For the next ten days, the design team was free to work without interference, constructing and deconstructing the Line Mecha chassis until they were reasonably sure that they had it perfect. In fact, it had gone so well that they were about to put Nico in the cockpit to do movement tests inside the bay when the incoming enemies alert sounded through their Cutter.
[Incoming Arisen vessels from the planet's interior side. Four vessels in total. Two are moving to engage the human fleet.] The Watch Captain informed the ship in his deep baritone voice.
[Inform the other vessels to deploy their Mecha but not engage at this time. Let the Arisen decide if we're fighting today.] Max reminded them.
If they wanted the humans to stay out of the fight, they would oblige, but the Koleska had made huge strides in their Piloting over the last week, with a new class of Pilot graduates on the lines and everyone making use of both the learning machines and the VR gaming pods to improve their skills.
The Cadet Corps flew up from the surface within minutes, and Max watched as the farmers pulled War Machines out of the barns and aimed them skyward, intent on preventing orbital assaults, though the Arisen would normally just appear on the surface and not need to fly down like a normal enemy.
Two Mixed Regiments and a hundred Titan Class Mecha based on the design of Cleansing Light were deployed from the human ships, and the two Arisen Cube Ships stopped at a distance of fifty thousand kilometres, sitting between them and the battle on the planet.
But the battle never occurred. The Koleska got fully deployed in under ten minutes, and the Arisen Army's fleet simply disappeared.
Max was too far away to read the minds of the Koleska Commanders, but they were broadcasting their thoughts for anyone to hear, and they were not happy with being ready checked by the Arisen.
They had diverted an entire planet's population, sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers into space, and scrambled an entire Battle Group from the Station and the surrounding ships, amounting to millions of total work hours, and not a single shot was fired.
But the biggest problem was that it was making the politicians nervous. There was no way to tell if they backed down because they were outnumbered by the defenders with the human fleet here or if they really hadn't been intent on attacking if the Koleska had done what they wanted and prepared the entire planet for war.
If they sent the fleet away to reinforce the other war zones, would the next Arisen attack be much worse for them? Or would it be the same because they responded the same?
The uncertainty was enough to rattle the Politicians, even when it relieved the Commanders. They didn't sign the checks, and the money wasn't coming out of their accounts, so why would they care if they did a forced ready check? They should be done at random anyhow, so why should it matter if the Arisen initiated one themselves?
[Well, that was fun.] The leader of the Super Heavy Battalion laughed.
The Koleska started to disappear back into their ships and return to the planet while the human force stood guard, waiting until they were sure that the threat was really gone before they stood down.
Max was about to return to his work when he checked the sensors one last time and noticed that not every alien vessel had departed. There was one Darkling attack craft hidden at the edge of the asteroid field, and the sensors of his Cutter had detected the scans it had sent out to analyze the newly arrived human Mecha.
One small attack craft was no real threat, but it meant that the next time they met, the alien species would know a lot more about their capabilities than they had the last time. The real question was if they would assume that all of these Mecha had the same capabilities as Max's Cleansing Light did or if they had already realized that they were a reproduction of the original and didn't have all of the same weapons systems since they had been optimized for ease of use and for fighting against the Arisen.
After a few minutes, the small attack craft vanished into the asteroid belt, vanishing from his scanners, and the region was deemed all clear for the Mecha to return to base.
It was an interesting change but hardly important as the species already had a pretty good grasp of the capabilities of human Mecha after being involved in a few battles involving Max and Nico.
But the Innu took it differently.
"What if they're planning to change their stance on humans? Either to ask us to fight with them or to attack us? We should have something completely unexpected when we scale the Line Mecha up for Lead Researcher Nico's personal unit.
Rapid fire Mass Drivers and Disruptors are an amazing combination and would be suitable for use on pretty much any class of production Mecha, but for a Commander's personal unit, we need something with more flair." The researcher explained this to Max as soon as he returned to the lab bay.
"Well, we will consider anything if it's effective and stable. But Nico has the last word since it's her personal Mecha you're going to be working on once this Line Mecha design is finished and tested. Impressing her with your ideas isn't going to be easy. Even impressing the tenured professors to get your doctoral thesis approved might be easier." Max replied with a wink to let the Innu know he was at least partially joking.
"We will be done with the Line Mecha soon, I'm certain of it. My thesis is on layered space and the properties of the other spatial layers. I have a theory that we can breach them, and if I am right, we should be able to not only move more quickly but harness an immense amount of energy from the other layers."
Max knew all those words but still had no idea what she was talking about beyond the most basic of concepts.
"Well, I hope that you can get an experiment approved." He informed her, which seemed to be enough to assure the researcher that he wasn't going to flat-out reject her idea.
She went back to work in a much better mood than she had been in a few minutes ago, and Max saw the dozens of Professors and others who had called her delusional or insane for her ideas. But the true innovators always got called insane until they could prove that they were right, and that was ultimately the only way to tell a visionary genius from a lunatic or conspiracy theorist.
She had certainly been sent on the right deployment, though. With the number of times, he could see her being shut down in her memories, they were likely the only chance that she had to actually get someone to let her try to breach the layers in space, assuming that they actually existed, of course.
Most of the other Thesis ideas were more plausible, but none of them would be easy to accomplish on a practical level. They would likely spend most of their time here just trying to prove new theories, but if it led to a breakthrough, Nico might finally have the Mecha that she had been dreaming about.
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