Blue Star Enterprises

Chapter 2-33

The ship shook around Alexander as Eden’s Fury towed it away from the station. He really hoped the entire trip wasn’t this rough.

After about ten minutes, the turbulence settled down and his radio flashed, alerting him that he had a message. He was glad he finally had time to combine the radio with one of the tablets to allow for text messages. Alexander could have kept the simple light panel, but it wasn’t quite good enough to relay complicated messages.

He pulled up the tablet that the radio was attached to and read the message. Na was simply confirming that they were away from the station and heading away from the planet.

As much as Alexander would have liked to simply jump to the next system once they were clear to jump, that wasn’t a good idea. He wanted to make sure the jump drive was working properly in the system first so he could address any issues that might crop up before leaving. It would also allow the docking and undocking procedure to be fully tested.

If something broke once they left the system, they wouldn’t be stranded thanks to the repair robots and the printer aboard the Fury, but it would delay them while repairs needed to be made.

It was too bad the jump fields of ships were not designed to extend very far past their hulls. The bulge of the warp bubble on Dawn only extended a few feet past the shuttle’s hull, making it a very tight fit. Modifying the devices to cover more space meant replacing the entire jump field emitter and providing additional power, something he did not have the expertise to do. If those emitters had been damaged in the pirate attacks, he would have fed the ships to the smelter, like he had the others.

It took six more hours before Alexander got the next text, letting him know they were far enough from the planet to do a jump. He could have done it a few hours ago with the power available in the shuttle, but he didn’t want to push the shuttle’s reactor to its limit.

He typed a response back to Captain Na and waited for the clear signal.

***

After leaving the Coalition Navy, Na had sworn he would never step foot aboard another military vessel again. And yet here he was, Captain of a frigate, if only temporarily. He had only agreed because he owed Alexander a debt that would take years to repay. Even then he might not have agreed except this trip also allowed him to speak to his family again.

It wasn’t that he feared a fight, he had been in numerous small and medium-sized skirmishes during the tail end of the Coalition’s conflict with the STO. The reason he didn’t want to be a captain aboard a military vessel is because he had never been a very good officer during his tour of duty. Even though those days were long past him, and he had grown and matured, he didn’t want his actions to be responsible for getting people killed. It’s why he left the service when the war ended instead of joining the STO like his former crewmate, Colonel Jun had done. There was also his responsibility to Petrov Station that he needed to think about.

His decision to walk away from military life certainly wasn’t out of some misplaced pride for the Coalition. Their leadership had been rotten to the core and that had brought about their downfall just as much as the STO had. Not that the STO was much better, considering what they had done to him and his crew.

The first time Alexander brought up the question of captaining this mission, Mingyu had flat-out refused. Even stating the fact that the STO likely wouldn’t praise him for his actions was not enough to dissuade Alexander from this rash voyage. Then he tried to point out they were all quarantined, hoping the man would drop the request.

That hadn’t worked. In fact, Alexander had slapped him with some facts that he had overlooked. While the STO had quarantined his ship, they hadn’t bothered to list the crew aboard the ship in the quarantine notice. Alex even showed him the records he somehow pulled from the stealth ship that showed he was telling the truth.

Even then, Mingyu was skeptical. It wasn’t until he had a face-to-face conversation with Captain Krieger that he finally believed what Alex had shown him. During that discussion, Krieger hadn’t asked if Mingyu would take him and his people back to STO space, likely because he thought there would be little point in doing so. Mingyu didn’t bother correcting him either.

With this loophole, he and his people would be able to access a Qcomm. It had been over six months since any of them had spoken to their loved ones back in STO space. For his part, he was looking forward to speaking with his father and the rest of his family. Hopefully, he could finally convince his old man and the rest of them to join him. It was too bad they didn’t possess a Qcomm relay, they could have transported more communications from the rest of the people on Eden’s End.

When Alexander finally convinced him to take on this role, Mingyu had another hurdle, convincing his crew to assist. He wasn’t sure how they would react when he told them they would be returning the rescued STO people back to STO space. Some were fine with it, others less so. He managed to get enough people to crew Fury, which was only possible thanks to Alexander’s improvements to the ancient ship.

"We’re clear of the ship’s warp field, Captain," his pilot stated happily as he inspected the very fancy control panel.

Alexander certainly hadn’t skimped on the ship. The bridge was a tiered setup that ran in a half-moon with a massive holo display that filled the entire circular depression in the center. That holo display acted as a window to display what was in front of the ship, but it was so much more. With the touch of a button, it could flip to a tactical view, showing a complete three-hundred-and-sixty view of the ship out to a full light second.

It was a ridiculous amount of information to have at hand. Everything inside that sphere got a little line and tag next to it, and all he had to do was reach out and it would zoom into that icon. This little feat of technology was all thanks to the supercomputer Alexander had added. If the damn things weren’t so expensive, and it wouldn’t have required an entire overhaul of Destiny, he might have considered adding something like it to his own ship.

The computer wasn’t the only thing that made the display possible, the ship’s optics were also far superior to anything he had ever worked with, allowing him to see The Moonlit Destiny clearly, even though they were well past Eden’s End’s gravitational pull. Normally he would be forced to rely on other, less accurate sensors, for those ranges.

And the weapons. They had tested the weapons, and they were terrifyingly effective for such a small ship. Simply click an icon or multiple icons on his console and the weapons would auto-target, which was good since he didn’t have a dedicated weapons officer or anyone even trained to operate targeting systems. His sensor operator back on Destiny usually took on that role, but she had stayed behind.

Not everyone on his crew was happy that Mingyu had accepted the task of taking the STO people home. He couldn’t blame them. Some had lost loved ones back on Petrov Station because of the STO’s actions, or inaction.

Mingyu calmed his thoughts and sent Alex a response to let him know he could do the test jump.

The first issue that cropped up as the Fury watched the damaged STO ship, was that the jump field was taking much longer to form. He would need to ask Alexander about this when they joined them at the rendezvous point since the field disrupted radio transmissions.

After taking three times as long to charge as the Fury, the ship finally vanished. He waited to make sure there wasn’t a debris field or that the ship simply popped back into normal space before giving his next order. "Alright, spool up our drive."

When they arrived near the destination point, Alex and the Epsilon’s Dawn weren’t there. It appeared on their scanners a moment later, but it was way off target and almost at the edge of Fury’s light second scanner bubble. The only reason they could locate it at all was thanks to the emergency beacon Alexander had welded to the outside of the ship. If that beacon stopped working, they would need to do a sector-by-sector scan to find the shuttle, since the STO ship didn’t appear on normal sensors.

As they approached the ship, he wondered if Alexander had figured out a solution to the jump problems. If not, their journey was going to take much longer.

***

Alexander wasn’t even aware that he was off target until Captain Na radioed him. He had to scratch his proverbial head at that because he had no clue what went wrong. The ship jumped, although it had taken longer to charge than he had planned for. He would need to look at the logs to determine what was going on.

The physical damage to the ship wouldn’t affect the jump, it was all inside the field, and that was what determined what jumped and what didn’t. If the fields for either ship had been large enough, they could have simply jumped together. That wasn’t likely to happen though. Jump fields took a lot of energy, and ships weren’t designed to adjust those field dimensions.

While Mingyu secured the Fury to the Dawn again, Alexander went through the jump log, and the programming to see if he could figure out what went wrong. He found that one of the power lines running to the drive was pulsing intermittently. That could certainly account for the jump discrepancy.

The problem was, that the only way to fix that issue would be to replace that entire cable. And it would take days to produce a new one. Instead of waiting, he told Mingyu to proceed to the jump point they had selected. He sent instructions to Mikhail Yun, Mingyu’s Chief Engineer, to produce a new cable. With any luck, it should be complete by the time they reach the next system.

When they neared the jump point north of the system, the Fury reoriented and released the Dawn once more. So far the towing method Alexander had come up with was working, but they still had two more weeks and another dozen or so systems to jump through. It was going to be thoroughly tested during that time.

The Fury cleared his warp sphere and retracted the clamps while it prepped its own jump drive. This would be a tandem jump. Hopefully, they would arrive at the same relative distance from each other this time.

Mingyu took into account Alexander’s slower jump charge and both ships jumped within seconds of each other. It would be two days in hyperspace before they exited at the next system.

Ever since his first jump aboard the Zephyr, Alexander had been curious about warp drives. He wondered why they didn’t simply bypass systems and go straight to their destination. While the drives did heat up the longer they maintained the field, it wasn’t what prevented that from happening. The reason ships jumped to the next closest star was a limit of processing power as well as stored energy. At least it had been that way when they were first developed. With the advent of supercomputer chips, that first limitation wasn’t really an issue anymore, but most ships still traveled from system to system.

Back when he first learned about this, it hadn’t made much sense to him, but now that he knew most ships didn’t even use advanced chips, let alone the supercomputer ones, it was clear why they still did it the old way.

As for power, ships could only store so much energy. That didn’t prevent anyone from taking the shortest route to their destination, it just might take multiple stops between the systems to get you there. And maybe that was the problem.

The more jumps you make, the more chances of something going wrong when you come out. If your jump drive failed inside a system, you could most likely expect rescue at some point if you were in STO space. If you broke down in the void between stars, the chances of anyone ever finding you, let alone coming to your rescue, were slim to none. Only the truly desperate would risk that.

Since there was nothing to do but wait for the next few days, Alexander decided to head back to the shuttle and see what a jump looked like without the filter of a computer.

As he sat in the cockpit of the shuttle, he couldn’t help but be amazed by the sight. Everything in front of the ship was a painfully bright blue, while all the stars aft of the shuttle were a red so dim, it was almost black. He had to think about it for a bit to understand what was going on. They were essentially crashing into the light in front of them, causing everything to look blue, while the light from the trailing stars was traveling slower than they were, causing it to shift into the red spectrum.

It was one thing to understand the physics behind it, but a whole nother to see it in action. And it was beautiful.

Alexander found the view to be rather peaceful and sat there watching it for most of the trip. He should have realized that peace wouldn’t last.

***

"You sure that bastard Shall came this way?" Temy asked for the fourteenth time.

"How many times do I have to tell you? I’m sure he came this way because I pulled the flight log from his ship."

"If you’re wrong, the boss isn’t going to be happy," the Cartel thug stated.

"As if I give a shit about your pathetic outer world cartel," Simon muttered under his breath.

Temy didn’t hear him, the man was too busy trying to keep his lunch down. Simon rolled his eyes at the grounder.

He wouldn’t have bothered with this job but he was one payment away from losing his ship and with it his ability to make a living as a mercenary. The person he owed money to was much scarier than Temy’s boss.

He checked his scanners again to ensure nobody had entered the system. He wasn’t worried about his quarry, they would come back this way eventually and get caught in his gravity trap long enough for Simon to disable their ship. Purchasing the item from the black market had cost him a hefty sum, but it had already proven to be worth it as he had captured three targets by using the device.

While he wasn’t worried about his target, Simon was worried that one of the Char family or another pirate would stumble upon him out here. Pirates didn’t take kindly to outsiders poaching their areas of space.

As he was checking the sensors again, they pinged as something dropped out of warp nearly on top of the gravity trap. His sensors were having a hard time telling him what it was, what he could see clearly was an emergency beacon pinging. That meant whatever the ship was, it was damaged.

He knew this ship couldn’t be Shall’s, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, he fired up his drive and headed straight for whatever unlucky bastard got themselves stuck. Maybe he could earn enough from this score that he could space Temy and head back home to pay off his debts.