Chapter 195. Control (1/2)
”Is it ours?” Ves asked as he walked towards the inner base.
”It's doubtful.” D'Amato replied as he tried to hurry up. His missing arm disrupted his coordination. ”From what little sensors we still have in place that are transmitting back their readings, the fleet is several times larger than the expeditionary fleet at its height. None of the incoming ships are broadcasting any identifiers that we can recognize either.”
Could there be a fourth party trying to ruin the third party's game? Or were the sandmen up to no good?
”It's not the sandmen, if that's what you're thinking. They're fairly distinctive even at a distance.”
They entered a command center after the guards verified their identities. These days, his contributions extended Ves a lot of privileges including extended access of the base. He even got to meet Commander Tregis in person.
The man looked as if he'd aged a lot since the start of the expedition. Tregis wearily gestured Ves into his office. ”Ah, I was just about to summon your presence. Please sit.”
After Ves and D'Amato took a seat, he began to ask the first thing that came to his mind.. ”What's the status of the pirates?”
Tregis gripped his fist. ”They're getting close to finding out the entrance to the underground cavern. Even without a professional surveyor in their payroll, they're exploring and scanning the surface of Groening IV with numbers on their side. With the amount of processing power at their disposal, they'll discover the entrance at any moment now!”
The ground team faced a difficult situation then. If the recent arrivals turned out to be friendly, then the base camp merely had to wait out their arrival. If they proved hostile, then they had even less hope than before, because any friendly reinforcements would have to go through two enemy fleets.
Ves couldn't give up too soon. He held out hope that the incoming fleet would prove friendly. ”How shall we fend off the pirates if they come? We don't have a lot of assets left. In addition, all of our mechs and mech pilots are worn out.”
”According to the latest calculations, the unknown fleet is making good speed towards Groening IV. If the Dragons of the Void make a stand, then both fleets are projected to clash within twenty-two hours. A fleet engagement will drag on for several hours, though, so we'll have to hold out for around thirty hours.”
Thirty hours sounded a lot. With the arrival of an unknown element, the pirates must be accelerating their efforts at finding the entrance to the lush metallic jungle underneath the surface of the planet.
”We'll have to do our best to fortify our position then.”
Tregis nodded. ”Our miners have already finished extracting the motherlode, so we can fully concentrate our defenses here. However, that still leaves us with an exhausted force. In truth, I've assigned some men to employ a radical solution to increase our defenses.”
”What is it?”
”Bringing back to Kaius online.”
What? Ves widened his eyes as he heard the preposterous words coming from his mouth. ”That's impossible! That mech is a badly-damaged enigma and we don't even know how it works!”
Ves thought that Chief Ramirez and his men were in the process of dismantling the huge chimera mech in order to make it easier to move.
The base commander didn't deny his assertions. ”It's a longshot, but we should be prepared to employ every resource we have on hand. Our exobiologists and mech technicians are already at work trying to get the biological machine to work. They're still encountering problems with the control method. Your should see if you can lend a hand.”
After Ves received his assignment, he left the office, but not before he got his shield generator back. He'd been looking for the valuable life-saving device. Tregis told him that his men found it in a corner or something, but Ves knew they probably tried to appropriate it for themselves only to get defeated by its highly advanced locks.
Once he stepped outside, he took a deep breath and sampled the local air. Ever since he got transformed, he didn't bother wearing a bulky hazard suit anymore. The things were nuisances as far as he was concerned, though he also drew a lot of weird looks. No other human could survive toxic atmosphere without a suit.
”It smells like death.”
With D'Amato and Lucky in tow, Ves walked over to a beefed up workshop and received a very firm security check before being allowed entry.
The Kaius obviously received a lot of care. A combination of workers from multiple disciplines crawled over the dormant monster. They worked on both its mechanical and biological components.
Impressively enough, the workers made good headway with both. Replacing the worn-out alloy components with freshly fabricated ones required little brain power, though Ves found it regretful that they hadn't consulted him about it. After all, Jutland likely improvised the later additions, which caused the chimera mech to become increasingly burdened.
Still, that mattered little compared to the living components of the mech. A couple of exobiologists who Ves didn't recognize led a team of assistants in reviving and healing most of the damaged tissue. Compared to Doctor Jutland, they made a lot of progress by virtue of their collective intelligence and much better lab equipment.
”Come over, Ves.” Ramirez called while he looked over the giant mech from a ramp. When Ves climbed the ramp, he once again got a good glimpse of the chimera mech's primal majesty. This was truly a mech that ruled over all. ”The commander wanted to keep you out of it, but we're running out of time. This mech is nothing but a hunk of junk if we can't figure out its control method.”
Ves understood House Kaine's desire to monopolize the inner workings of the Kaius. The machine not only represented a unique fusion of the living and the mechanical, it also outperformed any other mech of its size.
”How did Doctor Jutland control the mech anyway? What kind of progress have you made?”
The maintenance chief shrugged his shoulders. ”You'll have to ask the exobiologists for the specifics, but in short they found some creepy stuff inside the head of this big thing. It looked like a brain of a mech pilot that's been tortured into staying alive. Well, we ripped it off as fast as possible and started working together to rewire the Kaius into accepting the input of a standard cockpit.”
When Ves looked over the schematic of their progress, he found that they made some significant changes to the Kaius. They stuffed a sturdy cockpit in the chest cavity that used to hold the giant psychic brain that Captain Kaine punctured at the end of Jutland's final stand. The mech technicians worked together with the exobiologists to allow the cockpit's neural interface to connect with the nervous system of the Kaius.
”I'll be honest with you.” Ves said after studying the schematics. ”I don't have a clue how the neural interface works. This is out of my area of expertise.”
The Mech Trade Association posed very strict limits on the modification of a neural interface. It would be very easy to make the wrong decision that could end up frying a mech pilot's mind. Most mech designers opt to use a standard, off-the-shelf neural interface without any tweaks for that reason.
”No one else knows a thing either. Just take a look at it and see if you can knock it into place.”
With time running out, the base camp needed every asset ready to defend against invaders. Commander Tregis put a lot of hope into the Kaius. The chimera mech was a king among melee-oriented mechs, possessing a perfect mix of speed, power and armor.
Ves first approached the chest area that had been opened up to make way for a cockpit. An exobiologist stood next to it wracking his mind on the problem.
”Hey, can you tell me what kind of issues you've encountered trying to get the neural interface to work?”
”It's complicated.” The man replied, but explained the issue in a simple way. ”The Kaius is not just a machine. It's also a living being. The remarkable thing about this chimera mech is that it possesses its own subconscious that is able to decide whether to allow you to control it. Obviously, we're not Doctor Jutland, so it hasn't submitted to our control.”