One thing was abundantly clear to Alexander after the last attack, he needed to increase production speed.
While everyone kept telling him that what he was doing was a miracle and it would take normal people years if not more to get to this point, that simply wouldn’t cut it. There were threats out there that would return. He couldn’t imagine the pirates that fled would be happy about their loss. At some point, they would try again and he wanted them to see a veritable fortress and turn around.
Then there was the STO. Who’s to say they wouldn’t attack Eden’s End simply to erase any knowledge of Epsion’s Dawn from leaking out? Considering the shifty practices he was aware of them doing, he wouldn’t put it past them.
Alexander needed a strong enough deterrent to make anyone second guess attacking this system. There were a few issues with what he wanted and what he could accomplish though.
With the smelter being damaged, that was going to slow down production slightly. While he believed he could get it functioning again, it probably wasn’t going to work nearly as well as it had before. Not that it mattered if Captain Na and the Destiny didn’t return soon.
It had been three days since the Destiny had jumped out of the system to escape the pirate fleet. Not that Alexander blamed Na for the choice. He would have done the same thing in his position.
Until Na decided to return or Alexander figured out a way to mine effectively to make up for his absence, his material options were limited. Once he repaired the smelter, he needed to focus on hauling the defunct pirate ships and large debris to the station for recycling. With only five working robots, it was going to be a slow process.
The robots and available materials had always been his main bottlenecks, especially in space. He had three more robots without chips in storage, but he was loath to use the few remaining advanced chips to operate them. Alexander had attempted to link multiple robots to one chip, but it hadn’t worked. Well, it had, but all the robots could only perform the same task at the same time. The advanced chips were powerful, but the self-learning algorithm took up a significant portion of their processing power and without that algorithm, they were dumb.
Alexander did have a few of the super-computer chips that he purchased for the specific use of upgrading the facility systems and operating as the computer core for starships. Would it be worth risking one of those very expensive and irreplaceable chips to operate a bunch of automated construction robots though?
The chips were certainly powerful enough to do the job. One chip could operate an entire starship’s systems. It was too bad none of the surviving ships from Arkonis Anazi utilized them. The gunboats were too small to need that much processing power, and the frigate was too old. Neither utilized the advanced chips either. Their systems were weirdly hardwired into the ship and used antiquated systems that Alexander hadn’t seen before.
He hadn’t had a chance to inspect the derelict pirate ships from this most recent battle, but his hopes weren’t high that they used the newer chips either, except maybe that big ship that got away. The Epsilon’s Dawn, however… had two super-computers inside its hull.
Alexander was staring at them right now. He was also looking at a nuclear bomb that was linked to the two interfaces.
Staring at the weapon while having a polite conversation with Captain Krieger had been a bit awkward, but Alexander couldn’t quite figure out how to broach the topic of the weapon.
Considering what he found on the bridge, the man must have tried setting off the device to scuttle the ship. That obviously hadn’t worked. But it meant either the interface to the device was damaged, or the weapon itself was damaged.
Neither was a good sign. For all he knew, the moment he started mucking about on the ship, the triggering sequence might go off. Even standing here now was a risk he would prefer not to take. He examined his memories for anything related to these weapons. No surprise, he came up blank, other than the fact he knew they were deadly, and that most global powers during his time on Earth used to have stockpiles of them.
If this were any other ship, Alexander would have sent it crashing into the planet just to avoid the hassle. But this ship was a treasure trove of possibilities, even if he couldn’t dissect it. It was also a bargaining chip as well as a means to keep Krieger and his surviving crew in line.
With a sigh, Alexander approached the device and inspected it closely. He didn’t touch it until he was sure there were no pressure triggers or anything like that on its surface. He did find a bio-scanner and he almost chuckled.
Before moving to open the panel on the front, Alexander moved out of the room and into the hall. When he had questioned the traitor, he had sucked out all heat from his extremity. And he already knew he could make his exterior comfortably warm for when he held Yulia. He pushed on that ability until his exterior started to go from black to a dull orange.
A yellow message scrolled through his menu, unreadable as always, but Alexander ignored it and pushed even harder until he started to glow red hot. The color of the distorted messages changed from yellow to orange and he held the temperature there. The direction lines painted on the walls and floor of the ship curled up from the radiant heat transferred through the floor. The lines flaked off the nearby walls in a circle around him.
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When he figured he had burned off any possible biological contaminant that might trigger the sensor on the weapon case, he slowly reduced the temperature of his body until he was matching the ambient temperature of the room with the nuke, which was the same temperature as space, since all of the compartments either had holes in them or were open to others that were.
Once he matched the background temperature, he moved back into the computer room and over to the weapon.
With the same care he used for delicate electronics, Alexander removed the cover and examined the internals of the weapon. He stood there in surprise for a long time until he laughed good and loud. The weapon wasn’t real, although it had been designed to appear real. Its entire interior was empty except for a note written in marker on the inside.
Sorry, we weren’t able to get our hands on an actual nuke before the ship was launched. They are surprisingly hard to come by without arousing suspicion. Hopefully, you will never see this note. If you are seeing this note, it means you attempted to scuttle the ship and realized it wouldn’t work so you came down here to find out why. For that, we are sorry. All we can suggest is that you manually smash as many things as you can, and if your reactor is still working, set it to full output and disable the containment field. Good luck!
-STO BO Engineering Team
He assumed the BO stood for Black Ops. Alexander just shook his head at the absurdity of it all. The STO with all their rules and regulations couldn’t even manage to acquire something as outdated as a nuke, a technology that would ultimately protect their investment. Yet somehow a pirate had gotten their hands on one of the weapons without issue.
He put the panel back in place and continued searching the ship. The empty weapon might have been just a decoy, so he would make sure there wasn’t a single compartment left aboard large enough to house a second or real weapon before he did anything else.
His radio blinked at him on the third day of scouring the ship. He read the message and sighed in relief. Captain Na had finally returned to the system. He typed a response back since he was in a vacuum at the moment, letting Lucas and ground control know to have the man dock at the station.
It would be crowded with five ships, but they would make do.
He was almost done cataloging anything of interest on the Dawn. Honestly, he was a bit let down. Other than the armor and whatever system allowed the ship to mask its jump signature, there wasn’t much that set the ship apart.
Sure it had lasers instead of Gauss cannons, but when Alexander measured the energy output of the weapons, he was surprised to see they weren’t as powerful as the one he built for the Fury. And that was even before he factored in the direct energy shunt from the reactor, which increased the laser’s output significantly.
What he did learn from the weapons, was ways to improve his own. That little nugget of knowledge came from one of the weapons that had been struck by an enemy projectile and torn open.
It wasn’t easy walking along the outer hull of the stealth ship, but the plates that made up the carbon armor didn’t cover the entire exterior of the ship. Each armor plate was contained by a metal frame that was coated in some light-absorbing paint. When he traced the actual damage to the ship, he found most of it came through those butted-together metal seams and not the strange armor. He doubted the Aliens who had come up with the armor would have designed their ship with such a vulnerability. It seemed like this was probably some consolation by the STO or a technological limitation on their part when trying to reproduce the material.
Considering what he saw of the plates themselves, he wondered how strong a ship wrapped entirely in the material would be. While he hadn’t run his sample through the mass spectrometer yet, he was almost certain it would be a match for his body. If it was, that would make the armor extremely strong. He wondered if the alien ship the STO recovered had self-repair like he did. If the aliens could repair their armor as he did back on Petrov station, it put their ships leagues ahead of humanity.
Once he was done on the outer hull, Alexander scavenged a few batteries and super-capacitors from damaged areas where they wouldn’t be missed. Krieger and his crew would likely realize he stole stuff from the ship but they wouldn’t be able to prove it. If they confronted him, he could simply deny the allegations. He somehow suspected they wouldn’t though, at least until a rescue came along to take them back to STO territory.
Unfortunately, Alexander couldn’t figure out how the Dawn’s system worked to mask the gravitational signature of a jump. When he examined the FTL drive, it looked exactly like every other FTL drive he had ever seen, just with slightly newer hardware. That meant there was some software in the design that allowed it to do what it did.
Using a few tricks he picked up during his early repair days, Alexander supplied power to a terminal in the maintenance room for the FTL drive. Then he used the trick he used on the Fury when he unlocked the hidden safe to access the terminal’s core programming. Much like it had with the safe, the programming window popped up inside his mental space. Unlike the safe, this programming was encrypted and also had significant safeguards in place to prevent its theft.
Alexander was so used to watching code that he didn’t understand that he could pinpoint the moment the defensive programs triggered.
The program first tried to send a message to a line Alexander had traced to the computer core. If he had to guess, it was meant to trigger the self-destruct. Even if the bomb was real, the power Alexander was providing the terminal, was only enough for the terminal. It quickly faded away in any exterior connection.
When the program realized it had failed, it tried attacking him directly. Other than a slight tingling sensation coming from his fingers, he didn’t sense anything. He realized the program was using the power in the terminal to try and electrocute him. That was cute.
He would need to warn Lucas about that nasty little bit of code.
The last thing the program attempted to do was to erase itself. It did manage to do that inside the terminal, but not before Alexander had secured a copy of the program inside his mind space. When he got back to the surface, he would transfer it into a chip and let the younger Laront have a field day with it.