The Mech Touch

Ves looked down at the token. No matter whether the RF had been 'slow' to process the attributions of the killing of several phase lords, or simply decided to use the last battle as an excuse to buy his favor, the actual reason was not important.

A Warship Token was a Warship Token. Each medallion represented a legal right to own and field a warship. That was still an immensely rare and valuable privilege in the early years of the Age of Dawn.

When Ves picked up the item, he quickly puzzled out the type of warships that he was allowed to own by owning this token.

"A Light Cruiser Token?"

The female admiral who was known to be a loyalist of Fleet Admiral Stanley Argile nodded.

"Nobody will agree to award you with four Warship Tokens or even a single Heavy Cruiser Token. We must recognize the contributions of others as well. This is what your clan deserves after we have made a fair calculation of risks and rewards."

"Is this the token that comes without any strings attached?"

"Yes. This is an unrestricted version of a normal Warship Token. We have surrendered the right to conduct inspections on your ship and design. As long as you do not do anything egregious with your light cruiser, we will not be inclined to monitor your warship too closely. You also have a choice of receiving a restricted RF Heavy Cruiser Token, but your prior decisions indicate that you would rather obtain this reward instead."

"You are right." Ves said as he spun the token in his hands. "I don't like too many people snooping at my stuff. It is hard to avoid that these days, but that is not an excuse for me to grow complacent. Thank you for delivering this token to me. I do not have any plans to acquire and field a light cruiser at the moment, but I am sure I can find a shipyard that can build me a good ship."

"I own a few shipyards as well. I can handle it. I don't want to bother with your stuff. You have your way of doing things and I have my way of doing things."

"That is one of the subjects that we would like to discuss with you." Admiral Chelsea Mieli leaned forward over the table. "After recent events, the Red Admiralty is currently evaluating whether we need to step up our timetable and accelerate the pace of reforms. One of the proposals we are considering at the moment is to increase our acceptance of metaphysical phenomena. An example that we are particularly interested in are 'living warships'. If you have plans to develop a living warship from the ground up, we would be glad to participate in your research. We can offer a large amount of experience and put our resources at your disposal. We only ask that you give us permission to make use of our shared work."

Ves raised his eyebrow. He expected to hear an invitation like this, but not so soon. It appeared that his product reveal had caused the CFA to take him a lot more seriously than before.

"While I do have plans to develop living warships for myself, I work best if I try to keep all of the work in-house." Ves steadily answered. "I am still a mech designer. I do not intend to devote too much time on developing living warships. The unique conditions that made it possible for me to turn the Dominion of Man alive are not replicable. I have to figure out an entirely different arrangement for more ordinary warships."

"We can help with that. No matter the stage of your research, we have highly competent scientists and naval engineers of our own. They may not possess the strange metaphysical strengths of high-ranking mech designers, but that does not mean that they are any less knowledgeable."

Many people tended to underestimate the scientists and engineers of the fleeters, but that was a big mistake. The CFA and RF managed to rival the MTA and RA for so long that the two sides had to be comparable in strength and competence.

The research capabilities of the fleeters may not be as flashy as their mecher counterparts, but they had become extremely good at developing powerful hulls and equipping them with cutting-edge technologies.

Therefore, Ves truly felt the sincerity in Admiral Mieli's offer.

He saw an opportunity to collaborate with the RF more closely and on a more permanent basis. This was a good way to balance out his overdependence on the Red Association.

"I am not principally opposed to further cooperation, admiral. I just do not think I am ready to deliver a working example of a Carmine warship so soon. I need to draft entirely new theories and test them out until I am sure that I have created a mature product. The problem is that you can't just build a random prototype warship where you can safely test your new works. The size difference between the two was numerous."

Silence fell silent for a moment as the two took a few sips of their drinks.

A surprisingly harmonious mood spread between the two. Even though they were far apart in everything, they both felt as if they could become good friends.

Ves took this as an encouraging sign. The Red Fleet was so large that it was split up into multiple factions. No single group of fleeters could represent the majority.

Admiral Mieli happened to be part of Fleet Adimral Stanley Argile's faction. They were most supportive of change and were eager to abandon old traditions that no longer made any anymore.

That meant that if Ves wanted to establish any form of deep cooperation with the fleeters, he better win over Argile's faction first.

What they were asking for was too much. Ves could not pull a Carmine dreadnought out of his head.

Admiral Mieli needed to make other requests, ones that Ves could fulfill.

The problem was that the RF did not really know what Ves was capable of in relation to starship design and construction.

That did not mean that Admiral Mieli came unprepared. It would be an insult to her intelligence and the intelligence of her staff to be ignorant on basic information.

We have studied what you have done in the last battle." The woman said in a steady tone. "We have studied your decisive approach towards modifying and improvising weapons that exceed the normal standard. You have shown a capability to develop much stronger warship guns that can help us break through the firepower ceiling."

"It will not be mass producible." Ves shook his head. "At least not right away. You will have to wait until I have become a Star Designer to produce warship-grade guns that retain their special properties regardless of what I do to call for attention."

After all, the rules of the warship industry were completely different than of the mech industry. Ves could not rely on the convenience of his design philosophy to mass produce a completely reimagined version of a warship."

"We are hiring numerous new as well as experienced 'cultivators' in our ranks." The RF admiral whispered to Ves. "The Second Main Fleet has already made a series of discoveries and minor breakthroughs when facilitating their efforts into empowering our warships."

"Hiring outside cultivators, eh? I bet that each of them won't mind it if they disappear and deter any pursuers from taking money in the same place."

Admiral Mieli elegantly shook her head again. "These cultivators have proven to be highly inconsistent, unreliable and far too unruly to control through normal means. Their power may have gotten to their heads."

"I am not surprised. Our race has long lived through many years as ordinary people. After a certain incident, the hired cultivators kept growing stronger, and started to exhibit extremely strong mood swings."

"Then you either contracted dubious cultists who did not truly understand their scriptures, or made a temporary deal with an extremist cult with very deviant beliefs. Be careful who you invite into your doors. One of the purposes of the Red Collective is to organize these messy cultivators, stuff them inside the sects that align with them the best and hope that they can develop stably and without interruption."

The much older female admiral thought about the suggestion. "In hindsight, our approach towards recruiting personnel that wish to become a part of the RF is less than ideal. We suffer from an inability to discern whether a claim is true or false. This slows down our rate of innovation and prevents us from obtaining tech that is equally as superior as that of the RA."

"If you can recognize that much, why not force a change?" Ves inquired.

"That is what we have been doing for months or years." The fleeter high officer sighed. "There are too many traditions and too much inertia holding us back. What we need is a shock such as the unveiling of a Carmine version of a warship to convince every person that our circumstances have changed, and so should our policies."

"Is the opposition from the Fifth Enforcement Fleet and allies too great?"

"Yes, but they have reduced the pressure as of late. We believe that Fleet Admiral Amelie Jameson and her supporters have reluctantly decided to stay more up to date with new developments."

"So what does this all mean for us? What do you propose we do, admiral?"

Admiral Chelsea Mieli stared into Ves' eyes for a few seconds before she laid out her true proposal.

"What you have heard before is only a warmup. What we truly want is for us to cooperate with you as a leader of the Red Collective. We plan to propose a joint development team or department within the fledgling organization that is responsible for researching and developing 'artifact warships'. It should not be a research team that only investigates one avenue of empowering warships with cultivation science. It should comprehensively study how humans such as you and I can comprehensively enhance the performance of our warships."

Ves looked a bit surprised. "Can't you do that in-house, admiral? I mean, warships are already your thing."

"That is how our R&D is supposed to progress, but our thinking is far too entrenched to take a more open-minded approach towards hyper technology and E-technology." The older woman in uniform lamented. "Think about how much progress we can make together, Professor Larkinson. Our best scientists and naval engineers are ready to cooperate with the cultivation scientists and other mystics that have mastered the more esoteric arts. We do not ascribe to the assumption that technology is diametrically opposed to 'magic'. We believe that the two can be combined to produce synergies that we have never discovered before. Your Carmine mechs are the defining example of such a fusion."

Ves understood what Admiral Chelsea Mieli truly wanted. She and the rest of her faction were tired of getting obstructed by the overly cautious and paranoid fleeters within the RF.

Instead of further wasting their time on convincing unwilling fleeters to engage in more research in this direction, the more forward-thinking fleeters would rather start a new research operation in the Red Collective!

The advantage of doing all of the more groundbreaking and radical research at the Red Collective was that it should be much easier to get stuff done. The RC would still be brand-new, and Ves should have a massive influence in shaping people's attitudes towards combining cultivation science with naval engineering.

The biggest disadvantages to this were that it would enrage a lot of people within the RF, and that it would be difficult to keep this valuable research confidential.

Nonetheless, Ves could actually see this plan work out well. There were fleeters that sought to produce true change, and if they could not find it within the RF, then maybe the RC would be able to give them a better result!

Ves actually found this proposal to be valuable to him as well. The Red Collective and by extension himself be able to harvest all of the R&D gains from this joint research initiative!

This was like gaining an inside track in the most cutting-edge research projects of the Red Fleet!

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