“You want to arm the guard forces with a full military kit?” Damien asked dubiously.

  “I would prefer not to, but if the Shican reach the ground, the guards are going to need every advantage they can get just to survive. And not just them. I want to arm every single person who is trained in hand-to-hand combat or weapons of any kind.”

  “Everyone?”

  Alexander nodded.

  “You’re putting the kill switches in the suits and weapons, right?”

  “No,” he replied.

  Alexander wanted to, but he had realized a significant flaw in adding such a feature. It boiled down to how much ECM the Shican would bring to bear. He assumed that if they reached the surface, they would go all out, and that would be an issue. From the last few operations aboard Shican vessels, he knew that even his newest armor had issues accessing its more advanced features under such conditions.

  The only way to overcome the Shican neural net’s adaptability was by having more processing power, and the suits weren’t up to that challenge individually. There was also the possibility that the cyborgs acted as additional links on their neural network. They certainly had the hardware to pull it off, but without a living subject, Alexander couldn’t prove if they shared a link. He regretted having Krieger dispose of the captive before examining the individual more closely.

  Linking the suits to form a network to cut through the ECM was a possibility, but that link was not very robust and could be drowned out by ECM as well, leaving them back where they started. He wasn’t too worried about that happening because he didn’t plan on actually linking the suits. There were simply too many unknown factors to rely on the link that had proven less than useful in the past.

  Alexander was more worried about what might happen if the enemy ECM managed to activate the kill switch. Even if by accident, it would render every single defender powerless. It wasn’t that far-fetched a problem to consider. He had been working with Rush and the others to figure out a similar way to disrupt the enemy cybernetics using ECM, but efforts on that front had been slow. Without that information, he couldn’t risk introducing such a vulnerability into the augment suits until he knew just how capable the Shican’s organic computer networks were, and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

  Damien looked like he had bitten into a lemon at Alexander’s statement. “I don’t like it, but I haven’t heard any dissent recently, so I don’t think it will be an issue. Let’s just hope that I don’t come to regret those words later.”

  Alexander was glad his Head of Security considered such problems, but he was overlooking a few things. Just because there was no kill switch didn’t mean he couldn’t stop people from misusing the weapons and armor. He had three AIs to help put a stop to any shenanigans. Those would be backed up by the strike teams, which would be deployed as well, and were fiercely loyal to him and BSE. Since the strike teams were essentially useless aboard the fleet, he had convinced Krieger and Galloway that they would be more useful helping with ground defense. They had agreed since there were no further plans on boarding enemy ships until the war was won.

  ***

  Over the next few weeks, the scout ships managed to pinpoint the enemy fleet a few times, even in deep space. The fleet engaged them each time, or tried to, but the Shican jumped the moment the Union fleet appeared. It was annoying that they refused to stay and fight, but understandable as well.

  It was clear that the Shican knew humanity had a new weapon. Krieger also confirmed that the Grand Commander had survived the initial attack, which helped explain why the Shican had shifted tactics so quickly. Prior to that, it had only been a guess that the Grand Commander’s flagship had survived the surprise attack.

  That didn’t mean the enemy hadn’t taken any losses since the first surprise attack. In the last interception, one of the gravity bomb-equipped Stingrays got close enough to the enemy fleet to detonate its payload. About a dozen enemy vessels were caught up in the destruction before the rest entered warp again.

  Alexander read the reports, so he knew Krieger had tried to get the automated vessels to jump within the enemy formation, but the Grand Commander had figured out a way to block any attempt to warp inside his fleet without bunching up his vessels.

  The combination of active warp fields and the anti-laser chaff, which was contained within their armor, disrupted incoming warp fields, dumping ships outside their perimeter. That wouldn’t have worked against most of his fleet, since they were equipped with Nova drives, but he couldn’t risk jumping the smaller Union fleet within the enemy’s numerically superior formation. And forget about jumping in and launching a gravity bomb from a manned vessel. That was a suicide mission. Even Katalynn wouldn’t ask her people to do such a thing unless there was no other option.

  Thankfully, they had plenty of options now that the enemy was on the defensive.

  The first was trying to use the Stingrays to get close to the enemy fleet, but the gunships were too small to support the Nova drive, let alone the upgraded reactor. They had to be shuttled close to the battlespace aboard the Seahorse carriers.

  Alexander had only upgraded three of the carriers with the new drive, since the gunships were not very effective against the Shican vessels with their defensive fields. He didn’t feel that upgrading more of them would have been worth it in the short term. Now that he had equipped the gunships with gravity bombs, he had hoped they would be far more effective, but the Grand Commander had anticipated their next move and cut off the attempt before the fleet had even tried it.

  The next few weeks had turned into a game of cat and mouse, with the Shican barely escaping ahead of the scouts detecting them and the fleet jumping in. That changed after the last altercation, where they lost ships to the Stingray. Since then, none of the scouts had detected their emergence from warp, even after a week. After studying the Shican’s engines and reactors, Alexander knew they couldn’t remain in warp any longer than human vessels, giving them about a five light year range before they needed to stop and reset their systems, so they should have emerged by now.

  Because none of the scouts had detected them, it was believed that the Shican had changed their vector of advance. Some of the scout ships were trying to locate their new approach, but there weren’t enough available to cover that much open space.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Katalynn was using manned vessels to cover Asgardian systems, in case the enemy changed course to head toward one of those worlds instead, but it was unknown if that was even worth the effort. Alexander had taken a different approach and, after consulting Krieger, agreed to pull back the BSE scouts and place them in a sphere around Unokane, starting at about twelve light hours from its star.

  There weren’t nearly enough automated ships to cover every angle of approach, but he hoped it would give them a heads-up when the Shican finally appeared.

  The enemy’s change in direction did have one upside. It slowed down their approach and gave Unokane a bit longer to prepare. For which he was glad. The orbital defenses were being reinforced daily, and there were so many of the pod-based lasers in orbit now that he swore he could see them twinkling in the starlight.

  Alexander lost count of how many of the weapon systems were now orbiting the planet and moons, but he was pretty sure the number had passed twenty thousand at some point. If every single laser could be brought to bear at once, that was nearly forty pod lasers per Shican vessel.

  Unfortunately, that was impossible. The lasers had to orbit the planet like satellites, or they would have burned up in the atmosphere long ago.

  There were also a few hundred missile platforms, but those had the same issue. They were easy targets for the enemy lasers and plasma cannons.

  The space station was also equipped with its own defensive systems now, including a defense field, energized armor, and lasers, but once again, it was a semi-stationary object stuck in a predictable orbit.

  Last but not least were the ships that didn’t or couldn’t accompany the combined fleet, which included Alexander’s prototype battleship Defiance, two dozen Stingrays, and twelve new EFEC Swordfish, which were nearing completion.

  If the Shican attacked Eden’s End, he had no illusions that they would kill off the entire enemy fleet even with all of those defenses. Those systems were all designed to damage and delay the enemy long enough for the rest of the fleet to arrive.

  With the orbital defenses well in hand, Alexander had focused most of his attention on the ground defenses over the last two weeks. Most of the ground-based weapon emplacements were complete or nearing completion after he ran into a series of issues early on.

  Based on his experience building the railguns and FE cannon prototype, Alexander had decided to test the first EFEC emplacement before building the rest. It was a good thing he had, because the air pressure exerted by the round being fired blew the entire weapon and pit apart.

  The problem was an easy enough fix. He just had to keep the entire pit in a vacuum, but that did require some extra engineering. An airtight cover over the pit, along with a gimbal at the top to allow the end of the barrel to rotate while it remained in the center of the cover, were the first and easiest of the fixes. Keeping the air out of the barrel opening turned out to be a bit of a challenge. He needed to create a cover that was both airtight and opened fast enough to get out of the way of the round. He eventually went with an iris-style cover.

  The system wasn’t perfect. A little air still made it into the barrel the moment the cover opened during firing, but it was negligible, and by the time it was compressed enough to cause shockwaves, the round had cleared the pit and was in the final section of the barrel, causing the shockwave to pass above ground.

  Adding those changes did reduce the weapons field of fire pretty significantly, but the overlapping fields from the other emplacements still allowed for full coverage above the facility, above ten thousand feet. He would have preferred to have more coverage at a lower altitude, but the lasers would be able to pick up the slack.

  Alexander wasn’t the only one dealing with issues. Yi Na and his crews had been hard at work, and they managed to get the domes done without much fuss, even with the considerations for the main atrium, which was now depressingly dark, thanks to the stealth coating glued to the transparent ceiling.

  The biggest problem came when trying to cover the rest of the facility. While everything was encased in concrete to help keep the occupants safe from the star’s intense radiation and the acid rain, it wasn’t a smooth coating.

  The massive structure had many protrusions and valleys. Some of those low spots acted as little pools for acid rain to accumulate, and still held water, which was surprising given the star’s harsh glare. Those areas had to be pumped out and inspected for damage before the carbon nano-tube weave could be rolled into place.

  Knowing that water accumulated in certain spots did help explain why some portions of the facility had rotted away much faster than others. Yi Na hadn’t mentioned seeing the problem when his people were making repairs, but then again, it might not have been clear since the areas had already been destroyed.

  If Alexander was going to incorporate the energized armor permanently after the war, he would need to work with Yi Na to address those issues, but that could wait. He was heading to meet with the foreman to discuss other problems.

  Alexander found Yi Na gesturing angrily with his hands and yelling through his mask at a group on one of the nearby roofs. The planet was in one of its long night cycles, and the work lights bathed the area in a harsh white light and long-reaching shadows.

  The man turned at the sound of his approach.

  “Alex, glad you’re here. We have a problem.”

  “Is it about what you sent in your report?”

  Yi nodded. “The main areas of the facility are almost completed, but areas like this,” he waved around him to a series of covered vents and other objects that poked above the roofline, “are taking far too long. We need to prioritize what to protect and what to leave to fate, because if we don’t, we aren’t going to save anything.”

  “What if you had more help?” Alexander asked as he looked around.

  Yi shook his head. “It isn’t about having a lack of help. If anything, I have too much. I’m spending most of my day directing people who haven’t done this sort of work before. Not that anyone truly has, but at least my construction crew quickly figured out how the material needed to be laid out. The other issue is lighting. I don’t have enough to spread workers out across the entire surface. And before you offer to give me more lights, I don’t want those either. With so many unskilled workers, I want to keep them within earshot in case something goes wrong.”

  “I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought. Work with me, what can we get done in the remaining time?”

  Yi motioned for Alexander to follow him over to a nearby folding table with a small holo projector on it. The man activated the device, and an aerial view of the facility appeared. He pointed to colored sections overlaying the facility. “The green areas are complete, while the blue already have the carbon mesh laid down and are just waiting for more concrete to be pumped up to cover it.”

  “And the red?’ Alexander asked, looking at a whole lot of red sections.

  “Areas I consider too difficult to cover.”

  Alexander noticed that one of those areas was above his workshop, and another was above the space where the other engineers worked. The converted Gravity Solutions building was also marked red.

  He pointed to the GS building. “Why’s that red?”

  “Too far away, and there aren’t any people living there.”

  Made sense. However, losing it and the gravity plate production line that was inside would be a significant blow. “Are the rest of the blue areas living space?”

  “Most,” Yi admitted. “Some of the living spaces are in the red zones. I suggest we move people from those areas as soon as possible.”

  “No good options, I see.”

  “Not really,” Yi admitted. “I can guarantee that the blue areas will be complete before the initial arrival estimate of the Shican, but nothing beyond that. I don’t want to expose my people to unnecessary danger. I hope you understand.”

  “I do,” Alexander replied, “Okay, do what you can to get those blue areas secured, and I will speak with the Council about moving people from those other areas and making sure the shelters are fully stocked, and people understand where to go.”

  Yi Na nodded and hurried off to yell at another group.

  Alexander took one more look at the holo, then sighed. If the Shican attacked the facility, there was going to be a significant amount of damage to fix, but he would do his best to keep everyone alive.

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