Alexander looked over the three people standing in front of him. Damien had just finished filling him in on the Council changes.

  He sighed. “When I first asked the Council to look into the growing discontent issue, I thought you would try and find a solution to the problem. That’s kind of the whole point of the Council, you focus on the people’s issues so I can focus on my work. Instead, you went ahead and invited someone who is antagonistic toward the changes I’m making. At least you didn’t agree to his initial terms, but still, it's not great. Kick him off the Council.”

  “We can’t do that,” Damien ground his teeth.

  “If you can’t, then I will,” Alexander said.

  “Sorin was legally accepted based on the rules you established for us, Alex. If you decide to change that because you don’t like it, you will show the drifters that you are no different than any other government and will lose any support you might have earned from the drifter populace. There is nothing that unifies us quicker than someone in power overreaching,” Gabriella responded before the conversation could go any further.

  Alexander gave the woman a scathing look. “So what, just leave him be and hope for the best? By your own admission, he was involved in a scheme to blackmail you, and possibly destroy critical food supplies.”

  “We have no law in place against blackmail,” Damien stated bitterly. “We will be rectifying that shortly. As for the seeds, we can’t prove Sorin or his people were involved.”

  He turned to face his Head of Security. “How much of a concern is he?”

  The entire Council, minus Nancy – or who he had assumed to be the entire Council as of only a few minutes ago – had barged into his workshop to drop a steaming pile of shit right at his feet. To say he was upset would be an understatement, and that was impressive considering his issues with feeling emotions.

  “I don’t know,” the man admitted. “Most of his followers are people who haven’t taken you up on your work offers. My concern is that Sorin’s position will legitimize them, and others will flock toward their cause, or make them cause more trouble because we didn’t bow to their demands.”

  “What a colossal mess,” Alexander said in disgust. “How do we fix this?”

  “We could add positions for the refugees,” Sheila said.

  Alexander shook his avatar. “No. I don’t want any more councilors until this issue with Sorin and his goons is resolved. With only one member, he shouldn’t be able to force any votes through to add more, so long as you three vote against it.”

  “Sorin is right on one account,” Gabriella said. “The traditionalists should have representation, and with them, the refugees as well. Just with people who actually have their best interest in mind.”

  “I agree, which is why there will be changes to the Council after Sorin is dealt with. I would make them now, but that would just make that cockroach crawl back into his hole to cause trouble at a more inopportune time. Do you have enough people to keep track of Sorin and his people?” Alexander asked Damien.

  The man shook his head. “If I did, none of this would have come to pass.”

  “Fine, do the best you can for now, and I’ll work with your brother to see if we can come up with a remote solution to track them.”

  Damien frowned at that suggestion, but nodded in acceptance.

  Alexander watched the group leave, wishing he had been more involved in local affairs and that he had never created the Council in the first place, but he couldn’t change the past now, so he would simply have to deal with the problems that came due to his desire to remain out of local politics.

  After the group left, he didn’t immediately go back to work. If Sorin had been as shady and self-serving as they said, then he certainly could have done more damage if he had been left to his own devices. What he was suspected of doing already was bad enough, but if the man gained enough supporters, he could disrupt food supply, repairs, or any number of other services that the entire population of Eden’s End relied on.

  Alexander would have been forced to step in and deal with the issue if that happened, but that would have turned a large portion of the populace against him. At best, the people would see him as some heavy-handed dictator and simply leave at the earliest possible opportunity. Eden’s End would survive even if every drifter left, but it would put a serious wrench in his current plans, and he felt like there was an invisible clock ticking down for the next issue to reach his doorstep. If it wasn’t for that feeling, he might have ignored the Council’s suggestion and simply removed Sorin and his family.

  The problem was that Alexander didn’t know what Sorin’s goal was. If the man had truly been responsible for blackmailing Gabriella and destroying the seeds, he couldn’t figure out why. A Council seat was hardly justification for actions like that. The man would have been better off growing his supporters and using them to force the Council to add a new position.

  He would have to let things play out and get some evidence against Sorin to prove to the rest of the population just how corrupt he was. It wasn’t ideal, but the cards were already on the table.

  While Alexander waited for Sorin to make his move, he would look into the man’s background. It didn’t seem like Sorin understood politics any better than the other Councilors or Alexander; he was just more devious. The situation Sorin had put into motion sounded more like the start of a comedic movie villain’s attempt at politics than actual politics. Like the man had a working understanding of something, but no experience wielding it. It made Alexander wonder where the man could have gotten this information from. It’s not like political subterfuge was something you could purchase a learning module for.

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  The man’s timing was suspicious as well. Alexander had only witnessed the growing resentment amongst the locals after he claimed the system. It was hard to believe that was a coincidence since he hadn’t made any announcements about the new status of the system. If Sorin was after full control, his actions made much more sense.

  Sorin was also completely delusional if he thought he could pull it off. Even in the infinitesimally small chance that it worked out, he would somehow need to convince the BSE employees and Alexander to go along with it and that was never happening.

  Arresting Sorin after he did whatever nonsense he set out to do would still shake the drifter population, but the blame would fall squarely on Sorin at that point.

  That was the only reason Alexander was allowing this stupid stunt to play out. Even then, he was only giving them two weeks to act. If Sorin and his goons hadn’t done something drastic by then, it was likely that Damien, Gabriella, and Sheila had misread the man. He didn’t think that was the case, but he couldn’t simply go around removing people who were following the rules.

  Even if nothing happened, Alexander was going to remove any sort of political power the Council currently held. He had been debating on taking that step for some time, but saw no immediate need to do that until now. While the people needed a voice, he couldn’t afford for politics to derail any of his projects.

  Two weeks. If nothing happened, he was going to remove the Council’s authority. They would still represent the people, but they would have no actual power. They would need to approach him or the representative he chose in their place. There would be no more of this jockeying for power on his watch.

  Finally calming down enough to focus, he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind so he could finish checking on the projects he had been working on when the three barged in.

  The Talon’s new engines were ready, and his bots were already starting to remove the old ones from the massive ship. In a few days, Alexander would need to go up and personally attach the new thrusters. He could have relegated this work to the linked bots, but he didn’t have the time or patience to write the one-off program, especially now.

  Jasper’s ship was also in the dock, getting a brand new set of Alexander’s Class 4 engines. They were the iterations after the ones he sold to the STO and were one step up on the model that Dr. Nova Lund had explained to him.

  Alexander would have provided his friend the best of the best, but he wasn’t capable of producing anything beyond that iteration yet, and it would have been a bad decision to make his friend’s ship stand out too much. The engines he was getting would put him well above any competition for quite some time. It was the least he could do to thank Jasper and the crew of the Zephyr for all the work they had done for him.

  The new printer was also coming together, looking like some weird unfinished gate ring in orbit.

  He couldn’t wait for that to be completed so the fishbone ship could begin being constructed. Having a dedicated ship would make his work so much more efficient.

  The new control ships were already in the belt along with the Destiny. Mingyu was keeping tabs on the ships and adjusting their work as needed. The other three ships were also out there, taking on ore as the mining bots quickly tore into the asteroids.

  The one complaint Mingyu had was that the mining bots weren’t durable enough. He was already seeing broken components on them. Alexander had provided a printer to replace these items as needed, but he was already designing more robust parts for the future.

  Everything was on track with those projects, and even Eden’s Might was scheduled to be completed in a month. It would have been three weeks, but Alexander pulled the construction bots off the ship to help retrofit the Talon and Zephyr.

  He hadn’t received any response from Captain Krieger yet, even though he had read the news headline that clearly listed the man’s discharge from the Navy. That was a week ago. Either the man had no interest in responding to Alexander, or something else was going on with him.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t sit by and wait for Krieger to respond, so his plans had to be changed to account for the former captain not being involved.

  Alexander had a self-imposed deadline of three months to get the Hawks trained up and as many ships as possible ready to hit the pirate station to recover the five vessels. He hoped three frigates, an assault ship, and two gunships would be enough to take the station.

  He knew all of the crews involved were already running drills and simulations. It wouldn’t be the most accurate simulation since they had no information on this hidden station, but it was the best he could do.

  There was a way Alexander could improve their odds, but it required him to slave one of the frigate’s supercomputers. If he decided to go down this route, whatever ship he chose would be very limited in its ability to run its more advanced systems while it was controlling the pod lasers. That meant it would need a larger crew if it was to be effective in combat.

  It would provide the ship access to nearly sixty of the weaker laser weapons, giving it a hell of a lot more punch, but the trade-off was that it would be much more vulnerable during a fight.

  He wasn’t sure the tradeoff was worth it, but it was something he would think about and test before he decided if it was workable or not.

  After finishing his checks, he tried to go into his design software and do some work, but it just wasn’t happening.

  With a sigh, he secured his terminal and went for a walk. There were too many things on his mind for him to focus on improvements right now. Sometimes he felt like he was standing on top of a house of cards, and if any of them fell over, the entire thing would collapse.

  While he knew that wasn’t true, he couldn’t help feeling that way sometimes. There were just so many moving parts right now, and he needed all of them to work smoothly, or he wasn’t certain what the future would hold.

  He couldn’t even predict what Harlow or Katalynn Char might be up to or how it would affect him going forward. If either one of those people dropped by again, all of his carefully laid plans would go up in smoke.

  That was why he was pushing so damn hard. The one thing Alexander had going for himself was his ability to scale and build much faster than others. He had been told this enough times by so many different people that he had to believe it was true, even though he felt like he was still well behind the curve. It really boiled down to avoiding assembly as much as possible by wholly printing things like entire engines and ships. Connections had to be checked and tightened after the fact, but that was infinitely faster than building each component separately and assembling it.

  The problem was that he was starting from so far behind the STO and other interested parties that he couldn’t ease up. He needed to maximize all of his resources as much as possible, or it felt like he was wasting his efforts. He also couldn’t spend every waking moment designing and building new things. As a father and the owner of BSE, he had other responsibilities. Ones that he hadn’t always done a good job of.

  The Council’s little talk today was a reminder of another responsibility he had neglected. He was sure that whatever Sorin chose to do, it was going to disrupt his work. It would not harm Yulia, though. He had already sent Dog an updated report and combat program to help keep her safe, and he was preparing additional measures in that regard.

  If anyone on Eden’s End so much as laid a finger on Yulia, he wasn’t sure what he would do, but he was certain that the responsible party would not enjoy the consequences of their actions.

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