The Mech Touch

”You Blind Men pretend that you can see further ahead than anyone else, but to me your names are right on the mark. As far as Iʼm concerned, all of you must be blind as a bat if you think the Blue Paradisios are any good!”

The Blind Prophetʼs projection shook and leaned back against Vesʼ increasingly more vehement tirade. ”Mr. Larkinson, whoever you are, your infantile flailing amuses no one.”

”What did you say?! Infantile flailing?! Iʼll tell you what infantile flailing means! Your Blue Paradisios are living proof of Ronnie Blastʼs infantile flailing! Your mechs are complete failures as an effective design! The only thing it has going for it is its mobility and accuracy, but at what cost?!”

”Ronnieʼs mech model shares none of the excellent armor coverage of my original Crystal Lord design! Not a single hint of compressed armor is retained in Ronnieʼs bastardized design, but he has the gall to keep its armor plating as thin as the thickness a data pad! I bet your mechs canʼt even cope with continuous micro-impacts from space dust! Thatʼs how pathetic the Blue Paradisio is able to withstand damage!”

”My authentic Crystal Lord design is a marvel of endurance! It is a sleek and compact design because locomotion on land doesnʼt require too much energy. Itʼs a completely different matter when Ronnie mashes in a flight system all of a sudden without any regard of my designʼs existing internal architecture! The abomination that he created with blending the Crystal Lord with a spaceborn mech design has turned your mechs into the worst of both worlds: low-performing with incredibly poor endurance!”

”That sad excuse of a laser rifle youʼre wielding is a horribly overpriced piece of crap. You would have all been better off salvaging a half-wrecked laser rifle off a debris field than buy this hamfisted imitation from Ronnie! It is capable of firing a powerful laser beam, I admit, but whatʼs the point when its firing rate is slower than the amount of meals I eat every day! Its knockoff crystal technology implementation is so crude and sloppy that itʼs obvious that Ronnie has no idea what he was working with! I bet those laser rifles are already giving you problems, right? Thatʼs because those cheap imitation crystals are burning themselves out! They barely last a couple of hundred shots before they give up the ghost!”

Ves lost himself in his tirade. He truly wanted to make the Blind Men see what an awful mistake they made by buying so many copies of the Blue Paradisio!

”Mr. Larkinson, I do not appreciate you finding fault of our mechs. A battle is fought and won by men, not mechs. We have already seen that your mechs are not in good shape. The condition of our machines will hardly be a detriment to our assured victory in the coming battle.”

”Hehe.” Ves nefariously chuckled. ”Your victory is assured? You are truly blind to believe so! To me, your mechs are all one step away from falling apart! Let me see from what mech you are transmitting. Ah, that one in the middle and front, eh? Iʼve studied this mech of yours. Is your flight system stuttering? Thatʼs because itʼs installed incorrectly during the assembly phase! Whoever fabricated this copy did such a poor job that it will only take a single strong impact from the sides to dislodge critical parts of your flight system! By then, your mech is a sitting duck, condemned to coast in space in a predictable path that makes it easy for us to shoot you down!”

”And that mech to the right of you. That machine is a particularly poor effort on the part of the manufacturer. Did Ronnie outsource the fabrication to a bunch of monkeys or something?! I bet its legs hardly function at all. Not that itʼs important in space battles, except I can tell you that if those legs are shot out from under it, the failure will cascade to the mech engine, causing it to shut down entirely and rendering the mech mechanically frozen! How would it be able to fight if it canʼt move its limbs?!”

”That mech at the rear has a severe sensor problem! Any half-decent ECM system can fool its sensors to such an extent that it will truly to turn blind! Itʼs liable to fire its laser rifle at your own mechs rather than the mechs of its opponents!”

”The mech next to the last one takes the cake in terms of poor craftsmanship. Whoever fabricated this mech needs to be thrown out the airlock because its power reactor is no good! That mech already has jitter problems right? Thatʼs because itʼs constantly attempting to stall its inevitably reactor shutdown! One strong concussive shock will definitely force its power reactor to stall and undergo its emergency shutdown process! The mech pilot inside wonʼt even have any power left to call for help by the time it becomes a floating statue!”

By now, the spectators and anyone else who listened in turned numb. The communications officer opened up an unencrypted channel to the Blind Prophetʼs mech, so plenty of other people listened in as well.

None of them expected to hear Ves turn into a maddened dog who couldnʼt let go of the Blue Paradisioʼs many faults!

As the primary recipient of Vesʼ angry ramblings, the Blind Prophet hardly got a word in response! It hardly even registered to the pirate commander to press the button to shut down the communication channel.

This was because the faults that Ves exposed so brutally about their mechs all described their current states to a disturbing degree of accuracy! The Bind Prophet simply could tear his ears away from the unvarnished exposure of all of the flaws of his outfitʼs mechs no matter how much it hurt to listen to Ves!

The pure emotion that Ves put behind his words practically drew the Blind Prophet into a forced introspection. Not a single fault exposed by Ves was inaccurate. This mech designer truly knew what he was talking about!

”Hahahaha! Tell me, Blind Prophet, are you still pleased about your new mechs? Do you still think you got a good bargain by purchasing these flying wrecks? Open your eyes, old man! The truth is that Ronnie Blast bamboozled you with a mech model thatʼs horribly overpriced! How much did you pay for them all? I bet you paid at least thrice as much as they are actually worth! Hahahaha!”

”You blind idiots. If youʼre blind enough to fall for Ronnieʼs scam, how are you even confident of winning against us?! Your judgement is completely wrong! Let me tell you something. Fielding the Blue Paradisio against the sole mech designer of the Crystal Lord is the last mistake you will ever make in your lives. Thatʼs because Iʼve already picked out all of the faults I mentioned and more and sent them all to our own mech pilots. It only takes a few well-placed prods to collapse all of your shoddy mechs! There is nothing about your Blue Paradisios that can confound my judgement! To you, they might have seemed like decent marksman mechs, but what I see is nothing but a collection of holes!”

The Blind Prophet shook. His expression had become grave at the start, before growing more resigned, until finally settling on fear.

Yes. Fear! The Blind Prophet didnʼt do anything to hide his obvious, naked fear towards Ves!

As Ves wound up for another angry speech despite both forces about to come into fighting range, the Blind Prophet finally shook up and pressed a button to close the channel. The pirate commanderʼs projection winked out just as Ves wanted to berate the man some more.

”What?! How can you shut off the channel!?”

Without asking for permission, Ves connected his CFA comm to the CFA shuttle in the Shield of Hispaniaʼs shuttle bay. Using its advanced CFA communications technology that Ves had inadvertently updated previously with his connection to the galactic net, it forcefully intruded upon the communication system of the Blue Paradisio and reopened the comm connection by force!

”You again!” The Blind Prophet despaired as he kept pressing the button and activating the mental command to shut down the channel. His own mech refused to obey his commands! ”Why wonʼt you go away?!”

”WHERE ARE YOU RUNNING, OLD MAN?! I have much more to say! Just look at you flailing around trying to deactivate this channel! Hah! Tough luck! The security suites of your mechs are so poor and outdated that any three-year old child with a hacking comm can take over your mech! Just look at how easily I managed to forcibly reopen this channel!”

”Go away!” The Blind Prophet screeched. ”Your poisonous words will not have sway on us!”

Ves cruelly grinned. ”No chance of that, you blind old man! I admit that youʼre blind, but your ears seem to be working just fine! Let me tell you about your good buddy Ronnie. You see, Ronnie is a bad boy. Instead of licensing some proper software for his mech, he probably probably pirated some random mech operation system for his Blue Paradisio design. WHAT AN IDIOT! No mech designer should pirate a random software package off the galactic net! Your mechs are all riddled with backdoors and holes that it would probably take our hackers a couple of minutes to sabotage!”

”Thatʼs not possible! Mechs arenʼt supposed to be susceptible to hacking!”

”Oh, deny all you want, but how can you explain how easily my comm hacked into your mechʼs communication system? Face it, you old man. You not only got scammed by Ronnie, but you are piloting mechs that anyone with decent hackers can take control of! Your Blue Paradisioʼs software is so decrepit that even two-hundred year old mechs are harder to hack than yours!”

”No more! Please, no more, Mr. Larkinson!” The spooked pirate commander pleaded. ”Weʼll go! Weʼll go! We wonʼt disturb you any longer!”

After that, the Blind Prophet issued a quick series of commands that immediately saw the battle line of the Blind Mech turn around and flee back to their carriers!

Even their carriers started to turn around as if they couldnʼt wait to get away from Vesʼ acid tongue!

Ves grew even angrier as he saw all of the mechs of the Blind Men turn around in an attempt to flee his destructive rants. He stood up from his observation chair!

”WHERE ARE YOU GOING! GET BACK HERE! RUNNING WONʼT SAVE YOU FROM THE REALIZATION THAT YOU BOUGHT THE WORST MECHS IN THE FRONTIER!”

Even though the Blind Prophet couldnʼt cut off the forced communication channel, the pirate commander did his best to ignore the voice of Ves.

”Lalalalalala! I am not hearing anything! I am not hearing anything! As soon as I get out of here, Iʼll make myself turn deaf!”

”Why are you running! Come back here pirate! I can talk all day about your faulty mechs!”

Even as Ves continued to yell at the fleeing Blind Men, Major Verle regained his senses first. He looked back at the local plot and saw that the sudden exit of around sixty rifleman mechs turned the Remediers and the Slick Hairs into complete disorder.

The two pirate outfits couldnʼt believe what was happening! One of their fellow gangs was actually running away before they even fired a single shot!

”Attack!” Major Verle forcefully commanded. ”Send in our assault force! Crash into the Remediers! Theyʼre vulnerable as long as they remain in disarray! Break them apart before the Blind Men regain their senses and turn around!”

It took some time, but the prepared mechs of the Vandals and Swordmaidens began to move in against their unsettled and distracted opponents. The pirates had left themselves completely open by listening in on Vesʼ public tirade!

”Why are you running! Iʼm not finished yet! Not by a long shot!” Ves kept hounding the Blind Men even as they crashed into the hangar bays of their carriers in an attempt to get out as fast as they could! ”No matter how many light-years you run, the truth will catch up to you! Just face it! You all bought crap mechs that are worth less than how much you can earn back if you scrap them all! Buying Ronnieʼs products is the biggest mistake in your blind, foolish lives! Next time, buy legitimate mechs instead of cheap knockoffs!”