The Mech Touch

Much had changed in the months since Ves first presided over a session of the Interim Leadership Council.

He revealed his ambitions to become a major player of human civilization and managed to cobble together a Coalition of Faiths.

The Red Two, the Terrans and the Rubarthans had cautiously begun to roll out their newly authorized kinship networks.

So far, the feedback had been universally positive. No one who connected to the new networks had regrets about it. In fact, the early adopters had become the most ardent supporters of accelerating the rollout of the kinship networks!

It was a pity that the powers that be still stuck to their caution and insisted on a months-long observation period to see whether the people connected to kinship networks would slowly go crazy or become brainwashed over time.

Fortunately, the paranoia of all of those bigshots eventually had to make way for necessity. The Red Tide Offensive may have slowed down a lot, but it was still grinding away at red humanity's lines despite all of the exterminations committed by the patrolling god pilots and dreadnoughts.

In the months since the start of the Red Tide Offensive, the third defensive band eventually succumbed through sheer attrition.

No matter how many mechs, starfighters and warships that red humanity could muster, the native aliens always managed to bring more!

Even if the human defenders managed to put up a valiant fight and attain a hard-fought victory in the field, it did not seem to matter too much on a strategic level.

In order for humans to gain the upper hand in the Red Tide Offensive, they had to keep winning their battles or at least force their enemies into draws. They could not afford to fail too many times because they lost ground each time they did so. Mounting an attack to retake lost territory was much costlier than defending. This was why each defeat, though rare, set them all back on an incremental basis.

In contrast, the native aliens had it much easier. Sure, their winning rates were terrible. They were often unable to overcome the superior grit and tech employed by the defending humans.

Yet it was fine. Regardless of the outcome of a battle, each fight exhausted the humans a little more.

Their mech pilots and support personnel got killed. Their mechs got damaged on a large scale. Their logistics became overstrained in an effort to replenish all of the machines that got destroyed. The supplies they relied upon to fight at their best eventually became exhausted.

Since reinforcements were very limited, all of these fights gradually depleted the combat effectiveness of the defending troops.

The attacking aliens only really had to succeed once in order to make all of their prior sacrifices worth it! Their reserves were so much greater than their human adversaries that they could keep banging their heads against a wall until it finally crumbled due to all of the repeated knocks!

The Red War was profoundly asymmetrical. Red humanity still retained their quality advantage, but the native aliens ruthlessly exploited their quantity advantage to the fullest!

The Red Cabal and their alien collaborators did not hesitate to throw away the lives of trillions of hapless alien cannon fodder just to get rid of the extragalactic invaders as quickly as possible!

The orbits of many planets had turned into huge junk belts. So much debris of fallen warships and phasefighters floated lifelessly in space that the human salvagers simply lacked the numbers to pick up all of the valuable wrecks and break them down into usable materials.

While the bounty of materials recycled from all of those broken mechs did much to relieve red humanity's resource shortages, its factories were working at full capacity and could not produce war materiel any faster.

Two major bottlenecks constrained red humanity's warmaking potential to an increasing degree.

The first was strained logistics. It took a lot of cargo ships to haul stuff around. Human shipyards were pumping out new hulls as fast as they could manage, but the expansion in transportation capacity simply couldn't keep up with the constantly rising demand.

The second was the lack of trained soldiers. Red humanity still had a large population of civilians, but only a fraction of them were potentates that possessed the aptitude to pilot mechs.

Of all potentates, only a minority of them had taken the life of a professional mech pilot.

The remaining potentates ultimately did not enter the cockpit due to a variety of reasons.

Perhaps they lacked the courage and guts to enter the battlefield and stare death in the eyes.

Perhaps their genetic aptitudes measured below the threshold that would open up promising mech piloting careers.

Perhaps they were bad or motivated students that failed to graduate from the mech academies.

Whatever the case, a lot of states and organizations had become increasingly more desperate to mobilize these initially unqualified potentates.

With martial law in effect, these potentates that had previously been living well among the civilians got ripped from their homes and put into high-intensity boot camps.

No matter how awful they were at piloting mechs, at least they could still control a mech when it mattered!

Many mech manufacturing complexes had begun to fabricate a large amount of cheap but easily-to-pilot frontline mechs in order to put these pilots to good use.

Whether the attempt to convert all of these additional potentates into useful soldiers succeeded or not, it was worth a try to increase the amount of mechs on the battlefield.

Still, it took a lot of time to complete these training programs. Red humanity needed a faster solution to ensure enough troops held the line.

The Red Fleet's Starfighter Corps had become increasingly more prominent for this reason.

The fleeters invested a lot of effort into supporting its rise.

They not only did whatever they could to partner up with many states to construct massive factories that churned out one strike craft after another, but also started to glamorize the life of a heroic starfighter pilot!

Ves found it rather funny to see the fleeters attempting to imitate the mechers by turning well-performing starfighter pilots into heroes.

Their public relations and marketing departments must be working hard to find notable individual starfighter pilots that performed way above average and turn them into war heroes.

Though red humanity was still too enormous with mechs to take starfighters seriously, the persistent efforts of the fleeters slowly started to take root.

The general public was gradually beginning to appreciate the soldiers who fought in the same battlefields as mechs and alien phasefighters with nothing but flimsy craft that possessed none of the advantages of the others.

When so many people volunteered or got conscripted to serve in the Starfighter Corps, it was inevitable that a few outliers would emerge that performed brilliantly and displayed excellent talent.

These were probably the sorts of prodigies and geniuses that would have broken through to a higher rank if they could!

Unfortunately, starfighter pilots did not possess the capacity to do so. Ves figured that it was theoretically possible to plagiarize the development trajectory of a mech pilot and change stuff around so that it accommodated mechs instead, but it wouldn't nearly as well without the support of a pinnacle work like the Red Kingdom.

Without this powerful but invisible automated construct, there was no way for starfighter pilots to be able to break through en masse and collective work towards attaining godhood.

This was why Ves started to hear talk about what the fleeters intended to do in order to solve this problem.

Ves personally guessed that the fleeters were thinking about erecting their own version of the Red Kingdom, but the truth was a lot more pragmatic and controversial!

"What?! Are the fleeters crazy?!"

"I am being serious, Ves." Jovy Armalon said. "I have heard from reliable sources that the admirals of the RF have started secret talks with the leaders of the RA about opening the Red Kingdom to starfighters and starfighter pilots."

Ves looked absolutely gobsmacked at this news. The mere notion of expanding the responsibilities of the mech community's precious Red Kingdom to encompass starfighters and everything related to it sounded like heresy to the highest degree!

There was no way for him to interpret this move as anything other than a betrayal of everything a mech designer stood for! Ves struggled to believe that Star Designers were willing to entertain this notion!

Even Jovy struggled to hold in his own reluctance towards this potential development.

"Is it even possible to expand the Red Kingdom to encompass starfighters and starfighter pilots?"

Jovy shrugged. "It is possible in theory. Whether it will work in practice is another matter. The Star Designers who administer the Red Kingdom will have to make extensive renovations in order to accommodate this potential development. The Red Kingdom may even become split in half because of this. I do not think that anyone really knows how to make this happen. There is legitimate fear that experimenting too much with the Red Kingdom will cause its existing services to the mech community to degrade, thereby inflicting untold damage to all of our mechs and mech pilots."

"Damn! They better not mess up our greatest dependence!"

"There is no immediate cause for concern, Ves. The talks have remained just that. Talks. No progress has been made, which shows that the speakers on our side are holding fast. If not for the urgency of the Red War, we wouldn't be entertaining the fleeters in the first place. The Polymath's prolonged absence is clearly felt at this time."

"What does the Polymath have to do with this subject?"

"Her knowledge base is vast. If there is anyone among red humanity that can come up with a viable plan to alter the Red Kingdom to accommodate starfighters, it is the Polymath." Jovy answered. "Since she still remains out of contact inside the persistent spacetime bubble surrounding Bridgehead One, we cannot count on her services, which makes everyone much less confident about successfully altering the Red Kingdom."

"Oh. That… kind of makes sense. It is rather weird that so many people put a lot of faith in the Polymath. There are plenty of other Star Designers in the Red Ocean."

"Yes, but many of them are too specialized and do not particularly possess any brilliant insights in subjects that fall well outside of their areas of expertise. They are also not as fast to learn and master the necessary knowledge to perform the changes as intended."

Ves found it kind of funny that the Polymath's involuntary separation from the rest of the Red Ocean actually hindered the fleeters from tacking starfighters onto the Red Kingdom!

"I take it that there is another big reason why the RA is stalling on this issue."

Jovy smirked. "Yes. That reason is you, or rather the comprehensive Swarm Project that you are leading. It is already nearing its highly anticipated completion, which means that it will most definitely become relevant soon. It appears we have succeeded in maintaining the secrecy of Carmine mechs despite the progressively greater number of people that are involved in our ambitious project. The Red Admiralty truly has no clue that their hopeful Starfighter Corps may become red humanity's discarded toy overnight."

With the support of the Survivalist Faction and the Transhumanist Faction, Ves had managed to make extensive progress in designing all of the versions of mechs that encompassed the Swarm Project.

Prototype testing had already begun despite the fact that Ves and his collaborators had yet to complete the design of several features such as modular weapon systems.

Nonetheless, the early tests of the Carmine System based on organic ultra-large enhanced cockpits consistently produced good and reliable results!

No significant accidents occurred that could call into question whether the Carmine System applied in this unusual manner posed a serious short to medium term health risk.

No mecher dared to assume that the Carmine System was safe to use over the long term, but most people weren't able to cast their visions that far anymore.

The point was that the Swarm Project showed such promise at this point that the introduction of Carmine mechs to the masses would definitely outshine all of the effort the fleeters put into promoting their starfighters!

"We red humans are still mech fanatics at heart." Ves remarked. "The Age of Mechs has not ended long enough for people to stop their unreasonably strong obsession towards mechs. As long as we dangle the promise of piloting mechs without the need to possess the right genetic aptitude in front of their faces, starfighters will probably become yesterday's news."

"Hence why certain leaders of ours are continuing to stall the talks to prevent starfighters from gaining the support of the Red Kingdom. They all hold the same beliefs as you, Ves. Your Carmine mechs will soon change our civilization forever."

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