The Mech Touch novel Chapter 5090

It was common sense in space to never travel in straight lines.

This was especially the case in times of war and conflict.

Any human fleet that traversed through alien-occupied space would always be vigilant about getting ambushed en route.

If the aliens collected enough information about the coordinates and the direction of travel of a human fleet, then it was possible to prepare an ambush along the way.

The best way to prevent this from happening was to vary the direction of travel from time to time.

By deviating from the most mathematically optimal route and taking a few short detours, the chances of slamming into ambushes dropped dramatically!

This was a habit that had already been ingrained into many well-run human fleets.

The same applied for the aliens.

Even if the aliens did not think it was likely for adversaries to prepare an ambush for their fleet, it was still prudent to make regular course changes, just to prevent them from flying straight into a field of mines.

The operation that the Hidden Smile had just commenced should have little to no chance of successfully working.

Predicting the right route and coordinates of the incoming yurzen raiding fleet should be as difficult as finding a needle in a planet-sized haystack!

Venerable Zimro Belson had a better chance winning a lottery than to make the correct predictions.

Yet that was exactly what they had just done!

When Zirmo 'communed' with Ylvaine and recited the set of coordinates supplied by the design spirit, the DIVA operatives proceeded into motion as if the information they obtained was infallible.

This was ridiculous!

It was not as if Venerable Zimro doubted Ylvaine's ability to make accurate predictions. The successful performance of the Transcendent Punishers and the Transcendent Chargers among other Ylvainan mechs showed that the design spirit possessed real prediction skills.

However, Zimro still found it rather difficult to believe that Ylvaine could foresee enemy movements so far in advance while still providing accurate coordinates!

Trying to predict the correct route and coordinates among so many different possible choices was mind-bogglingly difficult!

Most fleets did not just vary their trajectories on the horizontal plane. They also did not hesitate to fly significantly above or below the invariable plane of a star system!

Making a correct prediction to intercept a fleet that varied its flight path to such an extent was virtually impossible.

Yet the Golden Skull Alliance did not hesitate to turn this into the lynchpin of its ambitious plan!

"Do you think this can truly work, Lucky?"

"Meow meow." The cat replied in a non-committal tone.

The cat had already changed into his upgraded Misfortune Harness at this time. The black metal armor was supposed to make him look more menacing, but it also happened to make him look cuter in the process!

Though Venerable Zimro wasn't able to understand cat speech like certain other members of the Larkinson Clan, he was able to gauge the cat's emotions easily enough.

"You have greater faith than me, then." The expert pilot shook his head. "What about you, partner?"

"Faith has gained a power of its own in the Age of Dawn." The third order living mech spoke in a soft tone to reflect their hidden state. "Your mindset is still stuck in the Age of Mechs. That is cute, Zimro, but it will not avail you much in these changing times. Exotic radiation is more powerful than you can comprehend. Ever since I have started to 'cultivate1 according to the method passed on to me, I can already feel myself growing smarter and tougher in ways that should be impossible."

Venerable Zimro along with many other mech pilots felt puzzled by that. They never heard about mechs absorbing energy from the environment and magically evolving by themselves all of a sudden. Even biomechs did not grow over time to such an extent!

Still, they could not deny what was happening in reality. They interfaced and interacted with their living mechs every day. They not only experienced the accelerated growth of their battle partners practically first-hand, but also benefited from it a bit as some of that progress fed back to them through the man-machine connection!

Time passed by as Venerable Zimro continued to wait for further developments.

At one point, he received an update from a DIVA communications officer.

"Our listening posts have successfully confirmed that the incoming yurzen raiding fleet is still following the predicted trajectory." The woman spoke. "The fleet in warp is projected to hit the mines or bypass them within approximately 76 minutes. Please get ready. If the mines succeed in pulling the alien warships out of warp, then we must move quickly before the aliens can depart."

The expert pilot grew a lot more alert at this time.

The remaining minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness as Zimro constantly wondered whether the alien fleets would bump into the mines.

Did Ylvaine manage to make the correct prediction?

Zimro truly wanted to believe that the design spirit had managed to get it right, because the consequences of getting it wrong were too serious!

The colony established on the surface of Corellix III housed around 900,000 colonists according to the latest count.

This was a massive figure for a colony at this stage of development, but the pioneers had originally been optimistic about starting extensive mining and industrial processing operations in this metal-rich star system.

Now, only around 1300 mechs along with an incomplete array of defensive turrets and fortifications were all that stood in the way of total destruction.

Thinking about how many lives were at stake made Zimro feel increasingly more concerned.

He thought about how few minutes the Hidden Smile deployed. The stealth frigate was small and slim to begin with in order to make it as easy as possible to hide her emissions.

Her storage capacity was quite limited for that reason. She was only able to carry a single mech and two small stealth shuttles in her hangar bay. Her cargo hold also couldn't hold more than a couple of dozen modestly-sized transphasic mines.

The damage potential of these mines were fairly low. They were mainly designed to break warp bubbles and throw starships out of warp travel.

These mines had an effective range that stretches on for tens of kilometers in a vacuum environment, but that was incredibly small in open space!

In order to increase the hit rate of these mines, they possessed the capacity to move and relocate, but that only worked against relatively slow-moving targets, not ships traveling in warp!

The alien fleet could easily bypass the 'net1 cast by the Hidden Smile by thousands of kilometers or more if it just shifted its forward direction at the slightest of angles.

When the critical time dwindled down to 30 minutes, Venerable Zimro could no longer hold in his unease.

"What if Ylvaine is wrong?"

It took a bit more arguing before the captain of the Hidden Smile decided to trust the expert pilot and grant permission. _{freёwebnoѵel.com}

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