The Mech Touch

Both sides experienced an increase in the rate of hits after a while. Not only were the marginally shorter distances making life easier for everyone, they also became more proficient in landing their shots under difficult circumstances.

The alien warships incurred more scars, especially the ones that the higher ups designated as priority targets.

However, despite their poor conditions, the pakklaton bird-shaped vessels were showing a lot of resilience.

Ves and many other people knew that this was largely because their firepower was being scattered across a larger surface area.

A mech would already be lucky enough to avoid another miss. It was a luxury to try and make the laser beams converge on specific weak points.

As a result, while the alien warships undoubtedly endured a lot of shots, the damage inflicted by thousands of mechs did not actually amount to anything substantial at this time.

Sure, their systems were deteriorating and the aliens were having greater trouble maintaining their earlier level of performance, but their powerful laser cannons still kept firing!

The alien attacks were slowly having an effect. Unlike the weaker and much more scattered firepower from the human mechs, the pakklaton warships did not experience as many challenges in concentrating their firepower.

As long as one heavy laser beam struck a human warship, the attack would certainly burn through a couple of armor layers if the shield generators had succumbed.

The consequence of this was that the bow sections of all of the human vessels in front were blackened and seriously compromised.

While ships like the Graveyard, Gorgoneion and Spirit of Bentheim still had plenty of matter for the aliens to burn through, their buffer was shrinking by the minute.

"Repairing all of this will be expensive!" Ves idly complained.

He did not begrudge all of the damage. He would rather end up with a more expensive repair bill than see more lives being lost.

Besides, with the Diligent Ovenbird in the fleet, the fleet did not have to detour to another pitstop in order to effect the necessary repairs.

As long as the Larkinsons weren't too picky about the materials, they could slowly restore the surface damage of the affected starships.

Ves feared that the damage wouldn't be constrained to this level. Once the alien warships began to pierce through the final forward defensive layers, a lot of compartments, ship components and lives would get lost soon.

There was little he could do, though.

Under ordinary circumstances, the Larkinsons could deploy their space knights in front of their more vulnerable vessels, yet that was not a realistic option.

Some of the laser beams were so large that they engulfed mechs entirely!

The Larkinson defensive mechs either melted into slag or deteriorated to such an awful condition that the mech pilot had no choice but to eject the cockpit!

As a result, a lot of defensive mech pilots felt useless at the moment. Aside from firing potshots at the pakklaton fleet with their spare rifles, they could not perform their traditional role of defending their more vulnerable comrades.

Not even the new Rigid Wall mechs, of which only a handful of copies existed in the fleet, dared to stand in the way of those warship-grade attacks.

The new defensive mech of the Living Sentinels might provide a lot more value in battles against other human forces, but it had not been designed to take part in this kind of battle!

As Ves observed all of this happening from the bridge of the Spirit of Bentheim, he began to regret some of the choices he had made before the start of the current design round.

Back when the expeditionary fleet was parked in Vulit, he became so excited by the successful recruitment of four relatively young and capable Journeyman Mech Designers that he did not put as much thought into the kind of enemies he would face.

It couldn't be helped. He along with many other Larkinsons fought against hostile human forces for so long that they all defaulted to preparing for the next fight against a human opponent.

Though Ves was certain that the Golden Skull Alliance would exchange blows with other human forces sooner or later, right now alien fleets posed a greater threat to his fleet due to special circumstances.

What he should have done was to prioritize projects that were much more effective against large and individually powerful threats such as warships as opposed to smaller swarming threats such as mechs.

"We could really use more mechs with bigger guns." Ves wanted to palm his face.

The Larkinson Army didn't field a lot of Transcendent Punishers and Eternal Redemptions either. Both mech models might not be entirely up to date for the Red Ocean, but they still inflicted a lot more damage on average than other comparable ranged mechs due to the greater calibers of their weapons.

Yet because they only amounted to a couple of hundred machines, their collective weight of fire wasn't overwhelming enough. There were too many mechs in the Larkinson Army that would do fine in a fight against other mech forces but were relegated to sidekicks in this battle against alien warships.

Suddenly, one of his projected control panels flashed.

"What has happened?!

"An enemy attack has managed to land on a heavily-damaged section of our hull and trigger a minor power surge. The efficiency of our remaining forward shield generators has dropped by 19 percent and will remain so until our damage control parties have remedied the faults."

Ves grew a bit more uncomfortable when he heard that. The Spirit of Bentheim was part of the vanguard of the fleet because she was substantially more armored than the other non-combat vessels of the Larkinson Clan.

Though he could have instructed his people to put the Spirit of Bentheim in the back, that was a cowardly and slightly illogical move.

He commissioned the factory ship so he knew how much damage she could take. If he insisted on removing her from the vanguard, then another and likely more vulnerable ship would incur damage instead.

As a result, Ves acquiesced to the decision to have the Spirit of Bentheim function as a shield even though he and many of the people he cared about were aboard.

He hadn't even ordered his wife and child to move to another ship!

Part of that was because he wanted to keep them close to him. If the Spirit of Bentheim ever became separated from the rest of the fleet for some reason, then at Ves he still had his immediate family by his side.

Another part of it was there was no clear alternative that was better.

He would never put his daughter on a vulnerable civilian vessel such as the Vivacious Wal or the Dragon's Den. Their hulls may be relatively thick compared to sub-capital ships but in relative terms they were the equivalent of giant tin cans!

If the alien warships were able to focus their firepower on any of them, then the ship in question would not fare well from the bombardment!

The more defensive vessels such as the Graveyard and the Gorgoneion were much more resistant towards damage, but they went out of their way to attract more firepower in order to fulfill their roles.

Ves felt it was just fine to leave Aurelia aboard the Spirit of Bentheim. He even wished he could hug her at this moment, but that would only distract him from the developing situation.

After a few minutes, he received a new hail. He accepted the call, causing Calabast's projection to appear by his side.

Just like every other Larkinson, she was wearing protection that could keep her alive in the event of vacuum exposure. She donned a familiar heavy infiltrator suit that was covered with modular equipment.

"Ves." She nodded towards him. "As you know, our Blinding Banshee has been scanning the enemy ships non-stop. It was only until recently that our more powerful active scans have started to provide us with more detailed observation data. Look at these results."

She called up another projected screen that showed vague snapshots of the alien starships.

Different from last time, their resolution was higher and the images were also projected with maps that measured heat, mass and other indicators.

What stood out from Ves was that certain weird bits were moving in and around the hull of the pakklaton ships.

In the visual images, they looked like tiny black blobs.

"What am I looking at, Calabast?"

"Voribugs."

"What?!"

Ves leaned closer in order to study the latest readings in greater detail. Now that she had pointed it out to him, he quickly found that her conclusions were quite plausible!

Practically all of the alien vessels showed strange activity that fit the pattern space bugs eating through their hulls.

The infection on some vessels was greater than others, hence the reason why the ships didn't dare to come too close to each other.

It also explained why the pakklaton fleet hadn't attempted to accelerate in any direction. The ships that were most badly affected by the Red Ocean's native menace were so riddled with metal-eating space insects that their sub-light propulsion systems no longer worked!

What Ves found peculiar about the pakklatons was that they sought to defend their entire fleet rather than leave the crippled ones to their fate.

This was not the most rational decision to make, and that made him feel uncomfortable.

Calabast noticed his discomfort and smirked. "Bad guys are not supposed to feel guilty about their actions, you know."

"I am not feeling guilty." Ves quickly shot back. "I just find it distasteful to clean up the leftovers of the Big Two. They could have been more thorough in wiping out the aliens."

"Then why did you choose to proceed with this attack?"

"You know very well why we are doing this. Aside from all of the rewards we can gain from defeating this fleet, we also need to harden and shape the mentalities of our clansmen. They don't live in a fantasy galaxy here. It's better if I expose the cruel reality of our invasion of the Red Ocean now than under more uncontrollable circumstances."

"You know this will make a lot of Larkinsons doubtful about themselves if they survive engagement." Calabast stated as she crossed her arms. "Since the start, you propagated a culture in the clan that is based around honor, compassion, integrity and all of those other nice buzz-words. Our days were much simpler back when we fought back against clear aggressors that we could paint as evil. It's a lot harder for us to maintain the high ground now that you are forcing them to commit an act that everyone regards as dishonorable."

"It has to be done, Calabast. Besides, we stand to gain tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of merits if we destroy these alien vessels. That is not as much as I'd like, but still worth the effort if we can minimize our losses."

The woman gazed deeply at him. "You don't care about the merits. Not really. You're enjoying this. You enjoy putting others into uncomfortable situations. Perhaps you don't go out of your way to mentally torment your own clansmen, but you don't mind taking advantage of this opportunity to throw them off-balance."

"I am not enjoying this!" He insisted. "I am doing what I think is necessary to mature my soldiers and make them ready for the struggles to come! Everything I do is logical. Our clan will grow stronger once we pass this hurdle."

"Even if it comes at the risk of painting us as the bad guys?"

"There is no good or bad in the Red Ocean. There's only the strong and the weak, and I would rather fall in the camp of the former than the latter." Ves answered.