Once the last of the Terminus Mecha Battalions were back aboard the ship, they set course for their next target.

The Hunters had already cloaked their ship and were intending to meet them there since their mothership was significantly faster than Terminus, even when not using portals to skip large distances.

Max could have done that, but the trip would only be a few days, and they could use it to collect data on the stars that were within sensor range of the ship as they passed, checking for additional threats and signs of possible habitation.historical

They had done that once as they passed by the first time, but now they had more data on how the locals had hidden, so they had a better idea of what signs to look for that would indicate that there was life from the same expansion wave surviving in the region.

"It's late. Time to go to bed." Nico informed him just as the data screens throughout the ship signaled the graveyard shift to come on duty.

It was good to have her back on the ship. Nico wasn't shifting her outer temperature to the cool metallic version to sleep anymore, but the warm and soft version was much more pleasant to spend the nights with.

So pleasant, in fact, that Max actually missed the first messages of the morning, deep in slumber.

"Alright, time to get up and get fed before people start missing you." She informed him before planting a kiss on his cheek.

"That doesn't encourage me to think of activities outside the bedroom." Max reminded her.

"Well, that's boring. Why only think of doing them in the bedroom? But seriously, it's time to get out of bed and start answering those messages already. Your watch is driving me nuts with everyone looking for updates, and I'm not sure you'd remember to turn the notifications back on if I silenced them."

Man nodded and picked up Nico to head to the shower. "You're likely right, but it sure would be relaxing not to have that thing telling me to get back to work every five minutes."

"Also, haven't you gotten lighter again? I swear Cyborgs are supposed to be much heavier than standard humans, but I am quite sure that you're actually lighter than I am."

Nico smirked and held out an arm to admire it.

"I will have you know that I have lightened this body as much as possible with the combination of human and Hunter technology without compromising structural integrity.

I am just as sturdy as the day I was remade, but now I am back to the average weight for a civilian male, without all the muscle mass that the soldiers are packing. I did get a few ideas from your usage of [Optimize] last night since it affects my whole body, not just the relevant bits. I believe that I can increase my strength and durability a bit more without adding any new materials or mass."

"Well then, it worked out amazingly for both of us." Max chuckled.

A fully modified and Optimized Nico was a scary thought, both in and out of combat, but it was good to see that she had accepted her biomechanical existence so fully. That might be partly due to the fact that she was capable of so closely emulating a human now, but she took great pride in making sure that everyone knew that she was a modified Cybernetic organism of her own design.

Even on the live streams that the Innu Technicians did, it came up quite regularly. Mostly when Nico did something superhuman and reminded viewers that her appearance and stats didn't match, but sometimes she would reference the modifications she made to herself as part of a proposal for a new product.

The streams were going amazingly well. Not just because of the sales volumes that their newest products like the Terraforming Array were doing, but the Tech Nomads working aboard Terminus had become something of a Cult Icon among the Innu for their plethora of slightly outdated but nearly free-to-use schematics, as well as their entertaining presentation methods.

The thought that you could put an augmentic suit on a frail and dainty Innu researcher and have her tear apart a civilian hover transport with her bare hands shocked many of their viewers, but the mannequin with "Cheating Ex Lover" written on it sitting in the back seat really sold the utility of such a development outside of combat, which the Innu extremely rarely engaged in.

That particular video had gone viral, getting over a hundred billion views, and it didn't even go into the details of the suit's technology. It was only a product demonstration for the new cloth sheathing on the gloves to prove that jagged metal shards wouldn't damage them.

Millions of comments and an intense gender war in the comments section later, the Terminus Tech Nomads were a household name among the regular viewers of Tech Streams.

"My work is all administration today, and I should be done in a few hours. What are you lot up to in the development labs?" Max asked after their second shower of the morning, the first one having been rendered ineffective by the innovative drying method employed afterward.

"We are working with the Canis volunteers today to adapt sensor suites for species with particularly sensitive hearing and sense of smell.

The Canis senses are dozens of times more sensitive than a standard human, so they can pick out much smaller signals without assistance, which means that we don't need to put all that work into augmenting their helmets. We only need to clarify the input with a small augmentation to allow them to pick out patterns and identify specific scents with ease.

If this pattern works correctly, the Canis should be able to tell what route a patrolling soldier took that day by the scents that had gathered on their clothes. It would be devastating as an infiltration technology, and we could further boost the sensor data later to adapt it for human and other species' usages.

It's not on the publicly listed patents anywhere that we could find in the Alliance, though they likely have something like it off the books, so we won't be broadcasting that one as part of our stream, only the trials that we are doing later in the afternoon to try to rig up a rudimentary vehicle cloaking device."

Max smiled at their proactive nature. That was exactly the project that he was going to request that they start working on.