The Mech Touch

The Scarlet Rose traveled quietly back to Coalition space. Along the way, she sometimes made some stops in order to allow Aisling to meet with some officials and other people.

Ves shouldnʼt have noticed anything. Locked within his quarters, the only way he should have been able to ascertain what was going on was by tracking the intervals between FTL transitions.

No one figured out that he managed to tap into the shipʼs systems!

With Luckyʼs help, Ves managed to gain a complete overview of all of the parts and systems of the Scarlet Rose.

Though there were plenty of ship components which mystified him, after Lucky performed a thorough investigation, he ruled them out as obstacles to his ploy to take over the ship.

After finishing the survey, Ves carefully studied the diagram of the Scarlet Roseʼs layout and identified each and every critical part or system that he needed to subvert.

There was a lot he needed to grasp!

A mobile supply frigate might not be a particularly sizable ship class, but a ship like the Scarlet Rose was stuffed with tech!

As a ship commissioned by the Coalition Reserve Force, she was built to a very high standard! Only the military ships of the Friday Coalition contained more safeguards and backup systems!

Ves sighed and shook his head as he held Lucky while soaking in his bath.

He couldnʼt find any other reasonable opportunity to interact with Lucky aside from holing up in the bathroom.

To open this window of opportunity, Ves pretended to be extremely indignant about being spied upon while he was doing his bathroom business!

He acted like he was immensely shy about his body and thoroughly searched the entire bathroom compartment from top to bottom! He destroyed each and every optical sensor until he was sure there was nothing left!

He gambled that Aisling wouldnʼt intervene for fear of upsetting him. Luckily, she only admonished him a single time during mealtime before dropping the topic!

The monitoring system of a modern second-class vessel was very pervasive. Optical sensors only consisted of a portion of the monitoring in each compartment. There were heat sensors, sound sensors, gravitic sensors, radiation sensors, mass sensors and a multitude of other ways to track what went on inside a compartment!

Ves did not touch any of them. He only cared about disabling the only sensor type which could expose Lucky.

As for the other sensors, Luckyʼs ECM systems effortlessly fooled them into thinking that nothing was there!

Once he satisfied this condition, Ves interacted with Lucky without any issue. He could even summon his System comm and purchase some gadgets in order to assist him into taking over the ship.

However, with how easily Lucky could infiltrate and sabotage the various systems and subsystems of the Scarlet Rose, Ves would rather keep his Design Points in reserve.

Who knew what kind of surprise he might encounter during his hijacking attempt! Keeping over 1 million DP in reserve would definitely be able to save him in a pinch!

For now, Ves felt confident he could take over the ship by relying on his existing means.

The engineering section, the security compartment and the bridge all needed to be secured.

At the same time, Ves had to sabotage or subvert every backup system that activated in the event of some sort of failure!

As a ship built to a high standard, the Scarlet Rose featured a lot of backups and redundancies! Not even his Barracuda offered so many redundant systems!

”Every starship is just a fragile shell that protects the people inside from the ravages of space.”

Radiation, vacuum, frost, space dust and other threats constantly bombarded space-faring vessels.

Unlike astral beasts, humanity never adapted to space. Fragile humans like Aisling and Patricia had to rely on external tools to master space.

Humanityʼs reliance on starships was the main reason why the race came to dominate the galaxy!

Though mechs had become ascendent in the Age of Mechs, no human dared to neglect their civilizationʼs dependence on starships!

”Humans are rather helpless.” He sighed and idly splashed some bathwater over his head. ”Ships give us strength, but they are all potential deathtraps!”

A starship was not so easy to run. They consisted of many different interconnected compartments, components and systems. The complexity of a mobile supply frigate like the Scarlet Rose exceeded that of a mech by at least a hundred times!

This was not just due to her immensely larger size, but also due to all of the functions she was supposed to run on a continuous basis!

The more systems a ship possessed, the greater the chance that something might go wrong!

If the inertial dampeners of the ship suddenly shut off, all of her passengers might slam against the bulkheads the moment the vessel accelerated or decelerated!

If the life support systems failed, the oxygen and temperature levels might drop, causing every human to suffocate while shivering in the cold!

These were just a handful of the many essential components and systems that the crew and passengers of the Scarlet Rose relied upon to preserve their lives!

”If I wanted to, I could instantly kill each and every person aboard this vessel.” Ves muttered darkly.

Due to the potential risks, expensive ships tended to offer several redundancies. For each primary system, there was at least a secondary system on standby that was ready to step up in the case of a crisis!

All of these systems were spread out. This was because a ship could easily be rendered impotent if some important compartments incurred catastrophic damage for some reason!

”When it comes to ship design, you can never put all of your eggs in a single basket!”

Fortunately, with Luckyʼs thorough scouting, Ves identified every relevant system. He only had to program some malicious code and pass on some instructions to his cat in order to subvert their functioning.

Ves did not dare to penetrate these systems too thoroughly. He only affected them as little as possible. The main goal of his sabotage was to make them unresponsive to any commands.

Everything had to run normally, or at the very least pose no hindrance to his plans!

Ves quietly made a lot of progress on this front. He believed it wouldnʼt take much longer to complete this step!

However, that only took care of the ship. Paralyzing all of the systems, especially the defensive ones, was not enough! He needed to mop up the people on the Scarlet Rose as well!

Thirty-five of them consisted of spacers. Each of them kept the ship running.

Ves decided to clean them all up!

While it was very problematic to operate the Scarlet Rose without a crew, Ves believed it wouldnʼt be a problem to operate her for just a week!

As a highly-automated vessel, the Scarlet Rose was designed to rely less on humans. Ves believed it was feasible to return to Cloudy Curtain without relying on the existing crew!

Each of these spacers posed a threat to him. Ves was far too paranoid to keep them alive and continue their duties under his command! They only had to perform one act of sabotage out of spite to massively screw him over!

The crew shouldnʼt be left alive, particularly the captain and the chief engineer!

”Only the captain and the chief engineer can mitigate my sabotage!”

The two possessed extremely high authority. As long as Ves gave them some time, they could easily reverse his sabotage and restore the systems to normal!

Ves had to take them out right away before he did anything else!

”The problem is that the bridge and engineering sections are located too far apart!”

Ves was confident he could sneak into either the bridge or engineering and take out the crew inside.

However, the moment he made a move, he would undoubtedly expose himself!

Even if he somehow took care of both, he still had to contend with the remainder of the crew as well as the security officers aboard the ship!

He wasnʼt too worried about the crew in the short term. As long as he moved quickly and took out his priority targets, the remaining spacers should be confused of what was going on. As long as Ves sabotaged the communications systems, he should be able to prevent them from coordinating their actions!

He had two more priorities to deal with after he took care of the bridge and engineering.

”First, I have to kill all of the guards and security officers. Theyʼre already pretty capable by themselves, but they are a lot more threatening once they make use of the internal defenses!”

Each compartment and corridor section possessed an isolated defense system that was completely cut off from any other system or network.

In the event some hostels boarded the ship, the guards could fortify themselves in each and every section by activating these independent defense systems.

”There are way too many of them for me to sabotage them all.” He sighed.

If he had two months, then he could surely subdue all of these defenses. Yet Ves wanted to make his move before the Scarlet Rose crossed into Coalition space!

For this reason, he settled for sabotaging only the minimum amount of internal defenses. Ves planned his route and settled for tampering with the defensive systems located along the way.

This meant that he could not deviate from his route! As long as he stepped into a compartment he didnʼt control, heʼd be vulnerable to the ship!

”Well, as long as I deal with all of my essential targets, the rest of the ship wonʼt pose a threat.”

Aside from the security department, Ves had to take care of one more potential threat.

The mechs.

The Scarlet Rose carried four spaceborn mechs. As long as even a single one deployed into space, it could easily apply a lot of leverage to Ves!

He did not wish to expend a huge amount of effort and succeed in taking over the entire ship only for a mech to threaten to blow her up shortly afterwards!

Therefore, he had to find some way to neutralize the mechs quickly enough.

He first thought of trying to kill the mech pilots, but that led back to the same problem of trying to kill the captain or the engineers.

Once someone died or got attacked, the entire ship would definitely be alerted!

”Instead of killing the mech pilots, why not sabotage the mechs?”

As a mech designer, his understanding of mechs is immensely great! Even though Ves did not entirely understand the second-class mechs, he could easily think up many different ways to sabotage the machines!

The challenge was to do so without letting anyone else get wiser. For now, the mechs were stowed in the mech hanger, and each of them were constantly being checked and maintained by a team of mech technicians.

Though mech technicians were normally easy to fool, Ves did not underestimate their capabilities. Unlike the mech technicians from the Bright Republic, these ones came from the Friday Coalition!

They were smarter, more educated and more component than the mech technicians he was used to! Ves had to approach this sabotage very carefully in order to keep them in the dark!

Time was beginning to run out on him. If he didnʼt launch his escape plan in the next few days, the Scarlet Rose would successfully cross over into Coalition space, which meant that Ves would have to escape hostile territory!

Ves did not relish his chances. The Vandals barely managed to cut through the territories of the Vesia Kingdom, and only managed to succeed due to various factors.

This time, Ves didnʼt think the Friday Coalition would be that incompetent!

In fact, even if Ves launched his hijacking attempt right away, the CRC would not let go of him so easily! The Fridaymen would certainly dispatch a pursuit force to retrieve their ship!