BSE Chapter 4-23

The next few weeks flew by for Alexander. Thankfully, there were no more incidents at the Meteorite bar. And despite the assurances from Krieger, Alexander was still surprised when nothing came of the fight. The STO hadn’t said so much as a word about it.

He would like to say everything was going as smoothly.

Willard had turned himself into an annoyance. The man wouldn’t stop pestering the traffic control technicians every few hours to try and speak with him.

Alexander had a good idea as to what the man wanted to discuss, but he wasn’t in a hurry to invite the man back down for a chat so he pushed it off for as long as he could.

While there hadn’t been any communication about repairs to their partially disabled ship, he knew Willard had discussed the issue with STO headquarters. They had told him no when he requested additional funding to replace the aging and broken thrusters. The excuse was that he had the necessary materials onboard to make temporary repairs.

If the man wasn’t such an ass, Alexander might feel sorry for him being treated so harshly by his own command.

With no other recourse, they were forced to try and make repairs on their own, but Alexander already knew what they would find. The Blueridge’s thrusters were all shot and well overdue for complete replacement. Trying to repair the underlying damage with a patch would likely cause more coolant leaks, further exacerbating the issue.

It all worked in Alexander’s favor, all except keeping Willard here. If he could ship one person back to STO space, it would be that man.

His watch beeped and a moment later a knock came at the door.

“Your visitor is here,” Pembrooke said from outside.

“Send him in.”

Willard stomped in, looked a little more annoyed and a tad bit less kempt than the last time he had visited.

“Willard,” Alexander spoke in a bored tone, not even adjusting his avatar to make it look like he was addressing the man. “Unless you are here to make a purchase order, my answer from our first meeting hasn’t changed.”

The man clamped his mouth shut as he was about to say something. He took a calming breath and straightened before speaking. “How much would it cost to replace all of the Blueridge’s thrusters?”

Caught by surprise at the question, Alexander paused and actually looked up at the man. He knew the STO hadn’t changed their mind, so where were these funds coming from? He could ask, but then they would know he was monitoring their communications.

To give himself time to think, Alexander pulled up a satellite feed of the ship in question. You could see work lights and men floating around the back half of the vessel to try and effect repairs. If Willard was surprised by the surveillance, he didn’t show it.

“Four thrusters?” Alexander asked. He hadn’t really paid the STO ships much attention, leaving that to Krieger to handle. It was a surprise to see four thrusters on a ship because all the destroyers he had seen only needed three thrusters. Just how old was the Blueridge?

“Yes, all four,” Willard stated, trying his best to hide his annoyance.

Fletcher had paid fifteen million credits per thruster, but Alexander was pretty sure the man had significantly overpaid just to keep things quiet in regards to that deal. The standard price of one of Alexander’s thrusters was three million. Since he didn’t much like Willard, he tacked on an annoyance cost.

“Eight million a piece, for a total of thirty-two million.”

“Fine,” Willard stated without flinching at the cost. Either the man had no idea how much an actual thruster cost to replace, or he simply had so much money that he didn’t care. “How long until they can be installed?”

“You’ll need to sign a contract and pay at least half upfront before I agree to start,” Alexander responded.

He wasn’t about to work for free just to have the Willard renege on the deal and leave with four brand-new engines.

Willard reached into his uniform and produced a small tablet, he pushed a data chip into the tablet and typed something out before pulling the data chip back out and setting it on the table. Then he gave an annoyed gimme motion.

Understanding what the man wanted, Alexander pulled up a standard contract and added the requisite number of engines to it. The man signed it without reading.

The data chip held the required funds on it. Alexander jacked up his framerate and reviewed the security camera footage to get a better view of the man’s tablet. It wasn’t perfect, but Alexander did get a decent glance at the screen. He thought maybe Willard was stealing from the STO, and Alexander had enough issues with them at the moment. That turned out not to be the case, Willard was accessing a personal account and the sum inside it made Alexander’s corporate account look tiny in comparison.

“Now, when can the engines be installed?” the man asked again.

Quickly depositing the money, Alexander looked at his build queue. “I have an opening in two months.”

“What!” the man shouted. “That’s unacceptable. I demand you prioritize my purchase.”

“If that was unacceptable, you should have read the contract before signing it. It clearly states that there is no delivery date unless agreed upon by both parties beforehand. And if no date is set, the customer is entitled to the next available stock of thrusters that meet their order requirements. The soonest I can make that happen is two months,” Alexander stated.

He could easily increase his production output and have the thrusters ready to go in two weeks, but he saw no pressing need to stretch his already thin material supplies to accommodate Willard.

“Are you telling me that you won’t be producing four thrusters in two months? That’s absurd.”

“You’re right, that would be absurd. BSE is producing thrusters every week. They are all spoken for already though. If you can somehow convince the other captains to delay their order or sign it over to you, I’m more than happy to make the switch,” Alexander added with a smile.

“And who are these other customers?” Willard asked in annoyance.

“I’m not going to give you my customer data. If you want to contact the captains of each ship in the system to ask for yourself though, feel free.”

Willard paused at that and narrowed his eyes. “Most of those ships are running BSE transponders. Are you telling me that you are one of these customers?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Alexander asked in return.

He was waiting for Willard to ask the obvious question and it came out eventually, albeit grudgingly.

“Are you willing to swap order priority with me?”

And there it was.

Alexander couldn’t help but laugh. “Hell no. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other work to attend to. I will see you again in two months when your order is ready. Have a good day, Vice Admiral Willard.”

If anything, Willard stormed out of Alexander’s office even more annoyed than he had after their first meeting.

Once the man was on his way back up to the Blueridge, Alexander left his office and headed to his own shuttle. It was time to head back to the weapon’s testing range. Lucas had dubbed the place The Pit.

This wasn’t his first trip back to The Pit. They had run a few more tests on his body, but his math had been off and the data had been a jumbled mess. He was pretty sure he had it correct this time.

Lucas was waiting for him inside the shuttle. “How was your meeting?” the man asked with a yawn as he lifted his legs off the co-pilot council and stretched.

“Exhausting, so the exact opposite of your nap. Are you ready?”

Lucas nodded and strapped himself in.

***

Alexander stood just outside the ship and looked around at the changes. A small rainstorm must have come through since their last visit and the area now had washouts all over the place.

“Is this going to screw up the calculations?” Lucas asked from behind his mask.

“Maybe. I don’t know how accurate of a reading we need, but we’re already here so we might as well run the test.”

Lucas squealed in delight, “I’ll grab the weapons.”

“You shouldn’t get this excited about shooting at your boss!” Alexander yelled after the man.

He already had the instrument in hand so he walked over and placed it in the same spot as before. It was about ten feet behind where Alexander would be standing.

A change this time around was that two more of the devices joined the first. Alexander wanted to get readings from three points so he could compile the information into a three-dimensional rendering even if the data wasn’t great. That was actually easier than figuring out the math behind the readings.

Once Alexander was in position and waiting for Lucas to finish his setup, he pulled up his internal interface and linked it to the tablet he was holding behind his back. The tablet allowed him to connect with the three devices, which were already on and running. A weird gravitational picture began to appear inside Alexander’s mind space.

The gravity of the planet was the strongest, but it was so strong that it just appeared as a flat white field that slowly grew weaker the higher you got. He adjusted his simulation’s settings to filter out the planetary gravity and to only represent it as the surface of the planet. From there he was able to pick up much smaller gravity fields. The second biggest signal came from the shuttle, even though it was a few hundred yards away.

At that distance, it had a minute effect on the gravitational field, but it still needed to be accounted for. Next was his own form, which seemed to bend a tiny area of gravity toward it. He was looking for any changes in that field.

“Ready!” Lucas shouted and Alexander watched as even that action caused some minute fluctuations in the gravity.

That was interesting, but not what he was here to study.

“Ready!” Alexander shouted back before going still.

They had improved their testing process, and now Lucas actually counted down from ten in his head before firing a single round.

The round whistled past Alexander, and he heard Lucas curse.

“Resetting!”

On the third shot, Alexander’s field finally engaged. The effects shown in the simulation were surprising. The field wasn’t increasing gravity, it looked like it was repelling it. It wasn’t a uniform area that got repelled though, and even the parts that were being repelled, weren’t by much. Less than even the gravitational field that Alexander’s body produced naturally. That made the effect seem like more of a byproduct than the field’s purpose.

The reason Alexander came to that conclusion was due to how weak the actual gravitation change was. It was nowhere close to stopping a projectile, even one thrown by a person.

That ruled out gravity manipulation as being the source of his defensive field. He was a bit disappointed by that. The ability to manipulate gravity would have been a huge discovery, maybe even enough to finally figure out how the gravity plating worked.

Purchasing more from the source was on his to-do list while visiting the STO. He had the location of the company that produced it, it was just a long way to go to get some.

There might be something in how the field was produced that he could look at at some point, but he needed to figure that out before he could even consider that option.

“Did it work?” Lucas shouted, pulling Alexander from his thoughts.

“The simulation worked, but the results aren’t what we expected!” Alexander responded. Instead of further yelling, he walked back toward the man.

“So, what do we test next?” Lucas asked as they took a break aboard the shuttle.

“I still feel like static electricity plays some role in the field's formation. I can feel it when the defensive field powers up.”

“You already tested that in the lab though,” Lucas stated.

“No, I tested the static field that a ship uses. While it does use a charge to knock dust and debris out of the path of a ship, it isn’t technically static electricity. If it was, it would work even better in the atmosphere.”

“That’s not confusing,” Lucas grumbled. “So if your defensive field is an actual static field, how do we test for that?”

Alexander wanted to slap himself as he thought of a very simple way to test his hypothesis. “Grounding rods.” He got up and walked to the hold where he had a small printer along to make anything they might need.

“Grounding rods?” Lucas asked in confusion as he followed along.

“Yeah, if my field is some sort of weirdly condensed static discharge, then it should be easy to see it spark when it comes into contact with a metal object.”

“I know what a grounding rod is, Alexander,” the man rolled his eyes. “Wouldn’t that just mean the field discharged as soon as you touched something?”

Alexander shrugged at Lucas’ question as he watched the printer spit out six eight-foot-tall steel rods. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Ten minutes later, they had the rods and Alexander jammed them into the ground around himself, starting from six inches away to a foot, leaving only the front of his body clear.

The grounding rods further distorted the gravity around Alexander and he hoped they wouldn’t disrupt the readings from the instruments.

When Lucas fired this time, there was a more significant change. The field deployed, and there was definitely an electrical discharge as the field came into contact with the closest rod. Instead of the field collapsing though, the rod was forcefully yanked out of the ground and sent hurting away with a sonic crack. The other rods followed to a lesser extent and the flechette was still stopped in its tracks.

It seemed he had finally stumbled onto something. His defensive field was indeed some form of condensed and highly energized static emission. Something had to be producing a huge amount of static electricity inside his body to keep it active though.

While that was great to know, and meant he was one step closer to figuring this problem out, his idea to wrap this same field around the ship would not work. His defensive field would have a similar drawback to the static field with how it worked in space, but didn’t work in an atmosphere, only reversed. That probably explained why his body had been damaged in the first place. If the ship he had been on lost atmosphere, his defensive layer would have been rendered inert.

“Holy shit!” Lucas exclaimed as he ran over. “Did your field send the grounding rods rocketing away?”

Alexander nodded his avatar. His mind was a whirl of thoughts after this test.