“Everything is loaded and secured, Captain,” Matthew’s XO stated.

  Alexander had purchased quite a bit of supplies, both food and medical. Then there were the teological items like a smelter. That was just the stuff stored aboard the Talon. He wasn’t even including the items Captain Daniel was transp aboard the Zephyr or the Arklight Industries ship that was carrying the Q rey and teis that would be installing it.

  Matthews nodded. “After we reach our destination, you’ll be the Captain. Perhaps I should start calling you Captain notain Sable has a g to it.”

  His first mate shifted unfortably at being addressed by her first name, but she took the teasing in stride.

  “I believe Captain Blht sounds better,” she responded. “…It will be stra having you aboard the Talon, Sir.”

  Archie smiled, he couldn’t help but be proud. Sable wasn’t his daughter, but she might as well be sihey had been together since she graduated from the flight academy on Ganos. The Hawks were quick to offer her a position, seeing her potential. “You’ll do fihout me. I should know, I trained you myself.”

  The raven-haired woman smiled slightly at his words.

  “Shall we make sure the passengers are ready to depart?” he asked, as they exited the hold.

  “I have a few of our people preparing them, but I agree, we should che them. It’s odd having so many people oalon who aren’t part of the Hawks or aren’t prisoners.”

  Archie nodded in agreement. Finding dispced people wasn’t hard, not with the war ramping up in scale.

  It was getting so bad that the pary governor had even tried preventing them from leaving, g this w or that to try ahem around Ganos. The Hawks’ legal team tore those arguments apart. They had doheir civil duty for aire year. Even if the governor was finally willing to pay for their serviow, the Hawks had prior itments. And the Talon o go in for maintenance.

  As for the people, filtering out the types who would help Alexander and Eden’s End wasn’t too hard. They couldn’t simply take those people and call it a day though. Some had families, so they had to e along as well. Unfortunately, their recruiting efforts had made waves and mees started to show up at their recruitment drives, slowing dowire process.

  The Hawks turhem away, but some of them must have had money or means, because three ships floated nearby, waiting to follow the Talon when she finally departed the system. He couldn’t even stop them from tagging along. With the STO ws requiring people to use designated jump points in member systems uhere was an emergency, following their course would be easy.

  With those additional ships, their fleet had grown from the i ships to eleven now. It included the Talon, Zephyr, the two Hawks gunships, the Arklight transport, an Arklight frigate, twht corvettes, and now the civilian ships.

  It was ridiculous.

  Archie had tried getting the captains of the civilian vessels to leave by expining they were headed outside of STO spad that none of his ships were obligated to defend them in the case of an attack, but they either refused to listen or simply ignored his s. It wasn’t like he could fire on them either, not uhey attacked first.

  It seemed these ships were tagging along whether he liked it or not. Whether or not Alexander would wele all these unknees was another matter. He would o apologize to Kane about this situatiohey arrived.

  The pair made their rounds, making sure everyone was ready to go before they headed to the bridge.

  “Executive Officer Blht, I’ll let you do the honors,” he gestured the womao the Captain’s seat, while he took her normal spot.

  She gave him a single nod of thanks before addressing the crew. “Notify the ships in the fleet, we are heading out.”

  ***

  The Talon was the first to enter Varlen, followed shortly after by the Hawks’ gunships. A few mier, the Arklight vessels appeared all together. Being one of the few panies with clearao install Qs paid well it seemed.

  Archie wished the Hawks could afford a jump synizer. It would have required a superputer on the lead ship to manage such a plex seque the tactical bes of ensuring your entire fleet arrived at the exact same moment were obvious. Even if you jumped at the same sed as other ships, your ces of arriving together were slim to here was always a bit of drifting no matter how well you timed your jumps.

  The Zephyr appeared and Archie sent his respoo the STO’s challehe reply they got this time was wildly different tha time they were here.

  Stay clear of the station, and keep your ons offline, our fleet will be shadowing you while you are in the system.

  He chalked it up to growing tensions with the pirates. Soon his ships were moving through the system toward the far jump point. An hour ter, his sensor operator reported the additional jump signatures of their hangers-on, which had ballooned out to unreasonable numbers during their trip out here.

  Another fifteen vessels had tagged along after they left Ganos, bringing their follower t up to eighteen ships. The odd mix of ships sisted of smaller mining vessels, some haulers which were probably family ships, judging by their smaller size, and then the rger ships which could house dozens or even hundreds of people for all he knew.

  The STO was demanding an answer for the additional ships, but the Talon didn’t reply. It wasn’t their responsibility to answer for these vessels. Either the Captains of those ships vihe STO to leave them be, or the few ships his sers were seeing in the system deemed it not worth their trouble and simply left the civilian vessels alone.

  Archie sighed. That was really their st ce to get rid of those ships. Short of them entering a fleet of pirates en route, he doubted anything else would scare them off at this point. Well, that wasirely true. Once he left STO space, he could calcute his own jump points to throw them off and force them to return home. Doing something like that felt wrong a against everything the Hawks stood for though.

  He would take them out to Eden’s End, if Alexander dehem safe harbor, he would dispatch his two gunships to returo STO space. Either way, ohey arrived, every single person going down was getting subjected to a detailed sing. He had provided a simple warrant ser the st time they were here, but it wasn’t enough to look for criminals who may have avoided actual criminal warrants. The st thing he wao do was dump a bunch of trouble in Kane’s p.

  ***

  Alexander was in the middle of rebuilding Dr. Lund’s testing equipment for the fifth time after she notified him it still wasn’t sensitive or accurate enough for her needs when his radio beeped.

  Gd to have a break from the woman’s project, he stepped away from the design interfad picked up the radio. “This is Alexander, what’s up?”

  “Hey, Alex, it’s Lucas. The Hawks and your friend have returned. I figured you might want to know.”

  Alexander was overjoyed to hear this news. He had been expeg them for a few days now so it was good to know they arrived safely. “Wele them bae, a me know when they get within a half-hour unication dey range.” An hour between reply and response was still quite a bit, but it was manageable.

  An hour and a half ter, he got the first response from Captain Matthews. The man must have sent it as soon as he ehe system.

  “Uh, Alex,” Lucas said over the radio. “You might wanna e to the aer to see what Matthews sent.”

  Frowning, Alexander made his way to the aer. It couldn’t be an emergency, Lucas would have said something about that. He arrived just as Damien was leaving. The man looked slightly more ahan he normally did.

  “Seems we got a few more people thaicipated,” he stated as he walked past.

  Alexauro watch him leave. He was about to ask Damien what he meant by that statement but decided it was better just to find out directly from Matthews.

  The lively versation that had been going on before his arrival, died down as he ehe room. “What’s going on, Lucas? I just passed your brother and he looked annoyed.”

  Instead of replying, Lucas made a flig motion from his terminal that pushed a video to the holo dispy. “See for yourself.”

  “Mr. Kane, as your sensors have probably alerted you by now, we are finally back along with Captain Daniel and all the items you asked us to purchase. Some of those are on the ships that are pinging the Arklight identification. Unfortunately, we picked up quite a few strays along our path. About an hour behind us are eighteen civilian vessels ranging from small freighters, to transports. As far as we know, they are all refugees from worlds Harlow has captured. I wao give you a heads-up as soon as possible as I suspect they are going to request asylum. We obviously don’t know any of these individuals, so whealon arrives, I will be sending dowroops to help facilitate their background checks… assuming you allow them safe harbor. We’ll be in touch shortly, Captain Matthews, out.”

  Alexander’s first thought was, how bad is the war going that this many people decided Eden’s End was a better alternative than staying in STO space? Then he wondered how to house them all until he realized he had no obligation to house any of them.

  He could simply turn all these people away and call it a day… He could. Would he though? He wasn’t sure. Alexander had e to realize the drifters who were w for him were likely the only ones who ever would. A few of the younger geion might e around when they came of age, but that wasn’t all that many more that he could t on. In fact, it was less than a third of the current popution of Eden’s End. The rest were simply not ied or ily opposed to helping him. Those people still tributed to the overall upkeep of the unity, so it wasn’t like they weren’t doing anything. They just didn’t want anything to do with him or the ges he was introdug.

  That didn’t ge the fact that Alexander needed people. He would have preferred to hand-pick everyone he allowed out here or have people he trusted to do it for him, but at some point, that simply wasn’t feasible. It seemed that point was now.

  Before, he might have been forced to turn them away, simply because he didn’t have the resources to expand his barter system to include too many more people. Now that the Q is here, people will have access to their STO ats and credits.

  The holdout drifters probably wouldn’t use either, but that was fine, he could keep providing them tributions in the form of barter. The issue was going to be iing these new people. He wasn’t going to charge the people, who Jasper and Archie picked, rent or taxes as that had been part of the agreement to get them to e here in the first pce. He didn’t have that same dilemma with these uninvited guests and would be charging them appropriately. It would force them to be productive as well as provide a source of ihere were plenty of jobs for people of all skill levels, so there was no excuse for not w.

  If they didn’t want to help out, they could build outside of the facility and live anywhere else on the p if they had the means to do so, but Alexander pnned on submitting a cim over the entire system as soon as the Q was oO w required a few things before cims could be made, which is why he hadn’t do before. While he wasn’t joining the STO, they had a long-unused cuse in their g ws that allowed indepe nations to cim their owories outside of STO space.

  The rules were extremely strid required the sn nation to have its ow, which was three or more ships; aed administration, the w for which was vague; and they didn’t engage in any pirate activities or other items banned by their charter, such as svery.

  There was oher requirement, but it wasn’t really part of any w. The nation requesting snty had to do sh a process that required three STO clerks to attend via holo and the meeting had to be real-time and on the p requesting this independence. You might be able to get past that requirement if you could vihree bureaucrats to e out to your system, but good luck doing that.

  It was wild to think the STO had so much power and reach that they could tell already-established nations that they weren’t reized as suder the STO’s ws. Unfortunately, it was true. The STO held all the cards when it came to human space. Alexander po ge that before they realized he was breaking other STO ws that weren’t covered uheir sn rules. It was an ht on their part, probably because nobody iirety of the STO’s existence had ever been in a position to use these ws to their advantage, something he had no problem abusing.

  Ohis was done, everything on the p and in the system would belong to Blue Star Enterprises. He would o discuss this ge with the Eden’s End cil though.

  The rules only stated there o be elected leaders. It didn’t specify the scope of their powers. He wasn’t going to suddenly give Damien or the other cilors power over the entire p or system. They wouldn’t want it or even know what to do with that much power even if he did. Hell, he didn’t know what to do with that much power either, but he o ensure someone else didn’t swoop in and cim this system. That would be disastrous for Alexander’s future pns.

  Speaking of pns, this ged a lot of Alexander’s. He mentally reahem, pushing his school ssh academy up in importance. With that done, he o speak with the cil and find out how the restru of Eden’s End was going. That meant finding and speaking with Yi Na. The man must be doing a det job because Alexander hadn’t heard a peep or pint since Mingyu’s younger brother took over those responsibilities.