Chapter 992 992 Military Intelligence
Max and Nico took their seats in the meeting with the military leaders, who all looked much more nervous than the situation called for. Max already knew what they had to say, and if he were actually mad, this wouldn't be such a cordial meeting.
But to subordinates who were suddenly called in a large group to talk to the big boss, it was hard to get past that ingrained feeling that you might have messed something up that you hadn't noticed before he did.
"Who wants to start? Remember that I can read your minds, so this is mostly a formality to get everyone on the same page and brainstorm solutions." Max reminded them.
That helped calm the Officers, and the first to stand was the leader of the third Battalion.
"We encountered some difficulty with piracy when making one of our deliveries. My Battalion had a talk with the Black Market, and they assured us that it wasn't sanctioned by them, but we have delayed their next shipment by a week as a punishment for giving others the impression that they might be willing to purchase goods stolen from us.
The details are all here in my report."
That was pretty straightforward and proper for a Reaver response to an untrustworthy trading partner, and nobody in the room had any issue with it.
"That's fine. They will get the message." Max agreed.
Then, he searched the minds of the people on the ship. There were a lot of Black Market-operated businesses here, so they should know about the situation.
It only took a few seconds to find the real answer. One of the underlings thought that he could pull a fast one on the boss, and once the Pirates had been eliminated and the Black Market sanctioned for a week, the bosses did an intensive search for traitors and purged him and everyone he was working with.
In short, the problem was well and truly taken care of.
The next few notices were just mundane business, and everything seemed to be under control for most of their business operations, with the exception of the Industrial Equipment sector, which sold a lot of demilitarized Line Mecha for commercial use and had attracted the attention of the Alliance Government again.
The Envoys on the ship were looking into it, but Max checked the records, and nothing that they had shipped had any armour or weapons on it. They didn't even sell the mining attachments preassembled with the chassis. Those had to be sourced separately.
While they were going through the minute details of the daily operations, reiterating the details that they had given the Council, a message came in on the Koleska frequencies.
[Attention all armed and capable beings of the Universe, the Great Enemy has attacked the Rift, and you are called upon to defend your very existence.
Should the Great Enemy make it through the blockade, they will have free access to your homeworlds.
We will assemble in one standard day.]
The message wasn't from the Koleska. It was to them and coded as having come from the Darklings. The code wouldn't mean anything to most species, but Max recognized it from interacting with their systems in the past.
If the Darklings were calling all intelligent species to defend the rift, as they called the giant area of destroyed space between where the Anomaly the Hunters had been defending and the one where the Koleska lived, it could only mean that whatever had taken the planet and destroyed the Anomaly was headed toward the majority of civilized species in that region.
Max and Nico looked around the room, and then Max paged the Board Members to come to him. They were nearby, likely in the offices, so he added a note to bring the Envoys from the Alliance with them as well.
Everyone would need to understand just what was going on, and most of them didn't have all the details about what had happened to the world that the Hunters had been protecting yet.
That was confidential and held within the Alliance military, so it wouldn't have been spread to the politicians yet.
The room fell silent while they waited for the rest of the guests to arrive, but everyone was thinking the same thing. What had happened that would make someone request every single intelligent species to come and intervene in some massive-scale battle?
As a matter of fact, what sort of enemy could possibly be so dangerous and so numerous that it would take a force that large to control them?
More details were slowly leaking in from the Koleska and Commander Yuri, who saw to it that he personally kept Max in the loop with every new development even after Max had left to help the Hunters.
From what the Koleska could tell, there were millions of warships headed toward the rift, which was currently fluctuating with energy, as if a massive battle were taking place inside the damaged space.
That was certainly not good news, and the Koleska had sent a full third of their military might to assist their allies at the battle.
That was as much or more than any of the others had sent, so they couldn't be accused of holding back in a time of need, and they had sent their most advanced troops, the new generation trained with the learning machines that the humans had provided them.
Then a message came from the Cygnus Commanders, requesting an opinion from the Reavers and the Alliance on whether it was appropriate to send the force on that side of the Anomaly to the battle, with the Cygnus Military units on the human side reinforcing the Anomaly until the battle was settled.
They had a thousand Titan Class Mecha there, along with fifty Destroyers. It was a fleet on par with most of the species that were called to arms, and their Koleska allies would need all the help they could get if this so-called Great Enemy could actually make it past the Rift.
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