The Mech Touch novel Chapter 409

On the day the LMC unveiled the Crystal Lord design, the tense situation in the Coscos System cast a shadow over Bentheim. Underneath the grey, overcast streets of Dorum, fewer people walked by as everyone worried about their jobs, their safety, and whether the Republic could repel the Vesians yet again.

Ves looked down on the streets from Marcella’s office.

"The public is getting more uncertain these days." He spoke. "The Bright Republic fought against the Vesia Kingdom for how many times? And never have we succumbed to their onslaught."

"There’s always a fluke. The Vesians might have called up an ally, or the Mech Corps may have screwed up at some point. You know the Vesian nobles keep trying to invade the Republic because they hope they’ll eventually get it right and blow past our defenses."

That was the awful thing about living in a state entangled in a generational war. The only reason why the Vesians haven’t permanently instituted a state of war against the Brighters was because they didn’t have the resources to sustain their aggression.

"Did you fight in the previous war?" Ves suddenly asked. "You obviously haven’t started out as a mech broker."

The woman shrugged. She softly caressed her artificial limb. "I took part in the previous war, aye. It’s not a pleasant experience and I don’t really want to talk about it. I was too young back then. Young and stupid. I still needed five more years to graduate from the mech academy, but the Republic instituted accelerated training programs that attempted to cram everything we needed to learn into a span of only two years."

Ves understood. When the war dragged on and pilots began to grow scarce, the Republic tended to scrape up the young and the old.

These days, it took eight years to turn a fresh potentate into a barebones mech pilot, but they could barely pilot an industrial mech in the basic academies.

In order to gain more advanced fighting skills, the mech cadets also needed to spend some years at an advanced academy. The most well-rounded programs often ran for six years. Therefore, the best and most qualified graduates spent at least fourteen precious years in the academies.

They not only learned how to pilot a mech, but also how to work as a team and how to kill an enemy mech. At the advanced academies, they stopped learning the basics of each mech archetype but chose to specialize in a single role to their utmost.

Practically every state in the human-dominated parts of the galaxy adopted this mech training model. It originated from the galactic center where first-class mechs would also be extremely complex to pilot, but it spread out to the rest of the galaxy as academies in poorer star sectors lacked the resources to provide effective teaching.

Marcella continued her story. "In truth, I only experienced the end of the last war. They put a handful of prematurely graduated mech pilots like me into battle-scarred units where the only mech pilots who survived are those who are the toughest and most resilient men and women I have ever met." _{freewebnσvel.cøm}

"Did you enjoy your time with them?"

"I sure did. Most of my friendships today can be traced back to my service time. Those who survived formed a bond. We fought and watched each other’s back even as missiles rained down on us and took out a hapless colleague. They taught us not to blink and keep on marching forward."

"Your luck must have ran out at some point."

"Yup. It happens to the best of us. The war began to wind down at that stage. The planet we fought over was bombed to hell and back. There was hardly any area in sight where the soil hasn’t been disturbed by passing mechs or spent ordnance. Just when I thought I could make it through the end, the Vesians pulled off their final offenses. I barely got into the cockpit of my mech before a surprise attack punched right through the chest of my machine. That was the closest to death I’ve ever been."

Ves could imagine the horror of getting your cockpit breached by a mech-scaled weapon. "You survived, obviously."

"I was one of the lucky ones. Supplies ran short and the doctors became overwhelmed by the sheer amount of wounded that poured into their treatment facilities. Did you know that mechs are horribly lethal? Anyone facing a mech directly in battle will rarely get away unscathed unless they have their own mechs. It takes many tons of armor to endure a casual attack by a mech."

Both of them fell silent after that. As a young man who never experienced the previous war, he only heard about its horrors from the second-hand stories his aunts and uncles were fond of repeating.

Naturally, most young kids at that age hardly understood the cynicism acting as an undercurrent to their tales. Kids like Ves only focused on the glory and heroics of piloting mechs.

Now that he grew older, Ves felt a little more ambivalent about war. He disliked it, but as someone who designed and sold mechs for a living, his entire business model revolved around conflict.

Without war, who needed mechs?

"Sounds like it hasn’t been a pleasant experience for you. Why did you enter the mech broker business then?"

"Well, my ability to pilot a mech has fritzed up due to the wounds I suffered back then. Due to the backlog of wounded, by the time a medical bot arrived at my side, I lost the opportunity to regrow my arm. I didn’t understand the weird the science stuff the stupid bot spoke out, but I knew by then that more than ten years of my life is wasted. Think about it. What was I supposed to do with all my years of learning how to pilot mechs?"

"So you continued to get involved with mechs, just in a different way."

Marcella nodded. "After the war, everyone tried their best to forget what happened. The new generation of mechs swept through the galaxy and people needed to make sense of the new designs that rolled out of the mech factories. That’s where people like me come in. Just because I can’t pilot them anymore doesn’t mean my mind has turned stupid. I studied under a mentor at first. I learned all of my business acumen from him. After that, I branched out on my own."

"Mechs have a way of persisting." Ves remarked with a rueful smile. "Now that I think about it, there are many possible careers for veterans such as you to pursue. There is still life after war."