The staff of the Golden Legion brought out a simple meal once everyone was seated, some form of meat and root vegetable stew with wine, which seemed to brighten up the mood of the dignitaries.
"It is a Golden Legion tradition. None eat more luxuriously than our soldiers while there is a battle raging. It reminds us all that we are one Legion, and not self-driven individuals. I hope you don't mind the food too much.
But we are also celebrating, I suppose. If you can send soldiers to each city to help our troops, it should be enough to stabilize all the Command Seats in Sector Seventeen so that we can begin to fortify and prepare to repel future enemy advances." The General announced.
Max considered the options for a moment, then began to write up a deployment plan as he ate. The room was quiet, filled with the clinking of silverware and the scratch of stylus on tablet as the military commanders drew potential deployment plans during the meal.
They were almost finished when one of the advisors noticed that Nico had barely eaten.
"No need to stand on formality with us. It's going to be a long meeting, so it's best to get some food in you early." He laughed.
Nico smiled and shook her head. "I am a full conversion cyborg. I only need enough nutrients to keep my brain functional, the rest of my body is entirely artificial."
The advisors were strangely excited about that part for some reason, and it only took Max a second to realize why.
An advisor with the title [Personnel Recovery and Trauma Mitigation Minister] clapped his hands and almost looked like he was going to hug Nico for a second, before catching himself and sitting back down.
"I don't suppose that your magnificent technology can make medical centres that would be able to do the same for our wounded, would it? We have millions of long term disabled cases after these attacks, and some from before, who were injured on duty. If you have the ability to create lifelike augmentic limbs, it would be a huge win for our military." He suggested.
Nico frowned, but still nodded. "It would take some additional study of your biology, but I can get that from your medical records. I wouldn't recommend full conversion, as it is known to drive the subject insane and many never adapt. However, there are a few options.
For those who are paraplegic, we can do a partial conversion. For those missing parts of limbs, an augmentic replacement, possibly even a biological one, might be possible. We can make them for our own species, but I'm not sure how yours will take to them.
Or, in the very worst-case scenarios, we can strap them into a Mecha type war machine with a full neural link and let them serve the remainder of their lives entombed in a mechanical coffin to take vengeance on their enemies."
Max recalled Nico making those in her past life, twisted monstrosities of steel and biomechanics. They were utterly insane, driven mad by the curse of their existence, as the war machine became their body in a neural link they would never be able to break.
Berserker infantry the size of Mecha, with no fear of death, and an insane need to make others suffer as they were suffering, made for a deadly combination on the battlefield, but he couldn't see the Golden Legion agreeing to it once they saw what it entailed.
Max cleared his throat. "I'm not sure that they're desperate enough for the last option. The Golden Legion honour code prefers to die with dignity than remain suspended in an undying state of constant war."
"Right, my fault. But once I study the Golden Legion genome, I'm certain that we can equip the shuttles we send to deliver our troops with a medical bay capable of cybernetic augmentation." Nico agreed.
She hadn't given up on the idea, she had just put it to the side so that she could remind them of it again later if things truly did get that desperate.
Despite the generally high level of technology, Max had noticed that the medical sciences among the Golden Legion were not all that advanced. It was like they simply didn't care enough to develop them, or had forgotten them in favour of other priorities over the millennia.
When you have so many people and no real threats, you only really have to cure illness and disease, which they had nearly eliminated. The repairs of injuries became a much lower priority, as they were much less common and so rarely in the line of duty.
For such an honour-driven society, crippling yourself doing something as a hobby or doing something dumb was the peak of embarrassment, so they didn't bother to learn to help people hide their shame.
But now that there was a war, and their people had been injured in battle, they were eager to get the fallen martyrs back in the fight.
"We will provide you with whatever resources we can in exchange for your assistance. I suspect that as lovely as our home is, you don't intend to stay here indefinitely, so perhaps we can put in a good word with our Guardian Being to get a portal opened to send you to another layer, where you can move to a location where you can return home." The General suggested.
"That sounds like a wonderful plan. Thank you, General. We will start on the security teams for your cities here in Sector Seventeen, as well as retrofitting the delivery vehicles as medical bays with staff." Max agreed.
It wasn't much to ask, and it was a benefit to everyone. Plus, it would give them an excuse to head to battle to "Assist their forces" and search for answers on their own.
Answers like "What is still waiting for them in the other layer of space, which was attacking the Anomaly Region". Or "How many of the Greater Energy Beings were going to be willing to show their faces after two of their own had been crippled during this attack."
Those were the sorts of answers that really mattered to Max.
