Blue Star Enterprises

Captain Valeria Greaves exited the Goliath transport ship and entered the STO Navy Fleetyard in Varlen. Her ship was still hidden inside the 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 needed to be retasked. Command had refused to transmit new orders over Qcomm, which meant whatever she was doing was top secret, but that didn't make the loss of her previous mission any more palatable.

She reached her destination and checked her dress blues to ensure everything was in order before knocking on the hatch.

The door slid open and a face she recognized greeted her. She slapped a crisp salute. "Vice Admiral Fletcher, I wasn't expecting you personally, Sir." Normally her missions came from the intelligence department. The fact that the head of Navy Intel was here delivering it in person, meant whatever mission she was being assigned was beyond secret.

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

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

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

Still, it was concerning that one of the Erebus class ships had gone silent. They were meant for stealth and reconnaissance, 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 communication windows likely was dangerous. She would need to be cautious in her approach.

Valeria supposed she would find out what waylaid the Dawn when she arrived at the ship's last 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 last scan of the Y6X-3H2 system.

A few hours later, the massive transport ship disgorged its cargo far from prying eyes and the Delta's Eclipse made its way to the nearest jump point.

***

Considering the possibility that hostiles capable of taking down an Ererbus class 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 distance the entire way. She wanted to get a clear picture of what was going on before she committed to entering the system's gravity well.

The ship would likely still be able to jump from most places inside the system, but she couldn't be certain. She knew some pirates were now using cargo containers fitted with gravity plating to produce artificial gravity wells.

Those traps didn't cover a big area, but it was usually enough to throw off the precise calculations of a jump or destabilize a warp bubble enough to trigger the safety overrides built into most commercial vessels. Eclipse had similar safeties, but it also had two supercomputers capable of crunching the math to produce a new jump calculation in less than a second.

"Anything to report?" she asked the sensor operator.

"There is one active 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 correct Navy signature, but the message isn't STO standard, Ma'am."

"Hmm, send it to my console."

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 planet, 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 planet. 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 planet," the sensor operator stated. "We can also see a space station, along with a collection of ships. The emergency beacon 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 unregulated space station was a problem. She couldn't simply approach the planet. It could be a trap. And even if it wasn't, she couldn't exactly communicate with them, given the nature 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 down Delta's sister ship. For all she knew, she could end up just like them, or worse.

The second 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 last of the bad options was to record everything she could and return to Varlen to see what Vice Admiral Fletcher wanted to do. She was loath to leave Navy personnel down there but she needed to report this. The scans she had of this system from six months ago showed none of this orbital infrastructure other than the station. Whatever was going on here was outside her pay grade, and she wasn't nearly as gung-ho about action as her former Captain and mentor.

"Pilot, plot a course out of the system and get us back to Varlen so we can 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 done it far outside the system boundary to completely mask their jump. It was another thing they would need to watch for. The only reason they knew the ship was here and could track it, was because one of the new camera satellites accidentally picked it up passing between the camera and one of the planets. "As much as I want Krieger and his people gone, I don't want the STO to know we can 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 knew the 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 latest visitor, am I clear?" He made sure everyone in the command 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 explain to the man that he hadn't bothered communicating with the first and only STO ship to pass through here in four and a half months.

"So what now, Alex?" Lucas asked.

"Now we wait until the STO Navy arrives. I don't imagine it will be long."

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

"Lucas, can you bring 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 construction. The other ships had been moved to their own docking clamps and a ring now ran around the outside of the hangar where four ships could moor at the same time. Even that was pushing 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 new station or redesign the current one.

Eden's Fury had been rebuilt from the inside out, which made it much easier for the robots to access. All of the internal spaces where the crew would reside during combat had been armored with the latest 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 contained titanium, and he got quite a bit from recycling the other ships.

Some of the internal systems hadn't been put in yet, but they were being manufactured now. That was the main holdup. Once those were done, the interior could be closed off and the first layer of outer armor could be added.

"Switch over to printer five, please."

The view switched to a massive circular construction with ion thrusters along the outer edge. Inside that was a rapid halo of bright white light as the printer assembled components for one of the three new engines Alexander would be adding to the Fury. An attached assembly platform held the partially assembled thruster in line with the printer.

Alexander had originally planned to print the thrusters planetside 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 handle that sort of scale would have taken too long. And that was only one issue to overcome, there were multiple others. Instead, he simply decided to build a massive printer in orbit. With his newest generation of self-learning robots, it took less time to assemble the printer than it did for him to design it.

The design was nothing like any printer he had ever seen before, even the other orbital ones. He did away with the print container, and most of the clunky stuff that went with ensuring a sterile environment inside a contained area for optimal print quality. Instead, he leaned on another technology to bridge that gap and added a static field generator 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 interact negatively with the robotic print heads, but he did manage it on his small-scale test. It was actually easier to accomplish on the full-scale print ring.

Now he had a twenty-five foot diameter print head with no length restrictions. 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 deficiency.

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

If everything went to plan, Eden's Fury would be complete 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 knew there was only a small fleet at Varlen the last 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 need the STO breathing down his neck about that, especially since he had already learned all he wanted to 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 done the math for him, and while it would take every ounce of power the shuttle was capable of producing, she assured him that it could form a jump bubble.

The rest of the shuttle, including life support, would need to be offline to make it happen though. That meant he needed to fly the shuttle and remain on the Dawn since nobody else could survive during the passage between systems otherwise.

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