Blue Star Enterprises

Alexander stood next to Lucas, inspecting the hardware interface the man had put together. It was-

"Don't give me that look," Lucas said before Alexander could finish his thought.

"I wasn't giving a look," he stated, surprised that the man had called him out.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

Lucas snorted. "Yes, you were. You may think you do a good job of hiding your feelings Alex, but anyone who really knows you can see the minor changes in your body or even the pauses in your avatar that you use to project what you're thinking. And yes, I know the interface is ugly and doesn't fit into the form factor you asked for. Trust me, I tried. You also didn't ask for pretty, you asked for functional and that's what you got. I'm going to need your help to do the rest."

Alexander held his hands up in submission. "Fair enough," he admitted, earning a wry smirk from the younger man.

"It works though?" Alexander asked.

"It does. And it wasn't easy to cobble together with your requirements. Those processors are a bit odd."

Alexander had noticed similar oddities when first working with the processors. He wasn't sure if it was due to the strange architecture, the materials involved in their manufacture, or the early implementation of room-temperature quantum processing for self-learning algorithms but whatever the cause, the processors didn't always work as you might expect.

The issues didn't affect the processing capacity or the processor's ability to carry out accurate commands, it was more to do with the functionality of the new processors. Even with Alexander's tweaks and the accuracy of the nanoform lattices, he had a seventy percent failure rate on the newly produced processors even when there were no manufacturing defects that he could find.

He thought that quirk was related to the age of the processors he first tested but it had carried through to the new batches as well. It seemed to be some sort of design problem but he hadn't had time to dig into the actual architecture of the processors to figure out what might be causing the issues. For now, he would just work around it. The processors were cheaper to manufacture than buying advanced chips from STO space even with the error rate and exotic materials they required. The ones that failed the tests simply got recycled, so it wasn't like the materials got wasted.

Over the next few days, Alexander worked with Lucas to refine the hardware to fit inside the cubic form factor he had wanted. Lucas wasn't lying when he said it was difficult. Eventually, they did come up with a pseudo computronics cube, and it was only possible thanks to his new nano-assembler. Without it, the cube idea would not have been possible.

After that came tests, lots of tests. The processors performed a little under what he had expected but it was within estimates of loss. The thing he was more concerned about was their ability to sync. Alexander took a second cube and stuck it to the first, the alignment pins making sure everything was in place as the two cubes clicked together.

There was more processor loss than he anticipated between the two cubes but he had originally figured it would take three of the new processors to equal one of the supercomputer computronics modules so he was still on track to hit that estimate. When he connected the third unit, he barely passed that margin.

He could have kept going by adding more cubes, but the loss in processing speed seemed to grow exponentially worse with each addition. For now, this would have to work to supplement his shortage of computronics.

With time, Lucas and he could refine the processors and work on a better solution than stacking cubes.

"How are the deployments of new satellites going?" Alexander asked after their tests were concluded.

The man dragged out a long-suffering sigh. "Excruciatingly boring. Had you told me a year ago that launching weapons into orbit would have become this routine and dull, I would have avoided this position."

Alexander chuckled at the man's exaggerated reaction. "Cheer up, I have something new for you."

"You do?" Lucas replied happily, his expression changing in a heartbeat.

Alexander motioned toward the holo display in his lab and the screen changed to show a new satellite, only this one sported twelve open tubes as it rotated slowly in the hologram.

It didn't take Lucas long to figure out what it was. "A missile launcher?"

"Close enough. I call it a missile platform. It's capable of holding and firing twelve anti-ship missiles." Alexander had considered making smaller interceptor missiles but decided against that plan. He didn't need to add yet another weapon to the logistics requirements he already had to keep track of. Discover stories with empire

"I thought the whole reason you didn't want to produce missiles was that they weren't all that effective, especially with your old comput- You're going to put the new processors in the missiles?"

Alexander nodded his avatar. "We won't know if the missiles I equipped the Eden ships with were effective at all until they return, but I somehow doubt they were worth the effort to manufacture. With smarter missiles, they will be much more capable of avoiding incoming defensive fire as well as shrugging off ECM."

"They're your processors Alex, but it just seems like such an awful waste. I guess if they work, they work though."

"You're only saying that because you want more to play with," Alexander laughed.

"You're damn right I do," the man smiled. "Speaking of which, I need more to finish the research core you asked me to build."

"Was that batch seriously that bad?" he asked as he walked over to a fresh crate of processors.

"Not any worse than the others," Lucas admitted. "I've been playing around with the processors, some work better in conjunction with others, so I'm just trying to find the most optimal ones to pair together to build the research core. When it's complete, it should be as powerful as three of the supercomputer computronics. However, it will probably require twenty of your cubes to get there."

If Alexander wasn't manufacturing his own processors, he would have balked at the cost. That would have been multiple billions of credits in hardware alone. Instead, he just sighed. "I want you to make a third computer core as well. It won't need to be as powerful as the research one. When it's complete, transfer all of the facility processes over to it. I want to reserve the two computronics supercomputers for defensive systems only. And stop giving people unfettered access to them, please."

Lucas looked sheepish about that, and he should, the man understood system security far better than even Alexander did. "Dr. Lund was really convincing, and I kind of owed her. She provided some of the math I used in the defensive subroutines for the facility and ship's systems."

He hadn't known that Lund had offered her help to anyone else, but he supposed it made sense. Lucas was a smart dude, but some of the stuff he created was beyond Alexander's understanding. At least now he knew why he hadn't been able to bypass the security.

"Transfer her access to the research core, that's kind of what I wanted it for. Well, that and the academy when it's up and running."

He doubted Nova would take advantage of her access, but if she was running a test while the system was being attacked, that could severely limit their ability to control the satellites around the planet. With a thousand, that might not have been too much of an issue, but Alexander was in the process of doubling that number.

He finished up his work for the day and went home.

The next day, Alexender spent with Yulia. The girl was slightly more withdrawn than usual ever since he had decided to have her train with Damien. He wanted her able to defend herself without having to rely on Dog always being around. When he first thought of asking Damien for this favor, he figured the man would go easy on her since she was a child.

Alexander and Damien's views on training turned out to be wildly different and that resulted in a rather heated argument when he saw the bruises on his daughter. He had demanded to know why he was abusing his daughter. Damien hadn't backed down though, his main reason for training her like he did was because a real attacker wouldn't go easy on her. There were some other points the man had made, but it was the first one that stuck with Alexander. When he sped up his mental faculties to process the man's words, he realized Damien was right, so he let the training continue. That didn't mean he liked seeing Yulia come home bruised and sore after every training session. Every time he saw her like that, he got the urge to find Damien and return the favor.

In a perfect world, Yulia would be able to grow up as a normal child, free from fear or worry. This wasn't a perfect world or a perfect universe though so Alexander had to give her the tools to build her own future free of those worries, especially since he couldn't be there for her all the time.

She may not like it in the short term, but he hoped someday she would understand why he decided on this course of action.

He chose not to dwell on those thoughts, instead, he switched his focus to Yulia. "How are the new go-carts?" he asked as they walked toward the racetrack.

"They're good, but I still wished they were faster," she stated, coming alive.

Alexander chuckled. For her eleventh birthday, he had worked with Yulia to upgrade the go-carts from something that was more reminiscent of a little child's plastic petal toy to the current go-carts that were completely made from aluminum, had actual rubber tires, a full roll cage, and five-point seatbelts instead of just the simple roll bar and lap belt. He also added a motor that was double the power of the previous model.

He figured if this obsession with speed wasn't something he could turn her away from, he might as well safely encourage it. That didn't mean he was going to capitulate to her request to make them even faster. The other kids were only now getting a handle on the new go-karts.

Another thing he had done for her birthday, was equip the vehicles with datachip scanners so people could now rent them anytime using credits. The extra money went straight to her to do with as she pleased. Most of it went into purchasing cosmetic customizations for her go-cart.

Alexander hadn't gone a whole lot into money management with her. Considering they had no access to STO credits until recently, it seemed like a low-priority concern. Now that they had access to a Qcomm and the STO network and currency, he was beginning to teach her how to handle her money. It was an important skill to learn.

He had also been shifting the contribution system over to credits slowly. BSE was making a bit of money from the new residents, but it was actually the few ships that had dropped off passengers that brought in the bulk of his new income.

Alexander had sold three engine upgrades over the past few months. It wasn't much but each sale got the word out and helped pad his shrinking pocketbook.

Those ships also brought in some unwanted attention as well, both in the form of advertising his new engines as well as delivering unknown corporate spies to his door. Alexander only knew about the second issue thanks to his Qcomm interface filtering all message traffic.

He would have preferred if Omni would have remained ignorant for a few more years, but he already knew that wasn't the case. From the few communications he had already intercepted, it was clear Omni had become aware of his sale of engines to Fletcher and the spies had been tasked to figure out how he had beaten their output specifications.

He didn't know how the megacorporation had learned of his deal with the Vice Admiral, but they had. If it wasn't for his efforts to monitor message traffic, the spies would have been attempting to get into his systems already. Right now they were mostly just waiting for confirmation to act, but he couldn't be sure they hadn't already done some espionage since they arrived.

Obviously, Alexander wasn't going to allow that to continue, but he had decided to take a page out of the corporate playbook by playing dirty. Instead of getting directly involved right away, he altered the information being sent to Pembrooke and used one of Omni's own people against the rest of them. The man was rather adroit at locating his fellow spies and disrupting their work.

He had chosen Pembrooke for a few reasons. The man knew him, sort of, but he was also on the outs with Omni according to the real messages being sent to him. Alexander was hoping to make that gap unbridgable to see if he could sway Pembrooke over to his side. A man of his talents and experience would be a huge win.

While it was amusing to screw with Omni's spies, that amusement quickly faded when one of them had been arrested trying to break into a secured area. After being questioned, the man had lied through his teeth. Alexander assumed the man had finally figured out something was off and decided to act on his own. That wasn't good. If the other spies figured out something was up, he might have issues. While he was pretty sure he had the identities of all the Omni people, he needed to be sure. And who better than a former Omni employee to see to that?

Soon he would confront Pembrooke and lay out the facts. If the man was as smart as Alexander thought he was, he would understand the implications of his actions and the false orders Alexander had fed him. If not, Alexander had no room on Eden's End for spies, and no compunctions about sending them on a scenic trip to the surface.