Blue Star Enterprises-Chapter 232 - 4-48

The first thing Alexander noticed once they undocked was that their shadow had vanished. That was less comforting than he hoped. He would have preferred to keep an eye on someone who might have nefarious intentions.

That being said, he wasn't about to sit around and wait for them to pop back up. The fleet formed up and headed toward the jump point. It would be another month-and-a-half-long journey to reach Sol if everything went smoothly. It was hard to believe that Unokane was about the same distance from Yggdrasil's Eye as Epsilon Indi was from Sol.

***

The rest of the trip was uneventful, he might even call it boring if that wasn't exactly what he had been hoping for. While it was amazing visiting some of the systems he remembered from when he was human, the actual visits were rather anticlimactic. That probably had a lot to do with the fact that there wasn't much in those systems other than corporate-owned stations and mining operations.

There were no habitable planets along the rest of their route, which was not surprising. Even nominally habitable planets like Eden's End weren't exactly abundant.

That didn't stop millions of people from living in those systems, though. The amount of traffic was not something Alexander had included in his trip planning and they were forced to take indirect paths on more than one occasion as ordered by the local traffic control or forced to skirt around corporate-owned assets protected by armed fleets of their own.

None of them were a threat to his fleet, but they stayed well clear of them anyway. He wasn't here to start a fight or attempt to muscle in on someone else's assets.

Alexander wasn't surprised by the density of corporate assets as they moved closer to Sol. It was the cradle of humanity after all, and the systems closest to it would have been the subject of exploitation first and foremost. Even without a hypergate, Sol was still pretty centrally located within the STO's borders.

With what Alexander saw as they flew through the systems, he was able to make a rough estimate of population and resource extraction. He figured it would take a few thousand years to mine even the poorer systems of their resources. As a comparison, a system like Eden's End would continue providing materials, at the scale he was seeing in these systems, for probably close to ten thousand years, and he knew there were much richer systems out there. It was safe to say humanity wouldn't run out of resources in their sphere of influence any time soon.

They weaved through the last of the traffic and avoided the grumpy corporate security forces to finally arrive at the jump point to Sol. freewēbnoveℓ.com

He now understood why the STO had incorporated strict jump points. It would have been a huge mess if people jumped in and out of systems wherever they wished. While space was big, and the chances of jumping in where someone else was traveling were low, it wasn't non-existent, especially with the volume of traffic he was seeing.

While the STO method worked, the problem could be alleviated by having ships with FTL comms aboard each ship. All they would have to do was forward their jump data to the next system, ensuring the area was kept clear for their arrival. Instead, they had to queue up in the jump lane and wait an hour between ships to ensure the one ahead was well clear of their exit.

There was an upside to that process; Willard was forced to jump a full hour ahead of Alexander's fleet, giving him an hour of not having to worry about the asinine Vice Admiral.

Once it was their turn, Alexander's entire fleet jumped in sync.

***

Anatole was looking over some documents on his tablet when there was a knock on his office door.

"Enter," he stated without dropping the tablet.

One of his assistants entered. "Admiral Dufresne, you wished to be notified when the Blueridge arrived. They entered the system thirty minutes ago."

"And Kane?" Anatole asked. He had been keeping apprised of Kane's fleet and whereabouts since the man entered Varlen, but it would be just like Willard to fuck up and lose the man right at the goal.

The inquiry was a witch hunt, and Anatole loathed that, but he couldn't retract Admiral Util's orders without causing friction within the admiralty. He wasn't about to risk his position for an unknown CEO such as Kane or chance getting caught up in whatever corporate conspiracy Util had kicked off with his idiotic orders.

Anatole knew his position was weak. The only reason he had been given it was thanks to his family's connections with the current chairman of the STO, which irked him. He had worked hard his entire career to get where he was, only for the Admiral position to be given to him for political reasons, and because Admiral Clement had been relieved of his position because of his failure to predict Harlow's attack, which was ridiculous. Nobody could have predicted that.

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He shouldn't really complain. Nobody within the STO was truly free from political obligations. Even the Chairman was beholden to corporate interests, so rocking the boat was a bad idea and would land Anatole in hot water. Instead of ending up like that fool Willard, Anatole would do his job to the best of his ability and avoid the politics involved as much as possible. He just wished they didn't make his job so damned difficult.

"They should be arriving shortly," the aide said. "We confirmed they jumped an hour after the Blueridge."

Anatole nodded and put down the tablet. "Tell Willard he is to meet with me for a debriefing as soon as he arrives."

The man nodded and exited Anatole's office.

The sooner he took Willard's rank away, the better. Anatole despised incompetence and greed, but he could put up with someone who had one of those two traits. There was certainly a fair share of people with either of those attributes in the STO leadership, both civilian and military. What he refused to put up with were people who embodied both of those traits.

Willard was a prime example of someone too stupid to overreach, yet he had, on more than one occasion, and, going by reports, continued to do so.

If it wasn't for Admiral Util pushing through Willard's promotion, the man would have been gone a long time ago. It had cost Anatole quite a bit of effort and cost him personally as he was forced to swap his quadrant of control with Util in order to wrestle away Willard from under the other Admiral's clutches and rein in that buffoon, but by then the corporate plot was already in motion.

Thankfully, Willard was so incompetent that it was easy for Anatole to convince the other two Admirals to agree to bust the man back down a rank. Util hadn't even seemed concerned, which meant whatever reason the man had for promoting Willard had already run its course.

That was how Anatole figured out the plot involved Kane. The simplest theory was that they wanted Kane to strike at Willard to cause a conflict between the STO and BSE, but that never happened, so it gave Anatole time to try and counter Util's actions.

First, he removed the provocation of the other fleet ships from Unokane. After they returned to Varlen, he sent people he trusted to question the crews. That was when they uncovered the attempted sabotage.

Anatole wasn't surprised; that was why he sent his people to investigate. Some of those captains had very suspicious transfers in their bank records.

In the end, they never caught the actual saboteur, but they did learn that almost all the recalled captains had taken bribes. Those individuals were quietly hauled off to military prison until their hearings.

With those ships no longer having active captains, it meant Varlen was no longer a viable site to keep active. He would have loved to transfer captains from other locations, but the war had killed off a lot of good commanders.

With Willard still out of the picture and unaware of the site issues, Anatole ordered the remaining captains to other locations. Then he had his people take Willard's cruiser along with most of the crew stationed at the base.

The warship would be more useful in helping drive the pirates back than sitting and waiting for that wastrel Willard to return and use it as some sort of accessory to make a statement.

That left Kane.

Anatole didn't have a good read on the man. Everything he did defied expectations. He fully expected to hear that Willard had died at Kane's hands after learning about the sabotage, but not a peep. Then they all showed up in Varlen with Willard alive and well.

He had read the man's file and seen what to expect. A bit jarring, assuming it wasn't just all made up, but he had seen rich people do stranger things in his life. It was obvious the man was a very competent engineer. Then there were the disturbing rumors about Kane's origins.

There was no hard evidence to support those claims, but he had been privy to the top-secret mission briefings back when that alien vessel had first been recovered, so there might be some truth to those rumors. Considering Fletcher had been in control of that vessel and the research around it, his untimely death could probably be attributed to whatever the corporations were up to with Kane.

That was another reason Anatole wanted Willard out of that position. Having someone as useless as that in charge of Navy Intelligence was just asking for trouble.

As for what happened to the alien ship and research, who could say? It was long gone by the time Anatole's people got a chance to look into it. He feared the technology was now in the hands of whoever disposed of Fletcher.

He sighed internally. If that was true, the corporations were one step closer to wrapping their greedy little hands around the entire STO, and there was little Anatole could do to stop them. He missed the days when the STO was at war with the Coalition. At least back then, everyone was focused on defeating their sworn enemy instead of trying to stab their peers in the back at the first opportunity.

Speaking of being stabbed in the back, Anatole stood from behind his desk and adjusted his suit. He had a meeting with Admiral Util in a few minutes to discuss the uptick in activity along the Xin border.

As much as he wished for the camaraderie present during the Coalition war, he didn't actually wish to experience such a devastating conflict again. Hopefully, Util would see reason and agree to deploy some of his assets to Anatole's quadrant. So far, the man had been stonewalling any attempt at reducing the number of ships defending his area of space, even though that was the safest sector within the STO.

Anatole would have gone to the other two Admirals, but both of them had suffered significant losses under Harlow's attacks and couldn't afford to shift any assets around at the moment. Efforts were underway to replace those losses, but ships didn't appear overnight.

He could petition the STO Chairman to move assets around, but the bureaucracy involved in a decision like that outside of wartime ensured a conclusion would take months or years. He would consider it if no other option presented itself, but he was loath to put his eggs in that bureaucratic basket.

Had he known about the Xin activity beforehand, he would have transferred resources from his old quadrant to the one he oversaw now. Either Util had hidden the issue while he was in command, or hadn't known about it. Neither was a good sign.

At least with the pirate conflict over, he could withdraw his ships from that border to reinforce his own. That was another reason he decided to decommission Varlen. The system had not seen any threats in decades, and with Kane out there, pirate sightings had dropped to an all-time low.

Anatole was gambling on it remaining that way, but he needed the forces elsewhere until the Navy recovered to its pre-conflict state once more.