Chapter 7025 Shifting Geopolitical Landscape
Chapter 7025 Shifting Geopolitical Landscape
Several fancy new warfleets of the Cybernetic Empire had arrived in the territories of the Rubarthan Pact!
After arriving at their respective destinations, the warships and unarmed vessels of the latest superpower of the red humanity scarcely spent their time in realspace before they moved to the nearest Lagrange points and engaged their advanced superdrives.
From the data readings of their FTL transitions, it appeared that the Cybers had managed to refine and improve the superdrive into a more efficient and optimized product.
The initial versions of superdrives consisted of crude but effective attempts to merge the functions of human FTL drives and alien warp drives together.
The combination certainly worked in theory as well as in practice, but the implementation was anything but elegant.
Newer superdrives became more efficient and fixed a lot of little flaws and quirks. They required less phasewater to construct and took less time to traverse the same distance.
However, this combination tech was still relatively unrefined. The researchers and developers who worked in this sector knew that there was a lot of room for improvement.
However, the apparent performance of the more advanced superdrive pretty much told them that their work thus far was child's play compared to what the scientists and engineers of the Cybernetic Empire managed to produce!
They must feel incredibly sour about the immense technological lead between themselves and the Cybers.
There was no way for the rest of red humanity to catch up to the Cybers anytime soon!
Unless red humanity obtained theoretical secrets or an actual physical copy of a Cyber superdrive, the work of ordinary developers would always remain far behind!
Superdrive developers were not the only people who worried about their competitiveness. Many other R&D personnel had many reasons to feel concerned about whether the Cybers had reduced them all to primitives who had fallen at least two generations behind!
Even mech designers feared whether their works had become obsolete. The Polymath alone had 53 years to push the standards of mech design to an extensive degree.
However, it was difficult to make comparisons when the Cybernetic Empire refused to share details about their most advanced mech lines.
The new human superpower tightly controlled all transmissions of information between Bridgehead One and the rest of human society.
This action disappointed many red humans who looked forward to exploring the progress made in 'the future'.
A turbulent week went by. Every day, more developments took place. The geopolitical landscape continued to shift drastically as the hegemony maintained by the Red Association and the Red Fleet continued to diminish.
The mechers and the fleeters had no good answers to the events that took them by surprise.
Their power was lacking and tied to existing frontline commitments. Now that they had been deprived of their overwhelming power, they could only rely on diplomacy and other forms of soft power in order to maintain their authority over human space.
Unfortunately… not that many people liked the mechers and the fleeters to begin with. Just as with the Big Two, the Red Two might not come across as evil, but they had long built up a reputation for being insufferably arrogant.
Even if the mechers and fleeters had long safeguarded human civilization and made sure that most ordinary people became shielded from both alien threats and human depravity, the common folk did not necessarily understand all of the effort their overlords had made to increase galactic stability for so many years.
It did not help that the hegemons also claimed a large amount of wealth and resources from their subjects. They occupied the best star systems and levied all sorts of fees and taxes.
Perhaps the ordinary folk might not have any direct exposure to this exploitation, but even they could tell when the growth and development of their states were constrained by the mechers and the fleeters.
Of the two, the mechers at least managed to earn a little more sympathy due to their openness in recruiting from the masses. They also dealt with products that a lot of people were able to get in touch with during their lifetimes.
As for the fleeters, hardly anyone outside of the mysterious spaceborn clans understood them. The warship guardians were so insular that they came across as different species to those who encountered them for the first time.
All in all, the RA and the RF found itself completely out of their element as they belatedly learned that neglecting popular support might cause them to lose control over the Red Ocean Union!
As the only colonial alliance that was not aligned with the Terrans or the Rubarthans, the Red Ocean Union had become even more important to the Red Two than before.
If they lost control over this space, then not only would the mechers and the fleeters be their remaining source of manpower and capital, they also stood to lose their last remaining shreds of legitimacy!
There was no way the RA and the RF could maintain their enormous sizes and fund their astronomical expenses without a real dominion at their disposal!
For this reason, the mechers and the fleeters no longer remained complacent and rapidly worked to shore up the shortcomings that caused a lot of people to lose faith in the hegemons who shaped the old human order.
The Red Two made the uncharacteristic decision to become more transparent. Their propaganda arms suddenly became a lot busier as they worked to highlight the many contributions their god pilots and warfleets had made in safeguarding human civilization!
[The Fist of Defiance has made an incursion across the border! He and his invincible superdimensional god mech have smashed apart more than a dozen alien assault fleets and personally crushed the skulls of an ancient phase whale and dozens of other phase leaders! Analysts believe that the god pilot's daring raid will slow down the ongoing offensive against the Krakatoa Middle Zone and prevent it from falling to the native alien invaders.]
[Since the beginning of the Red War, we have sacrificed multiple mech corps and hundreds of warships to the enemy. The Red Association and the Red Fleet have done so without expecting to earn any honors or remuneration from all of the states that are at risk of succumbing to the ongoing invasions. Without our active protection, all of the states that are located in the zones under attack would have succumbed without exception. Even the Terran and Rubarthan zones are doomed to crumble if we were not present to assist them in defending their own border regions.]
Everyone noticed the differences right away. The mechers and the fleeters not only became more active in the media, but also became a lot more active in local communities.
It was easy to figure out that these arrogant first-raters only came around and started outreach programs because they were in trouble.
However, their efforts clearly worked. Many ordinary people did not really care about independence and the right to field their own warships. They just wanted to remain safe and their planet to remain protected.
So long as the mechers and the fleeters corrected their attitude and emphasized all of the contributions they made, it was not that hard to shift public perception into a more positive direction.
Through these hasty but effective methods, the Red Two managed to stop the bleeding. Their grip on the Red Ocean Union had not weakened any further.
While the RA and the RF urgently strengthened their ties to the masses they depended upon, other notable groups made their own moves.
The Terran Alliance and the Rubarhtan Pact continued to change the way they operated now that they had officially thrown off the yoke of the Red Two.
"Those mechs are different!"
"How so?"
"Look at the antenna-like arrays mounted on their upper backs. Those things have never been there before. Are those… shield link arrays?!"
"They dare?! Isn't support link technology exclusive to the Red Two and their closest associates? There is no way the Terrans and the Rubarthans received permission to mount them onto their own machines."
"You are right. I think the first-rate colonial superstates have grown tired of waiting for permits that will never come. They have clearly taken matters into their own hands. If they tried to pull this off during the Age of Mechs, all hell would break loose. Nowadays, the RA and the RF can do nothing."
It was not that simple to mount shield link arrays onto existing first-class multipurpose mechs.
Many of the popular first-class multipurpose mech models were carefully designed and precisely engineered to excel in their official configurations.
Only the modular and semi-modular mech designs could accommodate shield link transceivers without requiring extensive reworks.
These were also the first first-class multipurpose mechs that embraced this coveted high technology!
Although not enough time had passed for these new generation of shield-linked mechs to show off their improved performance, their appearance already injected a lot of confidence in the Terran and Rubarthan soldiers!
The latter especially needed all of the encouragement they could get. Their pressure was enormous now that their superstate had to fend off the native aliens and the mutated voribugs at the same time!
Unfortunately, the Rubarthans needed way more than better-shielded mechs in order to stop the tide of voribugs.
The Cybernetic Empire had already deployed a number of their warfleets, but no one was sure how effective they could be. The Cybers had spent two generations preparing to fight the native aliens. How well did their advanced tech stack up against the mutated voribugs?
Hopefully, the Polymath and her empire managed to develop at least a couple of weapon systems that happened to be effective against giant bug swarms!
While the Cybernetic Empire was already moving to prop up the Rubarthan Pact, the new superpower had also started to reach out to many other states and organizations, particularly those who had been neglected by the Red Two.
Ves noticed that the Larkinson Clan became increasingly more invested in cooperating with the Cybernetic Empire.
It felt strange for him to remain uninvolved in a matter of great importance to the clan.
Saint Commander Casella Ingvar led the negotiations, and she clearly possessed her own set of priorities that differed from his own.
This meant that Ves might not like whatever she was willing to give up in order to obtain a valued concession.
In order to prevent Ves from entering into any needless fights with the new matriarch, he held back his curiosity and tried his best to give the Saint Commander enough room to make her own mark.
Talks progressed quickly. The Larkinson Clan was young and the matriarch possessed all of the power needed to make decisions. She did not have to persuade a council to back her proposal.
The Cybers also happened to work quickly. Their efficiency was astounding, but many people gradually learned that this was all due to the reforms enacted by the Polymath.
Although the Cybernetic Empress did not directly participate in the negotiations, it became clear that she had a vested interest in its outcome.
The biggest reason why the Cybernetic Empire treated the Larkinson Clan so highly was not its glorious war record or its amazing living mechs.
It was because the Larkinsons controlled the only known entry method to the Blue Dimension.
Ketis did not intend to create a new dimension breach so soon.
She and Gloriana still worked hard to earn hundreds of Ascension Points and unlock a few desirable upgrades.
Continuing to spend AP on opening the same portals on repeat might be satisfying in the short term, but it would stunt their growth in the long term.
This was why the two female mech designers wanted to make sure to continually upgrade the Dimension Observatory so that the next dimension breach was better than the last one.
Only by making the portals larger and more persistent would red humanity be able to harvest enough mid and high-grade superdimensional matter to upgrade every ace mech and god mech!
The Cybers may have missed the first two mining ventures, but they were determined to participate in the next one!