Blue Star Enterprises-Chapter 4-2

Katalynn and Ylva both left the central atrium shortly after nightfall, so the conversation Alexander had planned to have with the Asgardian leader got delayed for the time being.

It was probably for the best after the memorial unveiling. It was rather late even in Eden's End's day/night cycle. He decided to head home and brush up on some learning modules since there was little else to do with everything running at full production capacity.

***

Alexander was in the process of getting Yulia ready for school when there was a knock at the door.

"Is this a good time?" Katalynn asked as she stood out in the hallway.

His surprise at seeing the woman outside his door was broken when Yulia hurried over.

"Hello!" Yulia smiled. "Are you going to walk with Alex and me to class?"

Katalynn quirked an eyebrow at the girl's question and looked at him.

"If you have some time, it shouldn't take long," he admitted, stepping aside to let the Lagertha in.

She was alone today, which surprised him almost as much as her visit.

"Yulia, finish your breakfast and grab your tablet."

"Okay!" she replied happily as she rushed back over to the table to finish her oatmeal and dried fruit.

It wasn't until his daughter disappeared into her bedroom that Katalynn spoke again. "She seems spirited. I was never much of a morning person in my childhood."

"Really?" he asked. "I would have thought you were always a driven person."

Katalynn nearly snorted but caught herself. "Let's just say I was not as I am now and leave it at that."

Alexander nodded and the conversation ended just in time for Yulia to come running from the bedroom waving her tablet. Dog hurried behind her, happily wagging his tail.

Katalynn stiffened slightly at the approach of the two-foot-tall robot, but she quickly relaxed when she realized it wasn't a threat. "Interesting companion," she said idly as the three stepped out of the apartment and walked down the hall toward Yulia's classroom.

Yulia being the smart girl she was, had moved on ahead about thirty feet to let the adults talk privately.

"He is," Alexander admitted. "Dog started out as a simple toy to keep my daughter company. He's grown a bit since then," Alexander chuckled slightly.

Katelynn looked at him sideways. "Is that some sort of inside joke?" she asked.

"I suppose it sort of is. What I mean is that I've upgraded him a few times now. First as a simple nanny to help monitor Yulia, then as a bodyguard, after Dalton kidnapped her."

"Yes, I heard about that situation. I'm glad you killed that parasite. He infiltrated a few Asgardian worlds over the years, killing people or taking hostages. He even tried that approach on Asgard once but was not able to trick our defenders with his lies. That is one benefit of not allowing outsiders to visit."

Silence followed that statement, and the trip to school and back to his apartment was an uncomfortably quiet one for Alexander. He would have spoken up, but if Katalynn wanted to wait to speak, she probably wouldn't answer his questions until she was ready.

She took a seat on the sofa, which looked all wrong. Mostly because she was much too tall for the furniture, which Alexander had made slightly smaller to accommodate Yulia.

"What you said and did for the fallen will be remembered," she stated as soon as she was settled. "It is not often I hear my own people praising another Jarl's generosity. If I didn't know better, I might suspect you of trying to poach some of my people," she said coldly.

Alexander was taken off guard by this statement until the woman laughed.

"I'm joking. At least about that last part. It was a wonderful ceremony, even if you aren't yet up to speed on Asgardian customs. And the monument… well, I think that goes without saying."

"…Um, thank you," Alexander responded sheepishly.

It wasn't every day that someone like Katalynn gave him a compliment, and he found he didn't quite know how to respond. Despite the woman's often brash and forthright nature, he found he rather liked her. He wouldn't quite slot her into a friendship position, but maybe with time, she would become another one of Alexander's good friends.

"So what did you want to talk about?" he asked, hoping to steer the conversation to other matters that were less embarrassing for him. That was not a feeling he much enjoyed experiencing.

She sighed slightly, leaning into the couch and throwing her arms over the back. "I received a Qcomm message from Loki. The message was waiting for me even before my fleet arrived, but there was little I could do about it at the time. Even now I'm not sure I can do anything."

"A problem back home?" Alexander guessed by her mood.

"That is an understatement of the century," Katalynn said. "Jarl Isbjorn returned to Yggdrasil's Eye shortly after my fleet departed and is now claiming to be the King."

Alexander was so shocked by that statement that he forgot to add emotion to his avatar. "What? How is that even possible?"

"A faction of Lokis or perhaps all of them support him," she shrugged.

"You seem rather nonchalant for someone who has just been deposed and had her spies turn traitor on her. I gather that I am missing some context here."

"The man can say whatever he wants, it doesn't make it true. He has to kill me to claim my seat. As for the Lokis, their allegiance is to the Asgardian people only. If they thought Jarl Isbjorn would make a better ruler, I do not doubt that they would try to set up a confrontation between the two of us. Isbjorn likely already knows of what happened to my fleet here, so he will be even more assured of his victory."

"So you plan to take your fleet home and face off against him?"

Alexander hadn't seen the exact concentration of forces this Isbjorn fellow had the last time he was there, but from everything he learned about the man, he guessed it was slightly skewed in his favor. And now Katalynn only had three ships remaining.

"You want to take the BSE fleet with you?"

The woman shook her head, making the tension Alexander had been holding release.

"No. While the offer would be appreciated, I would need to face off against Isbjorn with my fleet alone to retain any semblance of honor. It does not matter that I have only three ships, or that he should be challenging me to single combat for my title. Weakness is weakness. If I wish to live and be rid of the insolent Jarl once and for all, I need to somehow force him into the traditional duel."

"What about the victory here, certainly that has to count for something amongst your people?"

"It does or it will once word gets out, but that will take time. Until then, all the people and the other Jarls know is that I have failed time and time again. Isbjorn is likely relying on this to try and force a vote, which will force me to return to Asgard before word spreads of our great victory. I plan on doing just that," she stated as she stared at Alexander.

"How though?" Alexander asked. "I don't exactly see a confrontation ending in your favor."

"If we play by the rules Isbjorn has set, you are correct, I would perish. To change them, I need to request a favor from you."

"A favor? You want a stealth ship?" He asked. It was the only thing that made sense given her predicament.

"I do. And I know it's beyond me to demand such at this point in our political relationship, but I have no other choice if I am to be rid of Isbjorn before he can cause more harm to the Union. If you are

willing to accommodate my request, how long would it take for you to build another one of those stealth gunships? Time isn't exactly on my side here. Isbjorn gaining control will likely not be great for your future prospects with the Asgardians either. Despite you being officially recognized as a Jarl, my guess is Isbjorn will come for you once he solidifies his hold just to ensure all of my allies are removed. Your removal would be the easiest to justify given how recent your addition to the Union has been."

Alexander snorted. "By the time Isbjorn could move on Eden's End, I doubt he would have the forces to take it, but I would prefer to avoid another large-scale battle so soon. As for your plan, I could probably have a ship ready to go in two weeks, but there's a bit of a problem."

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"If it's money, I have that," Katalynn stated.

Alexander shook his avatar. "It's not only about the money." He sighed. She was bound to learn about his automated gunships at some point–might as well be now. "My gunships were all automated."

"Automated?" she parroted the word back, tilting her head slightly before letting out a booming laugh. "I'm never going to let Haldric live that down," she said with mirth.

"What's so funny?"

"My Sub-Commander praised the brave crews of the vessels you sent to take out Harlow's supply ships. When he finds out he praised a machine–present company excluded, he's going to be livid. That does present a bit of a problem though, doesn't it? Can you modify the ship for a human crew?"

"Probably. It was based on a captured pirate design, but I doubt that's going to be good enough to get you to the planet undetected."

She rose awkwardly from the too-low seat, walked over to him, and poked him in the chest lightly. "Last time I checked, engineering was your specialty. I need to get back to Asgard without Isbjorn knowing for both our sakes. I'll leave the specifics as to how that gets accomplished to you. And if this works out, you'll have my eternal gratitude and a favor that you may call upon whenever. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to see how the repairs on Valkyrie and my other ships are progressing." She gave him a slight nod in acknowledgment before striding past him and out of the apartment.

Alexander watched her go through his internal senses without turning to alert her that he was.

She was right. He did not want this Jarl Isbjorn character to be in charge, especially not this soon after joining up with the Asgardians. The man had already proven to be a duplicitous piece of bio-waste and with him at the helm of the Asgardians, they would likely turn into just another STO, maybe even worse.

Isbjorn was a problem. If he had learned one thing from the whole Soren debacle, it was to root out problems as soon as possible instead of letting them fester. The best way to deal with the problem while remaining uninvolved was to assist Katalynn in her crazy plan. And it was crazy.

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After thinking over the issue for a few minutes, he left the apartment and strolled over to his workshop. The large holo-display came to life as soon as he entered. Once he was in front of it, he pulled up two designs. One was of the automated gunship and the other was the recreated rendering of the corporate gunship.

It was time to put the old noggin to work.

The old pirate gunship was a little longer than a shuttle at about one hundred feet but had a much smaller profile and more weapons. The corporate gunship on the other hand was slightly smaller than a dropship, which was around sixty feet in length, making it about the size of a fighter jet from back in his day.

The corporate ship was able to be much smaller because it reduced space by using integrated systems and having zero creature comforts. The pilots had been attached to hoses that fed them and removed waste. The corporate gunship was essentially the computronics version of a ship. Building it that way made stealing any tech from within the ship much more difficult, but it also made the ship itself impossible to fix if something broke down. The few caveats to that were the propulsion system and weapons. It was a complete departure from the STO's policy of having easily repairable and replaceable parts as well as repair manuals available for all systems.

It made sense in an unlicensed, unregistered ship but if that was the type of future the corporations were trying to push for, it didn't bode well for anyone.

Alexander decided he was going to hybridize because the integrated systems would solve the issue of figuring out how to route everything properly. He changed it up a bit to make those integrated components replaceable because he didn't want to have to design the ship multiple times.

As one part of his mind was focusing on that problem, he turned another part to the propulsion issue. Katalynn probably hadn't thought of it, but a gunship, no matter what kind, would never make it to Asgard without having to refuel along the way because it used the older style of reactors that shuttles used.

There were likely refueling yards along her path, or maybe she planned on only taking the last jump alone, but he had a better idea and one that would make her trip much more stealthy.

For quite some time, Alexander had been playing with reactor designs as a way to try and shrink them and he had made some headway. He even had a design for a shuttle reactor that was half the size of the current one. That was still quite a bit larger than the reactors that Harlow had been using in his missiles though. Recovering some of those to study had been one of his first efforts when sending the bots out to clean up the mess in space.

It took piecing four of the destroyed missiles together before he discovered how Harlow's people had managed the feat.

He would like to say he was surprised that the pirate's method of shrinking the reactors was to simply remove all shielding, but he really wasn't.

That meant as soon as the missile reactors were engaged, they became sources of dangerous radiation. Alexander obviously couldn't do that on a ship design but that's where another one of his ideas came in.

One thing he had learned about the stealth armor was its ability to absorb radiation without becoming radioactive. He manipulated the thruster design and attached the ball reactor to the front of it, just like Harlow had done. Only instead of turning the result into a missile, Alexander wrapped the entire thing in stealth armor. From there he modified the thrust cone so it no longer protruded behind the ship and was instead inset into a vectoring nozzle that could also be closed off.

As the propulsion section of the ship was coming along, Alexander quickly designed the interior of the ship. Behind a sealed bulkhead in the rear of the craft would be the fifty-year core. A standard frontline ship core took up quite a bit of space, but he was able to shrink it down and adjust the fuel storage capacity for the ship's actual usage instead of just using one from a corvette. Even then, it was still a large item.

He would have simply placed that outside the ship along with the reactor, but the fuel core needed to be temperature-controlled for the best efficiency. That necessitated a few design limitations such as only being able to access the fuel core from an external hatch, but it was a gunship, not a pleasure yacht.

Two seats went into the craft next, followed by very basic amenities for survival. Katalynn and whoever she decided to take with her wouldn't be eating very well, but they would live. There were no beds either. The seats had enough room to lay flatish and that was all he could accommodate.

Once Alexander had a general idea of the interior layout, he started mocking up the substructure.

That part took him hours as there were a lot of things to consider while designing the bulkheads. One of those was weapons.

As much as Alexander would have loved to fit lasers on the smaller ship, he wasn't at a point where he could do that and have them be powerful enough to actually do any meaningful damage. With the reactor outside the ship, he also didn't want to have to run that much power cabling through the hull or even build a connector to pass it through as that would be a huge weak point.

It was bad enough with the few cables he was planning to run, but that was the tradeoff he knew he was going to have to make if he wanted to run the cutdown ball-style reactor. He mitigated the issue as much as possible by running the cables through an S-shaped opening that would have sealant through the entire channel to ensure it would stay airtight.

With lasers being out of the question, he turned to some spare parts he had lying around. Alexander had two perfectly good Gauss cannons from the recovered corporate ship. He pulled up their schematics and manipulated his design until the two weapons fit on either side of the ship.

They had a capacity of two hundred rounds each, which wasn't much, but was quite a bit for such a small ship.

On the corporate ship, they could be reloaded from inside the crew space, but Alexander made it so they were reloadable from outside. Since they weren't going to be able to store extra ammo onboard anyway, it didn't much matter.

That change allowed him to reduce the interior space, helping him keep the ship from growing any larger than it already was. With Alexander's design changes, it was already larger than the corporate gunship by twenty percent due to the hybrid approach.

With the guns in place, Alexander added the hidden missile tube. He would have added two, but the anti-ship missiles were not small weapons and he figured a single supercomputer-operated missile would be far more dangerous than two smaller missiles.

Once he knew where those parts would be situated, he started on the armor.

Alexander hadn't forgotten how rough his first visit to Asgard had been, so he knew he needed the ship to be durable. The first layer of armor was composed of the corporate composite, which Alexander had quickly figured out how to replicate after studying the ship.

The corporate armor wasn't as durable as the stealth armor, but it also didn't have the stealth armor's drawbacks.

The production process for stealth armor was extremely difficult, and they had yet to figure out how to make the plates anything other than flat.

That was the main reason Alexander hadn't deployed the armor on the other gunships. They were all rounded and had exposed parts that made it difficult to cover certain areas without making really small plates.

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Alexander's gunship started to take shape over the next three days. It was all hard lines and flat planes, with the barest hint of sensor antennas sticking out from the forward edges of the winglets. The design ensured he could cover most of the ship in the armor. He had decided to go with the actual armor instead of the coating to give the ship the best possible chance of avoiding detection. The coating would be applied to the parts that couldn't be covered by the armor as well as the metal frames that held the stealth armor so they could be bolted in place.

Once he realized the initial design was complete, he stepped back to admire the ship. Unlike the fishbone ship, this one had character to it, as Lucas liked to say.

To Alexander, it looked intimidating, sort of like a cross between a low polygon-stingray and the American stealth fighter that had been retired long before he had been born. It was an odd thought to have, but that was the first thing that popped into his head when he looked at the ship.

A slight rise in the center section showed where the crew was situated. The interior would project a holographic image of space in front of the pilots as well as act as a truncated tac-display, removing the need for bulky consoles.

He did include some manual controls built into the seats, but those were limited to flight control and weapon activation.

Despite the days of work he had put into the vessel, it was cobbled together at best. He would prefer to spend months working through a design and engaging people like Krieger and Matthews for tips, but his current efforts should be enough to get it to Asgard. At least that is what he hoped. There had been no stress testing, no system checks, and not even a flight profile generated as it would be designed to land on a planet. It was a hull that looked neat, would hold air, and could provide offensive capability if needed. The more he looked at it, the more anxiety it gave him.

This is why Alexander hadn't gone down the route of building his own ships yet. There were so many things that could go wrong.

Alexander knew enough about the basics of ship design that it should hold together. He decided they would need to do some basic testing to at least check the systems and the ship for quirks. Katalynn probably wouldn't appreciate the delay, but Alexander needed a bit of reassurance after slapping together the mess in front of him.

He projected the build time estimate into the holo and winced. If he sent the ship to a printer, it would take a month to build, most of which was to produce the stealth armor. He adjusted the calculation to include three more nano-assemblers, reducing the construction time to three weeks. It would have been shorter, but Alexander had to include the time it would take to build three more nano-assemblers large enough to produce the armor plating.

With a sigh, he canceled some print jobs and slotted in the new ones. If he was going to do this, he might as well do it right away. He added a week for testing as well. Branston was going to be tickled pink when he learned he would get to fly another experimental ship.