LOCATION: VARLEN

  DATE: 2405

  Judgement appeared a few light days out from Varlen. Alexander was there for a meeting with the STO.

  The STO Navy had been trying to contact him for months, but Alexander ignored their attempts because he was done with them. It wasn’t until Katalynn contacted him that he paid them any mind.

  Apparently, one of the STO’s spies had slipped a letter under her door a little over a month after the war ended. It simply said. ‘We know about the weapon. Please have Kane contact us to set up a meeting.’

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were talking about, but Alexander didn’t reach out to them. He had Theo do it for him.

  The man had negotiated the location, as well as the time for the meeting to take place at Varlen, two and a half months after their response.

  Of course, any of the ships in the BSE or Union fleets could reach Varlen in under a minute, but the STO couldn’t. Alexander used the time to convince Katalynn and the other Jarls to sign their own separate disarmament treaty, just to ensure that everyone in the Union was on the same page about the gravity bombs.

  “Are the picket ships showing any changes in the system?” Alexander asked.

  “No,” Krieger confirmed. “They haven’t detected any new jump signatures in the system since the small courier ship from a week ago, and that one departed within an hour of arriving at the station.”

  The STO had decommissioned Varlen a few years ago, but there was still a skeleton crew in the facility.

  “Then we wait,” Alexander said. “How much of the station have the microbots scanned?”

  Alexander would have loved to take credit for the ladybug-sized bots, but that had all been Rush and the other AIs’ doing. Without the worry of being annihilated by an alien race and a bit of inspiration from Alexander, the three managed to modify the gravity plating enough to send power through it.

  That was a huge discovery, but it was sort of blunted by the fact that the plates became unstable after they grew larger than a grain of rice. Not exactly a feasible alternative to having a reactor onboard, but they made great power supplies for tiny machines.

  “Captain Voss’s last report indicates that they scanned just over eighty percent of the facility. There were no signs of sabotage or weapons of any kind. The only radiation they picked up came from an old ultra-heavy water storage tank. Nothing dangerous, however.”

  He doubted that the STO was stupid enough to try to assassinate him or blow up the station, but he would rather be safe than sorry. The fact that they had gone to such lengths to contact him meant they were desperate and scared, which was never a good combination.

  Alexander wasn’t super concerned about his own safety. After the fight with Thesska, he realized just how durable his living alloy form was. Short of a bomb or nuke, he was pretty sure he could walk away. That durability didn’t extend to the other people attending the meeting, however. Speaking of.

  “Any sign of Katalynn or the other Jarls?” Alexander checked his watch. They were late; then again, the STO delegation had yet to arrive in Varlen.

  Krieger cleared his throat. “She said they would be delayed a few hours.”

  Alexander turned to the admiral. “When did she send that message?”

  “Right before you got aboard,” Krieger admitted.

  Alexander sighed. She hadn’t seemed upset when she contacted him, but she might still be holding a grudge after he refused to make more gravity bombs. “Did she at least say why?”

  “Apparently, the Jarls were arguing over what order they should be in when the fleet appears in Varlen.”

  Alexander looked to see if Krieger was joking, but the man’s face was unamused.

  Before he could ask more, the sensor operator spoke up. “The STO taskforce has arrived in Varlen.”

  “Krieger, can you put me through to Katalynn?”

  The holo popped to life, showing an annoyed-looking Lagertha Char. Her face brightened slightly when she spotted the new connection. She muted her others and turned to face him. “Please tell me the STO has arrived?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Thank Odin,” the woman said. “Now I can tell all these idiots to shut up and get in line or be left behind. We’ll be at your location in two minutes.”

  True to her word, Grimnir’s Fang, Stormraven, and the other Jarl flagships appeared nearby. The STO task force outnumbered them, but that wasn’t much of a concern. The ten Union vessels were more than a match for the STO vessels. He only wished they had more leaders to attend, but the other Jarls had died during the war, and finding replacements had been put on hold until the planets devastated by the Shican could be repopulated.

  The fleet synced their warp drive and jumped into Varlen the old-fashioned way. Alexander had programmed the jump so their fleet was the same distance from the STO station as the STO fleet was.

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  There was no communication between the fleets as they parked just short of the station, facing each other. Then shuttles began departing from a few of the STO vessels and heading toward the station. Alexander’s shuttle and the Union ones followed only moments later.

  ***

  Alexander, in his old robot form, along with the rest of the Union delegation, was led into a large conference room. The room had been recently cleaned. He knew that because the microbots had watched the skeleton crew scramble to make everything ready after the courier had arrived.

  The STO had made the entire meeting very hush-hush. He had his suspicions as to why, but it would be interesting to find out if they confirmed them or not.

  The four STO admirals stood as they entered. Alexander paused for a moment when he didn’t see anyone else. He had assumed at least one planetary governor or even the Chairman of the STO would attend, but only the four military members were here to greet them, and one of them was new. It seemed like Admiral Trelawney had been replaced.

  “We kept this meeting from STO leadership,” Patel said after seeing his group’s hesitation to enter the room. The man gestured to the chairs. “This was too important to let politics decide what happens. Please sit.”

  Alexander didn’t comment on what could easily be argued as treason as he took the central seat, which was a heavy-duty crate. He swapped it with the one to the right. Katalynn cracked a minute smile and took the new central seat, while Ylva sat on his right after giving a death glare to another Jarl who was about to take that seat. He wanted to sigh, but he kept himself from reacting to the woman’s antics. Everyone else quickly seated themselves, and you could practically cut the silent tension in the room with a knife.

  Patel was the first to break the silence. “Let me start by apologizing for the way I contacted you. We needed to speak, but you weren’t responding to any of our other methods of reaching out.”

  “You know why,” Alexander replied.

  The man held up his hand. “Yes, and while I’m sorry for how our relationship ended, we’re not here to apologize for that. We’re here to discuss a universal ban on gravity-based weapons.”

  The reaction from the Jarls was mixed, but it was mostly annoyance and anger aimed at the STO for thinking that they could dictate what the Union could and couldn’t do.

  Katalynn slammed her hand on the table hard enough to make the cups of water shake and silence the Jarls. Once she had everyone’s attention, she spoke.

  “We are not here to bow to the whims of the STO, especially after your government proved they can’t be trusted, not once, but twice over.” Katalynn let those words settle, and Alexander watched quietly as the admirals squirmed uncomfortably at the truth.

  Once she saw that her words had the desired effect, she continued. “That being said, perhaps there is some agreement we can reach.”

  Alexander hid the surprise from his avatar’s features. He never expected Katalynn to agree with anything the STO proposed. Then again, she already knew he wasn’t going to produce any more gravity bombs, so any agreement for the STO to follow suit was purely for the Union’s benefit.

  “You’ve tested one, haven’t you?” Alexander asked before the conversation could get back on track.

  “Yes,” Admiral Dufresne admitted. “Their destructive potential is…beyond what any of us imagined.”

  “You haven’t told your leaders either, have you?” Alexander guessed.

  Based on the way they stiffened at his words, he knew he was right.

  “Would you trust politicians with this information?” Patel asked. “They would either wave it around to proclaim how big their stick was or sell it to the corporations. The moment the corporations got their hands on the technology, the STO government would be redundant.”

  Alexander could certainly agree with that. “You know it won’t remain secret forever. Not with the knowledge of how to create gravity plating spreading.”

  “It seems we are both aware of the same problem,” Admiral Thorne cut in. “That means we are both looking for a way to stop or even limit how much damage the weapons could do. Perhaps a joint effort could speed up that research?”

  “No,” Alexander replied flatly. “I am only here in my capacity as a Jarl for the Asgardian Union.”

  The woman didn’t seem happy about his quick rejection, but she didn’t push further.

  Alexander agreed with the woman that something needed to be done to prevent the technology from being misused by corporations and other nefarious entities. Rush, Four, and Serina were already hard at work developing a solution, and they were confident they would have one in a couple of months. He doubted the STO would have one anytime soon. The reason for that was simple. It was much easier to counter a technology when you fully understood how the technology functioned. The STO Navy had been able to recreate the plates, but only because Rush had leaked the designs to them.

  It may have been done as a good-faith effort to help the STO after the Collective had destroyed the other plates, but it had opened up Pandora’s box. That was one choice Alexander wished he could go back and veto, but what was done was done.

  Eventually, the technology would spread, and criminals would try to capitalize on it.

  The rest of the meeting was a back-and-forth discussion about limiting the stockpile of the weapons and agreeing not to use them against human worlds, in human systems, or against human fleets.

  Katalynn pushed hard for other concessions and agreements, which Alexander thought were a bit much. The arguments were essentially pointless. After confirming what the meeting was about, he had dispatched a series of stealth corvettes to every known STO Navy black site to see where the weapons were being tested. The Union had all of those locations thanks to Vice-Admiral Fletcher’s data.

  What the stealth ships found at one of the sites was a debris field, and sensor data confirming that a gravity bomb had gone off at that location. The Admiral had lied about it being a test. It was clear that some accident had activated the gravity bomb since the station was replaced by a debris field.

  The Swordfish gathered data, then departed the system before the science vessels combing through the remains could detect it. Alexander left the data to Rush and the others, and before anything was even signed, they had located the planet where the STO were staging the transmission plates. He was surprised to learn that the system was Gliese 667, the same gas giant that Petrov Station orbited.

  Apparently, the STO had built an outpost station there, similar to the one at Varlen. If a conflict ever broke out between the Union and the STO, and Alexander didn’t already have a way to neutralize the weapons, he could at least destroy that facility. If the STO were smart, they wouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket, but he wouldn’t know until a weapon was tested. Thankfully, the stealth satellite network was getting upgraded to detect large gravitational disruptions.

  At the end of the discussions, an agreement was reached to limit the weapon stockpiles to twenty missiles. Nobody outside of BSE knew about the larger variant, and Alexander didn’t bring it up. If the STO was worried enough about the small ones to have a clandestine meeting with the Union, he couldn’t imagine what they would do if they knew he had weapons capable of wiping life from entire star systems.

  In the end, both groups went away happy, thinking they got the better side of the deal.

  If the STO only knew what Alexander was planning, they wouldn’t have been smiling as they left the conference room and boarded their shuttles. They would find out soon enough.

  If you'd like some more sci-fi adventures, go check out my new series, Corebound.

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