The Mech Touch

The old veteran who was sitting despondently behind the bar threw a disdainful look at the Avatar Commander. "You either fought against one or you haven't. There's no middle ground here, boy."

"We fought against an astral beast whose body was over 5 kilometers long. It took a lot of firepower and extraordinary measures to kill this battleship-sized beast. Does that qualify as alien to you?" Melkor snapped back.

"Hah! Slaying mindless beasts is no different from slaughtering cattle!" The old man laughed. "Astral beasts can be powerful, but if they're by themselves, it doesn't matter whether they are 5 kilometers or 50 kilometers long. Their minds are so simple and their attack methods are so one-dimensional that you can whittle them down by bombarding most of them from a distance."

"And real alien forces are different?"

"THEY KILLED MY PALS!" The veteran burst out! "Joey, Czelin, Avarash, Gallia. All of them were my friends and comrades. If we hadn't bumped into the aliens, my drinking buddies would have been sitting next to me. If they were still alive, a brat like you would have never been able to sit at that spot."

The old man continued to ramble about his lost comrades as if the loss was still fresh for him. The trauma had set in so deep that it was as if talking about his lost friends was the only way to keep them alive!

Melkor didn't know why he put down his commander uniform and donned a regular outfit before entering a random seedy bar in the cheaper part of Pejana.

Perhaps he was looking to take a break from his heavy responsibilities.

Perhaps he wanted to remind himself what it was like to be a normal person.

Perhaps he needed to talk to people who didn't clean up their behavior after they noticed his rank.

Whatever the case, Melkor began to regret entering this dreary water hole. Half the lights weren't working and the air filtration system was close to failing. The floor was sticky with dried beer and the cleaning bots had been kicked too many times to clean up all of the messes.

Melkor didn't even know how this place continued to function. The awful environment repelled a lot of potential customers. Those that did frequent the place were the sort of people who didn't have a lot of spending money.

Even so, the old veteran was worth his time. Despite the rambles and despite the erratic shouting, the man had fought a powerful alien fleet and survived the encounter.

Hearing his tale might provide Melkor with valuable insights that could keep his men alive if the expeditionary fleet ended up in a similar position one day!

"What happened first?" He asked. "Did you discover the aliens, or did they ambush you first?"

"The damn aliens caught us when we were prospecting one of the planets scoured by the CFA." The old veteran slowly answered. "You should see what the fleeters have done to it. From the records, it used to host billions of nunsers."

"Those large mammalian quadrupeds?"

"Yeah. We don't call them by those fancy words. Those nunsers have weird ideas on what their homes should be. They hardly build any solid structures. Instead, they keep constructing starships that can land upright on planets. The place our fleet visited used to host over a hundred thousand of their cylinder ships. Can you imagine it? To humans like us, a fleet composed of a thousand ships is already an armada. To the nunsers, it's their home."

"What did the CFA warfleet do when it dropped into the star system?"

"Well, we don't have any visuals, but we managed to figure out what happened by studying the ruins. The best we managed to figure out is that the CFA warfleet likely used their fancy portal technology to jump right into orbit of the planet despite all of the precautions the aliens have. The warships then began to bombard the entire surface with no delay. Hardly any of those large and powerful nunser cylinder ships managed to lift off from the ground. Any that flew higher than 10 kilometers instantly became a priority target."

Melkor could easily imagine the awful sight. If the CFA warfleet entered a remote part of the star system, then the nunsers would have been able to launch at least 100,000 of their cylinder ships into space!

The size of their ship-homes varied, but the nunsers tended to build big. Their average cylinder ships were around 300 meters tall but their main warships regularly surpassed a height of 2 kilometers!

Though the nunsers weren't able to build much of the latter, each of them were only a bit weaker than an equivalent human warship!

"What was the state of the planet when the fleet that you were a part of entered the star system?" Melkor asked.

"The planet turned into an enormous scrapyard. All of those nunser ships never made it to orbit, let alone escape into deep space. Almost all of them either crashed to the ground or toppled over. Without any nunsers, the ruined hulls were ripe for salvaging. We aren't the only ones who came, though. Other salvage fleets had already arrived weeks before and took their pick of the best pieces of salvage they could stuff into their cargo holds. In fact, the fleeters probably stripped all of those crashed ships of their phasewater before they left."

"I can't imagine that all of those salvaging fleets managed to take away all of those crashed alien ships. The volume of salvage is too immense."

"Yeah. I heard one of our officers say that the wreckage was still 99.9 percent complete. Still, that 0.1 percent is where the true profit lies. Whatever there was left overwhelmingly consisted of bulk metals. They take up a lot of space in a cargo hold but aren't worth that much when sold. This was why our commander ordered us to stay longer and dig deeper into the wrecks. In order to return to a place like Pellysa with cargo holds that are filled to the brim with high-value goods, we needed to scan the massive shipwrecks up close. We had worked for weeks but only managed to fill up 40 percent of our cargo holds."

"That was when a nunser fleet entered the star system, right?"

"Yeah…" The old man grimaced in pain. "The nunsers… what they did to us was nearly identical to what the fleeters had done to the aliens who used to live on the planet. The alien fleet dropped into high orbit without any warning due to the way their warp drives work. Not only that, but they instantly opened fire when our ships as soon as they became visible. We didn't stand a chance!"

"How.. how many alien warships attacked your fleet?"

"Thirty. Forty. Something like that. Only two of them were taller than a kilometer. The rest were fairly small. Our fleet has many more ships. We came with three fleet carriers and 77 combat carriers. We also brought a lot of cargo ships in order to carry all of our salvage. It's just…"

"Their weapons are too powerful."

The old veteran's eyes grew haunted.

"That day… was the most horrible one in my life. Have you ever seen our mechs being swatted down like flies? Each nunser ship is equipped with secondary gun turrets. Those guns aren't a big deal in ship combat, but they are much more powerful against mechs! It didn't matter how much we tried to weave and dodge the incoming energy bolts. The aliens fired so many projectiles at us that it was as if we got caught in a thunderstorm!"

Small, secondary gun turrets were some of the least cumbersome weapons to mount on warships. It made sense for the nunsers to equip them on all of their cylinder ships. All in all, even the weakest armed warship was able to simulate the firepower of hundreds of ranged mechs!

Fighting against forty of the smaller nunser ships was like fighting against an entire mech division of ranged mechs!

The pitiful human salvaging fleet didn't stand a chance in a fair fight. When a part of its mechs, ships and personnel had gone down to the surface, the salvagers were even less prepared to fend off an alien warship!

"I don't need to tell you what happened next." The old veteran grimly said. "The nunsers… showed no mercy. They shot down every ship, shuttle and mech within just ten minutes. Our weapons shot back at them, but the guns of our mechs were simply too light. Our gauss rounds bounced from their hulls. Our positron beams merely added scorch marks to their surface. Our plasma bolts left shallow grooves while our missiles, those that managed to survive the flood of intercepting fire, failed to punch through any of their thick hull plating."

"Your mechs failed to down a single nunser cylinder ship?"

"Yes! That's how strong they are! Their hulls aren't invincible, but they are incredibly thick. It takes forever for lighter weapons to drill to them. Do you know what happened when our concentrated firepower managed to make decent progress? The ships rotated! They rolled their damaged sides away from our guns and forced us to start all over again! If that wasn't enough, their other ships moved in front to soak up the damage. All our weapons managed to do was to scratch their hulls!"

That sounded similar to what occurred during the Battle against the Titania. The Larkinsons, Glory Seekers and Crossers struggled to break through the giant astral beast's fleshy exterior. Protection meant to give the creature the capital to survive attacks against warships was overkill against mechs!

Back then, the Golden Skull Alliance at least managed to turn the tables by employing its battle formations. The old veteran's salvaging fleet was not as fortunate.

"If the nunsers were so deadly… how did you survive?" The Avatar Commander asked.

Everything he heard so far painted the nunser cylinder ships as powerful warships that could easily crush smaller machines en masse.

Perhaps only first-class mechs were strong enough to pose an actual threat against the nunser ship-homes. Second-class mechs simply didn't have the firepower to overcome the defenses of the nunser ships fast enough!

Though the old veteran hesitated, he decided that he needed to pass on his experiences to another soldier while he still could.

"I… was deployed on the surface of that wreck-filled planet. I completed my guard shift a few hours ago and had gone to sleep. When the alarms started ringing, the nunsers already crushed our first carriers."

"And then…?"

"I… stepped out of my bed, injected myself with an emergency stimulant and suited up for battle. Then… everything went dark."

"You…"

"I only figured out what happened afterwards. It turned out that one of those nunser ships in orbit fired one of their main guns directly in the middle of our base camp. The entire center turned into a crater. The prefab lodge I was sleeping in was located further away. It didn't get destroyed by the strike. The impact flung and rolled it down a low hill. For some reason, the lodge's safety systems managed to stay online long enough to prevent my body from getting squished against the walls. It didn't prevent me from getting hit on the head at the end. By the time I woke up, another salvaging fleet had arrived to figure out what happened."

"I see. Are you… the only survivor?"

The man didn't answer the question, but his stare said it all. The battle against the ‘small' nunser fleet had ended in a complete tragedy for the human salvaging fleet!

What Melkor heard made him feel more and more concerned about the grand expedition. Though nunser ships were supposed to be rare in the Magair Middle Zone, humanity's understanding of the major alien races was still too shallow. What if the Golden Skull Alliance encountered the same nunser fleet one day? Would the Larkinsons and its allies fare just as poorly as the salvaging fleet?