Blue Star Enterprises

The shuttle landed in the mostly intact hangar aboard the refueling station and he waited for the air to be sucked out of the storage bay on the shuttle. Some of the loose debris floating through the space pinged off the shuttle's hull lightly, sounding like hail.

Before the air was completely removed, Alexander radioed the pilot. "Branston, you may want to just float nearby with your static field up. There is a whole lot of junk floating around, and I don't want to risk you or the shuttle if some of it comes tearing through this space."

"You won't hear me argue," the man stated. "You gonna be ok by yourself?"

"I should be. I just want to check on the construction bots and see just how much damage Eden's Fury took."

"You're the boss. Ping me over the radio when you're ready for a pickup." That last response came out extremely muted in the thinning atmosphere of the cargo bay but he caught it anyway.

Alexander gave the man a thumbs-up before stepping off the shuttle. The thin walls of the hangar had more holes in it than Alexander could count. He sighed internally at the damage, even though the hangar was never designed with an attack in mind. Even if he had armored the walls, he doubted they would have held up.

The door to the airlock that led to Eden's Fury had a few holes through it and was nonfunctional. He suspected as much after seeing the rest of the damage but it still annoyed him. Alexander moved over to a large rent in the wall where something had struck the station and ripped a large gash in the hangar wall.

With a bit of effort, he managed to expand the hole and squeeze through. The only problem was that he was now outside the airlock and the station. Alexander pushed himself across the space between the station and the ship. As he floated through space, he took in the damage he could see.

The station looked mostly fine other than the hangar. Most of the fire had been focused on the Fury and not the station itself. He would need to go into the ore storage to see if the smelter survived the attack. If it didn't he was going to need to purchase a new one from STO space. The construction bots were also in there, hiding behind the unprocessed ore. He hoped that had been enough to protect them.

With a flip, he landed feet-first on the hull of the ship and didn't even pause as he started walking to the missing section of Fury's hull. It was easy to get inside the ship from there since Alexander had left the door open to prevent anyone from pressurizing the ship and trying to seize it.

Considering the melted metal trails marring that bulkhead as well, it was probably good that he had.

Upon entering the ship, the first thing he noticed was that it wasn't nearly as dark as it should be. All the holes let in the light of Y6X-3H2's star, casting ominous blue-white beams of light through the interior. It would have given the interior of the ship a rather calming feel if not for its source.

Fury's reactor was dead, or Alexander would not have risked coming aboard. How it had survived the fight, and not melted down was beyond him, but Lucas had used it to great effect to cripple or outright destroy more ships than should have been possible. It proved his theory that he could pump energy straight from the reactor into a laser, but Alexander wasn't sure how he felt about that. It shouldn't have worked for more than a shot or two. And it was extremely dangerous.

Class 4 fusion reactors were not meant to have that much energy drawn from them like that. It tended to disrupt the flow of plasma unless the reactor was specifically designed to handle the extra load. Normally, the power conversion unit was designed to handle converting the heat of a reactor into usable power. What Alexander did was bypass the safety interlocks that ensured the unit didn't pull too much energy from the reaction to cause it to fail.

Causing it to fail is essentially what Lucas did. He drew too much power from the core and the reaction couldn't be maintained any longer and it simply fizzled out. It was safer than a core breach, but reactivating a reactor that was safely shut down, versus one that went offline unexpectedly were two very different processes.

The first only required you to reinsert the fusion activation crystal and run the startup sequence. The second required you to purge the entire core, and the fuel lines, open up the core to check for damage, and then do a partial restart and proper shutdown sequence before even getting to the startup sequence. It was weeks of work.

Alexander wasn't here to do that today. Purging a core and fuel lines on an undamaged ship took two weeks. And there was no point starting the process on the Fury until it was repaired. He still planned on repairing the ship, even though it was even worse off than it was the first time.

He was going to go about it a bit differently this time around though.

The only reason Alexander was on the ship today was to see if the core was intact and check the laser.

When he entered the engineering section, he found the reactor room to be nearly untouched. It wasn't for a lack of trying on the enemy's part though. There were numerous dents in the walls where rounds had nearly come through. When he examined the walls, he found that they had been triple-armored by the previous owner. The armor had been cleverly hidden behind normal bulkheads. It would certainly add bulk to the ship, but he could see the appeal of protecting the reactor like that. He wondered if he could do something similar but with newer, lighter materials.

It seemed even now this ship still had some surprises hidden away. He wasn't too concerned about that though, he would find them all when he stripped it down to the frame to start from scratch.

As for the laser, he wasn't sure how Lucas had hit anything with it toward the end of the fight. Most of the outer casing had melted into a large blob at the bottom of the turret, along with the blown or shot-out super-capacitors. The artificial gravity must have remained active for most of the fight.

Alexander couldn't see the condition of the part that sat outside the ship, but going by how distorted the piece of metal closing off the old opening was, it probably wasn't great. Pumping power directly from the reactor was a no-go unless he found much better materials to handle the heat. He didn't want to risk the lasers melting like this during a battle with people aboard.

After exiting the ship, he floated back over to the station and used the scaffolding to climb his way to the ore hangar.

The large hangar door only had two holes punched through it, but they ran almost the entire length of the door. Unlike the airlock, the ore door clam-shelled open, so the damage didn't have much of an effect on them. They were also thicker and designed to take the abuse of rocks bouncing around, so they were very much still working.

When he got inside, the first thing he could see was the smelter sparking violently. He hurried over and disconnected the power to the unit. It had taken three direct hits but was somehow still operational. He would need to pull the service panels apart when he got time and see if he could repair the damaged parts without replacing them.

One of the robots had been crushed by a large chunk of rock. It seemed like one of the pirate's rounds must have struck the rock, dislodging it in the zero-gravity environment, which sent it careening into the robot.

While annoying, one dead robot wasn't all that bad. The other five were still undamaged. He replaced their chips and reactivated them. Then he pinged Branston to come and pick him up. They had some ships to recover.

***

Vitor Krieger slowly opened his eyes, his head was pounding something fierce, which let him know he was alive at least. The room he found himself in was painted white. A hospital maybe? It wasn't the med bay aboard the Dawn, that he knew for sure. The STO Navy didn't paint the interior of their ships, except for directional lines on walls and floors. Most corridors were bare metal, coated to prevent oxidation but that was it. The outside of their ships was much the same since the paint didn't last long with all the UV radiation in space. He knew there were coatings to prevent that sort of thing, but someone in command either thought it was a waste of money or a waste of time to splurge for something like that for warships.

Some of the noisier areas, like the mess, sported sound-deadening panels on the walls, but that was the only consolation Navy ships got as far as aesthetics and comfort were concerned.

When he turned his head, he saw a man snoozing in a chair across the room. The man wasn't wearing Navy-issue clothing. That meant either he was captured by pirates, which seemed unlikely considering the pristine state of the room, or by whoever lived on Eden's End. Neither was a good prospect for a man in his line of work.

When he checked for the inevitable handcuff keeping him restrained to the bed, he found his hands weren't restrained. When he moved his feet, he didn't feel anything there either.

His surprised gasp woke the man in the chair.

The man jerked to a standing position and saluted him. "Sorry, Captain. Had I known you would wake up so soon, I would have had someone replace my watch."

Vitor narrowed his eyes at the man. Going by the proper salute and the man's jump to attention, it wasn't a great leap to realize the man once served in the Navy. He was too young to have retired though. "What is your rank, soldier?"

The man swallowed. "None, Captain. But my former rank was First Lieutenant. You can just call me Branston."

Why did that name ring a bell for him? He tried to shake the fog out of his head. His mind was usually sharp, even before his morning coffee, but this was different. "You drugged me?"

"You and the rest of your crew were sedated for the trip back. It was for your safety," Branston stated.

Vitor snorted at that. "I'm sure it was. …How many of my crew survived?" he asked, dreading the answer, but he needed to know.

"Um… thirty-six," the man spoke quietly.

Vitor let his head fall back on the pillow and squeezed his eyes shut. That was less than a quarter of his crew when the Marines were included. That loss alone might see him stripped of his Captaincy. The loss of a top-secret ship certainly would. Assuming he ever got back home. "Are we prisoners, slaves?"

"Huh? What? …Uh, I don't think you're prisoners. And you're definitely not slaves."

"Are you in charge here then?"

"No… Oh, Alex did ask me to radio him when you woke up."

"Alex? Alexander Kane?" Krieger asked.

The man nodded and held up a finger to ask for some time. Vitor blinked in surprise at the gesture. The man may have been navy at one point, but he hadn't been for some time if he used mannerisms like that in front of a superior officer. Not that Vitor was his superior.

Vitor got treated to a one-sided conversation as the man radioed someone. "Hey, Alex, yeah, he's awake. Ok, I'll put you on speaker."

The speaker on the little handheld radio crackled to life, but it sounded slightly muted to him. "Captain Krieger, I'm glad you made it. You had us worried for a bit there."

"You know who I am?" he asked.

The man on the other side of the radio chuckled. "It was written on the tag of your suit."

"Ah… And I assume you are Alexander Kane. Were you the one who rescued me?"

"I was one of the people that came to your rescue. You'll have to excuse my absence, there is a lot of work to be done after the attack."

Vitor decided to take an educated leap with his next question. "Find anything of interest while you're roaming my ship?"

Alexander laughed. "I was hoping you wouldn't figure out where I was. But I guess they don't give command of a ship like this to idiots. I must say, it's quite the vessel, Captain. I don't believe I've seen anything quite like it. You wouldn't happen to know how they made this armor do you?"

Vitor wanted to shake his head at the man's gall. "Fraid not. Even if it wasn't top secret, which it is," he pointedly reminded Kane, "I wasn't one of the engineers who came up with it."

"Hmm, that's a shame," was all Kane replied back.

"So what now?" Vitor asked. "You plan on keeping us prisoner while keeping the Epsilon's Dawn to yourself?"

"Stars above, no!" the man stated over the radio. "I think we both know the STO would not look too kindly on me for doing either of those things. And I have no desire to be labeled a pirate."

"Does that mean me and my people are free to go or contact STO command?"

"Well, sure. There's just a minor problem there. We don't have a Qcomm array in the system. So contacting them isn't really an option. I can give you your ship back, but I don't have the facilities to repair something like this. And we don't have any FTL-capable ships. Well… One of the damaged pirate ships might still be FTL-capable, but I don't need to be the one to tell you why flying a ship without a transponder into STO space is a bad idea. That means unless the Navy comes here looking for you, you might be stuck with us for a bit."

"A bit?" Vitor asked. "How long is a bit?"

"Hmm. Lemme think real quick… Probably around eight months, give or take a month."

"What! That's ridiculous. You're telling me there is no other ship that can take us home or get word to the Navy?"

***

Alexander felt bad about lying to the man, but he had already had Damien ask Captain Shall if he would be willing to assist. The man had categorically refused to help anyone who had any connection to the STO. It didn't seem like the eccentric Captain was willing to leave at the moment anyway. Especially with how hot local space was, and how angry the pirates were likely to be after this defeat.

It was probably for the best, Alexander didn't trust Shall anyway. He already had him on video inspecting his workshop and the lock on his storage area. He didn't care if the man was the uncle to Damien and Lucas, if he stole anything, he was getting locked up.

Captain Na wasn't an option either, as Destiny wasn't back yet, and he somehow doubted Mingyu would be willing to transport STO people after what they did to him and his crew.

Putting the radio away, Alexander picked up the piece of broken armor he had recovered from outside the ship. He held it up to his chest and he couldn't tell the difference at a glance. There was no doubt in his mind, that the armor was made from pure carbon but he wasn't convinced it was the same as his body. He would need further testing to verify that.

Either the STO had stumbled upon this design by accident recently, or they had finally managed to reverse-engineer it based on that alien ship Dr. Lund had spoken about. If everything checked out, this was clear evidence that his body was of alien origin. While Alexander didn't like jumping to conclusions it seemed obvious that it was the same. The real question was, who were these mysterious aliens? And if they were so much more advanced than both humans and Shican, why were they hiding?

Although… Now that he thought about it, maybe they weren't hiding. If the STO was able to reduce their jump signature based on some alien design, and practically go unnoticed in space, who's to say the aliens weren't doing the same thing, only better?