Blue Star Enterprises

Alexander stepped into his workshop. Even though everyone was extremely busy restocking supplies aboard the ships and preparing for the next mission in two weeks, most of his work was focused on monitoring the ongoing construction and waiting for the printers to finish.

That's why he had time to go to the training classes and watch over the kids for a bit. He didn't regret the time spent, but there were probably other tasks he could be working on.

There were no additional improvements or tweaks to add to the ships. He had given himself a hard cutoff date for changes so as not to extend their departure date with last-minute updates, even though he itched to add a few that he had already thought about.

He had spent some time speaking with the rescued engineers, a great deal of which had decided to make Eden's End their home after what the corporations had done to them. Then there were the pirate or Asgardian engineers as he had begun to think of them. They hadn't filled him in completely on what to expect, but they had let a few interesting tidbits of information slip. It seemed that while it was true that the Char family controlled Asgard, most people who lived in Char space simply considered themselves Asgardians and their territory seemed to be split up and controlled by Jarls.

It was a bit weird for him to think of these people that way since his only memories of Asgardians came from a few movie references stuck bouncing around in his fragmented memories.

While most of his questions met silence, Alexander still learned tidbits about their culture and way of life. They were also quick to point out why they hated the STO so much. If what the engineers told him was true and not hyperbole or flat-out lies, he could certainly understand their feelings.

Based on his experiences with the STO, he didn't feel like the Asgardians were lying. There might be some details lost to time, but he could easily see the STO pulling back and abandoning a huge section of space to save themselves.

The one thing that did surprise Alexander was the time he slipped and called them pirates. They took great offense to that, and one man had to be restrained after he tried attacking him. The Asgardians didn't consider themselves pirates, even though they attacked ships and took prisoners because they only did so to defend their territory.

It was a bit of a weak argument in Alexander's opinion, but he didn't push the point. It would be a subject he brought up if and when he met with Katalynn Char though considering that was one of his major concerns with working with them.

Armed with the little bit of knowledge he now possessed of Char and her people, he felt much better about approaching her for this mutual alliance against Harlow.

It was too bad he couldn't just have this conversation over Qcomm. If Char even had one, he had no idea how to go about contacting her through it. It wasn't like there was a Qcomm directory. The only way to actually contact private entities was if they gave you their comm number. Even people trying to reach Alexander had to leave a message on his corporate account unless he gave them his, which would do little good since he didn't bother wearing the thing anymore since moving out to Eden's End. Even after installing the Qcomm relay, he hadn't bothered wearing the device knowing how unsecure the network was. For all he knew, the comm bands transmitted everything they heard.

Even if he did have her direct line, he doubted a conversation through that medium would work considering what he had learned about the woman and her people so far. He got the impression that a face-to-face would be the only way to broker this deal and sending a single ship wasn't going to cut it. He had thought about that. One vessel could be ignored or eliminated, bringing a fleet meant she had to take him seriously and respond. Depending on how she responded, he would either move forward with his plan or leave knowing Char and her people were another threat he needed to consider down the road.

There would certainly be some rocky patches and issues to iron out if his plan went forward but he was more inclined to lean toward a successful fi- second encounter. It was weird to think that people he had thought were pirates might be more open to negotiating than the STO. Then again the STO was pretty much at the whims of the corporations at this point, so maybe not so weird.

Alexander quickly checked on the progress of his projects.

The new gunships were slightly delayed due to a printer issue that required Alexander to fly up and repair in person, but everything else seemed on track to complete in the allotted timeframe. The four new ships had already received their new engines and sensors, making them much more capable in those areas. The internal systems weren't installed yet, but they were being moved aboard the ships now. The current holdup there was that walls needed to be removed for some of those systems to be installed. Alexander wasn't concerned about those components delaying their launch date, he had considered those possibilities when deciding on what could be updated.

The biggest issue he was running into wasn't from his production schedule, or rearming the ships, it was actually providing food for the voyage. While Eden's End now produced a surplus of food that was packaged and stored, that was a rather recent change. Prior to Alexander's arrival, the people subsisted off mostly small gardens and the food the larger farmers grew throughout the year with the occasional stop by traders. If the population had remained the same, he was sure he could rely on that again, but the number of people had more than doubled since his arrival.

The food issue had also been slightly exacerbated by Sorin's attack on the stored seeds as well as his absence. Yes, even in death, the man was making Alexander's life difficult. The reason for that was that none of the drifters wanted to farm Sorin's land. Alexander had been forced to submit job requests to get people from the refugees involved. It was probably a good thing that the drifters no longer controlled all of the grown food, but it did set them back.

Alexander also couldn't empty Eden's End of all of its stored food and hope people would get by. It wasn't quite as critical of an issue as it might have been if they were farming on a planet that had to contend with seasons as they could grow year-round, but they had more limited space. The grow areas for Eden's End were producing fresh food every two months with the rotation of crops and the occasional freighter that tried their luck flying out here helped offset some of the food concerns.

Alexander had spoken to Sheila, Wei Na, and the other farmers to see if they could try to boost output to help with their deficit. It was decided that opening up new land for farming would alleviate the issue in the long term, so Alexander allowed farming to expand into Atrium C. They would need to dedicate a space for additional farming eventually, especially if the population continued to grow. In the short term, Captain Farthing would be purchasing a load of food from STO space before she returned after dropping off the people who turned down Alexander's offer or simply wanted to leave.

The people he spoke with assured him that they could stretch the current supply until she returned so he pushed that problem into the handled section. He had to consider that issue resolved since there wasn't anything he could do to make food grow faster.

With everything on track, Alexander wasn't sure what to do with himself. He had already spoken with Yulia about this trip. That was a small part of the reason he got her into training, and agreed to get the other kids in as well. Even though she had assured him that she would be fine, he wanted her to be too occupied with school and her extracurricular activities to think about his absence.

His worry over how she would react was unnecessary though. There wasn't any of the same melancholy or anger as the last time he announced he would be gone for an extended period, which made him rather sad.

Alexander certainly didn't want a repeat of her hating him, but he would have liked to have more of a reaction than the hug and confirmation that she would be fine that she had given him. This change was a bittersweet one for him, it meant his little girl was growing up and maturing. He supposed that was sort of the point of raising a kid, but he just wished it wasn't happening so fast.

He wondered if it had to do with her experiences over the last year. She had gone through quite a bit in the time since he last left. Some of it was good, some of it bad. He knew she had also confronted some hard truths, even though she hadn't confided in him about them. Alexander hoped she would feel comfortable enough to do so someday.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by emotions, Alexander locked up his workshop and decided to go for a walk outside the facility to clear his head.

***

The day of departure had arrived and people scrambled to get last-second items taken care of.

Alexander was a sea of calm amongst the throng of chaos churning around him as he stood on the bridge of the unnamed cruiser or so he looked from the outside. In reality, he was worried sick that something would happen to Eden's End while he was on this extended absence.

The trip to Varlen and back was a two-month round trip, the trip to Yggdrasil's Eye was a month and a half one way and he had no idea how long it would take to reach an agreement with the rather independent Asgardians. At a minimum, he expected the fleet would be gone for four months.

That meant Yulia would be spending that entire time with her friends' families, which was much less of a concern now since the three girls were practically siblings with how close they had become. He just wished it wasn't necessary to leave her behind, but there was always the possibility that this diplomatic mission would turn into a fight.

His worries over leaving Eden's End were slightly ameliorated by the fact that his printers had twenty of the automated gunships queued up for production. Lucas had access to add more if he thought the situation called for it, but twenty should be more than sufficient to protect the system from most threats that the lasers couldn't reach or at least chase away any ships that lingered in the system but outside of the defensive zone around the planet and moon. Someone would need to manually install the processors after the ships were complete, but there were plenty of people with the skills to do that task. They didn't need Alexander there for that.

Speaking of the automated ships, Alexander brought up the scanners and located them. The four that were coming along with the fleet were holding stations around the Talon at the moment. He had given them simple instructions to follow what the Hawks' gunships do and not crash into anything because they were still dumb as rocks as far as their general programming was concerned.

Each of the ships was fitted with a tight-beam laser transceiver but Alexander had restricted access to who could send commands to the ships. Right now only the Talon, his cruiser, and Vanguard, Captain Krieger's new cruiser, had access to send commands to the ships coming with the fleet.

For the home fleet, Captain Farthing had control of her escorts and the additional ones would all be controlled by traffic control.

It wasn't that he didn't trust the other captains, it was that he didn't want an open connection an enemy could exploit with ECM. Restricting who could send commands limited the possibility of them being detected.

If he could put off this trip for a few more weeks, he could increase the fleet size by another four gunships, but that possibility had been dashed when Krieger had finally received a reply from Fletcher. Enjoy new adventures at empire

Harlow's fleets had reengaged the STO battle groups, but Harlow's main fleet was spotted heading towards Char space after having put down an uprising on the Anazi homeworld of Haven. With that bombshell, Alexander canceled any plans to delay his departure or add the compressed plasma ejection thrusters to the recovered ships.

Fletcher didn't explain how he had gotten this info, but Alexander assumed it had to have come from the Erebus class stealth ships or maybe even the new Nyx ones if they had launched. That gave him around four months if Harlow skirted around STO space and made a beeline to Unokane, meaning he needed to strike a deal with Char quickly or head home and prepare as best they could. Lucas would continue building the gunships and defenses up as needed, so there was little point for Alexander to stick around for that.

Alexander wished he had a way to keep tabs on Harlow's fleet once they set out. A fleet of stealth gunships was starting to sound like a good idea. He sent a quick message to Lucas to see what he could do in his absence. The armoring process wasn't perfected yet, but the Head of Testing might be able to think of something that Alexander was overlooking.

It was too bad he hadn't made much headway with the stealth armor tests. Alexander had loaded a few of his long-term projects aboard his cruiser, but he wasn't sure how much time he'd get to actually work on any of them while being the captain.

He started getting ready reports from the other ships in the fleet. That meant he couldn't put this off any longer. He sighed internally and went over to a console to do the final task he needed to complete before shipping out, naming his ship.

Alexander had been dreading this from day one. He had a poor naming sense, and the few names he thought of all sounded dumb even to him. Names like Revenant, Void Reaver, Starbreaker, etc. When he floated them by the other captains, they said the names were fine, but Alexander could tell they hated them, they were just too nice to say anything about it.

He wished Jasper was here to name the ship. He had sent his friend a message a day ago, but the man hadn't responded, meaning he was probably mid-transit.

In a brief moment of naming epiphany, Alexander came up with a name that didn't sound like it had come from an edgy twelve-year-old. He entered the information into the ship's transponder data and clicked save. Thus the BSE Wayward Soul was born.

His comm panel flickered to life and Alexander accepted the incoming connection from Captain Krieger. "It's not what I would have picked," the man stated, "but it's certainly better than the other options you shared. Does this mean we're ready to go?"

Alexander did a quick check and verified that all the ships in the fleet had confirmed their readiness. Then he turned to one of the crewmen assisting with ship operations. "Is everything secure and ready to go?"

"Yes, sir," the man confirmed.

Alexander pressed the comm button to respond to Krieger. "We're all set to depart. I leave the overall command of the fleet to you, Captain."

Krieger confirmed the order and soon the fleet was forming up once more. It was much more impressive to see two cruisers side by side with two destroyers in the same configuration below them, surrounded in a diamond pattern by four frigates with the Talon behind the main ships and flanked by six gunships.

There was a final flurry of messages to and from the surface before the fleet started heading toward the jump point. It was time to see if his crazy idea had any merit.