763: 763 Lost and Found

763 Lost and Found

The whole point of a blockade was that you didn't dare to openly attack the target for one reason or another, so throwing their cargo into the atmosphere would actually be pretty effective.  1

Nico nodded in appreciation of the technique, and the Commander gave her a curious look. "What would the vaunted Nico Tarith have done in that situation?" 

"I have optimized the portals in my cargo ship for stacking, so once the main Portal is open, I can open a precision portal, like the ones we use to get around on Absolution in a hurry, and just drop the cargo right inside the warehouse, or in their yard. We used it to send home a passenger who needed to go further than most, and it's quite effective." 

That gave all of the Commanders a series of great ideas. Many missions were to take groups of people to places that they had no business being. 

"How secure are Alliance planets?" The man a few seats down on their side of the table asked. 

"You can't even portal close to many of them, and certainly not into Alliance Facilities. They are well aware of the trick and can track it back through the main Portal, I'm informed. But if you come through at a short distance and set off an EMP, it will scramble the traces, and you will be able to travel in while they react." Nico explained. 

"So, it's still a good insertion, and it will make a great delivery method. I wonder why the Black Market isn't using it now?" One of the Commanders asked. 

"Don't forget how rare it is that an Alliance delivery ship can Portal. Almost all of their planetary systems have a dedicated array, and entering on your own is restricted, so you pay the fee to use the array. Travel has gotten so convenient for them that they've stagnated. They don't really innovate any longer because there is already some system in place to do everything moderately well. 

Plus, their warp drives are different, they produce way less power than ours do, but they're more efficient at generating a Warp Field. We thought about emulating them, but they don't produce enough to keep up with the demands of battle, so you could say that Human Technology is just the military-grade version of everything." Max added. 

"Produced to minimum specifications by the lowest bidder?" Someone joked from a few seats away. 

"Better believe it. It's just that our minimum is higher than what they feel that their civilians need. So, we can do things that they forgot were possible. 

I think that with a bit of time, we're going to find that the Reavers are exactly what the Alliance had been missing, even if the Government wishes that we were still missing." 

That made most of the Reavers around the table laugh, but he had a point. Even the Giants couldn't 'rules lawyer' like a Reaver. Their minds looked for laws as written, exact and literal, whereas the Reavers looked at a document not for what it said but what it didn't. There were surely other species like them in the Alliance, but Max hadn't met them yet, leaving the Reavers as the leaders of the "Technically Legal" category of transactions. 

Even the majority of the new Warp Crystals that they sold for such an exorbitant price as a pre-tuned assembly so that the buyer didn't have to go to a Government licensed specialist to get them set up to do the overhaul on their ships fell into that category. 

Selling them was explicitly legal. But the ships that they were being put into were ones that were under investigation for a large number of crimes, and nobody had a record of the new Warp Signature since the arrays hadn't been tested in a ship before being sent out. You could get a very close guess, but the rest of the ship's systems would determine the exact signature. 

"Have you heard about the chaos in the Prince's Folly?" One of the other Reavers asked. 

Prince's Folly was the nickname for the old Kepler Empire Core that was taken over by the Rebel Princes. It never really settled, but the wars had mostly died out for lack of willing participants. 

"Oh, what's the latest?" Max asked. He hadn't been following it at all, so no matter what he heard, it would be new information to him. 

"They finally located the God Mecha and the Emperor's Flagship, and now the Core Planets are threatening to overthrow the Princes. They were told that the Emperor's ship had fallen and that the God Mecha was lost. Now that they know it was a lie, they're in full outrage mode. We're getting ready to gather some ships with the Cygnus and see if they'd like to join us when they're done." Mary Tarith laughed, but she forgot that Max could read minds. 

Located was a very strong word for the situation. 

The Emperor's Flagship, according to the official records, was Abraham Kepler, and General Tennant had brought it full of refugees to the outskirts of the Galaxy, where Max had set him up with his own planet to Govern. 

"Abraham Kepler was never lost, though, was it? Or did nobody tell them that we had set him up with a new planet to Govern? And what's this about the God Mecha?" Nico asked. 

"It showed up above Luminos, the Planet of Lights, where you set up General Tennant to Govern, with its pilot and copilot alive and well. Nobody is sure where it went after that, but they're assuming it's in secure storage on the planet. A hundred thousand tourists saw it appear, and it's been live-streamed all over. There's no question that the Mecha is intact and operational, but it does look a bit worse for wear. 

From what I understand, Luminos has top-of-the-line facilities, though, and they might be able to make a half-decent repair to the Mecha, though we don't have access to the original design specs or creation methods. The world that made it was destroyed at some point in the past and the Mecha was just handed down from antiquity, with millennia-long stretches where we can't verify anything about its history." Mary smiled. 

Great, now Nico wanted to go on vacation so she could break in and analyze the Mecha. 

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