Over the next week, Terminus kept in close contact with Rae 5 Command, testing the new technology while building a wide variety of devices from Replicators and Mecha to furniture and prefab building segments.
Over the course of their experiments, they did find a few software glitches that needed to be updated, but nothing that caused a catastrophic failure of the product only hung subroutines during the creation process.
They weren't alone in their work, though. After the original team from Nurba Gruber had been sent home for their attempts to bug the design lab, which had earned them an industrial espionage investigation from the Alliance Central Government, Terminus had come to an agreement to take one thousand new guests aboard from one hundred different interested parties, and allow them to sit in on the experiments with strict limitations prohibiting any form of recording or broadcasting the process.
Every time there was a minor software glitch, they would celebrate the failure of their new competitor, and every time the issue was fixed with a software patch a few minutes later, they would be crestfallen.
It was almost like watching a romantic comedy with a heavy side of drama.
With thousands of orders filled and transported to Rae 5 through a precision portal, another Terminus modification of the indoor portals that Alliance vessels used, they were finally beginning to catch up on the backlog of minor items that their new allies had ordered while the major factories and shipyards took care of the major product requests as fast as they could.
Max strode into the test lab with great confidence that day since he had a surprise for all of their unwanted but paying guests.
Nico and the Technicians had announced that the initial tests of the linked units were successful in creating multiple Mecha, and they were ready to show them off to the audience.
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Alliance's major Terraforming Companies. Welcome again to our test bay, but today we have an extra special surprise for you. We will be moving to another bay further down the ship, where we have prepared another Terminus Trading Company Exclusive product for you to observe.
This will be the first official Alpha stage test, and the product is clearly not ready for market yet, but it would be remiss of me to send you away when we have such a momentous occasion for you to observe." Max informed the gathered corporate lawyers and engineers.
"Is it related to the patents that we have come here to inspect?" One of the engineers, an older Innu woman whose enthusiasm defied all concepts of time and aging, asked excitedly.
"In fact, it is. It is a custom prototype based on an array of units of identical patterns to the one that we are using here. Working in conjunction with one another, we hope that they will be able to completely replace the traditional factory assembly line." Max informed her, bringing the crowd to an uproar about worker rights and protections.
The Alliance did have the same level of technology in its factories, or much higher levels in any self-respecting system, but somehow that never stopped the activists that got upset about every single new technology that replaced a traditional worker.
"Fear not, this version of the device requires a large number of operators and supervisors to function at full efficiency. They are just removed from the line and placed in a safe environment, away from hazardous materials." Max informed them.
That was a flat-out lie. Nico alone would be doing the work while the other dozen technicians were actually analyzing the performance of the machine, but the observers didn't need to know that.
The explanation served its purpose, and the majority of the complaints faded away as they walked down the corridor toward the testing bay set up for the large-scale tests.
For a change, ship security only had to turn around one visitor who got "sidetracked" and wandered into the secure areas of the ship, an improvement from every day before that Max took as a sign of interest in today's tests.
It really was a pain keeping an eye on all of these people, but fortunately, they only sent a few hundred to the daily tests while the rest compiled data and wrote reports back in their rooms.
"Welcome to the test bay, everyone. Please find a seat in the auditorium here, so you can observe through the window. Yes, the bay appears to be empty for now, but the entire wall and roof structure is part of the assembly machinery, and the raw materials will be brought in momentarily."
The raw materials, in this case, were from a freshly captured asteroid that was plucked from space by a shuttle with a gravity beam and deposited directly into the bay.
It was a dense metallic amalgam and floated in the center of the room for a few moments before the machines began to get to work.
First, it was broken into segments, and they were moved around the bay toward the locations where they would be needed, and then the work began from the floor up, printing floating layer after layer in the zero gravity environment.
For this to work, Terminus had to be at a dead stop, with no large objects nearby that could exert gravitational force on the ship and pull the object out of alignment. They were working on a method of stabilization, but it hadn't been incorporated into the room yet. If the object shifted too much, they had to pause construction to reposition it and begin again.
Only a quarter of the small asteroid that they had brought in was being used for this process, with the remainder moved to the side, but it was clear that the bottom layer of a ship's hull was taking shape in the bay.
Once they realized what was going on, Max was certain that the crowd was going to lose their minds. Having the device create objects less than fifty meters in size was not a huge deal to them. It wasn't a level of development where they felt that the human species was a threat to their business interests.
But if they could link them to create an entire spaceship, and they sold that technology the same way that they sold everything else, as a "fee to create" type of blueprint, it would crush thousands of corporate monopolies that had been carefully nurtured around the universe.
Those with money and power carefully hoarded technology in the Alliance. They made the products available but not the advanced production methods. Those they patented for centuries after creation and refused to license, letting the weight of the bureaucracy crush anyone who dared defy them.
The Tech Nomads were a fringe group wanting to distribute anything to anyone as a form of communal betterment, while Nico simply thought it was funny to make people mad.
The shuttle took form inside the bay, and then a large energy transfer began, jump-starting the Warp Drive and bringing the ship's bioelectric systems to life, albeit at one percent capacity and slowly growing.
"As you can see, the Shuttle is now complete, and the factory bay has powered down. Please follow me for an in-person exploration of the shuttle's build quality and functionality." Max informed the group, looking toward the engineers, as they were the only ones actually qualified to know what they were looking at.
