Blue Star Enterprises

"Everything is loaded and secured, Captain," Matthew’s XO stated.

Alexander had purchased quite a bit of supplies, both food and medical. Then there were the technological items like a smelter. That was just the stuff stored aboard the Talon. He wasn’t even including the items Captain Daniel was transporting aboard the Zephyr or the Arklight Industries ship that was carrying the Qcomm relay and technicians that would be installing it.

Matthews nodded. "After we reach our destination, you’ll be the Captain. Perhaps I should start calling you Captain now? Captain Sable has a good ring to it."

His first mate shifted uncomfortably at being addressed by her first name, but she took the teasing in stride.

"I believe Captain Bloomright sounds better," she responded. "…It will be strange not having you aboard the Talon, Sir."

Archie smiled, he couldn’t help but be proud. Sable wasn’t his daughter, but she might as well be since they had been together since she graduated from the flight academy on Ganos. The Hawks were quick to offer her a position, seeing her potential. "You’ll do fine without me. I should know, I trained you myself."

The raven-haired woman smiled slightly at his words.

"Shall we make sure the passengers are ready to depart?" he asked, as they exited the hold.

"I have a few of our people preparing them, but I agree, we should check on them. It’s odd having so many people on the Talon who aren’t part of the Hawks or aren’t prisoners."

Archie nodded in agreement. Finding displaced people wasn’t hard, not with the war ramping up in scale.

It was getting so bad that the planetary governor had even tried preventing them from leaving, citing this law or that to try and keep them around Ganos. The Hawks’ legal team tore those arguments apart. They had done their civil duty for an entire year. Even if the governor was finally willing to pay for their services now, the Hawks had prior commitments. And the Talon needed to go in for maintenance.

As for the people, filtering out the types who would help Alexander and Eden’s End wasn’t too hard. They couldn’t simply take those people and call it a day though. Some had families, so they had to come along as well. Unfortunately, their recruiting efforts had made waves and more refugees started to show up at their recruitment drives, slowing down the entire process.

The Hawks turned them away, but some of them must have had money or means, because three ships floated nearby, waiting to follow the Talon when she finally departed the system. He couldn’t even stop them from tagging along. With the STO laws requiring people to use designated jump points in member systems unless there was an emergency, following their course would be easy.

With those additional ships, their fleet had grown from the original eight ships to eleven now. It included the Talon, Zephyr, the two Hawks gunships, the Arklight transport, an Arklight frigate, two Arklight corvettes, and now the civilian ships.

It was ridiculous.

Archie had tried getting the captains of the civilian vessels to leave by explaining they were headed outside of STO space and that none of his ships were obligated to defend them in the case of an attack, but they either refused to listen or simply ignored his comms. It wasn’t like he could fire on them either, not unless they attacked first.

It seemed these ships were tagging along whether he liked it or not. Whether or not Alexander would welcome all these unknown refugees was another matter. He would need to apologize to Kane about this situation when they arrived.

The pair made their rounds, making sure everyone was ready to go before they headed to the bridge.

"Executive Officer Bloomright, I’ll let you do the honors," he gestured the woman over to the Captain’s seat, while he took her normal spot.

She gave him a single nod of thanks before addressing the crew. "Notify the ships in the fleet, we are heading out."

***

The Talon was the first to enter Varlen, followed shortly after by the Hawks’ gunships. A few minutes later, the Arklight vessels appeared all together. Being one of the few companies with clearance to install Qcomms paid well it seemed.

Archie wished the Hawks could afford a jump synchronizer. It would have required a supercomputer on the lead ship to manage such a complex sequence but the tactical benefits of ensuring your entire fleet arrived at the exact same moment were obvious. Even if you jumped at the same second as other ships, your chances of arriving together were slim to none. There was always a bit of warp drifting no matter how well you timed your jumps.

The Zephyr appeared next and Archie sent his response to the STO’s challenge. The reply they got this time was wildly different than the last time they were here.

Stay clear of the station, and keep your weapons offline, our fleet will be shadowing you while you are in the system.

He chalked it up to growing tensions with the pirates. Soon his ships were moving through the system toward the far jump point. An hour later, his sensor operator reported the additional jump signatures of their hangers-on, which had ballooned out to unreasonable numbers during their trip out here.

Another fifteen vessels had tagged along after they left Ganos, bringing their follower count up to eighteen ships. The odd mix of ships consisted of smaller mining vessels, some haulers which were probably family ships, judging by their smaller size, and then the larger ships which could house dozens or even hundreds of people for all he knew.

The STO was demanding an answer for the additional ships, but the Talon didn’t reply. It wasn’t their responsibility to answer for these vessels. Either the Captains of those ships convinced the STO to leave them be, or the few ships his scanners were seeing in the system deemed it not worth their trouble and simply left the civilian vessels alone.

Archie sighed. That was really their last chance to get rid of those ships. Short of them encountering a fleet of pirates en route, he doubted anything else would scare them off at this point. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Once he left STO space, he could calculate his own jump points to throw them off and force them to return home. Doing something like that felt wrong and went against everything the Hawks stood for though.

He would take them out to Eden’s End, if Alexander denied them safe harbor, he would dispatch his two gunships to return them to STO space. Either way, once they arrived, every single person going down was getting subjected to a detailed screening. He had provided a simple warrant scanner the last time they were here, but it wasn’t enough to look for criminals who may have avoided actual criminal warrants. The last thing he wanted to do was dump a bunch of trouble in Kane’s lap.

***

Alexander was in the middle of rebuilding Dr. Lund’s testing equipment for the fifth time after she notified him it still wasn’t sensitive or accurate enough for her needs when his radio beeped.

Glad to have a break from the woman’s project, he stepped away from the design interface and picked up the radio. "This is Alexander, what’s up?"

"Hey, Alex, it’s Lucas. The Hawks and your friend have returned. I figured you might want to know."

Alexander was overjoyed to hear this news. He had been expecting them for a few days now so it was good to know they arrived safely. "Welcome them back for me, and let me know when they get within a half-hour communication delay range." An hour between reply and response was still quite a bit, but it was manageable.

An hour and a half later, he got the first response from Captain Matthews. The man must have sent it as soon as he entered the system.

"Uh, Alex," Lucas said over the radio. "You might wanna come to the command center to see what Matthews sent."

Frowning, Alexander made his way to the command center. It couldn’t be an emergency, Lucas would have said something about that. He arrived just as Damien was leaving. The man looked slightly more annoyed than he normally did.

"Seems we got a few more people than we anticipated," he stated as he walked past.

Alexander turned to watch him leave. He was about to ask Damien what he meant by that statement but decided it was better just to find out directly from Matthews.

The lively conversation that had been going on before his arrival, died down as he entered the room. "What’s going on, Lucas? I just passed your brother and he looked annoyed."

Instead of replying, Lucas made a flicking motion from his terminal that pushed a video to the holo display. "See for yourself."

"Mr. Kane, as your sensors have probably alerted you by now, we are finally back along with Captain Daniel and all the items you asked us to purchase. Some of those are on the ships that are pinging the Arklight identification. Unfortunately, we picked up quite a few strays along our path. About an hour behind us are eighteen civilian vessels ranging from small freighters, to transports. As far as we know, they are all refugees from worlds Harlow has captured. I wanted to give you a heads-up as soon as possible as I suspect they are going to request asylum. We obviously don’t know any of these individuals, so when the Talon arrives, I will be sending down the troops to help facilitate their background checks… assuming you allow them safe harbor. We’ll be in touch shortly, Captain Matthews, out."

Alexander’s first thought was, how bad is the war going that this many people decided Eden’s End was a better alternative than staying in STO space? Then he wondered how to house them all until he realized he had no obligation to house any of them.

He could simply turn all these people away and call it a day… He could. Would he though? He wasn’t sure. Alexander had come to realize the drifters who were working for him were likely the only ones who ever would. A few of the younger generation might come around when they came of age, but that wasn’t all that many more that he could count on. In fact, it was less than a third of the current population of Eden’s End. The rest were simply not interested or indirectly opposed to helping him. Those people still contributed to the overall upkeep of the community, so it wasn’t like they weren’t doing anything. They just didn’t want anything to do with him or the changes he was introducing.

That didn’t change the fact that Alexander needed people. He would have preferred to hand-pick everyone he allowed out here or have people he trusted to do it for him, but at some point, that simply wasn’t feasible. It seemed that point was now.

Before, he might have been forced to turn them away, simply because he didn’t have the resources to expand his barter system to include too many more people. Now that the Qcomm is here, people will have access to their STO accounts and credits.

The holdout drifters probably wouldn’t use either, but that was fine, he could keep providing them contributions in the form of barter. The issue was going to be integrating these new people. He wasn’t going to charge the people, who Jasper and Archie picked, rent or taxes as that had been part of the agreement to get them to come here in the first place. He didn’t have that same dilemma with these uninvited guests and would be charging them appropriately. It would force them to be productive as well as provide a source of income. There were plenty of jobs for people of all skill levels, so there was no excuse for not working.

If they didn’t want to help out, they could build outside of the facility and live anywhere else on the planet if they had the means to do so, but Alexander planned on submitting a claim over the entire system as soon as the Qcomm was online. STO law required a few things before claims could be made, which is why he hadn’t done it before. While he wasn’t joining the STO, they had a long-unused clause in their governing laws that allowed independent nations to claim their own territories outside of STO space.

The rules were extremely strict and required the sovereign nation to have its own fleet, which was three or more ships; an elected administration, the wording for which was vague; and they didn’t engage in any pirate activities or other items banned by their charter, such as slavery.

There was one other requirement, but it wasn’t really part of any law. The nation requesting sovereignty had to do so through a process that required three STO clerks to attend via holo and the meeting had to be real-time and on the planet requesting this independence. You might be able to get past that requirement if you could convince three bureaucrats to come out to your system, but good luck doing that.

It was wild to think the STO had so much power and reach that they could tell already established nations that they weren’t recognized as such under the STO’s laws. Unfortunately, it was true. The STO held all the cards when it came to human space. Alexander planned to change that before they realized he was breaking other STO laws that weren’t covered under their sovereign rules. It was an oversight on their part, probably because nobody in the entirety of the STO’s existence had ever been in a position to use these laws to their advantage, something he had no problem abusing.

Once this was done, everything on the planet and in the system would belong to Blue Star Enterprises. He would need to discuss this change with the Eden’s End council though.

The rules only stated there needed to be elected leaders. It didn’t specify the scope of their powers. He wasn’t going to suddenly give Damien or the other councilors power over the entire planet or system. They wouldn’t want it or even know what to do with that much power even if he did. Hell, he didn’t know what to do with that much power either, but he needed to ensure someone else didn’t swoop in and claim this system. That would be disastrous for Alexander’s future plans.

Speaking of plans, this changed a lot of Alexander’s. He mentally reorganized them, pushing his school slash academy up in importance. With that done, he needed to speak with the council and find out how the reconstruction of Eden’s End was going. That meant finding and speaking with Yi Na. The man must be doing a decent job because Alexander hadn’t heard a peep or complaint since Mingyu’s younger brother took over those responsibilities.