[201-400] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 274: The Glowing Planet

The entire convoy went up in arms about the sudden discovery.

Cargo ships and carriers converted from cargo ships generally didn't possess great sensors. If they all detected strong readings of exotics at a distance of five light-hours, then the planet up ahead must be riddled with highly active exotic substances.

So high, in fact, that it must be worth as much as the gross domestic product of an average third-rate state like the Bright Republic.

Commander Leife, the woman in charge of the convoy, convened a hasty conference among the ship captains and senior mercenary officers.

She gazed at the eyes of Captain Spencer before glancing at the various projections of the other men and women. Almost every ship belonged to a different owner, complicating her efforts to rein in their impulses.

She reserved the most wary looks to the other two mercenary commanders in the convoy. Both of them rode in medium-sized carriers that would be able to overwhelm the Calcardon if they teamed up against the Barbed Lynxes.

"First things first. You all shut off your quantum entanglement nodes, right? It's not enough to flip a switch. I hope you all disconnected the hardware from the rest of your ships."

All of the captains nodded seriously. They all knew that as soon as they discovered something valuable, the first thing they had to do was to prevent it from spreading all over the galactic net.

Turning off their quantum entanglement nodes had been their first or second actions upon receiving word of the momentous discovery.

"Alright folks, we all know why we're here. Let's talk about the Glowing Planet."

They called it the Glowing Planet, for its very visible luminescence that lit up the planet like a star. At this distance, it could be spotted from the naked eye, which was very rare for a rogue planet drifting in the middle of interstellar space with no nearby star to reflect its surface.

It was as if a juicy pheasant decided to put on a coat of bright lights to make it more attractive to another predators that wanted a taste of its flesh.

Captain Spencer began to summarize the estimates the entire convoy had made so far. "The Glowing Planet is about the size of a small planet or a large moon. We're not quite sure if it started off as the former or the latter before it got pushed out of its star system. Whatever the case, the trauma of the event has warped the planet to the point of tearing up its entire shape."

A projection appeared of the Glowing Planet in question. The planet took on a slight egg-like shape as if it had been stretched by a pair of god-sized hands. The stretching caused the entire crust of the planet to crack, which inadvertently revealed rich deposits of exotics.

A mercenary officer rudely interrupted the briefing. "Let's skip all of the nerdy stuff and get to the real question that matters. How valuable are those deposits?"

"Not as much as you'd think." Captain Spencer cautioned. "The planet likely originated from the galactic heartland instead of the galactic center, so it mostly contains junk exotics."

Everyone's faces started to fall. So-called junk exotics referred to valuable materials that ranked at the bottom of the hierarchy of exotic materials. While they held significant value in even smaller quantities, they couldn't be relied on to construct a quality mech without pairing them up with other, more valuable exotics.

That said, the planet still represented a floating mound of cash in space. Captain Spencer passed around a list of exotics they detected so far. "There isn't anything exciting in this list, but what's notable is that all of these exotics are getting harder to import from the other Star Sectors. This means that the Friday Coalition and the Hexadric Hegemony will be sending out a massive fleet to secure the Glowing Planet as soon as they hear about its existence."