276 276 The Good Life
The trade goods started to flow into the ship within minutes, and Nico reluctantly agreed to allow a group of interior decorators as well as supply staff into the Terminus to decorate crew quarters in a long line down the center of the ship.
The layout made areas for all five Battalions, as well as the general staff, but to an interior decorator, it looked more like they had been separated by crew shifts and duty types. The fact that certain areas of the ship, which hadn’t currently been occupied by the Regiment were left entirely ignored by their decorating efforts.
They had no way to know that the ship was nearly empty, running at under ten percent of its normal capacity, so it seemed to them that they were rightfully decorating rooms for the upper crust of the Terminus Trading Company and their paying guests.
Since they were all still cramped into quarters on the Dutchman, other than the First Battalion, who had moved to the aft of the ship near engineering, to be close in case of attack, none of the Pilots or staff were aware of the changes that were taking place aboard the Terminus.
Simple alien furnishings were moved aside to make way for two thousand luxury suites, and the old furniture was moved into storage in the unused rooms.
There were some leftover bits of technology that were kept in the suites though. There was a very interesting form of replicator in each suite, originally intended for a family. It only created a few things, namely a simple uniform in various sizes, and three different alien meals that Max hadn’t had the courage to try yet, though Nico informed him that they should be safe for human consumption.
It was similar to their materials printer, only it used a generic block of material as its source, reforming both molecular bonds and even atomic bonds to create exactly what they needed.
When the devices were first discovered, they had searched the ship for a more capable version, knowing that the ship must have had one at some point, but much to Max’s dismay, it had been removed when the Colonists left.
When they got the chance, they would analyze these and send the data to Uncle Lu, at the research and development Lab, to see if he could make a breakthrough in the Materials Printing Field, but for now, that would have to wait. They weren’t going to be anywhere near Comor for a while, and it wasn’t safe to attempt to send that sort of information across the galaxy as a data signal that anyone could intercept.
It took twelve hours for the staff to finish the decorations and depart the ship, but finally, it was time to inform the Regiment that their new homes were ready for occupancy. But first, Max decided to take a look at the suite that had been assigned to him.
There were three levels of the “Luxury Unit” as the designer called them decorated today. Penthouse, Suite, and Dwelling. The names were terrible, but they did make sense to Max if you assumed that the people using them were a noble family and their staff.
In practice, they would be Commanders, Senior Officers, and Officers suites.
Max stepped into his suite, intended for a Commanding Officer, and gasped in awe. All the designs aboard the Terminus were originally intended to be family units, and the interior decorator had converted an entire unit into a suite, which was officially just for him and his guests.
There were kitchen facilities, a small gym with a spa, a luxury bathroom, with a jetted tub large enough for four of him to sit in and soak to their neck, plus four bedrooms and a living room, all decorated in the finest furnishings that Max had ever seen. The decorator had even put a crystal chandelier over the coffee table in the middle of the living room.
This was insane. He had thought that he would have enough room for two thousand men, as his agreement went, but Max didn’t account for the translation issues between soldier and Noble. Nobles do not live in a single-room bunk, they live in a suite, with room for guests and entertaining.
“Nico, you are checking out a standard officer’s suite aren’t you?” Max called out into the hallway, knowing that only eight of the top-level suites were designed. Max had requested five suites for the Battalion Commanders and their Technicians, and one each for the General, the Admiral, and a Guest, which would be occupied by Inquisitor General Ming for now.
“Yeah, I’m inspecting some of the mid-level suites that the designer made. It’s still a full-family suite, but it’s not quite as swanky as the one you are inspecting. They didn’t even use real silver cutlery, and the chandelier is synthetic, can you imagine that?” Nico called back from the next unit over.
In that case, it would still have four bedrooms, suitable for an entire wing of Pilots. Three Pilots to a standard wing, four bedrooms to a suite, which left them room to entertain guests, or have a storage room for every wing. It also gave them three times as many rooms available.
If they moved the Heavy Mecha wings into shared suites, they would have a lot of extra space.
The problem was that the Corvette Class Pilots were in wings of five. But Max had hope that the excess space that had been converted in the higher-end suites might not be wasted in the lowest-grade version.
He was right in his assumption, but in a very different way than he had thought. The “Dwelling” suites, which the designer intended for staff, had ten rooms in a cluster, around a central living room and kitchen, each with a small ensuite bathroom, but no huge main bathroom, gym, or sauna.
“Change of plans. Assign each suite to a wing, based on their Mecha, and then put the remaining ones up for grabs to the enlisted men. They can sort out their own rooms, and I can almost guarantee they won’t ever have had a place this nice before.” Max called Nico, who forwarded the directions to the rest of the Battalion Commanders, who had no idea what she meant until they got the map of their assigned zones.
The enlisted quarters were comparatively cramped, but the rooms aboard the Terminus had originally been built for much larger people, and they were four meters by six, making them as large as Max’s room at the Lab and now had been furnished with a bed, desk, and couch, all in the finest of materials, plus access to the shared spaces.
By comparison, their bunks on the Dutchman were three beds high, thirty men to a room, with just enough room to walk between the bunks and a standard locker for each enlisted crew member.
If they complained about the new rooms, they were free to stay in their old ones.