Blue Star Enterprises-Chapter 230 - 4-46

The fleet lined up to jump through the hypergate. It wasn't the first time Alexander had gone through a hypergate, but it was the first chance he got to watch it happen in such detail.

The last time he had gone through one was aboard Zephyr. Alexander loved Jasper's transport ship, but it didn't have the same quality of sensors and optics as a dedicated military vessel. After many upgrades and years of improvement, Alexander knew the sensors and optics aboard Grace were now more advanced than even what Krieger was working with on Epsilon's Dawn.

Much of that improvement was thanks to the captured corporate ship, which provided the components necessary to reverse engineer some of those sensors, but the optical sensors were all thanks to Lucas. Even the corporate gunship couldn't boast optical sensors as good as Lucas'. The only ship in the BSE fleet that had better optical sensors was Fafo, and that was because it had an optical sensor package designed for long-distance scientific research. Not exactly a normal addition to a ship.

Alexander would have loved to put something like that into Grace, but it wasn't practical for a few reasons. The first was that instrumentation such as that took up a lot of space. If that were the only drawback, he might have still tried to fit it into Grace. The second drawback was the main reason for not including the scientific sensors. They could only see a small section of stars at one time. Much like his centrally mounted lasers on the Sharks and Swordfish class corvettes, the optical sensor could gimbal slightly without the ship having to move to reorient, but it was limited. For optical sensors to be viable on a warship, they needed to be as all-encompassing as possible.

Just because Alexander didn't utilize the research sensors didn't mean they hadn't been useful. Lucas had studied the scientific research equipment to further boost the effectiveness of his own sensors. Those improvements were what allowed Alexander to passively track the small ship that was trailing them.

He would have disregarded the ship's direction of travel as a happenstance since there were dozens of vessels in line to use the hypergate, but the vessel in question had been flagged as suspicious by the computer core. It detached from the station at the same moment Grace left orbit. Instead of going to the hypergate immediately, the ship hung around until Grace rejoined the rest of the fleet. Once that happened, it trailed their fleet by a few light seconds, merging with the rest of the traffic heading toward the hypergate.

Even that wasn't all that peculiar until you included the fact that that same ship had been actively scanning Grace a few days ago. Most civilian ships were constantly using active scanners to avoid hazards, but they didn't have the types of sensors their mystery guest did. The advanced sensors aboard Yulia's Grace were able to determine that the unknown ship was using some sort of laser spectroscopy to scan their hull, which was confirmed by the computer core. Normally, only mining vessels bothered with such scanners because they weren't much use unless you were scanning for material composition. Alexander had included a set of those sensors on Grace, mostly for finding minerals to use if they needed to rely on their repair facilities aboard.

It was odd to see a VIP transport running those types of sensors. Alexander was also surprised to see that the vessel's transponder didn't list the ship's name or the owner. He decided to contact Eden's End and see if Theo could shed some light on why the STO would allow that.

"It's marked as a VIP transport?" Theo asked after Alex told him what was up.

Alexander nodded his avatar.

"That's easy then. It belongs to some noble, CEO, or planetary governor. Those are the only types of people who can utilize the laws designed for VIPs. I can't see another planetary governor bothering to visit someone else's planet incognito. Those sorts of things are usually made public for political reasons. CEOs wouldn't bother in most cases because representing their company and brand is the whole point. That doesn't mean it couldn't be one of those two, but it seems unlikely. I think your admirer is probably a noble. That's not good news, Alex. What did you do to draw their attention?" Theo asked.

Alexander had an idea about that, but he needed a bit more information before he could determine if he was correct or not. "Let me ask you another question first. How likely do you think it would be for multiple companies to have the same armor composition in their ships?"

Seeing the unknown ship use the spectrometer to scan them, Alexander returned the favor to see what sort of information it would return. He immediately recognized the composition of the other ship's armor.

"Same? It seems unlikely," Theo said. "Why?"

Alexander was afraid of that. While he didn't have a catalog of corporate armor composites, the armor on the gunship Krieger recovered was wildly different from any other armor composite Alexander had encountered so far and quite a bit stronger, which is why he had implemented it into his own ships.

"According to the sensors, the VIP's armor exactly matches the gunship we recovered."

"That can't be good," Theo stated. "Do you think they know the same thing?"

"It seems likely, given they used the same scanning method I did to learn about them, and the fact that they are following us," Alexander said in annoyance. "I have to cut our conversation short, we're next up to use the hypergate. I'll keep you informed of our stalker, let Krieger and the rest of the captains know so they can keep an eye out for trouble, and we can discuss this further when I have some more time."

"I'll alert them. Good luck, Alex, stay safe."

Theo finished his response just as Grace entered the gate.

The transition through the hypergate was a much different experience than jumping into FTL. Instead of seeing the light from nearby stars shifting their color bands, the transit only showed complete darkness.

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To the naked eye, that was probably a good thing.

Even the ship's sensors weren't able to detect anything once inside the gate. The trip ended as quickly as it began.

For everyone aboard the vessel, the transition through the gate was nearly instantaneous. That wasn't the reality, though. Alexander looked at the data from the comm nodes and compared it to what the one on Eden's End was showing. It confirmed that they had spent over an hour inside the hypergate.

The fact that a hypergate wasn't instantaneous wasn't a revelation. That had been proven long ago by the core worlds after FTL communications had been developed. It was just interesting to see it for himself. It also lent more credence to the gates being wormholes rather than folded space, as some researchers postulated.

Alexander hadn't known any of that information about the hypergates until he purchased the module relating to the unknown alien constructions. The absurdly expensive information packet was essentially useless, but there were a few nuggets of interesting data within that he would look into later.

With all of the fleet present, including Blueridge, they made their way through Borrus and toward the jump point, heading in the direction of Epsilon Indi.

To no surprise, the VIP transport showed up a few hours later and continued to tail them.

***

SYSTEM: EPSILON INDI

DATE: 2402

The remaining trip to Epsilon Indi was uneventful other than that transport trailing them the entire time, which became more and more obvious as traffic thinned toward that jump point.

The few ships they did encounter as they moved through the core system, scattered like roaches from the light as soon as they realized what types of ships Alexander's fleet was composed of.

That all changed when they entered Epsilon Indi. Unlike every other system, the ships flying around in the lawless star system didn't seem to care at all about Alexander or his ships. In fact, it seemed to be the exact opposite. Ships and even stations blasted Alexander's fleet with active sensors, probably trying to glean any useful intelligence they could about the new arrivals.

Seeing as they were technically outside of STO-controlled space, he finally turned on the scan inhibitor, making the locals' efforts useless.

The scan inhibitor came about when Alexander repurposed the same static field technology that Dalton had used to hide the weapons on his ship. Instead of requiring a vacuum to use the field, Alexander simply ran the field through the nanotubes that powered his new generation of ships.

It wasn't a perfect solution as the nanotubes didn't run through the entire hull like with the alien vessel, but based on testing, it did disrupt most active scans past that point. He hadn't bothered using the inhibitor before because no other ships had been so brazen as to try and do a neutrino scan on Grace. Even the VIP ship only used scanning that was capable of determining the material makeup on Grace's surface. Had it tried to actively scan the interior of Grace, Alexander would have sent a few of his gunships toward that vessel to make a point, VIP or not. Case in point.

A few of the BSE gunships broke off and actively targeted the vessels that were attempting to scan them. They would fail thanks to the scan inhibitor, but that wasn't the point. The point was to show them that they couldn't get away with it.

The ships fled as soon as they saw the gunships coming toward them. Now he just had to figure out how to stop the nearby stations from doing the same.

Alexander thought it was a bit ironic that the base technology in his scan inhibitor probably originated in Epsilon Indi or a system much like it.

He also wondered how Katalynn was handling the situation since Valkyrie didn't have the luxury of such a defense. Then he noticed none of the ships or stations had tried to scan her vessel. He sent a comm message her way to ask why that was.

Katalynn chuckled when Alexander asked her. "The first time we visited this system, we impressed upon the locals what would happen if they tested us. The few criminal elements who thought they could flaunt their power are no longer among the living."

"You destroyed their ships? Isn't that piracy?" Alexander asked in confusion.

She shook her head. "We didn't have to attack any ships, we simply docked at the stations owned by the same criminal elements who owned those ships. Then we showed them why it wasn't a good idea to anger Asgardians. The STO doesn't care if a bunch of criminals die off. Once word spread of what we did to the people who disobeyed our directives, they stopped trying to test us. If you're curious about doing the same, I can provide you with a list of stations to visit."

Alexander shook his avatar. "Thank you for the option, but I don't think that will be necessary."

"Suit yourself," she said with a shrug.

Alexander considered Katalynn's words. He could probably get the same result by simply adding his Asgardian affiliation to his transponder ID, but he didn't want to make that connection known quite yet.

For a black market hub, Alexander expected Epsilon Indi to be busy, but those expectations fell short. There was more traffic in the system than there had been in Ganos or Borrus. The difference was that the traffic was scattered amongst the seemingly countless stations and asteroid bases littered throughout the system instead of a single planet.

Alexander filtered out the stations until he found the one he was looking for. Once he did, they set a course toward it, a reluctant Blueridge joining them.

Their destination was the largest station in the system. It easily dwarfed the massive orbital elevator he had seen floating over Ganos. freewёbnoνel.com

The structure had to be ten miles across and half again as long. It looked like a giant cylinder floating in space. He couldn't imagine the amount of time and effort that must have gone into constructing such a monumental structure.

The massive station differed from all the other space stations in the system in another capacity as well. Unlike a normal station, which usually orbited a planet or other object, that wasn't the case with his destination. It orbited the stars like a planet. Massive thrusters on the rear of the station ensured it could keep that orbit around the triple stars. If you could even call the two brown dwarfs that orbited the orange dwarf true stars.

As they neared the structure, Alexander could make out ringed sections that bulged out slightly from the main structure. There was also an enormous neon sign that read 'The House of the Void,' which was a remnant from when the massive structure had been originally built to be a resort and casino.

Alexander was sure there were still some gambling establishments aboard the structure, but he was more interested in the half now owned by Gravitational Solutions.

The company and the way they operated were enigmatic at best, and there wasn't a whole lot of information he had been able to purchase about them. They had been around since before the Qcomm was invented, and he knew from some archived news stories that their majority ownership of the station was what prevented such a device from being installed. That likely also led to the swift decline of the gambling establishments. Hard to get people to part with even more money if they have no easy way to access it.

Despite the loss of the casinos, Alexander was almost positive that the station brought in even more money now than it used to.

He contacted the docking office and managed to procure a large enough hangar space for all of his fleet, minus Valkyrie. Katalynn had to settle for another hangar, which she was fine with.

The Asgardian leader needed to speak with Gravitation Solutions as well.