"Ah, I forgot Priscilla was your sister. I apologize for all the times that smell was me. It's a good thing that she didn't want to come along. The whole Galaxy would get the wrong impression of us." A boy at the end of the shuttle next to Max added with a laugh and promptly got a knife thrown at his head.
"Please do not throw knives in the shuttle. The walls will cause them to ricochet, and you could hit someone you didn't intend to. But if you do happen to get along particularly well with someone aboard the ship, there are no rules against it other than consent and public decency." Nico informed them.
"Public Decency? I'm not sure what all that entails. Is that like the rules about peeing in public places?" One of the students asked.
"Yes, also, keep your clothes on in public, and no public sexual activities. There are some nuanced rules, but you can look them up once we get to the ship. I didn't notice anything in public on Canis that was out of bounds on Terminus, so you should be fine." Nico agreed.
"Are there seriously aliens? Like real aliens, not just demihumans who adapted to their planet?" The boy asked.
"There are. Some look nearly like Demihumans, some wear human-shaped robotic suits that can be mistaken for actual people at first, like the Illithid, and some are completely foreign, like the Shin, who look like mobile trees."
"You're in trouble now. No peeing against the living trees." The talkative boy teased one of the others.
"Man, I was three years old. When will you forget that?" The boy in question asked.
"It was a holiday tree in the mall. I will never forget."
Max laughed at the banter. These ten should fit right in with the soldiers they would be bunked next to.
"I should warn the group about a few things before we land. Alcohol is available in many places on the ship and can be produced by your kitchen's replicator. We expect you to be sober to be on duty, and refrain from consuming if you can't handle your alcohol or become violent.
If you are violent without it, we have a variety of virtual reality combat training simulations, as well as well-equipped gyms to work off some excess energy. They are made for Kepler soldiers with systems, so there are more than enough weights for you to work off some excess energy.
Also, the ship is at half the gravity of your planet. You can adjust that inside your dorm area for comfort, but the common areas are all at Human Standard gravity levels.
The cruise ship area has a gravity slide, like a waterslide, but with the gravity controlled, the tunnels don't always lead down. They only feel like they do. There are swimsuits and sealed bags for your other clothing available at the kiosks by the entrance to the cruise ship area. Again, a reminder that there are change rooms for the purpose and no nudity is allowed in the public areas." He informed them.
"Terminus sounds like a fun place. Are there mating rooms? You know, if we do find someone we like and don't want to bother our roommates?" One of the girls asked.
"Yes, all of the rooms in the cruise ship area are soundproof and private. They are mostly just bedrooms, and almost all guests eat at the restaurants or cafeterias, which are included in your privileges as employees, by the way.
Nico will provide you with full details, but if you need privacy for such things, a small fee will get you a private room in the Cruise Ship area. Don't feel ashamed to use them if you need them, and if you find a long-term partner, we can arrange for family accommodations when they become necessary.
The Reaver Companies, like the Terminus Trading Company, are generational. Our core members will spend their entire lives aboard the ship, and so will the next generation. Our ship is fairly newly founded, but I am informed that we have already assigned a few family units to members."
The men of the Canis group shared a conspiratorial look, and the girls rolled their eyes at them.
"What are you thinking?" Nico asked, curious what the inside joke was.
"Maybe we should have brought Priscilla with us." One of the boys answered before they all burst into laughter.
The shuttle docked with Terminus not long after, and Nico led the new arrivals to their rooms while Max arranged the Cutters' departure and double-checked the path they would take to their destination.
They should be there tonight, but if they ran into any delays or unexpected phenomena, it might be morning, ship time, before they reached their destination.
The Admiral had already sent messages verifying that the planet was holding out against the attack and had learned that it was not their first time fighting the Narsians. They were so close to the Narsian territories that the attacks were direct, via line-of-sight portals, and not the all in transfer of a planetary military force like Max had seen in the past in the Kepler territories.
Supposedly those were their version of colonization and not their primary mode of a military offense, a fact that Max hadn't known before. He had assumed that was how they always invaded, and it had never occurred to anyone that they had attacked in the past that it might be a colonization fleet and not a normal, targeted military offensive.
That greatly changed the way humans would have thought about the Narsian attacks. Colonization implied that the Narsians didn't actually know that the planets were inhabited, only that they were inhabitable, so it was only a fluke that they hadn't hit a capital city yet unless the Capital cities were emitting enough of a signal that they knew to avoid those particular areas.
[All Cutters, maintain formation and Warp 5 until further notice. We will only scramble to maximum warp if we lose contact with the planet or receive additional distress calls.] Max informed the pilots and then got to work on the planning stages for their offensive beyond where the troops would land.
There were drones to deploy, bombings to plan, not to mention the matter of if he should intervene with Cleansing Light. It would escalate the situation to a whole new level, and being so close to Narsian inhabited planets, it might actually be worse for the humans they were trying to rescue than if he remained aboard Terminus.
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