The Mech Touch novel Chapter 476

The sighting of the enemy mech unsettled the Vandals under Lieutenant Burke. The woman made a gesture that forced the men and women to cut the chatter.

"Type and markings?"

The exo-skeleton soldier reported back after a few seconds. "Cat-like bestial mech, no ranged hardpoints. It’s coated in astral blue and silver with a prominent emblem of House Eneqqin."

A couple of Vandals quietly cursed while Lieutenant Burke started to frown.

"Strange. House Eneqqin should be directing all of their mechs to stop the main force. Why did one of their mechs stray to this part of town?"

Ves widened his eyes. "There’s a high possibility that it’s a scout mech! Be careful, its sensors are powerful enough to detect an exoskeleton suit from a distance!"

A loud, primal growl suddenly thundered over their heads!

"It detected my presence!"

"RUN! That’s an order!"

The thunderous steps of the four-legged mech echoed throughout the streets as the beast in metal skin rapidly surged towards the hapless exoskeleton soldier.

Ves heard distance weapons fire being discharged. The heavy rifles wielded by these soldiers possessed enough punch to chew apart a small vehicle, but against a mech, it must have been nothing more than a pinprick.

He could guess the outcome of the clash before its conclusion. With a distant crunch, the weapons fire ceased and the mech let out another artificial roar.

The Vandals hadn’t been standing still all this while. Under the lieutenant’s urging, they ran towards the nearest tunnel entrance that she marked out beforehand.

In the meantime, the mech started moving again. The echoes of its steps rang louder and louder.

"It’s heading straight for us!"

"How did it know how to find us?!"

"Johnson! Is your anti-observation gear still working!?"

"It’s still working fine! There’s no microbugs in the vicinity!"

"Don’t forget that this is House Eneqqin’s home turf! They must have embedded bugs resistant to anti-observation fields into the streets."

The theory was sound, but Ves started to doubt that conclusion. In any modern city in this age, the authorities littered the public spaces with all manner of sensors and observation gear.

However, the quality of these sensors only extended to how much their owners were willing to invest in them. In the galactic rim, most authorities only utilized the most basic and affordable sensors. They were cheap and easy to maintain, but came at the cost of being very easy to manipulate.

Anyone with means would be able to get their hands on software or devices that could hack, block, interfere, disable or even outright destroy these sensors. That was why crime and shady dealings still proliferated in the Komodo Star Sector. The ability to circumvent observation was too ubiquitous.

Naturally, not every method of observation could be stopped so easily. Enough investment allowed them to be resilient enough to withstand the most conventional means of blocking them out.

However, even if that was the case, the Vandals didn’t use run-of-the-mill countermeasures. One of the Vandals in a hazard suit carried a big anti-observation backpack module. It didn’t quite provide them with total stealth, but it somehow disabled several of the most common means of observation in the vicinity.

It actually worked quite similar to the Privacy Shield in his old comm, but it was a lot bigger and cruder.

With such a device in their midst, chances should have been low that House Eneqqin detected them, but somehow that wasn’t true. Were these streets so important that the authorities installed much more effective means of observations, or had the Vandals slipped up somehow?

Ves thought back on how the former base of the Dastardly Handsome Bastards suffered from an artillery bombardment out of the blue. The kind of mechs that can lob those kinds of heavy explosive shells shouldn’t have been very common. House Eneqqin absolutely couldn’t afford to divert one of them from the battle with the main Vandal ground force.

Yet they did so anyway against all common sense. Even if the Vandal ground force eventually managed to break through the defense lines, the absence of a single artillery mech must have exacerbated House Eneqqin’s defeat.

So why did they not only divert an important mech, but also managed to accurately bombard their key positions?

The Vandals had taken all kinds of precautions. They cleaned out and chased away all the occupants in the neighboring blocks. They employed powerful blockers that made it difficult for anyone to spot anything unusual about the base. If House Eneqqin wasn’t specifically keeping an eye on that base, then they shouldn’t have known about their presence.

Even as Ves could almost feel the mech bounding closer towards him and the fleeing Vandals, his mind finally made a possible connection.

His self-made comm!

Ves currently carried two comms. One of them was his military-issued one, which still couldn’t do a lot of things, but at least it possessed an extremely high degree of security.

The same couldn’t be said for his other comm, which he crafted to grant him access to the galactic net and to facilitate in hacking simple devices. As much as the black market designs for this series of comms claimed that they wouldn’t leave a trace, how much could Ves believe in them? Certainly not very much, especially since he reproduced one of the cheaper designs.

He hadn’t done much with the comm since he made it. His unexpected arrival at Captain Orfan’s temporary hideout changed his entire planning. Instead of using his comm to hack into locked aircars and hijacking them to bring him closer to the manufacturing district, he used it to hack into some of the mechs and enter the virtual portal of the Clifford Society.

Ves briefly hung on the latter. Who on this planet would connect with the network of the Clifford Society all of a sudden while Detemen IV was burning? No average mech designer would resort to such an action. Any Vesian who kept track of the comings and goings of the galactic net would immediately investigate the unusual connection.

Dread ran through his body as Ves almost faltered in his flight. One important question dominated his mind.

"Is it my fault that House Eneqqin bombarded the base?"

The possibility existed that Ves had directly led the Vandals to their doorstep and offered them a prime opportunity to massacre a lot of Vandals at once. The enemy might even be tracking their position right now through his unsecure comm!

"I got to get rid of it!"