While Nico was disappointed with the rate of progress that they were making on the cloaking device, they were still making progress, and in a uniquely human fashion, not using any methodology that was known before.

Simple optical camouflage was a simple matter, they could already do that to some extent with Keper technology, but it only blocked eyes and cameras using visible light, so it wasn’t in widespread use.

To be considered fully cloaked, a standard sensor suite shouldn’t be able to detect the object, and that included sound, thermal emissions, and energy signatures, which any ship they passed or alerted patrol would be looking for.

The Hunters weren’t, strictly speaking, allowed to help her with the project. Still, she had a meeting with Huntress Khan in only a few minutes as soon as Max arrived at the shuttle bay, and she was certain that she could weasel a little more help out of her without breaking the restrictions placed on her by the agreement her species had with the Alliance.

If you ignored the sensor readings that said the precious minerals had been fully extracted, and the air was toxic, Raeven was a beautiful planet, floating below them like a blue and green marble, tinted slightly teal by the toxins in the atmosphere.

It somewhat reminded her of the clear waters of the pond they had found at a vacation spot, the one with the waterfall and the opal stone bottom, absolutely beautiful. She would have to ensure that the efforts to terraform it and prepare for the arrival of a new population didn’t destroy the natural beauty of the planet.

So, while she waited for Max to finish his meeting with Medusa, she drew up plans to turn the planet’s barren moon into a major industrial facility. Asteroid mining drones could feed it, and the produced products would be sent back down to the planet at regular intervals, which would allow the workers to operate in shifts and keep the early stages of industrialization off the planet.

There was no telling how many people they would want to send to this world. Even if they sent a billion, the majority of industrial workers could be stationed on the moon, while high-efficiency biomass farming could take care of the part that needed to be done on the surface.

That seemed like a much better plan to her, so Nico added it, as well as the necessary spaceport, to the floating city that she was designing for the first inhabitants, which should be fully self-sustaining for a hundred million people, spreading over a thousand square kilometers, and suspended above the surface by pillars and gravity control devices.

She was doing her best to get that design finished while Max was busy since he knew that he would recall it from her memories right away when he saw the plans.

It was the Impossible City, or the City of Demons, as his soldiers had called it in her past life after her forces had taken it and made it their largest-ever recruiting facility. A monument to human achievement that had been the most advanced feat of engineering ever attempted.

Of course, this one just looked like it since she didn’t have the technology or knowledge to actually remake the original.

There was something about the surface ruins that bothered her though like she was missing something huge, something important, but she simply couldn’t figure out what it was. That was what occupied her mind when Max finally showed up to catch a shuttle to the Hunters mothership for their meeting with Khan.

“How bad do you think it’s going to be?” Max asked once they had departed the ship, and even the Illithid could no longer hear their thoughts.

“I think it’s going to be huge, but not immediately dangerous, or she would have warned us not to try to terraform this planet.

There are a dozen others just like it, all built the same right down to the continent shapes, so there is no need to remain on this one if there is any sort of a reason not to pick it.” Nico shrugged.

There wasn’t really time for more conversation, as the two ships were only a few dozen kilometers apart, incredibly close by orbital standards but convenient for both parties in this case.

Huntress Khan greeted them at the landing bay with a very serious look on her face and led them silently to a meeting room, where a series of energy fields engaged as they entered the first of three sets of doors and then again at each layer after that.

If they weren’t already clear that this was a private conversation, even from her own troops, they were now.

“I will cut to the chase. I still don’t know what that material is, and that bothers me, but what bothers me more is this statue I found. That, my friends, is the God of War. Not a god in the literal sense. It was a God Class Mecha, or perhaps a world ship from the annals of Hunter history. The story is a fairy tale to Hunters, so the exact size and description are somewhat blurred.

We didn’t make it, but in our earliest space-faring days as a species, we saw it traveling and the utter ruin it left in its wake. Entire solar systems were destroyed, and trillions of sentient life forms were dead within days and replaced by a new civilization as if they never existed.

The species that operated it ruled a region of space a billion standard units beyond the Alliance borders, near the edge of what the Hunters had mapped at the time, until something happened to them. After a hundred thousand years of utter domination of their region of space, they simply vanished.

Now, this is important because while it was a billion standard units beyond the Alliance, that makes it even further from this Galaxy. There is no reason that ruins that are exactly like hunter fairy tales and statues of that machine should be anywhere near your civilization.” Huntress Khan began.