Chapter 2-2

Alexander exited the facility and headed toward one of the shuttles. All of the intact ones had been moved to one landing pad, the closest one to his workshop. As he walked across the pad, he could hear the sounds of work going on in the distance. A large crew of workers were cutting up the scrap from the nearby damaged railgun.He could see they hadn't even finished cleaning up the surface yet. It would be three or four more weeks of work before all of the scrap was removed. Then the engineers, that Alexander and the Hawks had trained, would need to inspect the pit for damage before any new construction could begin.

There was likely to be quite a bit of damage, the missiles the pirates used were powerful enough to damage everything around the pit as well as the guns themselves. So he had little hope that the pits were in pristine condition.

It was too bad he didn't have any schematics for missiles. Despite that issue, he had it on his list to check the other missile crash sites to see what could be recovered. The railguns probably hadn't left much behind, but there might be something he could use to help him design his own at some point. seaʀᴄh thё NôvelFire(.)net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

That was a later project though. Today he focused on the shuttles in front of him. He wanted to know which one was in the best condition so he could focus his efforts there.

As he stepped aboard the first ship, he was instantly glad he didn't have a sense of smell. The walls were coated in dirt and grease. He was also pretty sure some of the black spots were mold. He typed out some commands on his tablet and sent a list of cleaning supplies that he needed. Those supplies were mostly for him at the moment, he didn't want whatever was inside this ship to follow him back into the facility so he was giving himself a thorough scrub-down after he was done.

Alexander ignored the filth and got to work pulling off service panels and inspecting the components behind them. He could only give them a visual inspection, but what he found wasn't very inspiring. He found microcracks, hoses fixed with cloth, and some unknown sealant, as well as other issues. And that was only the surface items.

As he entered the cockpit, he found the place littered with garbage and dried blood. The chairs were worn out and had been taped and patched what looked like a dozen times. He would have likely replaced them anyway, just to remove the smell he assumed they emanated but it was still annoying to see the disrepair.

The window was the biggest issue. Multiple small holes peppered the material from the short but intense firefight that must have occurred between the surviving pirates and the Hawks. Replacing the heavily reinforced window was going to be a nightmare. That probably meant this shuttle wasn't going to be the one he repaired unless the others were much worse.

His last stop was the reactor. He had to access that from outside the shuttle. It took time to remove the panels keeping the engines and powerplant safe from reentry. He could have just ripped them off, it would have been faster. But he couldn't afford to damage anything since he didn't have design specifications for the shuttles. Everything he needed to fix or replace, he would have to reverse engineer from scratch.

With the covers removed, he got a good look at the hidden engine components as well. The engine looked corroded as hell. He could see the pirates had replaced a few components because their corrosion wasn't nearly as bad as everything else, but the overall shape of the engine left a lot to be desired.

As for the power plant, he quickly pulled the emergency shutdown when he saw it. The casing was cracked in several spots. And not microcracks, but cracks you could see with the naked eye. He was surprised that the containment field hadn't ruptured yet.

Fusion power plants didn't explode, but they contained a lot of heat and energy. All of that was contained by an electromagnetic field. The fusion reactor inside this shuttle was about the size of a sedan. If that field failed, all of that heat and energy would be dumped into the material of the reactor casing, immediately vaporizing the interior lining of the chamber and heating the material around it enough to deform or even completely melt some of the metal. And that was while it was on standby.

If the shuttle had been powered up to full operational output and the containment field had then let go, it would likely have been enough energy to reduce the entire shuttle to a puddle of molten material.

After learning of the issue with this shuttle, Alexander quickly went to the other shuttles and shut down their reactors as well. It would take time for their power plants to expend the heat and power still in the fusion chamber, but he wasn't going to stick around and wait for that.

While his body seemed sturdy, something told him, he would not survive an uncontained fusion reaction.

After cleaning himself off, Alexander returned to his workshop. He wasn't sure how long it would take for the reactors to grow cold, but he had other things to do in the meantime.

He moved over to the mass spectrometer he had printed out. On the scanner bed were three tiny black flakes of material. Inside his mind space, he glanced at the three tiny dead spots in his vision. They were the result of damage taken in his fight with Arkonis, the pirate prince who threatened Yulia. Over the last few weeks, he did notice those dead spots were shrinking slightly. Measurements also confirmed that the damage was repairing itself, albeit slowly. He had swabbed and tested the area with anything he could think of, but the tests were inconclusive.

He wasn't sure what to make of that. He thought maybe it was nanites repairing the damage, at least that's what his memories of sci-fi back in his day always claimed as the miracle catchall. But nanites should have shown up on the swab tests. It was a mystery he would need to keep working away at.

In the meantime, it was good to know he was mostly bulletproof, even without that weird static field that popped up during the fight and had since deactivated. Alexander had tried multiple times since then to try and get the field to activate manually, but he either couldn't or simply didn't have the required knowledge to do so. He could only figure the knowledge belonged to one of his lost memories.

As long as it still worked when he needed it most, he could live with that. It did beg the question, why did he have something like that built-in? The obvious answer was that he was a military robot. But he didn't have any inbuilt weapons. Alexander would have noticed that by now since he had experimented with his hands and arms more than any other part of his body. They were built for fine, dextrous work, not for holding a weapon.

Then again, that didn't stop him from carrying around and using that massive grenade launcher. So maybe whoever built him figured he could multitask?

He looked at the flakes on the scanner again, then rubbed the tiny indents on his body. Whatever had fixed him up so rapidly back on Petrov station didn't seem all that inclined to do it again with these small spots. That was annoying. But it did give him his first opportunity to figure out what he was made out of so he couldn't complain too much.

The scanner finally beeped, letting him know it was done. He was a bit surprised by the results. The tiny flakes were composed of pure carbon and that was it. Normally you would get tiny amounts of trace materials in the sample. But the report showed nothing but carbon.

How was that even possible?

Even the smelter wasn't able to separate every atom perfectly. However, it was so close as to not matter. But these little flakes were 100% molecularly pure carbon according to the instrument.

That didn't explain why he was so durable though. Carbon was durable in certain lattice configurations, even diamond wasn't the most robust material out there. It was tough, sure, but it was extremely brittle. There had to be some weirdness going on at the molecular level to make his body so strong. Unfortunately, all he could do at the moment was guess since he wasn't aware of any structure in carbon that could provide this type of strength without being super brittle. Alexander didn't have a microscope powerful enough to see individual atoms. He would need to build an electron microscope for that, and he simply didn't have the manufacturing capability to build something that specialized. Not yet anyway.

Alexander set the three small flakes into a container, sealed it, and stored it in his warehouse for future study. Then he went back to the workshop and began building the shuttle from memory inside his engineering program.

This would only be a rough layout meant to assist him when he needed to make replacement parts. He was certain adjustments would have to be made but it was a good place to start and kept him busy while he waited for the shuttles to discharge their reactors.

He even modeled replacement hoses, components, chairs, and other items. Before he knew it, six hours flew by.

"Alex!" Lucas pulled him from his work. "Sorry for disturbing you, but we got a bit of a problem."

Alexander followed the man to the security room. It was now manned by two people at all times.

"Take a look at these readings."

Alexander looked at the holo display. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible blip on one of the readouts. He hadn't been all that knowledgable on the jump wave scanner, but he knew enough. "Is it a residual wave?" He recalled Jasper telling him that sometimes old jump signatures could bounce around a system for months. Most systems were tuned to discard those low-power gravitational echos.

"That's what I thought at first when one of the techs brought it to my attention. I was bored at the time so I did some calculations to trace it back and see who it came from. I say I did the calculations, but the computer did most of them. The computer triangulates where the echo originated from and rolls back through the orbital mechanics of the system to pinpoint its source. I thought maybe it was an echo of the pirates. But it wasn't."

The man scrolled to another set of readings. "These are from the pirates jumping in, you can see all fifteen blips clearly. We were able to determine they used the large gas giant to mask their initial entry into the system. We need to do something to prevent that from happening again."

"It's on the list," Alexander sighed.

Lucas nodded. "As I was saying, this signature came from a lone ship. And there is no echo. This was the jump signature." The man scrolled again. "This is what a normal jump signature looks like. This one came from the Moonlit Destiny when she jumped in by herself." The man overlayed the two.

The new echo, or he guessed primary jump signature was a tiny fraction of what the Destiny's was. It was so small that it would have been ignored by any newer system as an echo. "Is it from a small ship?"

"I couldn't say, I'm not a sensor expert. I compared it to a normal jump and a jump echo. This is the jump signature of the gunships the Hawks brought along. As you can see, they aren't much weaker than a bigger ship. And this second one is a jump echo from the same ship a few hours later. The strength is about the same as our mystery signal. But if you overlay them, you can see the mystery signal is actually more coherent than the jump echo. I don't know how to explain this."

Alexander sighed. "Shouldn't you have brought this to your brother instead of me?"

"My brother only cares about the things he can have an impact on. A sensor echo that may or may not be a ship hiding in the system is not that."

Alexander wasn't sure he agreed about this not being a sensor echo, but after the attack, he wasn't going to discount the man's concern. They needed someone more knowledgeable about jump mechanics or gravitational sensors to weigh in. "Have the prisoners that the Hawks rescued from the pirate ships recovered yet?"

"As far as I know their injuries were healed. I can't say they've recovered from their ordeal though."

"Fair enough. Could you or Gabriella speak with the survivors, and see if anyone knows anything about jump signatures?"

"You don't want to talk with them yourself?" Lucas asked with surprise.

Alexander gestured to himself.

"…Oh, right. I sometimes forget you can be rather intimidating. I'll see if Gabriella will speak with them. She's better with people than my brother or I."

"Thank you. And let her know I will issue her contribution for doing this."

He sighed internally as Lucas left the room. Alexander didn't need another mystery at the moment, he had enough stuff to deal with. Speaking of problems, he decided that enough time had passed for the shuttles to discharge, so he headed back outside to finish his inspection.