It took the Hawks’ engineers less time than he would have imagio reroute power from a w area to the bst door that led to the Low Orbit Launcher.

  Once power was restored, the facility codes worked to bypass the security lockout that had been triggered by some fault in the uncher system.

  The thick heavy bst dave an audible clid a strobing light along with a sireed ahin the area that they were opening. Alexander watched silently as the door ponderously slid aside. At least it didn’t appear that rust had any effe the meism. If they had been rusted, he would have been in trouble. He had nothing big enough to remove bst doors this heavy.

  Ohe door was fully open, the lights and siren shut off. Alexander waited for the meraries to clear the room before he entered along with the ineers.

  The first thing Alexander noticed was the dome above the uncher. It seems part of it had colpsed onto the deviot enough to expose it to the outside elements, but enough ter a safety lockout.

  The uncher wasn’t much to look at if he was ho. It was a wide regle that seemed to be attached to a curved dish underh it that allowed it to angle upward. There didn’t appear to be any way to traverse the uncher from side to side either. Going by the retractable portion of the overhead dome, it could probably only fire from a certain position as well.

  He had expected something to this extent after talking with the Captain and Lucas about the device, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.

  The thing was huge, big enough that his entire body could fit ihe unch rails. He expected it to be big sidering the size of the unch capsules but it was still surprising to see up close.

  The unch capsules looked like those cmshell ste racks that people stu the top of their cars for road trips. Only these were about twice the size and with a metal strip running along the entire circumference. He lifted one of the lids and found the inside empty. He was a bit bummed about that. Not that he expected to find anything i but it would have bee if there was. With the unch capsule ope a good idea of how much space he had to work with; if and whe the thing operational.

  The answer was, not a lot. About half of the area inside was taken up by foam padding. Probably to protect the tents as much as possible when they were unched into orbit. Depending on what he unched, he could probably remove the padding. He would have to print new unch capsules anyway sihe ones in this room had seeer days. They were as likely to disie on unch as they were to make it into orbit.

  The capsules seemed to be mostly some sort of pstic, so that was good. He had limited materials left after repg the robotics for his b and the few simple mining drones he had going were not very capable.

  He was hoping to alleviate some of the pressure on the locals to farm, so they would be more ined to mine for him, but so far only three people had taken him up on the offer. That was still three more thahough. Despite the rather crude mining equipment Alexander was able to provide them, they were much more adept at gathering useful material for his smelter than the drones he had.

  “Alex, it stinks in here!” Yulia pined.

  “Put your mask on then.” Yulia had asked to apany him today si was her day off from school. She was slowly pig up English but she kept defaulting to her old nguage when speaking to him. He was tempted to not answer her unless she used English, but that seemed extremely petty. She was als to fit in by not wearing her mask, but she liked to pin about the smell. He would always o remio put the mask ba. To which she would pin that she didn’t like wearing it as she was doing right now.

  “We talked about this. I am w on fixing the air purifiers, but you will o get used to the smell or wear the mask.”

  “I don’t like wearing the mask, everyone makes fun of me when I do.”

  Alexander made his avatar nod. “I’m sorry to hear that. But those are the only two options at the moment.”

  The little girl grumbled for a bit before finally putting on the mask. The smell really must be awful in this room, usually she just tried to put up with it. That probably meant air was leaking into this room from outside. Once he got the facility sealed back up, positive pressure would fix that issue.

  While his schedule was quite busy, Alexander made sure to spend as much time as he could with her so she didn’t feel lonely. Yulia had struggled the first few weeks to make friends, kids being kids. Some were nice, some were mean, and some didn’t want to py with the outsider. Yulia was an outgoing girl though. Even without speaking the nguage, she mao make a few friends.

  Alexander got a kick out of watg them unicate through ughter and haures. But Yulia awo new friends, Sarah and Cire got along fantastically. Minus a little road bump with the whole ‘trying to go pces’ she wasn’t supposed to. But the parents of the twot over it ahem py together again. Alexander got the distinct impression that the girls’ parents bmed him for the whole thing. That was fih him, so long as they didn’t shun Yulia for doing something stupid that she genuinely felt bad about afterward.

  Some other kids hung around occasionally, but he hadn’t gotten their names yet. Either because Yulia didn’t know them, or she just fot to mention what they were. He was gd she had made the transition without much trouble. It took her mind off the ck of response from her old friends.

  With the pirate threat on the same side of STO space as Petrov station, he wasn’t sure if the messages that were being transferred by the Hawks’ ships would arrive. There hadn’t been any reply to them yet which wasn’t a good sign.

  As much as Alexander would like to sit and hang out with his daughter all day, he had to refocus on the current task. He walked over to one of the engineers who was iing the railgun.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Not good,” the man replied as he pulled his head out of the barrel. “Both rails o be repced. Seems like they were due for rept even before they shut it down though. We would also like to gh the entire electrical system. You don’t want arical short in a railgun. That muergy dumped into the body could damage the metal g, and then you are looking at repg the ehing instead of just the rails. You already saw the unch capsules. Might as well just recycle them, there’s no point fixing them up.”

  Alexander nodded. “I po.”

  “Good. Other than that, you will o rebuild the trol room. Probably for the best anyway. I saw those aerminals, one holo terminal could repce that whole setup. Assuming you have the means to build one.”

  “I’ll see what I do.”

  The man tinued. “Then there is the ceiling. Your best bet is to just tear it all down and build fresh. Who knows what structural defects are present? It obviously wasn’t built very well if part of it colpsed like this,” he gestured to the broken crete lying around the room.

  Alexander sighed. “Please tell me that’s all?”

  “For now. Until we get power to the loading system, we won’t know if that works or if the gears that raise and lower the uncher will need repg. We will also o ihe barrel for defle since part of the roof colpsed on top of it.”

  “And if it is damaged?”

  “Then we will o pull the entire barrel instead of just the rails. Luckily the outer g and barrel are two separate parts on this unit. That isn’t always the case with unchers.”

  “You have experieh Low Orbit Launchers?” Alexander asked in surprise. From his versation with Matthews, he figured they weren’t very popur.

  The man shook his head. “No, but some missile systems use a simir unch ptform to eject missiles far from ships before they light off their drives. Doing it that way means they need less propelnt to home in oarget which means you pack more explosives into a smaller form factor.”

  “Ah,” was all Alexander could say to that.

  He gathered up the information he needed along with sh measurements of the rails and headed back to his workshop. On the way there, Yulia spotted her friends.

  “Alex, I py with Sarah and Cire?”

  He figured she would ask as soon as he saw the slightly irls. He nodded. Before she could rush off, he added. “I’ll be in the workshop. Make sure to return before the evening meal.”

  She nodded and waved at him as she sped off. He watched the three girls giggle spiratorially to each other before running down a side hallway. A female merary stepped up o him.

  “I’ll keep an eye on her like always.”

  “Thank you for doing this for me, Zorina. It means a lot that I don’t have to worry about her stantly.”

  The woman snorted. “You’ll have to learn to let her be by herself soon. I don’t pn on stig around when our deployment ends.”

  He sighed and nodded. “I know.”

  The woman smiled and fast-walked to catch up to the screaming children as they raced down the hallway.

  He knew he was being overly protective. He couldn’t help it. The sad fact is he was better than he was before leavirov. He had an actual reason for his overprotectiveness ba Petrov Station, but he couldn’t lean on that excuse here. Other than a few kids pig on Yulia, nobody had bothered her much siheir arrival. He had purposefully told Zorina to keep a low profile and only intervene if she was in real danger or doing something she shouldn’t be doing. Kids being jerks didn’t t, even though Alexander had the urge to go talk to those children’s parents to set them straight.

  Alexander ehe manufacturing bay. The pce was still in full motion king out new beams for the colpsed ses. He didn’t interrupt that process. Instead, he went over to the prierminal and began building a model of the parts for the uncher.

  It didn’t take long, they were essentially a U-shaped pieetal. He didn’t waste any of his preetal though. Instead, he created arusion tip aruded the forty-foot-long rails out of a cheap and recycble pstic material. He wao make sure the dimensions were corred they fit before he bothered wasting good material.

  While that was going oook what he knew of the uncher and the railgun he had built ba Petrov and came up with a few designs for orbital defense guns. Of course, he had two arms and could split his attention, so with the other hand, he designed battery and capacitor banks.

  Alexander had worked with over a dozen types of battery systems and probably close to a huypes of capacitors during his time at Petrov. Now all that knowledge was going into designing the most energy-dense system he could e up with given what he knew. He was sure there were better designs out there, the stuff he had worked on was usually decades old by the time he saw it. But it was a signifit step up to what existed on Eden’s End, so he wouldn’t pin.

  Ohe designs were plete, he sent them to the printers. The first railgun would take six hours to print and it was only at the scale of a slightly rge handheld rifle. Alexander wao test the device before he went and printed a full-scale model that would be nearly as long as the uncher.

  He looked at the finished model. As far as desig, it was not very inspired. The gun was a regur block with a hole in the ter of the square end about the width of a thick pencil. It sat on a simple weighted and recoil-abs tripod. He had thought about adding the dish and loading meism like the uncher had, but decided against it for the test. Those systems were easy to replicate and he khey would work. He wao ensure his on design funed correctly. Manual aiming and reloading would have to be done for now. As for the design, he did that for ease of manufacture.

  He would likely carry over the blocky design for any defeurrets made using the flechette rifles that Travers had mentioned as well. He didn’t have the luxury of multiple processes for building ons. He could print whatever, but he only had a few printers. And he couldn’t tie them all up with printing ons that may or may not get used. One of the manufacturing lines became free, he would set that to building the ons.

  After he ied the gun to e was funal, he printed out a dozen tungsten sabots. Using his limited supply of tungsten like this hurt, but it was the hardest material he had avaible. It would get repced eventually by the workers mining the surface. The p was ri metals, along with other rare earth materials. Trace amounts of tungsten and those harder-to-e-by minerals were already ing in with each load.

  Alexander loaded everything up on a little robotic cart that looked like a topless golf cart. He had built the small vehicle to haul heavy loads around the station. It was mostly used to carry the rept beams to the work sites where some of the engineers and locals were clearing up rubble and removing rusted beams to repce them with new ones.

  As he was doing this, his door opened and Travers walked in. The man whistled as he saw what Alexander was loading on the cart. “Now ain’t that the ugliest little dug you ever did see. I alreferred fun over form though. You going out to test it?”

  Alexander nodded.

  “Mind if me and my team tag along? It isn’t every day we get to see a railguing fired.”

  “I don’t see why not.”