Blue Star Enterprises

Alexander stood off to the side and watched as the kids raced around the track he had set up in the old parking garage.

He noted Yulia’s razor focus as she pulled up behind the other kids, ready to lap them. Alexander wasn’t surprised by this. The other kids hadn’t had much time in the go-karts, which was easy to tell by how they weaved back and forth and bumped into each other.

They were all laughing and having a good time though, so winning probably didn’t matter to them as much as it did Yulia.

A good deal of the drifter children were present along with some of the new arrivals to take their turns racing. Alexander noted more of the local children’s parents attended this event than they had the play. He could understand that racing might be more interesting than watching a play, but you should support your kids no matter what.

Another thing that came to his attention over the last few days was a slow increase in hostile looks from some of the locals as they glanced his way. He wasn’t sure why the new hostility was appearing now, and only seemed to be coming from the drifters and not the new arrivals. He would need to ask the Council to look into it to see if there was some underlying issue that he could fix.

Alexander suspected a few possible causes for this sudden change in mood. He was rapidly changing Eden’s End and had dumped twelve hundred refugees on the population which was likely causing friction between the two groups. He also knew there was friction amongst the drifter population. Some wanted things to remain the same as they had always been, while others welcomed the quality of life improvements that Alexander had brought. Most of the latter group were part of the population who actively worked with Alexander to implement those improvements.

As much as he would like to set aside an area for the traditionalists just to make them happy, that simply wasn’t possible. They either needed to learn to fit in as things changed, ignore the changes, or leave. He wasn’t going to waste resources building them their own area where they could toil away using inefficient methods when quicker more efficient ones were easily available to them. That was just idiotic.

In a way, their reticence to improve their own lives was the sticking point for Alexander. He could appreciate people wanting to hold onto their traditions, but not when they actively caused hardship. That stubbornness to change and adapt is probably why he simply didn’t care what they did. And now that he had a whole new group of people who were more than willing to accept his changes and work with him, he cared even less about the traditionalists.

He knew this was a bad mindset to have, he should care equally about everyone on Eden’s End, but he just couldn’t do that.

With the multiple attacks, and Yulia’s kidnapping, he saw these freeloaders in a new light.

Alexander paused and did the mental equivalent of a deep breath. Calling the traditionalist drifters freeloaders was unfair. They weren’t freeloaders. They worked, harder than they probably needed to. And that work did provide extra food and other services to the rest of the population. He just had a hard time thinking of them as anything else ever since Yulia’s attack. His declaration to get rid of Harlow and the threat he posed to Yulia, him, and Eden’s End seemed far more important.

They had a new reminder just a few days ago that Harlow hadn’t given up. With the constant trickle of refugees that seemed to keep coming in ever since that first group, there was bound to be another attempt to capture him. One man was caught with a weapon in intake. Instead of surrendering, he attempted to shoot his way out, injuring the other civilians who had arrived with him, but the guards were quick to take him out.

Crazies are crazies and normally Alexander wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but times had changed. Until proven otherwise, he assumed all threats had come directly from Harlow. It didn’t take long to be proven right at least this time. Damien’s people found a data chip on the man with another bounty offer from Harlow. A day after that a ship tried sneaking into the system, maybe they were related to the first man or were a separate party entirely, it wasn’t clear. As soon as one of the modified robots approached the ship to scan it with the ultrasound device that Alexander had come up with to at least locate hidden weapon compartments, the ship tried to run for it. It even activated its weapons and Fury was forced to destroy the vessel.

With all that on his mind, the traditionalists would have to forgive him if he had little compassion for their complaints.

Maybe the Council had some ideas for how that group could be mollified. He wasn’t going to do anything drastic like evict them for complaining, that would be super hypocritical of him considering he had agreed to let them stay and live how they wanted when he first arrived.

Alexander was pulled out of his thoughts as people started clapping. He quickly joined in. It seemed the race had finished. A simple holographic display showed the race order.

Yulia had finished two laps up on everyone else, which wasn’t a surprise. He assumed once the kids got more comfortable with the go-carts, that her lead would evaporate, and she would be forced to improve if she wanted to stay on top.

It would be a good lesson for his daughter to learn.

He stuck around for another race but had to leave after that one, work demanded his attention. He said goodbye to Yulia and left her in the care of Dog.

The much-improved robot had an inbuilt pulse rifle module now, making the robot far more useful as an actual guard dog. After the attack, Alexander had considered building Yulia a fully armored augment suit to help keep her safe. Yulia probably would have found it exciting, at least at first. Thankfully, he came to his senses before printing the thing. He wished he would have done so before wasting the time designing it though.

He supposed it wasn’t truly wasted time. If she ever did need an augment suit, he had the design schematics ready to go. Considering she was growing every day, he would need to adjust the design weekly, but he was more than up for the challenge.

It didn’t take him long to arrive at his workshop. The old parking garage was nearby, making it ideal for both him and Yulia. And while it was a bit annoying for the other kids to get to, they also came over to this area for the playground. That would likely change soon as the other domes were fixed, but for now, it was convenient for his daughter.

The first thing he checked on when he arrived at his workstation was his orbital printers. They were still chugging along on the parts for the control ships. The log showed a few part faults that had to be removed and sent back to the smelter, but that was expected.

When Alexander first encountered these random fault issues, he wasn’t sure what was causing them. It hadn’t taken him long to trace the root cause though. The print errors were a byproduct of the fact he wasn’t using a clean environment to print in. Using the static field as a replacement for the clean room of the printer worked quite well and kept material costs low. It wasn’t perfect though.

Occasionally, the field would push a dust particle into the print area, instead of redirecting it away. This issue happened to ships on occasion as well, which is why ships had thicker plating at the front. With the static field slowing the dust, the plating could absorb the impact of any small particles.

Normally, Alexander didn’t care. The part being printed would be removed for recycling and the print would begin again. Eventually, he would be printing much larger items, or entire assemblies at a time. He couldn’t afford to have dust and debris entering the print area in those cases. It would be a time-consuming process to disassemble the part to remove the damaged component if that happened, which would render any advantage his printers gave him null and void.

Alexander pulled up his latest orbital printer schematic and looked to see if he could make any further improvements to it.

The current orbital printers were the twelfth iteration of his design and the same schematic he was looking at now. With everything going on, he hadn’t had time to come up with a solution to the intermittent print quality issues.

He broke the design down and started from scratch. Since he stayed at home during the night to watch over Yulia ever since the attack, that had given him plenty of time to catch up on some learning modules. The one he had been looking forward to the most was the static field engineering module he had purchased during his trip to Varlen.

Based on his experience with the devices, he knew there wasn’t all that much to them, but the actual engineering behind them was rather complex.

It seemed that generating a static field capable of interacting with matter was a rather involved process.

Alexander wondered how his own defensive field compared in complexity. Maybe one day he would figure that out.

Now that he understood the engineering behind the device, he realized the static fields were wildly inefficient. He didn’t know if this was because they worked well enough that nobody cared enough to make them better or if he was able to see these issues because of his ability to put information together from sources he had personal experience with. Either way, he saw an issue and a possible solution to it.

Going on a hunch, Alexander designed and built a new generation of static field generators.

The devices had already been tested over the last few weeks, proving they worked at least as well as the old design. His new design still projected the field that charged particles so the second field could interact with them, but instead of having that second field on at all times, it only activated in the presence of those actively charged particles.

His theory as to why the occasional particle slipped through, was that it was caused by the two fields interacting and weakening the initial charge.

With the second field only coming online after charged particles were detected, it both used less power, could be activated as far out as the initial field, and had less risk of stripping the charge from any dust or debris.

It would take far more testing to see if that was the case, but considering his early tests proved the new design worked, and used less power, he wanted to implement it into his printer. It would be much safer than slapping it onto a ship and hoping for the best.

He had further ideas on how to use the static field with his printers, but that would have to wait until he did some testing and understood the technology a bit better.

The new printer took shape and Alexander was pleased by the result. Normally a bit less power draw would be inconsequential, but that wasn’t the case with the printer he was planning on making.

He was utilizing all his ship resources to the best of his ability, but it was time to take that next step. This printer would make that a reality.

Alexander added the new printer to the queue and pulled up one of the ugliest ship designs he had ever seen, and he just so happened to be the architect behind it. The wholly original design consisted of a square crew section, followed by three exposed scaffold sections that led to an engine section.

The open scaffolds formed an inverted triangular shape with all of them having crawl spaces inside them so the crew could get to the engines to make repairs in an emergency. It wouldn’t be too arduous a trip through those areas because there would be no artificial gravity in those sections, even when he found enough gravity plating to outfit the rest of the ship.

These design decisions left the ship looking a bit like a filleted fish. That was until you added the modular sections.

Much like with his robots, Alexander didn’t want to design individual ships to perform specific roles. He didn’t have the resources to go down that route any time soon, so everything he built needed to be as multipurpose as possible. This ship would be capable of taking on multiple utility roles. The main two he had in mind at the moment were ore hauling and cargo transportation.

Without the learning module on how to build FTL arrays, the ship would be stuck working inside the system. That was fine for now since he mainly needed it for the ore hauling at the moment.

The overall dimensions of the ship were slightly larger than Eden’s Fury, but the entire structure would fit within his new printer ring once it was complete. With a little nod to how ugly the ship was, Alexander dubbed the design, the fishbone.

He only wished others appreciated it as much as him. He still recalled what Jasper had said to him when he first laid eyes on it.

"Alexander, I say this not to be mean," his friend stated. "This is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I know you prefer function over form, but you should really think about making your designs look a bit nicer if you ever wish to sell them."

The critique was a bit harsh but understandable. The ship was an ugly square thing, with zero attention to aesthetics put into it. Alexander’s goal with the ships was to build them as quickly and efficiently as possible so he could expand his ability to procure resources. He didn’t need the ships to look pretty to do that.

That’s where the attachments came in. They did not lend any improvement to the fishbone’s overall look. If anything, they made it look even uglier. The ship looked like a fat fish when the two large ore containers were attached to the exposed scaffolding.

The transportation containers weren’t much better. They stuck down from the overall body, making the fish look like it had udders. There were other transportation configurations, but the four-down one allowed the ship to carry the most cargo. With the ship configured like that, it could carry up to eight of the thrusters he had sold to Vice Admiral Fletcher.

It was an impressive cargo capacity for such a small ship, and that was all that Alexander cared about at the moment.

Assuming his new printer performed correctly, the new fishbone ship would take a little over two months to complete.

He quickly finished up his work and headed home. Yulia would be arriving soon, and she would be very hungry.