The process to get an official agreement from the Emperor, at least when General Ming was asking, was a surprisingly short one. Within an hour, they had an official deed, granting Rae 5 to the Tarith Reavers to do what they wanted in exchange for their assistance in dealing with the Rebels’ alliance with the Tapani.
Mary Tarith used that as leverage to get a lot of other Reavers on board with the deal, promising them the use of cities that Terminus would construct, and for some of the larger groups, rights to put a Space Station in orbit around the planet for their own personal use.
It was like heaven to the Reavers.
Now, all they had to do was make sure that Tapani High Command noticed the wave of Reavers heading for the uninhabited buffer system, and didn’t notice that some of them were in fact Kepler Military Vessels.
For the Reavers, their ships were precious and hard-earned, nearly impossible to replace. For the Kepler Fleet, ships were just another line item, so the intention was to have Kepler forces deal with most of the orbital fleet, and the Reavers deal with anything that directly threatened their control of the planet since their presence was officially only to distract the enemies of the Emperor.
The response was much larger than anyone could have anticipated. Over the next six hours, they received responses from over fifty Reaver fleets looking for a cut of the deal, and Four Death Wind Mercenary Companies looking for use of repair and cross-dock facilities to move their goods from ship to ship.
All of that could be built and agreed to without issues, they would just need to borrow a small asteroid from the field in the outskirts of the Star System so that they would have the raw materials to create a Space Station large enough.
Rae 5’s habitable planet didn’t have a proper moon of its own to control its motion, so putting an especially large space station in orbit would actually be for the benefit of the planet’s habitability. It would help stabilize the rotation and the tides, as well as provide a brutal final line of defense.
Mary Tarith had big plans for her new home, and to Max, it looked like she wanted to live in a fortress world.
“Are you planning on fighting something bigger than Tapani afterward?” He asked, looking at the plans for a series of highly armed defensive stations around the system.
“Not particularly. We agreed that everyone would have their own space in the system, we didn’t say that they would all be in orbit of the same planet. If we space them out around all of the mid-zone planets, we can give everyone more space to work in privacy, out of the direct line of sight of their competition. That will make them a bit happier than all being crowded around one planet, and we can provide an open trading port for general purposes.” Mary Tarith said proudly.
“What Mother means is that the defensive weapons on those moon-sized space stations would blow any approaching fleet out of the system, and the scatter of the planets means that there would be no safe angle to approach from 99 years out of one hundred.” Nico translated.
It was a bit hardcore, but who was he to argue? The Reavers kept trade in the Galaxy moving, and if they were going to get their very own star system to use as a distribution hub, here in the southwestern quadrant of the Galaxy, they could do what they wanted with it.
Where they would find the manpower to actually do all that was the question. Terminus had great terraforming tools aboard it now, but they were museum pieces, and not intended for use in space.
[Terminus Trading Company, do you mind if we convoy with you?] A signal came through to them, alerting the Admiral.
It wasn’t a Reaver code, but a Kepler Civilian one that anyone could be using.
“Nico, we need a patch through the last contact. I want to know who is sending us messages and if they are legit.” Admiral Drake messaged directly to Nico’s communicator.
“I’m on it, give me a few minutes to message back,” Nico replied, preparing to establish a connection to the approaching vessel.
She was only working for a few seconds before she stopped and sent a positive reception message.
[Terminus Trading Company to Civilian merchant vessel Monarch, I see we all have the same destination in mind, please do join our convoy. You will be pleasantly surprised with what we have prepared at the destination.]
The message wasn’t encoded, encrypted, or even sent in pulses to try to keep it from being detected, like two unconcerned merchants casually chatting about public business on the public airwaves.
That could only mean that it was exactly the opposite of that, and soon after Nico sent the radio information of the lead ship that had contacted them. It was a Kepler Destroyer, three times the size of Terminus, with an armament that could annihilate a small nation’s entire fleet in an instant.
But it wasn’t alone, it was traveling with three Mecha Carriers and eighteen Battle Cruisers in a formation designed to confuse enemy sensors and make their fleet look like close to fifty much smaller vessels.
So, Terminus led the way to the Rae 5 system, with the Military in tow, laughing and joking like old friends over the airwaves and talking about the profits that were to be made once this deal is done.
They didn’t specifically mention Rae 5, but they were headed straight there. Any idiot could follow their route, and they were hoping that a certain group of idiots would try.
[Admiral Drake to all units, we have detected hostile signatures incoming. After we translate into the Rae 5 system, we will have four hours before their arrival to make our presence look legitimate.]
That wasn’t much time, but if they could get the Military to tow some asteroids into orbit and place smaller vessels near them, to appear to be Reaver work vessels while hiding the fleet itself inside the disruptive atmosphere of the Gas Giant planet, they should be able to make this ambush work.