Now that everyone was getting settled into their new homes, and Uncle Lu had a wonderful new Mecha Design project that the entire Rae 5 system would benefit from, there really was no choice except to make themselves comfortable for an extended period on the planet.
It was much safer to examine Terminus’ engines while they were powered down and the ship was on the ground and not in space, so Uncle Lu was making the best of his time here to get the essential study done.
He hadn’t been slacking on his original designs, but he needed a much smaller power plant that would be capable of the energy output that he required for his weapons and travel designs, which the Terminus promised to provide him, assuming that he could understand enough about its design to engineering a miniaturized version of it for the Mecha.
“You know, I’ve seen something similar to this before. One of the Intergalactic cultures on the Northern side of the Galaxy uses a form of Crystals to power their drives. Unfortunately, we’ve never seen one of their large ship drives, only the one on a crashed shuttle that Kepler Engineers studied before the mother ship came to retrieve it, but I suspect that they were the origin of this ship.
The technology is too similar not to be, but it looks like this one is at least fifty thousand years out of date, from their first wave of colonization in the Galaxy.
“So what you’re saying is that this design has the promise to reach speeds that would make intergalactic transport possible?” Nico asked hopefully.
“No, as I understand it they use a version of stabilized wormhole to travel to distant galaxies, getting close to their perimeter with the wormhole then using the Warp Drives to travel the rest of the way in. Even getting the travel time to a decade would take a warp factor in the thousands, and that’s just not practical.” Uncle Lu sighed, wishing that he could actually find a way to do exactly that.
“Even if we could get this old ship up to modern Kepler standards it would be a huge victory for us. In the role of a cargo freighter, we are slow but acceptable. As a frontline attack ship, we are laughably slow to respond, and the Reavers are going to need all the firepower that they can get once the Tapani either rebuild their military force or arrange enough alliances to return.” Max suggested.
“We will start with new engines for one of the Cutters. Once it is up and functional, we can do the testing and start on a version of the Colony Ship’s engines that will help it keep up.” Uncle Lu agreed.
Taking their research subject offline for modifications was the last thing that he wanted to do, even if the colony ship needed to be faster.
For an entire week, Max organized training drills for the Regiment, making sure everyone was still in top shape in case of attack, while Nico worked on the recipes for the Replicators, and Uncle Lu reverse-engineered the ship’s main engines.
It was starting to feel like home here on Rae 5, even though his actual family was moving out in the next few days.
They hadn’t made anything official, but Max had seen the housing request for the children and Molly, but Dave’s name was also on the tenant list for that unit. It looked like his old friend had found himself in a mighty fine new situation after all the hardships he had gone through.
[Commander, we have an update from Imperial Command. The rebellion in this sector has been officially put down, and the Civil War on Kepler Terminus is over, with the Loyalists victorious. How loyal the planet remains is still in question, since the forces on the planet were allied under the local authority and not the Fleet, but for now, things are stable, and they are allowing Refugees to begin to return to a number of their homeworlds.] Inquisitor Ming informed Max.
[So the flow of them here to Rae 5 is nearly over then?] Max asked.
This week they had seen at least two ships every day, after the initial influx, and it had gone a long way to filling the other two cities that had been built on the planet so far.
[I wouldn’t say that it is over. A lot of ships are still making inquiries about coming here, but as with the ones that have already arrived, vetting all their passengers and crew for Rebel sympathies takes a lot of time.]
That was the Reavers’ biggest challenge these days, looking into everyone who arrived and making sure that they weren’t here to take down the new Reaver stronghold before it could even be properly established.
For that reason, they limited the number of visiting ships in the system and put everyone in quarantine until their credentials could be verified.
There were still three large ships that had to be cleared before they could either unload their refugees or leave the system, but the progress moved along fairly smoothly, with cooperation from the Captains and the planets that they had been evacuated from.
Some had indeed been full of Rebels, though they were civilians, and the refugees were not happy to find out that they were being turned away because the leadership of the Rebellion had turned on the Reavers.
The Reavers were a sign of freedom to most of the Rebel Civilians, people who lived outside the rigid constraints of the system, and out from under Imperial Rule. But to know that the so-called freedom fighters had attacked the people’s heroes for sheltering former soldiers that the news on most of their planets had been calling deserters and traitors for half a year now, went against everything that the Rebellion was supposed to stand for.
Instead of being allowed on the planet, those groups were mostly split up between the Reaver Companies, so they could keep an eye on them. Sending them back to Kepler was a death sentence for most, and kicking them entirely out of the system would only give propaganda ammunition to the Reavers’ enemies, but isolated on mining stations and outlying space stations, they could be vetted for problematic individuals before the rest were given a free pass to move on, or work under lower supervision.
In essence, they were prisoners. Well-paid prisoners, but prisoners nonetheless.