Blue Star Enterprises

Alexander was just finishing up a work order when Mingyu Na came through the door followed by five security officers.

He put down the tool he was holding and looked at the Captain. “So this is it then?”

“I told you when we spoke earlier that this was the most likely outcome.”

“You did. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” He hated it, and he couldn’t do anything about the fact. Not because he didn’t want to though. He physically couldn’t stop them because of the damn restrictions in the control box.

“Don’t be like this, Mr. Kane. I didn’t want this outcome any more than you did. But we have to be practical. Petrov Station only has a population of just over a hundred thousand people. If I had to guess, Omni employs more than that just at one of their construction yards. We pushed the mega-giant as much as we were willing to for your sake.”

Alexander laughed. “My sake? How much is the station pocketing from this deal?”

Na’s smile thinned but he didn’t reply.

“Just take the stuff and get out of my shop.”

The Captain motioned with his head and the security officers waved in some workers who set about putting the printer on a dolly. While they worked, the Captain walked over and stood next to Alexander while he watched his work being stolen.

“We did try,” Na spoke quietly.

“I believe you. But that’s not the point, Captain. You only tried because there was something in it for you and the station.”

“Everyone wants something, Mr. Kane, you are no exception. One day you will realize this and see we did what was best. Try not to let this color our relationship. There is much we can do to help each other.”

Alexander focused his attention on the man without adjusting his avatar. Did the Captain seriously believe he would work with them after they sold off his hard work to help line their own pockets? The gall.

If it wasn’t for the fact he was stuck on this station, he would have told the man off. But until he figured out how to bypass Yuri’s hardcoded restrictions, he was left at the mercy of those who ran Petrov Station.

He chose not to respond to the Captain’s last statement. He simply waited for the workers to finish and everyone to leave. Captain Na was the last one out, the man paused in the doorway.

“Think about what I said, Mr. Kane. Your talents are wasted down here. Your account should have your settlement already deposited.” With that statement, the Council Captain left his shop.

A flicker of anger ran through Alexander’s mind, vanishing before he could even process it. He didn’t bother checking to see how much Omni had paid to steal his invention, he simply turned around and went back to work.

***

Mingyu kept his face placid, but inside he was fuming, not because of what Alexander Kane had said to him. The man was understandably upset. Were he in the man’s shoes, he would be raising hell. It seemed Kane was a much more level-headed individual than him.

He had tried to convey the importance of working with Mr. Kane to the other Captains but they couldn’t see what he could. Most seemed to only care about the short-term gains of fleecing money from the mega-corporation. Over a measly one hundred million credits. That was barely the operating budget for Petrov for a full year. Had they instead stood behind Kane and helped him grow, the man could have earned the station billions. Their idiotic and short-sighted approach caused him to reevaluate his opinion of some of the Captains.

It was foolish to alienate such a talented individual. Just the fact that Omni had sent someone to take his work should have pointed that out. Someone like Alexander Kane came around once in a lifetime.

Instead of standing behind the man, they squandered any opportunity to get in his good graces. Something that could have propelled Petrov Station to greater heights. Even a token effort to have the man at the trial probably would have been enough to stay on his good side. But no, they threw it all away to carve out the most money they could.

He knew some of the Captains were struggling but he didn’t think they were so bad off that they would completely dismiss his suggestions. It made him angry but also made him wonder.

After being outvoted, he looked into the station finances, and what he found was troubling. The last time Mingyu had station duty was five years ago. Back then the station finances were doing okay. They weren’t great, but then again they never really had been. With Petrov being so far from the rest of human-occupied space, it didn’t see a huge influx of traffic or trade. But even then, they made ends meet.

Now the station was running a deficit and it seemed to be growing with each year. It wasn’t clear how or why that had happened. The books were in disorder. What he could see was that Kovalenko and Hoffman had been taking out large loans against the station's finances.

Since the trial was ongoing, Mingyu hadn’t confronted the men about the issue. Accusing one of the family heads, let alone two of financial misconduct was unheard of. Mingyu couldn’t deny the evidence though. Both men had recently done major upgrades to their ships.

While not in itself damning evidence, it was suspicious. The Na family wasn’t the richest family on Petrov Station, that title fell to the Weiss family. But even a family as wealthy as the Weiss didn’t do more than one ship system upgrade at a time. It was impractical and expensive.

Without access to Kovalenko’s and Hoffman’s personal financial records, he couldn’t say for certain, but he could almost guarantee both of their families were less financially stable than his own. While that didn’t mean they were poor, it did mean they couldn’t afford these ship upgrades. Dock records also showed that neither of these men had done any active mining or cargo hauling in nearly a year.

Money didn’t just appear from thin air. If neither of these Captains were active, and yet their crew were still employed and getting paid, the money had to be coming from some other source. There were only two options that he could think of, and neither was good.

Mingyu had found precedence in the archive of one family being stripped of their power after consorting with pirates early in the station’s life. While there was no evidence of collusion in this case, this situation was equally as bad. He hoped he was wrong and that these men were just both really bad at managing finances.

No matter what was found, it was likely both men would be stripped of their positions and exiled. The station was the lifeblood of all the families and over a hundred thousand people. To not even tell the Council of this financial issue was gross incompetence at the very least.

The issue with the Captains and Alexander weighed heavily on his mind. He sighed quietly and followed the cargo and security officers to the VIP hangar. It was time to get this transfer over with and get the pompous Omni rep off their station once and for all.

***

Theodore Pembrooke watched as a group of workers carted in a large crate atop a dolly. He couldn’t help thinking, ‘This is what three hundred million buys you.’

The cart was followed by station security, which immediately made his own security people tense up.

Last came one of the Council, Captain Na. The man’s face was tight with annoyance as he watched the handoff of the cargo to Theo’s people.

Once the cargo was secure aboard his ship, the Captain spoke. “Your docking privileges expire in twenty minutes. I suggest you hurry unless you wish to be charged for an additional day.” Theo only smiled at that.

No more words were exchanged, and soon the station personnel evacuated the bay. Once aboard and sealed up, his ship started powering up. They didn’t hurry though, that would show the Council that Omni was worried about their little threat. Twenty-five minutes later, his ship floated out of the dock, soon met by their escorts.

It was quite something that the STO fleet had left only the day before. Almost like it had been planned, he chuckled internally. He was sure his insight into that little affair would stir up some discussion back home, but for now, he was curious to see what OMNI’s investment had garnered them.

He walked over to a comm panel and clicked on engineering. “Yeah, what is it?” a gruff voice responded.

“Chief, it’s Mr. Pembrooke. When you have a moment, could you meet me in the hangar?”

The man grumbled, obviously wanting him to hear since sound couldn’t be transmitted without the button being pressed. “Give me twenty minutes. I need to make sure the powerplant is operating properly after being offline for so long.”

There was a soft click, indicating the other side had disconnected. Theo smiled at that. The Chief engineer was a hoot. The man really was the Chief Engineer. Not just of this ship, but of OMNI as a whole. The Chief Engineer occasionally took trips like this as a form of vacation or when he was needed for his expertise. The man also didn’t care who he was speaking with. He spoke his mind and that was that.

The Chief got away with it because he was a genius, and OMNI wouldn’t be where it is today without him and his inventions. Particularly his advances in AI modeling.

Twenty minutes passed rather quickly and soon enough a stocky older man tromped into the hangar. “What is it you wanna waste my time on now ya glorified errand boy?”

Theo chuckled. “Oh, how I have missed your acerbic wit, Chief Benning.”

“Quit trying to butter me up with your fancy words. I’m not one of your pillow girls. Just tell me what you want.”

“I was hoping you could give me some insight into our most recent acquisition?”

“Waste of my damn time,” the man grumbled under his breath. The engineer walked over to a locker and pulled out a drill before stomping over to the crate and removing the bolts that secured the top and sides.

With a grunt, he pushed the items off and looked inside. “This is the shit you bought?”

Theo frowned. “Did they switch it on us?” He didn’t think the station Captains had the balls to do something like that but you never could be certain with some people.

“What are you yammering about?”

While he did enjoy the man’s cutting commentary, he was starting to get annoyed. “Is it or is it not what we were supposed to get?”

“How the hell would I know?”

A vein pulsed in Theo's forehead and he pulled out his tablet and scrolled to the page that showed what they were supposed to receive. Then he handed it over to the Chief. The man glanced at it momentarily before handing it back. “Yeah, that’s what we have.”

“Good, for a moment you had me worried.”

“You should be. This is shit.”

He took a deep breath before responding. “Can you elaborate?”

“Shit, it comes out your rear end. But if you are referring to the specific shit in front of us, just look at it.” The man waved to the device like he should understand.

“Please continue.”

The man shook his head. “This is why I keep telling those idiots in corporate not to purchase shit without consulting with me. This ‘printer’, if you can even call it that, is forty years out of date. My grandchild has a more advanced printer and he's five.”

“What about the modifications, surely those are important.”

The Chief scoffed. “I wasn’t sure what they were at first glance, but after taking in the whole thing I’m pretty sure I know what they do.”

“And what’s that?”

“Nothing any newer industrial printer can’t. If my guess is correct, and they usually are, it’s a ring designed to emit an electromagnetic field.”

Theo was confused. He didn’t know a whole lot about technology, but he wasn’t completely unfamiliar with certain things. “Why would someone want to create an electric field inside the print area?”

“An electromagnetic field, not an electric field, ya nitwit. Normally there would be no point. The field this little thing can create would be too weak to do anything, especially on a planet. And the OMNI orbital printers already have similar technology built into them.”

Understanding came to Theo. “That device cancels the effect of gravity?” If that were true, this purchase was even bigger than he realized.

The engineer burst into laughter. “What are you smoking? Of course, it doesn’t. All it likely does is counteract the field produced by gravity plating. Hell, it probably doesn’t even do that. It probably just weakens it. While I will give the man credit for coming up with a unique way of going about it, it is functionally useless. Any printer created in the last decade can compensate for the effects of gravity while it prints. And newer ships can just switch off sections of gravity to produce better effects.”

No, that didn’t make sense. He had been sent out here personally to oversee this acquisition. He was starting to hyperventilate. “What about the designs I sent you?”

“What about them?”

“There has to be something worthwhile there?” Theo’s panic began to rise, causing his voice to break slightly.

The old engineer quirked an eyebrow at that. “Just how much did this cost OMNI?”

Theodore told him. He had to wait ten minutes before the man stopped laughing long enough to speak. “You wasted three hundred million. I could have saved us four months and a trip out here if someone had just spoken to me first. Sure, OMNI will probably make their money back… eventually.”

“Eventually? But we could implement this into new designs.”

“No, you can’t because our new engine designs have already eliminated those inefficiencies. Hell, the next-gen engines are more efficient yet. The only thing these designs are good for is improving existing installs of older models, and you know how OMNI feels about that.”

He did know. OMNI’s current sales philosophy revolved around new engine installs, not upgrading older engines. So why had corporate sent him out here to buy it… unless. His face went pale.

“Oh ho! Looks like someone finally caught on,” Benning chuckled.

“But- I’ve been a model employee. Why would they want to set me up for failure.”

“You are but a small cog in a large machine, Pembrooke. Someone high up the chain saw this opportunity and gambled on it. Or maybe they thought you were getting too big for your britches. Either way,” he shrugged. “Do you think they are going to take the fall when it turns out the investment of three ships and over five months was wasted? But don’t worry your tiny little brain, they probably won’t fire you and if they sent you out here, you’re obviously not being liquidated.” Chief Benning chuckled again.

A cold creeping sensation went down Theo’s back. He was usually the one who liquidated people, so he knew what that meant.

“They will simply demote and reassign you. Good luck with that by the way.” The man clapped him on the shoulder before walking out of the hold laughing.

This wasn’t funny, why was he laughing?