Max finished sending messages to all of the ships of the Terminus Trading Company Fleet, ensuring that they were all up on the new weapons and thrusters and that their Mecha would be ready to deploy in the event of a space battle.
The terraforming was just completing, and General Tennant, now Governor Tennant, was preparing a huge celebration to mark the final regions of the formerly toxic world being cleansed.
That was when Nico planned to portal the Terraforming Array away. From that moment on, Max needed to be on high alert for alien species detecting their new project and the possibility that they would attack to try to stop it from happening.
Of course, he hoped that she was right and that she could get it completed before anyone noticed, but there were a lot of eyes looking in their direction, and Max wasn't sure how well they could track the destination of a portal or if anyone who did detect it would act to try to follow them.
They were supposed to take a multi-stop route to her chosen destination, an uninhabited star system within Klem territory. Still, there were no guarantees that they wouldn't be followed or detected.
Not knowing was the most annoying part of dealing with new species. If they were near, Max could read their thoughts, most of the time, but if they didn't know their military capabilities or used units of measurement that he didn't understand, then he couldn't gather any useful information at all from them.
Down on the surface, Governor Tennant had begun his speech, informing all of the city's residents and guests of the momentous occasion that they had all been waiting for.
[Thank you all for coming to celebrate our first day as a fully terraformed colony. As of ten minutes ago, the last of the Terraforming Array units completed their work, and we have verified through our satellite network that there are no more remaining toxic areas on the surface or in the oceans.
That isn't to say that the whole planet is safe, there are still many dangerous areas, but they are natural dangers. Many of them are beautiful landmarks of this world, like the mineral springs of the Samantha Mountains, which vent scalding hot waters into the air around the pools every few minutes thanks to the Geothermal heating boiling the underground reservoir.
The link to view them is available in the tourist highlights, and a fly-over tour is available every day, leaving at nine in the morning.
With the completion of the Terraforming, it is traditional to rename a planet after its new occupants, so let me present to you Luminos, the Planet of Ghost Lights.
Now, I have spoken enough, everyone. Please enjoy the party.]
Max switched his main feed from the cameras in the city to the data feed from the Terraforming Array, which had just made its final jump, using a Tarith Family ship's Portal Generator so that the signature wouldn't be the same as the last jump that they made.
They had jumped from orbit around a populated planet with dozens of manufacturing facilities, so there were many portal signatures in the area, and a number of warehouses where they could have been stored, if they weren't still in use. The plan was to use that as a distraction and to send industrial spies searching through millions of units of textiles, looking for them if they had followed the Array that far.
Now that they were in place, Max began looking over the design of the ship, which was more and more incredible the deeper he dug into it. It was designed so that the interior would look more like a misty planet, with huge amounts of open space for giant trees to be grown or for projects to be moved through the air to distant regions of the ship.
It wasn't hugely space efficient, but with the size of the vessel, it didn't have to be. From the interior, it would feel like an actual world to the residents and would also help alleviate some of the stress that was known to be suffered by residents of more cramped vessels, who never got to see the outside world.
Agoraphobia was common among those who were raised on such cramped vessels, and this design, with kilometre-high ceilings through most of the main body, should alleviate almost all of that.
The actual construction of the ship seemed to be going extremely quickly, much more than Max had anticipated and faster than it had on the planet, so he took a good look at what the Array was up to, according to its data feed.
The hull was made of the monomolecular material that they had identified on the planet he was currently circling, and the strange bond that turned it into a logic-defying single unit seemed to be incredibly compatible with the Array, which could extrude it like a liquid instead of having to create individual molecules over and over.
As fast as the units could power the constructors, the hull could be formed. The process was fascinating to watch, as it all needed to be surrounded by an energy barrier, separating it from all other matter and antimatter. If it touched either, it would solidify, and the form would be set, so every hull section was made as one piece and would self-repair to maintain its shape once it came into contact with anything else.
That made the whole ship ablative in one sense, but Max knew that they had the technology to inject more of the strange matter into the hull pieces until they regained their original form.
The Hunters had done it to restore relics that they had found once they discovered some of the secrets of the material, thanks to the discovery that it had a vulnerability to the Disruptors. Knowing how to break it down showed them how to rebuild it, and that was when they learned that rebuilding an existing piece always took the original shape and that any exposure to other matter would stop the process.
There was still a lot that nobody knew about it, but if they could build ships out of it, that was as much knowledge as most engineers had about the materials that they used in their designs, so it was good enough for Nico, who was more focused on having the coolest toy in the Universe than the practical matters of actual ship repair while it was in service.
That was hard logic to argue with. It was definitely going to be a cool toy, with the very latest of technologies adapted by the Research Department, as well as their unique new combat technologies and an experimental Warp Drive that would propel this monstrosity through space without using portals all the time.
Nico's directed thoughts caught his attention as he was admiring the biome designed specifically to keep the Shin and Dryads happy, an immense forest which was intended to have a World Tree at its core. Oddly, the strange plant couldn't be replicated alive, it came out lacking something, but the Shin had assured Nico that they were capable of growing her a new one for the new ship.
[I know you've given in and snuck a peek by now. What do you think? Is it cool enough? The inner hull layer is finished now, and I will start building the outer shells over it. In total, there are three layers of containment in the outer regions, as well as the more decorative plates to protect docked ships from debris.
As far as atmospheric stability goes, it should be better than anything else that we have, and the bubble-type structures can be both isolated and jettisoned in an emergency, like a major infection or catastrophic damage.
There was something else. What was it? Oh yeah, I finished the new weapons. Did you get the notification? What time is it? If they haven't arrived yet, they should come soon.]
Nico was clearly so focused on her work that she had forgotten about everything else, including the messages that she had scheduled to go out this morning, but that wasn't surprising. As far as she could tell, this thing was the single biggest weapon in the known Universe, and Max could tell that Nico was confident that someone would want to fight them for it.
Max was a bit afraid that she was right, but there was no denying that even the Alliance would be forced to respect their level of development once this thing was in action.
This chapt𝒆r is updated by free(w)ebnovel(.)com