5090 Gnawing Uncertainty
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?"
He did not have any proof that the interception attempt would fail, but that did not stop him from feeling incredibly uncertain about this dubious operation.
His instincts couldn't avail him in any way at this time. No one among the crew of the stealth frigate saw any reason to question Ylvaine's oracle.
As Zimro continued to stare at the projected map that displayed an estimation of the yurzen raiding fleet's current coordinates and route, he developed an increasing feeling that events wouldn't play out according to plan.
If they got it wrong, then many of the colonists who were stuck on Corellix III would most definitely perish!
Even if the expeditionary fleet managed to catch up to the yurzen raiding fleet while it remained in the vicinity of the planet, it would already be too late to save all of those human lives!
"Phobos?"
"Yes, my friend?"
"You can feel my anxiety, right? Am I being too sensitive about this, or are my concerns justified?"
"...I truly do not know, Zimro."
Though a living mech like the Phobos possessed a lot more confidence in Ylvaine's predictions, his constant exposure to his pilot's doubts had caused him to become a lot less certain about this operation as well.
Neither of them could predict whether this highly improbable interception attempt would succeed.
Zimro pulled out the totem of Ylvaine from his pocket. The patriarch had personally shaped it out of a spare piece of Unending alloy and gave it to the expert pilot.
"Ylvaine is good at predicting a lot of stuff." Ves said at the time. "You can trust him to point you in the right direction for the most part. The biggest caveat is that he struggles to predict powerful entities and highly abnormal phenomena. The energy required to read their futures is too great. I also cannot say for certain whether the aliens possess any intentional or unintentional factors that can mess up his future sight. If you have any reason to doubt his predictions, then listen to your intuition. This is the strongest and most admirable quality of expert pilots such as yourself."
That sounded good, but the problem at the moment was that Zimro's intuition wasn't telling him anything!
He felt he needed to do more than stay dormant in the hangar bay of the Hidden Smile.
He had no influence on everything that was about to happen outside if his expert mech remained hidden and out of the way.
Venerable Zimro made an impulsive decision in an attempt to suppress his inner turmoil.
"Open the main hatch."
"Pardon, Venerable Belson?"
"I need to launch into space in advance."
"That is inappropriate, sir. The plan doesn't call for that. You should wait until the Hidden Smile has maneuvered closer into position before you bring out your Phobos."
"I can't wait for that." Zimro retorted. "Please oblige my request."
It took a bit more arguing before the captain of the Hidden Smile decided to trust the expert pilot and grant permission.
The act of launching into space was a little different from normal. The Hidden Smile was designed in such a fashion that a mech like the Phobos could launch out while keeping the ship under near-perfect stealth.
Perhaps a few minor disturbances were unavoidable, but the Hexer shipwrights and stealth experts had done a good job at minimizing them whenever possible.
The Phobos had already activated his Seferath transphasic active stealth system at this time.
As the expert stealth mech quietly drifted away from the hidden position of the Hidden Smile, Venerable Zimro felt a bit lost at the moment.
What was he supposed to do now that his expert mech had left the hangar bay?
"Meow?"
Even Lucky expressed his confusion! His metallic tail curled in an uncertain manner as he waited to see what Zimro would do next.
Venerable Zimro did not speak at this time. The Phobos was doing his best to remain hidden.
Several minutes passed by as the expert stealth mech continued to drift off without any destination in mind.
It was not until his instincts began to generate a nervous thread in a specific direction that he altered course.
The Phobos made a gentle turn and began to traverse a direction that slightly brought the expert mech closer to the hidden minefield.
The more distance the Phobos traversed, the more Zimro felt as if he was approaching a looming threat.
There wasn't supposed to be anything in front of his expert mech aside from the transphasic mines, and these gadgets had little chance of threatening his machine at this distance.
What was wrong with him? Why did he feel progressively more nervous?
It wasn't until the Phobos drifted forward by a dozen or so kilometers that Zimro forced the Phobos to stop his forward motion.
"Meow?"
"What is the matter, Zimro?" The Phobos asked.
The expert pilot's heart rate had abruptly surged.
His eyes shook as he peered through the forward sensors of the Phobos.
"Can't... can't you feel it, partner?" The man whispered. "If my hunch is correct... we are not alone in this region of space at the moment."
"Meow?!"
Lucky grew a lot more alarmed at the moment.
"I don't think I am wrong." Zimro softly spoke as he gently controlled the Phobos to back away a bit. "In fact, the more I stare at this empty patch of space, the more I think my worries are justified. There is a hostile stealth ship lying in wait in the vicinity of the minefield!"
This was a bold statement, especially when Zimro could not provide any solid proof to back up this explosive assertion!
If his improbable prediction was correct, then the aliens may have arrived in this star system a lot sooner than the humans thought!
