Major Miller smiled when he heard the names of their personal Mecha. "So, I take it you'll be loading them yourselves then. Who else knows that this operation is happening? I need to know who else I can work with while you're gone."

pαndα---noν?1,сoМ "We will inform Admiral Penner before we go. She makes most of the ship-wide announcements anyhow, and it wouldn't be right to leave her out of the loop. She can be a bit intense, but she's trustworthy." Max informed him.

"I believe that. That woman is a bit scary, but she's definitely trustworthy. With the two of us aware, we should be able to manage the crews for a week. Should I set up a scheduled time for daily meetings with the Envoys? That way, you know when they'll need to meet with you?" Miller asked.

"I have their favourite drinks programmed as a single item in the replicator. Envoy beverage platter is the title on the entry. You can bring them here in the mornings and let them work in peace since this area of the ship isn't accessible to the public. They can come after breakfast and stay the morning. Nobody would question it since I've been spending half the day in meetings with them already." Max agreed.

"That works. If you want to inform them, we can just work their actual meeting with you into the schedule. Where will you be relaying your messages through?" Miller asked.

Nico smiled at him. "Rae 5 Moon Base. I'm in contact with them daily, anyhow, since I collaborate with Uncle Lu on so many projects. Adding the data stream from our ship to the daily link with the Research Department will be completely undetectable unless they manage to crack our encryption, which shouldn't be a concern now that we've updated it with the help of the Hunters."

"How did you manage that? The Hunters are supposed to be hard to get anything out of, according to the Alliance sorts I've been talking to." Miller asked.

"We have a special connection. I actually traded it for the killing blow rights to three Behemoths of different patterns, though." Nico smirked.

"So that's how it is. You were hunting with them, and it helped the hunt, so they made it easy on you." Miller realized.

"Exactly. It's a lot like working with the Canis. They are much kinder when you're willing to participate in activities that they are interested in." Nico agreed.

"Speaking of that, we are expecting our first little Canis in not too long. One of the men that joined our team has gotten his girlfriend from the Cruise Ship hospitality department pregnant, and according to the doctors, it's all going well. I was talking to him at the pub the other night." Miller informed them.

"We will have to set up something special for the day. Book the happy couple a nice celebration dinner for whenever they choose or something, and get them moved early into a family suite, if they haven't already applied." Max suggested.

"They've already applied, and the paperwork is processing. We just had to make sure that they were actually together and not just a casual hookup that would be a disaster living together." Miller chuckled.

There were more than a few of those on any large ship, so it was a valid concern. Moving them in together as soon as you heard the news could be a disaster in the making. Max recalled one from when he was a child, and the Kepler Terminus bureaucracy had sent a celebratory message and the paperwork for application to move into a family residence to a man who already had a wife and kids.

His mistress had put him on the birth certificate, and given the age gap, the bureaucrats had assumed that it was the child of his son. They didn't know that his son was already living with his boyfriend in the family home, and the resulting fight had been the talk of the neighbourhood for weeks.

"Well, we can call Terminus a proper Colony Ship then. You can't be a real colony ship without the children of the staff living on board, after all. When are you planning to add to them?" Max asked with a wink for his former logistics officer.

"Not that soon. I'm not a family sort of person, but you know." Miller shrugged. historical

"Fair enough. We will head out right away if you don't need to grab anything from Terminus before you lock yourself in here and pretend to be me for a week?" Max asked.

"No, I'm good. I can make whatever I like in here since I'm using your energy allocation." Miller laughed, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head.

Max could sense that the man didn't actually have any big desires and knew he wouldn't have anywhere to put them anyhow, so the threat of using up Max's allocation was no real threat, even if Max didn't have basically unlimited use of the ship's resources.

Max sent out an explanation of the situation to Admiral Penner so that she would be up on the situation, as well as Admiral Drake, so he would know that Major Miller was aboard Absolution for the week since the officer was so involved in the ship's logistics.

It wasn't, strictly speaking, his responsibility, but he couldn't stop himself from at least reviewing the logistics reports from the ship.

Once they confirmed that they understood and wouldn't do anything to give away the fact that Miller was covering for Max, Nico issued an order to the Androids to load up the two custom Mecha into the ship they were taking and remotely reconfigured the hull design to replicate a generic Alliance Corporate Yacht.

There were over sixty of them aboard Terminus right now, all very similar in hull design and docked in many different spots all around the ship. They also left on a regular basis, going back and forth to larger ships or returning to their home planets now that they were in Alliance territory and the vessels could make it home in a matter of days without using a Portal.

"Be safe, and let us know if things get dangerous here. We can portal, so we can be back in under a minute during an emergency. It would actually be faster than having us go to our Mecha from our offices here aboard Absolution, so don't worry about the scouting mission. Just call us if there is a threat to our security." Nico informed the interim Commander.

"Understood. I know you're always up for a good battle, so I won't let you down."