Blue Star Enterprises

The Shican fleet arrived outside the human system and waited for the two new sensor ships to find the enemy trail. It had taken two weeks for the ships to reach him, but Thesska wasn't in any hurry. Subspace disturbances, while harder to detect, lingered far longer than jump trails. Gravity trails were easy to detect, but didn't last long, or they didn't normally. That many ships jumping and moving in tandem left a gravity wake behind them that tended to last months, even if it was highly diminished. It was that wake they were looking for. It took time for the sensor ships to locate the gravitational disturbance caused by the human fleet, but they did find it.

"The clones are claiming that the enemy fleet split up here, Grand Commander," his subordinate said. "They also claim that the majority of the fleet headed deeper into the space controlled by the entity called the Asgardian Union, while the other is heading toward the border with the other entity called the STO."

Thesska knew more than he cared to about the human polities, but knowledge was required if he expected to destroy them properly. That was why he knew the Union had been responsible for the downfall of Sivarra and his ilk. The Union was a smaller but more militaristic polity than the STO, which excited him.

"Anything else?" Thesska questioned.

"The sensor ships are also picking up subspace echoes. They seem to be coming from the same direction that the smaller fleet headed.

Thesska exposed his teeth in satisfaction. They had a trail. Whether or not it led to their true target would remain to be seen. "We have their scent. Tell the fleet to set course toward the system where the smaller fleet jumped to."

Soon, it would be time to stalk their targets' nest and see just how hard it would be to flush out their quarry.

***

LOCATION: EDEN'S END

SYSTEM: UNOKANE

DATE: 2403

"You want to build a larger printer?" Lucas asked.

"Not just larger," Alexander admitted. "I want ones large enough to print anything instead of just frigates."

Lucas ran his hands through his hair and blew out a breath. "I mean, sure, why not. Going to take time to build them, however."

"Not as much as you might think," Alexander replied as he pulled up his newest design.

After seeing the reported losses from the battle, and the damage to the Eden frigates, and even the Orcas that Krieger had passed on, it was clear that larger, more powerful ships would be needed going forward. Alexander wasn't going to abandon the smaller ships. He was just going to relegate most new production to automated versions, which was now possible thanks to his new processor.

The holo in Alexander's office flickered to life, and both of them identified themselves before the image appeared.

"Um… What am I looking at?" Lucas asked.

Alexander smiled. "It's a printer bot. Each unit is independent, has an onboard computer core, and can produce the static field to keep its print area clear."

"That's very impressive, Alex, but I feel like I'm missing something. How is a single bot, or even a small team of them, going to build faster than a dedicated ring printer?"

Alexander held up his finger and played the simulation. It contained three parts. The first recording was a sped-up recording from a print of an Orca using only a single ring-printer. Once that was done, the image moved off to one side with a timestamp of a little over two months from start to finish.

The next showed their current operation, which was using two ring printers simultaneously. Halfway through, the rest was simulated, giving a completion date of a month and a half for the Orca. Adding a second printer wasn't exactly a hundred percent efficient, but it did help.

That image slid to the opposite side, leaving a third simulation showing the new bot design. The image dramatically panned out, earning an eye roll from Lucas and a chuckle from Alexander, because he knew it was coming. Soon, the single bot was joined by two, then five, then twenty, then a hundred more.

Instead of forming a circular disk like the ring printers, the bots flowed in a chaotic melee that shouldn't have worked, but did. It took Alexander a full month to work up the math needed to feed to the research core so it could define the most optimal approach to printing a ship, only to find out he had been overthinking things. He felt really stupid when the computer came up with the same result nature had after billions of years of evolution, and it was called a Fibonacci spiral.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Since it turned out that printing a ship in thin layers was not a very optimal approach, he had the research core come up with a print plan for the bots to keep them from crashing into each other and parts of the ship being assembled.

Chaos in motion was about as close as a person could describe the hectic dance, as the bots seemed to orbit themselves and others while occasionally zipping away and returning.

"Why do they keep leaving?" Lucas asked as he watched the simulation.

"To grab new material canisters. The bots need to be relatively small to move around each other, which limits how much material they can contain."

Lucas looked puzzled. "Won't that just slow the whole process down?"

"It does, but I'll explain that after."

It was strange watching a ship seem to grow from the inside out like a plant, but that's the closest approximation Alexander had for what he was watching.

Soon, the sped-up simulation was complete, and the timer showed just under a month for the Orca.

"Holy shit!" Lucas exclaimed.

"I thought the same thing when I first saw the data—the best part. The printer bot swarm is infinitely scalable. It'll just take some extensive planning to model the bot paths for each design."

"Can we even produce enough refined material to keep up? And what about the material canister issue?"

"To answer your first question. No. I have a second and third Maw already scheduled for production. We should have enough material for the printer swarm to complete both of those in…" Alexander waggled his hand back and forth. "A week or two. I haven't gotten the finalized swarm pathing yet, but I might not wait for the most optimal approach. Oh, I just remembered another thing. Small ships like the Stingrays and corvettes will still need to get printed the old way. There just isn't enough justification to waste the computing cycles to generate the pathing to use the printer swarm. Even if we did generate one, it wouldn't significantly speed up their production, simply because they are too small to dedicate many bots to the process. Actually, if my calculations are correct, the larger the ship, the more time we save. As the ship starts to expand, more bots can be added."

"You skipped over the other thing I asked about, but now I have another question. Can the bots start on an already started build?"

"I didn't skip it," Alexander made a huffing noise. "I was getting to that. A resupply vessel needs to be parked close to the swarm's work area. You can kind of think of it as an upgraded control ship, resupply ship in one. It doesn't need to control the bots since they will all have the older style of pseudo-computronic core inside them, but it can monitor and watch for mistakes, while correcting those, and further optimizing the process. Its secondary function will be as a docking vessel for the bots to offload their empty canisters and pick up filled ones to keep the print going non-stop. Sort of how the maintenance bots swap out the canisters in the large ring printers now. And yes, the bots can take over an existing assembly, but it won't really speed things up much more than a single printer. I assume you asked because the battleship is behind schedule?"

Lucas nodded.

"Don't tell your brother, but I commandeered the security core to work on the pathing for the battleship. If Damien complains about slowness in the system, just say there is a maintenance check running or something."

Lucas laughed. "You don't know my brother nearly as well as you think if you believe he would come to me with a problem. If Damien ever asked me about a computer issue, I would have to run tests to see if I fell into an alternate dimension. My brother isn't exactly a technophobe, but he has about as much patience for technology as he does for pirates. If something doesn't work, his idea of fixing it is hitting it, and if that doesn't work, he stomps off in a huff until someone realizes the system doesn't work and fixes it."

Alexander looked at Lucas in shock. "Seriously?"

"Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit," Lucas chuckled, "but you get the point. He probably won't ask."

Alexander shook his avatar in exasperation. "Anyway, I hope to have that pathing model complete by the end of the week. The new bots are small enough that the regular printers can produce them, so enough of those should be ready to go in three days to start the new mass smelters. Once those are under production, I'll be producing more mining drones, control ships, and Fishbone haulers. We really need to increase our mineral intake."

"I hope you're ready for another round of complaints from the civvy miners. They had a fit the last time we dumped a boatload of new mining drones in their zone."

Alexander had heard from Mingyu that some of the independent miners were grumbling, which was annoying. They knew the Union and the STO were at war with the Shican, but that didn't seem to stop them from feeling slighted, even if they didn't own the asteroids they were allowed to mine free of charge. "I have faith that Theo can handle any complaints, which should be few and far between, considering the miners are getting paid triple the normal rate for their services."

"Better him than me," Lucas replied. "Any idea how much time the new swarm will knock off the battleship's production schedule?"

"I can only guess," Alexander admitted, "but I think it will knock a few weeks off the schedule, which will bring us back to the original timeframe. I know that's not the most impressive, but with the ship being partially completed, it's going to slow things down at first. Once the bots get past the partially completed sections, things will speed up significantly."

"I hope you're right, Alex. That's a whole lot to put into an untested printer design."

Alexander nodded his avatar. "That's why I'm starting with the smelters and less critical ships. I hope to work out any bugs or other oddities before they start on the battleship. We can't afford delays, you read Krieger's report, right?"

Lucas nodded grimly. "It kind of makes me wish I were a captain so I could be there when the enemy experiences a taste of their own medicine."

"It's not too late to make that happen," Alexander smiled.

"Not a fucking chance," Lucas laughed. "I'll stick to my computers and engineering, thank you very much."

Alexander laughed along with his friend, because he was the same way. While he could command, he knew it wasn't where his talents lay.

It felt so good to laugh and let a bit of the worry melt away for a bit. He knew the losses were heavy, and once the meeting was over, Alexander had a much more somber task, which involved adding more names to the monument to the fallen, which he expanded to include a new section, specifically for losses in the Shican War. Every person who sacrificed themselves to stop the aliens deserved to be remembered.