Max watched through the external cameras as the Space Station that Nico had ordered for the planet arrived through the most massive interstellar portal he had ever seen. The cost for the transfer had been incredible, as it took twelve ships of the newest generation hull design, all Cruiser Class, to generate enough power to move that massive structure through.

It was a decommissioned cargo transfer terminal from an agriculture-focused star system with six habitable planets and could accommodate two hundred bulk freighters around the outside of its torus-shaped outer ring, with another hundred on the inside of the torus, and it had a large bulk storage sphere in the center, which had since been repurposed to a trade market and staff quarters.

It was nearly perfect for their needs, even if it was an ancient and somewhat low-quality design, to begin with.

They weren’t going to get a new spaceport anytime soon. There were too many orders for even Nico’s influence on her mother to get them to the head of that particular queue. But what they could do was send over a spare Terraforming pod and give it a fresh coat of paint, fix the cracks, refurbish the atmospheric systems, and give the interior a quick renovation to synthetic luxury, making it look much more like a first-class planet’s spaceport than an old grain bin in space.

Every square meter would be needed in the near future to lock Alliance yachts to while their guests were on Vacation on the planet, a concierge service offered by gravity beam and magnetic locks that were being added all over the station’s hull.

Once they had disembarked, they could select to have their pilot leave or to check into a spot for their stay if the ship was unattended, but it would not be free. The city held millions of people, and there was only so much space on even this large of a space port’s hull.

A Moon Base would have been best and might still be if they decide to renovate this planet’s moon in the future, but that was General Tennant’s problem, not Max’s. He had only signed on to get things up and running and to make sure that the Hunters had their chances to search and examine every bit of the surface so that they could look for the truth behind the relics.

At first, Max had feared that they would be annoyed that so many more people were now coming to look for the same thing, but the Hunters didn’t mind at all. They viewed the other scientists as somewhere between useful idiots and extra hands for their search and knew that the Alliance wouldn’t hold back the data they found. There was no reason for them to do it since they had no idea what the Hunters were trying to find from the research.

The belief that the relics might belong to an ancient Galaxy destroying dominant species from the far side of the universe was a joke to the Alliance but not to the Hunters, who took their ancient records very seriously.

The station had come with a crew and, surprisingly, a rather large supply of goods. When they had purchased it, the station had been mothballed for over a millennium, but it still had thousands of tonnes of forgotten crops frozen in its inactive holds. So, the newly hired crew got to work with an industrial replicator and started making tourist trap collectibles and other random items that alien visitors might like.

Once it was remade into a luxury spaceport, all they had to do was change the prices. No longer were they a sketchy stopover on the way to vacation. Now they were a respectable stopover, with sketchy businesses and inflated prices suitable to its grandeur, as you would expect of any spaceport.

The only thing they didn’t mark up was the food and drink. As the replicators had spread, and food shortages mostly became a thing of the past, the machines had developed a unique reputation among humans for being art school food. Exquisite to look at, flawless in execution, but lifeless, without any local flavour, because the recipes were the exact same everywhere you went.

For picky eaters, that was perfect. They would always get what they wanted. But for foodies who didn’t have the technical skills to program the machines, which made up 99 percent of users, a new pattern had formed. They would use the machine to generate all the ingredients separately, then cook the meal themselves to give it a personalized flavour.

So, on the station, all of the food and drinks were reasonably priced, with only one high-end steakhouse that cooked in front of the guests being priced well above the average.

The real money was made on the trinkets, keepsakes and miscellaneous items.

They took most of the day to get prepared after the station was hastily renovated, getting the lay of the station again and moving everything they needed into position to ferry guests between their docking bays and the Cutter that would be doing transit service every hour.

There was a new pair of ships on order, much smaller seventy meter luxury yachts instead of the cavernous expanse of the Cutter’s hold, but with so much going on aboard Terminus and the ship taking in its own massive influx of guests, there simply hadn’t been the resources or manpower to get them built yet.

Finally, just after midnight, the first ships with guests bound for the planet were allowed to portal in and start staging for their trip to the surface. Too much atmospheric turbulence caused by multiple ships landing would mess up the effects of the illusion, so none of them could land. The shuttle was the only permitted transport, but from what Max could tell, not a single guest minded at all.

They were so happy to be the first to see a new attraction that they hadn’t even complained when General Tennant had put all guests on a thirty-day visitors visa, not allowing any extended stays without certification from a prestigious Academy or the Central Government that they were there for business purposes to research the planet’s phenomenon and relics.