The Mech Touch

6027 It’s Mine Now!

Ves looked at a projection of the largest and most valuable captured enemy warship.

She was shaped like a tower more or less. Her hull was wide and flat, which was typical of orven ship design.

Much of her surface was covered by gun turrets of all kinds. The thought of commanding all of this firepower after converting the captured vessel delighted him a lot!

It hadn't been too long ago since he issued the order for the expeditionary fleet to find and capture a stop warship.

Ves did not expect that the Golden Skull Alliance would not only take so little tto fulfill his request, but exceed his expectations by securing a much more modern and powerful alien hull!

"What is she called?"

Commander Casella's lips twitched. "Her official designation according to the orvens is… excessively long by our standards. I will not even attempt to pronounce how it is spelled in the native alien language. The translated nof the alien battleship is not as… poetic. Do you truly want to hear it, sir?"

This must be good. Ves gestured for her to proceed, which she did with obvious reluctance.

"Very well. The full translated nis as follows: The Torturous Scream of a Human Dying in Agony over a Span of 46.7 Hours."

"..."

"I swear that I am not deceiving you, sir. This is the best translation of the nthat the orvens have bestowed on the captured warship."

"Do the orvens really use the long form of this nin daily parlance?"

"That is not the case. They usually make do with calling their ship 'The Torturous Scream' in most cases. That is also the working nthat we have adopted for her. Since we have claimed the hull as our prize, it is within our prerogative to renher. You can keep her current nor bestow her with a more dignified one if you wish."

Ves dismissively waved his hand. "We can think about that later. In fact, I find her current nto be quite… amusing. How big is the Torturous Scream, exactly?"

"She is 3.6 kilometers long, but she is also much wider compared to human starships, so her internal volis quite impressive. However, that also means that her cross-section is much wider when facing the hull from specific directions, so she is easier to strike from a distance. As far as we can tell, she follows the typical native alien design philosophy of high energy defenses and low material defenses. Her hull plating is relatively thin and her structure is only strong to a point. The Torturous Scream relies almost entirely on her segmented multi-layered azure energy shields to defend herself against external attacks."

"Wait, azure energy shields? Have the orvens started to roll out our most advanced energy shield technology already?!"

The Sentinel Commander grimly nodded. "The alien implementation is cruder and not as up-to-date, but the azure energy shields of the Torment Fleet already bodes ill for all of the mech forces that will soon have to struggle against them on a wider scale. Not all of the ships of the Torment Fleet integrated these recent technological developments, but it is clear that the rollout of updated warships is beginning to ramp up in alien space."

This was truly awful news!

Alas, there was nothing that Ves or anyone else could do to stop this development. Even if the traitorous cosmopolitans did not actively leak advanced human tech to the Red Cabal, that was not a permanent solution.

The aliens had their own means of capturing and reverse engineering the tech attached to captured human mechs and warships.

After all, humanity once managed to rise up in a similar manner during the Age of Conquest!

In a situation where two opposing sides were not at technological parity, the weaker side would definitely be able to catch up to the stronger side. It was far too difficult to widen this gap!

Ves set aside his concerns about aliens attempting to replicate humanity's legendary rise and focused on his more immediate concern.

"How much damage has the Torturous Scream sustained?"

"As you can see, her hull is largely whole, sir. The Glory Seekers failed to unleash one of their battle formations, but they still managed to eliminate around half of the crew members of the Torturous Scream. The drop in crew performance combined with quickly draining the azure energy shields has allowed our boarding troops to invade the hull and begin the long process of clearing her interior of surviving orvan threats. We have made sure to deploy a large quantity of Swordmaidens and other eager infantry units for this high-priority mission. We did not have enough manpower to efficiently clear many other relatively intact alien warships, but we deemed it necessary to allocate additional manpower in order to prevent the orvens from sabotaging the ship."

"I take it that our infantry forces have managed to succeed on that front?"

"That remains to be seen. We still have a relatively poor understanding of the actual state of the Torturous Scream. When the Glory Seekers struck the hull with a death wave attack, the orven crew members that managed to resist the effect did not caway unscathed. Many have becdisoriented and lost much of their concentration. Only a minority of orvens were able to maintain their wits. Of the latter, most of them tried in vain to repel our boarding troops. Incidences of sabotage is low, but the damage that these orvens were able to do was fairly significant. Numerous power generators have been overloaded, causing severe localized damage. If not for the fact that the orvens themselves have taken preparations to contain reactor explosions in case of accidents, the Torturous Scream would have been covered by a few more holes."

Ves carefully observed the helmet footage of a random collection of infantry deployed onto the orven battleship.

He found the alien architecture to look rather… quaint. The ceilings were high to account for the higher body length of the orven race. The lighting was dim as the orvens did not need more as they were blessed with excellent eyesight. Much of the bulkheads and decks were coated in black, making the environment look even darker.

It look… almost perfect to Ves' new sensibilities, but he understood that most humans would find the lack of strong light sources to be distressing.

Many corridors and scompartments were shaped like triangles. Their ceilings were sloped, which seemed like an incredibly awful waste of internal capacity to Ves.

However, the orvens applied this architectural feature so much throughout the Torturous Scream that it was impossible to correct in a short amount of time!

It was not worthwhile to invest so much tand effort into transforming the triangular spaces into square spaces.

As Ves continued to study the helmet footage, he spotted many areas where there were many more decorations on the surface.

This was different as much of the artwork was a lot more primitive and abstract. Many subjects took on a more religious angle as they were clearly made to revere the phase lords of the orven race!

All of that had to be removed before the Larkinson Clan could even think of using the Torturous Scream as a stopgap warship!

From what he could tell, many areas were undamaged. Only a small amount of compartments showed signs of light to moderate damage, and only a few compartments and sections had suffered from more significant cases of sabotage.

"The damage is fairly light considering that half of the crew initially managed to survive the battle formation attack." Ves remarked.

"We have found that the orvens serving on the Torment Fleet are well-trained, but not psychologically prepared to fight. What that means is that their performance is good in situations that they have trained for, but their effectiveness, cohesion and fighting spirit will rapidly drop once they are beset by unexpected situations that they have never seriously considered."

That was not a unique problem. There were plenty of human forces that suffered from the sfault. This was why Ves always insisted that his troops must be bloodied in order to supplement their training.

"I guess that works out in our favor. The orvens probably grew complacent after spending years in the service of a cowardly and famously risk averse orven phase lord."

This was further good news to Ves and the Larkinsons. The more intact the warship, the less tit would take to convert her into a human-usable vessel!

The only major complication was that her length and width far exceeded the internal dimensions of the E-66 Experimental Yard.

There were very few shipyards in human space that could fit such an oddly-shaped warship!

This made it a lot more difficult to refurbish her as much of the work had to be done in open space where cosmic radiation and solar radiation regularly wreaked havoc on exposed sections of the hull. However, it was still easy enough to implement a lot of internal transformations. The shipyard just needed to dispatch a lot of manpower due to the inability to rely on large machinery.

As long as much of the existing hardware and software of the Torturous Scream could be used by humans, it shouldn't take too long to repair and convert the interior for human usage.

"What can you tellabout her armaments?"

"As we have stated before, we expressly targeted a modern alien hyper battleship that features an obvious anti-warship configuration. There were more hyper battleships with anti-

mech configurations, but we did not set out to capture them as they do not fulfill a role that is as useful in your first-class fleet. What you need the most is a powerful firepower platform that can allow you to defeat enemy warships with overwhelming firepower and siege alien strongholds from afar."

"You made the right choice, Casella. We can already rely on our excellent mechs to defeat enemy small craft. Besides, our mech forces and boarding troops would have suffered a lot more losses if they attempted to capture one of the anti-

mech battleships intact. Those tertiary laser cannon batteries are no joke at those quantities."

Ves actually suspected that there was another reason why the Larkinson Army did not make any attempts to capture the threatening anti-mech hyper battleships.

The mech pilots were all afraid that they would get replaced. Even though the entire notion was absurd, there were still people that thought that warships equipped with lots of fast-

firing weapons would make mechs obsolete!

This was not true simply due to the fact that the weapon operators serving on those starships were unable to break through like mech pilots.

The projection changed to show a good overview of all of the armaments placed on the exterior of the hull.

"As you can see, the Torturous Scream is primarily built around her big guns. Her primary gun batteries are mostly made up of kinetic armaments, but there are also laser and plasma cannons mixed in. The heavy emphasis on kinetic weapons indicate that the hyper battleship serves as the main source of orbital bombardment of the Torment Fleet. The most effective way to bombard a location on the surface of a plis to launch a large amount of kinetic projectiles from above. Outside of that, the kinetic cannons can inflict a punishing amount of damage at short to medium ranges. This warship is a brawler."

Ves was not a fan of relying on kinetic weapons in space combat, but he had to admit that it was truly an excellent choice for orbital bombardment purposes.

The Eminence of Torment must have taken a lot of care to select and transfer the Torturous Scream to his Torment Fleet.

Now, the modern hyper battleship had fallen into the hands of the Larkinson Clan!

"It's mine now!" He grinned with satisfaction.