Late that night, the data analysis from the drones that Max had sent out began to compile on Terminus' mainframe, and he could finally get a clear picture of what they were headed out to find.
All the planets were habitable, or had been in the recent past, and each of them had some unique geological feature that suggested that they might have been artificially altered, which was what had drawn the attention of the Alliance to begin with.
For most of them, it was something simple. A perfectly round set of ridges, or a few pyramid shaped hills. Anything that was perfectly even and symmetrical was rarely caused by nature, unless it was a crater.
There really wasn't a bad choice among the remaining options, and each of them had a chance of turning up something good, but on one, Max found traces of a particular alloy, the same one that had been used for the Dyson sphere and many other ancient human designs. That was the winner. There was no way that it could have been formed in nature, and it was a sure sign that what had been there should have known about human technology.
The distance to it wasn't particularly far from their current destination, they could make it in one portal jump, but it was rather hidden from the Alliance's sensors by other stars and a strange spatial rift, similar to the one in the Anomaly region.
There wasn't going to be a better chance to get a real answer before they were forced to return all their focus onto the conflict on the other side of the anomaly, so Max got right to work, making plans for the drop locations and informing the crew of their destination.
The students would be returning from their field research in a few hours, and then they would have a day off to decontaminate, as was standard procedure, even though they had found no signs of life on the planet other than the crashed escape pods or shuttles that had littered the region with rare minerals.
Still, they were ecstatic that they had found something, and they got to bring it back to the academy with them as proof of their adventure. The materials would all be going to the academy's labs and storage, but the students could still tell others to look it up, and their names would be on the listing for the research team that had recovered it.
The bragging rights were what all the students were the most interested in. The fact that they had recovered unknown alien species ship fragments was secondary to the fact that they could brag about the fact that they got to go to an unexplored planet's surface to do it.
The shuttles came back in rapid succession, returning all the ground crews to the ship late that afternoon, and the away teams entered their mandatory day-long quarantine, while the Academy staff turned on the transmitters from the room so that they would allow the residents to chat with friends and family anywhere else on the ship.
The Alliance reporters were even more excited than the parents to get a chance to speak with the elusive elites that had been sheltered away at the Terminus Academy. Headmistress Medusa was notoriously difficult to negotiate with, and the students were mostly the children of the ultra-wealthy and politically connected, who were the only ones known to be able to secure a seat for their children.
They didn't know that there was a set-aside for true geniuses on scholarship, so any student in the Academy Uniform was taken as someone not to be offended, for fear of retaliation by their parents.
They had no graduates yet, as their senior Academy had originally only started with First Year students, while the middle school section took transfers of all ages. But Max could tell, by the minds of the students on board, that the sense of community was going to be an ongoing challenge for the reporters in the future. The students had gotten too good at political niceties during their education, and wouldn't be easy to trick answers out of.
One of the earliest lessons that students learned at the Academy was the value of retaining talent. All of them would presumably be top executives, politicians and researchers in the future, so they would be unlikely to manage much on their own, and would need to surround themselves with the perfect group of people to help themselves grow.
That was the role that the scholarship program played. Those were the right people, selected for their competence, and getting them set up at the businesses that the other students were set to inherit was a long-term networking goal.
As they say, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
The students began their broadcasts to the ship, through the reporters who had booked rooms on board, not long after they returned. The interviews were all smiles and laughter as they showed off the images of the relics that they had found, and bragged about how great it was to be a student at Terminus Academy, whose travels allowed unique opportunities like this.
It was only party coached, as the students truly accepted that no normal Academy could possibly offer anything even similar to this activity. But the reporters ate it up, and the volume of calls requesting a spot on the waiting list for upcoming class acceptances was incredible from the minute that they started to broadcast the interviews to their home news channels.
[Terminus will be opening a portal in two hours. Please note that this will cause interference with interstellar communications. Thank you for your understanding.] The ship's announcer declared.
That conveniently lined up with dinner time for the students and staff, which gave the interviews a definite timeline, though they could likely restart them afterwards if there was more to talk about with the returning students.
The returning research staff, on the other hand, were happily locked away in their containment room catching up on their reports with the intercoms off so that they couldn't be disturbed. It was a rare moment of complete peace and relaxation for a whole 24 hours before they had to get back to work. All that it was missing was a pool and a sandy beach.
