[401-600] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 454: Caught in the Web

Not everyone knew about Colonel Lowenfield's past, and those that did generally kept their mouths shut. Due to the eclectic backgrounds of the servicemen, the Flagrant Vandals developed something of a custom of not looking into anyone's past.

Ves hoped no one minded his attempt at digging into the colonel's backstory. He left Captain Branser to sober up with the help of a pill and left the lounge.

What he learned up to this point weighed increasingly heavy on his mind. The more time he spent with the Vandals, the more he learned they weren't so simple. The rest of the Mech Corps treated the Vandals with disdain, but this also allowed them to bend or break the rules with impunity.

Nominally, the 6th Flagrant Vandals Regiment answered to the 3rd Tarry Division. In practice, the 3rd Tarry exerted almost no measurable influence or control over their erstwhile subordinates. If they placed observers within the ranks of the Vandals, then they must have probably been bought or subverted somehow, because some of the things they did would never fly in the Republic.

"Collaborating with the Vesians, taking loans from unknown entities, exceeding the limits on fieldable mechs, this sure is a doozy."

Ves felt sure that this was just the tip of the iceberg. The Flagrant Vandals had been left to their own devices for so long that they had almost gone feral.

Nobody he met except for those transferred in recently held any belonging to the Republic. Perhaps even those who left family behind became increasingly estranged to their former ties as the strict isolation left them to turn to their fellow servicemen for comradeship.

It seemed as if the only reason they hadn't cut ties with the Republic was because they wouldn't get access to the central database anymore. In every other area except research and development, they achieved tentative self-sufficiency.

"Oh, I can't forget about the debt as well."

He didn't know how reliable Alloc's statement of the Vandals being over 200 billion bright credits in the red. From what he had seen so far, the Journeyman might have lowballed the actual figure.

Keeping two-thousand mechs and mech pilots in fighting condition was hard enough. Adding an extra thousand on top of that would bankrupt any force trying to stay afloat by themselves.

There was a reason many private outfits tended to field a hundred mechs or less. The amount of overhead ramped up pretty hard as larger outfits needed to provide more services. Gathering so many mech pilots in a single place also tended to be difficult to manage, as without sufficient discipline, they had a habit of getting into ego-fueled duels and brawls.

The Flagrant Vandals could count on their professionalism to stem the tide of these phenomena, but only to an extent. Working in the restricted area provided him with plenty of signs that discipline had already begun to strain.

A mech regiment that resembled criminal gangs more than a proud unit of the Mech Corps could not expect its mech pilots to

That left Ves with the most pressing question on his mind.

"What is their endgame?"

Ves did not hold any delusions that the Flagrant Vandals fought out of duty, loyalty or patriotism. The Bright Republic was worth fart for these marginalized servicemen.

Colonel Lowenfield seemed to be steering them towards some other goal that he couldn't quite figure out yet. Whatever it was, she felt it necessary to expand their numbers by half. Given her background as a logistical officer, much of her plans would be well out of sight. People like her knew how to hide plenty of secrets in plain sight.