[Hey Nico, how’s it going over there?] Max asked later that evening when he noticed the shuttle hadn’t yet returned to Terminus.

[All is well. We are waiting on approval from the Alliance Government for some essential work that needs to be done, but all of the basic tasks are already completed, and the Crystal Matrix in all their warp drives has been refreshed.]

Max could sense the excitement in her text commentary, so he assumed she had learned what she had gone there for while they did the repairs and left her to her work.

What he didn’t realize is just how much she had learned from her in-depth analysis of the Alliance vessels while they prepared them for a Warp Drive overhaul. The initial discovery that certain alloys appeared to interfere with the functionality of the Cloaking Device was only the beginning. They also found data on the resonance of Warp Fields that could be used with specific hull shapes to exponentially reduce the energy needed to stabilize them at higher values.

It wasn’t just a matter of finding a design that worked and scaling it to your purpose. The effect was also sensitive to total mass and specific warp factors.

If her estimation was right, very fast vessels like the warp 40 plus government vessel that had scrubbed itself from their logs could not actually maintain any value up to warp 40. Instead, they could go from roughly warp one through ten or fifteen and then one very specific speed far beyond that, where their hull resonance matched the activation of the warp field.

It was an absolutely fascinating discovery, though not one that they would be making practical use of any time in the near future. There simply wasn’t a need for it since the Reavers were focusing on equipping all of the Company Flagships with Portal Devices if they were large enough vessels to make it feasible.

For old designs, that meant mostly the Colony Ships and Destroyers. For the new Cruisers, with the most recent technology, it wasn’t an issue for them to sustain a portal within this Galaxy to move themselves through or a smaller one to move shuttles to nearby Alliance depots.

The word spread quickly about the trade deal, and some of the Companies were already looking to buy specific items from the Alliance warehouses. Mostly items for terrestrial use on their home planets, things like advanced farm equipment and weather control drones that weren’t in the human repertoire of cool toys.

It simply wasn’t possible for humans to make a replica of every device that the Alliance had to make their lives easier in such a short time. Now that they had the access, Max suspected that the will to do so would be considerably dampened.

Why would they dedicate years of research to develop a knockoff of something they could simply buy elsewhere for a reasonable cost?

The great limiting factor at this point was the lack of Alliance Credits that the majority of the Companies were suffering from.

That was where Nico and the Tech Nomads came in.

They had amassed an enormous amount of wealth already and had spent next to nothing, so they had expanded their loan program for Colonists to include the Reaver Companies. They could convert material goods in this Galaxy to Alliance Credits for a flat lending fee.

The Reavers already had a solid buy-and-sell marketplace, so getting rid of the goods without ever having to see them wasn’t an issue. Their trade AI simply found a buyer for the goods and took the Reaver Credits in exchange.

It kept the flow of goods moving through Reaver trade routes and brought new technology to far-flung and technologically limited worlds as the Reavers traded their old-generation devices for new purchases.

It all seemed very altruistic, bringing up the quality of life for more primitive planets within the Trade Group. Still, with their lending plan taking a tidy twenty percent off the top, it was quickly turning Terminus Trading Company into one of the largest banks the species had ever known.

The economy of scale, as Max’s grade school economics teacher, would have called it. There were many million times more Alliance members to buy things from and sell things to than there were humans, so the goods they sold made such immense amounts of money compared to what the humans needed that they simply couldn’t run out with their current business model.

Max was even considering importing a number of Alliance luxuries to give to General Tennant to help him get the planet up and running the moment that they landed with the Colonists.

They were bringing over asteroids to stock the world up with everything that it could need, and Terminus would send down state-of-the-art everything for the first city on the planet, but a few cool toys from back home would make the Alliance guests feel more at home and less awkward during their stays on what was intended to be a world for historical research and preservation.

When Nico finally did return with her team, they weren’t alone. They had no fewer than four technicians from the Alliance vessel with them come to talk shop with the crew aboard Terminus until their Envoys were ready to depart.

“Revolutionary Thought” is how they described the human method of repairing damaged warp crystals. It was a technique that they hadn’t mastered and weren’t even sure they had the technology aboard their ship to attempt, but the small team had refurbished the Crystal Matrix chambers on every single one of their Warp Drives in a single day and brought them all back to within factory tolerances for tuning.

They shouldn’t have worried about time to study with the human technicians, though. The envoys clearly had no intentions of leaving in a hurry, and only a select few knew that the newest patents filed by the Terminus Trading Company were going to keep the Envoys and their legal team around for more than a few days.