Before Alexander even left the meeting, he had the Seahorse added to the production queue in the printers. Stopping a build mid-print was never a good idea, but the carriers were far more important than finishing two more Orca's.

He really needed more large-scale printers, but they weren't cheap or quick to build. Despite that, Alexander added jobs for the smaller printers to crank out four more of the large-scale printers once they completed their Stingrays.

Alexander also messaged Theo. "Hey, did Rush contact you?"

"He did, but I told him we would have to think about his proposal. I agreed with your assessment; the man's motives felt off. I spoke with the Lokis about the GS Chairman, but they don't have much more information on him than anyone else I queried. It seems that the man keeps to himself and his company."

"If that's the case, what changed?" Alexander asked through the comm.

"I think your appearance caused him to change up his routine. Why? That I don't know. I will say, if his offer is legitimate, it would be a huge boon for the system and the Union in general."

Alexander groaned, "That's what Katalynn said. Let me think about it for a moment."

Alexander knew Theo was right, but it was hard to trust someone whose motivations he didn't understand. If easy access to the gravity plating wasn't such a huge win, or the fact that Alexander wanted to pick Rush's mind on the issue of detecting FTL comms, he would flat out refuse. Okay, that wasn't true. He would gently refuse. The situation was delicate, and Alexander needed to approach it carefully, even if he turned the man down.

It didn't take him long to come to a decision. It mainly boiled down to the fact that, despite Rush's weird fixation on him, the man had helped him on Earth. "Fine, let Rush know we are open to allowing a satellite office of Gravitational Solutions to be placed on Eden's End. He'll need to work with Yi Na or bring his own construction crew to make it happen, though. We don't exactly have a lot of space to expand surface manufacturing, and I'm not giving up any of my shrinking space for an outside company."

"I figured you would say that. I'll reach out to him right away. Was there anything else you needed me to handle?" Theo asked.

"We need to increase recruitment efforts. We may need to lower our standards slightly to make it happen, but I fear we're going to need crews, no matter how many automated ships I can make."

"I've already taken the liberty of expanding our reach into the STO. As for lowering our standards, I would advise against that. I'm already hiring some questionable people, and it's only a matter of time until that backfires on us or someone we don't control tries to sell BSE secrets to the corporations."

Alexander cursed softly. It wasn't like Theo's statement was a surprise to him. Adding more people always meant opening themselves up to corporate espionage. It was only a matter of time. "I'm going to compile a list of technologies that I want to start producing within the STO and the Union. Can you find me willing parties within the STO to help facilitate the efforts to expand our reach?" If someone was going to leak their secrets, it might as well be BSE doing the leaking and the ones to profit from it.

"You want the same setup as Earth?" Theo asked as he jotted something down on his tablet.

"Yeah, someone trustworthy enough to get everything up and running, but corruptible enough to eventually sell off the tech. Same shell company setup as well. Let's make it seem like a gold rush for the technology, that should help spread it to as many hands as possible." Publication courtesy of *.

"I can do that," Theo replied. "It'll take a few months to set everything up, though."

"That's fine… Oh, see if Jasper wants to get in on the action as well." If people were going to get rich, he might as well include his friends in that list.

Theo nodded in confirmation, and Alexander ended the call.

Now he just had to figure out what tech was safe to sell without giving away all his secrets. The comm nodes and the older style pseudo-computronics were already being sold. He added them to the mental list he was making anyway.

The nano-assembler would make a decent product. It wouldn't be quite as in demand as the other items, but it would spread as the processor production information did. It would have to come with a nano-scale fabricator, though. Alexander mentally combined those two into a single machine that wasn't quite as efficient as his current models.

Using the corporations' same tactics of withholding the best made him feel dirty, but unlike the corporations, he wasn't trying to maintain a monopoly.

He hit a bit of a wall at that point, realizing he didn't have that many unique designs that he was willing to turn over. A first generation of his ring printer was possible. He already made the newer versions available for Katalynn and Jarl Ylva Bergson. The first-generation ring printers were cheaper to produce than a standard orbital printer, but other than that, they weren't exactly great.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

They suffered from the occasional print error thanks to the shortfalls of the standard static field. Providing the upgraded version that corrected that error would open up his advancement in the static field research, and he wasn't willing to reveal his efforts there.

Alexander mulled over the problem for a bit before he came up with a solution. Instead of having one set of the standard fields, having two would keep the area free of those few particles that made it through. It would increase the power required to extend the first field farther out, but he was already planning on making the rings bulkier to make the cost difference between his printers and the standard ones not quite as dramatic.

The ring printers should draw quite a bit of interest, considering he could make them slightly faster than the current top-of-the-line STO models. Again, not as fast as his own printers, but a step up for most people who either couldn't afford the ridiculous cost of the existing ones, or couldn't buy them simply because the corporations didn't want them to have access.

Okay, now he had printers, a fabrication center, comm nodes, and pseudo-computronics. He added another item, but marked it as STO Navy only. It was the material composition of the corporate armor, along with the manufacturing method. He was simply going to sell that straight to the Navy. The newest armor weave as well, but not the actual armor design or the defensive field.

The STO Navy had enough engineers that they could design and build their own armor, and the defensive field was going to remain a secret for as long as he could control it. The technology was too much of a game-changer. If the extremely influential Willard family didn't have personal defensive fields, he was pretty certain that Omni didn't either, or if they did, they were keeping it very secretive. It seemed like even the Shican didn't have the tech. The aliens might have their ship shields, but the armored Shican the strike teams had encountered didn't have any personal shielding.

That was more than enough products to disrupt the market for now. He didn't want to collapse the economy of the STO while there was a war going on, just shake it up a bit so he could loosen the mega-corporations' hold on it.

Speaking of shaking things up, Alexander went in search of his Head of Medical Services. The day they returned, he had turned over the Shican corpses to her to see if she could learn something about them. Keeping them frozen and aboard the ship had been a headache, but he thought it was worthwhile, especially for the cybernetically enhanced ones.

Alexander found Gabriella at her desk doing some work on her tablet.

She looked up at his approach and sighed. "I was wondering when you would come by, asking about the mess you dropped on my lap."

Alexander chose to ignore the reproach in her tone. She was right, he had done exactly that. "Sorry, I've been rather busy. Have you learned anything?"

"No. Alex, I might be the Head of Medical Services, but I'm not even a qualified doctor, let alone a xenobiologist. Most of my ability to heal the sick is only thanks to the costly machines you brought to Eden's End."

"You–," he began to say.

"I wasn't done," she said, cutting him off. "I've been taking courses to become a real doctor instead of pretending to be one, but that date is years down the road. If you need someone to examine the scans and initial results, you need to find a qualified medical expert. The machines you have aren't designed for alien biology."

"You're right," Alexander admitted. "I'm sorry that I placed this burden on your shoulders without speaking with you first. Will the bodies hold?"

Gabriella shrugged. "As far as I can tell. I stuck them in one of the morgues, but we had to pump additional liquid nitrogen into the room to cool it to below freezing since I didn't want to use embalming fluid on the bodies."

"Thank you. I might know someone who can help, or at least point me in the right direction. I just hope he's still alive."

"Still alive?" Gabriella asked.

"He was a doctor on Petrov Station when the pirates attacked it. While we were in the STO, I saw that the Navy had retaken the station and driven the pirates out of the system, but they didn't go into specifics on survivors or deaths."

Gabriella shook her head sadly. "I doubt the STO would want to advertise just how badly they fucked up by allowing the pirates to run amok for years. If you get hold of him or someone else, let me know, and I will work with them on our end."

Alexander nodded and left the woman to her work. He didn't have a comm address for anyone from Petrov Station, or the station's comm address, but he knew someone who might.

Mingyu was out in the belt, mining, so Alexander pinged him. "Hey, when you get a moment, I have a question for you."

It only took a few minutes before a response came in. Alexander was glad that Lucas had made the Kcomms available to all the local ships as soon as he went live with them on Earth. It saved so much time.

"Hey, Alex. What's up?" Mingyu asked as he wiped sweat from his forehead.

"You're not working yourself too hard out there, are you?" Alexander asked.

The man chuckled lightly. "Hardly, but thanks for the concern."

Alexander didn't quite believe the man, but he was an adult and could do as he pleased. "I was wondering if you have the comm address for a Dr. Nord from Petrov Station, or a way to get hold of the station?"

Mingyu frowned at the question. "I'll be honest, Alex, I've been trying to forget the place existed. You know what the STO did after they kicked the pirates out, right?"

Alexander nodded. "They took over control of the station, abolishing the familial ownership."

"Can't say I blame them," Mingyu said with a sigh. "At least two of the family heads were traitors. Probably three. I've been trying to reach out to their families since the station returned to STO control, but I haven't had much luck. I fear that they're all dead, but I won't know for certain until the STO publishes a list of lost or killed. …Is it wrong for me to hope they died? At least then their pain would have been over quickly. I can't even contemplate the alternative."

"No," Alexander said firmly. The alternative was slavery, and that never ended well for anyone.

Mingyu was quiet for a bit before shaking off his melancholy. "I know of Dr. Nord, but I didn't have a comm address for him. I'll send you a list of the contact addresses I have for the station. I assume you wouldn't be asking unless you needed to reach him, so I wish you luck."

"Thanks," Alexander said as he received the data packet.