Ves felt a bit depressed as he ended his call with Jovy. He leaned back in his chair and looked around his private design lab. The state of red humanity was deteriorating by the day. The native aliens had commenced their final push and seemed determined to break any semblance of organized resistance. Now, Ves just learned that Human High Command might not go out of their way to stop the fifth defensive band from getting breached. If Ves was reading in between the lines correctly, Jovy’s answers came with the ominous implication that failed defensive battles and the mass slaughter of human civilians may be a deliberate part of HHC’s strategy! While the Red Three and all of the states publicly proclaimed their determination to defend humanity’s borders and value the life of every human, their leaders had secretly come to a consensus to sacrifice entire zones filled with defenseless civilians in order to stimulate the birth of god pilots! Ves suddenly shuddered as he suddenly made a very cynical realization! If his latest train of thought was true, then HHC never seriously thought about defending all of human-occupied space from the start! The strategists who shouldered the burden of finding a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat had made a cruel but arguably necessary calculation. They effectively abandoned any serious attempt to defend the Lower Zones and the Middle Zones. Transferring a lot of second-class ace pilots to the Upper Zones was just the most obvious manifestation of this strategic shift. Ves feared that the major powers had already made other moves behind the scenes. None of it was obvious on the surface, so many second-raters and third-raters still believed that their protectors were doing the best they could to safeguard their lives and homes. Few if any of them understood that they had already been condemned to die. This was particularly the case of the colonists who had settled in the Middle and Lower Zones adjacent to the border regions. The Krakatoa Middle Zone was one of many future killing fields. Ves had heard that a lot of Davutans and other colonists had made the determination to defend their homes to the utmost. While a limited amount of evacuations had taken place, logistical constraints and many other hurdles had effectively minimized the scale of human movements. On the one hand, public propaganda and the prevailing narrative among the commentators painted an overly optimistic outlook to their audience. A lot of space peasants who did not have the exclusive information channels that Ves had at his disposal ignorantly believed in all of the hype. They still thought that the Red Three and the other powers would prevail and turn the tables against the alien aggressors. Perhaps they even believed that they would be able to retain their peaceful lives on planets that would soon receive a lot of unpleasant visitors! The fundamental truth that Ves only just figured out was that HHC had no incentive to evacuate the space peasants from their endangered home planets. Instead, it was the opposite! HHC had a compelling reason to keep the space peasants trapped on their death traps and turn them into unwitting sacrifices of a dark but ambitious gambit meant to promote the successful emergence of god pilots! What a grand design! Whoever came up with it was a cold-hearted bastard alright. Ves could respect the ability to cut through useless sentiments and formulate a completely rational plan that was fully tailored to red humanity’s strengths as well as weaknesses. The space peasants living in the Middle Zones and Lower Zones had relatively little value to begin with, so the higher ups might as well squeeze out the best possible value out of them by turning them into breakthrough fuel. Second-raters and third-raters were so numerous that it should be easy to flood the galactic net with tragic scenes! Once their mass deaths got broadcasted on the galactic net for everyone to see, many peak ace pilots would eventually grow angry and lose their patience to the point of staking their entire lives and careers on a single throw of a dice! That was the outcome that HHC was trying to realize! Ves shuddered again when he realized how lucky he was for making so much progress in the past few years that he had promoted himself to an indispensable tier 3 galactic citizen. As the Father of Carmine Mechs, the Chief Councilor of the Upper Council of the Red Collective and inventor of all manner of useful stuff, he had firmly cemented his place in high society. He saw his somewhat forced relocation to an Upper Zone in a new light. The mechers compelled him to leave the expeditionary fleet behind and relocate to an Upper Zone because it was the only place where he could reasonably remain safe. HHC understood the necessity of preserving the best of red humanity. The first-raters represented the core of their civilization. They would eventually be tasked with revitalizing human territories after the native aliens had ravaged so many previously settled planets. As for the second-raters and third-raters? There were so many of them that even if the majority got culled, they would eventually breed and recover most of their population in one or two generations! Wait. Perhaps the bigshots already took the dramatic drop in human population into account. Ves was already aware that biotech experts had already begun to set up production facilities for the purpose of pumping out batch humans. These artificially conceived and grown humans could grow from embryo into fully functional beings in just a handful of years! The combination of accelerated human growth and EdNet-style accelerated learning could rapidly turn these test tube humans into productive members of society on an unprecedentedly huge scale! No one had ever tried to expand their population through industrial means in the past. There was no precedent for people to refer to. Everyone would be doing this for the first time, which meant that a lot of things could go wrong. Natural born humans might look down on batch humans and treat the latter as incomplete or flawed humans. Batch humans in turn may develop a lot of animosity towards their ’superiors’ and try to rebel. Continue reading at freewebnovel Ves could already see a potential ’dwarf scenario’ on the horizon. Even if other leaders could see it coming as well, they might not be able to stave off a violent schism. However, what did it matter? So long as natural humans and batch humans lived long enough to wage war on each other, at least red humanity managed to live long enough to engage in infighting again! This outcome was vastly more preferable to letting the native aliens overrun human space and kill everyone aside from a few lucky survivors who had fled into the most remote corners of the Red Ocean. As Ves was finally able to connect all of the dots and gain a clear understanding of what was truly going on, he felt more powerless than ever. According to the latest developments, it sounded that the Middle Zones next to the border regions would be among the first regions to collapse. The Davute Branch of the Larkinson Clan was right in the crosshairs of the ravenous and murderous native aliens. The enemy would not hold back. Not after everything the humans had done during the last years of the Age of Mechs. Humans had been anything but merciful when they launched a full invasion into the Red Ocean. Many of the planets that hosted a lot of humans used to be occupied by a lot of aliens. Many of them failed to evacuate when the humans arrived and wiped them all out without mercy. The hands of every human pioneer and colonist were stained with blood. It did not matter if they did the killing directly or just profited from the eradication of local aliens. They were all marked by the guilt of slaughtering alien lives and stealing their home planets. Now, the relatives of those dead aliens were about to come back and exact retribution on the humans! Ves let out a deep breath as he tried to think about his own stance on the matter. "I can’t do much." His agency was distressingly little. He was a mech designer and an innovator, but he was not a miracle worker. He could not come up with any invention that could reverse the current trend and stop the Krakatoa Middle Zone from becoming a charnelhouse. He had no way of persuading Human High Command to defend the vulnerable space peasants if he was unable to offer them a better plan. During a time of crisis, the influence of the Survivalist Faction had reached its peak. All of the extreme and radical solutions proposed by the Survivalists obtained the greatest amount of support! Ves had no way of defeating such a strong power bloc. Perhaps he might be able to design another fantastic mech that could help the second-raters and third-raters to stall the invasion and save more lives, but all of that took time that was in very short supply at the moment. What frustrated Ves even more was that he obviously could not fight the aliens in person. It was completely irrational for a mech designer to think about entering the battlefield and punching the aliens to death in person, but the phasewater-infused Larkinson blood that flowed through his veins kept urging him that he needed to stand up and use his strength to contribute more directly to the war effort! He firmly shook his head. "I have been watching too much battle footage as of late." Ves was afraid that he had become contaminated by all of the duty and nobility demonstrated by the brave linefighters at the frontlines. It frustrated him to see all of those good soldiers die while he remained stuck in the rear. There was nothing he could do to increase their survival chances in the short term. Perhaps he should look out for his Larkinsons instead. The Larkinson Clan had expanded rapidly as of late. Many members had not joined the ’main branch’ as it became a lot more difficult to directly join the main branch that was currently centered around the expeditionary fleet. Instead, most recruits joined the nearest planetary branches and became Larkinsons that way. So long as these side branch members proved their mettle and distinguished themselves in their jobs, they earned a chance to apply to the expeditionary fleet where much of the action took place. Ves called up a lot of information. He frowned when he saw that the majority of planetary branches did not own any starships of their own. They found it difficult to commission or purchase them because other parties had already claimed the ones that were even remotely available. All of this meant that it would be difficult for the members of these side branches to evacuate from their home planets in time. What was Ves supposed to do in this situation? If he wanted to do what was best for his clansmen, then he should scrounge up as many starships he could spare and send them to every star system with a large presence of side branch members and insist on evacuating them in advance. However, this was a very selfish decision in the eyes of the higher ups. In order for their strategy to have the best effect, the populations of all of the endangered planets had to stay in place. Too many people paid attention to the Larkinson Clan. If it turned out that the Larkinsons were fleeing from the Middle Zones and Lower Zones without regard for anything else, then they would not only paint themselves as cowards, but also risk the chance of sparking mass panic and hysteria! The best decision that Ves could make from the perspective of human leadership was to play dumb and do nothing to evacuate his own clansmen. "Damn… what do I do?" Sometimes, knowing too much was a detriment rather than an advantage.