The Mech Touch

Letting Saint Tusa and the Dark Zephyr go on a trip might cause the enemies to launch their attack sooner rather than later.

If the Dark Zephyr managed to sniff out the hiding place of the ambushers, then that may be enough to drive them into action.

The departure of a powerful ace mech from the Bluejay Fleet may also lure the cosmopolitans and the native aliens to take advantage of the situation and go on the offensive.

While time was technically on the side of the Bluejay Fleet, there was not much point to waiting around any further.

Fort Rock had come online. While there were still many areas of improvements, the engineers and construction crews had already plucked the low-hanging fruit. They were spending gradually more time on reconstruction efforts that yielded increasingly smaller gains in return.

They had already exhausted all of their stockpiles of high-grade materials and parts. They could only improve existing systems as opposed to constructing new ones. The low-grade materials mined from nearby asteroids were only useful for bulking up the asteroid and adding more physical buffers to the existing defensive works.

Since this was the case, the Bluejay Fleet might as well make it a little more enticing for their enemies to launch their attack sooner than normal.

Just as the delay was buying time for the mechers and fleeters to cook up more defensive solutions, their adversaries could also make use of the downtime to improve their sieging capabilities!

This was also why Admiral Tensen agreed to let the Dark Zephyr out. They needed to get a clear view of the enemy fleet's disposition and verify whether it was preparing a counter to their defensive strategy.

Many people were waiting for Saint Tusa to stumble upon the enemy and peel back the surprises that they might have in store.

Ves checked the status of the Dark Zephyr. According to the system map, the ace mech had already arrived at the closest planet and begun to scan its surface and orbit for anything hidden.

This was a lengthy and time-consuming process. The scouting vessels of the Bluejay Fleet had visited it before and found nothing interesting in and around the small, lifeless rock.

The Dark Zephyr's sensor systems were not necessarily better. They were smaller and lower tech. Their only saving grace was that Tusa's powerful true resonance boosted their performance to an unnatural degree.

What Tusa truly relied upon to detect traces of his hidden opponents was his Saint Kingdom and his sharp intuition. As long as the Dark Zephyr flew close enough to a suspecting hiding place, he would be able to sniff out the hidden enemies.

In the meantime, Ves continued his work on designing and supervising the production of battleship-grade hyper torpedoes.

He had already developed several variations of potent warheads, but now that he persuaded Admiral Gori Tensen to bring out a few weapons of mass destruction, Ves truly went wild!

The weapons of mass destruction were already formidable in their base forms, but they were limited by the restrained launching platforms on their respective ships.

The Tarrasque and the Babylon Excavator both reached the size and tonnage of a heavy cruiser, but they had to devote much of their internal volume to other systems.

Fort Rock did not possess this limitation. It was larger than almost every capital ship built by humans and offered an abundance of space to accommodate supersized instruments.

Lord Richard Brownstone's Rosfield Cannons was a typical example of this. The Senior Mech Designer quickly designed and produced oversized kinetic cannons whose calibers were so absurdly great that only the larger battleships could accommodate these guns!

They already placed a lot of strain on Fort Rock. The sections holding the massive triple-barreled turrets in place had to be reinforced in order to prevent the asteroid base from getting torn apart with each attack salvo.

Even so, the first test shots of the mighty Rosfields already caused parts of the interior to crack and tear!

The power of these cannons were so great that Lord Richard eventually had to reduce their power in order to make them more sustainable.

Meanwhile, the upscaled weapon system that Ves whimsically named the 'Doomspreader Torpedo Launcher' generated its own controversies.

The launcher system itself was not that impressive. Ves just made sure that it was robust and protected enough to not accidentally detonate the torpedoes in its launcher tubes if it ever received a firm tap.

Even so, no one serving on the temporary space fortress felt comfortable staying in the same base as dozens of extremely dangerous torpedoes.

Yes, torpedoes. They ceased being missiles when Ves scaled up their physical dimensions and equipped them with their own dedicated azure energy shields in order to increase their resistance to intercepting fire.

The tamest torpedoes that he had prepared were the hyper X-ray torpedoes. These were merely warheads that contained a lot of energy that Ves expressly designed to unleash their power in the form of X-rays in a forward cone.

Their legality in human warfare was already… questionable, but the ambiguity regarding their permissibility allowed Ves to get away with producing them right away.

He was quite happy with what he managed to whip up on short notice. Since he had designed and assembled the torpedoes by hand, he was able to make each of them alive. It was a lot easier to do this when he managed to lace the torpedo with hyper materials.

Ves was not quite sure whether there was any point to making the torpedoes 'alive', but that made this such an interesting experiment!

He created several variations of 'living torpedoes' with the aim of figuring out which one would inflict the greatest damage on the enemy.

The second variation of torpedoes that he managed to create were based on the radical idea of weaponizing unstable superdrives.

Yes, Ves sought to turn superdrives into the most powerful spatial weapons of the Bluejay Fleet!

It was extremely likely that they would eventually confront at least one greater phase lord. This was a formidable opponent that could not be hindered through quantity alone. If the Dark Zephyr was not available to stop this potent enemy, then the Bluejay Fleet and the newly built Fort Rock had to overcome the formidable defenses of such a large and massive opponent as quickly as possible!

Ves had seen what unstable FTL drives could do in the past. Although he did not understand all of the complicated science behind them and their more modern superdrive versions, he was confident he could turn them into effective counters against spatial defenses!

When Ves fleshed out his proposal and presented it to Admiral Tensen, the naval officer and his advisors called him crazy!

It took a lot of begging and persuasion for the stiff admiral to eventually give Ves a limited allowance.

"We have three backup superdrives of different classifications in reserve. You may repurpose them to build your 'Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes', but only if you do not step foot on Fort Rock any longer."

"Great!" Ves grinned. "You won't regret this decision!"

The stability and the engineering behind his Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes was rather dubious, but even if it did not produce the effect that Ves desired, it should at least be capable of giving a greater phase lord a nasty blow!

"I certainly do not want to get anywhere close to these warheads." Ves muttered.

He could vaguely sense the threat posed by the three torpedoes that the automated manipulators had carefully placed in storage.

The next two torpedo types were based on the 'tamer' weapons of mass destruction that the two heavy cruisers secretly stored in their vaults.

The Hyper Nanomachine Plague Torpedo was just as ominous as it sounded. The warhead was filled with an especially virulent type of nanomachines that were designed to devour everything and self-replicate at blinding speeds until they reached a certain time limit.

They were similar to the nanomachines used to make up most of the mech frame of the C-Man, but with all of the safeties removed.

As purpose-built weapons, the nanomachines contained within the torpedo were not designed with defense and control in mind. They were designed for pure malice, and that showed in how difficult it was to stop their spread and disable their activities.

Aside from their time limits, they were hardcoded to cease their operations after receiving only one of two specific signals.

One signal was unique to the Babylon Excavator that originally carried the nanomachine plagues. The code only disabled the specific batch that the warship carried in her vault.

Another signal was in the hands of the Red Fleet. If the Babylon Excavator was no longer able to stop the uncontrolled spread of nanomachine plagues, the higher ups of the RF at least had their own solution on hand.

Although the Hyper Nanomachine Plague Torpedo was not effective against targets protected by energy defenses, Ves had great hope for these warheads in the later stages of a battle.

The more straightforward weapon of mass destruction was the relatively boring Hyper Antimatter Torpedo.

The technical sophistication of this weapon was not all that great. Ves merely stuffed multiple smaller antimatter warheads into the much larger torpedo body to increase their potency a bit further.

Numerous engineers argued that this was a waste of firepower, but Ves did not agree with this assessment.

More antimatter = greater boom. Simple as that.

Ves needed no other reason to stuff multiple extremely dangerous antimatter warheads in the same torpedo!

As high-quality raw materials finally began to run out, Ves was left with only one final torpedo.

This one was arguably the most special one, because it was not designed to deliver an explosive payload to the enemy.

Instead, it was designed to deliver a feline payload to the enemy!

"Meeeeow!"

"Stop complaining, Lucky! If the enemy force is as formidable as I anticipate, then we need to pull out all of the stops. That includes making use of your impeccable infiltration, sabotage and assassination capabilities!"

"Meow meow meow!"

"I don't care that you are not designed to make your way across the battlefield inside a giant torpedo. You will do your part, or you may just die alongside everyone else once the cosmopolitans and the native aliens have their way!"

There were subtler and more low-key ways to deliver Lucky to an enemy warship or whatever, but Ves had little confidence in their viability.

A stealth shuttle trying to approach an unsuspecting enemy warship would probably get shot to pieces or detected in advance on a busy battlefield!

Ves believed it was better to cobble together a tough delivery system even if the enemy could clearly see it coming.

Just as Ves put the finishing touches on his Lucky Delivery System, an alarm quickly sounded in his design lab.

The alarm only rang once before it went off. That indicated that the Bluejay Fleet had caught sight of the enemy, but that conflict was not likely to break out right away.

Ves immediately called the admiral.

"What happened?"

"The Dark Zephyr uncovered a hidden phase whale enclave where the enemy fleet resided. The ace mech almost fell prey to a trap."

"Is Tusa and his mech alright?!"

The projection of Admiral Tensen nodded. "The Dark Zephyr is retreating as fast as possible. According to your ace pilot, he has discovered the presence of at least two greater phase lords and numerous lesser phase lords, as well as a sizable fleet of mixed human and alien origins. What is worse is that the apparent alien leader is more threatening than we anticipated. The more powerful greater phase lord has a 'Saint Piercer'-type weapon at his disposal. It is a spear with an exceptionally sharp and penetrating speartip."

Ves almost froze when he heard that. Prototypes of the so-called Saint Piercer weapons had shown up intermittently ever since Venerable Imon Ingvar's death, but each time they managed to inflict a lot of harm towards human forces!

Learning that he and his forces would have to contend against this weapon on this battlefield was not good news!

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