"Colonel Jun, why haven’t we been allowed to depart yet, I don’t understand?" Mingyu asked his STO contact and forr Coalition shipmate.
After reporting the pirate takeover, they had been sequestered in this damn military outpost for months. His crew’s morale was at an all-ti low thanks to being cooped up aboard the Destiny. It wasn’t a luxury ship, most of the ti when they were on a long deploynt, people were working and keeping busy. They didn’t even have that now. The only spot on the station open to civilians was the lounge. And there weren’t any more anities there than aboard his ship. He didn’t even want to go into how the children and Headmaster Wong were faring.
Mingyu was pretty sure if he didn’t do sothing soon, the man was going to go to the nearest STO officer and tell them he was kidnapped just to get off the ship and away from the kids who were even more cranky than his crew.
"Look, Mingyu, I’m doing my best. After you requested my aid with those guests of yours half a year back, I don’t have nearly the sa pull around here as I used to. Soone reported the training exercise to my superiors back on Earth."
He winced at that. "I’m sorry. If I had known, I wouldn’t have called in the favor."
The Colonel shrugged. "I was glad to finally pay it off, even if it cost the chance of moving up in my career. Sothing that was unlikely to happen anyway considering my previous ti with the Coalition. The problem here is the STO is trying to hide just how bad this pirate infiltration was."
"It wasn’t just Petrov then?" Mingyu asked in surprise. Pirate attacks on border systems weren’t exactly rare. It’s why Petrov station had hidden weapons systems. But a concentrated attack on multiple places at once was new.
"I shouldn’t even be telling you this but I feel I still owe you at least this much. Eight stations and three outer systems fell to the pirates on the sa day. It was a well-thought-out, well-coordinated attack. From what I gathered, the STO upper brass are deciding if they even want to commit resources to retake these systems."
"That’s ridiculous! They can’t just let the pirates do as they wish, it will only make them push for more."
The man nodded. "I know that and you know that, but the STO brass can’t see beyond a spreadsheet. And right now that spreadsheet says the cost outweighs the benefit."
Mingyu cursed, sothing he hadn’t done in years. "What does that have to do with my ship and the people aboard?"
Jun sighed. "They were debating what to do with you as well. They are afraid you’ll spread the word of what happened to other systems, requiring them to act for a change. I’m afraid they just issued a no-contact alert for you as of today."
"… I don’t understand. Is this sothing new in the STO?"
"It ans no public station or planet within the STO is allowed to offer you docking or landing rights. The rule was designed to stop the spread of possible contagions. As you can see, they found other creative uses for it as well. They have also ordered the engineers here to disable your communication systems, except for a tight beam laser link for ergency use. I assu they have also flagged all your comm bands so they no longer connect to Qcomms or relay stations either."
"How can they do this? We haven’t done anything wrong!" Mingyu had been a standup individual his entire life, doing his utmost to live within the law. Even when he found so of them to be nonsensical as well as a complete waste of ti. And now he and his entire ship were being punished for it. How was that fair?
"I know, old friend. Unfortunately, I had no say in this order. When I tried to argue against it, they threatened to lock up for insubordination."
"Thank you for trying. What am I supposed to do now? We can’t stay here. This ruling is essentially a death sentence, without the bother of taking us to trial."
"Now you’re just being overly dramatic. It’ll be tough, that’s true. But you can still do ergency docking and refueling at any Navy yard. There are also legitimate places outside the STO’s borders that you can go. You asked about a ship a few months ago?"
As if those places would be safe. Most were probably pirate hideouts masquerading as independents. "Yes, the Zephyr."
Jun nodded. "You’re in luck. A fleet station in Varlen pinged them, along with a rcenary ship heading for Y6X-3H2. If those are friends of yours, I suggest you start there. It’s well outside STO jurisdiction so they would have no reason to uphold this order. And it’s likely safer than anywhere else you might randomly stumble across."
Things had beco so hectic that he had forgotten about asking Jun to give him a heads-up on the ship if he could. He had been curious about where Alexander might have gone after learning he left on the ship. And now he knew. He didn’t begrudge the man for leaving after how the Council had treated him. He would have done the sa in his shoes. Mingyu wanted to apologize to the man and try to forge an actual working relationship with him if he could. That was before he was chased out of Gliese 667. Now… now, it sounded like this system Alexander had gone to might be his only safe harbor.
Jun was correct, it would be difficult. Mingyu didn’t even know where either of these systems were or what awaited him there. He gave it a fifty-fifty shot on whether or not Alexander would be happy to see him if he arrived. Or if he would even be welcod into the system. You didn’t move outside colonized space because you wanted uninvited visitors.
If he had any other option, he would have picked it. But this STO ruling effectively cut him off from any allies he had that weren’t stationed in military posts like Jun. And he had few of those as it was.
The Destiny would eventually need service and repairs as well. The Navy yards would provide consumables because they were bound by law to aid any ship in distress, but even those would be at a premium. He winced at the thought of how expensive any repairs might be.
With a quiet sigh, he nodded to Colonel Jun and headed back to the Destiny to inform the crew they were leaving. If his crew didn’t mutiny against him on this journey, he would consider himself lucky.
***
Alexander lifted one of the heavy beams in place as an engineer welded it to the one below. It had taken a few iterations, but he had finally co up with an acceptable design for a railgun emplacent.
It reminded him of old satellite dishes. The half-moon portion sat below the ground and acted as the weapons inclination adjustnt and reloading system. Along the periter was a rotational actuator that controlled the rotation, obviously.
The reloading system was at the bottom center of the dish. It ant the weapon would have to point straight up for reloading, which wasn’t ideal for aiming purposes but was the best thod he could co up with at the mont. Placing it anywhere else in the pit ant the gun would have to lower itself and rotate back to the loading chanism, and then back to the target before it could fire again.
An autoloader attached to the back of the gun would eliminate that issue, but that added unneeded complexity and weight to the part of the gun that moved. Having the autoloader as a stationary component at the bottom center of the pit eliminated those issues and allowed the loader to store way more darts than it could if it was attached to the gun.
With his design, it only had to get back to the correct elevation. Doing it this way also allowed the gun to rotate the full 180 degrees vertically in the cradle because there weren’t bulky autoloader components in the way.
Technically the weapon could even point down. But he had put limiters in to prevent that sort of situation from happening. He didn’t want so accidental discharge going into the very delicate internals of the emplacent if the elevation system failed for whatever reason or the cables to be ripped out if the gun got confused on orientation.
There were also so hard-coded limitations built into the program that Lucas had coded for him. It prevented the gun from firing at the facility, or while it was below the protective hatch that would protect it from the environnt. Whenever they got it put into place, that is.
The limitations on the weapon did leave a blind spot in the defensive envelope around the facility though. After talking it over with the Hawks, Alexander implented a second railgun design that would be placed above ground that would be covered with a do. These smaller railgun emplacents were not much bigger than Alexander’s first design test. The kinetic darts they delivered were about the size of a marker instead of the much smaller ones he used in his initial test.
As with the guns themselves, his ammunition went through a redesign. Instead of having fins that stuck out past the core, the rear tapered to a point and the fins maintained the original diater all the way back. It looked like a pointed teardrop with fins. He didn’t have any research to say which was better, but his tests of the new ammunition showed they didn’t lose velocity as quickly, and they were still stable in flight. That was all that mattered to him.
The larger emplacent that he was working on fired kinetic darts around the size of a can of spray paint. That was a whole lot of mass and a whole lot of energy. With as much power as he was pumping through the railguns, they should be capable of hitting anything in orbit, but not much beyond that. While not ideal, their main use was for shooting at ships in low orbit or anything trying to land that wasn’t authorized. And if he ever got around to it, he might even be able to find a suitable explosive to pack inside the darts. He wasn’t sure if the darts would do more damage as is or with an explosive inside them. That would take more testing to figure out at a later date.
Alexander would have preferred to use a smaller projectile, but the static shielding ships used to deflect space debris were strong enough to redirect smaller projectiles. It apparently added a considerable amount of counteracting force as well, which reduced much of a projectile’s punch. The round had to be large enough to overco both if it had any hope of punching through a ship’s hull. He didn’t have exact numbers, so he erred on the side of caution and went as big as he could. Captain Matthews said the size should be fine, so Alexander went with it.
He wished he had ti to study the static shielding system to figure out how it worked. According to Travers, static shielding was mostly useless planetside. Sothing to do with power draw as it almost constantly had to push atmospheric particles out of the way. He still made a ntal note to look into in the future.
The man welding the beam in place finished up and Alexander released his hold. The first railgun cradle was almost complete. A few more supports, and then the gun and power systems could go in. They were already built and waiting, it would just take so assembly. Alexander made that process as simple as possible so it didn’t even require engineers. Just move them into position and stick them together.
He wanted the design to be as simple and straightforward as possible because they needed to build six of the large railguns to cover all the blind spots around the massive complex. There would also be twelve of the smaller railgun turrets. Two for each landing pad. Then each entry would be fitted with an automated turret inside that would drop down from the ceiling with two of the flechette rifles inside it.
Was it overkill? Probably. Did Alexander care? No. Well, he only cared that it delayed his actual engine-building work. But safety had to co first.
The security room was also getting an overhaul. Alexander pushed a few projects farther down his list and used his limited supply of advanced computer chips for the new defensive center.
All of the computer coding ca from a very excited Lucas. When Alexander told him what he planned to do, the man could barely contain his excitent. Even the taciturn Damien seed less unhappy about this project than most everything else.
He was holding the final piece of the railgun mount when his radio buzzed. Alexander excused himself and put down the support as he grabbed the radio.
"This is Alexander." He hadn’t figured out a way to communicate via radio with his body yet, so relying on the small handheld units provided by the Hawks was the best he could do.
"Alexander, it’s Martinez in the security center. Our sensors just picked up a ship jumping into the system. Figured I would give you a heads up."
"…Um. Ok." He didn’t really know how to respond to that. The Hawks were still in orbit, they would deal with any hostile vessel that ca through. And if it wasn’t hostile, they would tell him. "Thanks," he finally said. Maybe giving a radio to the person watching the asteroid caras wasn’t the best idea. Then again it was infinitely better than having Yulia woken up every ti a ship jumped in and the facility alarms were triggered.
A few minutes later, he got another radio ssage. This ti from the Talon. "Mr. Kane, It’s Captain Matthews. We have received a tight beam comm ssage from the new ship. The Captain claims to know you and is asking if they can approach the planet."
Soone who knew him was here? He had no clue who that could be, Jasper wasn’t due back for a few more weeks. "Who is the Captain?"
"He says his na is Captain Mingyu Na. Ring any bells?"
Alexander paused. What the hell was one of the Council Captains doing way out here?
"Yes, I know him. I’m not sure what he wants from , though. Is his ship capable of landing?"
"No," Matthews stated flatly. "It looks like a large mining ship if I had to guess."
"Tell him it is okay to approach. I will speak with him in a few days."
Matthews acknowledged the order and closed the radio connection. While he didn’t think Na was here for nefarious purposes. There was the possibility his ship got hijacked in Gliese 667, or that he was being coerced sohow. Deciding not to risk it, Alexander urged the engineers to complete the first gun emplacent before the ship arrived. At least then they had so protection if things turned south. Not that he thought the Talon couldn’t handle a single mining ship, he would just feel better not relying on them completely.
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