Captain Valeria Greaves exited the Goliath transport ship aered the STO Navy Fleet yard in Varlen. Her ship was still hidden ihe massive transport and would remain so until they left with their new orders.

  It galled her to have to relocate. All the work she and her crew did in Epsilon Indi was now wasted, and she didn’t even have a clue as to what was so important that she o be retasked. and had refused to transmit new orders over Q, which meant whatever she was doing was top secret, but that didn’t make the loss of her previous mission any more patable.

  She reached her destination and checked her dress blues to ensure everything was in order before knog och.

  The door slid open and a face she reized greeted her. She spped a crisp salute. “Vice Admiral Fletcher, I wasn’t expeg you personally, Sir.” Normally her missions came from the intelligence department. The fact that the head of Navy Intel was here delivering it in perso whatever mission she was being assigned was beyo.

  “At ease, Captain Greaves, step inside and secure the door behind you. We have important matters to discuss.”

  She exited the room two hours ter. Now that she knew why Delta was retasked, she felt a bit better about the whole ordeal. Still, her former Captain, Viter had been out of unication for nearly four months by now. The ship was likely lost, acc to Vice Admiral Fletcher, but she believed differently.

  Valeria had been Krieger’s First Mate before she got promoted to Captain. She khe man, probably better than most. If there was any way to survive, that crafty bastard had probably figured it out.

  Still, it was ing that one of the Erebus css ships had gone silent. They were meant for stealth and reaissance, but they were also heavily armed and armored. There was nothing a single pirate ship could throw at them that would be able to get past their defenses.

  So whatever had caused them to miss their unication windows likely was dangerous. She would o be cautious in her approach.

  Valeria supposed she would find out what wayid the Dawn when she arrived at the ship's st known stop in two or three weeks. She boarded the Goliath and quickly made her way back to her ship to go over the data chip that the Vice Admiral had handed her. It detailed their st s of the Y6X-3H2 system.

  A few hours ter, the massive transport ship disged its cargo far fr eyes and the Delta’s Eclipse made its way to the jump point.

  ***

  sidering the possibility that hostiles capable of taking down an Ererbus css ship might be in the destination system, Valeria had her pilot jump them in well outside the Oort cloud. Their trajectory would keep them at a safe jump distahe entire way. She wao get a clear picture of what was going on before she itted to entering the system’s gravity well.

  The ship would likely still be able to jump from most pces ihe system, but she couldn’t be certain. She knew some pirates were now using cargo tainers fitted with gravity pting to produce artificial gravity wells.

  Those traps didn’t cover a big area, but it was usually enough to throw off the precise calcutions of a jump or destabilize a bubble enough ter the safety overrides built into most ercial vessels. Eclipse had simir safeties, but it also had two superputers capable of g the math to produce a new jump calcution ihan a sed.

  “Anything to report?” she asked the sensor operator.

  “There is oive transponder in the system, Ma’am. It belongs to the mining ship in the info packet, The Moonlit Destiny. There is also a distress signal. …It’s odd though.”

  “Odd how?”

  “Well, it’s got the correavy signature, but the message isn’t STO standard, Ma’am.”

  “Hmm, send it to my sole.”

  Valeria looked over the repeating message. It stated that the ship was damaged, and the crew was rescued. Then it listed Captain Krieger as a survivor along with other members of the crew. Finally, it called for any STO ship receiving the message to retrieve the crew and the damaged ship from the fourth p, known as Eden’s End.

  “Is there anything that looks suspicious?”

  “It’s unclear, Captain. We’re too far out for our sensors to get a good read.”

  “Fly us between the orbit of the fourth and fifth p. I want to know what’s out there.”

  It took time to adjust their course, but after another day, they were in position.

  “There are hundreds of satellites in orbit around the fourth p,” the sensor operator stated. “We also see a space station, along with a colle of ships. The emergency bea is transmitting from a bit of dead space there.”

  Well, that had to be the Dawn. She had hoped to find them drifting, maybe with their drive or FTL out. That would have made rescue easy. The ship being docked at an ued space station roblem. She couldn’t simply approach the p. It could be a trap. And even if it wasn’t, she couldly unicate with them, giveure of her ship.

  She had a few options, but none of them were good.

  The first was to simply retrieve the captured STO people by force. That was the most dangerous since she didn’t know what brought dowa’s sister ship. For all she knew, she could end up just like them, or worse.

  The sed option was to capture the mining vessel and interrogate the crew. That put the people on the ground at risk, assuming they were down there.

  The st of the bad options was to record everything she could aurn to Varlen to see what Vice Admiral Fletcher wao do. She was loath to leave Navy personnel down there but she o report this. The ss she had of this system from six months ago showed none of this orbital infrastructure other thaation. Whatever was going on here was outside her pay grade, and she wasn’t nearly as gung-ho about a as her former Captain aor.

  “Pilot, plot a course out of the system a us back to Varlen so we report this.”

  ***

  “Shouldn’t we radio them?” Lucas asked as he watched the stealth STO ship turn to leave.

  Alexander shook his head. It wasn’t clear when the ship arrived in the system, but they must have do far outside the system boundary to pletely mask their jump. It was ahing they would o watch for. The only reason they khe ship was here and could track it, was because one of the new camera satellites actally picked it up passiween the camera and one of the ps. “As much as I want Krieger and his people gone, I don’t want the STO to know we detect their ships.”

  “Gotcha,” the young man said with a smirk.

  They watched for a few more hours until the ship jumped out of the system. Now that Alexander khe secret of how they masked their jump signatures, it wasn’t all that impressive. It was certainly clever though, so he would give the STO that.

  “I don’t want anyone gossiping about our test visitor, am I clear?” He made sure everyone in the and room heard him.

  There was a chorus of affirmative replies. Alexander wasn’t sure that would be enough to keep Captain Kreiger and his people from hearing about it though. He sighed internally, hoping he wouldn’t have to expin to the man that he hadn’t bothered unig with the first and only STO ship to pass through here in four and a half months.

  “So what now, Alex?” Lucas asked.

  “Noait until the STO Navy arrives. I don’t imagi will be long.”

  The Fury was only half fihat in and of itself was a moal achievement sidering building a ship from the ground up could take years. Having a prebuilt frame and Alexander’s robots really sped up the process though. Produ was going so fast that they would have run out of material if it wasn’t for the ships they recycled.

  “Lucas, y up the shipyard cams?”

  “Sure thing,” he responded enthusiastically.

  The room's holo emitter switched to a full view of the station and the ship under stru. The other ships had been moved to their own dog cmps and a ring now ran around the outside of the hangar where four ships could moor at the same time. Even that ushing the small station’s capacity. Alexander had to build eight more robots with ion thrusters to keep the station stable and adjust its altitude when necessary.

  It was a bandaid approach, but he didn’t have the time to design a ation or redesign the current one.

  Eden’s Fury had been rebuilt from the i, which made it much easier for the robots to access. All of the internal spaces where the crew would reside during bat had been armored with the test armor specifications Alexander had at his disposal. He would like to say it was leagues better than the old external armor, but it really wasn’t. It was slightly better, but it only weighed about half as much as the old armor, so that was something.

  The rest of the interior spaces were lined with titanium to reduce weight as much as possible while ensuring it was just as strong as the steel alloy that was used in the old ship. Thankfully the Y6X-3H2 system was rife with the minerals that taiitanium, a quite a bit from recyg the other ships.

  Some of the internal systems hadn’t been put i, but they were being manufactured now. That was the main holdup. Ohose were dohe interior could be closed off and the first yer of outer armor could be added.

  “Switch over to printer five, please.”

  The view switched to a massive circur stru with ion thrusters along the e. Ihat id halo ht white light as the printer assembled pos for one of the three new engines Alexander would be adding to the Fury. An attached assembly ptform held the partially assembled thruster in lih the printer.

  Alexander had inally po print the thrusters pside and ship them into orbit. After thinking about it for some time, and dealing with Krieger and his crew poking around, he decided that wasn’t going to work.

  The preparation time to ensure his workshop could hahat sort of scale would have taken too long. And that was only one issue to overe, there were multiple others. Instead, he simply decided to build a massive printer in orbit. With his geion of self-learning robots, it took less time to assemble the prihan it did for him to design it.

  The design was nothing like any printer he had ever seen before, eveher orbital ones. He did away with the print tainer, and most of the ky stuff that went with ensuring a sterile enviro inside a tained area for optimal print quality. Instead, he leaned on aeology te that gap and added a static field geor to the printer ring that he pulled from one of the scrapped ships.

  It took a bit of testing to get the static field to not i ively with the robotic print heads, but he did ma on his small-scale test. It was actually easier to aplish on the full-scale print ring.

  Now he had a twenty-five foot diameter print head with h restris. They weren’t quite as accurate as the printers Dr. Lund said he needed, but they were close enough for now. He was already tweaking the design to remove this slight deficy.

  Alexander even had an idea of how he might incorporate the iion of the static field to help improve the printer, but he o purchase the info packet on how the fields operated before he could go down that route.

  If everythio pn, Eden’s Fury would be plete in a little over a month. If the STO reacted immediately, they might arrive before that happened, but he somehow doubted that would be the case. From what he saw so far, the STO was slow to respond to anything. And he khere was only a small fleet at Varle time he went through. The increased pirate attacks may have prompted more ships in the area, but if they could have sent them off to look for Dawn, they already would have.

  With that in mind, Alexander’s goal was to finish Fury, have Na and his crew pilot it, and take Captain Krieger and his people back to STO space. That left the Epsilon’s Dawn to deal with. He wasn’t keeping the ship, he didn’t he STO breathing down his neck about that, especially since he had already learned all he wao from the vessel.

  Fixing the ship wasn’t an option, but he could retrofit a power supply to the outside to power the jump drive. It just required tapping into the reactor power of one of the two shuttles they now had. Dr. Lund had dohe math for him, and while it would take every ounce of power the shuttle was capable of produg, she assured him that it could form a jump bubble.

  The rest of the shuttle, including life support, would o be offlio make it happen though. That meant he o fly the shuttle and remain on the Dawn sinobody else could survive during the passage between systems otherwise.

  It would also take pnning and coordination to tow the ship outside the gravity of the system and jump it, not o multiple times. That would be a challenge, but he was certain they could make it happen.