Blue Star Enterprises

Chapter 3-29

Alexander inspected the tests he had running to replicate the armor the Dawn was composed of. Early results were promising, but he still had a ways to go before he could shift the tests into a production capacity. He was halfway through inspecting the previous night's work when his radio beeped and one of the people in security spoke.

"Alex, the fleet's back, and all of the ships sent out are accounted for."

He sagged in relief and pulled the radio off his belt. "Thanks for alerting me. Please let Captain Krieger and the others know I will schedule a conference call with them once they are within a half-hour's communication range of Eden's End."

The man acknowledged the request and the line cut out. It had been nearly six months since the fleet departed Eden's End. They had been overdue to return for a few weeks now. Each day they were overdue to arrive sent a spike of anxiety through Alexander, making him wonder if he had made the right choice to send them out there at all. It was a feeling he hadn't experienced much of outside of worrying about Yulia's safety, and one he was glad to feel draining away now that the fleet had returned.

There had always been the possibility of ship losses when he first ordered this mission, he knew that and all the captains employed by him knew that as well. It wouldn't have made it any easier for him if one of the ships hadn't returned though.

Waiting for the fleet wasn't the only thing that had given him anxiety recently. Alexander had been keeping track of any news on the war. It wasn't looking promising for the STO. Harlow had taken another two systems, and then simply pulled his fleets back. There was a whole lot of speculation as to why the pirate lord who had turned into a self-stylized emperor had retreated, but Alexander got a bad feeling about the man's motives.

He had done calculations to see how long it would take Harlow to push through Char territory, assuming zero resistance. The estimate he came up with was about four months to skirt around the STO's sphere of influence in order to reach Eden's End.

Considering the Char family's hatred of the Anazi family, he doubted they would simply let him and his fleets travel through their systems unopposed but he couldn't be certain they even had any fleets out toward that side of their space. That brought up another question that had been plaguing him recently. Where were the Char pirates?

There was no way that Katalynn Char hadn't repaired her fleet by now. The ships that escaped hadn't been too heavily damaged. Yet, there hadn't been a single sighting of pirates since that encounter. At least none that they had detected.

That didn't mean Alexander had been idle in improving the defenses around Eden's End. The planet now sported over two thousand laser satellites and a dozen missile defense platforms capable of launching twelve of the newly enhanced missiles each, courtesy of Lucas' work with the older-style supercomputer processors.

It was complete overkill to fit missiles with those pseudo-computronics, but it was far cheaper for Alexander to produce hundreds of those than it was for him to buy even a single advanced computronic from STO space.

That wasn't the only change in defenses that Alexander had implemented. The nearest moon now sported over a thousand of the same laser satellites and four of the missile platforms thanks to the addition of eight more control ships that now floated around the moon.

He had spoken with Archie about deploying similar assets around the second closest moon but had decided against it. The smaller moon was much further out, making it less strategically viable for any attackers to hide behind. Kinetics were the only real concern at that range, and only if they were fired from Gauss cannons or railguns, but Alexander had a solution for those. Explore more at empire

His method for dealing with kinetics was rather simple, he simply deployed a grid of static field generator satellites based on the same design ships used to protect themselves from space debris. Expanding the fields to cover a wider area wasn't all that difficult. Alexander actually had the idea to make these quite some time ago, but as a sort of space scoop to help deorbit any debris left behind by the previous attacks. Energy usage was the only real concern with the new satellites, but they only got activated when an attack was incoming, which saved their onboard batteries from being constantly drained.

Alexander could have made more robust satellites with onboard reactors, but that seemed like a huge waste of time and resources for something that would likely see little practical use. And his only area of concern was the space directly above the ground facility. The fields wouldn't stop any incoming rounds, their only job was to slow them down enough that it would throw off their trajectory and ensure they caused minimal damage. He really wished he knew how his own defense field worked, that would have been a much better method of protection.

That was all the defensive upgrades he had added since the fleet was last here. The only other big change was the start of the space station. He had been forced to start it a few weeks ago because the storage area on the refueling station had reached capacity. So floating between the first and second rings of defensive lasers was the budding construction. Four massive printers trailed it in orbit, cranking out the large construction sections. These pieces would eventually be moved into place by the nearly hundred-strong team of construction robots that Alexander now commanded.

The inclusion of more control ships had allowed him to seriously ramp up construction efforts. They would slow again relatively quickly since the storage on the refueling station didn't have nearly enough space to store even a tenth of the material required for the station, but that was ok. Alexander would eventually balance out the incoming and outgoing material and reassign the remaining bots as needed to other tasks.

Those were the improvements Alexander had implemented since the fleet had been gone, it was time to learn if the mission had been a success or not.

He made his way to a private conference room off of the traffic control center and pulled up Krieger's report along with the recordings of the events.

If Lucas had been in the room with him, the man would have been able to see Alexander's avatar glitching slightly in annoyance as he read the report, one of the tells that he was ignorant of.

Alexander certainly wouldn't have engaged the two pirate ships waiting in that first system without a good reason. He wasn't sure he agreed with the reason Krieger put in the report either, but he wasn't there.

Then again, even if he had decided to attack the two ships, he wouldn't have stuck around to see who showed up after receiving the intel from the pirate. An unknown ship with unknown support was a dicey proposition in his eyes. And it had almost ended very badly according to Krieger's own testimony. Several people had been killed and injured during that engagement.

Alexander would need to have a private discussion with the man about picking his battles more carefully. Even though he managed to secure the corporate gunship, laser weapons, and armored vac-suits, that wasn't the mission.

He assumed Krieger had a bit of a hero complex based on his actions when Char's fleet had attacked Eden's End. It's why he wanted to hire the man in the first place and what made him such a capable leader. Alexander just needed to help the former STO officer focus on the bigger picture a bit more. Jeopardizing the entire mission and the future of Unokane to take out a few pirates and disrupt some illegal trade deal was not an acceptable trade in his eyes.

It worked out this time, only thanks to Alexander's overengineered ships, but next time might turn out differently.

That brought him to the attack on the station. The pirates had far more ships ready to attack than Alexander had accounted for. The lasers seemed to be the deciding factor in the exchange, giving the Eden ships the range and accuracy advantage over the pirates. He was a little surprised to see the use of the PDLs as offensive weapons, but they had actually worked quite well. What came as no surprise to him was the almost complete failure of the missiles. He knew slapping together missiles with early twenty-first-century technology was probably not going to end well.

The new missiles would take care of that issue. He made a mental reminder to have the bots rearm all the ships with the new weapons.

Last came the report on the station capture. That had turned out to be the easiest part of the whole operation. Alexander felt relief reading that. He was sure that taking the station would have been the most dangerous part, but it turns out they had help from inside.

He got to the line that showed how many civilians they had rescued and was shocked. "That's a whole lot of people," he muttered. He made another mental note to contact the intake team and let them know a few hundred new arrivals would be showing up shortly and to assign them temporary accommodations.

Temporary accommodations were now in the newly renovated atrium C. Yi Na and his people had completed the main dome and had practically blazed through B and D before completing work on the tram tunnel and then putting their full effort behind C.

There were a few small issues in A that needed to be addressed as well as some connecting tunnels and the maintenance areas, but it wasn't anything critical. Alexander instead had Yi focus his efforts on starting the new academy dome and arrival centers.

What this meant was that Eden's End was finally restored to its full capacity. It was also completely sealed off to the external atmosphere, and the complaints about the smell had quickly given way to happy smiles.

Alexander was just happy that the gloomy interior was now lit by bright lighting and the open spaces were once again starting to grow thanks to the UV lights placed high overhead. People were also using the trams to get around much quicker now, making their lives so much easier than before.

The last part of the report showed only four ships were recovered from the construction yards at the pirate station. What Alexander wasn't expecting to see was that two of those ships were cruiser-sized vessels, while the other two were destroyers. He had assumed maybe one destroyer and four frigates would have been under construction.

He once again underestimated what the pirates were capable of. If anything, that only made him think he needed more ships to see this mission to Char space was successful. With a frown, he turned to his tablet and flicked through the online catalog to find out how much the FTL drive learning module was. Then he looked at his corporate finances and winced.

Alexander had the money only thanks to Dalton's bounty and some of the private bounties that were placed on the man's head. A few of those people had finally flown out to Eden's End to confirm for themselves that the former assassin was truly dead, and finally paid up. Buying the learning module would wipe out nearly ninety percent of his remaining finances. Without any further delay, he purchased the module and quickly transferred it to the computer core with a message to Lucas to get it swapped over as soon as possible.

With Revenge being complete now, that gave Eden's End four warships. The Hawks added three more, and an additional two when the frigates from their sister organization arrived in a week or two. That brought the fleet size up to nine ships. With the four additional ships they captured from the pirates, that now increased his fleet count to thirteen.

That was three ships shy of what Char had when she escaped the system. He wanted at least an even playing field before meeting her. That meant three more ships would be needed. Preferably four, just so he had the advantage of numbers. That was assuming Katalynn Char hadn't increased her fleet size in the last nine months.

Even with the Hawks, he barely had the numbers to pilot the current ships. There certainly wasn't time to refit the four new pirate ships so they met the same standards as the Eden ships. Alexander didn't even need to see them to know that.

Harlow was off the grid and could be heading their way already. Alexander could not afford to push this meeting with Katalynn Char off for another six months to a year to refit those vessels. So how was he going to drum up four more ships and four more crews?

He had an idea, one he hadn't really contemplated for some time because the cost would have been absurd. Now, not so much.

"I'll need to update the design," he muttered before getting up and walking out of the conference room. He stopped in the traffic control center before heading back to his workshop. "Let Krieger know I'm canceling the conference call and will speak to him and the other captains when they return."

The communication technician nodded and sent out the message.