Blue Star Enterprises

Alexander saw Jasper and his crew off a few days later before heading to deal with another issue that had cropped up.

The ship carrying his stealth comm satellites had finally arrived at the border of Asgardian territory where some of the attacks with Xin were taking place. The first satellite hadn't been active for more than a few hours before it picked up a fight between the Asgardian defenders and Xin forces.

The Xin outnumbered the Asgardian fleet or they would have if Alexander hadn't also sent an additional twenty Stingray gunships and two more Fishbone transports meant for rearming those ships along with his satellite deployment ship.

He had watched the battle as it progressed and not a single Xin warship managed to escape the encounter.

The Asgardians hadn't lost a single ship and only two Stingray gunships had been destroyed during the ten-minute exchange.

It was a testament to the small ship's durability that only two had suffered enough damage to be knocked out of the fight. The improvements he had made were certainly living up to expectations. That being said, Alexander did notice the previous twenty ships he sent were now down to half their original number.

Considering it had been months since he deployed the original squadron of Stingrays to the front line, he wasn't surprised. Efforts to deploy more ships faster were beginning to ramp up now that the remaining Asgardian ships that could be repaired after the battle with Harlow had been. It freed up production for more Stingray ships, but also for the new Shark corvettes, two of which were already completed, rounding out his new frontline fleet composition with the twenty Stingrays and two Fishbone ships.

The ships were doing final testing before they shipped out for the front. It was still too slow though. Alexander wanted to have fresh ships sent to the front each month. Right now he was on a two-month timeline.

To ensure he met his new goal, he was increasing his printers once again. That change necessitated that he increase mining, which had a small uptick without his involvement thanks to new arrivals. Even with the new miners entering the system, he still fell short of his material needs.

Alexander was also quadrupling his output for pseudo-computronics. He wanted to increase production even more, but he was running out of available space inside Atrium D. He would need to speak with Yi Na soon to come up with a plan to expand his production area.

That's not why he had come to the Qcomm room.

Based on radio communications between the Asgardians and his ships, he realized another Xin attack was likely to occur soon. Normally he would only be able to observe even with his comm sats in place, but that wasn't the case with his new Stingrays arriving. Only one of them had a full comm node aboard as a test, but Alexander planned to put it through its paces during the next battle.

The Qcomm room had a new feature in the form of an interface chair. Alexander sat in the chair and connected to the comm node network. Through that, his mind was able to perceive as if he was aboard the command Stingray.

Alexander found the sensation a bit odd at first, but that oddness quickly went away as he adjusted to the new view in his mind. His ability to quickly adapt probably had a lot to do with his experience figuring out how his body first worked when he woke up all those years ago.

As he did quick system tests to ensure everything was working correctly, he kept a part of his mind focused on the radio chatter between the fleet. An Asgardian scout had arrived an hour or so ago and had spotted the Xin fleet on approach. From the previous system.

This new Xin fleet was half again as large as the previous one, making Alexander frown inside his mind space.

Why were the Xin throwing ships at the Asgardians?

He had read up on Grand Admiral Xin. The man was praised as a tactical genius during the STO/Coalition conflict but also labeled as ruthless and bloodthirsty. Smashing his fleets against the Asgardians made no sense, even if the man had more ships than he knew what to do with.

From the previous battle, Alexander had been able to determine that the Xin ships were old Coalition designs that still relied on autocannons. As far as he could tell from the scans, they were the exact same model of ships used during the Coalition war.

They were no match individually to an Asgardian ship and were barely able to even deal with the Stingrays unless multiple ships engaged one of the gunships at the same time.

With one part of his concentration, Alexander paid attention to the orders being issued by the commander of the overall forces. The man seemed competent, which wasn't much of a surprise if he managed to survive this long on the frontline.

With a second part of his focus, Alexander transmitted an updated program and ECM algorithm to the Stingrays. The comm connection started growing choppy as the massive data packet was sent through the network.

He would have to take that into account if he wanted to run updates in the future.

The data packet wouldn't override what the ships already had, it was just meant to add new data to their algorithms. The self-learning processors would be able to pick the data apart and choose the best parts of their old code and ECM and integrate it into the new programs Alexander had sent, making it even better.

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He could have done this himself, but he didn't have the time to go through the code, nor was he as quick at parsing the data as a computer might be, unless he chose to push his framerate to the max. That might work if he was there in person, but with the comm node struggling already, who knew how long it would take to transfer the data back and forth? The comm node simply wasn't designed to handle that much data that quickly. A bit of an oversight considering he had designed them with communications in mind, but that was fine. They could still handle ninety-nine percent of communications without issue so he saw no reason to upgrade them further.

Why waste time doing things the slow way when the self-learning program could do it in a few seconds?

In the time it took Alexander to have those thoughts, the Stingrays had all reported back that they had implemented the new upgrades. A further round of reports also stated that they added the upgrades that the other ships had developed.

Alexander might be shocked by that sort of individuality, but he had seen the same thing in the report that the surviving gunship had given him after Harlow's defeat. He quickly realized that this branched learning made them far more capable than his initial estimates. Instead of having one ship, the more he had, the more differences they could check, all because of a simple error correction feature he had added in an earlier iteration of the code.

The error correction feature was something to simply stop errors from occurring with the signal broadcast, but the computers had taken that subroutine to a whole new level and actually incorporated that feature into their learning. It was rather ingenious so he left it in. The one thing he did remove was anything relating to turning themselves into plasma missiles. He didn't need the Asgardians to think his pilots were suicidal.

Once it got out that his ships were unmanned, then he might add that code back in to give the ships one more card up their sleeve, but he would think on that later.

An alert went through the fleet and Alexander's musing came to an end. He returned all of his focus to the fight as he watched the Xin fleet start to appear in the system.

They were smart enough not to use the normal jump points, but it seemed like they were still struggling with jump lag as not all of their fleet was appearing at the same time.

Looking to take advantage of their lack of formation, the Asgardian commander ordered the fleet to turn toward their adversary and jump.

Alexander could tell something was wrong as soon as his ship reappeared. For one, he had temporarily lost connection during the jump. That was something he would need to take into account if he continued with this remote approach.

The other issue was the enemy fleet. Only about a third of them had appeared. They were forming up, as the Asgardian commander ordered gravity traps to be deployed.

Alexander really needed to purchase more gravity plates. His Stingrays didn't utilize them, because there was nobody onboard, but if he could turn them into mobile gravity traps like Harlow had done, it would boost the effectiveness of the small ships by quite a bit.

The Asgardian commander must have realized the issue as well because he ordered half the fleet to reverse direction. Sure enough, the remainder of the enemy fleet appeared as one, right behind the defending fleet shortly before the gravity traps could be deployed.

Alexander radioed the command ship. "Commander, you and the rest of the fleet deal with the new arrivals, let Jarl Kane's ships handle the first group."

"You have balls, whoever you are. Fine. I'll leave them to you, good luck."

The line cut out and Alexander didn't hesitate to accelerate toward the waiting Xin ships. He had the range advantage, but he didn't order the Stingrays to fire, no orders were necessary. Almost as one, they all launched their stealth missiles. Then shortly before crossing into enemy range, all thirty gunships filled the battlespace with the improved ECM.

Once the ECM was active, each ship went into evasive maneuvers as they continued their approach.

Railgun rounds began to fill the space as the gunships located weak points on the hulls of the enemy vessels. Before the hyper-velocity rounds could strike, the missiles detonated against ships. The missiles had taken a curving path at the last moment to strike ships along the flank where armor was the weakest.

Alexander noted only two of the twenty-eight missiles had been taken out by PDCs. The enemy destroyers were hearty enough to shrug off a single missile, but not the frigates.

Fifteen enemy frigates were out of the fight, while fourteen destroyers remained. Of those fourteen destroyers, thirteen were leaking atmosphere from gaping holes along their sides.

The two undamaged destroyers found themselves under a barrage of fire from the Stingrays. Alexander didn't need to destroy these ships, he just needed to make sure they couldn't back up their companions.

One of the undamaged destroyers exploded, but they managed to take out one of the Stingrays before they went. The enemy was launching missile after missile, but the ECM was making that a fruitless exercise.

At least for them. Alexander focused on a group of these missiles, and led them by the nose, so to speak, until they had performed a one hundred and eighty-degree turn and were now heading back toward the ships that had launched them.

The enemy ships were valiantly attempting to take out their own weapons, but Alexander was causing false sensor ghosts in the weapons to make them juke around. Only ten missiles made it all the way back, but that was ten more than Alexander had started with.

The already damaged destroyers rocked as the weapons hit, and one even tore in half. The rest were still attempting to fight, but they had stopped firing missiles. Either they had run out or they knew better than to feed even more weapons to their enemy.

It didn't matter, Alexander's ships whipped past the enemies' slow defenses and glacial turning pace, to rake their vulnerable aft sections with railgun rounds, emptying their remaining ammunition before clearing the battle space.

The only ship that still had power was a lone destroyer. It was the last surviving ship that hadn't been struck by his initial missile barrage. The vessel was corkscrewing wildly as its thrusters attempted to fire. It may have power and was still firing its weapons wildly, but it was in no shape to pursue the remainder of the the fleet.

He checked on the other part of the Asgardian fleet. They had lost a few ships, but the enemy was down nearly half of theirs and appeared to be in full retreat.

It was an overwhelming victory, but Alexander saw a few improvements that could be made. The biggest was the lack of onboard ammunition.

The Stingrays simply burned through their supply of railgun rounds too quickly. He would prefer to upgrade the ships to lasers since lasers didn't run out of ammo, but they were too small to fit anything substantial onboard, even with his most recent upgrades to the technology. He could have gone with Gauss cannons now that he understood how they operated, but they didn't hit nearly as hard as a railgun. That meant sticking with his preferred projectile weapon, the humble railgun. He had a few ideas on how to improve the weapon and ammunition capacity, but it would mean a complete redesign of the weapon and a slight modification to the Stingray.

Alexander wouldn't say no to that though.

He finished out the battle and sent the ships to rearm before disconnecting from the ship. It was time to make some improvements.