I had a thought. Occasionally, the Confederation Navy hires "rogues of various stripes" to pose as invaders to the Laberv system for War Games style training exercises. It's a nice cake-walk dry-run for testing out our new ship systems on the Ares. It's a non-live-fire exercise; more like "starship laser-tag". It's completely unobjectionable, and worthy pay. And it might introduce us to some "morally ambiguous" "unsavory characters", who we would presumably be cooperating in maneuvers with.