The fleet departed the next day, and Alexander wished them good hunting. With the existing gate network, they would arrive at the front in just under two weeks.
Based on the Grand Commander’s estimated whereabouts, the fleet would have just under a week to enact their plan before the Shican leader arrived to take control of the armada. The most recent reports showed that the enemy fleet was already starting to act more unified as the Grand Commander got closer, which was a weird thing to witness.
The Shican must have been communicating via FTL the entire time, but it took proximity to get the Shican to act with one purpose. Alexander hoped Krieger had time to shatter that tenuous grip. Humanity needed the Shican to be divided if they wanted to have a chance at survival.
The next few weeks were interesting for Alexander.
He spent a significant part of it working, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Not wanting to be a deadbeat dad, he managed to talk his daughter into working alongside him. With her having graduated early, it wasn’t all that difficult since she loved designing and building stuff.
The work she was helping with was important, but it wasn’t critical to the overall function of the devices. Yulia didn’t care; she was just happy to work on something, and Alexander was happy to spend quality time with his daughter, especially after how rocky their relationship had gotten before his abduction.
He also ate meals with her at night, which had been an experience. He had been forced to assure Yulia that everything was alright when he cried happy tears after his first bite. The taste was nothing special, but at that moment, it might as well have been ambrosia. Up until that point, he only had hazy memories associated with the tastes of food. He had dreamed of this moment for so long that the reality had overwhelmed him.
The gratitude he was feeling toward the Collective for that opportunity was almost enough for him to forgive Two and the others for attempting to murder him, almost.
“Are you ready, Alex?” Lucas asked, pulling Alexander’s thoughts back to the present.
“Why don’t you do the honors?”
“Don’t have to ask me twice,” Lucas replied with a chuckle. Then he flipped on the main breaker for the gravity plate production line, and the machines hummed to life. “Hmm. A bit anticlimactic.”
“What were you expecting, explosions?” Alexander asked with a laugh.
Lucas shrugged, and the pair walked over to the start of the production line, where three massive material containers sat. A sight glass showed the material flowing into the machine, so they were functioning correctly.
They walked along the production line, checking each step of the process. The first machines were designed to excite the material so that other machines could force the material to share a quantum signature. That all had to be done quickly because the material was naturally opposed to such a state. Changing the material from solid to liquid, as it was printed, also caused further destabilization of the quantum connection.
Once the item left the printer, a final process ran to stabilize the material’s quantum connection. That had to be done at exactly the same time in two separate chambers, one for each side of the connection.
Alexander was oversimplifying the whole process, but he barely even understood some of what was happening.
When he was on the Collective’s planet, he was more concerned with getting off the world as soon as possible. He didn’t need to understand how the Collective’s method worked because he had designed his own, which was riddled with problems but was enough to produce the small sample plates.
During the trip back, while he was working with Rush and the others, they helped him understand a bit more, but they were limited in what they could tell him, so it was like trying to explain how to create a fusion reactor to someone who had just discovered how to split an atom. It wasn’t until the conversation with Four after they arrived on Eden’s End that he had a firm grasp on what he had done wrong. That didn’t mean he understood their methods. They were toeing the line with their assistance, but the gravity plating played a key part in Alexander’s plan to defeat the Shican.
Alexander grasped the basics thanks to his work with the comm nodes, but he didn’t even have the scientific knowledge to explain some of the processes that Rush and the others helped him build into the machines. He wasn’t alone there. Humanity had barely studied quantum entanglement, despite having Qcomms for over a century. It was just more evidence to show how detrimental the corporate monopolies were.
Had the technology behind Qcomms been widely available, Alexander did not doubt that humanity would have pushed that area of science much further.
The pair walked to the end of the production line, and the conveyor pushed a pair of plates out, which slid down a short ramp and onto a rack. The pair was marked and placed on a slowly growing pile that was ready for testing.
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“It’s faster than I thought it would be,” Lucas said as he watched another set of plates emerge half a minute later.
Alexander nodded in agreement. “The initial startup takes around fifteen minutes, but the plates aren’t all that complex to print. Once they get going, they will come out at a constant rate.”
“How many do we need for a single ship?”
“You don’t know?” Alexander asked in surprise. “I figured you would have all that information memorized by now.”
“Ha-Ha,” Lucas replied sarcastically. “Some of us have squishy human brains with limitations, so why don’t you just tell me?”
“I have no clue,” Alexander replied. “Just because I can’t really forget details doesn’t mean I know every detail. I just entered the plate dimensions in my design program and worked from there. The rest is handled by the bots.”
Lucas sighed and brought up his tablet while he muttered under his breath about Alex doing a better job of resource management.
Alexander shook with mirth. He was being a bit pedantic. He knew exactly how many plates the smaller ships required, and he even knew how many an Orca needed, but beyond that, he only had a general idea. That probably would have been good enough for what Lucas was asking about, but his friend had specifically asked for how many a single ship needed, which varied wildly.
Lucas eventually stopped tapping on the tablet and turned it to face Alexander. It showed a rough estimation, based on the Barracuda’s dimensions.
Alexander ran through the calculations in his head and nodded. “It’s probably a little high; some of that volume is crawl space and missile storage, but that’s fine. I would have added ten percent to it anyway for a safety margin.”
“That’s a lot of plates,” Lucas said. “How long until the orbital facility is complete and can start mirroring the existing plates?”
“Maybe another week? It’s hard to say. The production line was much quicker to build in zero-G, with the help of the multipurpose bots, but it’s also far more complex. We’ve run into a few issues that Rush has had to help solve.”
“Issues?” Lucas asked. “I thought this was all based on their designs.”
“Not exactly,” Alexander admitted. “According to Rush, the Collective never required something so crude as a production line to mimic or realign an existing plate’s frequency in subspace. This is all new ground for both of us.”
“So what now?” Lucas asked. “I know this is an important product, but it feels underwhelming compared to a new weapon system.”
“Of course, you would think that,” Alexander chuckled. Then he paused to rub his chin in thought. “Well, we could start loading them aboard one of the Fishbones to test the deployment options.”
Lucas agreed, and a shuttle was loaded with as many plates as it could carry over the next few days.
That gave Alexander time to create the powered racks for the plates to sit in once they were loaded in the cargo module for transport. It didn’t take him much time to do that, because he just modified the existing design, which currently provided power to the floors that ships had been using for decades. The rest of the time, he spent modifying two vessels for another test.
Additional plates were strategically attached to the exterior of the automated Fishbone, and their counterparts were loaded aboard an unmanned Stingray, which left orbit soon after. Once he proved the plates functioned as intended, he would produce a much cheaper module to fly into interstellar space to house the transmitter portion of the zero-G plates instead of wasting a valuable combat vessel for the role.
The pair watched in the control room as the crudely modified Fishbone undocked and moved to a safe distance, but still well inside Eden’s End’s gravitational field. Then it powered up its jump drive and vanished.
The room erupted into applause at the accomplishment. It was the first time a human vessel had been able to form a stable warp bubble that close to a planet. Alexander and Lucas accepted the accolades, even though that was only a small part of the test.
A moment later, the ship reappeared near the gas giant.
Alexander looked at the orbital distance and frowned. “It seems there is some limit to how well the fields can counteract gravity.”
“Still,” Lucas replied, “that’s closer than I predicted.”
Alexander looked at his friend. “I don’t recall you making that prediction.”
With a straight face, his friend puffed himself up and replied. “I didn’t want to predict it out loud; it may have affected the outcome.”
Alexander rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh, sure.”
In truth, Alexander had no clue what to expect with the zero-G plates. Now he knew. Honestly, it was probably good that the warp field failed when it did. If it had failed closer to the target orbit, the ship may have been ripped apart by tidal forces.
It was showing yellow strain warnings from its abrupt exit even now. A dedicated warship probably wouldn’t be affected, but the Fishbone transport was a barebones hauler. Still, he would need to discuss adding a safety cutoff with Lucas. Alexander had picked up plenty of programming over the years, but Lucas was still the expert in that department.
The vessel descended into a lower orbit and eventually reached the required distance to mimic the current gravity plating’s strength.
Alexander called Captain Farthing, and a video window appeared over the terminal he was using. “The ship is in place, captain, please proceed with the test.”
He could have gone with another automated ship and a simple gravitational strain gauge to test them, but he wanted to know if people felt any difference. Adding living test subjects did require some additional safety measures, however. Both the deployment ship and Nemo had emergency cut-offs in place if the gravity rose more than twenty percent above normal.
The last thing Alexander wanted was for the deployment ship to fall into the gravity of the gas giant and pass that gravity through the connection, crushing everyone aboard one of the few ships that survived the Shican attack on the Unokane miners.
Captain Farthing nodded. It was clear when she turned off Nemo, her ship’s gravity plates, because her ponytail started to float above her head.
A moment later, the hair dropped back into place.
“Gravity appears normal, Alex.”
He nodded. “Keep an eye on it, but try to utilize the new plates exclusively for the next few days unless a problem occurs.”
“Copy that. It’s too bad you didn’t have time to outfit me like that other transport. That would have saved me a lot of time running back and forth from the belt.”
Alexander agreed. There just wasn’t enough time to do everything. The fleet was a good example. They were running dark, but he was sure they were experiencing gravity plate failures by this point. He wondered how Krieger was handling that issue.
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