“What do you mean there’s nothing?” Benning demanded.
The agent looked uncomfortable but responded anyway. “All of the research was cleared out before we arrived, sir.”
“What about the engineers and scientists involved in the projects?” Benning asked in annoyance, already suspecting the answer.
“Vanished without a trace,” the agent confirmed.
That bastard Fletcher must have known something was up and alerted the research outpost to dismantle their research ahead of time. Perhaps if he had gotten the location of the secret STO research station sooner they might have been able to recover something.
“What of the alien ship?” Certainly, something so large couldn’t simply vanish.
“We have a docking log for a Goliath class transport, but the transponder number has been wiped from the buffer. I’ve obtained the log and sent it to the forensics team to see what they can recover, but it was from three months ago, sir.”
Three months? That was shortly after his agent arrived at Varlen. If Fletcher had gone to this length to keep the alien ship and research from him, there was no chance he would have missed this log entry, which meant Fletcher left that log on purpose. The former Vice Admiral must have known this entire time and wanted whoever was after him, and the alien tech, to know he knew.
Well played, Benning thought. He could admire an opponent as crafty as Fletcher, even though the man’s actions hurt him, he was still out of the picture.
Benning pondered his options. There was still one avenue left to pursue.
“Has the new Vice Admiral been able to contact any of the Erebus or Nyx class ships to bring them in?”
“No, sir. They were all ordered on year-long no-contact missions before Fletcher’s untimely passing.”
“Of course they were,” Benning muttered quietly. Even an Admiral couldn’t send ships on indefinite missions. That was an annoying development, but it would only delay his acquisition of the technology. “So be it. Pack up everything you find, I don’t care how insignificant you think it might be. We will study everything until the stealth ships finally resurface.”
The man nodded in confirmation and the secure Qcomm line cut out.
Benning sat there in silence for a bit, lightly tapping his fingers on the top of his desk. He would likely be able to recover some data from the facility no matter how well Fletcher and his people cleaned up before they left, but it probably wouldn’t be anything of significance. The members of the assembly wouldn’t be willing to wait a year to see any promised gains from the technology though. Benning would have to give them something to hold off the people who wanted Omni to fail.
Benning refused to let that happen, at least in his lifetime, which kept getting longer with every medical advancement Omni acquired. He would throw all that medical mumbo jumbo aside for pure technology, but even with his AIs, he had yet to figure out how to transfer a person’s consciousness into a machine to reach true immortality.
He had time though.
As for the issue with the assembly, he wasn’t about to give up after a few minor setbacks. It was time for plan C.
“AI,” he spoke into the room.
“How may I assist you, Chief Benning?”
“What tertiary development packages do we have available?”
“We have three technological breakthrough packages that meet those requirements, would you like me to go over the specific technologies included in them?”
“No. Do any of them contain weapons or ship improvements?”
“Tertiary package two contains an unreleased Omni thruster design deemed to have too much of an improvement for the current market. None of the packages have weapons designs or specifications that are not already publicly available.”
“Release package two to the members of the assembly with Omni’s apologies for the loss of future revenue. Let them know that plans will be back on track within two years.”
“Package and message sent,” the AI confirmed.
“AI, start converting our production over to those unreleased designs and prepare a news release to occur in six months.”
“Production updated and news release scheduled.”
“That will be all,” Benning stated.
The assembly would be mollified for a time after they received their free upgrades, and Omni would be forced to release the design to the public sooner than he would have liked, but that was the price of failure.
Speaking of releases, Benning checked in on Blue Star Enterprises. He could have had the AI do it, but he liked to do things himself sometimes. The data that came up was still rather sparse, but it did show a few changes. The company was located in a system called Unokane, it listed its status as a member of an independent nation, and now the page showed a list of military accomplishments. Those accomplishments were directly accredited to their new Admiral Krieger.
Among those accomplishments was an extensive list of pirate bounties claimed by the company. He spotted the names of Harlow Anazi, and his brother Arkonis, however, he had to actually look for them. They were listed in random spots, almost as a snub to the pirate's notoriety. It seemed that BSE had been busy purging the galaxy. A noble yet shortsighted goal. The pirates would return in a decade. At least they made effective scapegoats.
For a moment, Benning pondered going after Krieger. He was certain the man had some information on the stealth ships and how they were designed, but he decided against it. The cost would likely outweigh any benefit. A lowly captain would have little understanding of the engineering behind such stealth systems.
Going after Kane was still an unknown. That’s why he had directed Harlow at the man. Despite his advantages, Harlow had still failed, meaning Kane had resources that couldn’t be accounted for.
Benning didn’t like unknowns.
One of those unknown resources was the shadowy ally that had helped Blue Star Enterprises and Kane survive Harlow’s assault. Considering the system’s location, Benning had a good idea of who that ally might be, but it made no sense. The Asgardians hated outsiders, they hated STO corporations even more. He couldn’t picture them allying themselves with one.
A sudden thought struck him. What if they weren’t outsiders?
BSE and Kane could be some offshoots from the Asgardians. It made the man’s fake backstory make a lot more sense. If he was correct, that meant the Asgardians were gaining power. He would need to do something about that if true. “AI. Do we have any agents on-” he paused to look up the planet’s name, “-Eden’s End?”
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“Eight agents made landfall and checked in.”
“Checked in? No updates?”
“No updates from the assigned agents. There was one recent update from an unassigned agent.”
“Who?”
“Theodore Pembrooke, agent class three.”
Pembrooke! Benning usually didn’t bother remembering the names of low-level employees, but Pembrooke’s situation had been so humorous that the name stuck in his mind. “AI. Calculate the chances that Pembrooke was turned.” Benning had a pretty good idea of what the AI would say, but he wanted confirmation.
“Calculation complete. There is a ninety-eight percent probability, plus or minus two percent, that he has turned his back on Omni.”
“When was Pembrooke last on corporate grounds?”
“Nine months and three days ago.”
The timelines didn’t match up so that probably meant Pembrooke wasn’t responsible for Kane figuring out the secret to pulsed fusion. Somehow Kane had swayed the man over to BSE after that point.
If Kane had independently figured out the same model that Lund had or something close enough to make no difference, he might have to revise the lifecycle of Omni’s models and release new models much faster. It was too early to tell for sure.
He needed to wait and see if Kane released another drive that outcompeted Omni’s in the next year or get an actual agent on the planet, then he would have confirmation. Losing pulsed fusion would be a blow, but Omni had been slowly stepping away from its production of the pulsed fusion drives for some time. Even with their current release schedule, they had about a decade left before the cap was reached on the technology and if Omni had to contend with the upstart BSE, it was likely that the remaining timeline for sprinkling out improvements would come to an end much sooner than anyone realized.
“AI. Estimate a production shift from our pulsed fusion lines to compressed plasma ejection to account for a competing entity with similar pulsed fusion production capabilities as Omni.”
“To make a changeover and beat out a competitor, all of Omni’s production would need to be switched over within three years.”
Benning cursed. Not only had Kane cost them significant profits by eliminating Harlow and ending the war prematurely, but they would also lose out on seven years of additional profits on their most lucrative production line if he was correct.
Omni had compressed plasma ejection thrusters ready to go for all of the classes of thrusters, but it would be much harder to convince people that swapping over was worth it. The requirement for a whole new reactor and fuel delivery system was going to be a sticking point for most because it tripled the cost. He would need to speak to Mrs. Cho Xiyu at Dynamic Energy Systems to ensure she knew their switchover timeline was accelerating.
Something would still have to be done about Alexander Kane and BSE, but he wasn’t sure what. One thing he did know was that he would need to get the man away from his seat of power before any true attempt was made. Maybe it was time to lean on his political connections.
***
Alexander looked around. He could have sworn he heard someone speaking his name. There was nobody in his workshop though so he shrugged and focused back on the small sphere on his bench.
There were hundreds of fiberoptic wires spilling from the item, making it look like the sphere was growing crystalline hair.
Those fiberoptic connections ran to a modified pseudo-computronic cube. There was another device just like it aboard Resolve as it patrolled the path between Varlen and Unokane.
Resolve wasn’t alone, four of the new Stingray gunships escorted the vessel. With the changes in command at Varlen, Alexander told Captain Ramirez not to jump into Varlen with his small fleet.
The captain had gone back to commanding the frigate because his destroyer had been damaged in the fighting and was currently under the knife to be stripped down and rebuilt with all of the BSE and Asgardian-inspired improvements that Alexander could shove into the vessel.
Once Ramirez’s destroyer was back in action, it would finally be time to tear down Vanguard. He would have included Wayward Soul in that list, but the ship was too badly damaged to justify a refit. Once the other two ships were operational, he was retiring Soul to The Maw. The material would be used to build a new ship in the future.
There were initial plans and meetings about designing a cruiser and destroyer from the ground up, but that was a whole lot more involved than a simple gunship. The whole partial integration wouldn’t cut it on ships that large, but that was a problem for later. Right now he was testing his… KaneComm, BSEComm? He didn’t have a name for it yet. Not that it even worked all that well to justify getting a name.
He had managed to quantum entangle multiple sets of particles and even send data from one to the other, but the bandwidth was laughable. Like pre-dialup laughable. Maybe even worse than that.
Right now he was recording the incoming test data from the unit aboard Resolve. It was just junk data, but it gave him a way to estimate transfer speed.
Another issue that he was running into was that his current prototypes could not send and transmit at the same time.
It didn’t take Alexander long to figure out a solution. He needed more entangled pairs to up the bandwidth. He would also need a second set of entangled pairs to handle the other half of either transmitting or receiving. That was if he wanted to go with the same approach Qcomm was using.
Newsflash, he didn’t. The central node network that Qcomm was likely using meant they had a single point of failure. Alexander wanted to eliminate that security issue by making a mesh/distributed network, where every comm array was a node. It would allow them to cut a node from the network without issue.
That did mean adding more complexity to his nodes though. He would need to add multiple linked pairs to each, allowing them to daisy chain across the network until the messages reached their destination.
Doing things that way did slow the transmission slightly, but you were talking picoseconds for each array handoff. Considering the signal could be crossing lightyears of space, even a few seconds of latency would be fine with him.
Alexander just needed to figure out how many entangled pairs he needed to ensure holo-video transmissions and then he could start to figure out how big the next prototype would need to be to fit it all in.
After he did the math, the answer turned out to be a lot. Somewhere in the order of ten trillion entangled pairs to ensure clear video and audio across the connection. So twenty trillion to make it a two-way communication. Sure that was a whole bunch of entangled particles, but it wasn’t really that hard to make them once you had the process down. Alexander's prototype was using over a thousand. He could have waited a day and had a hundred thousand ready to go, but he didn’t like waiting.
The growth was exponential after the first set was created. A new batch would be needed for each entangled pair node to ensure the paired nodes weren’t mixed up but that wouldn’t take long to setup.
After he did the math, he realized the containment spheres would need to be about the size of a bowling ball to contain the particles and the sensors that allowed the data to be converted from particle movement and back again, but that was easy as well. Turns out that using a static field generator inside the sphere gave fast and accurate readings.
Alexander didn’t see anything like that on the Qcomm so he wondered what they used for the data transference.
It took another week to set the nodes up, but Alexander now stared at five identical orbs.
Each orb contained one hundred trillion entangled particles and was linked to each of the other orbs.
There was a mess of wires that ran out of each that was designed to interface with a standard communication array. He placed each in a container and locked them so only he could open the crates.
The devices would go to Admiral Krieger, Captain Ramirez, Farthing, and Bloomright. The last would be placed inside the Qcomm chamber on Eden’s End.
Alexander had already tested the devices by placing them around the facility. They seemed to work fine. It might not be the most in-depth testing he had ever done, but if they worked, they worked. It didn’t matter how far away you got, that wouldn’t change.
He also realized that this innovation changed everything. The major issue with interstellar distances was communications, which had been reserved for planets only—at least what was publicly available. He suspected some of the STO corporations had access to shipboard FTL communications, and now he did as well.
Alexander wished he had this a few weeks ago when he sent two dozen Stingray gunships to the border to help firm up the defenses against Xin. He had coded a rudimentary program into the automated ships to respond to commands from whoever was in charge while they were out there as if they were real people.
It was audio only, but he hoped nobody looked too closely considering the vessels were there to assist with the war efforts.
He had also included two fishbone ships with docking collars for four vessels at a time that would allow the stingrays to quickly rearm and reenter the battle. There were enough missiles and railgun rounds aboard those two support ships to rearm each ship over forty times.
They were lacking the smart missiles though. Processor production was still a bottleneck there, and until Alexander rearmed his capital ships and planetary defenses with the weapons, he wasn’t going to waste them on gunships.
Speaking of Asgardians, Katalynn should be arriving at Asgard any day now. He really hoped she was able to defeat Isbjorn.