Alexander exited the facility and headed toward one of the shuttles. All of the intaes had been moved to one nding pad, the closest oo his workshop. As he walked across the pad, he could hear the sounds of woing on in the distance. A rge crew of workers were cutting up the scrap from the nearby damaged railgun.

  He could see they hadn’t even finished ing 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 o ihe pit for damage before any new stru 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 dition.

  It was too bad he didn’t have any schematiissiles. 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.

  That was a ter project though. Today he focused on the shuttles in front of him. He wao know whie was in the best dition so he could focus his efforts there.

  As he stepped aboard the first ship, he was instantly gd he didn’t have a sense of smell. The walls were coated in dirt and grease. He was also pretty sure some of the bck spots were mold. He typed out some ands on his tablet a a list of ing supplies that he hose supplies were mostly for him at the moment, he didn’t want whatever was ihis ship to follow him bato the facility so he was giving himself a thh scrub-down after he was done.

  Alexander ighe filth and got to work pulling off service panels and iing the pos behind them. He could only give them a visual iion, but what he found wasn’t very inspiring. He found microcracks, hoses fixed with cloth, and some unknow, as well as other issues. And that was only the surface items.

  As he ehe cockpit, he found the pce 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 repced 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. Repg the heavily reinforced window was going to be a nightmare. That probably meant this shuttle wasn’t going to be the one he repaired uhe others were much worse.

  His st stop was the reactor. He had to access that from outside the shuttle. It took time to remove the panels keeping the engines and powerpnt 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 o fix or repce, he would have to reverse engineer from scratch.

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

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

  Fusion power pnts didn’t explode, but they tained a lot of heat and energy. All of that was tained by aromagic field. The fusioor ihis 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 g, immediately vaporizing the interior lining of the chamber aing the material around it enough to deform or even pletely 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 tai field had the 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 pnts 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 untained fusioion.

  After ing himself off, Alexander returo 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 speeter he had printed out. On the ser bed were three tiny bck fkes of material. Inside his mind space, he g 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 st few weeks, he did notice those dead spots were shrinking slightly. Measurements also firmed that the damage was repairing itself, albeit slowly. He had swabbed aed the area with anything he could think of, but the tests were inclusive.

  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 ba his day always cimed as the miracle catchall. But nanites should have shown up on the swab tests. It was a mystery he would o keep w away at.

  In the mea 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 sihen to try ahe 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 beloo one of his lost memories.

  As long as it still worked when he 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 ons. 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 on.

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

  He looked at the fkes on the ser again, then rubbed the tiny is on his body. Whatever had fixed him up so rapidly ba Petrov station didn’t seem all that ined 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 pin too much.

  The ser finally beeped, letting him know it was done. He was a bit surprised by the results. The tiny fkes were posed 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 fkes were 100% molecurly pure carbon acc to the instrument.

  That didn’t expin why he was so durable though. Carbon was durable iain ttice figurations, 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 molecur level to make his body s. 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 o build aron 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 fkes into a tainer, 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 yout meant to assist him when he o make rept parts. He was certain adjustments would have to be made but it was a good pce to start a him busy while he waited for the shuttles to discharge their reactors.

  He even modeled rept hoses, pos, chairs, and other items. Before he k, 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 dispy. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible blip on one of the readouts. He hadn’t been all that knowledgable on the jump wave ser, 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 tuo discard those low-pravitational 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 calcutions to trace it bad see who it came from. I say I did the calcutions, but the puter did most of them. The puter triangutes where the echinated from and rolls back through the orbital meics 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 see all fifteen blips clearly. We were able to determihey used the rge gas giant to mask their initial entry into the system. We o do something to prevent that from happening again.”

  “It’s on the list,” Alexander sighed.

  Luodded. “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 overyed the two.

  The new echo, or he guessed primary jump signature was a tiny fra 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 pared it to a normal jump and a jump echo. This is the jump signature of the gunships the Hawks brought along. As you see, they aren’t much weaker than a bigger ship. And this sed one is a jump echo from the same ship a few hours ter. The strength is about the same as our mystery signal. But if you overy them, you see the mystery signal is actually more coherent than the jump echo. I don’t know how to expin this.”

  Alexander sighed. “Shouldn’t you have brought this to your brother instead of me?”

  “My brother only cares about the things he have an impa. 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 dist the man’s . They needed someone more knowledgeable about jump meics ravitational sensors to weigh in. “Have the prisohat the Hawks rescued from the pirate ships recovered yet?”

  “As far as I know their injuries were healed. I ’t say they’ve recovered from their ordeal though.”

  “Fair enough. Could yabriel 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.

  “…ht. I sometimes fet you be rather intimidating. I’ll see if Gabriel will speak with them. She’s better with people than my brother or I.”

  “Thank you. A her know I will issue her tribution 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 iion.