[201-400] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 282: Smooth

The Happy Jelly emerged at the edge of the Glowing Zone in a lurch. Its oft-repaired and barely functional FTL drive strained to bring the ship into realspace without breaking her apart.

Ves gripped the cushioned pod seat sight at the moment of transition, but everyone else simply shrugged off their nausea and went back to work. They had already become used to the violent transitions from the higher dimensions back to the lower ones.

"Damnit, this ship will really kill them all some day." He muttered as the seat automatically withdrew the straps that held him in the pod. "Tell me you didn't enjoy the ride, Lucky."

"Meow!"

Lucky didn't look too chipper either. The glowing blue lines of energy between the gaps of his elegant bronze plating burned bright now. Ves surmised that Lucky already accumulated enough energy to evolve from level 2 to level 3. For some reason, the gem cat held back, likely because Ves needed his help if he wanted to make it through the upcoming campaign.

It didn't help that many of the mechs the Whalers used enjoyed less than stellar maintenance. The lack of leadership, the shortage in manpower and the pervasive attitude of doing the bare minimum resulted in a lot of heavily degraded mechs.

The mech technicians often dismissed the minor problems that piled up in a mech, unaware that several unrelated errors could cascade into catastrophic faults down the line.

Ves had accessed some of the logs and noticed that the Whalers didn't fight very often. This had allowed the problems to fester, because the Whalers never really experienced a significant loss arising from a lack of maintenance.

Now they faced a reckoning. According to some of the contingency plans the Blood Claws passed to the Whalers, each mech might be facing an average of six intensive engagements. In these kinds of pitched battles, the mechanical state of any mech was of extreme importance.

Too bad none of the Whalers really listened to him. The few times he got hold of Walter, the burly man told him to piss off and bother someone else. When Ves approached the officers like Fadah, they'd tell him that he worried too much.

"Sure, our equipment is crap. That's a fact. They're cheap to get and cheap to use. We break things a lot, so we don't actually bother trying to keep our gear in shape."

Indeed, over seventy percent of the mechs aboard the Happy Jelly consisted of frontline mechs. In addition, the Whalers acquired at least half of them through the grey or black market, so their reliability was questionable.

Their only advantage to the gang was that they cost only several million credits a pop. The most basic frontline mech in the Bright Republic could be bought for five million credits. In comparison, Ves thought that some mechs looked like they'd been salvaged from a battlefield and refurbished up to a point where the Whalers snapped them up for half the minimum price.

Very obviously, the Whalers could put a lot of mechs on the field this way. Most of its members consisted of local recruits from Cloudy Curtain who hadn't been able to attend a fancy advanced academy offworld.

This meant that most of them lacked the training and skills to pilot anything more sophisticated than a barebones frontline mech. It would have been useless for them to pilot something as sophisticated as the Blackbleak as they wouldn't be able to control the mech efficiently.

"That's still no excuse to neglect the maintenance of their mechs!"

Ves wanted to tear his hair out. Even though he kicked the mech technicians assigned to his command into action, they quickly returned to old habits once he walked away. Discipline was nonexistent and playing games on their comms turned out to be their most frequent activity.