Blue Star Enterprises

After speaking with Matthews, Alexander had some things to consider. It would take a bit to come together before he was ready to present it to the rest of his team, but he was hopeful that a plan would come together. Hopefully, trying to work with Katalynn Char wouldn’t come back to bite him, but if he wanted to take the fight away from Unokane and to Harlow, he needed allies to work with.

Alexander had already seen the news reports of Harlow nuking that one planet, there was no way he was allowing that psychotic bastard anywhere near this system.

He had purchased access to the galactic news to keep track of when Krieger was finally released from the Navy, but he was glad he kept it because it allowed him to learn just what Harlow was capable of if he didn’t get his way. It made his idea of working with Char look not so bad in comparison.

That being said, he had just taken his first steps down that long road to make anything a reality, and one pothole along the way could derail that trip entirely. Finding allies was important, but it wasn’t immediately critical. He would need to keep working at that long-term goal as time permitted.

In the meantime, he needed to focus on finishing the compressed plasma ejection engine design so he could outfit the Talon while it was here for maintenance. Work on the project had been put on hold while he assisted Damien and the Hawks in their efforts to root out any more possible troublemakers.

Speaking of troublemakers, Alexander had sequestered the crew who refused to sign up with BSE. Originally he was going to let the people live normally like the rest of the people on Eden’s End until it was time to take them back, but due to recent events, he changed his mind.

Considering one of the men, who refused to accept the contract, was caught trying to send coded messages back to STO space through the Qcomm, Alexander felt vindicated with his decision. A few of those people grumbled vociferously, but Alexander put his foot down. They were moved to a temporary area in Atrium D where they could move around in a walled-off area. Food and entertainment were provided, but they were not allowed to mingle with the populace.

His treatment didn’t win him any favors with those individuals, but he didn’t care. They still had access to send messages to the Qcomm, if they wanted to call for a ride, they were more than welcome to do so. Otherwise, the plan was to send them back to a civilian station within STO space as soon as a ship was available. By agreement, the Hawks would eventually send someone to take them home, but by then, they would no longer be Alexander’s concern.

Dalton’s ship might be an option, but it wasn’t designed to carry more than a handful of people at a time. And it was rather unsafe with the modifications the man had done to it.

As much as he would like those people out of his hair, he needed to focus on the important issues plaguing him at the moment. Alexander knew he was facing an unknown deadline until Harlow decided to throw something new his way. He needed to be ready for that.

Knowing that he was on a tight timeline, he was tempted to throw all of the supercomputers, Jasper had brought in the last shipment, into more control ships and construction drones.

The threefold increase in construction capability would be a game changer. At some point, he would do it because he had to, but not today. He simply didn’t have the need to refurbish a frigate in a single month. If he had the available crew, it would be a different story.

He thought about making a sort of automated carrier but dismissed the idea for the same reason he wasn’t making his own ships from scratch yet. His control ships were the only ships Alexander had built so far, and they were a mess on the inside. He had not bothered taking into account many things when he built those ships, so the internals were a rat’s nest of cables and other control systems.

It wasn’t really a concern when the ship had no internal walls separating the space, but that wouldn’t work with an actual warship though.

Another reason he hadn’t gone the carrier route was the issue with what it would carry. He really only had two options. Either build a bunch of bots or use his laser platforms. Neither of which was fast or maneuverable with their little ion engines. If he was setting up some static defensive point in a system, then the carrier would shine, but from what Alexander had seen so far, space battles happened very quickly and the area of space people could warp into was massive. Still, it was something to consider for the future.

While the bots wouldn’t do a lick of good in a battle, he could put them to work mining. Yeah, that seemed like the best option in the short term.

Alexander made some rapid flicking motions that sent print jobs to all of his printers, including the three orbital ones he was now running. Within three days, those print jobs would be assembled into three new control ships along with thirty new drones. The drones would carry the mining modifications to help bolster his lagging resource collections. He sent Mingyu a message, notifying him he would have company out in the belt soon. He figured a heads-up would be wise since the man had one of the only ore haulers in the system and he would be working alongside the new bots.

He thought about it for a bit before sending the Hawks a message as well.

Unlike Mingyu, who was likely deep in the mining belt, the Hawks replied rather quickly.

His query had been a simple one. He wanted to know if they had cleared the two small mining ships that arrived with the rest of the refugees. They did, and both ships were clear of any contraband.

That was good. If they had found any contraband, he would have commandeered those ships and had the crew arrested, but then he would have been short on people to crew them. An ongoing issue it seemed.

He looked up the crew manifest and sent their captains job offers. Alexander had a lot of credits, it was time to put them to work.

It didn’t take long to get replies from the two ship owners. They both agreed to act as hauling barges for his mining operation. They agreed so fast that Alexander was sure he had overpaid. It was what it was. He needed their ships until he could build a hauler of his own and paying them a lot of money was the quickest way to make that happen. The two ships would likely not be able to keep up with his automated miners once they really got going, but it was better than nothing.

Realizing he was overlooking a resource, he messaged one last person.

"Captain Farthing, are you busy at the moment?"

"Not at all, what can I assist you with, Mr. Kane?"

Alexander rolled his eyes at the woman’s overly formal tone through the radio. "First of all, call me Alex or Alexander, everyone does. As for what I messaged you about. How would you like to upgrade from a shuttle?"

"Very well, Alex. You might as well call me Penny then, so long as the conversation is between just the two of us. As for upgrading, I would be a rather poor captain if I declined outright. I don’t want to be rude as you are my boss, but I assume you recall my stipulations."

How could he forget? You didn’t come across a Navy captain who didn’t want to pilot a warship every day. "I remember, Penny. The ship does have weapons, but you will be using it to haul ore."

"…That’s a first. May I ask why you have an ore hauler with weapons on it?"

"It’s technically not an ore hauler. I’m referring to the ship we confiscated from the man who attempted to kidnap me and my daughter." He chose not to mention the fact that he did indeed put weapons on another mining ship.

"Ah, that makes sense. Does that mean you are done searching the ship?"

It was a good question. The answer was, yes and no. Shutting down the ship’s reactor had given them full access to scan the interior of the vessel. What they found was surprising. The ship had four small Gauss cannons, and two PDCs hidden behind fake hull plates. Not much of a surprise other than the fact there were so many weapons on such a small ship.

The bigger surprise was the massive optical array hidden in the front of the ship. He knew the ship had one based on his electronic escapades through its computers during his brief stint aboard, but he hadn’t been prepared for just how impressive the array was. Alexander itched to pull it apart and examine it, but he needed the ship intact for now. The only thing of concern was the explosives hidden throughout the ship. It took a dedicated team of explosives experts from the Hawks to clear out those to ensure the ship was safe.

It was actually a stroke of luck that the ship hadn’t blown up the moment Dalton died. The explosives were linked to his bio signs, but thanks to some fluke with their range of detection, and Alexander having never released his grip on the ship’s computer, it wasn’t able to process the command. And once the command failed, the computer wasn’t smart enough to realize anything had gone wrong. That was just another example of how close he had come to losing it all. He would not, could not let that happen again.

"The ship is ready to fly, are you interested?" he asked instead.

"It beats sitting around here," she eventually responded. "Will I get some crew?"

"The ship is designed to fly with a single person but pick four people from the other two crews." This would short the other crews of the additional people he had promised them, but it couldn’t be helped.

With the start of the academy ramping up, Alexander was hopeful at least a few of the locals and refugees would take advantage of the naval courses.

If he had another year and change, he could assign Markus to one of the ships as a Cadet, but that was well into the future.

"Very well," Penny stated. "Does this ship have a name?"

Alexander wasn’t going to use the name that Dalton was using, but he did have one in mind. "It’s called Fafo."

"Fafo?" the woman asked. "That’s an odd name. Does it mean anything?"

He smiled internally. "Nope, nothing significant." Alexander wasn’t sure if the term meant anything in this day and age, but he liked it as a bit of an inside joke. And if anyone did understand the meaning, well, they might learn what happens when they decide to mess with him.

He gave her the expected timeline of when to ship out and said the vessel would be fully stocked and ready for her crew when they arrived.

Now that Penny was onboard, he felt better about the three ships keeping up with his mining drones. That should clear up any resource shortfalls and give Mingyu and his crew some much-needed downtime.

That did push his bottleneck down the line, but Alexander had already anticipated that issue over a year ago. With the two smelters he purchased in Varlen, the two that he had Jasper buy for him, and even the malfunctioning one that he had managed to finally repair, he had more capacity to refine material than he knew what to do with.

It wasn’t a bad problem to have. He just wished he could increase his employee count as easily, but that was a bottleneck he didn’t have much control over at the moment.

Alexander went over his orbital infrastructure one last time to make sure he didn’t miss anything. There were things he wanted to implement, but they could wait.

Seeing as he was using all of his assets to the best of his ability, he finally turned to the hologram he had been working on the entire time he had been sending out texts and conversing with people. His little trip aboard the kidnappers’ ship did have one advantage. It forced him to push his abilities and expand his mind, allowing him to multitask way more effectively than before. That was a small silver lining to that rather unwelcome encounter.

His once messy and convoluted compressed plasma ejection design was now much sleeker and way more simplified. Even with all the redundant systems, the military Class 7 design was only half again as complicated as a Class 5, making it far superior to the Talon’s current Omni thrusters as far as simplicity went.

The real question was, did they outperform the Omni thrusters? The answer to that was, no. Alexander only had two sets of compressed plasma ejection thrusters to compare his design to, one from Omni, and the other from Sinorus. Based on those findings, it seemed there was a very slim design margin to get the thrusters to work properly.

He tried all sorts of thrust cone and expansion chamber configurations to try and optimize the output, but they all boiled down to the same shape. Alexander shouldn’t be surprised by that, compressed plasma ejection worked on a wildly different principle to pulsed fusion.

Once he came to that conclusion, he simply designed his thrust cone to split the difference between Omni and Sinorus’ designs. The insignificant thrust difference between the two was so negligible as to not matter. Instead, he focused on improving the plasma flow, and reactor output, which was the real bottleneck in his design.

A smoother flow meant a more stable thrust. Using an idea he had kicked around for a while, which was once again brought to the forefront of his attention by the unique use of the static fields on Dalton’s ship, Alexander wrapped the plasma flow in a static field instead of the electromagnetic field that it was normally contained by.

The emitters looked a little weird with their placement, but he just wanted to see what it would do when he ran it through the simulation software.

It didn’t work, but it didn’t exactly fail as he expected it to. He added back the electromagnetic field generators but left the static field emitters and tested them again. Alexander wasn’t sure if the two would have strange reactions or not, but this is what testing was all about.

There seemed to be some reaction to having both fields active in the containment tube, but it was a small change. Not enough to justify adding both to an already complex propulsion system. If he could find a way to combine both fields in the future, then maybe he could revisit the design.

He moved on to the reactor. Alexander’s knowledge of reactors was probably his weakest subject as far as the propulsion components on ships went. He had a few memories of reactor designs from back in his day, but the reactors of the twenty-fourth century had little in common with those antiquated designs. And why should they, those designs had never even seen commercial use, while these reactors were used every day.

It didn’t help that he had seen dozens of different reactor designs over the years. The one he was looking at now was called a ball reactor. It was a simple spherical reactor that made a miniature star at its center. It was large, complicated, and not very efficient, but it was one of the simplest reactor designs that Alexander had access to. This was the type of reactor the Moonlit Destiny had.

For all its flaws, the reactor was nearly maintenance-free, which is why it was still in use on quite a few ships.

The Talon’s reactor was a whole different beast. Alexander didn’t have schematics for it, but he was allowed to study the design and watch the reactor in action. It was a type of reactor called a disk reactor and it looked like a squashed ball or inflated pancake. Inside the reactor was a series of rings. Depending on the reactor output, there could be up to seven of these rings. The Talon’s reactor only had three. The main ring, and two auxiliary rings.

Instead of encasing the entire reactor in an electromagnetic field, the rings sort of contained the plasma in a loop of magnetism that kept the energy far enough away from the delicate rings, while also keeping it from contacting the outside of the containment vessel.

The reason for the separate rings was that it allowed you to pull plasma from the auxiliary rings to use as the ship’s thrust, while not disturbing the main power ring. And if you somehow disrupted the flow of one or both of the auxiliary rings, the main ring was designed to restart them without interruption.

It was a beautiful design, but Alexander had no idea how to recreate it. He had a few prototypes in the works but none were functional at the moment.

The final design was what the shuttles used. It was a simple reactor that used the magnetic field to hold the fuel in place while a grid of lasers heated it to ignition, similar to how the pulsed fusion drive operated. It was the smallest of the reactor designs that Alexander had access to, but it also had the lowest output. These smaller reactors weren’t designed to handle the higher energy fuel contained in the fifty-year cores that starships used either. The shuttle reactors could only convert heavy water and super heavy water into fusible material.

He was pretty sure he could increase the efficiency of the reactor and shrink the entire design by quite a bit, but that didn’t really solve his problem of coming up with a reactor design for his compressed plasma ejection thrusters.

In the end, Alexander decided to just retrofit his engines to the reactors that were already available on the Talon and the Destiny. It would take a bit more work on his part, but why bother reinventing the wheel when it was already there?

The Talon might not see much improvement, but it would have brand-new engines. The Destiny, however, should see a slight improvement over their outdated Sinorus engines.

With that decision, he made a quick change to the design to allow for the connection change and queued up the engines to the orbital printers. Once his new control ships were done printing, it would be time to retrofit the Talon.

It was good timing since Eden’s Resolve would be leaving shortly with the first delivery for Vice Admiral Fletcher. That gave Alexander a little over two months to finish the retrofit for Talon.

Alexander checked his watch and saw it was nearly time for Yulia to get out of class. He quickly saved his work and locked down his workshop before heading out to pick her up.

He knew he had been a rather negligent father lately, but he was doing his best to spend time with her whenever he could. It would have been much easier if there had been a second parent for her, but Alexander had no intentions of finding a significant other. Even if he considered it, what would be the point? It wasn’t like he could make them happy, and he was starting to realize he probably wouldn’t have the same feelings for them as he did Yulia.

Alexander’s feelings had come back when Yulia was first attacked back on Petrov Station, but Alexander barely felt anything towards most people even now. The few exceptions were his close friends and the people he hated with a burning passion, like the pirates who attacked the facility, Dalton, and Harlow. Everyone else just fell into a grey area of complete emotional disinterest for him.

Maybe one day he would figure out a solution to that problem, but for now, he had enough people he cared about.

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