Morning had just returned to the Moon Base station, and the day shift was on their way to work, but a general feeling of depression was settling in over the staff. It had now been two months since the main research team had disappeared to work on their new project, the Dyson Sphere that they had so much early success with.
The workers on the station didn't have the security clearance to know what had happened, if it was successful, if it was being refined on site, or even if the worst had happened and an entire team had been lost to science.
The feeling had been building for a while, and Uncle Lu could sense it, but until today, he hadn't been able to share anything with them, for fear of data leaks.
But today he had good news.
[Attention all refinement stations. We are expecting the primary research team back at the base within the next 48 hours, so please inform your group supervisors if your projects will be finished by that time so that they can assign new projects when they are announced.
Those without a project for the day will be temporarily shuffled to help another team finish their work, and we are hoping to have at least five stations open for the incoming surge in workload.
Thank you for your time.] Uncle Lu announced over the intercom.
There was a lot of cheering from the workers, even the other development teams, who were working on secondary weapons for the new Mecha design.
The information that Uncle Lu had received informed him that they had found a way to make the Dyson Sphere replicator creatable, though it would require a specially redesigned replicator, which could not be made by the regular replicator system, so they would be limited edition specialty tools.
That was actually good news for the Reavers, who would be the first customers to buy them once the new power system made it to market. Specialty tools were the bread and butter of a mobile repair shop.
Any planet's universities could train mechanics, but with proprietary software and tools, only certain ones could train them on the most specialized of equipment. That meant more prestige, and more money for the work that they did.
With that in mind, Uncle Lu returned to monitoring all the teams, to make sure they were working at peak efficiency before he returned to his latest personal project, a new Mecha Chassis.
It was still in the digital design phase, since he was so busy these days, but it was going to be glorious. He didn't have the hubris to call it a God Class Mecha, but it was far beyond the standard of the Titan Class units, assuming that the Dyson Sphere could output enough power for the systems that he wanted it to have.
As long as the size hadn't changed too much, he had left enough room for a separate weapons power system and a conventional Warp Drive with an interlayer portal generator, so the Mecha should be able to fight anywhere that humans had the knowledge to access and move around. But more importantly, it was massive, with the theoretical capability to even go toe to toe with the Greater Energy Beings.
It had taken him over a month of dedicated work and leaving the supervision work to his subordinates before he had finished that analysis, but once he had, the old researcher was certain that he would be able to make a Mecha that could stand against them.
There had been another breakthrough in Warp Drive technology this month, thanks mostly to Ranarth's data sets. The secondary research teams had found a way to get one of the designs to work with human technology, and the output of the warp drive could be maintained with a containment vessel a fraction the size of the current units.
When they tested it, the unit still became unstable if they tried to increase the power to more than that of a Cruiser Class ship, but it was small enough to be put into a Cutter Class, or possible an Interceptor Class ship.
If they could get the power output of a four hundred metre long Cruiser into a ship under fifty metres long, their fleets would absolutely crush any trade group that was foolish enough to go against them. Already, the Alliance's largest trading companies were suffering from a lack of modern ships as the Reavers vessels with their own Portal Generators started cutting hours and days off the travel time to make deliveries, or undercutting them on their routes.
Interstellar shipping was not cheap. There were countless people on the trading ships who expected to get paid, as well as the costs to keep the vessel up and running. But the Reavers had integrated repair teams into their ships' crews, which most species didn't have the luxury of doing, and they had a suspicious lack of appetite for expensive foreign goods.
They loved to buy them in bulk, but they only shipped and resold them to planetary groups, and rarely did you see them using a foreign item themselves unless the humans couldn't make an equivalent.
Uncle Lu was hoping that these three new technologies would be a killing blow to competition against the humans. With faster, more powerful ships that others were unable to work on, more powerful Mecha, and an even more abundant power source aboard their larger vessels, they could build nearly anything that they wanted, and still have enough power left over for the crew to live in luxury.
Just the thought of a Mecha that could run an entire factory world was enough to make Uncle Lu laugh like a little kid again.
Oh, the things that they could do if they snuck a pleasure yacht full of workers and one Dyson Sphere equipped Mecha into an uninhabited system. Ever since he was on Comor, working for both sides of the Comor and Kepler alliance, he had understood that everything is a state of grey. It wasn't an illegal breach of copyright if nobody could prove where the goods came from, and with isolated pop up factories that could be instantly closed when investigated, they would be rich.
Well, more rich.
All he needed to do now was talk to Mary Tarith about his plans, and see how far she was willing to go with the idea, and if she thought that they could do it without breaching their agreements with the Alliance. There were plenty of prohibited goods that the Black Market wanted which they could produce, but there was a much larger market for counterfeit goods.
Logistics and Distribution were her specialty, design was his. All he needed to do was get her to agree to help him turn his mobile factory plan into reality, and he knew just the bribe to get her on board. He was the first one to know that her daughter was coming home, and he had arranged for them all to have dinner tonight.
If young Miss Nico couldn't escape her mother's overbearing love, Mary Tarith would surely be grateful to him for arranging the situation. Perhaps he should arrange for Nico's father to be there as well. He had heard that the man was so busy with his work on Absolution that he only went home for dinner once a week. But he wouldn't be able to turn down a formal dinner without seeming rude.
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