The Mech Touch novel Chapter 7501

Chapter 7501: Unfriendly Miasma

The Hypeh-Tekas System was hell.

No.

That was not the right description for it. An unknown party had somehow pulled the underworld into the material realm at this particular location.

The dead roamed among the living.

Not only that, but the former unceasingly sought to attack the latter!

Their ravenous hunger for life and their unceasing aggression towards those not of their own kind caused them to assault the human interlopers with no regard for their own survival!

Over half an hour passed with no discernable change in pattern.

The deathborn continued to converge from every direction and attack the first human life form that got in their way.

They phased right through transphasic hull plating and thick meters-long alloy structures as if they did not even exist.

Active azure energy shields seemed to be a little more effective in hindering their advance, but that was only because the relatively weak hyper technology component was the only reason why it worked in the first place.

They were only able to slow down and block the advance of a fraction of the deathborn arriving from afar.

"This cannot go on." Admiral Gori Tensen concluded. "We have already tested dozens of different attempts to block the deathborn and push back this miasma. None of our existing technologies at our disposal has proven effective and cost-efficient enough to protect our mechs and naval assets in a stable, reliable and sustainable manner."

There were a small number of solutions that proved partially effective, but they were either so unstable or so prohibitively costly in resource consumption that they could not be relied upon for the entire duration of their stay in this befouled star system.

"Our warships are operating at reduced effectiveness due to the constant harassment of the deathborn and the oppressive nature of the surrounding ’miasma’." Commodore Zonrad Reze said. "Our most important stations are still reliably manned, but reducing or outright removing the staffing at the outer stations of our vessels will impair the performance of our weapon systems, external defensive systems, sensor systems, damage control systems and so much more."

"I thought your RA warships are highly automated."

"That is true, but what you may not be aware of is that our more extreme automation levels must only be used in the direst of emergencies. There are too many safeguards and restrictions applied to our core systems to prevent any chance of our AIs going out of control and abusing our technology against the human race. The same measures that are protecting us from getting betrayed by our own tech is stifling our ability to properly harness our automation. Our specialists and I are in the process of temporarily deactivating some of these restraints, but that will take valuable time. Until then, we will not be adequately able to defend ourselves against more direct threats."

"The Tortuous Scream doesn’t suffer from those problems. The orvens who originally designed and built her did not incorporate so much excessive safety restrictions. We have also applied our own custom software and hardware on top of the original alien systems, so we can still fire her primary gun batteries without too many problems. What is even better is that all of her bunker mechs also remain nearly fully operational. The deathborn and the dark miasma do not pose as much of a threat to a piloted mech."

Right now, the combined fleet was in a relatively precarious condition.

The carriers and warships of the Larkinson Clan, the Red Three and the Terrans were all operating at reduced effectiveness due to the hostile environment.

The mechs on the other hand seemed to be able to tolerate the current circumstances much better.

While the mech pilots proved very vulnerable to the hostile environment outside of their cockpits, once they interfaced with their machines, they were completely different.

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