Blue Star Enterprises

There was a lot to be said about automation, but sometimes it just wasn't feasible to use it. Alexander was experiencing one of those times.

He cut away the wall with a torch, but the confined space and sensitive wiring behind it made the job far harder than normal.

He was currently aboard Resolve, modifying the ship to fit the new comm node. It felt a bit sacrilegious to cut up one of his creations in such a haphazard manner, but it was the most expedient method of getting the project done.

The crew were all planet side for some rest and relaxation, so he was alone up here. That gave him time to ponder the implications of Fletcher's gift, which had arrived a week ago.

The research data alone had been staggering but ran along parallel lines to Alexander's own efforts. Other than a few new ideas, that he integrated into his manufacturing processes, he hadn't been able to learn much about how the unknown aliens built their ships because the STO hadn't ever figured that out either.
Continue your saga on My Virtual Library Empire

They did have a few ideas on how the aliens might have accomplished it, but it was all speculation. Alexander wasn't surprised to learn that one of those ideas involved printing at the atomic level as he had postulated.

After going over the research and taking a few samples from the ship, specifically from areas where the hull seemed to curve as well as sections that included the outer armor along with a cross-section of the interior, he changed his hypothesis on the alien's methods.

Alexander still thought atomic printing could be used to create a similar result, but he was leaning toward another method used by the ship's original creators. That method consisted of growing the ship. The STO hadn't thought of that possibility because they lacked a key detail that Alexander didn't. That was the fact that he had seen the self-repair capabilities of his own armor in action.

The dead ship didn't display any sort of regrowth, and Alexander's tests had been inconclusive, but he wagered the growth was brought on by a whole lot of energy as well as some stored medium, which may have been stored in the missing aft section.

He likened it to the growing of crystal, and now he felt confident that method was exactly what was used to create these ships.

The samples he took from the ship had none of the tell-tale signs that printing left behind. Even with his nano-assembler, there were signs left behind by the lasers.

With those indicators being absent in the alien ship samples, he was confident in saying it wasn't printed. That being said, he had no idea how they went about growing a ship or even how a crystal could be manipulated to grow in a specific way. The idea was just so alien.

That didn't stop him from postulating though.

There had to be some sort of pure environment, either filled with a specific carbon-heavy gas, or pure carbon dust, sort of how artificial diamonds were produced back in his day. It would also have to be under extreme pressure to produce some of the carbon structures, yet devoid of that pressure for others. The armor was some form of lonsdaleite, but that was interspersed by the diamond light tunnels that acted as photoreceptors, both of which required high heat and pressures to create.

The armor then transitioned to a layer of carbon nano-tubes and then into simple carbon fiber composites on the interior of the ship. Every transition to a new material structure was made without fault or other processes to attach the exterior to the interior. As for the curved sections, they weren't truly curved, they were just slightly adjusted growth patterns to the exterior. The closer you looked, the easier it was to see the flat faces of the material.

Building a ship that way would make trying to fix it an effort in futility, assuming it didn't have the same self-repair capabilities that Alexander's own body had.

The pressurized rooms simply held delicate instruments and computers. Considering what Krieger had said, Alexander almost expected to find a bunch of scientists in stasis. There was none of that, and nothing living aboard the ship, he checked.

What Alexander found curious about the alien vessel was the lack of wiring. At least until he discovered the nano-tubes embedded behind the armor and in a few other samples that the STO had cut out.

He assumed that the nano-tubes acted as both a shock absorber for any impacts along the hull, as well as a power conduit.

If that was the case, that was crazy. He did the math based on the sample size he took and estimated that the alien ship was capable of handling two hundred percent as much power transfer as Vanguard. What it used that much power for was unknown.

It certainly wasn't for weapons. The STO had cut out one of the turrets and taken it off for study but left the remains of the other on the ship. Even without the research notes into that turret, Alexander could see it was just a single-barrel railgun. It was highly incongruent with the rest of the technology of the ship, but the weapon was made from the same carbon composite apart from the rails, so it was original to the vessel's construction.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

According to the documents he perused, the STO had taken the railgun research and integrated it into their own Gauss cannons, over a decade ago. That meant the alien weapons were even more anemic than his first attempt at lasers. Not that his newest lasers would have had any effect on the alien ship.

The thermal transfer of the armor was ridiculously efficient thanks to the materials it was built from as well as the multi-layer design.

There was no sign of heat sinks or anything like it aboard the recovered portion of the ship, but there had to be something like it in the missing aft section. It was too bad that section of the ship had never been recovered. Alexander was sure the power and propulsion systems would have been a vast improvement on current human tech just based on everything else he saw.

Considering the scope of the gift, and all he had learned so far, he hadn't actually benefited much from having the broken vessel in his possession. Time would tell if it was more a curse than a gift.

He finished cutting out the last portion of the bulkhead when his radio beeped.

"Alex, you have a Qcomm call from the Lagertha."

That must mean she was successful. He felt relief that Katalynn was still alive. "Patch it through, please."

He turned as the ship holo flickered to life, and Katalynn's gaunt gaze met his.

"Are you okay?" he asked in concern. The woman looked like someone suffering from a long-term sickness instead of someone recovering from wounds received in battle.

"I'll recover in time," she said in a raspy voice. She paused and then added. "Thank you for asking. If it isn't obvious by this call, I won against Isbjorn, but the bastard poisoned his blades. His fleet must be captained by his closest followers though as they all fled as soon as they learned of his death. They have been labeled traitors and deserters and are to be treated as pirates if they remain within Asgardian space. I doubt they will come your way, but I figured I would warn you anyway."

"I'll let my people know to keep an eye out. I'm also glad to see the prototype held together."

She snorted weakly. "That's quite the prototype you built. And I'm already hearing reports from scouts that you have more heading toward the front?"

"Prototype version two," Alexander stated.

"I see. Thank you for reinforcing the border so swiftly. I know your fleet suffered as much as mine, so it would have been understandable if you held them in reserve."

"How- How are things in the capital?"

"As well as can be expected," she said with a tired sigh. "I'm as weak in body and power as possible and there are those who would love nothing better than to point that out or challenge me. Our defeat of Harlow has silenced many of my detractors though. If they tried to make any moves on my position now, they would likely find themselves at odds with the rest of the Jarls. So I should probably be thankful for that. Your position has been solidified as well."

"I wasn't aware it was on shaky ground," Alexander admitted.

"As long as I was Lagertha, you would have been fine. People might complain, but that is human nature. You can't please everyone. If Isbjorn would have won the throne, or there had been no victory against Harlow then you may have been in trouble. However, if that last had occurred, you wouldn't have been alive to worry about it. As it sits now, all I hear are praises for the new Jarl's courage in the face of adversity. I think Jarl Bergson has been spreading that around. The young woman has taken quite a liking to you, Jarl Kane. If you were human, I would suggest a pairing."

If Alexander could have blushed, he was sure his face would have been the color of a ripe tomato.

"What now?" he asked, quickly changing the subject.

"Now we rebuild, we rearm, and we fight off Xin's incursions. Other than that, feel free to keep doing what you do. When you return to Asgard in the future, your ship will be waiting. We can discuss further business at a later time. I just figured I would reach out and let you know everything had worked out thanks to your assistance. Once again I find myself in your debt. If there is something that I can do to repay this in the future, please don't hesitate to ask."

He nodded and thanked the woman before she cut the connection.

Alexander was glad that he no longer had to worry about that. With a new sense of energy, he returned to work on the comm node installation. A few hours later, when he finished, the wall looked exactly the same as it had before he started.

Nobody would suspect that the new cavity contained the armored FTL comm node. And with it being behind three other layers of armor, it was pretty safe from even a direct hit.

His original idea had been to place the nodes in the computer core room, but he had eventually decided against it. While the core was triple armored as well, there were no real places to hide the comm node in the walls.

And this was a technology he wanted to keep secret for as long as possible.

On Lucas' recommendation, Alexander had designed another type of node. It was a single chain node and could be made much smaller because it wasn't designed to handle ship communications or the transmission of holo-data. The new node was the size of a tangerine and was being included in a new series of satellites that would be placed in adjoining systems as an early warning and detection system.

Each system would have a pair of those stealth-coated satellites, to provide both redundancy as well as to help monitor the other satellite for stealth degradation. It was past time they had an early warning system, but with the lack of ships and pilots, using relay scouts like the Asgardians used was not feasible.

Eventually, he planned on covering the entire Asgardian territory as well as parts of the STO with the satellites. Being forewarned would change everything.

In time, someone would figure out what he was up to, but he hoped by then, he would have a massive information net that would make Unokane unassailable by outside forces. And while he would like to share the discovery with Katalynn, he wasn't going to at this moment. He trusted her enough to give her the prototype ship, but there were people like the Lokis that he didn't trust quite yet and she had stated personally that there were corporate spies on Asgard.

The longer he could keep them in the dark about his true reach, the better. That being said, he also needed to take advantage of the goodwill generated by Harlow's defeat.

It was time to capitalize on this increased notoriety and use it to grow the academy. Being this public hadn't been his intention when he first envisioned the school, but he now realized he was thinking too small. His original idea would never allow him to compete with the mega-corporations. It was time to turn The Lund Academy into the finest place of learning in all of human space and entice the brightest minds over to his side.