Astraeus Station Read online

  It was something I didn’t micromanage though, I worried about building for customers, external threats, and building test devices for Diana or anything my sister and Cassie wanted. I’d hired Jessica Mills to handle inside security. She was a bear shifter, had military and security experience, and headed up the security section of the station. She was five eight, a redhead, and extremely athletic and strong even in her human form.

  Technically, I ran it all, but I didn’t micromanage anything. Cassie was a far better person for dealing with politics and all that, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start, much less her long experience and vast number of contacts in countries all over the world.

  Point being, before I’d gone off on a few tangents, was that we were a big legal question mark in the eyes of the world, and Cassie seemed to be having trouble bringing us fully in line with the laws. Legal communications and internet access were a good start, but we had a way to go. We needed space ports, ways for tourists to come up here, not to mention workers for resorts and for the station itself.

  “Options?”

  Cassie sighed, “We could make you a warlord.”

  I laughed.

  She snickered, “Seriously. Not a warlord, but instead of registering with a government, we could petition the U.N. to recognize us as a sovereign country, in space. It’d be a lot of work, we’d have to come up with our own laws, security would become the police, and we’d need courts. You’d essentially become a head of state, or dictator, because we wouldn’t be running elections. The station belongs to you. It would also make all the tech upgrades we sell, and ships, our exports.”

  “That sounds complicated, are you sure?”

  She shrugged, “I think so, I don’t think we’ll get a sponsor, they keep rejecting our applications. For all the same reasons we’re being rejected, it should qualify us to be a country. The three of us would be your cabinet, and we might need to add more down the line. Still, it should be years before the station fills up, if not decades. Not much would change, we’d just need our own laws. I also suggest most laws being broken should lead to either community service or permanent banning from the station, we don’t want to fill up jails. Anything less than a capital crime, which would have a more permanent consequence.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, “If you think you can pull it off, just let me know what you need from me. We both know who would really run the government.”

  She giggled, which wasn’t all that comforting.

  “I’ll set it up, you’ll be head of government, and responsible for enforcing the laws. No different really than being in charge of the person we appoint as head of station security. Taxes won’t be an issue, we’ll have our personal wealth from the ship business, and selling Diana’s inventions, and the government and station will be balanced by rents.”

  I nodded, “I’m not really worried about that, the station and nanites maintains itself, so we won’t have to tax for road maintenance, or anything else like that, like a normal country would.”

  She said, “Exactly.”

  “It’ll get more complicated though, second generation. In the beginning, we can offer dual citizenship for those that agree to move here, and banishment will work because they’ll have somewhere to go back to. Next generation, we’ll have citizens of Astraeus only, they won’t be citizens of their parents’ country of origin, so banishment won’t work. Other countries won’t want our criminals.”

  She nodded, “You’re right, and we’ll adjust and come up with solutions. Right now, we just need a basic body of laws and government to be accepted. I don’t think it’ll be too big a problem for a very long time. To start we’ll have mostly security as citizens. The resort workers will be given visas for the duration of their employment. I suspect most of the legal issues will be from tourists who won’t be citizens at all. We’ll work it out, I’ve seen it time and time again the last three centuries, I have a good idea of what works, and will take care of it.”

  I just nodded, and pushed away my other questions for the moment, like education, I trusted her.

  Jayna said, “There’s a lot of interest for my ads. I have some up for the station and you to influence opinion, as well as ads for nanite health beds, our new cell phones, data connections, computers, and of course the private and commercial ship designs. I suspect that once we’re accepted not only will the resorts open, but you’ll be busy building and exporting a whole bunch of stuff.”

  Yeah, I’d designed a cell phone using entanglement. No getting out of range, in the entire universe, theoretically. No doubt I’d be sued before I could sell the first one.

  Diana interjected, “Nothing major, but we’re making progress. My main focus is on safer clean power generation, which would be a game changer on the planet’s surface.”

  I nodded. Shuttles would replace planes, cars wouldn’t need gasoline, houses could be powered without an electric company that generated electricity through pollutants. There were so many possibilities they couldn’t be listed, and I was sure each one would be a major disruption of economies, so we were moving slowly. I wasn’t greedy, I had a space station, was rich already, and my personal life was going well. I wanted to pass that on to the world, but we had to be careful, or we’d do more harm than good, at least in the short term.

  She added, “I’m also working on a possible new weapon as well as a defense. If it turns out to be feasible, we won’t have to worry about the grays anymore, we’ll have an edge.”

  I nodded, and I pulled her in for a short and mostly chaste kiss, given our company. It was something we’d discussed a lot the last month. I couldn’t imagine the grays didn’t know we had their technology, yet they’d never even mentioned it. We’d speculated a lot as to why. One possibility was the network of ships I read was one of their older ones, and they had better tech and weren’t worried. It just seemed counterintuitive that they wouldn’t care, were they that arrogant, or that secure in their twisted game that had gone on for who knows how many years to keep predator species in space in check? Thousands of years at least, perhaps millions.

  Sure, their planets were very well protected, but it wouldn’t take me longer than a few years to build a fleet capable of matching them, or at least matching what I’d seen. They weren’t even watching us anymore, unless they had a separate ship network for spying on FTL civilizations. We’d come to no conclusions, just a lot of possibilities, and who knew if the truth was even among those possibilities.

  The best-case scenario of course, was that they didn’t care, and didn’t believe we were a threat to their evilly designed empire despite that. It was still disturbing to me, though I had to admit it worked. Any race attacking another would lead to their own annihilation, no exceptions. They may get away with it once or twice, but eventually one of their prey will make it to the grays, and that civilization will cease to exist.

  I suspected there’d be more violence, and deaths in the long run, if not for their twisted game which they controlled. That didn’t mean I liked it. On the other hand, it made our world and colonies relatively safe, now that we’d proven we could defend ourselves. I doubted any other race out there would risk the genocide of their race on an attack on us.

  The ones that had tried had been erased from the universe. We hadn’t participated, partially because it disgusted me, but also because our warships weren’t FTL capable. Given my stance on that, I’d suggest their design was very effective. We could do whatever we wanted in our fifty light year territory, outside of that not so much.

  Diana blushed, but seemed to enjoy the attention.

  Dinner was finished cooking, and we all sat around the table to eat. We had a roast, veggies, and mashed potatoes.

  “So, power systems?”

  Diana nodded, “We’re looking at several things. One of the most promising is the strong forces the nanites use to bond to each other, so that they even remain one solid piece when power is disconnected. Imagine a generator that uses those forces to bond and
release in series, to provide motion. If it breaks down, there’d be no explosion, it’d just stop generating electricity. Think liquid metal flywheel.”

  “That would be bad, say for a plane in the sky.”

  Diana giggled, “Yes, if that was the whole system. Like the ships it would use supercapacitors to store energy and clean up the current. If the engine failed, then any car, ship, or shuttle would retain more than enough power to land, pull over, or if in space come to a stop. Maybe even finish out the trip. We’re also working on other theories, vacuum energy for one, but our initial findings suggest that may be even more dangerous than nuclear reactors when something goes wrong.

  “Still it could be sized down to any application, since the energy generation can be scaled down to any level. Imagine a phone with one, and a supercapacitor, the size of a pea. You’d never have to charge your phone again. Computers, remote controls, and tablets. In other words, forget power generation for a house, or even wall-plugs, never mind merely shutting down polluting power plants. Your car, oven, dishwasher, heater, air conditioner, lamps, air filters, fans, coffee makers… basically everything, could be sold with its own independent endless power source. Two of them even, just in case one breaks.”

  Oh, holy crap. I’d been thinking something that could replace power plants at a house or car level, not down to the level of everything.

  She shrugged, “Obviously for high power requirements, like what a space ship would use, reactors would still be the way to go. But appliances, even air conditioning and dryers, don’t use nearly that much power, and they’d suffice. It’s how it has to be, inevitably the more power something generates the more destructive potential it has. The only truly viable answer for clean and safe energy on a planet’s surface will be separate small power sources for everything.”

  “Planes with anti-gravity?”

  She nodded, “Trickle charging high capacity super-capacitors. The supercapacitors could hold enough energy for a trip, and the system could fully recharge while on the ground between flights.”

  “Do you know how many people that would piss off?”

  She giggled, “Yeah, if we figure it out, we’ll have to move carefully.”

  “So why waste time on vacuum energy if it can be more destructive?”

  She smiled, “Weapons? To replace the need for reactors in ships? Imagine if the nanites themselves were power generators as well? Safety will obviously be a huge concern there, no one will want their ship made up of trillions of nanoscopic bombs. One blowing could cause a chain reaction, so if we do work it out then we’ll have to see how safe we can make it, before it becomes feasible. It might not be worth the effort, except to increase our understanding of the universe. Although, it might be a useful addition in missiles only, and greatly enhance the yield of an anti-matter missile, not to mention greatly extend the range, way past two to three light seconds.”

  Good point.

  We moved on from that, and then started to talk and banter about normal things. We usually talked about our day, what we had going on, and then put work behind us for the evening, as much as we could anyway. There was so much going on, making the station a nation, scientific advancements, revolutionary products that would change the world, ship building and selling, a resort and city on the station, and the list seemed to never end. A lot of times it was hard to let it all go, but balance in life was important.

  It helped that Cassie was like a second sister to me, playful teasing included, and Diana could be damned distracting when she put her mind to it. After dinner, we watched a little television, and called it a night.

  Chapter Three

  First thing the next morning I started the build of the eight colony ships, which would take three months. Well, I started on it once I’d gotten done goggling at my account statement. We wouldn’t have any trouble being able to afford supplying the station with the things only Earth could provide, which would very shortly be only luxury items and foods. Our farm levels on the ship would start putting out food soon, enough for the amount of people up here at any rate.

  The second thing I did was read over the messages. Cassie had already sent out a memo about our intentions, and that our security force would require dual citizenship to remain a part of the security force. I was glad Cassie had it all under control, I also had no doubt she’d have to deal with the U.S. who’d be against it, and had veto power in the U.N.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love my country of origin, and America is an amazing place, filled with good people. It was just the few with power that had ruined things there. Enough said about that, as far as I was concerned it was in the past, and it would stay there as long as we weren’t attacked again.

  I knew eventually they’d figure out how to make their own nanites, it was a production issue, our current level of technology wasn’t up to making them yet. Once they had one, they could make more, and eventually have enough to build one of the energy to matter converters. At that point, they could build anything they wanted, much as I could.

  Somehow, I doubted they would hardcode rules not to fire on the station. My hope was that by the time that happened, we’d be too established and necessary in the scheme of things for them to bother with. Not to mention a few years of me not attacking the country and keeping my word would hopefully calm ruffled feathers and fears.

  That didn’t mean I wouldn’t prepare, I could always trump anything they did with my power to own and control technology, as long as I saw them coming first.

  “Is this a joke?”

  I looked up, I hadn’t even noticed Jessica come in the command center.

  I corrected playfully, “Is this a joke, High ruler of Astraeus?”

  She snorted, “Good luck with that.”

  I nodded, “Your job won’t be different, you’ll just be enforcing our laws instead of the laws of a host country, and you’ll be chief of police instead of chief of security.”

  She frowned, “There’s a whole lot less politics with the first title.”

  I shrugged, “I’m not worried about it. We’ll be a country but act more like a business, just with our own laws. The only reason we’re doing it is because we can’t find a damned sponsor.”

  She shook her head, “If you’re a head of state, you need guards. You’ll also have politicians and heads of state visiting, not just gamblers and tourists.”

  I sighed, “I’ll take guards if I leave the center of the station or the secured areas. I don’t want to lose you, so what are you saying?”

  She opened her mouth, and closed it, then said, “I’m just… annoyed. Fine. I’ll do it. But I won’t handle the press or arrogant politicians, I want to hire people to deal with that aspect. Both giving press conferences and guards for visiting politicians.”

  Yeah, she could be a little touchy, most shifters were, and they didn’t like surprises.

  I nodded, “I don’t have a problem with that, you might want to check with Cassie. She’s putting it all together, make sure she doesn’t already have a plan for it.”

  She sighed, “Fine. What’s your real title?”

  “Emperor Scott. No, I actually have no clue, ask Cassie, and let me know.”

  She laughed, “I’ll do that.”

  One of the scanners went off, about five A.U. away from Earth, and I looked at the hologram of the solar system and zoomed in to the area. It was a huge, ugly, and blocky red ship that’d just dropped from FTL. There were large airlock doors tightly spaced down the sides of the ship, and I didn’t recognize any weapons at all. Clearly, it was a merchant ship.

  I quipped, “You forgot about security for visiting alien merchants.”

  She scowled at me.

  I pointed at the hologram, “Not joking that time.”

  She looked at the command table, and her mouth dropped open.

  “Shit.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  Excuse the language, but it turned into a clusterfuck of major proportions. No one ha
d any plans for when an alien merchant showed up, or at least not a joint plan. There were six countries with warships, and no doubt they all had their own plans and proposed procedures, although I might be being generous in that regard. I suspected over half of them hadn’t ever even considered the possibility the other races might want to trade with us.

  Clearly, no one including the ninth idiot, that would be me, had bothered to tell anyone else their procedures.

  The alien sent out a request to approach, and dock at the station to discuss trade opportunities. Thanks to having gray technology, we already had translations for every language of the FTL races, so at least that wasn’t a problem.

  Regardless, I sent out an invitation to approach, two others of the ships said we weren’t interested and demanded they leave our territory, three of the ships welcomed them but commanded they wait for an escort in system, and of course one of them proposed to go out and talk to them in person, no doubt hoping to cut me out or gain some kind of advantage for their country.

  In short, we made a wincingly bad impression, and no doubt the alien merchant had no clue what to do. Clearly it was something we should’ve worked out, but it’d only been a month, and we’d all been focused on our own backyard and rules for space.

  I sent out a second message inviting a ship from each country to the station, and I suggested we could all meet the alien. I also may have suggested we’d have a day before the alien got there, so could hammer out some agreement that wouldn’t make us look like idiots. I felt a little uncomfortable with it, making a decision, and I knew it’d piss off some of the countries on Earth that we’d left them out without a chance to get in their own piece.

  After an hour of fierce debate, and figuratively smacking my head on the desk multiple times, they finally agreed, and I sent another message to the alien to approach the situation. I also apologized for the conflicting orders, and I further stated we didn’t have a procedure yet.