Once Max had rolled Dave all the way to the aft of the ship where his unit was stationed, he had a pretty decent idea of what had happened in the old neighborhood since he left. The Police presence picked up, the drugs and violence got worse and worse, and the factories nearby were repurposed from general goods to high tech which none of the workers from the slums were qualified to make, so a lot of people lost their jobs, making things even worse.


    “What about the twins, and the other ones that my mother was scheduled to have?” Max asked.


    “They lost them all, just after you left. Theary Inquisition was at the clinic in the neighborhood when she came to give birth, and I suspect they were looking for you, now that I know you had already left the. But what they found was your mother, all strung out on drugs, and they called Child Services to take the kids away.


    But she was so high that she didn’t understand who they were looking for and insisted that she never had a son, only one older daughter who had cruelly abandoned her to a life of poverty.


    They assumed that she was mentally deficient, and coupled with the drugs, Child Services determined that it was for the best if they just took all the children away from her.


    I have no idea where they went, but we never saw them again, so I think that they put them into a cement in a better neighborhood, not into the foster system. You know how popr kids younger than toddlers are among parents looking to adopt.” Dave exined.


    “Well, at least they weren’t left at the house to starve to death when one day nobody came home for them. If it wasn’t for you, that might have happened to me long before they stopped showing up for good.


    But I would like to know where they are now, with everything going wrong on the. Nico is a better hacker than either of us could hope to be, her Innate Talent lets her control technology with her mind, and she can just straight bypass security measures instead of trying to crack passwords and decode encryptions. I will ask her to look into it here in a minute.” Max told his friend, then paused before opening the Mecha hangar door.


    “I hope that you’re ready for this old man. These aren’t the Mecha of your Generation.” Max teased, then pushed the button to open the st doors.


    “By the Emperor, your force has four Phnx ss Mecha, and they’re all artillery pattern? No wonder you had the guts to actually stay and face a Klem invasion.” Dave muttered, making Maxugh.


    “My Battalion has four Phnx ss Mecha. There are twenty of them aboard the ship right now, all identical. Then there are the new pattern Crusaders. You would love these Fast Attack Pattern ones. Infernus Pattern the troops have started calling them, thanks to the Fusion mer on their arm.


    These things can melt rock to liquid and burn even the toughest of bugs to ash.” Max bragged.


    “Keep talking them up like that and I’m going to need an alone moment. But let’s go see these Mecha up close.” Dave joked, rolling himself forward down the ramp, picking up speed as he went.


    Now that he was aboard their ship, and they had the technology, Max thought he should check the Tarith Family passengers for an augmentic doctor. They could patch Dave up as good as new and he would be ready to walk off the ship by the time they reached Kepler 142.


    “Commander, who might this old infantryman be?” One of the techs called, as Dave rolled up to the leg of Enduring Rage and began stroking it with the sort of affection only someone whose life has been saved by Mecha could know.


    “This is my childhood friend and caretaker, Dave. Take good care of him for me, would you? I need to grab him a pack of smokes from the supply.” Max called back.


    “Don’t bother, I have a fresh pack on me. The troops didn’t hold back with the requests, so we have a year’s supply of smokes in the cold storage.” The tech replied.


    “That should keep them fresh. Have you had any luck with the programming for those material rbiners that the Terminus came with? The ones that made the food paste crap?” Max asked.


    “Well, kind of? It’s a work in progress since Nico has been too busy to trante everything for us, but we have the basics down, and now it makes Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese sandwiches, but the bread in the sandwiches tastes pretty basic.” The Tech exined.


    “Better than ration biscuits?” Dave asked.


    “Not many things aren’t better than Ration Biscuits. But it’s still a pretty basic meal.” The tech shrugged.


    “I could live on Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese. I am also a fairly skilled programmer, why don’t you let me see what you’re up to?” Dave asked.


    Max nodded his permission to give ess to the isted unit that they had pulled out of storage for the tests, fearing that modifying one of the linked ones mounted in the ship might destroy them all if they made a mistake during the process. And they had made mistakes, more than a few, some of which might actually be a new variety of bioweapon.


    Dave tapped away happily at the screen for a while, shocking the technicians, who had spent almost the entire time just learning the aliennguage before beginning to work.


    “How are you doing that?” The tech asked as Dave worked.


    “I don’t need to read theirnguage, I can read your codingnguage and go from there. The major problem is that whoever created this isn’t a cook. They inserted the final product for the bread, but not the ingredients and process, which the machine was looking for, so it is estimating the missing steps, see the error codes that came up. I can’t see what they mean, but they only ur in the bread, since the rest of the meal is simplybining and heating to temperature.


    Try it now, and I think that you should have a nice breadyer, with a crispy crust, like the sourdough I made at home.


    The tech activated the machine, and the meal came out the same as always, but with a small change, the sandwich now had a crust to it, and a distinct smell of toast, not the nd nothingness that it had before. The Tech ced a piece under the sensor suite beside the device and hummed happily as he read the oue.


    “It looks safe to eat. We have been using a Cyborg to taste test everything since they can stop their stomach from digesting anything and therefore won’t get poisoned, even if we fed them a stone.” The tech exined, but Dave went straight for the sandwich and dunked it in the soup.


    “Yep, definitely edible. I lived on Military rations for almost a decade, no simple synthetic sandwich is going to hurt this stomach.”