willing to interrupt our restoration effort."

Ves already guessed that this would be the case. "If your crews can repair the Spirit of Bentheim as best as you can manage, how much of a beating can our flagship endure?"

"Not as much as before. The sections that we have repaired will never be able to resist as much damage. I do not recommend you to send out your factory ship on another solo combat operation."

"Understood. Don't worry. I think our alliance will be taking it slow for the next few months. We will need a lot of time to digest our recent gains."

The mech forces of the Golden Skull Alliance also exposed many shortcomings and weaknesses in the previous two operations that urgently needed to be addressed.

Once the fleet was in a better condition to resume the Trailblazer Expedition, Ves intended to put more effort into going on the offensive.

"What's your evaluation of the ship that we have currently stored inside the Small Oven?" Ves asked. "It must be pretty interesting for you to come across a completely different ship that is based on a highly exotic tech base."

"That's an understatement." Vivian said. Her mood immediately became more enthusiastic as she thought about the alien vessel.

"Every part about the archeship is fascinating. From her highly effective and sustainable active stealth system to how all of her systems can only be powered or accessed with electric resonance, there is so much novelty that it is impractical for us to research her. We don't have the personnel, knowledge, resources, lab equipment and infrastructure to decipher more than 5 percent of what goes on in that exotic alien ship."

That caused Ves to frown. "Do you require additional funding to expand the size and capabilities of your Naval Design Department? If you are short on anything, just let me know."

"Our workload and responsibilities has increased considerably since we started to gain access to large quantities of captured alien ships, but this problem goes deeper than this. The archeship is entirely made out of alien high technology as far as I am concerned. We can't easily study it and reverse engineer all of her advanced technological principles by ourselves."

"Are you saying..."

"If we want to make the most of this archeship, we can't keep her for ourselves." Vivian directly stated. "We need to outsource this endeavor to a large and competent partner. I'm talking about a state or a massive organization. Only they have the capabilities to effectively research a large agglomeration of highly advanced and exotic alien tech."

"..."