Blue Star Enterprises-Chapter 4-20

Alexander didn’t wait for the STO to leave the surface before tracking down Lucas. “Is it already done?” Given what he learned from Willard, there was no point disabling the ship now. The man was stuck here anyway.

“About that,” the younger man said with a chuckle. “Getting the bot over there undetected was easy enough, but your whole plan was unnecessary.”

“You didn’t disable their ship?! Good. I’ll be honest, I may have jumped the gun a bit with that plan.”

Lucas looked a bit sheepish. “Umm. I didn’t say I didn’t disable them. I said your plan was unnecessary. Once the robot got over there, I could see that the cooling passages on their outdated engines were already reaching the failure point. To be honest, I’m surprised they made it all the way here without issue. One poke was all they needed to rupture. Nearly took out the robot as well, that would have been hard to explain away, but it’s done.”

Alexander groaned. “Whatever, it’s fine. That just guarantees that the STO can’t issue Willard new orders and even if they do, he can’t do anything about them. It also might get us access to the ship to remove whatever sabotage might be in place.”

“He was planning on staying?” Lucas asked in confusion.

Alexander nodded. “Apparently the STO wants me to attend some inquiry into Fletcher’s death. Pembrooke says it’s probably a ruse to get me onto their playing field so they can deal with me more easily and I agree. The problem is that Willard’s orders are for him to escort me personally, which means he must wait here until I decide to make the trip to Sol.”

“Ah,” Lucas said. “So either he annoys you long enough with his presence that you are forced to deal with him, or you take their offer and leave aboard the Blueridge?”

“Or I evict the STO fleet from the system and the Blueridge mysteriously explodes, which they will blame on BSE,” Alexander added.

“Well, shit,” Lucas stated. “That does sound like something the corporations might set up. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I’m with you no matter what you decide to do, Alex, but just out of curiosity, what are you planning?”

“Honestly, if it was just the STO to worry about, I might take my chances and get rid of their ships while sending some falsified Qcomm message back to the STO to let them know they are transitioning out of Unokane. I don’t want to have to kill innocent people though. And if the corporations are involved, I can’t risk that option anyway, because they would have contingencies in place to ensure the STO knows what truly happened to their ships. So, instead of playing their game, I plan on going to Sol, just on my terms and timeframe. If they don’t like that, well too damn bad.”

Lucus rubbed his hands together in glee. “I know that look, what new technology are you planning on cooking up to help deal with the STO before you head off?”

Alexander chuckled. “I do have a few projects that I would like to have completed before I consider leaving. The new frigate is the most important for obvious reasons.”

“Understandable, but what are the other projects you had in mind?”

“You remember that experiment I was doing on static fields?” Alexander asked with a smile.

***

Alexander and Lucas stepped into the research wing of Atrium D. At one point, it had been a block of living quarters, but Alexander had Yi Na connect the unused apartments and remove all but two entrances. Then, those entrances were locked so only authorized BSE personnel could enter.

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“I thought you said that research had hit a dead end,” Lucas said, picking up the conversation from before they relocated.

“It did, but that was before I left for Asgard. I’m hoping I’ll have some new insights and a fresh pair of eyes never hurts either.”

Lucas shrugged and followed along.

There was a slight pause as Alexander had to wait for Lucas to suit up. The chamber where the experiment was taking place was currently in a vacuum, and they had to pass through an airlock to enter.

Alexander could disable the vacuum, but that would ruin whatever research algorithm the computer was currently running. Considering there may be millions of permutations at play, Alexander wanted to expose the testing to as little outside influence as possible.

After a quick suit test, Lucas gave a thumbs up and the pair stepped into the airlock. It was rather cramped with the two of them inside, but they made it work.

As soon as the interior door opened, Alexander’s hand whipped out and caught the ball of metal that was ricocheting about the interior space and heading straight for Lucas.

The man’s reaction was delayed, but he managed to stumble back into the airlock.

So much for not disrupting the test.

With an internal sigh, Alexander went over to the terminal inside the room and shut down the testing. Whatever the program had been modeling could wait.

The air in the room refilled and Lucas took his helmet off. He glanced around nervously before stepping into the room again. “What the hell was that?”

“It seems the program was testing kinetic motion through static field manipulation. I would say it succeeded.”

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“I’d say,” Lucas muttered as he glanced around at the dented walls. “You may want to add some stricter modeling controls.”

Alexander didn’t respond to the statement. The whole point had been to give the self-learning capabilities of the research core free rein to see what it could come up with. The stricter he made the models, the less experimenting it could do.

He looked over the research notes on the project he disrupted. It had been going on for over a month and started with just simple static field manipulation to lift an object. It would take time to go through the iterative tests to see how the program arrived at this point, but it was progress.

Unfortunately, it was progressing in the wrong direction. The whole point of the metal ball and the containment unit in the center of the room was to allow the ball to fall, and then a rod would launch the ball back up again while the program tried to stop its movement using the static field generator.

Alexander glanced over at the busted containment cylinder. Accelerating a projectile through static field manipulation hadn’t ever crossed his mind, but now he was thinking of possible uses for such a technology.

“I think I need to repair and reset this test, maybe with a separate pseudo-computronic core to keep any testing bias from seeping in.”

“You think that’s wise?” Lucas asked as his foot crunched on a piece of broken metal.

“Maybe with a plastic ball instead of a metal one this time,” Alexander added.

“Probably a good idea,” Lucas commented dryly. “So what now?”

“Pull the research from the core and sift through it at some point. I don’t think it’s going to get me where I need to be though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If the self-learning had made any headway into stopping motion using the static field generator, it would have remained on that path.”

Now that he had his helmet off, Lucas scratched his head. “Isn’t that the whole point of a static field?”

Alexander shook his avatar. “No, that’s a common misconception. A ship’s static field only acts to repel a charged particle or object. With enough processing, you can control where that object goes. That’s how my nano-assembler works.” Alexander paused. “Now that I’m saying it out loud, I should have realized this test would never have resulted in what I was hoping for.”

“You want to recreate your whole,” Lucas gestured to Alexander, “right?”

“Yes. My internal interface labeled it a defense field. I thought it was just an upgrade to a static field, but now I’m not so sure.”

The pair lapsed into quiet thought for a bit.

Lucas was the first to interrupt the contemplation. “Let’s start from the beginning. What do we know about your defense field?”

“Not much, honestly,” Alexander admitted. “It’s projected from within my body, it seems capable of stopping all inertia on a physical object. That’s about it.”

“Is it though?” Lucas asked. “You know it works in the atmosphere as well. Static fields don’t as far as I’m aware. You also know it has to project some sort of field, which means it can be observed, we just need to figure out how to observe it.”

“True,” Alexander admitted. “Go on.”

“If the projector isn’t on the surface of your body, it must mean it’s internal, which means this defensive field can pass through solid matter. Static fields can’t do that either, which is why they require projectors.”

Alexander kicked himself mentally for missing that. “You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You’ve been a bit preoccupied with other things,” Lucas said with a smirk.

“Fair enough. If your guess is correct and the field can be observed, how do we test that?”

Lucas grinned wildly and Alexander groaned. “I think you just wanted an excuse to shoot something at me.”

“I would never,” the man said in mock horror.

“Uh-huh. Fine. We can do that, but how do we observe the field?”

“Easy,” Lucas stated. “We deploy the best sensors we have, which would be ship sensors. I’m sure they should be able to pick something up. Once we know what, we can narrow it down from there.”

***

Instead of taking the time and effort to print a disconnected sensor suit from a ship, build a mounting solution for it, and provide power to make it all function, Alexander decided to go the quick and easy route.

“I guess this works,” Lucas said from the shuttle’s co-pilot seat. “I was kind of hoping to see what you came up with for a sensor station.”

“I’ll have to develop one once we narrow down what we are looking for, but this will allow us to get to that point much quicker.”

“Fair enough,” Lucas admitted as they neared their destination.

There wasn’t a weapons testing area near the main facility, but Alexander had built one to test the missiles and other weapons quite some time ago. It was located in a ravine between two shallow mountain ranges to ensure any damage was contained. It was also two thousand miles from the facility.

Alexander didn’t know what types of weapons he might test in the future. If he ever developed weapons of mass destruction, he wanted to ensure they were tested far from any people.

He hoped it never came to that, but if the Shican ever came back, he wasn’t pulling any punches.

Despite the ad-hoc nature of the test, it still took some time to set up. The pair had to spend time dialing in the sensors on the shuttle for a specific range, giving them the best possible chance at success. If the test yielded no results, he would have to switch to Lucas’ original suggestion and build a sensor platform with actual ship-grade sensors instead of the shuttle ones, which would slow progress down quite a bit.

Creating a mobile sensor platform would probably take as much time as building an entire ship. Landing one of the Eden frigates was a possibility and would save time. They were small enough to land on the surface of a planet, but with the STO ships in the system, he didn’t want to pull one of the few BSE ships from active duty for a simple test.

Once the sensors were aligned, Alexander walked out to the point that had been marked and gave Lucas a thumbs-up.

The man returned the gesture with two of his own before walking behind the mounted grenade launcher and pulling the trigger.

The three dummy rounds impacted Alexander and he sighed.

His defensive field did not engage, which meant it could detect an actual threat. He wasn’t about to allow anyone to shoot live explosives at him, but Lucas had a second option. The man hauled the weapon crate over to the table and pulled one of the flechette miniguns out.

With a bit of effort, he managed to get it onto the table and sighted in.

Alexander waited for Lucas to give a thumbs-up before he returned one of his own.

His gesture was followed shortly thereafter with a string of flechette rounds and a red flashing warning inside his mind space.

[WARNING THREAT DETECTED!]

[COUNTERMEASURES DEPLOYED]

[DEFENSE FIELD ACTIVATED]

Expecting it that time, Alexander tried to feel for or see the trigger mechanism within his light show of a code so he could activate it at will. Nothing stood out to him and he let out a sigh as the flechettes all seemed to impact an invisible barrier about a foot from his body and stop.

While he waited for Lucas to check the sensor readings, he plucked one of the projectiles from the air and examined it. It was completely undamaged by the abrupt halt, which was surprising. The flechettes weren’t exactly durable. Their whole purpose was to shatter before they could punch through a station wall, which was why they weren’t the greatest weapon to use against an armored adversary.

An increased volume of fire had been the answer to that problem, which led to the development of the flechette minigun, a joint project between Alexander and the engineers working for Damien.

Alexander looked up and saw Lucas waving in excitement. It seemed like the sensors had detected something after all. Maybe he would finally make some headway on this project.