After a long day of meetings and filming, some of which took a dozen takes because nobody could be serious while others were pretending to be serious, they had finally managed to make a proper video for the signing ceremony, and the Reavers were relaxing with the Envoys to celebrate a job well done.
But they were not just relaxing, everyone was waiting for the response from the Alliance citizens to the videos that they had spent all day making, with the guidance of both Felicity and the Envoys' personal videographer.
The success of the project was vitally important to the future of both factions, as neither could afford their people panicking nor thinking that they didn't have a chance in this fight. The humans would fight anyhow, and some other species would as well, but a loss of morale was devastating to their chances of success.
The news networks were loving today's developments. The viewership was higher than it had ever been, and trillions of reaction streams had been made, spreading through social media like wildfire. It seemed like a silly way to spread news to Max, but they were the niche micro celebrities that people were watching, according to the experts, and waiting until their data was in would give a much more clear idea of the overall response.
Nico was drinking with one of the other female Commanders, as well as the leaders of her research team, who had gone into overdrive tweaking the designs for the ships they were making so that they would have as much of the most current technology as possible without a full redesign.
Not all of them had completely overhauled weapons, as the idea was to prevent the enemy from adapting by throwing every conceivable form of firepower at them, while reserving the more specialized weapons for moments when they were facing particular enemies, like the Greater Demons.
So far, there hadn't been any sign of them on either side of the battle. The fighting in the Koleska Region on the other side of the Anomaly was fierce, but the enemy still hadn't shown their leaders, perhaps out of fear after the combined efforts of the mortal races had so quickly killed one last time.
That level of fear was good for the defenders, and with the reinforcements arriving in the form of that Android Fleets, they were rapidly managing to stabilize the situation.
There had been some strange reports, though. The Androids occasionally went haywire, and began following their own orders. They hadn't turned on their controllers or allies yet, but they seemed to be following outside intelligence that was concerning the species of the Koleska Region.
That was the hallmark of the Arisen, and the reason that autonomous units had been prohibited in the area for millennia.
But with the Arisen Army's expertise and their intelligence, it was actually more effective to let a small number of them interfere and manage an attacking fleet of androids than to let the inexperienced volunteers and the ships' AI systems do it alone.
The Arisen had lost their original forms, and now preferred to live in constructs, so if they wanted to live in the Androids, Max honestly wasn't all that concerned. They were individually less deadly than the War Walkers, and they blended into society with ease.
The only reason that anyone had even noticed was that the possessed ones would lead the others contrary to orders in combat that they felt were a tactical blunder, and then the possessing Arisen Spirits would leave again after the battle to go fight elsewhere.
It was actually a pretty good system, and Max wondered if he would be able to make a deal with them to work as the AI on a new series of ships. All he would have to do was set up an automated construction facility somewhere, and have the Arisen take the ships over as they were created. Nobody would know where they came from, or where they went, just like the original Arisen Fleets, but faster to recover.
The Arisen were incredibly powerful, but once their units were destroyed, they took time to recover and reconstruct them, they couldn't keep up the sort of casualties that the other species routinely suffered.
There was a half formed memory from his past life, and Max couldn't quite recall the details, but he was fairly sure that the reason had to do with the construction of the War Walkers being tied to their mental energy. It exhausted them to repair the bodies that they used, and there was no way to speed that up, even if they were able to live nearly indefinitely in their forms as artificial energy beings.
The only real issue was that he had no way of directly contacting them to set up the plan. He could ask Ranarth, as the two groups had an uneasy understanding. The Arisen believed that they had been preparing the other species for this invasion, while the Darklings had been preserving species that the friendly Gods thought should continue to exist.
It had led to a lot of battle between the two factions, but they should have some way of contacting each other.
That could wait until he had a surefire way to get them the fleets that they wanted. It shouldn't be difficult, there were dozens of Terminus Trading Company vessels in the region if you counted the Android Fleets, so he could build the facility somewhere that the others would be unlikely to notice.
Then it hit him, he didn't need to contact them if they were contacting him. Max sent out an order to all the Androids running the operating system that Nico had created, instructing them to inform any possessed units that Max wanted to set up somewhere to build more fleets to be run by the Arisen. If they agreed, a single fully android manned vessel could be commandeered, and it would create the facility in a location of their choice.
It might not be as cool as a whole army of War Walkers, but the Arisen seemed to have no problems commanding large numbers of androids, and when they were in Mecha, they were still just as deadly.
With the order sent out, all that he had to do was wait for something to happen and hope that they suddenly got a massive free army out of the deal.
