The Mech Touch novel Chapter 760

After an hour of introspection, he imagined he achieved a tiny bit of progress in straightening out his crooked design philosophy. It wasn’t easy by any means, and it might take months to restore it to a pure state, but at least Ves saw some hope in his current approach.

"I only need a couple of minutes to put my design philosophy to the brink, but I need months to undo all of the damage I’ve done."

Creation was harder than destruction. That applied to pretty much anything, so Ves did not expect an easy road to recovery.

In the meantime, Ves sensed that he really shouldn’t put his design philosophy under stress during his recovery period. Putting more stress on a broken limb for example only exacerbated the damage and prolonged his recovery period.

Even though he should take it easy for the next couple of months, Ves feared he may need to compromise his much-abused principles yet again if the Aeon Corona System turned out to be a cesspool of danger.

"I feel like an abusive husband who can’t help but make excuses for hitting my wife." He grimaced.

His design philosophy was his ’wife’ in this analogy. The danger here was that he might hit her too often or too hard one day that his design philosophy decided to give up on him and file for divorce.

With all that he put his design philosophy through lately, Ves certainly deserved it, but he did not want this to happen.

"Can you forgive me, please? I swear I won’t hit you again!"

Ves suddenly shook his head. What was he thinking about? Why did he suddenly imagine his design philosophy as his wife?

"I think I have to call this a day."

He felt reluctant to go to sleep. While the Vandals stood down from red alert, the current condition or yellow alert meant that they still anticipated possible threats. Yellow alert merely allowed for a rotation of shifts so that all of the stations would continue to be manned while off-duty personnel had a chance to eat and sleep.

"Still, my mind really needs a break."

Ves figured that someone would wake him up again if anything drastic happened, which admittedly didn’t seem very likely.

The Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet had limped their way out their initial emergence zone. The ominous Vesian fleet that initially burned in pursuit had sustained heavy damage from the pirates, while the forces aligned to the Church of Haatumak learned the hard way why they shouldn’t challenge a detachment of a battle-hardened military mech regiment.

He rested for four hours before an alert woke him up. Ves blearily emerged from his bed and took one look at the message from his comm before he jumped out and dressed himself up at his best speed.

He raced towards his office where a security officer handed over an important package to him. As soon as he received it, he thanks the officer, entered his office, threw a sloppy greeting to Ketis and jumped behind his desk, activated his signal jammer before finally inserting the encrypted data chip inside the package into his secure comm.

The contents inside the data chip contained all of the logs, readings and telemetry out of the simulations and live deployment of the Parallax Star!

While Ves grumbled a bit about missing out on the tests as they happened, at least it appeared that nothing drastic had gone wrong. Venerable Xie hadn’t gone insane or went onto a random murder spree. According to the biometric logs, the expert pilot exhibited an increased amount of exertion, but that could have been attributed to the man’s slightly increased performance with the Parallax Star from before.

"It’s good to see at least one of my changes went as planned."

The slight increase in performance helped justify his changes and mask all of his shenanigans behind the scenes. To the rest of the Vandals, it appeared that Ves managed to successfully tweak the Parallax Star in favor of Venerable Xie.

Only Ves and Major Verle knew the truth, and if it was up to him, that would remain so forever.

He still found it a waste to set a fatal trap for an expert pilot. If the expert pilot hadn’t been so slavishly devoted to the failure of a Fourth Prince, then the Vandals could have forged a tighter bond with the versatile fugitive from the Dark Plasma Star Sector.

Incidents like these illustrate the difficulty of converting a foreign expert pilot to another cause. No one wanted to let go of their trump cards, especially to those with power and ambition, so they did everything in their power to indoctrinate their expert pilots into becoming their loyal servants.

The MTA’s emphasis on protecting the rights and privileges of expert pilots emerged out of necessity. If expert pilots enjoyed no such protection, that left them vulnerable to all kinds of brainwashing and coercion by unscrupulous states and power players.

The fact that practically any expert pilot that experienced forceful persuasion often stagnated or regressed didn’t stop them at all, though it would be bad for the MTA as a whole. In order to make the advancement towards expert pilot as attractive as possible and to leave the path open towards ace pilot and god pilots, elite mech pilots of all stripes needed to be treated with respect.

This policy sounded good to Ves until he ended up in the position of one of those people who needed an expert pilot under their thumb. Then it became a hindrance that Ves had willfully violated.

Ves dove into the logs and the telemetry, trying to find any signs his intervention had any side effects. He found plenty of abnormal indicators, but they shouldn’t come to anyone’s attention as long as they remained small.

The amount of abnormalities did concern him, however. It told him that his changes resulted in a spillover effect that cascaded many other parameters.

The man-machine connection was one of the most complex and mystifying fields in mech design. It occupied the same status as FTL drive mechanics to starship engineers.

Ves merely dipped his toes in the field himself, so while he expected his changes to have missed the mark somewhat, he did not feel pleased that it had grown to this extent.

This was like ordering an artillery mech to perform a precision bombing but instead the mech decided to go wild and carpet bomb the entire surroundings around the target region!