The Mech Touch

"You actually got the ships?" Ves asked in astonishment.

"Well, they're here right now. Can't you see?" Calabast grinned as she stood before him while holding Lucky in her arms. "To be honest, I can't claim full credit. A lot of barriers are no longer so insurmountable as long as I have Lucky at my disposal. Having an agent who can turn invisible and phase through every solid barrier as if it was a projection is practically cheating!"

The cat in question wasn't in a hurry to return to Ves. He instead settled into Calabast's embrace as if she was his mother. He even arched his back while letting out a lazy yawn!

"Meow~"

Ves furrowed his brows a bit. While he was happy that Lucky was able to make himself useful, he didn't want that to come at the expense of his pet's original purpose.

A gem cat's primary purpose was to produce gems!

The more Lucky grew, the less gems he produced on a yearly basis. Even though the quality and potency of the gems had gone up, Ves felt quite annoyed that Lucky spent most of his time napping, stealing food, fighting against Blinky, asking for petting and many other activities.

While Ves understood that there was probably little that the gem cat could do to control or hasten the production of his gems, he couldn't get rid of the suspicion that Lucky's other activities delayed the release of his next batch of gems.

The Larkinson Clan still needed the capital ships though. To see four of them being delivered to the Larkinson Clan at once was an amazing sight! As he looked at the projected view of what was happening just outside the Larkinson fleet, he could clearly see a small swarm of tugs dragging over four massive ships of varying shapes and sizes.

The Vivacious Wal, the Andrenidae, the Discentibus and the Blinding Banshee all appeared to be in decent shape, but their external condition was not indicative of whether all of their systems were sound.

"They're not moving under their own power." Ves stated the obvious.

"Yes. Well, given the nature of the hasty agreement I have forged with Mr. Gillian Semdam, I thought it was prudent to encourage him to send over the vessels as soon as possible. The longer the ships stay in the hands of S&S, the greater the chance that the company might tamper with their systems. Rushing the handover will severely curtail the risks. In fact, with Lucky's help, I have already set up an extensive monitoring network around S&S. I have been able to track exactly what each executive, shipwright and engineer has been doing in the past few days."

Ves looked quite impressed. "You don't do anything by half-measures. What are the chances that the Semdams has done something improper with the ships anyway?"

She smiled. "Well, I have extensive access to their internal databases and body of correspondence, so I am somewhat aware of the routine tampering they do to every starship that passes through their hands. That said, I cannot account for any methods that the engineers and other specialists haven't documented or submitted to the databases, so the ships likely aren't completely clean."

"Will our forceful negotiating methods come to bite us back?"

"According to my read on Mr. Semdam, the chances of that happening is minimal." Calabast confidently stated. "He is a man that rarely lets his spite overtake his reason. We are still in the possession of incriminating material and we can release it to the right people at any point. Given these circumstances, it is in the best interests of both him and us to honestly abide by the terms that we have set. Any impropriety that takes place will inflict losses on us both, and no one rational will choose to go down this self-destructive path. This is why I have deliberately tried to keep the terms reasonable. The more we push S&S, the greater the chance of lashing out. We do not need anything else from the company, so I have refrained from issuing any further demands."

That sounded nice, but Ves bet that Mr. Semdam still felt pissed.

What if the man's emotions overtook his reasoning? What if he wanted to take revenge regardless of the consequences?

That was what the extra monitoring is for, Ves supposed. If Mr. Semdam ever made a dangerous decision, Calabast would probably know straight away. Ves just decided to trust her to deal with the aftermath.

"So how spaceworthy are the ships that we have just received?"

Calabast shrugged. "I am not entirely certain about that. You will have to ask Vivian Tsai once she has finished inspecting each of the four vessels. From what I have gathered, the ship parts are all there and they should all be in working condition. That doesn't mean that it is safe to put them into operation straight away. The necessary checks still have to be performed and the ship also needs to be loaded with an enormous amount of supplies and configured for our use. It will take a lot of time to prepare skeleton crews and rush them through the familiarization process of their new vessels. At minimum, this will take a couple of weeks, and that is on the extreme end."

This was one of the downsides to rushing the handover process. If Semdam & Sons was allowed to ready the capital ships through their own means, then they could have probably done a much more efficient job. Just because the capital ships had been in their possession for a while didn't necessarily mean the ships were immediately good to go once they received their crews.

The capital ships had been languishing in orbit of Talulah Silver for numerous months or years. As odd as it sounded, a lot of powerful and complicated ship systems were designed to be in constant use. Letting them fall silent for long periods of time caused them to deteriorate faster than if they were being used normally.

In order to prevent its complicated systems from breaking down while the ship in question went on ice, they had to be locked down and configured in ways that slowed down the deterioration process.

Now that the capital ships were being pulled out of stage, the Larkinsons had to invest a lot of manpower and effort to reverse these storage measures.

Though Ves hated it, as an engineer himself he understood the necessity to take proper measures to preserve the integrity of large and complicated machines. This was especially when there was a chance that a single critical system failure could potentially doom the entire vessel during FTL travel!

"I don't want to stay in the Pelsa Ryndover System for too long. I hope we can leave within a month at most" Ves murmured. "Anyway, what will you be doing with the Blinding Banshee now that you have obtained your dream vessel?"

Calabast grinned like a kid in a candy store. "The Blinding Banshee is not exactly the ship of my dreams, but she is leagues better than the facilities that my Black Cats and I are currently using. We'll be moving in right away to assume control over her extensive scanning and espionage-related systems. The most important priority is to make sure that all of the equipment is clean. As you can imagine, that is anything but easy to verify when you're dealing with a ship with such a background and purpose. I'll have to borrow Lucky for a while longer in order to make quick progress in this essential chore."

Ves frowned. "You said that too about the Spirit of Bentheim, but as far as I'm aware that task has stalled."

She shrugged. "So far, we have found surprisingly little backdoors and improprieties on this ship. Lucky and I have already inspected all of the most critical compartments and systems such as the bridge, the workshops and the data rooms. They're all fine. What remains are lesser ship sections that aren't critical to the functioning of this factory ship. Once our new Blinding Banshee comes online, we can utilize her powerful capabilities to sweep all of the vessels in our fleet one by one. You can't imagine the scale and efficiency of their operation. While I probably have to plug Lucky into the Blinding Banshee in order to boost her capabilities, once the two are combined, there is very little that can avoid our sweep!"

Lucky began to grow a little uncomfortable in her embrace. "Meow?"

She caressed his ears. "Don't you worry. Aunty Calabast won't treat you wrong."

"Meow…"

Ves was thinking about the implications behind her words.

"If you plug Lucky into the Blinding Banshee, can you hack into enemy starships as well?"

For a moment, he began to imagine how he could make better use of this combination. With Lucky's advanced hacking suite and the Blinding Banshee's range, the two could potentially hack and sabotage starships from a distance!

Wasn't he worried about lacking fleet carriers in his fleet? Instead of buying them, he could hijack them instead!

Calabast firmly shook his head. "Don't be silly, Ves. Ships contain so many hardware-based safeguards against remote takeovers that it is impossible to take out a ship that easily. To do a proper job, the crew in question has to be debilitated and an agent such as Lucky has to sneak aboard the ship in person in order to physically access the core controls."

That was a lot more troublesome. The reason why Lucky managed to take over a modern fleet carrier like the Auralis with ease was because their entire crew had already been killed. If there were any senior officers or virtual security specialists still alive, then his cat would have encountered a lot more hindrances!

Ves reluctantly dropped this unrealistic notion. If he wanted to hijack a ship, he had to do it the old-fashioned way. The Larkinson Clan in its current condition should already be capable of doing that as long as it faced a weaker opponent.

The two discussed a small portion of what needed to be done to ready the ships for travel. Of the four ships, the Blinding Banshee possessed the lowest volume due to her unusually narrow hull shape, so it wouldn't take as much time to bring her online.

It was a different story for the other starships. The Vivacious Wal was so wide and fat and contained so many different facilities that it would take tens of thousands of crew members a lot of time to get everything up and running.

Fortunately, the civilian orientation of the leisure and entertainment ship meant that most of her stations didn't have to be crewed by highly competent personnel. There was already a large population of civilians in the Larkinson Clan who could easily transfer over to the Vivacious Wal in order to bring her to life.

The Vivacious Wal was exactly what the Larkinsons needed to feel more at home. While she was not exactly an ark ship, there was enough overlap that she could essentially fulfill the same purpose. The only major shortcoming was that she was not able to take on as many permanent residents as a true ark ship.

The Andrenidae was also a civilian vessel, but she required trained personnel to crew. The basic ship systems themselves weren't too complicated, but she carried a large capacity of bee-themed mining mechs that all had to be piloted by humans.

Interestingly enough, the bee-themed mining mechs were designed in a way that allowed mech pilots with very low genetic aptitudes to operate them without too many complications. After all, they weren't meant to participate in battles where quick reactions and lots of data processing were vital.

Ves knew that it was even possible to replace the bee mechs with shuttle-like vehicles that could be piloted by a small crew of norms or automated entirely. This reduced the demand on potentates but also came with an inevitable loss in efficiency.

For now, Ves wasn't sure whether to retain the mining mechs or replace them with mining shuttles. He supposed there ought to be enough dropouts and marginal cases to give them something useful to do. The clan might also want to allocate mech cadets to the worker bees in order to give them useful experience in handling real mechs under real conditions.

"Hmm, it doesn't matter too much right now. It's not as if we need to mine anything while we are still in the Milky Way."