The Mech Touch

Ves wasnʼt completely sure he killed off the female Benny. Who knew if she faked her deathcry?

The air smelled like burned metal, composites and flesh. The bridgeʼs air filtering system worked overtime in cleaning the air, yet more fumes kept being released by the damaged and broken workstations!

In an abundance of caution, Ves carefully circled around until he finally encountered her remains.

She was dead alright. For all her combat intuition and training, she hadnʼt moved fast enough after exposing her position!

In truth, Ves hadnʼt defeated her. His weapon did. His Amastendira was so powerful that it could easily tear through most materials!

Unfortunately, Ves also expended a considerable amount of full-powered shots!

He expended one shot to kill off all of the regular crew.

He used his second shot to kill off the guards.

He took two shots to overcome the shield generator of the female Benny.

He fired two additional shots at the captain to overcome his own shield generator before killing him entirely!

He used his last shot to surprise the assistant by firing at her through the workstations.

Ves fired all of those shots with full power without holding anything back in reserve. He feared the Fridaymen possessed some sort of additional protection that mitigated the damage.

Though Ves recognized that he wasted some of the energy he expended, he would rather be safe than sorry!

”Overkill is better than underkill! Itʼs better to kill my enemies twice than leave them half alive!”

He briefly sought the womanʼs laser pistol and inspected it for a moment.

Though smaller and weaker than the Amastendira, Ves rarely encountered pistols as strong as this one! He fiddled with it for a few seconds before finding out that it was locked.

He didnʼt dare to keep the weapon any further for fear of triggering an anti-theft system. Perhaps the weapon might blow up if he held it any longer!

After putting down the peculiar weapon, Ves approached the half-burned captainʼs chair and tried his best to ignore the rancid smell emanating from the ashes and charred remains of the captains.

Nothing recognizable remained! Neither the spent shield generator nor any other equipment survived his attack.

The captainʼs chair was inoperable, denying Ves a way to patch into the shipʼs systems.

Though Ves had sabotaged a lot of peripheral systems, he didnʼt dare to touch any of the core systems for fear of giving himself away!

While he succeeded in keeping his hijacking attempt a secret due to his caution, he gave up the ability to usurp control in a very short amount of time.

”I need Lucky to complete the takeover!”

He gave up any thoughts of taking over control and considered the remaining steps of his plan.

”Right now, no one should be left alive at engineering. The security compartment should be in shambles right now, giving Lucky plenty of opportunities to clean up the stray security officers.”

Along with his takeover of the bridge, three most important sections of the ship should have fallen under his attack!

Wiping out the captain and the bridge officers meant that the ship lost central control. Though it was still possible for the remainder of the crew to get up to mischief, Ves believed it was unlikely that they could organize anything substantial in a short amount of time!

At least, that was what he tried to achieve with his original plan.

The problem now was that he had given the captain a lot of time to respond to his attack. Without the ability to access the bridge systems, Ves was completely in the dark about the captainʼs final actions.

”This is going to be trouble.” He muttered darkly.

Right now, Ves had no idea what took place at the remaining two critical sites.

The security department should be in a very bad shape. The armory stored a lot of gear, some of which contained a lot of energy.

While it had taken Ves and Lucky some time, they managed to rig a lot of ordinance to explode.

The calculations he performed gave him enough confidence that very few security officers stationed in this section managed to survive unscathed!

The only guards that should have escaped this attack were those stationed elsewhere. The guards stationed at the bridge and engineering accounted for at least four of them, which was quite a lot.

Ves doubted that any other security officers had slipped the net aside from those guarding Aisling.

As the most important individual on the ship, at least two guards accompanied the Clarion alumni at all times!

Now, the big question in his mind was what the survivors planned to do. His attacks on the three critical ship sections must have shocked the Fridaymen completely!

The captain and the female Benny even had the mistaken impression that the ship was under attack by a team of commandos!

None of the Fridaymen actually knew that the special forces actually amounted to just Ves and Lucky!

This was rather fortunate. If Aisling and the crew knew that their opposition only amounted to a human and a mechanical cat, then they would definitely mount some sort of counter-attack!

As it was, the surprise attacks he launched at the start were incredibly forceful! Who could have suspected that one of their prisoners was responsible?

When Ves failed to gain control over the ship, he gave up on trying to control it. He looked at his Comm and saw that he still had at least four minutes left to make use of his Full Stealth augment.

This was not enough to sweep every compartment of the ship, but he didnʼt have to. He merely wanted to intimidate the survivors into giving up any hope of retaking the Scarlet Rose!

The ship was already halfway in his hands!

He looked down at his Amastendira and winced. He only had three full-powered shots left, which didnʼt give him much leeway. Without the ability to overcome the locks of the weapons dropped by the crew, Ves couldnʼt afford to fight a protracted battle.

He dialed down Amastendiraʼs power setting to conserve its remaining energy and heat absorbing capability. He didnʼt need much power to kill off the ordinary crew anyway.

Before he left the bridge, Ves made sure to break the surviving consoles and work stations. He also sabotaged dozens of wireless receivers to prevent anyone from patching the bridge systems with their comms.

This made the bridge inoperable for a brief amount of time, giving Ves the confidence to leave the bridge!

One of the shortcomings of his assault was that he could never cover enough ground. Killing everyone at the three critical sections did not give him complete control over the ship!

As long as at least one enemy remained behind, they could always mount a comeback! Perhaps they might take advantage of Luckyʼs departure from engineering and sabotage the FTL drive or something!

Ves decided he needed to be proactive and actively hunt down the remaining crew!

”Itʼs time to hunt!”

Ves left the bridge and began to follow a predetermined route. He had already memorized where the crew were supposed to be stationed.

None of the hatches on his route barred his way. He already tampered with them beforehand.

Each time the hatches slid open, Ves activated his stealth module and surprised the alerted crew with attacks coming out of nowhere!

In fifteen minutes, he swept through the living areas, life support, the mess hall and other compartments at the upper decks.

At the same time, Ves had instructed Lucky to sweep past the manned compartments of the lower decks.

As long as both of them relied on their tricks, there was no way the regular crew could stand a chance!

None of the men and women Ves encountered posed a serious threat to him. The Coalition Reserve Corps only subjected its servicemen to a nominal amount of combat training.

Ves feared that he might encounter an enemy as formidable as Aislingʼs assistant.

Fortunately, none of the remaining officers and ratings carried any shield generators. They were completely vulnerable to his surprise attacks!

After Ves finally rendez-voused with Lucky at the middle decks, he looked at his comm in distress.

He had completely expended his stealth charge!

It seemed that he needed to rely on Lucky to complete their sweep through the ship.

”Are you okay, Lucky?”

”Meow.” Lucky replied tiredly.

”How many guards did you kill?”

”Meow.”

”Did you count the bodies at the security department?”

”Meow.”

Ves briefly tallied the numbers. The CRC stationed fifteen armed security officers on the Scarlet Rose. He only killed three of them, one of which he stumbled in the corridors.

As for Lucky, aside from killing the two at engineering, he only managed to kill two more survivors who survived the brunt of the explosion because of advantageous positioning.

Though it was difficult for Lucky to count the number of guards who perished when the armory exploded, the cat guessed that four of them had perished!

”That makes thirteen.” Ves smiled in relief. ”We took care of every guard other than Aislingʼs escorts!”

”Meow!”

”I know youʼre tired, but hang on, please! We only have one compartment left to secure!”

Neither Ves nor Lucky bumped into Aisling, Patricia and their guards.

As long as they remained alive and aboard the ship, Ves did not feel assured he could complete his takeover!

No matter what, Ves needed to get rid of them one way or another!

After becoming assured that his plan remained intact, he moved towards one of the central compartments of the Scarlet Rose.

As a mobile supply frigate meant to accommodate a mech designer, her mech workshop took up a lot of space!

Ves and Lucky approached one of the entrances of the mech workshop. He nodded towards Lucky, who flew away in order to enter the compartment from another direction.

Neither of them were sure whether Aisling and Patricia remained in the mech workshop. For all he knew, they could have hopped into the escape pods and ejected from the ship by now!

No matter what, the mech workshop remained the only major compartment that hadnʼt been swept yet. Ves was almost sure he could find the two mech designers inside along with their guards and some mech technicians.

When Ves approached the entrance, he was about to activate the backdoor he inserted into the hatchʼs control system.

Yet just as he did so, his intuition screamed with alarm!

Ves did not doubt his instincts, especially when he had entered his most alert state in years!

He jumped aside and ran away as far as possible and turned around a corner just as a mech-grade missile shot through the opened hatch and slammed against the bulkhead!

Almost instantly, the missile exploded, inflicting massive damage to the corridor!

Fortunately, modern missiles concentrated most of their damage forwards! The payload blasted through the bulkheads and damaged the compartments behind them! The structural damage was significant!

Though Ves escaped the brunt of the attack due to his timely evasion! He also flattened himself on the deck and tried to minimize his profile as much as possible!

”Ahh!”

Powerful concussive shockwaves blasted over his body, making him feel as if his inside had turned to mush! His eardrums probably ruptured!

A lot of errant shrapnel ricochet through the corridors. Some of them managed to bounce around the corner he was hiding behind and landed on his body, turning him into a pincushion!

”AAAAHHHH!!”

Though Ves distanced himself enough to preserve his life, his body was in an extremely bad shape!

Humans could never withstand the power of mechs!

Just staying within the vicinity of a small missile designed to harass enemy mechs or intercept incoming ordnance was enough to destroy his body beyond recognition!

Though his body was much more resilient compared to normal humans, he still lay helpless against the deck, vulnerable to anyone who wanted to finish the job!