"All I am saying is that your ship is larger than the old Lab on Comor was. If you wanted to there is no reason why you couldn't have your own mecha manufacturing onboard Terminus.

You could tell everyone that your pickup site is confidential, obscure where the Reavers are building the new Mecha, and then just keep making as many as you need from the safety of your own ship. It's the perfect hiding spot, nobody would ever suspect that a small trading company was the one that was carrying the blueprints and technical data around." Uncle Lu was telling Max.

He had stopped in at the lab to talk to him about the custom order for Line Mecha with neural links, and they had gotten sidetracked by the proposition of making large numbers of Mecha aboard Terminus for distribution to their allies here in the Rae 5 system and abroad.

"It's not a terrible idea. With the new amenities, we need to hire staff to do everything in the Cruise Ship area, so we could bring on a bunch more workers at the same time, under the guise of taking them as maintenance and technical staff." Max reluctantly agreed.

"Don't forget that you have a visitor coming as well, and if you get on their good side you might be able to convince them to get you some upgraded construction technology that would put your current materials printers to shame." Uncle Lu added.

That might be pushing their luck. As a pacifist species, the makers of Terminus would naturally be very reluctant to give Max anything that could be used in a military capacity. They most likely had much better materials printing technology, going by the state of the Replicators, which were now considered ancient relics to them, but they wouldn't want to part with them to help out the humans.

"We will take that as it comes. We can make them with what we have, we salvaged a few military-grade printers from Kepler ships already, and they are set up to make everything on a standard Mecha. Updating them to build the new patterns shouldn't be too hard, at least not for the Line Mecha, which doesn't use any truly exotic materials in its build."

Uncle Lu nodded as he thought and then started making notes on his pad. "All is well that ends well. If they won't give you new printers, that's not a big deal, since you can get by with what you have. But you might want to hide the fact that we have been updating the power plants of all the Mecha in your Regiment using the Crystal Generators based on the Warp Drive in Terminus.

They are coming here to see what you have managed to do with the technology, since they detected that someone had broken the warp 10 boundary, but they won't be happy to find out that the majority of the examples of the new drives are in military ships, so you shouldn't tell them that you put them in the Mecha as well if they don't specifically ask." Uncle Lu sighed.

The continual advancement of technology was his goal in life, curtailing and hiding it for reasons of politics was anathema to his outlook on life, even if he understood the necessity and went along with it for the greater good.

"I will let you get to work building those custom units. Feel free to go wild with the neural link. I promised them something like Cygnus, not an exact copy, so if you have a better idea, feel free to have them test it for you." Max informed Lu, then started making plans to get more staff hired.

With the sector around them stable, the influx of refugees had slowed to a trickle, so he would have to hunt down over a thousand people to run and maintain their new facilities, as well as skilled manufacturing workers for the construction bays.

With a whole new planet, he had at first thought that this might be the easy part, but it turned out that everyone had the same idea, and they had snapped up as many workers as they could get to work all the new shops and factories in the system.

Once Max left the meeting with Uncle Lu, he went to a terminal and placed an ad on the local data net, looking for workers. All sorts of hospitality, maintenance, custodial staff, and factory staff for the onboard shop item production, according to the job advertisement.historical

It would be held the next day in two locations, here on the Moon Base, for those who were already in orbit, and on the planet in the Capital. Even if they lived in one of the other cities, there was a public shuttle that flew between them on a two-hour loop all day and night, so it wasn't hard to get to the meeting if they really wanted the job.

There were still a fair number of people looking for work on the planet, but finding enough that wanted to be on a touring Reaver Ship for the indeterminate future should be a lot harder than just finding people that wanted work.

Or so Max thought until he saw applications that were being sent through. Not only were there far more than expected, but the applicants also had a wealth of experience that he didn't expect. Most were between 26 and 28 years old, and Kepler born, meaning that they had just finished their tour of duty before coming here to Rae 5 as refugees.

Some were Reaver born, but the majority of applicants that Max saw were definitely Veterans.

In the normal course of events, Pilots and specialists who didn't actually want to be in the army would finish their tour and go home, and then would be recruited out of retirement to work in government-associated facilities on their homeworld.

But many of those worlds were barely habitable right now, and a few had taken ELE Orbital Strike Barrages after the Rebellion was deemed to have won the battle against the loyalist forces on their surface. They were the object lesson that had made most of the other planets in the area surrender, but that left billions either dead or homeless throughout the sector.

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