The dinner wasn't a particularly long one, only a courtesy to the visitors and a way to socialize the Admiral with the two Reavers so that he had an excuse to come check in on them every day so he could see how Nico was doing with the Mecha development.
He didn't have any skills in the area, but he was a huge fan of new technology development videos, including the live streams that the Terminus Trading Company broadcast for the Alliance Data Network.
He never thought that he might get a front-row seat to actually watch them make a brand-new Mecha variant right on his own ship, where he wouldn't have to guess what was being created through the careful camera positioning and the censors which hid military secrets.
"Thank you for your hospitality, let us know when you return, and we will prepare a meal for you from the wide variety of alien dishes that we have added to our Replicator systems," Max informed the Fleet Admiral, who paused in his walk out of the bay.
"You have more options than what comes programmed into the Replicators?" He asked, shocked by the revelation.
Nico nodded. "Of course. We developed them in the first place, and the Terminus Trading Company has had contact with many more species than anyone else in the Trade Group, so we have had to add their culinary preferences to our Replicator systems in order to keep all our guests fed.
So, we program new things all the time, and we have even found some local Koleska specialties to be quite appealing. Are there any particular flavours that you enjoy?"
Admiral Rashad smiled back at her. "Well, there is this particularly rich chocolate cake..."
The staff looked confused, but both Nico and Max laughed at the reference to her mother's famous cake.
"You know nobody else can make it quite the same way that she does. It's not for lack of trying, either. I have a variant of it programmed into the Replicator, and it is close, but there is something missing from the flavour that the Replicator doesn't seem to emulate quite perfectly."
The Admiral sighed. "I have run into that same issue. There is a species of bird on my home planet which is incredibly tasty, but the Replicator system doesn't get it quite right. I'm not sure what is missing, but there is part of the flavour profile that isn't correctly replicated, and it comes out a bit bland, like a generic or mass-produced version of a masterpiece."
That was a problem that had been bothering Nico for a long time, but there was no time to get to it right now, and she still hadn't isolated what caused the issue. It was most likely a specific chemical reaction during cooking that caused the problem, and that could be solved for the bird since she could program the Replicator to create it raw, and then they could cook it conventionally and test the flavour, but that wouldn't work for cake.
She wondered what else wasn't quite right in the Replicator, but everyone had just accepted that the food from the Replicator had a specific taste based on the sample which had been used to program it, and nobody who ate it knew what the original was, so they didn't know if the replicated version was wrong or not.
The thoughts of how to alter the Replicator led Nico to wonder how she could alter the Disruptors to be more effective against the Arisen ships. They were already sufficiently deadly against the War Walkers, but against the actual ships, they were much less impressive.
They tore apart the hull with ease, but the more powerful and varied shielding methods proved to be quite effective at stopping the energy beam without faltering.
The Cygnus officers left while Nico was lost in thought, and Max locked the bay doors behind them to gain some privacy and prevent the creation process from being interrupted.
As far as Nico could tell, the issue was that the Arisen simply had too much experience with energy weapons. The Koleska used all energy weapons, and the Darklings used primarily energy weapons, with close combat blades coated in energy barriers as well.
What she needed was something truly novel to break through their defences faster than they could adapt their technology to defend against her.
That meant no single technology would really do the job perfectly, as they could just adapt their shielding either between fights or once the battle started and they realized that she was there.
Realistically, it was impossible to make the perfect weapon. She knew she had tried many times in two lifetimes, and the first one was centuries long.
But if she couldn't find something that worked all the time, she could just use everything that worked most of the time. Lasers weren't the most effective weapon against the Arisen, but they did work.
They had gotten uncannily good at stopping her Mass Driver rounds, which were slow to fire and large enough for their sensors to track. But if she shrunk them and increased the firing rate, she could offset that disadvantage.
Add to that the Disruptors, which had proven so capable of taking out the unique hull materials they had encountered in this region, and she had the basis for the weapons suite that she was creating.
That was the easy part, though. She needed a much more capable platform for the weapons. Increased mobility and orbital maneuverability, and you could never underestimate the value of user comfort.
So it needed to have a miniaturized Warp Drive and the new precision portal function that her memories said should be called Blink. It wasn't quite what the Knife Ears were using, but it was similar and could emulate the vanishing act that the Arisen pulled, only she would appear instantly and not sometime later.
The four arms of Shattered Pride were a huge advantage on the surface when she was mostly fighting in two dimensions, but in orbit, it would be better to get full 360-degree coverage from a hard-mounted weapons system instead.
Then, there were the energy-coated blade wings that the interceptors used. Sure, swords did the same thing, but a weaponized hull was just too good of a feature to pass up.
With that, Nico had the outline for what she wanted to do, and she began to set up the Terraforming Array in the cargo bay to create her new Mecha's hull.
It would take a lot of testing to get it perfect, but she would do small-scale prototypes of the weapons and shielding functions, as well as the hull fitments first, and that would be of just as much interest to the Admiral as the final product.
It was a shame that she didn't have her Innu assistants here with her, but she didn't want to risk bringing them into a foreign warzone just to help her build a single new Mecha. However, if the prototypes worked as well as she hoped, she could make a Light Mecha or Mobile Suit specifically for fighting the Arisen as well.
The market for that would be insanely large.
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