“That is all well and good, but where would you ever get ten million residents from, and where will you find a hundred Mecha Regiments? In case you had forgotten, a hundred thousand trained pilots are more than most nations could boast, and you plan to put them all on one ship. One very large ship.

Not to mention the cost and complexity of actually building such a thing and the four hundred Cutters you will need to staff to deploy the ship’s defensive force. Or the millions of support staff to keep the whole thing running. Are you going to depopulate a colony somewhere?” Major Miller’s rant predictably focused on the logistics of the matter, but he had a point.

You couldn’t just make millions of people appear and join your Company. There simply weren’t enough Reavers for the purpose, and most of them had already been claimed.

The fact that Mary Tarith had found enough workers and Pilots for the four ships that they had just received was amazing enough, but this was too far.

“That’s the genius part. We don’t have to. The Volga nation was kind enough to send me a unique pilot. An android powered by rudimentary artificial intelligence and capable enough not to embarrass himself in a Titan Class Mecha.

After completing the analysis of his design, I have determined that we can create an entirely synthetic fighting force and use the Commander’s ability to provide targeted firing solutions to his allies to improve their skills. Then we only need to staff the ship, but we don’t have to get it anywhere near full. If we recruit a skeleton crew from across the human nations and the Alliance to keep the place up and to run basic functions, we will attract the rest of the occupants on our own.

Everyone wants to know where we are going, what we are up to, and how we are doing it. So, if we drop this bombshell on them, they will be busy for years trying to decipher what we did, and by then, we will have our residents settled in and happy in their new homes.

We can establish research and development companies right there on the operations base, along with any other production companies that we want. They will make money, producing unique human products, and that will draw workers to us to fill the ship.

It might be a bit empty at first, but I know that if I send out a message that we are recruiting, I will get a lot of responses for everything from maintenance to product testing and legal work.”

Max thought about her proposal for a while and then shook his head.

“We need more humans on the ship. It’s the Terminus Trading Company, representative of the Reavers and, through them, humanity. We can’t fill the entire ship with random Alliance workers to exploit for their unique ideas. We need to keep the vessel mostly human to give the proper impression to visitors that humanity is an independent and powerful species, not a subordinate of the Alliance that is being used to do their dirty work.” Max reminded her.

“I agree with the Commander. We need to keep the ship mostly human for the sake of appearances. They don’t need to be Reavers, and if you’re using Android Pilots for the mecha, they don’t need to have a system, but we need to remind everyone that we meet that we are the representatives of humanity.” DiFranco announced.

Everyone else in the room seemed to agree with the sentiment, even the little Innu girl, so Nico began to formulate a new idea.

Klinger was the first to suggest a solution. “Once it is built, we can go to various human planets. I am thinking of hive worlds and holding job fairs. If we grab a hundred thousand from ten different worlds, we can create a nice varied crew and not deplete any planet’s population too much.

You know how it is on the Hive Worlds. They’ve usually got populations upward of eighty billion. They won’t even notice that we were there. In fact, we could go to some of the old Kepler core worlds and pull a million without anyone really noticing, except a government benefits worker, who just might trade you everything from exorbitant amounts of cash to sexual favours to take their unemployed away.”

The other Commanders reluctantly nodded in agreement. In a major hive world, you would be very popular if you offered to provide a million off-world jobs for their chronically unemployed. The problem would be the quality of the workers you would get.

“Enough with the staffing solutions. How and where would we even build that thing? It’s too large for any dry dock that I know of to work on it. Plus, what would you make it of? Or can the new generation replicators create a sophisticated enough alloy to build that without a forge or secondary processing stage?” Lucci, their only female Commander and former leader of the Second Battalion asked.

“That is the easy part. The terraforming here is almost complete, it will finish up tomorrow, and I can portal the entire array into an uninhabited system to build the new ship without anyone noticing. With that many machines and a large enough asteroid, I can have the ship built in a matter of days. They can even provide it with a breathable atmosphere since they were designed to terraform a planet.

I have a special idea for the hull as well, and if it works the way I am hoping, I think that the unaligned species will think twice before attacking us.” Nico informed them with a smile of anticipation.

“You are totally hoping that they attack us to try to steal that space station in the form of a world ship. I can see it in your eyes.” DiFranco replied.

“Yeah, he’s right. You didn’t mean a single word of that bit about other species not attacking us. This thing is like a huge floating fuck you to every military in the region.” Klinger added.

“Oh, ye of little faith. Do you really think that I didn’t prepare for that? I have come up with improvements to the current Mecha lineup to allow them to fight more effectively in space. From what I can tell, nobody else fights on the surface anymore. They just go all out in space above the planet. We are behind the curve with our tactics, but not for much longer.

Once the refinements are complete, I will send the data to all of your vessels so that the existing Mecha hulls can be upgraded with the new technology.”

She really did think of everything. If Max didn’t know better, he would think that she had been planning this for much longer than just the morning.