"It looks like we have impressed a few people. The sales for the plans are off the charts already, and we're only a few minutes into the broadcast." One of the Tech Nomads informed them happily, indicating the computer where she was relaying the ongoing Terraforming effort to a dedicated live stream.

That one would run separately from their daily updates and would stay online for at least a week, giving potential customers enough time to view the array in action. It was a subtle bid to get more distributors of the technology but served a much more important role as an for the companies that were reselling the terraforming packages on their behalf in the Alliance.

Everyone had seen the theory and the small-scale test, but seeing the array working on a planet would be a much better sales point, especially over the course of weeks, when they could build a time-lapse and show the progression of this world.

The Terraforming devices were working flawlessly, and the development lab had a timer running for the next batch to be sent out to begin their work. These ones would be staggered further apart, making a mostly clear path across forty kilometers at a time that shouldn't fill in quite as quickly.

It was all for show until they could get the full array online and begin the comprehensive overhaul, but that couldn't happen until after they had disassembled a few more asteroids and sent them in pieces to the surface to be used as raw materials for the restocking of the planet's rare minerals which had been completely extracted.

This batch would be set to a wider area of effect, working closer to standard output, but that wouldn't be enough to fully clear the atmosphere of a planet this polluted in a single pass. Terraforming took time, and as much as Max would like to hurry the process along, there wasn't much they could do but make more Drones and wait.

Back inside Alliance territory, the feed from the live Terraforming effort was about to cause much more of an uproar than anyone aboard Terminus could have anticipated.

One week into the project, when the worst of the atmospheric contaminants were gone and the full array was up and running, the first life forms were reintroduced to the planet.

It was a monumental proof of function for the Terraforming array, as it proved that their claim of being able to custom design a living planet right down to the minerals in the soil and the types of plants was no joke or exaggeration. But to the wealthy customers of the Alliance, it was a simple proof of one other much more noteworthy fact.

They were getting ripped off by the providers that they had used in the past.

It didn't take any more time for the Terraforming machines to create a full forest than it did for them to reshape the hills, and entire oceans could be stocked in a single comprehensive pass, as the life forms could be introduced over the full depth of the waters, based on their natural preference.

If the planet already had all the essential elements for organic life, all the system had to do was combine them into simple organic acids and then recombine them into living biomass.

The uproar among the wealthiest elites of the Alliance wasn't loud or public, but over the course of only a few days, half a dozen terraforming companies went under, and their operators went into hiding, possibly outside of the boundaries of the Alliance itself.

The situation was so dire that Terminus even managed to gain a new visitor, courtesy of the Alliance's Stability and Justice Council.

A World Ship named Frozen Gates was sent to the system to observe their efforts, officially to make a proper recording, as part of the hearings on the status of humanity as a species. Unofficially, it was a defense force ship, fully armed to defend Alliance worlds against incursions by hostile alien species.

The fear was that the disgruntled and shamed former Terraforming Company operators might try to take their frustrations out on Terminus or some other Human world.

Little did they know that the possibility had occurred to Max long before they had begun this project when they first broadcast the plans to the Alliance and announced that the Terraforming Array would be available for licensing.

There was always a chance that someone they put out of business would attack them, and they weren't particularly afraid of the fact. Sure, the Alliance had mighty technology, but they were severely lacking in warships and weapons.

The chance that a Civilian force would have something that could threaten Cleansing Light was very slim, and the chance that the aggrieved party would actually come to them, where the ones who forced them from their home in the first place would e expecting them to show up was even lower.

But it was a good chance to show off for the Alliance, and classes were about to start at the Academy, which meant that a lot of the parents who were either on the Cruise Ship or somewhere in orbit around the star system would be going home soon.

That would free up space and staff to host new dignitaries, as well as spread the first-hand accounts of what the experience was like among the Nobles of the Alliance.

[Hey Nico, what can you tell me about this ship that has come to watch us work?] Max asked, hoping she had some good information for him, despite their security measures.

[Not as much as I had hoped. I can confirm that one of the students we have here is from a family that is on the Stability and Justice Council, but we have other councilor's kids here as well after that pay-for-grades scandal that spread a few months back.

I think it's not so much for our direct safety as for the safety of our students.

But on the bright side, I can tell you what frequency and pattern their warp drives are using, and I have some data about their power usage. It's rather impressive how efficient they are. They're using a tenth of what we do per person. If I could get our systems to that level, we wouldn't have to consider rationing. We could run everything on full blast all the time, even at maximum warp, without fear of running short on power.]

Max chuckled at her frustration. Getting even a little data from a ship that advanced was not easy for them, so she had done pretty well to get what she did. They also had some of the schematics for the Alliance technologies already, thanks to the scans of the many ships they had taken aboard Terminus, but they couldn't openly duplicate them to lower their power usage. They needed to recreate them in a whole new way and call them a new human development.