The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1665

Chapter 1665 Dishonor

Captain Melinda Larkinson gritted her teeth as the empty void of space lit up by a multitude of lasers.

Since no mech was stupid enough to employ lasers against the sandmen, only the enemy utilized this method of attack!

When she took in the overall battle situation, her heart chilled.

Two huge spherical monoliths dauntlessly pressed forward.

If that was it, then the defense force could have bombarded their huge surface areas with impunity.

The problem was that a huge swarm of sandman drones surrounded the monoliths!

An estimated twelve to fifteen sandman admirals led this huge fleet, causing the higher ups to dispatch at least several mech regiments and auxiliary forces to meet this incoming threat!

While the power of so many mechs and starfighters was terrible, the sandmen did not go down without a fight!

Explosive shells and kinetic rounds slammed against the monoliths on a continuous basis.

Compared to the swift and agile sandman drones, the monoliths were so big that it was impossible for a mech to miss their shots!

However, half-a-dozen rods sticking out of the monoliths accumulated energy regardless of how much damage the monolith sustained. Even if a couple of salvos of concentrated fire managed to break one of the rods, the other rods finished their accumulation and discharged a very powerful laser beam that was equivalent in power to warship armament!

No standard mech could ever output so much energy in such a devastating laser beam!

The worst part about the laser beams was that the monoliths didn't waste their awesome firepower on the mechs.

Instead, they targeted the carriers flying in the rear!

Due to the need to resupply exhausted mechs and take in ejected cockpits, the ships couldn't be too far away from the battle.

Each heavy laser beam struck a deep groove in the surfaces of the heavily-armored combat carriers.

While the integrity of the carriers weren't affected, it was not very easy to repair the battle damage!

Due to the scarcity of exotics, the Bright Republic simply couldn't afford to waste so many resources on repairing combat carriers. The best the Mech Corps and the Starfighter Corps could do was fill up the gaps with cheaper and more inferior armor plating.

In such a costly situation, the carriers should have withdrawn further away.

However, due to the accuracy of the lasers against large objects, the distance needed to dodge the heavy laser beams was too unreasonable! A distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers meant that mechs and starfighters would have to exhaust a lot of energy or waste a lot of time by coasting on a ballistic trajectory in order to intercept the sandman fleet.

In addition, the monoliths did not possess a single mode of attack. If the sandman admirals detected that no ship was in range, the monoliths would immediately retract the large rods and form thousands smaller ones instead to target the small craft!

In such a situation, the casualties among mechs and starfighters would surely grow exponentially worse!

Therefore, the generals in charge of the war theater made the difficult decision to use the combat carriers as bait. Even though repeated exposure to heavy laser strikes would surely consume the combat carriers, they were just ships!

Unless armed with shipboard weapons, the carriers could not stop the sandmen by themselves!

At this moment, ships were valuable, but effective combat units were even more valuable!

As long as the Bright Republic still fielded mechs, it still had hope of winning the war!

As an officer of the Planetary Guard, Melinda knew all of this. She had no choice but to accept this situation despite knowing how big of a price the Bright Republic would have to pay afterwards.

Her modified Desolate Soldier continued to fire its Sandbreaker rifle at one of the monoliths, which rapidly lost a lot of mass due to all of the damage it endured.

However, most of the damage only affected the exterior shells of the monoliths. So long as the center of the huge amalgamations remained untouched, it took far too much effort to destroy the monolith!

That was because all of the sandman admirals hid in the core portion!

"AHH!"

The second-generation starfighters that screened the mechs couldn't handle so much overwhelming firepower! Despite their heavier armor, the sheer amount of sandman drones rapidly ate away at these slower-moving small craft!

This was the downside of targeting the monoliths first. The amount of sandman drones hadn't diminished at all, which meant that their effective combat strength against mechs and starfighters still remained intact!

The strategy adopted by the defense force was very clear. The generals would rather sacrifice the combat carriers and the starfighters in order to preserve as much mechs as possible.

Melinda's heart bled as she saw hundreds of starfighters and their pilots succumbing against the sandman drones in just a single minute!

Fortunately, the designers of the second-generation starfighters managed to improve the ejection system of these fighter models.

Their thicker armor gave the starfighters a longer buffer to eject. The decision to eject had largely been automated. So long as the starfighter detected that it was reaching its limit, it would automatically eject its pilot without any further delay!

As for letting the starfighter pilots decide themselves whether they should eject, that option had been removed in the second generation starfighters.

Too many starfighter pilots would not hesitate to eject immediately as long as their craft suffered a single scratch!

For this reason, the decision to eject had been taken away from their hands, which deeply disconcerted Melinda.

To her, it was one thing to answer the call of duty. It was another thing to be forced into duty!

"Is this really the Bright Republic I know and love?" She whispered to herself.

Though she understood the merits of these decisions, morally she found the desperation exhibited by her home state to be more and more abhorrent.

A part of her would rather see the Bright Republic fall than to let it continue its existence through dishonorable means!

That was what her Larkinson blood and heritage compelled her to think!

She firmly shook her head. "What am I thinking?! There are trillions of innocent lives at stake!"