The Mech Touch

Right now, Reina Kernsk was no longer conscious and aware of what took place. Her mind had completely shut off in order to allow for another person to 'pilot' her body as if it was a biomech!

Saint Yorvick Clive knew that the actual person in control of this body was Elder Yistrach Clive, a woman who held great authority over the Clive Consortium.

Not only that, Yistrach Clive also happened to be the mother of Yenames Clive.

It was due to her love and desire for her son to do well in this important assignment that she had decided to intervene and trigger a highly consequential action that was years in the planning!

"My son isn't ruthless enough." The elder expressed her disapproval as her actions triggered a series of events that were bound to drastically change the trajectory of Davute from this day onward!

Elder Yistrach Clive did not maintain the tenuous connection to her current meat avatar for too long.

Since she resided all the way in the old galaxy, she was only able to maintain this extremely intimate connection over the galactic net.

No matter how well she and her trusted subordinates encrypted this data transmission, the chances of getting caught rose exponentially the longer she maintained it. This was especially the case when she connected to the cranial implant of a crucial figure in President Yenames Clive's administration!

As such, she did not linger any further and decisively shut down the connection.

The chief of staff's body slumped for a few seconds as her cranial implant exhibited dramatically less activity.

Once the woman straightened her back and restored her old posture, the original personality and consciousness of the body was back in charge!

What was odd about her return was that she did not exhibit any awareness that she had blanked out or that a completely different individual hijacked her body for a brief moment!

As far as Reina Kernsk was concerned, she had just concluded a fruitful meeting with her boss. She did not notice the unexplainable passage of time as her brain literally could not process this specific thought.

Madame Kernsk turned towards the direction of the Indormeon and made a respectful bow.

"I shall be making my way to the primary control room in order to supervise the sound engineers and the producers in person."

"You may proceed." Saint Yorvick Clive transmitted as if he had checked her intentions and found nothing untoward.

As the woman moved away, the ace knight mech that was hovering behind the grand stage remained mostly still.

Its pilot understood quite well the events that would take place after the elder had intervened.

Saint Yorvick even participated in the planning of the secret plan as it involved many moving parts that had to go exactly right in order to make it possible.

Did he feel guilty for playing a key enabling role in a violent disruption of the founding ceremony?

He did not. Though Yorvick ostensibly pledged his service to the colonial government and its prospective president, he always remained loyal to the Clive Consortium.

In any cases where these two loyalties conflicted, he was commanded to prioritize the interests of the colonial state over the interests of any individual stakeholder.

At least that was supposed to happen.

The reality was that the Clive Consortium tampered with the procedures and created a deliberate loophole that ensured that his original employer could still count on his assistance in certain matters!

As far as Saint Yorvick was concerned, his continued loyalty to the Clive Consortium superseded every other promise and commitment he made.

He even received express permission from the Clives to lie or misrepresent his position if that was necessary for him to perform his missions!

Although this was not an act that was becoming of an honorable ace pilot, Saint Yorvick had never been raised to respect notions such as honor and fairness.

He just presented everyone with the illusion that he was honorable and that he never spoke any falsehoods. This was what he had been trained to do since before he graduated from the mech academy.

Not many individuals knew his true guise. Only certain elders and senior leadership figures of the Clive Consortium understood his true nature.

This was also the main reason why he had been chosen to accompany his cousin Yenames Clive to the new frontier. The elders of the consortium would always be able to count on Saint Yorvick to assist with any corrective actions that they wanted to make.

The ace pilot silently prepared to defend his principal against the attack that he knew was coming.

Though the deaths that would surely fall already weighed on his consciousness, the mission always came first.

Having accompanied and guarded Yenames for several years, Yorvick personally agreed with Yistrach's judgment that the prospective president had been too soft in his decisions and compromised more often than he needed.

Since Saint Yorvick Clive roughly knew what was coming, he could already sense the air growing more and more tense.

While he waited for the action to start, the secret commands transmitted by the elder controlling Reina Kernsk's body were starting to do their work.

They made use of cleverly hidden backdoors that had been integrated in the software and hardware of many of the sophisticated control systems utilized by the colonial government.

Some of the commands did nothing more than temporarily deactivate a safety setting.

This allowed specific individuals, from systems engineers to military personnel, to secretly alter the settings of their areas of responsibility.

For example, the security personnel in charge of controlling the powerful energy shields that protected the VIPs of Block E, Block M and Block Y surreptitiously abused their access authority and weakened the protection to those seating blocks.

They did not directly reduce the power levels of the crucial energy shields. That would be too obvious and definitely make people suspicious.

Instead, they accomplished their goals by secretly sabotaging the settings of the power generators and energy transmission systems responsible for enabling the power-hungry shield generators to do their jobs.

If the shield generators could not draw nearly enough energy to resist an overwhelming attack, then the seemingly powerful energy shields were liable to collapse in an instant!

Another group of personnel committed a more obvious and blatant act of sabotage.

These compromised individuals similarly abused their access to highly sensitive systems to produce a small number of alterations that seemed completely innocuous and harmless on the surface.

While this may be true of these changes took place in isolation, when they all interacted with each other at the same time, they happened to produce a rare cascade of glitches that ultimately caused the power supply of multiple spatial interdiction field generators to become increasingly more unstable!

Just as any other advanced technological device, the power requirements were extremely harsh. The advanced field generators may be a product of high technology, but they were only ever designed to operate with an abundant supply of energy within reach!

As these ominous changes were taking place throughout the Government District of Kotor City, an entirely different set of events had been set into motion in a different location.

Even though the colony of Davute established the Academic District shortly after landfall, it was situated considerably further away from the Government District than the other starting city districts.

This was because the founders of Davute already envisioned the need to build a large and extensive academic sector to accelerate the research and development of their colonial state.

The first and most impressive academic institution was the Davute University of Technology.

The colonial state invested a lot of funding and resources to enable the DUT to output a lot of research and excellent graduates. Davute needed both of them to gain an edge in the upcoming war against Karlach!

However, the plan initiated by Elder Yistrach Clive did not concern the Davute University of Technology.

Instead, the focus lay on the institution that sat adjacent to the campus of the DUT.

The Davute Biotechnology University was almost just as old. Throughout its young history, it has quickly risen and secured its place as the region's most premier academic institution in the field of biotechnology and biosciences!

The government may not invest as much money into the DBU, but the level of funding was sufficient to fund a number of massive research initiatives.

The directors of the biotechnology institutions had chosen to pursue a strategy of specialization. By concentrating a large share of resources into specific departments and research projects, the DBU would quickly be able to stand out and become a famed and prestigious biotechnology university in Krakatoa and the neighboring middle zones.

One of the departments of the Davute Biotechnology University that had been selected for this strategy was the  Olena Volkova School of Genetics and Exobiology, or OVS for short.

As a university department that was specifically set up to study the wonderful diversity of alien organisms of a brand-new galaxy, the OVS played a crucial role in figuring out how alien exobeasts and exoplants worked.

By understanding the unique and wonderful products of nature in the Red Ocean, biotech researchers could subsequently use this knowledge to develop many difficult applications.

While this kind of work was most often used to develop powerful new genetic modification templates for the purpose of human augmentation, the goals were different in the new frontier.

Institutions such as the OVS primarily studied and experimented with the organic systems of native exobeasts to decipher and make use of their biological relationship with phasewater!

As phasewater was an exotic that was prevalent on many different planets, including lifebearing ones, it was rare but not completely unheard of for organisms to evolve that somehow incorporated phasewater into their bodies without getting torn apart.

This was extremely special as there were many intelligent species in the Red Ocean that tried and failed to accomplish the same result through artificial means.

A small proportion of rare phasewater exobeasts even grew so formidable that they had become absolute apex predators that could demolish plenty of mechs with the help of their remarkable abilities!

The existence of these creatures spurred frantic research projects throughout the Red Ocean.

Davute did not want to be left out of the party, so it invested a lot of resources and other forms of support to get the Olena Volkova School of Genetics and Exobiology off the ground as soon as possible.

Right now, many schools in the Academic District closed their doors due to the start of the founding ceremony.

Many students either traveled to one of the more central and dynamic city districts or chose to gather and celebrate at the few local establishments that continued to operate on this important day.

Only a small number of guards and caretakers could still be found inside the nearly emptied school buildings.

Although many scientists preferred to witness the founding ceremony in downtown Kotor City, a lot of sensitive, dangerous and complicated laboratories needed more than a bunch of uneducated guards to control the situation.

Only the scientists who worked in these facilities themselves possessed the deep knowledge and expertise to respond to any accidents and prevent ongoing experiments from escalating into calamities.

By far, most of the scientists and researchers would rather be elsewhere than remaining stuck in their labs. They would rather join the soirées organized by their distinguished colleagues or gather with a number of other professors and industry magnates in order to expand their networks and secure additional funding for their pet projects.

Since a few of the scientists absolutely had to be left behind, the universities and schools all employed lotteries to decide who had to undertake this undesirable duty.

In rare cases, a few of the researchers chose to volunteer for this duty, either because they could gain a valuable favor which they could cash in at a later date, or because they wanted to grant their other colleagues the time of their life.

Professor Murmillian Granse of the Olena Volkova School of Genetics and Exobiology happened to be among the volunteers.

The only difference was that he had no use of favors and he did not accept this boring assignment because he wanted to sacrifice himself for his fellow researchers.

His motivations were entirely different from everyone else, because he did not possess much of an attachment towards Davute at all. He could care less about attending the founding ceremony.

The truth was that Professor Murmillian Granse was a traitor all along.