BSE Chapter 4-1

Sparks from welders, shouts from workers, and frantic activity surrounded Alexander as he surveyed the damage on Wayward Soul.

It was hardly the only ship to have been brutally mauled during the week-long conflict with Harlow, the self-proclaimed pirate Emperor. Most of the combined Asgardian/BSE fleet had been ravaged, but in the end, the combined forces had managed to put an end to Harlow’s reign of terror and rid the galaxy of an untold number of pirates once and for all.

Alexander only worried about his ships at the moment and let the other captains worry about theirs. The ships that were little more than floating wrecks or whose crews had mostly perished during the battles had been attached to a very temporary docking ring to secure them in place.

The ring had been constructed and built while the rescue and cleanup efforts had been underway after the battle, and had finished shortly before Harlow’s public execution. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional. The new structure resided where the former refueling station had once orbited Eden’s End.

The former fueling and refining station had been a target of one of Harlow’s attacks and had not survived the battle. Cleanup crews were already scouring the crash site to reclaim material. They were going to need every bit they could get to effect repairs and build new ships until mining operations could resume properly. However, that wasn’t a critical issue at the moment.

There was so much material floating around from the battles that the surviving smelters couldn’t keep up. Not including the loss of lives, the biggest setback for Alexander happened when the refueling station went down. The stockpile of material for the space station as well as the smelters was going to slow the recovery efforts.

It wouldn’t slow him down for long though. Alexander had figured out how the smelters did their work back when he designed and built his nano-stripper. He could simply build more of those, but something so precise was overkill for ninety-nine percent of the items he needed to build. The nano-stripper was also considerably slower at processing material, which was at odds with his current needs.

So he built a new smelter that Lucas had said looked like the maw of some demonic beast. The name stuck and now The Maw was being produced by his largest ring printer.

When it was complete, entire frigates could be fed into the processing plant to be reduced to component materials. Larger ships would need to be cut up and that was why he was aboard Wayward Soul at the moment.

Alexander needed to determine if the ship was worth repairing, or if cutting it apart and starting over would be quicker. He didn’t stop the people or bots from effecting repairs though. Even if he did go down the path of dismantling the ship, it wasn’t going to be for quite some time. The repairs made sure it was at least combat-capable if they needed it.

The top half of the ship was a slagged mess where the plasma ball had passed through the upper turrets and outer armor. What hadn’t been vaporized by the intense heat, had been melted or fused into useless scrap.

Even beyond that, people had died if they were too close to the top of the ship as the heat soaked into the vessel.

Any deaths were unfortunate, but if Alexander hadn’t reacted as quickly as he did, the ball of plasma would have hit one of the missile rooms and they would all be dead right now. He doubted he could survive the entire ship’s remaining missile supply detonating.

He tried not to dwell on that possibility as he finished his survey of the damaged sections. There was simply too much substructure damage to bother repairing the ship to its former self. It would be without the top row of weapons as well since replacing them would not be worth the time or effort.

Alexander sighed and headed for the shuttle as he sent commands directly through his fingertips and into the direct link interface he had built for his tablet.

It wasn’t as nifty as controlling things remotely with his mind, but he had used the direct link technology to great effect during the battle when he engaged the ship's thrusters to push them out of the direct path of the plasma ball.

He thought about designing an implant for humans to do something similar but decided against it. First off, he had no idea how a human brain functioned or if it took to implants. He assumed if it did, someone would have invented something like that long ago considering how prevalent he recalled the idea being back in his time. The fact that he had never heard mention of implants being in use probably meant the technology had been abandoned at some point. He stuck the idea in a project folder anyway as a maybe for the future.

Alexander arrived at the shuttle bay just as his watch chimed a beep, letting him know it was time to head back to the surface.

As he left Soul, he found the space around the temporary ring station to be even more frantic than inside the ship. Every single surviving bot had been called upon to assist with ship repairs and salvage operations. That number was increasing by the day as his smaller ring printers pumped out more and more bots, straining the control ships’ ability to handle them to the point that some tasks were pushed off on Vanguard, Valkyrie, and the surviving Eden ships’s cores.

If these automated workers weren’t running off of supercomputers with vast improvements due to their self-learning algorithms, he would not be risking his life flying through the clouds of robots that seemed to be moving back and forth constantly.

He recalled a memory from back on Petrov Station where a transport bot nearly ran a man over or the time one crashed into a ship parked in a hangar. It was a good reminder of just how stupid the non-learning ones could be. Now that he had purchased the computronics required to make smarter robots, he understood why they weren’t in greater use, beyond the STO’s dislike of them.

Alexander soon cleared the construction zone and pushed the shuttle into a downward slope toward the planet.

It wasn’t long until the forward view was obscured by aerodynamic heating as it dipped into the planet’s thin atmosphere. That wasn’t enough to truly slow the shuttle, so he fired the forward thrusters, slowing the ship further.

Soon the shuttle’s speed fell enough that he could see out of the transparent composite windows. As he curved around the planet, the only structure built on the surface soon came into view.

Much like in space, the facility was a hive of activity as well.

The impact craters and sections collapsed from hits by missiles fired by Harlow’s fleet were in the early stages of repairs.

While the craters were annoying, especially on the landing platforms, they were not an immediate concern. The thick concrete that covered most of the facility blunted the damage of the already slowed projectiles.

Alexander’s static field array had worked so well, that he wanted to implement more of the satellites. He would love to have enough to cover the planet twice over, which would also cover the station once it was complete. He estimated it would take approximately twelve thousand of the static field satellites to provide that sort of coverage. That was a long-term project. He would settle for just providing two layers of coverage for all his space assets in the short term. And as soon as he had the production capacity to switch over from making robots, that’s what they would be pumping out next.

More printers might be needed, he realized. He updated the print log, which was ridiculously far behind. Instead of slotting a few new printers in toward the end of the print queue, he pulled the next printer that was set to complete a construction bot and set it to printing only printer sections.

He couldn’t go nearly as wild with the printers as he had with the bots though, because the printers required at least an advanced computronic to run properly. And his supply of those had run out, meaning he had switched to his pseudo-computronics to run them.

It was actually a boost to their processing power, but the process of making those new pseudo-computronics was the slowest part of his production line. That was something he would address when time allowed it, for now, he was stuck with his current output of the new processors.

Alexander had plenty in storage though. They had been earmarked for installation within missiles, but time had run out to get them installed.

His musings were interrupted as the shuttle touched down, crunching slightly as the landing legs smashed loose debris.

He quickly set the ship in standby mode and hurried off of it and to the dedication that he had personally requested.

Alexander passed through the empty and unmanned arrival terminal as he made his way to the central dome.

The large structure had been damaged once again, but the first repairs had been made to it and the structure was once again whole after less than a week. That was all thanks to Yi Na and the hard work and dedication of his employees.

Allowing the man to take over construction efforts had been one of Alexander’s best decisions.

Soon he arrived inside the packed central atrium. Almost every single man woman and child who lived on Eden’s End was in attendance along with the Katalynn Char, her advisors, Jarl Ylva Bergson, Captain Bloomright, and the rest of the captains from the surviving ships.

A simple thank you would not suffice for the losses they suffered in the defense of Eden’s End, so Alexander was here to take a small step toward evening the scales.

The crowd saw him approach the short stage and quickly quieted.

Yulia waved to him and he smiled slightly but otherwise didn’t respond as he took his position at the center of the stage in front of a large cloth-covered object behind him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in arms,” he began. “First, I want to thank you all for taking the time to be here when there is much work to do. I will try to keep this as brief as possible.” There was a smattering of claps following that statement.

“We’re not unfamiliar with struggles and hardships but last week we came through a crucible far harsher than we have ever faced before. Yet we came through it, and I believe we will be stronger for it in the long run. None of that would have been possible without the help of Lagertha Katalynn Char or the rest of the Asgardian fleet.”

The woman stood and turned toward the crowd, nodding slightly before taking her seat again.

Once the scattered applause died down, Alexander continued. “That being said, not everyone is with us to celebrate this victory over evil. I feel each and every loss personally and because of that, I wanted to do something to commemorate every single brave man and woman who has given their life in defense of Eden’s End.”

He stepped over to the large object behind him and lifted off the white cloth.

As soon as the cloth was pulled away, the crowd gasped in shock at the enormous glittering diamond memorial that stood beneath it.

The material of the diamond was so pure that you could see straight through it, but it was just milky white enough that you couldn’t fail to miss it. This was not due to clarity issues in its creation but by design. The entire six-foot tall, twelve-foot long, and two-foot thick memorial was one solid diamond.

It was as pure as you could possibly make a diamond because Alexander had crafted it using his prototype nano-assembler that was being used in his armor experiments. It turns out that making diamonds using the nano-assembler process was significantly easier than creating the carbon compounds that made up his armor or even the STO’s poor facsimile of it.

The side facing the audience had every name of the fallen manufactured into it when it was constructed, only the letters were made from black diamond, leaving the surface completely flat, which made it sparkle brilliantly as the facets on the top caught the sun.

The memorial had space for many more names and Alexander had determined how to modify the diamond structure without damaging it to turn sections into the black diamond. He hoped he would never have to add further names to this memorial though.

He stepped aside and gestured at the monument. “The monument will be here to visit anytime. If you would like to visit it now, you may. That is all I have for you, thank you all for coming.”

Alexander stepped off the podium but didn’t go far. Katalynn and the Asgardians were the first to visit and say whatever prayers or words they might offer the departed before they walked off. By then a line had formed.

Katalynn approached him and turned to watch the procession of people silently.

Jarl Ylva joined shortly after and the three stood and watched as most of the people filtered past the dedication to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice to save them.

Once the last of the people filtered out of the atrium, the sun had begun to set. He turned to Katalynn, but the woman simply held her hand up. “We will talk later.”

He nodded and the three stood there in silent reflection as they acted as a sort of honor guard for the memorial until the sun finally set over the horizon a few hours later.