[Mess Hall officers, you have first priority of access, come get your supplies for the week. We have two weeks of fresh produce, and then we’re back to shelf stable, but the good civilian stuff, not the packed by the lowest bidder version.] Max informed the Regiment as soon as they were back at warp.
He would never hear the end of it if he made the crew eat another freeze-dried and canned meal when they had literal tonnes of fresh food sitting in the cargo bay.
Since they needed the crew relatively sober, the General had decided to ration the Rum supply. One Barrel per Battalion per month. That worked out to roughly a bottle per person every month, or a shot a day, which gave them enough for celebrations, but not daily intoxication.
All of the officers expected their rationing to meet with at least some backlash, but the General had given them enough to quiet almost all the malcontents. What they had failed to account for was the sudden demand for aluminum through the smaller materials printers in the general quarters, as the soldiers who preferred a little nip every day ordered flasks to store their weekly ration.
Max headed to the First Battalion Mess Hall for dinner, to see what they made of the new supplies, and found a surprisingly simple meal on offer, but a very happy crew.
There was a chicken and dumpling stew, along with Toasted Tomato sandwiches and an assortment of fresh fruit laid out for the crew.
Max could smell that the bread was freshly baked, a distinct change from the hard biscuits which were the staple starch of the rations and long voyage kitchen packs.
They had ordered a lot of raw flour and shelf-stable milk this time, which weren’t on the military’s usual procurement list since they avoided issues with lactose intolerance. The creamy stew and buttermilk biscuits that the small sandwiches were on seemed to be a hit though, so Max made a digital note to keep the ingredients in supply every time they picked up rations.
“This is amazing, but the real question is if there will be bacon.” Major Petrova, the muscular woman who led Max’s Charlie Company asked.
“Likely at breakfast. It stores for 90 days according to the ration guide, so we ordered enough to serve it at breakfast regularly for the next three months.” Max informed her.
The look that she gave the kitchen staff promised violence if there was no bacon tomorrow, the good stuff, not the freeze-dried version that every military unit kept in stock for its high protein and fat contents.
With the lunch meal served, the work crews were off to the storage bay to move all the new materials back to their assigned Regiments. The idea was that if they took heavy fire and one area was heavily damaged or rendered inaccessible, they would still have raw materials in four others, so they could keep fighting and not be crippled by a lack of munitions and repair parts.
The Terminus seemed to have extremely impressive shielding though, and Max wondered what it took to put it into the state that they found it in. It was obvious that the ship’s power supply was overloaded, but going by the data that Max had seen, they would have had to basically autopilot directly into an asteroid field for that to happen.
Which made him wonder if there was a problem with the navigation or sensors. A failure of either could be a disaster for the Regiment if they ran into the same issue that the Colonists did.
Max sent a report on the topic to all the Battalion Commanders, as well as engineering, Nico, and the General. He requested a meeting that evening, which would make the General happy. He always preferred to have dinner meetings now since he didn’t have a staff of nobles to chatter idly and fill his quarters with noise anymore.
His first idea was to retrofit additional sensors to the ship while they tried to recover the logs that the Colonists had destroyed in their attempts to remove all traces of their identity.
The engineering teams had deciphered enough of the computer’s programming now to work out how to add some sensor data to the ship’s own information, and they had the technology to build a new sensor suite suitable to an interstellar ship.
The only issue was that at faster-than-light speeds, the energy of the warp field made it unsafe to work outside the ship, so they would have to wait until the next time that they stopped to do the actual retrofit.
For now, it looked like they were getting good data, but they couldn’t be sure. In fact, they didn’t even know if the majority of the damage had been done before or after the Colonists abandoned the ship. The reports that they had recovered named the lack of mobility as the reason for their leaving, but there weren’t any more details.
Their next planned stop was a small Kepler zero gravity manufacturing facility, just outside the Empire’s official borders and next to an asteroid mining facility. General Yaakov had been in contact with them already, and they had a need for some of the materials that Terminus had picked up, plus they could provide them with Kepler-approved trade goods that the Regiment could use as cover to enter back into Kepler space without drawing suspicion.
It wasn’t illegal for a Reaver ship to enter Kepler space, they just had to prove that their trade goods weren’t on the prohibited list.
As of that moment, the only shipments that Terminus had on board were from approved import nations and facilities, with the rest of the ship housing their mercenary force, which was only subject to regulations on its usage.
This was their new hide-in-plain-sight plan. They could trade their way across Kepler space much more easily in a Colony ship without raising suspicion, and they could disappear without a trace if they needed if they employed the assistance of Imperial Command and known loyalist forces.
As long as they weren’t recognized they should be perfectly safe.