[Fifteen Minutes to Portal Activation. All Vessels, please hold your position until the Portal is open, in compliance with safety protocols established by Alliance Officials.] Admiral Penner broadcast on all the standard hailing frequencies.

They hadn't had any issues with ships trying to do dumb things in the past, but there was always the first time, and she didn't want to do the paperwork for tearing apart a commercial transport with a Portal.

Not only would it be a PR nightmare, but it would bring them no end of nightmares in the form of corporations filing complaints against their Portal Technology, either in an attempt to get it banned or to get the schematics so they could steal it.

Most of the population of the ship didn't even notice when they first began to move. Only a few very sensitive species, and the ones watching the exterior monitors, could tell that Absolution was moving.

One of those people was Headmistress Medusa of the Terminus Academy. It was somewhat unexpected that the ship would be going into Alliance Territory since the major appeal was the distant Galaxy where the students were located and the relative safety that it granted them being out from under Alliance oversight.

Not that she was particularly concerned while Terminus was docked inside Absolution, but she would have to carefully monitor requests for access and departure from the Academy to be sure nobody was trying anything nefarious against her students.

The ship would likely be in the region for a while, but the students of the xenobiology classes were studying Klem right now anyhow and had an entire planetary battle to go over, while the rest of the students weren't in course paths which usually got new data during the school year. historical

Constantly updating like that made it very hard to set a curriculum, but a few sciences were all about new things, and the opportunities that following humans around presented were perfect for their needs.

For example, the students of the Quantum Mechanics department were going to be spending the entire year trying to decipher how exactly the Terminus Trading Company actually managed to stabilize the warp drives aboard Terminus.

The design was similar to Alliance crystal-based drives but, in some ways, completely alien. When they had reconstructed the power system on Terminus, the human engineers hadn't truly understood what they were looking at in the schematics since the original occupants had destroyed so much of the data, so they had improvised until it worked and ended up with something not quite the same that they based their future research paths off of.

It had led to a wildly divergent technology that they were now proving wasn't actually inferior to Alliance Crystal Warp technology.

She watched as the Portal opened and then zoomed in on the only occupied planet in this star system. She stared in horror as she saw the devastation, but the local security forces, with the assistance of an Alliance Patrol, had erected barriers around every city and moved all of the residents inside and away from the farms and small towns.

Most of the planet had been overrun by Klem already, and it was clear which regions they had already passed over, as all biomass had been stripped clean, and even the soil looked dusty and dead once they had left.

Huge swarms of Klem could be seen around all of the cities, and she worried for the residents. They were known as the Snorr and were not counted among the Curious Species. They preferred to spend their long lives in contemplation of the secrets of the universe, which seemed like an oxymoron with their designation, but they had absolutely no interest in the practical applications of the revelations they had received.

The only reason that they were among the advanced species was that the Valkia had found them early in their expansion and chosen to protect them in exchange for the insights that their lives of contemplation generated.

The Snorr thought of great universal truths, and the Valkia implemented the ones with practical value, as well as trying to guide them in a direction that would help them develop the areas where their technology was lacking.

If the security forces hadn't shown up, the whole species would have been wiped out, as their own lives barely rated enough interest to them to stop thinking and eat. Even their forms had evolved to a gelatinous version of their original evolutionary path so that they were better suited to long periods of inactivity.

To Max, that actually made his job easier. Nobody was going to be doing things like wandering about, trying to take photos of the Klem, or going on vacations for ridiculous reasons during a disaster. They were happy to just sit at home and contemplate the likely ways they could die.

But to Headmistress Medusa, it was highly concerning since the species was actually quite important to the development of new policies and procedures, despite the low profile that they kept.

While she couldn't prove it, she suspected that the only reason that the Alliance had gone so far as to hire humans to deal with the issue right away was that the Snorr were threatened. If it weren't for that, they would have likely dragged the process through the courts for a number of years while the status of the Klem was challenged before they actually did anything.

That would be far too late for the first planets, which were infested, of course, but it would be perfectly legally correct by Alliance procedures.

She formulated and sent a message on that topic to the Commander so that he would at least have access to her insights if he had a moment to read them. Once she was satisfied that she had told him everything that he would need to know about the background politics and situation, the Headmistress returned to the issues presented by her students.

There were thousands of them wanting full access to Absolution during the next month's week-long break, and that meant they would want to invite family to the ship, stay in hotels, and do all the other vacation sorts of things that every student on break wanted to do.

It was a lot of paperwork for her office to go through, and she still had to schedule a meeting with Max to make sure that it wouldn't be an issue to let the students onto the World Ship for a week when it was still so new and understaffed, with upgrades still being completed.