Alexander and Lucas left the engineers to their work as they moved over to his workshop. It was a little dusty from lack of use, but everything was pretty much how he had left it.

"The planetary static field grid is up, the upgraded laser satellites are in position, the station is operational, and all of the ship production and upgrade programs are on track or even ahead of schedule. Are you sure you even need me around?" Alexander joked.

"Don't even say that," Lucas sighed in exhaustion. "You may have left Pembrooke in charge, but the man's been busy with recruiting as well as his efforts to build your network. I've been running the day-to-day stuff for BSE, which reminds me I need a raise."

"Fair enough," Alexander agreed. "I'll double your salary."

Lucas paused. "Wait, seriously? I was joking."

"I wasn't," Alexander replied.

"Okay… Thanks. I guess I don't really know what to say. While it feels great being appreciated, I don't do this job for the money; I do it because it's interesting."

"I know," Alexander replied. "That doesn't mean I can't reward you as well."

Lucas hid his embarrassment with a cough before continuing. "Anyway, where was I? Right. Even with the automation, everyone's been running twelve-hour shifts since the Shican attack. Mingyu and the other miners haven't even taken a break, seemingly hell bent on outdoing your robots in mining resources."

"Is it really that bad?" Alexander winced.

He didn't want people working themselves to death over one attack. While he was almost certain the Shican would return in some capacity in the coming months, there was a tiny chance that they might not. He didn't have any idea how the inner workings of Shican society or its military functioned. For all he knew, they could see the loss of their ships as a sign to stay away. That didn't seem to be the case from the previous war, but a man could dream.

"Eh," Lucas said, waggling his hand back and forth in a so-so gesture. "It's exhausting, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't like anyone asked them to do that. Pembrooke and Krieger laid out the stakes, and people chose for themselves. I imagine the thought of an alien armada descending upon them had some impact on some of their choices, but others were probably more tempted by the money. It's a good thing BSE is earning credits again, because you're spending money faster than ever. It's making a lot of people extremely rich, and extremely happy."

"I was going to ask them to slow down, but it sounds like that's not really going to do anything. I could step in and help, but I don't want to step on anyone's toes with the ongoing projects. You and your team have done amazing work while I was gone. I'll be honest, I feel like a bit of an outsider at this point."

Lucas began to protest, but Alexander put his hand up to stop him. "It's not your fault, it's mine. I was more focused on politics during the trip, and didn't do a very good job of keeping up with what was happening here as much as I probably should have. Hell, I didn't even know that you had built that engineering bay, or that you had turned it into a giant vacuum chamber. I'm sure it's in Theo's reports, but I've had very little time to go through them with everything going on." Alexander sighed. "Katalynn did tell me that as a leader, I would have to prioritize, but it still sucks. I just want to sit in my workshop and engineer stuff while raising Yulia, but my responsibilities are much larger now."

Lucas snorted. "Join the club. I used to be a deadbeat programmer/hacker with no plan for my future, and no intention of ever working with, let alone for, another company. Yet here I am, Head of Research and Development for BSE. Arguably one of the most influential companies to emerge in the last hundred years."

Alexander would have blushed if he could blush, but obviously he couldn't. He could have simulated it with his avatar, but he chose not to in order to save Lucas any embarrassment.

"Life does sort of get away from you, if you aren't paying attention," Alexander said wistfully as the pair surveyed the quiet workshop.

Lucas cleared his throat. "Enough wool gathering. Why did you want me to follow you to your workshop?"

Alexander plastered a big grin on his avatar and pulled up his tablet, flicking the file from it onto his main holo display.

The large display lit up with a mind-bogglingly complex diagram.

"You didn't?" Lucas asked with a slight squeal of delight.

"I did," Alexander replied smugly. "You're looking at the next generation of computing. Or at least our next generation. I wasn't able to simulate the processing output on the trip back, but now that we're here, let's see what this beauty is capable of."

After a thorough simulation of the new processor design, they both whistled in approval.

"It's not a generational leap in computing, but ten percent more processing speed than the QuantumLogic supercomputer processors is still amazing," Lucas said.

"Assuming the simulation is accurate," Alexander reminded him.

"Yes. Assuming that, but even if the processors have the same or even slightly less speed, it's still a huge boon for us. What about the issues we were running into with the old processors?"

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"I assume you are referring to the diminishing returns when linking the computronics cubes? It was a design issue with the original processor. They were never meant to link to multiple other processors. That extra load was causing the main pathways to become bottlenecked with instructions. You see these branching structures?" Alexander asked as he zoomed in on the schematic.

Lucas scratched his head. "Multiple pathways? Shouldn't that reduce the overall processing speed and increase power draw since the processor has to be able to check and verify each path and the instructions coming in?"

"That's what I thought at first. When I looked at the overall architecture of the processor, I realized it was highly inefficient. By optimizing the other pathways, I was able to recover most of that lost speed. It'll never be the fastest computer, even if it does beat QuantumLogic's processor, which has been out for over a decade, but I can guarantee you that its ability to multitask and link to other processors will be far greater than before. We'll need to test that to see how much, but that'll have to wait until the new processors are completed."

Lucas clapped his hands rapidly like a giddy little kid. "When will they be ready?"

He waved to two dusty and dark-looking machines against the far wall. "I just need to check over the nano-assembler and fabricator to make sure they are operating at peak performance. I'm surprised you aren't using them to produce additional processors right now."

"Yeah, we moved that production to a dedicated manufacturing area a few months ago. We produce more processors and pseudo-computronics than we can use at the moment, so I didn't see any reason to keep running your single-unit machines. I figured I would save them from the additional maintenance. Those damn nano-fabricators need a complete overhaul every six months or the quality goes downhill fast."

"Another thing I wasn't around for. Are the industrial units based on the machine here?"

Lucas nodded.

"I'll see what I can do to improve the design, but don't expect anything anytime soon."

"That's fine," Lucas replied. "The maintenance is annoying, but not overly concerning. We rotate the three machines we have on a two-month cycle, so only one is ever down at any given time. We also have the space to add another three of the machines if needed."

"How big is our surplus of processors?" Alexander asked as he cleaned off the dust with a static field wand that worked better than a duster. It didn't send the dust and debris everywhere. It simply collected it and held it in place until he turned the device off. It was a simple thing he had created out of boredom one day back when he was experimenting with the static field emitters for his nano-assembler. It wasn't the most unobtrusive device, being connected to a large cord and a metal box that contained the batteries, but he kept it around for nostalgia's sake.

"Figured you might ask me that," Lucas muttered as he pulled out a tablet and flicked through a few screens. "Right now, a little over a thousand."

"That's with them going into the missiles?" Alexander asked in surprise.

Lucas nodded and put away the tablet. "We can produce missiles faster than we can produce the processors, but our storage is full, the ships all have a full complement on board, and the few we send off for the war effort barely dip into our production. Before you ask, Yi Na has been contracted to build four more storage facilities. The man's a bit backlogged, though."

"What is Yi working on?" Alexander asked as he mulled over the problem. He recalled just how quickly they had run out of missiles back during Harlow's attack. They couldn't afford to be short on ammunition if the Shican showed up.

"A few of the new arrivals contracted him to create private domes for their companies."

"We're already at the point where people can afford that?" Alexander knew a few smaller companies had agreed to move out here, but he didn't think they had the necessary funds or need for such a large space.

"Wei Na started her own bio-tech firm."

"Oh yeah. I remember now. Mingyu told me she wanted to make her own versions of STO medicines."

"Yeah, she did, and it was a big hit with the Union, Eden's End, and BSE. She now provides nearly thirty percent of BSE's medical supplies. The dome she's building will be a dedicated medical production facility and testing lab. The other two medical companies decided to merge, and the pair is now in direct competition with a few products. They also contracted Yi Na for their own facility. Apparently, high-level medical testing requires strict quality control, and our existing engineering spaces weren't up to the task."

Alexander almost laughed at that. It was good to see competition bloom, but it sounded more like Wei had an axe to grind, and the other two companies had some long-standing resentment toward anyone from the Coalition. He would have to ask Theo to keep an eye on things and make sure their friendly rivalry remained that way.

The two chatted as the machines hummed to life and began creating Alexander's new processor.

While those were whirring away, he retrieved his old testing rig and swapped out the processor socket for the new one. The robots he used for testing were gone, but it wasn't much effort to print up new ones.

All of that was completed before the first processor slid out of the machine. He noticed they were going to take quite a bit longer to print than the old model.

Lucas, wanting to see the thing and be the first to touch it, hurried over with a child-like giggle.

Alexander rolled his avatar's eyes and waited by the testing rig. After a few minutes, he simulated a cough to get Lucas' attention.

The man turned beet red. "Sorry, forgot you were here."

Alexander shook his avatar and motioned for Lucas to bring the processor over. He had to admit, it was a thing of beauty. It looked a bit like a pearl with the way its traces caught the light beneath the clear diamond thermal spreader. He could have gone with traditional materials to transfer the heat, but with the additional pathways, he wanted to ensure they had the best possible heat transfer medium. That was especially important with the replacement of the gold traces with the same composite carbon nanotubes used in the alien ship.

The testing was everything Alexander hoped it would be. The new processor was a little slower than the simulation predicted, but it was still faster than QuantumLogic's current supercomputer processor. Where it really shone was in managing multiple robots at the same time, nearly doubling the control capacity to forty robots on one processor.

It was an insane improvement and opened up a whole host of possibilities, considering Alexander planned to make an automated fleet using Nova's FTL bridge discovery. Those automated fleets should even the odds when it came to facing the Shican's carriers. By all accounts, each of the enemy fleets that came through the gate had one carrier, two destroyers, and one of those larger ships, which he had dubbed dreadnoughts. If they stayed consistent with their past actions, the Shican would likely try to overwhelm their foes with sheer numbers.

The dreadnoughts were a big enough issue to overcome. He couldn't afford for the aliens to have a numerical advantage as well. Thankfully, the Stingrays were relatively fast to produce and inexpensive, as far as spaceships went.

Technically, that wasn't true; it was inexpensive for him. While on the way home, he did the math on what one of them would have cost if it had been manufactured in the STO. You could buy a well-equipped frigate, or on the civilian side, something like Mingyu's ship, Destiny.

Alexander really should start designing and building civilian ships, but there was always something more pressing that needed his production capacity.