Because of the additional attack, the meeting was hastily ended, and Max returned to the stacks of paperwork that needed to be finished for the day-to-day operations of the Terminus Trading Company.
The Board of Directors did almost all the work, but even after that, he still had a lot to read over, sign off on, and at least a half dozen items that had piled up over the last week they wanted his input on before they made a final decision.
So, Max's eventful day turned to one of drudgery while on the other side of the Anomaly, chaos began to spread through the assembled species.
There were only a few that had recovered enough strength at this point that they were comfortable sending out forces to assist the battles, so the Anomaly Fleet had requested that the Regiment that had joined the Android Fleet take them and spread them between the two locations as soon as possible.
Since the human home worlds weren't in the region, there was no reason to assume that they were in danger as long as the Anomaly Fleet stayed right where it was, hosting the interspecies meetings.
The human ships were mostly unknown to the people of the region, even after the battle. They had seen them in combat, but most had no dealings of any sort with them before the nomination to make them the neutral ground for the meetings.
It was a genius move on their part, becoming a well-known faction at the same time as building a reputation for neutrality, and it gave them the perfect excuse not to move away from the Anomaly, even though there was a large force on the other side as well.
Max wasn't particularly concerned about them managing to keep the anomaly secured, since they not only had the ability to spread their sensors through the other layers now, but they also knew how to force the Anomaly closed in an emergency.
It would cut them off from the rest of humanity, but if it meant preventing a full-scale invasion of their home Galaxy, Max knew that they would do it at the very last moment.
As he finished with the paperwork, Max considered what he could do to increase the military might of the human fleets. Most of them now had access to the Androids and the majority of the Mecha patterns, so it was mostly a matter of need that limited the number of them that everyone kept on board.
A whole regiment of Super Heavy Mecha didn't make sense for a trading vessel, no matter how intense the threats in the surrounding Galaxies got. A single Battalion with a handful of Super Heavy Mecha leading them was more than enough to take care of the standard threats, and if they deployed a Drone Fighter formation, they wouldn't even have to deploy the Mecha most of the time.
Sure, human pilots were better than the Androids in most situations, but the Androids were rapidly improving, and the Reavers valued their people, so they were quickly becoming the defensive force of choice for countless ships.
But therein lay the real danger. If the ships relied on androids to do the piloting, they would only be effective until the enemy learned of that fact and started deploying customized weapons to counter them.
A Mecha that was hit by a massive EMP could have its power supply rebooted and operate with Mechanical controls until the computer could be recovered, either from a secure backup, if that survived, or back at base in the repair hangar.
But if that same weapon hit an Android, it didn't matter that the Mecha had mechanical backup controls, as the operator would be essentially mind wiped and waiting for a new operating system, plus repairs to all the overloaded circuits.
That was why the Kepler Mecha still used both mechanical and neural controls in the first place.
If there were no human defenders in the force, they would be helpless when the enemy counterattacked, but with all humans, they would suffer too heavy of casualties when the enemy attacked in the first place. It was a difficult issue to balance, and there was no perfect answer when it came to the value of human life.
Max was deeply lost in his thoughts when the next round of messages came through on the Command Channel. Lost enough that he almost missed the notification noise.
[The battle is back on again. Seven new star systems have been attacked, all by unknown alien species from the other side of the Rift. All forces are returning to their defensive mobilization routines, and any assistance that can be provided is requested from the species with faster recuperative abilities.]
The Koleska was one of those species. Their people grew to adulthood twice as fast as most other species, and with the help of the humans, they could now train much faster than most others, but that meant that they could replace a generation of warriors in ten years instead of twenty, not in two months.
They hadn't taken as heavy of a loss as many other species had, though, and they were ready to spread out through the surrounding areas, to help secure the homes of their allies while the local armies pushed forward to fight in assistance of their neighbours.
None of the systems immediately around the Koleska had been attacked yet, but Max could only assume that it was just a matter of time.
The attack pattern was the same as the first time, pushing out from the Rift in space to overtake the most vulnerable targets first, with the exception of the Myceloids, who went for the strongest.
The actual planets attacked were different, due to the change in defence patterns, but the strategy remained the same, and Max began to understand the nuance behind it.
Time didn't matter as much to the energy beings, they lived for hundreds of millennia or longer. So, they would attack and retreat, and keep doing it until the defenders ran out of planets to defend. Then they would work their way out into the rest of the universe, and overtake what they could until they ran out of forces or met with something that they couldn't defeat.
