Not being alerted to the unknown ship when it arrived, irked Alexahe fact that it was Branston who had alerted him and not Lucas or Damien pissed him off. Especially when Branston informed him of what Damien had asked him to do. Thankfully the former STO pilot was smart enough to realize that Damien had no authority over him and deed the order.

  Branson worked for him, and the shuttle beloo him. It wasn’t at Damien's bed call to do with it as he pleased, especially when the man wao sacrifice it to buy time. Alexander uood the man was worried about another possibly hostile ship, but they were going to have a serious discussion wheuro the surface.

  If Damien wanted access to Blue Star Enterprise assets, it was time to ie the security forto his pany. If the man refused, he would remove access to the security ter for him and his people. Alexander might separate those departments anyway, sidering Damien was never involved in the space side of things. The man was petent at running facility security, but he cked the tactical knowledge to deploy assets in space.

  Alexander couldn’t fault him for that, everyone had their strengths and weaknesses and it seemed he found Damien’s.

  As for Lucas, Alexander knew why he hadn’t reached out. If Damien was in the room, Lucas teo defer to his older brother on most matters. her man was really cut out for being in charge of system-wide defensive operations but it wasn’t like he had many options. Alexander couldn’t cim to be aer though.

  Together they made it work, but that was the problem. Alexander wasn’t there to help make it work. He was stu one of the derelid now ransacked pirate ships, doing his best to keep them and the robots on track, which wasn’t easy. The programming Lucas ahrew together to allow the robots to act as tugs wasn’t the greatest. It had slowly gotteer as he adjusted it on the fly and the robots learned but that took time.

  They had plenty of time to learn though. It was still awelve hours until he arrived at the space station. Of course, that was just the end of the easy part of this trip. He suspected it would take an additional few hours to mahe ships to dock them properly.

  With the station only having o of dog cmps, the other two ships o be secured via airlocks to Eden’s Fury. And he had to do it in such a way as to not block the firing line of the frigate.

  With plenty of time and nothing to do, he had dohe math, and both ships should fit.

  Hours ter, Alexaood on the hull of one of the ships. The station and Fury were growing rger in his vision, meaning they were only a few minutes out. The tugs were already slowing their approaot that they had been moving all that fast to begin with.

  By the time they stopped retive to the station, he felt like he could jump across the intervening space with ease. Obviously, he didn’t do that, that sounded like a good way to miss the nding and float off into space or to get pulled down by the p’s gravity. Seeing if his body was capable of surviving orbital reentry was not on his bucket list.

  He tapped oablet and watched as the three tugs from the other ship moved to the ship he was standing on. Sihey were in a bit of a rush, there hadn’t been time tram the tugs to do a maneuver such as this. That meant Alexander had to manually guide them in. Something, he wasn't even sure he could do. Nobody else would be able to perform the mahough sihe ship had no internal power and there was not even emergency power to ruernal cameras. That meant he had spent the erip attached to the hull outside the ship. It felt more like riding a wild animal than it did towing a spaceship. The experience was… different.

  Alexander used the tablet interface to guide the robots into pce. Their magic grapplers tched onto the ship’s hull. Once he figured he had them spread out properly, he tested out the maneuvering.

  The ship wobbled and he had to adjust some settings to pensate. Once he had the ship’s motion smoothed out, he started moving closer to the frigate.

  Feeling like he was falling toward the p was something he wasn’t sure he would ever get used to. It just felt wrong. Alexander pushed that feeling to the back of his mind as he trated on his approach. He was moving much slower than was necessary, but he couldn’t afford to damage the airlo either ship. If he did, he would have to weld the ship to the Fury to keep it from drifting off.

  It took hours of tration, but he finally felt the airlock log cmps ehe ship was rotated slightly more than he wa to be but it would have to do. He detached the drones ahem to the unship.

  They repeated the process on their own, their self-learning taking up the sow that they had do once. He moved to the rear of the ship he was standing on and winced internally as the engine e was torn in half by the other ship. He nning on repg them anyway but he had hoped to get away without causing any additional damage.

  In a much shorter time than it took him, the sed ship was locked to the Fury.

  He crossed bato the ship and avoided the mess and floating debris that the pirates had left after ransag the vessel. They had deliberately damaged every single system aboard the ship, including the reactor g. If the hull wasn’t still mostly intact, he would have fed it to the smelter. But he didn’t have time to design a ship from scratd it would still take less time to repair this ship than build a new one.

  Alexander ehe Fury’s airlod once clear, made his way across the ship to the airlock for the hangar to the station. It was a real roundabout way to get there, but the station was never desigo park ships for aended period. Eventually, multiple airlocks would o be added to the exterior of the structure. He was already printing out more dog arms and temporary airlock mounts that would at least let him dock multiple ships to the station, even if the extra mounts didn’t lead anywhere.

  “Any issues with the cargo?” Alexander asked as he stepped aboard the shuttle.

  Branston stepped out of the cockpit after the atmosphere normalized. “Not that I could tell. The engineers packed everything up and it was waiting for me as you said. What’s in them by the way?”

  “pos to repce the Fury’s main autoon with a ser.”

  The pilot whistled in approval. “I never served aboard any of the STO’s newer ships. So I never got to see any of their fancy ser onry in a.”

  “Not much to see. The beams are invisible to all but sensors,” Alexaated as he went to each crate and examihe tents.

  He watched as the man rolled his eyes. “I know that. I’m referring to the damage they inflict.”

  “Let’s hope this ser doesn’t disappoint. Mind helpi it moved onto the Fury?”

  Branston nodded and helped float the crates over to the frigate and secure them to the deck. He could have used the robots, but they were busy dismantling the main on.

  One bonus of removing one of the ons is that the ammo ister would be able to be reused oher main on. It had to be cut away, and the log portion that preve from being sed out removed, but the bots could hahat.

  While they were w, Alexander moved the power systems into pce. He had prepared for both possibilities but he really hoped he didn’t have to shunt energy directly from the reactor. He would find out soon enough as that’s what he here to test.

  He could have done all this testing on the ground, minus the main power tap, but he decided to ge up his pns after having to e up here anyway.

  If he was going to be in space, it made more seo test in pce, instead of test and implement. With two visits by pirates in as many days, there was no telling when more would appear. He could have designed a railgun to repce the autoon, but his ground-based ones werely desigo be mouo a ship. It would have taken just as much researd time to design and modify his existing railguns to work with the Fury as it did to create the ser.

  her system was ideal. The railgun would have required plex meicals for autoloading, which would have ated maintenand ammo ste. The rails were also subject to deterioration with each use. If he had a crew and the ship was in perfect w order, he might have been fih that, but he couldn’t afford to dedicate his time or the stru robots' time to stantly sing out damaged rails. With the ser, cooling, and power ptiohe main issues. The power issue was already resolved and the cooling was handled by a heat pump. There would be some maintenance s with the rotation assembly, but probably not many si used the same design his robots had been relying on for months now.

  The room was silent as he worked but he could feel the thumps as the bots cut away the turret behind him. Eventually, the work light he had brought along was washed out by the harsh white gre of psma cutters.

  Alexander ighe distra as he figured the supercapacitors along the eerior wall of the turret room. Before he fihe entire on assembly and ammo ister were pulled from the ship.

  He paused in his work arieved the rest of the crates, opening them so the robots could extract the pos for the ser.

  The bots sed the parts before one scurried off to print a pte to seal the hole. The ser didn’t look like much. The majority of the on was housed in a sealed der that poked down into the room where the ammo ister had been. The final part that rotated looked like a rge, yet stubby hobby telescope. Most of that was the optical sensor and aiming system, both of which operated on his home-made puter chips. The rest of it was cooling.

  Now that he had his new geion of printers, the chips he was capable of produg were in the low one-hundred-naer ra didn’t hold a dle to the current tech, but his homemade chips were now more than capable of handling plex tasks like target acquisition, and trag.

  The part of the ohe beam exited would normally be sidered a sedary mirror on a telescope, but in this case, it was the ser. And everything around it was auxiliary systems and cooling.

  Soon a new armored pte arrived to patch the hole and the robots quickly welded it in pd welded the ser’s mounting ptform to it.

  It was janky as hell, but it should work. When he had more time, he would redo it properly.

  Alexander worked through the night to get the ser operational when he heard his radio buzz. That was a good sign, it meant the welds were holding air.

  “Alex, we have another ta the system. It seems our STO spy ship is back,” Lucas stated.

  Just what they needed right now, the STO poking around. “Keep an eye on them.”

  It wasn’t more than four hours ter that he got another much more panicked radio call from Lucas. “Alex! We have big trouble. Twenty-two ships just jumped into the system. And they are all running without transponders. Some are already moving toward Captain Na. I alerted Destiny, but Na said he was aware and they were moving to a jump point.”

  “How long until the pirates arrive? Doesn’t he have time to make it to the p?” Alexander asked as he opped w.

  “Roughly a day. They ehe system going full burn. Captain Na says he could make it but it would be too close and there wouldn’t be time to disembark before the pirates arrived.”

  “Alright, tell him to do what he feels is best to keep his people safe.”

  “I’ll rey that to him. Are you pnning to head dht away?”

  “I’m going to finish this ser and fly down with Branston,” he stated far more calmly than he felt. This was it, what they had been dreading this eime.

  “…” There was silence for a moment before Lucas responded. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? There’s no way one ser is going to do anything against that many ships.” He could hear the in the man’s voice but he o see this through. There was no way the six railguns would be able to deal with the pirates if they were smarter than the previous ones and dider orbit. That left the ser as the only le deterrent.

  “It’s our best bet. You and Damien make sure everything is ready on the ground.”

  “…We’ll be ready down here, Alex… good luck.”

  With that, the radio went silent and Alexander tinued his work. He would like to say he found a bit of extra speed, but he was already w as fast as he safely could. Any faster and he ran the ce of screwing something up. With the amount of energy he was w with, making a mistake would be disastrous.

  And now they couldn’t even run the o without alerting the pirates. The only testing he had done was with the aiming system, so at least he khat worked. Without being able to test fire the on, he o manually double-check each system and hope the on worked as designed.

  It took Alexander six hours to finish his work. He could have been done in three, but he decided to run the power cable from the reactor to the capacitors and hope for the best. Running the power directly would likely overload the ser when it was engaged, but it was better than sitting and waiting for the capacitors to recharge from the ship's power verter if they o fire a sed time in quick succession.

  He made his way to the shuttle, where a panicked Branston had been radioing him every hour for an update. Making the former pirate sve wait on him while pirates flooded toward Eden’s End was cruel on his part and Alexander khat. He would o make it up to the man as soon as possible.

  Getting the firmation of his b, Branston wasted no time as he backed them out of the hangar and made his way quickly to the surface.

  All of the facility defenses were ohe three guns previously destroyed by the pirates having been repaired i few months. All of Alexander’s improvements had been added to them as well as the existing guns. It didn’t make them shoot any harder or farther, but it made them easier to fix and harder to take offline.

  It would take a direct hit from another missile to do that now, and with the sedary railguns sing the skies, they would have to oversaturate their defenses before any missiles could get through.

  Now all he could do is wait and see what the pirates would do.