To distract from the construction of their new base of operations, Max prepared to declare a holiday aboard Terminus, which should distract all the visitors who were here to actually work for various Alliance companies and not just on vacation.

It was also a day off for the Academy, the one day every week when they had no classes, and Headmistress Medusa was willing to give the students a pass to go to the Cruise Ship section and unwind for the first time since they had arrived at the Academy.

That should be a day that nobody would forget anytime soon. Most of the students had gone straight from the hangars to the Academy, so they hadn’t seen any of the other amenities that the ship had to offer, and things like the World Tree and the Gravity slides they had only seen on video.

Being their day off, many of the students were still waking up for the day when the notification was made through the Academy, and chaos took over the quiet atmosphere of the compound.

A single hallway was locked down for the students, so nobody could get lost on the way or access off-limits areas by accident, so Max wasn’t too worried about their safety, at least not until they reached the end of the hall and met with the vacationers and the attractions of the ship.

While the students were running around like madmen, Headmistress Medusa had a more practical request for Max.

[Commander. Now that the Terraforming is complete, I am assuming that you are planning to leave orbit and make for the next bit of official business within the next week. If possible, I would like to send some of our students to the surface before that point. Geology is part of our mandatory training, and the senior students would typically take a field trip every semester to gain hands-on experience.

I believe that this world, freshly terraformed and without hostile fauna, would be ideal for the first-term trip.]

[Would you be amenable to springing it on them as a surprise? The next two days would be ideal for a planet-side excursion, and after that, we will have an increased likelihood of needing to move the vessel to another planetary system.] Max replied, knowing that making it look like everything was normal would deter any suspicions that Terminus Trading Company was up to something.

There was no hiding it from the Illithid, but Max was deliberately not thinking about the actual specs of Absolution, and the observer aboard the Alliance Envoy’s vessel wouldn’t be likely to recognize the technical jargon that the design team was using.

Even Max only understood a fraction of it, and he lived within range of their minds.

It only took the Headmistress a few minutes to answer before she came back with a list of requirements, including chaperones from the defence forces and the total number of students that would be in each group, as well as the regions of the planet that would be ideal for their studies.

The different classes and grades were studying different regions at the moment, so the Headmistress determined that sending them to the one they were currently working on would be the best course of action.

Finding enough people to escort them wouldn’t be a problem, and they could easily produce enough civilian-grade augmentic suits for them, which was one of the requests from the Headmistress so that they didn’t contaminate the research zone or contract any foreign illnesses. There was a minor concern about bringing back foreign objects that could be used as weapons, but the school security team thought that they could catch any of them that made it past basic screening.

She was incredibly strict with the list, especially since the tourists were taking trips on foot around the surface, but according to Medusa, it was a scientific best practice not to have direct contact with the area, only interacting with it from inside a sealed suit.

It didn’t need to be augmentic, just sealed, but some of the environments were hostile, like the desert and the volcano research teams, so it would be best to give them climate control and some measure of resistance to hot or sharp objects.

[Max to research team. We need civilian protective suits in the sizes and species listed in the attached file. No armour, no flat space technology, and minimal augments are to be included. Please inform me of when you will be able to provide those in the Academy Uniform colours. Tonight or tomorrow would be preferable, as our timeline is limited to allow them to properly explore the planet before we leave.]

[We are sending them on a school field trip? That is awesome. I wish I got to go on good field trips back when I was in school. We went to the crappy local aquarium for biology, then a Mecha production facility for science, and that was it. We have a design for the repair staff that will be perfect for the occasion.

We made it for the aftermath of Klem battles since some of them smell really bad inside, and the Mecha specialize in making insides into outsides. We just need to adapt them to the species and recolor them. Give me an hour, and I will be able to deliver them to the Headmistress.] One of the human researchers answered, and Max considered whether allowing the perpetually upbeat Innu around humans on such a casual basis might actually be a bad influence on the humans.

That researcher was entirely too happy about being at work.

With all of the important plans put in place, Max leaned back to relax and started to look through some of the random cultural articles that the Envoys had marked as low priority. They were good reading, but not really about anything important enough that he would want to have the data in a learning device.

At least not until he got to the fifth one, on the unique nature of the “Curious Species,” as the author called it.

According to the attached data, less than one-tenth of one percent of all species possessed the mental pathways that led to an inquisitive nature. All other species were adaptive and only developed new technologies and behaviours in response to a need or danger, but the curious species would develop new things just because they didn’t exist and actively look for new things.

That made up most of the species that Max had come across from the Alliance, but it made perfect sense. They were the only ones who would be interested in coming to see him. The others had no interaction with humans, so their existence was a simple fact that had no bearing on the lives of the members of that species.

How they had made it to the status of advanced cultures without an inquisitive nature was a mystery to Max, so he put the topic at the top of his leisure reading list, intending to find out if they relied on others to develop new things for them, or if they actively deprived some portion of their population in order to trigger developments, based on past experiences and the statistical probabilities.

The possibilities were endless, and Max laughed as the author described their tense relations with species like the Valkia and Giants, who loved new information and cultural customs, and the Innu, which was widely regarded as the most annoying species in the Universe.

Max’s experience with the Alliance data net had been heavily influenced by the Innu, thanks to their tech nomad streams, so he had never noticed that the actual number of species which followed them was only a few hundred of the million or more sentient species that the Alliance should contain.