Luke Tarith smiled at Nico, who made a lewd gesture in his direction that made the small gray-skinned woman next to him giggle.
"Enjoy your trip, and I hope that all of our new members will get settled into their new homes without any issues. Did the scanners detect anything that might still be giving off a signal?" Max asked to break the awkward silence.
"No signals of any sort were detected, and the passengers have been scanned both internally and externally for electronic devices, with nothing found. We also searched for biomechanical devices and organisms since Divine Tribulation is short on data about what sort of life form the Arisen are." Luke informed him.
"I wish we knew as well. It's a bit unclear what sort of existence they are, but it seems to be energy-based and non-corporeal, so we have been scanning everything for their unique signature. It was in the data package that we sent you. The base signal is what their lifeforms give off innately. It doesn't appear to come from any form of device." Max replied.
Luke turned to leave with the small woman under his arm once everyone was loaded, and the Co-Operative group leader wiped a tear from his eye.
"It's good to see love blossoming after all this time. Some of our people have been on here for many years and had nearly lost hope that someone would really take us in for longer than it took to repair our ships and make us go away again." He explained.
"These are our personal communications channels. If you happen to load up again, we will take a few more people, either children or people with job skills. Everyone aboard our ship is expected to provide in some way or be part of a family with an employed member, and we are quite good at finding work for the ones who are somewhat reluctant to lift a finger to help themselves." Nico told him with an indulgent smile.
The Reavers' rules were actually quite harsh on slackers, but there was no need to tell him all about that. The ones who made it to Absolution would learn fast enough what was expected of them, and it wasn't much, just enough to make sure everything was running smoothly.
Max recalled a notation from the maintenance department, requesting to reassign more workers from the electrical grid to plumbing since it was so rare that there were power problems, but plugged pipes still occurred despite their best design efforts.
The electricians were at two days a week, six-hour shifts. Since the wages on Absolution were salaried by jobs, they were loving life, unlike the sewage department. The problem was resolved when the new floor opened. They simply didn't hire as many new workers and instead put up a list looking for transfers to the new zones.
That got them back up to four days a week, which was enough to satisfy the department manager that nobody was completely slacking.
The lead vessel of the Co-Operative fleet was gently moved out of the cargo bay now that all of their residents had departed, and they rejoined the flotilla, preparing to head to some new world to search for new passengers, instead of their previous plan to look for a new home.
"Do all of your ships still have enough people to crew them?" Max asked as the Cruiser turned to depart the area.
"Some of our ships can be operated by just one person, so we have more than enough left. Most of our lead engineers stayed, as well as the Captains of the ships, who all chose to remain with their vessels.
We will be fine, and now that we won't be attracting the Arisen Army, we might be able to begin to reform our reputation. The Arisen kill all sentient life, but they don't destroy the worlds, and they don't take them all over either, so there are plenty of worlds which should be suitable to stop over on once we find some new people.
If they are safe there for months at a time, we will know that we can start repopulating the area, and we can bring more survivors to them. That is what we will do now that we know the legacy of the Co-Operative lives on in another region of the universe with your species."
"In that case, we are finished here, and we will return to our vessel and bid you farewell."
After a round of handshakes, Max and Nico returned to their shuttle and secured the walkway.
"So, is there anything in their system that you didn't manage to pilfer?" Max asked once they were alone with the delegation from the Koleska station.
"Probably not. I made a full backup of their ships' computers and every linked device in the fleet to create the retrovirus. It's running on that data tablet on the command console table." Nico laughed.
Okay, that was just embarrassing. It didn't actually take much to run a ship, but being able to download the entire fleet to a data tablet because they had nothing resembling security was just sad.
As soon as the Co-Operative fleet turned to leave, the Koleska Subcommander finally spoke up again. "I can't believe that you stole all of their computer data. Do humans not have a rule against that?"
Nico laughed and shook her head. "We do, but the rules are somewhat flexible. In this case, it was needed to create the retrovirus, so I did it on my own initiative. Usually, we won't gather data from allied computers."
That was a bald-faced lie. Nico got data from everywhere that she could access, but the Koleska didn't need to know that.
"And what will you do with it now that you have it?" The Subcommander asked.
"I will secure it and keep it safe in case there is a variant of the invasive code encountered, as it will serve as a solid base code in our attempts to prevent any future intrusions by Arisen Army computer viruses. I will provide a copy of the retrovirus that we created to the Koleska, so they can scan their own systems and all visiting ships in the future.
You never know when a seemingly safe ship might have been infected by contact with a random bit of code, so it is best if they add it to their security measures."
The Subcommander nodded in agreement. "I will see to it that our procedures are updated now that we know how the Arisen Army has been tracking vessels. The problem might be much more widespread than just the Co-Operative."
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