Yulia cautiously opehe 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 st leg was dragging behind him by the cable to the motor. They had been pying in the park whehought it would be a good idea to have him climb on the merry-go-round. Theried to see how fast she could make it spin with him on it.

  They were having a bst, 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 pstic 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 py with any time she wanted. She just hoped parts f were in there as well.

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

  “e on Dog, I o get you fixed up.” The robot woofed happily and followed her into her room.

  ***

  Alexander ulled out of his work finishing up the design for the ser pods when a went off on his terminal. He walked over to see what it was and chuckled.

  “I k 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 wahem, so long as they didn’t harm anyone else.

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

  He would have dohis work much sooner, but he o plete the assembly of the two trol ships. Without them, his ability to grow their orbital defenses would be severely hampered.

  After the first vessel was pleted, the sed oook hardly any time at all since Alexander had already printed all the major parts for it ahead of time. And the space station had prihe frame.

  Now he had twenty mostly autonomous robots to handle stru, repairs, and salvage. That pletely removed his bottleneanufacturing and baaterials. To try to remedy the material shortfall, he had half the robots colleg 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 tooo justify fixing.

  The only parts being saved from those vessels were the fusioors. One because he had promised it to Markus, and the other so he could study the design to hopefully produce his owher 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 escheractitirely, but that robably a bad idea.

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

  Alexander focused ba the task at hand.

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

  Alexander po offset the issue of weak ons by building dozens of these inexpensive devices. One shot would be all the ons would get before having to recharge for a few hours using the sor 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 gnced over at the prihat umping out more of the man’s cameras. After outfitting the Destiny with ons, Na had agreed to find suitable asteroids to house the cameras and transceivers for these new spy satellites. He would also be able to pce them in the correct orbits throughout the system. That reciated since he was the only Captain with a w ship around here who Alexarusted.

  He would have tasked Branston with this job, but Shuttle 1 only had enough fuel to make it to the 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 repg the shuttle’s thruster with his geion model but decided against it. The added efficy of the shuttle worked to their be right now, even if it reduced the lifespan of the thrusters.

  inally, Lucas just wanted cameras around the big gas giant that was closest to them, but Alexaalked him into increasing their sensor ce to the entire system. The ser link reys would be easier to dete the false asteroids farther from the p, but it was cheap insurao ensure nobody was hiding out there.

  ***

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

  He never regretted spending the moo upgrade his optical sensors to the state-of-the-art ones his ship now sported. The rge array was something you would normally only see in a stific vessel. It did mean his ship had fewer ons, but in his line of work, intel was almost more important than having a big gun. And once again, he was gd 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.

  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 statioher. Whoever had taken the young pri had already retrofitted a ser 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 oime 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 p 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 khe man would demand he finish what he started. That bastard would probably cim anything he learned while on this mission beloo him anyway, so that option was out.

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

  That only left how to get down to the po locate his target. His inal idea had been to use the cover of the battle to sneak dowhe horizon and approach the ground. That pn was made with the assumption that only a few ships from the Char would be here though. Their distra would have been just enough to allow him to sneak in uhe cover of battle.

  He had not taken into at Katalynn Char ing in person ing aire 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 p.

  With his inal pn up in smoke, he would o e up with an alternative way to get down there. Dalton had no iion of throwing himself at the p's defenses like Arkonis or Katalynn had, he wasn’t stupid. He tiapping his fingers as he surveyed the facility, a qui of the holht it into closer focus and he examined his options.

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

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

  He would o report back to Harlow and vihe man to wait though. Dalton made a sour face just thinking about the versation. Harlow was not a man of patience despite what he cimed.

  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 uable jump distahout lighting off his main drive, but that was fi gave him time to refine his new pn.

  ***

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

  “Why not just have the shuttle carry them up?” Lucas asked in fusion. “It should be able to fit at least six of them ihe cargo area.”

  “There is actually enough room fht 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 pg these ons. There is also the wear ao sider. The poor shuttle has been going practically nonstop since I rebuilt it. It’s overdue for a full service. That makes the low-orbit uhe only real alternative.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” the man shrugged.

  For once, a test went off without a problem. The ser pod was fired into low orbit without a single issue. O ast the atmosphere, a quick test fire was initiated to ehing was damaged during unch, and even that went off without a hitch.

  Alexander patted a smiling Lucas on the shoulder. “gratutions on the first successful unch. 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 p. I’ll o monitor them while they start w to make sure nramming adjustments o be made. We ’t afford to lose them or the preprocessed materials. Ohat’s plete, I’ll start work on the sed shuttle. That ill finally have a backup to allow the first some downtime.”

  Unfortunately, Alexander didn’t have enough materials to build a third trol ship or even a trol node. He didn’t want to use up his st superputer 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 ht.

  Lucas groaned. “Sounds exhausting, don’t you ever rest?”

  “I’ll rest when we have a defensive bubble around the phat will prevent anyone fr anything dumb again.” That was a lie, Alexander had no iion of slowing down. He did pn on shifting his priorities to ensure he spent more time with Yulia, but that shouldn’t be an issue ohe ser work was in pce.