"Please follow us to the pavilion. Do you have any weapons on your person?" A member of the Special Forces team asked.
"Of course I do. It's built into my armor. I recommend that your negotiator keeps a pistol on themselves as well. It is considered common courtesy among the Reavers to not leave yourself defenseless in case the negotiations are interrupted." Nico explained.
"What a strange tradition. We will inform the negotiator." The mechanical voice responded.
Inside the cloth-covered building, the team took up places behind the negotiator, who had his rifle slung over the back of his chair, and Nico could see he still had a combat knife holstered in the chest carrier on his armor.
She took a comfortable seat across from him and placed a data tablet on the table between them.
"I will assume that since your dialect is still quite close to Human Standard that you can read the language? If not, I can work on a translation for you." Nico greeted him.
"What is this? You have drawn up terms of surrender for us already?" The man asked, seeming startled.
"Why would you surrender? We're on the same team. These are the standard conditions of every planet or planetary cluster wishing to join the Reavers Trade Group. They detail the trade of technology, terms of nonaggression toward other members, and an assistance obligation should a member neighbor be attacked, which might not actually apply to you.
The details are, of course, open to negotiation, and I will have a supply shuttle come with demonstration models of the basic technologies that we are offering all members to increase their quality of life.
Many of your cities took significant damage fighting the Narsians, and this is the perfect opportunity to rebuild in a more efficient way, with more luxuries."
The negotiator picked up the tablet and looked through the terms, then used the data transfer function to send it down to the facility below. He clearly knew nothing about data security, as any trojan or other backdoor virus that Nico had left on the tablet would have infected their facility when he sent the message, but it was possible that he was simply that confident in their security and was testing her to see if they actually tried to hack the bunker.
A shuttle landed outside the shield a few minutes later, and both of them looked out the open flap to verify its identity.
"That's one of mine. It should have the Replicator and a small-scale version of the Materials Printer on board. I will have them open the bay doors. Please send someone to remove the two items from the cargo hold and bring them here. They're perfectly safe, I assure you, and I will be right next to you." Nico informed them.
The negotiator looked tense but nodded, and the items were brought in and placed on the floor to Nico's right.
"Now that the replicator is here, we can start with the Reaver standard greetings. Do you perhaps partake in alcohol, negotiator? Reavers are quite fond of the Rum we make, and the Replicator turns out a very decent facsimile of the home-brewed version."
She couldn't tell through his helmet, but the man seemed to smile as he nodded.
"Indeed we do. Please, do demonstrate this technology that you are so proud of."
"Marvelous. Can someone grab us one of the broken tree branches outside or even a large bundle of grass? The replicator needs biomass to function, of equivalent weight to the item being produced."
A soldier ducked his head out the door and caught a bundle that was tossed to him from a compatriot in one of the Light Mecha. It appeared to be some sort of animal dropping, but it was dried and solid.
"Close enough. Place it beside the replicator, next to the label marked feed." She instructed.
The soldier looked confused but set it down as instructed while Nico stood to tap a set of buttons on the touchscreen.
"There we go, a bottle of Rum, two glasses, and a platter of snacks. That biomass was denser than it looked."
The snacks were a simple thing, cheese, and crackers, as well as a few slices of roast meat.
"I didn't know what you liked, so I bought some of everything."
With her piece said, Nico poured two glasses of Rum, sipped half of hers down, then stacked a bit of cheese on top of a cracker and popped it into her mouth.
"Man, I love this cheese. No matter how many negotiations I go to, the cheese and crackers never get old." She sighed.
The negotiator was visibly sweating when he took his helmet off and placed it on the table, but he drank the Rum, coughed, and went for the cheese and crackers. Nico chuckled at his caution and took a bit of the sliced meat before settling back into her seat.
"Well, does it suit the local taste? Reaver Rum is well known throughout human space as one of the finest of liquors available."
"Certainly finer than the watered down mead that a junior officer like myself can afford." The negotiator agreed.
"If your leadership chooses to purchase a large number of these replicators, there will be no need for that, only for rationing by energy usage, should your power supply prove limited. It all takes the same amount of work to recombine, so the weight and volume is the real difference, not the quality.
If you should so choose, we also have a Terraforming Drone available for purchase that could rebuild entire cities for you in a rapid time span. Do you have Materials Printer technology on this planet already?" Nico asked.
"We do, left over from the Colony ship and basic terraforming devices, though they're no longer capable of fully reworking the environment. Mostly we do our construction traditionally at this point, as the planet is lacking some of the materials needed to repair the Materials Printers that we came with.
"This one can solve that. It has basic recombining technology and a wide variety of designs that are no longer under patent protection, so the parts for your existing printers might be among the plans. Do you have the model numbers and makers?"
The negotiator finished the glass of Rum and wrote a slip of paper with a string of information on it. "That is the part we need and the original manufacturer's code for it."
Nico searched her stored data for it and found the part relatively quickly. She had made one in her room as a child. The technology was extremely rudimentary, barely worthy of being called a materials printer, but it was still in the files that they had transferred to the new device, with the expectation that many of the Mercenary groups might be working with similarly outdated technology.
"I need a large bit of metal. The type doesn't matter too much. At least twenty kilos." Nico informed the door guard, who hurried to comply now that he had seen the replicator in action.
He returned with a lump of iron ore from the entrance of the mine, and Nico fed it to the Materials Printer, along with some scraps of more precious metals from her storage, prepared for demonstration purposes.
"You still need the basic materials for this one, but it can substitute many of them for easier-to-find versions. I only added a bit of copper, tin, and aluminum to the pile for this one. I believe the planet has them all in relative abundance."
She pressed start to begin the process, and seconds later, the replacement part was complete.
"Feel free to send someone to verify its function, but that's the part you specified." She informed the negotiator with her very best smile.
R𝑒ad latest chapt𝒆rs at f(r)eew𝒆bnovel.com Only