[401-600] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 474: Compromised

Certain mech designers liked to employ such traps in their mechs and offer them to the market as security features.

With the amazing amount of power and value associated with mechs, theft was an unavoidable fact of life. The amount of potentates willing to make a living by stealing mechs instead of piloting them in battle was quite a lot, and over hundreds of years they became rather inventive in their methods.

Security suites kept pace as well of course. When Ves licenced a cockpit production license, it already came with an appropriate security suite. Since the cockpit models he selected for the Blackbeak and the Crystal Lord designs fell into the premium range, Ves had never heard of someone managing to steal them from their rightful owners.

Yet.

There would always be freaks and genius hacking teams that could accomplish the impossible. To deter these threats, mechs sometimes incorporated a couple of hidden self-sabotage measures that would spring their traps at the right time.

Ves himself never thought about using such inane methods because he didn't care too much about in whose hands his mechs ended up with after his company sold them off for the first time.

The mech designer of the knight mech in front of him thought otherwise. This person must have been a rather vindictive fellow, because its multi-layered security was replete with traps and other obstacles. It took the two remaining hackers a lot of effort to get past the final locks.

"The risks of taking the knight mech along our deployments is too great." Orfan eventually decided. "Yet it's a shame to keep it in the stables. Tell you what. I'll allow it to be brought online, but assign the mech to guard this base. The damage it could do to our other mechs will be kept to a minimum."

That safeguarded the Vandal mechs deployed on the streets, but opened the door to other risks inside the base.

Ves did not know whether to feel comfortable with this solution, because the fallout of a compromised mech might spill out to the rest of the base. Still, it wasn't as if they had any choice.

"Let's do that then."

A mech pilot came to wake the dubious mech up. Nothing strange happened at the start, so the sabotage didn't go into effect at once. Ves read the telemetry transmitted by the mech but couldn't spot any anomalies either. In the end, he gave up trying to figure out the consequences and let the mech take up its guard duty.

"Alright, get back to work!" Ves yelled at the Vesian hackers. "There are still several more mechs to go!"

It took a long time to get the handful of remaining mechs to unlock. Night had fallen by the time the mech stables became empty. The only untouched mechs that remained consisted of a handful of damaged mechs that the Vandals had somehow taken out in the process of conquering this base.

They didn't have enough time to bring them all online. Ves hounded the hackers past their exhaustion and forced them to unlock the one mech which the mech technicians labored to restore to limited functionality.

Its lame leg might not provide the damaged mech with a lot of mobility, but when it came to standing guard, its crippled limb didn't pose much of a hindrance.

"This is all I can do for now."

Both the mech technicians and the hackers worked in a neverending shift. While Ves himself felt he could go on for a entire week, the others only possessed a limited physique. Pushing them on was out of the question.

"You can rest now."

The mech technicians sighed and dragged their weary bodies out of the mech stables. Troopers carried the prisoners back to their cells. Hardly anything of value remained in the empty mech stables.