Now that Alexander had everything pulled from the ship that he could, without actually taking it apart, he waited for Branston to arrive so he could return to the surfad begin his project.

  It didn’t take long for the pilot to nd in the hangar aurn him to the facility. “Oh, before I fet, please give this package to Captain Krieger if you would.”

  “What is it?” the former Navy officer asked in fusion.

  “They are the ID tags from the bodies we recovered. I sealed them all in one of the rooms aboard the ship, so they could perform whatever burial rites they wished when they returned home.”

  The man’s face turned solemn as he accepted the package. What Alexander hadn’t added, was that the box also taihe fusion activation crystal for Epsilon’s Dawn. While the ship was a bargaining chip, he felt like a little bit of goodwill would go a long way here. He never inteo keep the ship, so holding it hostage wouldn’t feel right.

  Alexander would have delivered it in person, but after seeing the ship's armor, he didn’t think it would be much of a leap for the STO Captain to figure out he might e from the same source as the base material. That secret would likely be exposed eventually, but he decided now was not that time.

  He entered his workshop ahe items he had procured down on one of the workbenches. Before Alexaarted testing how many robots he could link to one superputer interface, he o answer another burning question he had. He walked over to the mass speeter and put the armor sample inside. When the results came back, he wasn’t surprised by what they showed. It was made from pure carbon. It wasn’t a clear answer, but it was another data point that led him to the clusion he had suspected for some time. There was one final test he o run before he would be certain, or at least as certain as he could be that his hunch was correct. Alexaored the sample in another tainer and pced it in his ste room o the pieces that had fked off of his own body.

  While he was in there, he retrieved one of the superputers and the three robots that he had in ste. He returo the workshop and queued up the design for his robots. He set the manufacturing array to produce ten more.

  As that was going, he set the superputer into the holo ser. It accurately marked the locations of the puter’s tacts and Alexander built off of that. He figured he could go about linking robots to a tral processor in two ways, with a tether, or wirelessly. A tether would be faster and make it impossible to block the signal, but the downsides of the limited range and hassle of dealing with a physical limitation were a deal breaker for Alexahat meant a wireless e was the only viable path.

  He started designing the core troller that would be powered by the superputer with wireless transmission in mind. Alexander borrowed the uplink designed by Lucas and added that to the model he was building. He still couldn’t believe the man had designed su effit and powerful radio transceiver from cobbled-together spare parts. Wanting to ehe troller had backup options, he included a tight beam ser link, as well as infrared and microwave transceivers.

  Alexander would have loved to use FTL s like the Q’s used, to facilitate unicatioween the robots, but he didn’t have a sample of the teology to try and reproduce it yet.

  Sihe troller was going to o be in space as well as be able to unicate in multiple dires at once, Alexander added plenty of power systems, ion drives for maneuvering, and even one of his Css 2 engines simir to the one Shuttle 1 had. Only it was his fen version, which dialed back the effiore closely match Dr. Lund’s optimization model. It was also the first geion he designed specifically for each css of engine, instead of just using the Css 4 as a base and moving stuff around to fit. Doing that was fine wheing, but nobody was going to buy an ehat had to be modified for each craft. Not when they had standard designs already avaible.

  By the time Alexander’s design was plete, the troller was half the size of a shuttle and looked a bit like a pore with all its sensors and antennas. He saved the design and started a new ohe new design was much simpler. There were no engines, no fuel ste, and no power systems. It was just a block to hold the superputer and two dozen cables running off of it with transceivers on the ends shaped like cubes. The cubes had electrical tactors around the exterior that perfectly matched where the advanced chips had theirs.

  He sent that design to the old printer and it wasn’t long until the very simple device took shape.

  O was done, Alexaook one of the cubes and opened up the puter core on the robot. He pced the cube into the open space for an advanced chip until he heard a soft cliotifying him it was locked into pce. He repeated this process for the other two as well. He did o bypass the safety lockout that prevehe robot from operating if the core en, but that was easily aplished with a jumper wire.

  He would have removed the safety lockout, but he didn’t want to damage the robots. He hat core to lo pce when he built the wireless cores that would eventually go into them.

  Ohat was done, he moved over to the troller and was getting ready to work on that when there was a kno his door.

  “e in,” he called while he tinued w.

  Captain ered the room, looking ed. That couldn’t be good.

  “Mingyu, I’m gd you and your people are safe. I assume this visit is to discuss why you were gone so long?”

  “Yes, and no,” the man said with a sigh. “Alexander, me and my entire crew owe you a debt, and I pn on repaying it, but it’s getting far too dangerous in this system. Unless you assure me that you have an immediate solution to that problem, it might just be safer for me to take my ces in STO space as an outcast. I hope you uand.”

  Alexander did uand. The fact that Na was sidering going back to STO space told him how important this was for the ma dowools he was using and gave the Captain his full attention.

  “I see. I ’t say I bme you. If I were in your situation, I might make a simir choice. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have even e back to let you know. I would have simply headed to STO space-” Alexander’s words trailed off as he realized that was exactly what Na had done. Something obviously ged his mind though or he wouldn’t have e back.

  “…We were on our way before I stopped and turned back around. That’s ere gone for so long. I’m sorry if that feels like a betrayal, but my crew and my ship e first.”

  His suspis about the maended absence were firmed. “I won’t say that your as don’t hurt me. They do, but I’m not going to hold them against you. While it's true we have a deal, I don’t believe either of us expected two entire fleets of pirates to show up unannounced when we agreed upon that deal. You asked if I had an immediate solution to this pirate threat. I don’t. I assure you I'm w on one. Before you say goodbye—” Alexaopped the man, notig his expression fall with disappoi. “Listen to my proposal. You wouldn’t have e back if you didn’t think I could make the system safer.”

  Alexander waited for Mingyu to mull over his words.

  It took the man a few minutes before he finally replied. “Very well, I owe you at least that much.”

  He o the man and motioned him over to the holo dispy where he modeled all of his projects. “After the attack, I knew we needed more defeions in space. We ’t simply rely on spy ships from the STO ing along to save us ime.”

  That got a slight chuckle out of the severe man. “Is that what that strange ship docked at the station is? Even parked right o it, the Moonlit Destiny’s sensors were having a hard time pig it up.”

  Alexander nodded. “We also have the STO survivors in our med bay waiting for a trip bae. That’s not really your unless you’re willing to take them back to STO space.”

  “The STO do their own up,” Mingyu responded coldly. It was a far nicer respohan Alexander expected after they made the man and his crew pariahs.

  “Fair enough,” he tinued. He pulled up a design he had e up with in the wake of the attack.

  The captain of the Destiny scratched his head. “Your defeion is the cmshells you used to deliver pos to the space station?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.” Alexander pyed the animation. While the exterior of the cmshell looked mostly the same as those he had used before, as soon as the front levered open, it exposed a ser. “They won’t be as powerful as a ship ser, but we k out dozens of these things a week. They are limited to a single shot before they have to recharge, but if Lucas target them all in the same spot to fire simultaneously, they will melt through any ship's armor with little effort. That’s not all though.”

  The image Alexander brought up was The Moonlit Destiny. Twelve points along the hull were highlighted before small domes appeared in those spots.

  “You pn to arm the Destiny?” Mingyu asked in surprise.

  Alexander shrugged. “Why not? You said it yourself, it’s not safe out here. And we don’t operate uhe STO’s rules. The smaller railguns are the same size as the ones proteg the nding pads so they aren’t going to turn you into a warship. But you shouldn’t o worry about running from gunships or small corvettes anymore.”

  “…Arming us would make it impossible to return to STO space,” the Captain ented quietly.

  “It would. It’s why I never brought up the option before.”

  “ges like this would require the Destiny to remain docked for months. Are you sure that’s wise?”

  The fact that the man hadn’t ht rejected the proposal put a smile on Alexander’s face. “Normally, it would. But the turret pods are self-tained. It took me some time to figure out how to make that happen, but I was able to make it all work. All you o do is route power to them ahem to the outer hull. The rest is just software and training.”

  The man was quiet for a bit again. “ we ge out some of the railguns for point defense ons? While shooting back sounds nice, I would prefer some way to defend against ining missiles.”

  Alexander smirked and zoomed in on the ship. “I figured you might ask that.” The much closer view of the ship showed the fun turrets, two oop, and two otom of the ship. There were four PDCs, one for each er. “The point defense ons use the otes. You’ll probably o turn off your artificial gravity to run all the ons systems until a dedicated power system be put in pce, but this should give you some mueeded peaind. What do you think?”

  “I think you khis versation was ing a long time before I did,” ed.

  Alexander ughed lightly at that. “Rumors spread like wildfire down here, Captain. Once I heard your people were worried about more pirate attacks, I started ing up with a solution for you.”

  The man sighed, then turned away from the holo dispy to look directly at him. “If you make these ges happen before the pirate attack, my crew and I will stick around. If you ’t, we’ll jump out, and you won’t see us again. That’s the best I offer.” The man stuck out his hand and Alexander shook it without reservation.

  “You just keep the ore ing, and I’ll ensure anyone who tries to mess with this system the ime won’t even live tret that choice.”

  Alexander watched the man leave. Losing Mingyu at this stage would be disastrous to his pns, which is why he offered to arm The Moonlit Destiny. He was gd the man accepted the agreement.

  He turned back to his creation and pced the superputer into the cradle. O had power, from a simple wall outlet, he tested the programming.

  The puter effortlessly mahe three robots. Over the six hours, Alexander kept adding more and more robots as they came out of the printer until the strain was too much even for the superputer and they started to glitch out. It seemed like the number of indepe robots the puter was capable of handling was twelve. He decided to reduce the number of robots assigo a troller to ten to ehere was some wiggle room for more plex ands.

  With that done, he checked on the printer iation. It had already produced two of the turret pods for the Destiny. By tomorrow, the remaining pods would be plete, along with enough ammo for three reloads. His pod design wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Normally reloading them would require a spacewalk, but Alexander decided to include one of the stru bots for reloading to ease the burden oiny’s crew.

  Now that the arming of Destiny was underway, and his testing of the new superputer interface was plete, Alexander began printing out the pos to build his first ship. If you could call the bundle of sensors and engines a ship. While he rinting those parts on the surface, to be shipped into space via the shuttle, the frame of the trol ship was already under stru in orbit. It was a simple enough task for the unlinked robots to plete.