Blue Star Enterprises

LOCATION: EDEN’S END

SYSTEM: UNOKANE

DATE: 2400

Alexander strode into the meeting room where everyone he needed to speak to had gathered.

It had been a couple of weeks since the kidnapping incident where a man by the name of Dalton, a career assassin and fixer for pirates and criminals, had managed to take Yulia captive with an explosive device. He then used his daughter as leverage to take him hostage and deliver him to Harlow.

With a bit of luck, Alexander managed to free Yulia and safely store her in the stasis pod before he confronted Dalton. The man had quickly learned why it was a bad idea to threaten his daughter.

Alexander got what little information he wanted out of Dalton before tossing him into space. It wasn’t until one of his new captains suggested that the man might know more that Alexander realized his actions had been a bit rash.

After a lengthy search, they found the man’s corpse. Dalton had bitten off his own tongue instead of suffering a slow death from lack of oxygen. Despite the possible loss of information, Alexander couldn’t find it in himself to care that the man had chosen to end his own life.

He looked over the room, which was packed with mercenary leaders from the Hawks, the three new captains he had recently hired on, Captain Matthews, Damien Laront, and a few of his Guard Captains.

All chatter ceased as Alexander made his way to the front of the room.

"Sorry, I’m late, and thank you for your time. I’ve gathered you all here to get an update on our efforts to recheck all of the new arrivals. Who wishes to go first?"

Damien stood and walked up to the front of the room, Alexander stepped off to the side to allow the man to speak.

"We have found a few infractions amongst the locals. Nothing serious, but we have issued warnings to those individuals. Other than that, we have not found any weapons or other items of concern."

Alexander nodded his avatar and the next person to step up was Matthews. While the former Hawks Captain wasn’t in a leadership position anymore, the man’s experience was still valuable.

He cleared his throat before beginning. "As some of you have likely heard, the attacker had their DNA modified. We’re not quite sure how this was accomplished, but it’s something we will need to keep an eye out for. To ensure we have no more sleeper agents amongst the new arrivals, I worked with Eden’s End’s Head of Medical Services to perform DNA sampling on all of the new arrivals instead of just the usual skin surface sample. This is not something I would suggest you do going forward though as it is both extremely intrusive, as well as time-consuming and expensive. The fact is, we burned through most of Eden’s End’s medical kits designed for this sort of exam to perform this process. And we found no changes in any of the other people."

"Do you have another suggestion to prevent people from sneaking past the DNA scan?" Alexander asked, knowing the man did indeed have an alternative.

"Scan them upon arrival, like we are currently doing. Set them in a quarantine zone for thirty days, then scan them again. The quarantine will ensure there is no sickness amongst any new arrivals as well as ensure the DNA we have on file hasn’t changed in that time. We know from examining Dalton that whatever changes were done to his body were quickly reverting. By holding the people for that long any abnormality would quickly stand out and we could hold that person until the changes completely revert. To do this, you would need to create an arrival center though. The current setup doesn’t really allow for long-term habitation in a sealed environment."

Alexander thanked Archie and the next person stepped up. It was one of the Hawks’ new team leaders.

"We finished our preliminary searches on all the parked ships. Other than the one that belonged to the criminal known as Dalton, we found no evidence of hidden weapons. That’s not to say that we didn’t find anything of concern. Two of the transport ships had hidden compartments filled with drugs. The captains and crew of those ships have been taken into custody and questioned. The one crew was tight-lipped and refused to speak. The other crew was a bit more chatty. A few of the lower-level crew members sold the captain out. It appears that some criminal enterprises from within the STO thought to use this as an opportunity to expand their reach into a new market. The compartments were shielded similarly to Dalton’s weapons. The Hawks have not run into this method of hiding smuggling compartments and we currently have no way of uncovering them without doing manual searches of ships. Doing so on a mass scale simply isn’t feasible."

Alexander thanked the team leader and stepped back into the center of the stage. "As you can see, we have some issues to resolve. I don’t believe any of these problems are insurmountable, but we will need to be diligent. If you have questions or ideas on how to improve facility security, please work with our Head of Security, Damien. Until we have a solution to the shielded compartment issue, all ships will be checked by the Hawks. I don’t care if they land on the surface or dock at the station. Once they enter Unokane, they are subject to a search. In the case they are found to be smuggling illegal goods, their ships will be seized and anyone on the crew arrested."

That statement got a round of concerned mutters from the group.

"Is that an issue?" Alexander asked the assembled group of people.

Captain Ramirez, one of his new employees stood up. "The unlawful search and seizure of a ship is against STO law. I know this isn’t STO space, but we still need rules. It’s one thing if you provide a warrant and probable cause, but isn’t this going a bit too far?"

"No," Alexander stated bluntly. He understood the man’s concern, but Alexander’s concern was the safety and security of Eden’s End first and foremost. As far as he was concerned, everything else took a backseat to that goal. "We are not part of the STO, thus we do not need to follow their rules. That doesn’t mean there won’t be rules in place eventually to manage this issue. Until then, we will do what we must to ensure the safety of everyone here. If the ships arriving have a problem with that, they can leave. That being said, I don’t want to have to manually check every ship that comes along either. I expect to have at least a partial solution to the shielded compartment issue soon. Once we know that is working, I plan on pushing for a law that would grant automatic warrants for any vessel found to be having these compartments. This way we are not trampling the rights of ship owners, while also not being willfully ignorant of the dangers these criminal ships represent. Is that sufficient to soothe your concerns?"

Ramirez nodded. "As long as we have laws in place, I’m more than happy to carry them out."

He thought the man’s idealism was a bit misplaced, but he had to remember that all of humanity had been under STO rule for years, and most of the planets for much much longer than that. There were bound to be people who saw Alexander’s way of doing things as a bit heavy-handed.

"Speaking of ships. Captain Ramirez, you and your crew have had a week to familiarize yourself with the Resolve. How are things going?"

"About as well as can be expected. Some of the systems are still unfamiliar, but most are rather basic and my people picked them up quickly. It helped that you had training modules for each, and the supercomputer does do a lot of the heavy lifting. I am concerned that any losses amongst the crew or of the computer core could limit our effectiveness in a fight though."

"Do you feel the same way, Captain Hall?" Alexander turned to the captain of the Fury.

"I do. Right now we have enough crew for a day and night shift. If someone is injured or sick, we can make do, but it will significantly reduce our effectiveness. While I would prefer a full complement of seventy-five crew, I think another five crew per ship would significantly reduce this issue."

"Unfortunately, I do not have any additional trained military personnel to offer you. That being said, there are twelve hundred new arrivals. I will put up a job posting for additional crew. The ships are yours, and I expect each of you to interview these people and decide for yourselves if they fit within your crew. Don’t worry too much about training. Any people you pick will be given academy training to make sure they are up to the task."

"Thank you, Alexander," Hall replied. "I believe that will solve a whole lot of issues."

"So other than crew concerns, you are happy with the progress your people are making at understanding the ships?"

Both men confirmed that they were.

"Good. Captain Ramirez, in the next week or so, you will be taking the Resolve, along with a transport attachment to Varlen. Your contact there will be Vice Admiral Fletcher. While Resolve is gone, Fury will patrol Unokane. Once you return here, Hall will take the next transport and Resolve will patrol. Any concerns or issues, please contact me immediately."

"We are expected to do these patrols solo?" Ramirez asked in concern.

Ramirez didn’t seem like the most confident Captain out there, but Alexander didn’t have many options. He would have preferred to have Captain Krieger, but Krieger was being dragged through the mud in STO space as an example of what not to do. Until the STO decided to finally finish his court-martial, there wasn’t much Alexander could do to get him.

"For now. BSE doesn’t have enough ships to form a squadron. I don’t expect you to actively engage pirates outside of Unokane though. That being said, each of your ships is more than capable of going toe to toe with another pirate frigate. In the meantime, I will work on alleviating your concerns."

Alexander wasn’t sure how he was going to do that, considering he had enough trouble finding crew for two ships, but he would figure something out. He would have to if his idea to approach the Char pirates had any hope of succeeding. Doing so from a position of weakness was probably a bad idea. That reminded him, that he still needed to discuss this plan with a few people before he settled on it for certain.

The rest of the meeting was given over to discussion and questions. Alexander fielded most of them. The biggest concern was how to implement the quarantine area. That was easy enough. Alexander had already duplicated one of the domes from Eden’s End in his design for the academy. A quarantine dome would only be about half the size of the smaller domes, but it would be built specifically for long-term habitation, and that was it. With that in mind, the new building would be able to house two thousand people at a time.

He would bring the construction plans to Yi Na in a few days so he could look them over. It would be the first major new construction but the man had been doing well so far, so Alexander had no real concerns that he could handle it.

Surprisingly, the other major issue that was brought up was access to the Qcomm. It seemed word had gotten out about the installation faster than he expected. Alexander wasn’t quite ready to open up access to it yet, but he assured everyone that it would be publically available within the week.

He needed to ensure the hardware he planned to install was capable of capturing outgoing and incoming messages first. Then he needed to work with Lucas to ensure the computer core could process and flag suspicious messages. At first, they would probably just flag everything so he could go through it manually, but the system would eventually have to handle most of the load. It was a good thing he made liberal use of self-learning algorithms in his project.

Alexander certainly didn’t want to be bogged down with reading everyone’s correspondence, but it was better than the alternative of letting the messages go without oversight. That’s how they ended up with Arkonis showing up at their front door.

With so many new arrivals, he knew at least a few had to be spies as well. He also needed to ensure that nobody was communicating back to the STO with information on what they were doing with the learning modules. That would probably be a bigger issue than anything else he could imagine getting out.

Alexander and Lucas were working as fast as they could to get those modules stripped and transferred to the central library, but there were so many protections built into each module that it took a significant amount of time to bypass them. It turned out to be faster to set the module to play and have another source record it. That still took time as it had to play at normal speed, but at least it was something. They still wanted to get the original off the modules though.

If that wasn’t enough problems to deal with, Alexander needed to increase security on Eden’s End as well as come up with a plan for handling Harlow.

His idea to reach out to Char was part of that plan, but they were pirates, and he wasn’t about to trust them with his entire fate, which meant he needed more ships.

There was a lot to do and little time to do it.

He sometimes wished he had taken things much slower when he first came out. Maybe then he could have avoided so much attention. It likely wouldn’t have mattered. The traitor had sold them out the first chance they got. Arkonis Anazi would have still attacked when he did. They might not have prevailed if Alexander had been any slower at prepping the facility’s defenses. The same thing would have happened when Char attacked with her fleet. Although he had to chalk most of the success of that encounter up to the STO intervening.

All of this trouble seemed to be coming at him from all angles. Alexander was sick and tired of feeling like everything was on the verge of collapsing if he slowed down for a second. He wanted to be two or three steps ahead of anyone who wished him harm, which meant he needed to stop building defensively and start thinking about how to deal with problems before they arrived. Shifting to a more offensive approach to security seemed like a simple idea, but it was a monumental shift in how he was operating so far. He needed to lean on his friends and allies who knew much more about the topic to ensure he didn’t make a major mistake. One wrong move could prove disastrous for the future of Eden’s End.