The Mech Touch

Once Ves handled his affairs at the Eden Institute, he could finally direct his attention to his affairs in the Corellix System.

One of his foremost priorities at this time was to sort out the most valuable loot obtained in this battle.

Even though the majority of yurzen warships had successfully escaped annihilation and warped out of the star system intact, the original alien raiding fleet completely lost its fighting intent and cohesion.

Nobody was worried anymore that the aliens would regroup and continue their original assault on the colony at Corellix HI.

The Golden Skull Alliance succeeded in its primary objective of preventing all of the colonists on the planet from getting wiped out en masse.

This was a significant contribution to red humanity!

The Red Two already expressed their intention to build a stronghold on Corellix III. This endeavor would proceed a lot easier if there was an existing base of population and infrastructure on the planet.

Aside from that, keeping the remote colony intact meant that humanity effectively remained in control of the nearby border. Once red humanity no longer possessed any presence in the Corellix System, the alien raiding fleets would begin to set their sights towards the colonies situated deeper into human-occupied space!

All of this meant that the strategic significance of saving the local colony from destruction was quite high. There was no way the Red Ocean would deny the Golden Skull Alliance the rewards that it deserved.

What was particularly important to Ves was that the Larkinson Clan contributed a lot more to the success of this operation than the other alliance partners!

Even now, Minister Shederin Purnesse had become preoccupied with furiously trying to convince the other envoys that the Larkinson Clan deserved a much greater share of the overall rewards!

"40 percent is the absolute minimum that we should go for." Shederin briefly reported to Ves after the latest round of negotiations and horse-trading had concluded. "It is very much possible for us to attain 50 percent of total rewards and spoils if we navigate the subsequent rounds correctly. We truly accrued a great amount of accomplishments in this operation."

That was not an exaggeration. Ves briefly listed out the highlights of the Larkinson Clan.

Venerable Zimro Belson and the Phobos detected a hidden threat in advance and crippled Stingray 1's warp drives.

Lucky successfully captured the rare and valuable archeship, though not without incident.

Venerabler Isobel Kotin and the Promethea burned a handful of yurzen warships into ruined husks.

The Spirit of Bentheim lured away Stingray 2 and a part of the yurzen raiding fleet before breaking their backs after a long and dangerous running engagement.

The Larkinson Clan's lancer mechs expended a lot of expensive blast lances to quickly break open the defenses of a handful of important yurzen warships.

Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson and the Dark Zephyr essentially took out the formidable Stingray 1 by themselves by successfully pulling off an utterly amazing new displacement technique!

Ves really saw no reason why his clan should be denied half of the total spoils of the Battle of Corellix!

That was not to say that the other alliance partners did not make any effective contributions this time. The Glory Seekers definitely earned considerable credit for dispatching a DIVA starship and assigning Saintess Ulrika Vraken and the Macharia Excelsia to the Spirit of Bentheim.

Nonetheless, the expeditionary fleet wouldn't have been able to secure any of its objectives without the heroic and exceptional contributions of the Larkinson Clan!

"Tell those negotiators that I will not accept an outcome that is anything less than 50 percent." Ves said in a forceful tone. "We deserve to take at least one entire puelmer warship for ourselves given how our actions are primarily responsible for taking down Stingray 1 as well as Stingray 2."

"I will convey your words to our partners as best as possible."

Ves was willing to personally call for an emergency meeting if his clan received less than it was due. Although he did not wish to short his allies of their fair share of the spoils, that did not mean he was okay with getting exploited!

As time passed by, the expeditionary fleet experienced slight difficulties in properly managing two separate battlefields.

The Spirit of Bentheim continued to linger next to Stingray 2 while the bulk of the fleet stuck close to Stingray 1 and the majority of other captured alien vessels.

The Golden Skull Alliance already planned to dispatch the Wild Star along with a bunch of other capital ships to tow Stingray 2 as well as any other scattered captured hulls to the main battlefield.

This would keep all of the ships and valuable loot in a single manageable location.

All of this would probably unfold in the next few days.

In the meantime, Ves expressed a lot of curiosity towards Stingray 2. The puelmer vessel that had been initially struck by the Amaranto before the Everchanger disabled all of her exterior modules still remained mostly intact.

The most troublesome affair had been the boarding action that ensued afterwards.

The Larkinsons were physically unable to send their boarding troops into the ship because the ceilings of most of the hallways and compartments were far too low!

This was why the Larkinsons were forced to send in bots that they had fortunately prepared in advance.

It was a trivial matter for the Spirit of Bentheim to dedicate a part of her industrial capacity to mass produce a large amount of disposable puelmer-scaled combat drones.

The clan had bought the licenses from a company over the galactic net and straightforwardly produced the adorable round bots without bothering to tweak the designs.

The models chosen by the Larkinson Clan were not particularly strong or special, but they were adequate enough for the job.

Under the amplified glow of Lufa that the Everchanger purposefully radiated throughout Stingray 2's hull, the bots managed to overpower the feeble resistance from the trapped puelmer crew members with remarkably efficiency!

Although the ship still employed a lot of automated defenses that crushed a lot of invading bots, the disposable machines made use of their overwhelming numbers to sweep away all resistance by force if necessary!

The bots actually had to launch a lot of attacks onto the interior in order to eliminate all of the automated defenses that had remained unaffected by the Everchanger's glow.

"Stingray 2's degree of automation is higher than we anticipated." A man who served as one of the Larkinson Clan's alien technology experts reported to the patriarch. "What I mean by that is that once the majority of puelmers became incapacitated, the captain of the alien homeship may have activated a failsafe that caused most of the remaining active systems to operate without requiring directions from the crew. That, or the aliens already planned for this contingency in advance so that it automatically kicked in after certain conditions had been met."

Ves started to get a bad feeling about this. "What does that mean to us in practical terms?"

"Aside from the fact that our bots had to engage in extensive destruction in order to fully neutralize all of the threats inside the cramped vessel, the enemy failsafes also destroyed an extensive amount of valuables. The databases have been wiped. The warp drives fell apart. The ship's stores of pure phasewater has been entirely ruined. We're surprised that the ship did not self-destruct all at once. We believe that not even puelmers can tolerate the risk of their own ship blowing up due to faulty programming."

The damage sounded serious, but Ves did not feel too upset. He already had a feeling that the vindictive puelmers would do their best to deny as much loot to their captors as possible.

"Do what you can to salvage any remaining value from the damaged ship." Ves responded. "Can we salvage anything the puelmers have wrecked."

"We have a good chance of extracting a lot of useful data from the vessel, sir. We prioritized the need to take control over the puelmer ship's central databanks. Our bots managed to get there in time to prevent the alien storage devices from getting physically destroyed. This gives our specialists a chance to restore portions of the wiped data. In addition to that, the individual puelmers all carry personal devices of their own that store large quantities of personal data. The Black Cats should be able to glean plenty of useful intelligence from them. It will probably take a couple of weeks for them to deliver useful information."

That took a bit too long for his liking, but it was better than nothing.

"What about the rest of the ship?"

"While it is true that the effort to capture the ship has resulted in further internal damage, the interior is not completely ruined, sir. There are still plenty of intact ship systems left, and many of them are quite sophisticated for alien technology that may or may not be of interest to you and your fellow mech designers. I believe you can make a better judgment of this than our analysts."

"I will take a look at the interior of the ship myself later on." Ves said. "What about captives? How many living puelmers did we manage to grab?"

"The ship was originally crewed by a couple of hundred puelmers, which is rather low considering her volume and technical capabilities. As you are probably aware of, the puelmers typically rely more heavily on automation than most other races. The amount of eligible captives was rather low to begin with, and the fights that ensued after the bots tried to overpower them reduced that number even further."

"Wait, the puelmers actually managed to resist Lufa's tranquility glow and fight the bots to the death?"

The alien tech expert nodded. "The puelmers became a lot more emotional once they became confronted by the intruding bots. Their strong anger and animosity may have been strong enough to overpower the effects of the glow and enable them to offer much greater resistance than normal. We have attempted to employ non-lethal measures to capture them, but the aliens frequently resorted to committing suicide to deny us the satisfaction of capturing them alive. Our bots have only managed to capture 40 or so puelmers intact."

"Damn." Ves grumbled. "I would have loved to know what knowledge all of those smart puelmers keep in their minds. Wait. Those dead puelmers. Did you dispose of their bodies already?"

"Not yet, patriarch. Their advanced round suits of armor are of notable interest to us. We have yet to begin the process of prying them away from the deceased alien bodies."

"Make sure to preserve those alien corpses as best as possible. Their skins are actually quite valuable once we process them into exotic alien leather. There is just something about their rolling physiology that just massages their resilient skin into the right consistency."

"Err... very well, sir."

Ves already wondered if he could make use of puelmer leather to produce interesting new products. Perhaps he could replace his main desk chair with one that he designed and built from the ground up by himself.

He could also try to sew a special handbag for his wife in order to commemorate their happy marriage. Although she had expressed contempt at self-made handbags once before, he bet that he could definitely give her a pleasant surprise if he elevated the product with his creative design and his exquisite craftsmanship!

There were many other possible luxury products that he could make out of quality puelmer leather. He just became a little concerned at the conditions of all of the harvestable skins. What if the bots had been a little too rough and poked a bunch of holes in them? What if energy weapons caused much of the skins to burn into ashes?

"Damn, I hope that enough of their bodies are sufficiently intact. I might have to skin some of the puelmer captives in order to harvest the highest possible quality of raw materials!"