The combined fleet almost reached the border of the civilized space. In the past week, the engineers and other spacers focused entirely on making their ships FTL-worthy.
The surviving Larkinson ships that all sustained damage over the course of the campaign should still be sound enough to travel faster-than-light.
It was the pirate ships that generated a lot of concern. The FTL drives that the pirates smuggled out of civilized space should all be sound, but there was no telling what kind of traps or safeguards they contained.
From the start, a dedicated team of chief engineers had disassembled these large but delicate devices to inspect each and every single subcomponent.
The team detected a handful of traps, proving that the Allidus Alliance indeed buried some nasty surprises in their own FTL drives.