Not being alerted to the unknown ship when it arrived, irked Alexander. The fact that it was Branston who had alerted him and not Lucas or Damien pissed him off. Especially when Branston informed him of what Damien had asked him to do. Thankfully the former STO pilot was smart enough to realize that Damien had no authority over him and declined the order.

Branson worked for him, and the shuttle belonged to him. It wasn’t at Damien's beck and call to do with it as he pleased, especially when the man wanted to sacrifice it to buy time. Alexander understood the man was worried about another possibly hostile ship, but they were going to have a serious discussion when he returned to the surface.

If Damien wanted access to Blue Star Enterprise assets, it was time to integrate the security force into his company. If the man refused, he would remove access to the security center for him and his people. Alexander might separate those departments anyway, considering Damien was never involved in the space side of things. The man was competent at running facility security, but he lacked the tactical knowledge to deploy assets in space.

Alexander couldn’t fault him for that, everyone had their strengths and weaknesses and it seemed he found Damien’s.

As for Lucas, Alexander knew why he hadn’t reached out. If Damien was in the room, Lucas tended to defer to his older brother on most matters. Neither man was really cut out for being in charge of system-wide defensive operations but it wasn’t like he had many options. Alexander couldn’t claim to be any better though.

Together they made it work, but that was the problem. Alexander wasn’t there to help make it work. He was stuck in one of the derelict and now ransacked pirate ships, doing his best to keep them and the robots on track, which wasn’t easy. The programming Lucas and he threw together to allow the robots to act as tugs wasn’t the greatest. It had slowly gotten better as he adjusted it on the fly and the robots learned but that took time.

They had plenty of time to learn though. It was still another twelve hours until he arrived at the space station. Of course, that was just the end of the easy part of this trip. He suspected it would take an additional few hours to maneuver the ships to dock them properly.

With the station only having one set of docking clamps, the other two ships needed to be secured via airlocks to Eden’s Fury. And he had to do it in such a way as to not block the firing line of the frigate.

With plenty of time and nothing to do, he had done the math, and both ships should fit.

Hours later, Alexander stood on the hull of one of the ships. The station and Fury were growing larger in his vision, meaning they were only a few minutes out. The tugs were already slowing their approach, not that they had been moving all that fast to begin with.

By the time they stopped relative to the station, he felt like he could jump across the intervening space with ease. Obviously, he didn’t do that, that sounded like a good way to miss the landing and float off into space or to get pulled down by the planet’s gravity. Seeing if his body was capable of surviving orbital reentry was not on his bucket list.

He tapped on the tablet and watched as the three tugs from the other ship moved to the ship he was standing on. Since they were in a bit of a rush, there hadn’t been time to program the tugs to do a maneuver such as this. That meant Alexander had to manually guide them in. Something, he wasn't even sure he could do. Nobody else would be able to perform the maneuver though since the ship had no internal power and there was not even emergency power to run the external cameras. That meant he had spent the entire trip attached to the hull outside the ship. It felt more like riding a wild animal than it did towing a spaceship. The experience was… different.

Alexander used the tablet interface to guide the robots into place. Their magnetic grapplers latched onto the ship’s hull. Once he figured he had them spread out properly, he tested out the maneuvering.

The ship wobbled and he had to adjust some settings to compensate. Once he had the ship’s motion smoothed out, he started moving closer to the frigate.

Feeling like he was falling toward the planet was something he wasn’t sure he would ever get used to. It just felt wrong. Alexander pushed that feeling to the back of his mind as he concentrated on his approach. He was moving much slower than was necessary, but he couldn’t afford to damage the airlock on either ship. If he did, he would have to weld the ship to the Fury to keep it from drifting off.

It took hours of concentration, but he finally felt the airlock locking clamps engage. The ship was rotated slightly more than he wanted it to be but it would have to do. He detached the drones and sent them to the other gunship.

They repeated the process on their own, their self-learning taking up the slack now that they had done it once. He moved to the rear of the ship he was standing on and winced internally as the engine cone was torn in half by the other ship. He was planning on replacing them anyway but he had hoped to get away without causing any additional damage.

In a much shorter time than it took him, the second ship was locked to the Fury.

He crossed back into the ship and avoided the mess and floating debris that the pirates had left after ransacking the vessel. They had deliberately damaged every single system aboard the ship, including the reactor casing. If the hull wasn’t still mostly intact, he would have fed it to the smelter. But he didn’t have time to design a ship from scratch and it would still take less time to repair this ship than build a new one.

Alexander entered the Fury’s airlock and once clear, made his way across the ship to the airlock for the hangar to the station. It was a real roundabout way to get there, but the station was never designed to park ships for an extended period. Eventually, multiple airlocks would need to be added to the exterior of the structure. He was already printing out more docking arms and temporary airlock mounts that would at least let him dock multiple ships to the station, even if the extra mounts didn’t lead anywhere.

“Any issues with the cargo?” Alexander asked as he stepped aboard the shuttle.

Branston stepped out of the cockpit after the atmosphere normalized. “Not that I could tell. The engineers packed everything up and it was waiting for me as you said. What’s in them by the way?”

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“Components to replace the Fury’s main autocannon with a laser.”

The pilot whistled in approval. “I never served aboard any of the STO’s newer ships. So I never got to see any of their fancy laser weaponry in action.”

“Not much to see. The beams are invisible to all but sensors,” Alexander stated as he went to each crate and examined the contents.

He watched as the man rolled his eyes. “I know that. I’m referring to the damage they inflict.”

“Let’s hope this laser doesn’t disappoint. Mind helping me get it moved onto the Fury?”

Branston nodded and helped float the crates over to the frigate and secure them to the deck. He could have used the robots, but they were busy dismantling the main cannon.

One bonus of removing one of the cannons is that the ammo canister would be able to be reused on the other main cannon. It had to be cut away, and the locking portion that prevented it from being swapped out removed, but the bots could handle that.

While they were working, Alexander moved the power systems into place. He had prepared for both possibilities but he really hoped he didn’t have to shunt energy directly from the reactor. He would find out soon enough as that’s what he was up here to test.

He could have done all this testing on the ground, minus the main power tap, but he decided to change up his plans after having to come up here anyway.

If he was going to be in space, it made more sense to test in place, instead of test and implement. With two visits by pirates in as many days, there was no telling when more would appear. He could have designed a railgun to replace the autocannon, but his ground-based ones weren’t exactly designed to be mounted to a ship. It would have taken just as much research and time to design and modify his existing railguns to work with the Fury as it did to create the laser.

Neither system was ideal. The railgun would have required complex mechanicals for autoloading, which would have necessitated maintenance and ammo storage. The rails were also subject to deterioration with each use. If he had a crew and the ship was in perfect working order, he might have been fine with that, but he couldn’t afford to dedicate his time or the construction robots' time to constantly swapping out damaged rails. With the laser, cooling, and power consumption were the main issues. The power issue was already resolved and the cooling was handled by a heat pump. There would be some maintenance concerns with the rotation assembly, but probably not many since it used the same design his robots had been relying on for months now.

The room was silent as he worked but he could feel the thumps as the bots cut away the turret behind him. Eventually, the work light he had brought along was washed out by the harsh white glare of plasma cutters.

Alexander ignored the distraction as he configured the supercapacitors along the entire interior wall of the turret room. Before he finished, the entire weapon assembly and ammo canister were pulled from the ship.

He paused in his work and retrieved the rest of the crates, opening them so the robots could extract the components for the laser.

The bots scanned the parts before one scurried off to print a plate to seal the hole. The laser didn’t look like much. The majority of the weapon was housed in a sealed cylinder that poked down into the room where the ammo canister had been. The final part that rotated looked like a large, yet stubby hobby telescope. Most of that was the optical sensor and aiming system, both of which operated on his home-made computer chips. The rest of it was cooling.

Now that he had his new generation of printers, the chips he was capable of producing were in the low one-hundred-nanometer range. It didn’t hold a candle to the current tech, but his homemade chips were now more than capable of handling complex tasks like target acquisition, and tracking.

The part of the weapon where the beam exited would normally be considered a secondary mirror on a telescope, but in this case, it was the laser. And everything around it was auxiliary systems and cooling.

Soon a new armored plate arrived to patch the hole and the robots quickly welded it in place and welded the laser’s mounting platform to it.

It was janky as hell, but it should work. When he had more time, he would redo it properly.

Alexander worked through the night to get the laser operational when he heard his radio buzz. That was a good sign, it meant the welds were holding air.

“Alex, we have another contact in the system. It seems our STO spy ship is back,” Lucas stated.

Just what they needed right now, the STO poking around. “Keep an eye on them.”

It wasn’t more than four hours later that he got another much more panicked radio call from Lucas. “Alex! We have big trouble. Twenty-two ships just jumped into the system. And they are all running without transponders. Some are already moving toward Captain Na. I alerted Destiny, but Na said he was aware and they were moving to a jump point.”

“How long until the pirates arrive? Doesn’t he have time to make it to the planet?” Alexander asked as he never stopped working.

“Roughly a day. They entered the system going full burn. Captain Na says he could make it but it would be too close and there wouldn’t be time to disembark before the pirates arrived.”

“Alright, tell him to do what he feels is best to keep his people safe.”

“I’ll relay that to him. Are you planning to head down right away?”

“I’m going to finish this laser and fly down with Branston,” he stated far more calmly than he felt. This was it, what they had been dreading this entire time.

“…” There was silence for a moment before Lucas responded. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? There’s no way one laser is going to do anything against that many ships.” He could hear the concern in the man’s voice but he needed to see this through. There was no way the six railguns would be able to deal with the pirates if they were smarter than the previous ones and didn’t enter orbit. That left the laser as the only long-range deterrent.

“It’s our best bet. You and Damien make sure everything is ready on the ground.”

“…We’ll be ready down here, Alex… good luck.”

With that, the radio went silent and Alexander continued his work. He would like to say he found a bit of extra speed, but he was already working as fast as he safely could. Any faster and he ran the chance of screwing something up. With the amount of energy he was working with, making a mistake would be disastrous.

And now they couldn’t even run the weapon test without alerting the pirates. The only testing he had done was with the aiming system, so at least he knew that worked. Without being able to test fire the weapon, he needed to manually double-check each system and hope the weapon worked as designed.

It took Alexander six hours to finish his work. He could have been done in three, but he decided to run the power cable from the reactor to the capacitors and hope for the best. Running the power directly would likely overload the laser when it was engaged, but it was better than sitting and waiting for the capacitors to recharge from the ship's power converter if they needed to fire a second time in quick succession.

He made his way to the shuttle, where a panicked Branston had been radioing him every hour for an update. Making the former pirate slave wait on him while pirates flooded toward Eden’s End was cruel on his part and Alexander knew that. He would need to make it up to the man as soon as possible.

Getting the confirmation of his boarding, Branston wasted no time as he backed them out of the hangar and made his way quickly to the surface.

All of the facility defenses were online, the three guns previously destroyed by the pirates having been repaired in the last few months. All of Alexander’s improvements had been added to them as well as the existing guns. It didn’t make them shoot any harder or farther, but it made them easier to fix and harder to take offline.

It would take a direct hit from another missile to do that now, and with the secondary railguns scanning the skies, they would have to oversaturate their defenses before any missiles could get through.

Now all he could do is wait and see what the pirates would do.