Chapter 2-24

Yulia cautiously opened the door to their home and looked around. When she didn't find Alex waiting inside, she breathed a sigh of relief. "Dog, hurry up," she gestured behind her.Dog came limping in on five good legs. The last leg was dragging behind him by the cable to the motor. They had been playing in the park when she thought it would be a good idea to have him climb on the merry-go-round. Then she tried to see how fast she could make it spin with him on it.

They were having a blast, and Dog was happily barking as he held onto one of the metal bars. Unfortunately, his grip wasn't very strong because he didn't have hands.

Before she could stop, Dog lost his grip on the bar and tumbled back. He smacked into the bar behind him hard enough to break the plastic joint on his leg.

She knew Alex could fix it, but she didn't want him to know that she had been so irresponsible with Dog. With him out of the house, she hurried over to the printer Alex gave her for her birthday and swiped through the list of items she could make. While she could make her own, she didn't think she would be able to recreate Dog's leg by herself. It was a good thing Alex had preloaded it with a bunch of prints she could play with any time she wanted. She just hoped parts for Dog were in there as well.

It took time to find the file but she did eventually locate it. She smiled and sent it to the printer and waited. It didn't take long to complete, but she frowned when she looked at it. The new limb didn't have any of the motor components inside. She was going to have to swap them over from the broken limb.

"Come on Dog, I need to get you fixed up." The robot woofed happily and followed her into her room.

***

Alexander was pulled out of his work finishing up the design for the laser pods when an alert went off on his terminal. He walked over to see what it was and chuckled.

"I knew it was only a matter of time until she broke something on Dog. It's good to see she took the initiative to fix the problem herself though. I wonder if she will mention it to me or try to hide it?" Either way, he wouldn't bring it up. She was allowed to have her little secrets if she wanted them, so long as they didn't harm anyone else.

He cleared the alert notification from the print log and went back to his design. It had been a few weeks since his Epsilon's Dawn visit. During that time, Alexander did a thorough breakdown of the components he brought back with him. With that knowledge, he knew he could improve his power storage and distribution systems, as well as the laser that would eventually go into the pods.

He would have done this work much sooner, but he needed to complete the assembly of the two control ships. Without them, his ability to grow their orbital defenses would be severely hampered.

After the first vessel was completed, the second one took hardly any time at all since Alexander had already printed all the major parts for it ahead of time. And the space station had printed the frame.

Now he had twenty mostly autonomous robots to handle construction, repairs, and salvage. That completely removed his bottleneck on manufacturing and back to materials. To try to remedy the material shortfall, he had half the robots collecting the derelict pirate ships that were still floating around in the system. The other half was carving apart the remains of the two gunboats that had been attached to the Fury. After looking at them, he quickly realized those ships were simply too far gone to justify fixing.

The only parts being saved from those vessels were the fusion reactors. One because he had promised it to Markus, and the other so he could study the design to hopefully produce his own. Neither reactor was any good anymore, but he could still pull the activation codes from them and reuse them in a new reactor instead of creating his own activation crystals. Or he could just eschew that practice entirely, but that was probably a bad idea.

It was one of the things he thought the STO got right. The idea was so simple, yet it prevented someone from just breaking into a ship and taking it. When he got around to making his own, he would be improving on that concept though.

Alexander focused back on the task at hand.

With the improvements he picked up from the STO ship, he figured he could push the small laser's output close to half of what the Epsilon's Dawn's weapons were capable of. That wasn't all that powerful, but he was working with limited space.

Alexander planned to offset the issue of weak weapons by building dozens of these inexpensive devices. One shot would be all the weapons would get before having to recharge for a few hours using the solar skin, but if Lucas could get his targeting software to link multiple devices and have them aim at a single point, that would surprise anyone.

Speaking of Lucas, Alexander glanced over at the printer that was pumping out more of the man's cameras. After outfitting the Destiny with weapons, Na had agreed to find suitable asteroids to house the cameras and transceivers for these new spy satellites. He would also be able to place them in the correct orbits throughout the system. That was appreciated since he was the only Captain with a working ship around here who Alexander trusted.

He would have tasked Branston with this job, but Shuttle 1 only had enough fuel to make it to the nearest moon and back. It could coast, but if there was trouble, he had no way of making it back. The shuttle was not very fast either. Most of that was Alexander's fault. He thought about replacing the shuttle's thruster with his newest generation model but decided against it. The added efficiency of the shuttle worked to their benefit right now, even if it reduced the lifespan of the thrusters.

Originally, Lucas just wanted cameras around the big gas giant that was closest to them, but Alexander talked him into increasing their sensor coverage to the entire system. The laser link relays would be easier to detect on the false asteroids farther from the planet, but it was cheap insurance to ensure nobody was hiding out there.

***

Dalton had intercepted a communication from Char's people and smiled. He now knew where his quarry was located. Unlike them, he jumped in well outside the Oort cloud around Y6X-3H2. He wasn't in any hurry so he lazily approached the system while he watched the battle that had taken place over a day ago.

He never regretted spending the money to upgrade his optical sensors to the state-of-the-art ones his ship now sported. The large array was something you would normally only see in a scientific vessel. It did mean his ship had fewer weapons, but in his line of work, intel was almost more important than having a big gun. And once again, he was glad he had a crystal clear picture of what was going on in the system. What he saw, made him want to turn around and leave. Searᴄh the novel(F~)ire.net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Even with his sensors, it was almost impossible to spot the stealth ship that tore Char's fleet apart. He didn't overlook Arkonis' beat-up ship at the small station either. Whoever had taken the young prince out had already retrofitted a laser to the Headhunter and was using it to devastating effect against Char's people.

He chuckled at each of her losses. That humor was wiped away when he saw her disable the stealth ship before making an emergency jump. It was the one time during this fight that he wished he had jumped in closer. If he had been nearby, he could have easily boarded the vessel. But he was too far away and soon a shuttle arrived from the planet and docked to the mystery ship. It left again, only to return with some weird drones or automated tugs that pulled the damaged stealth ship to the station.

Dalton tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair as he thought over his options. He could try to trade Katalynn Char's loss to Harlow instead of the actual job, but he knew the man would demand he finish what he started. That bastard would probably claim anything he learned while on this mission belonged to him anyway, so that option was out.

He would still sell the recording of Katalynn Char running away, minus the stuff he didn't want them to know about, to the Xin clan. Maybe if he got lucky they would start fighting each other.

That only left how to get down to the planet to locate his target. His original idea had been to use the cover of the battle to sneak down over the horizon and approach the ground. That plan was made with the assumption that only a few ships from the Char clan would be here though. Their distraction would have been just enough to allow him to sneak in under the cover of battle.

He had not taken into account Katalynn Char coming in person or bringing an entire fleet with her, along with a new ship. Further, he hadn't expected the fleet to be turned away before it even got to the planet.

With his original plan up in smoke, he would need to come up with an alternative way to get down there. Dalton had no intention of throwing himself at the planet's defenses like Arkonis or Katalynn had, he wasn't stupid. He continued tapping his fingers as he surveyed the facility, a quick zoom of the holo brought it into closer focus and he examined his options.

There were no farms outside, which meant everything was grown inside the facility. He saw a small transport ship on one of the pads. With there being no ships to act as chaperones and no transponder signal, he took an educated guess that the freighter belonged to a smuggler. Nobody would be foolish enough to fly through pirate-infested space without an escort unless they could hide by turning off their transponder.

That was his way in. Maybe not that ship specifically, but one that carried other drifters or refugees. A ship like that was bound to come out here eventually, especially with Harlow stirring up space.

He would need to report back to Harlow and convince the man to wait though. Dalton made a sour face just thinking about the conversation. Harlow was not a man of patience despite what he claimed.

With his mind made up, he stowed the optical array and adjusted his course until he was heading back out of the Oort cloud. It was going to take a few days to get to an undetectable jump distance without lighting off his main drive, but that was fine. It gave him time to refine his new plan.

***

Alexander supervised the first launch of his new laser pods. The first few test fires were performed with dummy loads that mimicked the weight of the real one, so the adjustments to the launcher output had already been figured into the device. He could just crank the rails up to full power, and that would certainly get the weapons into orbit, but it would also damage half the components inside.

"Why not just have the shuttle carry them up?" Lucas asked in confusion. "It should be able to fit at least six of them inside the cargo area."

"There is actually enough room for eight of them on the shuttle," Alexander responded. "The reason I don't want to use the shuttle is because I don't want to tie it up placing these weapons. There is also the wear and tear to consider. The poor shuttle has been going practically nonstop since I rebuilt it. It's overdue for a full service. That makes the low-orbit launcher the only real alternative."

"Makes sense, I guess," the man shrugged.

For once, a test went off without a problem. The laser pod was fired into low orbit without a single issue. Once it was past the atmosphere, a quick test fire was initiated to ensure nothing was damaged during launch, and even that went off without a hitch.

Alexander patted a smiling Lucas on the shoulder. "Congratulations on the first successful launch. Only two hundred and fifty-five more to go." The man's smile faded and Alexander chuckled. "I'm joking. We'll certainly take some up on the shuttle."

The man's mood improved slightly at hearing that. "Are you going to stick around and watch?"

Alexander shook his avatar. "No. The shuttle should be dropping off the unlinked recovery robots at one of the pirate crash sites on the planet. I'll need to monitor them while they start working to make sure no programming adjustments need to be made. We can't afford to lose them or the preprocessed materials. Once that's complete, I'll start work on the second shuttle. That way we will finally have a backup to allow the first some downtime."

Unfortunately, Alexander didn't have enough materials to build a third control ship or even a control node. He didn't want to use up his last supercomputer either. Instead, he repurposed the advanced chips from the robots in orbit, and added four more robots, bringing the total of ground-based robots running on the advanced chips to ten. Ten of the robots would be able to carve up the remains of a ship in a few weeks without too much oversight.

Lucas groaned. "Sounds exhausting, don't you ever rest?"

"I'll rest when we have a defensive bubble around the planet that will prevent anyone from trying anything dumb again." That was a lie, Alexander had no intention of slowing down. He did plan on shifting his priorities to ensure he spent more time with Yulia, but that shouldn't be an issue once the laser network was in place.