[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 176: Groening System

Even Ves and Chief Ramirez had to make do with fewer mech technicians as every department became short-handed. Still, the overhaul of the Ajax Olympians still continued largely on schedule. Lord Kaine personally sent them a memo telling them not to reassign too many men away from this project.

"The big man himself wants to see these mechs up and running before we set foot on Groening IV." Chief Ramirez told Ves. "There will be hell to pay if we end up holding up the timetable. We've already suffered too many delays."

Everyone soon got over the deaths and went back to work with determination. This time, the hunting platoon didn't regard Ves as a busybody who had no place in their midst. While Captain Kaine still avoided him like the plague, he got along a bit better with the rank and file.

Even Ensign D'Amato mellowed out. He gave permission to Melkor to carry his personal sidearm and allowed Lucky to stroll around with just a tracking collar. Ves appreciated the amount of trust House Kaine extended to him. He felt a little safer now that Melkor could respond immediately.

"Will the expedition still be viable?" Ves asked the ensign one day. "We lost an awful lot of mercenaries. Will Lord Kaine be able to hunt enough hexapods to make up for his massive investment?"

"I'm not privy to the costs, but from what I know, Lord Kaine has already taken the loss into account before we even set off for this expedition. We always knew that we'll be losing a lot of mercenaries along the way. They're not exactly the most trustworthy bunch."

His remark made Ves look up at him. "You guys intended to cull the mercenaries from the start."

It sounded really devious now that he thought about it. He always wondered why Lord Kaine hired so many mercenaries to begin with. The man appeared to invite disaster by keeping so many potential enemies close. Now it seemed that the wily old fox had other intentions in mind.

The ensign smirked. "There might still be some people with questionable loyalties among the mercenaries, but they won't have the numbers to threaten our fleet. We've already cleaned up the worst of the bunch together with their pirate associates."

A few questions remained, however. Post-battle analysis revealed that much of the Dragons of the Void fought to the death except for the flagship of the pirate group. The pirate commander ruthlessly threw away his entire force and fled without a single shred of decency.

Once investigators began to dig in to the wrecks, they found to their surprise that much of the crew had been hopped up with stimulants. The poisonous cocktail fanned their aggression and lowered their inhibitions. In particular, they stopped fearing death.

To everyone's surprise, none of them had been forcibly injected with them. Instead, an unknown force subjected many of the pirates to a sophisticated form of brainwashing. The mech pilots had it particularly worse as their neural interfaces had been tampered with. When Ves had been asked to take a look, his face turned white as a sheet.

He beheld the half-broken neural interface helmet like it was a live grenade. "This thing is pure insanity. Messing around with the neural interface without express permission from the MTA is never a good idea. They've touched on a fundamental taboo."

The human mind was sacred. No one condoned brainwashing, not even if it happened to pirates. In the long history of humanity's rise to the stars, they dabbled plenty of times with various forms of brainwashing and mental conditioning. The horror of forming a society of human-form robots had once threatened humanity's dominance over the galaxy.

Still, the professional investigators working for House Kaine kept the details close to their chest. They only briefly consulted Ves on his opinions of the mechs they salvaged from the battlefield.