While the staff at the Lab was working to get the new Mecha designs finished, far above them, docked to maintenance station three, Abraham Kepler, the President Class transport was getting the most comprehensive overhaul that the crew had ever heard of.
Firstly, the warp drive was being fully upgraded and not just refueled, with the intent to increase the ship's maximum speed by over fifty percent to make it a more efficient first response vessel. Secondly, the entire crew quarters and every hangar bay needed refurbishment after the damages and hasty patches during the Scavenger attack.
Every bulkhead, every floor plate, and every electrical connection was checked, verified, and resealed.
On top of that, all new mecha repair gantries were being installed for the new mecha contingent that was going to be boarding in a few months. They weren't the same pattern as the previous gantries, and there were no Mecha currently on board to test them against, but they looked to be just as functional.
There was only one odd part about them. A number of them seemed to be for Super Heavy Mecha when they already had General Tennant and the Shining Darkness in residence.
The venerable Mecha had been moved to the station during the refurbishment efforts, but the crew listing still showed it as being stationed aboard Abraham Kepler.
Corporal Fritz was in charge of the refurbishment of the final three launch bays at the rear of the ship, a high honor that indicated to everyone around him that he was likely to be promoted to Sergeant as soon as this refurbishment was over.
The men who worked with him all respected him, and he was excellent at his job, but that had been his downfall. He was simply too good at diagnosing and repairing Mecha, so Command had held off on his promotion, sticking him at Lance Corporal, with an Engineering Specialty, for most of a decade.
That didn't really bother Fritz though. He enjoyed his job, and the people he met while doing it.
This final bay was an unusual one for Abraham Kepler. The ship had many other launch bays for orbital insertion fighters, but this one was the only one in Corporal Fritz's assignment. They wanted it changed out to launch a new pattern of fighter, which was nothing unusual, they changed them all the time, depending on what enemy they expected a mission to be meeting, but this time they wanted the refurbishment to include fifty VR pods in what used to be a crew ready room.
That made the Corporal think that this might be the last hoorah for the high casualty attack planes and that the storage racks were going to be only for emergencies. Normally all the pilots would assemble in this room, updating their wills and leaving messages for loved ones before launch, so if this room was being eliminated, there was a good chance that the pilots were as well.
They might only fight for a few hours of every deployment, but it wasn't unusual for them to lose a quarter or more of their numbers every time they were deployed. Some ships even went as far as recruiting prisoners or using soldiers on punishment detail to pilot the fighters when they were needed.
At least they had approved a color change for the hangar bay. It used to be a dull gray-green, but now it was a sky blue with white accents, making it feel a bit less miserable to be hanging out in the hangars all day. Less like an enormous warehouse, more like he was outdoors.
Because they were in the middle of a refurbishment and not on vacation like the Pilots and infantry were, Corporal Fritz hadn't had the chance to see the real sky above him in over a year now, and likely wouldn't for at least one more, unless they got this refurbishment finished ahead of schedule and earned a few days down on the planet below them.
"Fritz, we've got the next round of directions in from the design crew. They say that the structural team has finished the work on the hallways between our bays, and we can close them off to complete the painting and install the new floors." One of his team members called out, pulling Fritz away from his thoughts about the future of the Orbital Insertion fighter teams.
The VR pods weren't here yet anyhow, so there was no point in worrying about them, only about painting the room to put them in.
While Fritz worked to get the ship ready, General Tennant was working to keep the crew in the dark about the nature of the changes that were being made. Everything was done in modules, and the crews were carefully segregated by sections of the ship deemed in need of structural repair.
That had kept the crew locked aboard the ship for over a month already, but the major overhauls were nearly done, and they were mostly waiting on the final bits of crew comfort, as well as the final work to be done on the faster-than-light engines.
So far, it was clear that none of the teams working the bays had realized that the whole ship was being converted for a new pattern of Mecha, or that there were going to be a rather astounding number of Super Heavy Mecha aboard it. Having just two of them on board for the last few missions had raised gossip and spread rumors among the crew, rumors that the communications teams had to work hard to keep from being spread to friends and family of those aboard, for security reasons.
They had been working hard to isolate all chances of breach and betrayal before they could set out, and at his suggestion, they had even gone as far as having the manufacturing moved from the closest few planets here in the Comor System, to mostly uninhabited outposts a few star systems away.
Since there were only factories on the planet and no civilian population, they were ideal for a secret run-up of new designs, and the losses would be minimal if they were discovered and Command had to scuttle the plant to keep the technology out of enemy hands.
