After leaving his meeting with Krieger, he had a delightful dinner with Yulia. He stuck around to help her with her schoolwork – Nancy had agreed to start her on more advanced lessons – and once that was complete he tucked her into bed, and set Dog on guard mode.
Once he was certain the girl was fast asleep, he slipped out of their unit and headed outside. He would have relaxed his security measures around her, but there were quite a few families that were upset that their loved ones were being forced to do hard labor.
Alexander had ignored their pleas for additional lenience. Those people knew full well what they were doing and now they were paying the price. They should be happy he didn’t give them the same sentence that he had given Sorin and the Guard who attacked him.
Both of those men had families as well. The two men’s wives had screamed at him on more than one occasion. The guard’s wife had even thrown a tomato at him. Alexander caught the tomato and told the woman if she did it again, she would be sitting in lockup, which would be unfortunate since the children would be without a parent if that happened. The woman who threw the tomato had a young daughter who was only three, while Sorin had a son a little older than Yulia.
If he wasn’t mistaken, the boy’s name was Charlie and he had attended her birthday party. It didn’t seem like Yulia and the boy were close, but he still felt bad for the kid. While the little girl was likely too young to remember what happened, the boy wasn’t.
To assuage a bit of his guilt over taking away the boy’s father, Alexander asked a few people to keep an eye on him. He wanted to help encourage the boy along a different path than the one his father, and Sorin’s grandfather had tread.
Learning that bit of history had been eye-opening.
Before the trial, Alexander had used Sorin’s DNA profile to dig into the man’s past. Sorin was a black hole, having lived his entire life as a drifter, but his grandfather was a different story.
During the Coalition war, Sorin’s grandfather had sold intel to the Coalition that ended up getting thousands of STO Navy personnel killed and almost shifted the entire balance of the war. The man did this all because he wanted to be the planetary governor where he resided when the fighting was over. At the time Sorin’s grandfather had been only a low-level advisor for the then-current governor.
The man’s actions were quickly discovered after the attack, but not before he fled with his entire family. It seemed he instilled those same ideals to his children and grandchildren.
That information was not the deciding factor to give Sorin the harshest sentence, but it certainly didn’t help him any. Giving Sorin any other sentence would have meant the man could have gone on to do this somewhere else, and that was unacceptable in his eyes.
Alexander shook those thoughts away as he reached the exit. Two of the Hawks were on duty that night. They greeted him and opened the door.
When he stepped outside, he was surprised to see one of the very rare rainstorms that moved across the planet. The weather didn’t impede him as he made his way to the Blue Bell. Even with his enhanced vision, he had a hard time seeing the ship’s full outline on the overcast night.
Finding the manual release lever for the ramp took time, but he eventually located it. The seals hissed as they blew out pressurized air from inside the ship until the interior matched the planet’s surface.
Alexander stepped aboard the vessel but was almost immediately stopped. “What the hell!”
The small cargo area was filled nearly floor to ceiling with boxes and random items. There wasn’t even enough room for Alexander to move into the ship without pushing over the stacks.
With an annoyed huff, he opened up the first box and looked inside. They were parts for something, but he couldn’t say for sure what they went to.
Not wanting to leave the items sitting out in the rain, he called up one of his automated carts. He had about a dozen of the things around the facility, and some had been retrofitted to work outside, meaning their little cargo beds were covered.
The cart rolled up under the ship a few minutes later along with two of the spider bots as he had heard some people calling them, which wasn’t accurate at all because his bots only had six legs. “Load these on the cart and stay behind to help.”
The bots beeped in acceptance and started piling the boxes Alexander had already gone through onto the cart. Before they were done filling the first, the second cart rolled up.
Alexander realized if he was going to finish sorting through all this stuff before morning, he was going to need more helpers. He called up two more carts and four more bots.
So far all of the items Alexander had looked at were parts and components. They weren’t haphazardly packed into the boxes though, whoever had put them in there had wanted them to remain safe and secure. It took looking through over a hundred boxes before Alexander started to get an idea of what all the parts were for.
He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but if it was what he suspected it to be, he severely underpaid Krieger.
It wasn’t until half the cargo hold was emptied that Alexander finally came across the first of the processors that Krieger had mentioned.
It was certainly an odd design, however, it looked more like the processors he was used to seeing than the computronics that existed now. The processor had a manufacturing logo in microprint on the outside that read ‘BlueBell Logic Systems’
That wasn’t a name he recognized, the computronics he was forced to purchase at the moment all came with the same company logo, QuantumLogic. As far as Alexander knew, there were no other chip manufacturers out there. Much like Omni, it seemed like QuantumLogic had pushed out any possible competition. Alexander had seen other companies selling QuantumLogic computronics though.
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If he had to guess, QuantumLogic controlled some part of the production. This would ensure other people could produce the computronics modules, but they would always be built with QuantumLogic chips, no matter who manufactured them. Sort of like how graphics card retailers did it back in his day.
If that was true, and what he was seeing inside this ship was also true, had the previous owner run into an issue with QuantumLogic that forced him out of the market?
He could almost picture the course of events. The person spent their life coming up with a competitive product and just when they were ready to release it to the public, the corporation started threatening them. If Alexander had been in the same situation, he would have disassembled everything and gone somewhere else to set up shop. Hell, he had done exactly that.
Unlike Alexander, it seemed that this person never found that safe harbor to start over. Either that or fear had kept them from even attempting it.
If he was right, the similarities made Alexander angry. He knew the corporate autocracy was bad within the STO, but every time he encountered something new with one of these large corporations, he was reminded that they were worse than he realized.
He spent the next four hours cataloging and moving the rest of the contents within the ship. At least the stuff that was in the boxes. At some point, the owner of this ship had turned into a hermit and hoarder, and the items they kept were nothing but broken parts and actual garbage.
The garbage got sent to the incinerator and the broken parts got recycled. It remained to be seen if any of the other items were useful, but he had high hopes considering the care that went into storing them away.
Once the ship was emptied out, Alexander was able to get a good look at the inside. The ship was nothing special and most of the systems had been neglected. It wasn’t quite as bad as what he saw on the pirate shuttles, but it wasn’t good.
He called up Branston.
“Sorry to wake you up so early. Could you meet me at the station with the shuttle?”
The man let out a long yawn before responding. “Yeah, sure. I can be off the ground in thirty, is that ok?”
“That’ll be fine, thank you Branston.”
Alexander sent the bots back to their assigned areas and dismissed the carts as he walked to the bridge to prep the ship for takeoff.
He wasn’t going to keep the ship, it simply wasn’t worth repairing. He was however going to have his bots remove anything useful before smelting the rest of the material. It would give him another supply of gravity plates, a fusion reactor, and an FTL drive. He wasn’t sure the reactor would see any use, but he would still hold onto it for now. The other components would go into one of the fishbone ships, allowing him to finally have a dedicated transport vessel that could fly between systems as well as have gravity.
The lack of gravity aboard her ship was the main complaint by Captain Farthing.
Dropping off the ship and getting picked up took a little over an hour. By the time they landed, Alexander had just enough time to hurry home and get Yulia’s breakfast made.
He walked her to class before heading off to start the final briefing.
The room was packed with his three crews, the Talon’s command, Archie, and the mercenaries who had been trained to operate Eden’s Might. He could see the people were introducing themselves to Krieger and his crew when he arrived.
“I’m sorry for being late. Everyone please take a seat, we have a lot to go over and a few major changes.”
It didn’t take long for the room to settle.
“First off, I’ll be changing the commander for this mission from Captain Bloomright to Captain Krieger. I have full faith in your abilities, Captain Bloomright, I just want to ensure we have the most seasoned captain possible in command, and that happens to be Captain Krieger. Krieger, please stand and tell the room why I chose you.”
The man stood, somehow looking sharp despite the fact he was wearing loose clothing. Alexander made a mental note to print the BSE uniforms before everyone headed out in a few hours. He had more than enough printer capacity to get it done.
“As you may have guessed, my name is Captain Krieger or just Vitor while I’m dirtside. I worked in military special operations for a decade before joining the STO’s Black Ops program as a Captain of an experimental ship.” That got some mutters of approval from the crowd as Krieger continued. “More recently, I was involved in the defense of Eden’s End. That is how I met Mr. Kane.”
Alexander breathed an internal sigh of relief. Krieger had sounded a bit bitter with that last sentence, and he thought the man might go into way more details than needed to be shared at this time. Thankfully, Krieger stopped himself.
“As you can see, Krieger has plenty of experience dealing with pirates and leading. As for the next change. Before I simply wished to have the pirate station destroyed if it couldn’t be taken. I’ve changed my mind, and here’s why,” he gestured for Branston to step forward. The man wouldn’t be going on this mission but he was here to prove a point. “Branston here was a slave aboard Arkonis Anazi’s ship along with others. If that holds true for this pirate station, which I believe it will, we can’t simply destroy it. We need to save those people. I know this will make things much harder, but I have faith that the Hawks are up to the challenge. To make sure they are, I will be providing additional equipment.” Alexander turned on the holo and an augment suit rotated in the display. “Meet the first generation of BSE’s new augment gear division. The holo is interactive, so please step up and take a look.”
Five more holograms popped up around the room, giving people time to step into the suits and sort of wear them.
“I won’t say no to new gear, Mr. Kane,” Captain Bloomright spoke over the noise. “But I don’t think even you have time to produce enough gear to outfit my people before we leave.”
“Normally, you would be right, except I had these completed weeks ago. I wasn’t planning on issuing them for this mission because they were mostly untested, but I don’t want to leave any possible advantage sitting around. I will be including the design specs, so your engineers can fix any issues they encounter as your people get used to the armor. He turned to face Krieger’s lone Marine. “I didn’t forget you either. Your suit should finish printing shortly.”
He saw the Marine grin from ear to ear at this statement.
“You will also be issued the flechette minigun that Damien’s people designed. I didn’t have any time to design anything else, and the weapon is more than enough to deal with most problems you might encounter on a station. If you run into a similarly armored pirate during your boarding action, the suits are networked, allowing them to produce a much stronger electronic countermeasure program than would otherwise be possible.” Alexander would have loved to stuff the suits with an advanced computronic module but that wasn’t really feasible.
He would need to rely on his homegrown twentieth-century chips to bridge the gap while in the networking configuration. The wireless connection could be disrupted, but he was hoping the pirates would be too busy dealing with the gunfire from the people wearing the suits to think of that.
The meeting soon concluded and people hurried to their shuttles to catch a ride to orbit. Alexander pulled his people off to the side and led them to his workshop where he handed them each three sets of newly printed uniforms. They were dark blue with white trim to match the ships. “If we’re going to show the universe we’re a force to be reckoned with, I figure we might as well look the part. Galloway, your augment suit is coming off the printer over there in three minutes.”
The Marine rubbed his hands together in glee as he headed over to the printer to wait.
Alexander just shook his head and walked over to Krieger. He lowered his voice so only the Captain could hear. “What do you think the odds are of a successful mission?”
The man didn’t respond right away as he thought over the question. “Until we get eyes on the station, fifty-fifty. That’s the best estimate I can give you.”
Alexander nodded. “Let’s hope that luck swings our way.”