Even though Alexander had his answer for how to work around the gravitational bleeding issue, it still took a full day of simulation testing to find a configuration that both worked and wasn’t so complex that it would be a nightmare to maintain.

  His idea to wrap the gravity plate was a good one, but the inhibitor had to be tuned and placed at a slight angle so it focused the field to a certain point, almost like a lens. Unlike a lens, however, it wasn’t amplifying the gravity; it was just reducing the field’s ability to expand past a certain point.

  After they figured out that issue, the rest of the bleed over was handled by a series of eight panels made from the zero-G plates, which stretched from where the gravitation field started to the bottom of the drive generator. One was also placed below the device to contain the field from expanding beyond the Nova drive.

  To ensure that a power outage or disruption to any of the systems wouldn’t cause the field to expand beyond the confines of the drive chamber, the power was first fed through the plate, which provided the gravitational field that assisted the drive’s operation. Then it was fed to the interrupter, the zero-G plates, and finally the generator. That should stop the main plate from producing a gravity field before any of the other plates could lose power. That timing was only in the microseconds, but it mattered.

  Both the interrupter and the zero-G plates got secondary battery backups as well, while the main plate was given an emergency cutoff system if it detected any failure within the system.

  Alexander heard one of the engineers muttering about overkill, but he believed otherwise. In a rare act, he had Lucas reprimand the guy. If the system ever failed and the main plate stayed powered for even a fraction of a second longer than the containment fields, it would crush the ship and everyone aboard.

  He wanted to add more safety measures, but time was of the essence, and the prototype drives would be going on unmanned vessels.

  After Lucas and he verified everything looked good, the production began.

  It was during that time that Theo stopped by. The man was smiling widely and came over as soon as he spotted them.

  “Alex, I got good news.”

  “You could have just pinged it to my comm.”

  “True,” the man admitted, “but I thought you might want to read Krieger’s full report, so I brought it in person.”

  Alexander motioned the man to an empty meeting room. Once inside, Theo handed him a tablet.

  As he read over the report, a smile started to form on his face. “No losses?” He knew the mission had been a success, based on the earlier comm message, but the details were lacking. Krieger needed to wait until he reconnected with the fleet, and the scout ships reported in before he had a full picture.

  “Seems so. The report also states that the enemy armada has partially broken up, and some of them went after Krieger and his fleet. Others seem to be trying to chase down the Asgardian fleets or are heading for STO space. There weren’t a whole lot of details as the Union fleets are now under a communication blackout, but I got the distinct impression that it’s chaos out there.”

  “Krieger did say that was going to happen. What about the Grand Commander and the remaining Shican armada?”

  “Krieger left four Swordfish to monitor their movements. The ships jump out and send updates once every four hours, which then get routed to a series of Stingrays that rejoin their fleets to relay the updates via tight beam. It’s not an ideal solution, but it ensures the enemy can’t locate the fleets by tracking their subspace signals. The reports are also sent to us. The last few showed a group of Shican vessels appeared in the system and were merging with the rest of the armada. We can’t be certain that these are the Grand Commander’s vessels, because Krieger has the only device capable of distinguishing between the Shican ships, but their formation did tighten up after their arrival.”

  “Hmm. Let’s assume that he has arrived then. Have Krieger or Katelynn provided an estimate on when the enemy might advance?”

  “Only that it’s too soon to tell,” Theo added. “The Union fleets have shifted strategies from destroying their fleets outright to harassing them instead. They theorized that if all the rogue fleets were destroyed, the Grand Commander would have no reason to wait. By picking off a few of their ships at a time and fleeing, the goal is to further inflame the Shican’s bloodlust. The hope is that the desire to act gets communicated back to the main armada, slowing down the Grand Commander’s attempts to reestablish order and cohesion.”

  Based on what Alexander knew of the Shican, it could work. Then again, the Grand Admiral may just write the rogue units off and move despite having half his fleet missing.

  “Thanks for the update. Did you have anything else to tell me?”

  “Not much, but since I’m here, a representative of the STO Navy reached out to see if we knew the whereabouts of Chairman Rush and the other members of Gravitational Solutions. It appears that the gravity plate issues are affecting everyone now, and they are looking for a scapegoat to pin it on.”

  “What did you tell them?” Alexander asked, not surprised at all that the STO would contact Eden’s End to ask that question. Rush wasn’t exactly quiet when he brought his fleet to Unokane.

  “The truth,” Theo admitted. “That Rush and the entire GS group fled soon after the Shican attacked Unokane.”

  “Did they buy it?”

  Theo shrugged. “I’m keeping track of the few spies that the STO managed to put in place on Eden’s End. They don’t have access to anything of importance, so all they can do is document what they hear and see, and send coded reports back to STO space. Rush’s presence could be a problem, but I see he returned to the surface looking completely different, and even his name is different in the STO database. I would recommend calling him by his new name, but even if his old name gets used in public spaces, nobody is going to know it’s the same guy. I would very much like to know how he updated the STO database, though.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “He is an AI, so I assume he hacked into it,” Alexander muttered offhandedly as he flipped through the rest of the report. “—Wait, what’s his new name?”

  “Um, Sergio.”

  Alexander shook his head. “I’m not calling him that. I would rather call him One.”

  “Probably for the best,” Theo replied. “I’m already hearing rumors around the facility about the new alien AIs.”

  “It was bound to happen at some point. I would have thought something that juicy would have spread by word of mouth much quicker, however.”

  “Normally, you would be right, Alex, but I think with the war going around, everyone’s being a lot more tight-lipped in what they say to people.”

  “If anything else important pops up, let me know by comm. I’ll be heading into space in a few hours to test some prototypes that might take a few weeks.”

  Theo nodded and headed off with his tablet.

  Once the door closed, Alexander resecured the room and moved over to the small conference table. He pulled a secure data chip from an inner pocket of his lab coat and popped it into the holo projector. The device was not connected to the facility network, but that didn’t mean he took any chances.

  Unlike his other top-secret projects, nothing appeared when the holo came to life. Using his newfound abilities as a pseudo-AI, he unencrypted the hidden file he had been working on. The device schematic wasn’t complete, but when it was, it would be one of the most devastating weapons ever created by any known race, except for maybe the Collective. He couldn’t say for sure what sort of weapons they had made.

  Alexander had come up with the idea shortly after seeing the results of the early Nova drive simulations. It was such an easy leap of logic that he was surprised the Shican hadn’t developed their own version already. Then again, according to Rush and the others, the alien cats had just cracked the truth behind how gravity plating worked. In time, he knew they would build a similar device; it was a logical step in the technology, and also why Alexander was developing the gravity bomb first.

  His goal was to fit the entire design in the standard casing of a missile, which was proving difficult, but not impossible. The gravity bomb worked just like a gravity trap. Place some transmission plates close to a star or large gas giant, or even better yet, time them so they are launched closer to those stellar bodies at the same point the missile is fired. Once it reaches its destination, it simply overcharges the internal plate, and the extreme gravity floods through the connection, crushing everything within the field. It was the exact problem he had spent so long trying to avoid with the Nova drive.

  The device would have a short lifespan once activated, so the field would not expand to anywhere near the same size as the gravity traps, which covered an area about the size of a small moon, but they would be devastating nonetheless.

  Alexander flipped to the next file on his secret drive, and a shudder ran through him at what greeted him. The second design was practically a corvette in scale, with the capability to fit a Nova drive inside. The drive’s only purpose was to deliver the weapon to its destination.

  The larger weapon was not meant to crush ships or small fleets, however. He had done the math, but he couldn’t be certain of the true scope of devastation without actually deploying the device. That didn’t mean that he didn’t have a general idea of what it was capable of. It would be an extinction-level event if used on a planet or near a system’s star, that was for certain.

  The gravity bomb’s destructive potential was why he was being so damn secretive about it. He didn’t want to even consider deploying such a horrific weapon, but if the Shican refused to back down after he struck their leaders with the EFEC Swordfish, he would have no choice but to use them.

  He also knew that the moment he deployed such a weapon, it would be an arms race for the Shican to create their own. And he could not allow that.

  Alexander had spent the last few weeks preparing a secret production facility in interstellar space to build the devices, which was hard to do without tipping off Lucas or anyone else to what he was up to. He trusted Lucas and his friends, even the AIs to some extent, but he didn’t want to burden anyone with this decision.

  One of his duties while testing the Nova drive prototype would be a quick visit to the weapon’s facility to check on the progress. Everything at the site was being managed by automated systems at the moment.

  The transmission plates would also be hidden aboard the prototype vessel and deployed via a small stealth-coated satellite around a gas giant or the star in the system he selected. The star was so far away from any others that humanity had never even given it a scientific designation. A ship with a warp drive would take ten jumps to reach it, making it improbable that anyone had ever bothered to visit the lonely destination.

  It was a perfect place to hide the transmission plates and be used as part of the Nova drive’s long-range tests. Dr. Lund’s math said the drive should be capable of traveling hundreds of light-years in a single transit, but that was assuming ideal conditions and a ton more power. Alexander would be happy if it reached the distant star in one jump, which was sixty light-years from Unokane, and nearly forty from the next closest stellar object.

  The tests would start slowly. They obviously weren’t going to jump the vessel to such a distant location right off the bat. If it broke down for whatever reason, it would be stuck there until a second vessel could be finished and tested properly, wasting time they didn’t have.

  Alexander closed the documents and the minor changes he had added based on their successful simulations. Once done, he removed the data chip from the projector and wiped its log file, employing a method he learned from Rush.

  He stood up, adjusted his lab coat, and strode out of the room with a smile to hide his anxiety. Maybe the Shican would see reason and retreat to their own space, ensuring he never had to deploy the gravity bomb. He thought the possibility unlikely, but a man could hope.

  ***

  SYSTEM: PALISADE

  DATE: 2404

  “Admirals, our fleet managed to destroy a quarter of the Shican forces before they fled, but we suffered nearly equal losses despite having more than four times their number. I hate to admit this, but our losses would be far higher if Admiral Krieger hadn’t provided us with information on the enemy’s shielding capabilities.”

  “Has your fleet finished its retrofit to lasers?” Admiral Thorne asked.

  Captain Bell shook his head. “Not yet. We received the distress signal from Gateway, and I had the fleet rush there to engage the Shican. Before they departed, about two-thirds of my forces were converted. Once again, we have BSE to thank for the speedy turnaround. The production capabilities here have tripled their output with the new printers. We’re starting to run short on manpower, however. Is there an estimate on when I can expect replacement personnel?”

  Admiral Patel nodded. “We’re working on it, Senior Captain Bell, but we still need to keep a fleet at the border near Xin space. They may have pulled back, but that doesn’t mean they have given up, especially since we now know that the Shican were behind those attacks from the beginning.”

  “In the meantime,” Admiral Dufresne cut in, “you’ll need to reduce your crew sizes to the bare minimum. We are sending you some new schematics that should help. The Palisade Naval Yard should have no problem producing them and outfitting the new ships coming out from the docks.”

  Bell perused the document, his eyes going wide. “You want to put computronics on the ships?” The cost would be horrendous, but a much more pressing question came to mind. “What about the prohibition on self-learning?”

  The Admirals shared a look before Patel spoke up once again. “The STO Council has met and agreed to overturn that ruling for the duration of the war. Not that I think they will reinstate it once the war is over. Let’s be real, the corporations have ignored that rule for decades, and they have used that to catapult themselves far past the STO in terms of technology. It’s about time we stop living in the shadow of the past and start looking to the future.”

  Bell nodded. He had no strong opinions on AI or self-learning machines; he was just surprised to hear that a rule that had been in place since before the inception of the STO was now being removed. Maybe that was the problem. Since it wasn’t an actual law, it wasn’t enforceable, other than shaming the company caught breaking it. At least they were removing it for a good reason.

  As always, thanks for reading! And thanks for the support! If you enjoy the story, please rate it and comment below!

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