By the time the pair of them reached the surface, the engineers had already disassembled the test rig and had part of it loaded onto a shuttle. It would take three trips to move the entire rig into space, then Alexander's bots would reassemble it to save time and keep any risk to a minimum.

Most of the engineers weren't trained for zero-G assembly or maintenance, so there was no point sending them up. The few who were trained were Asgardians, and they were more than happy to supervise the bots as they reassembled the stripped-down Stingray test rig.

Alexander was glad someone else was supervising the work. Otherwise, it would have fallen to him or Lucas to monitor the bots on the new project. It probably would have been fine; the bots had experience assembling the early version of the gunships, but why risk it?

"It looks like you have things well in hand," Alexander said to Lucas. "I'll keep my comm on this time, just message me when the test is ready. I need to check in on the progress with the Seahorses."

"Sounds good. I'll talk to you in a few hours, Alex."

Alexander headed off to his workshop, still finding it hard to believe he had wasted over a day. His printers didn't need oversight most of the time. Any bugs or quirks that the printers might have had were worked out of them over the years. Even the large ring printer had fault detection built into it. It was usually on new prints that he wanted to keep an eye on things.

It wasn't the end of the world if he missed something on the Seahorse prints. The carrier was too large to print in one go with his current generation of printers, so its components were being printed and assembled by the army of bots. A bad component wouldn't be great, but it wouldn't set back progress on the two vessels by more than an hour or two. He was less worried about the structure of the ship than he was about the armor.

***

Alexander stepped out of the storeroom after speaking with the engineers assigned to the production line. He was extremely impressed by the improvements Lucas had incorporated into the process. Only one percent of the stealth armor panels now failed the test. That was a much lower error rate than even the STO had managed to hit, which was good because production of the panels was still pretty slow. He was going to have to compensate Lucas for his hard work.

He also checked in on the prototype stealth armor manufacturing line. Production was still hit or miss there. Despite that, Lucas had managed to produce enough good panels to outfit Kaela's ship, which was the only ship, other than the alien one he had hidden away, that sported the optical camouflage.

The issue they were running into was getting the materials to merge properly while they printed, without destroying the optical pathways. It required very controlled temperatures and a sealed environment to make it work. Too hot or too cold, and the material either didn't bond to its neighbor, or it shattered. Controlling that heat was proving difficult. Even a slight variation of a few degrees in temperature within the containment area while the printer was adjusting could ruin that batch.

A failed print was still a better outcome than if the plate had shattered. If that happened, the entire machine had to be shut down, allowed to cool, and someone had to go in and scrape the remains out. A process that Lucas said could take hours. Then the machine had to be reactivated, checked for sterility, and brought back up to temperature before the process could begin again.

It was a thousand times more finicky than just printing the normal carbon panels, and Alexander wasn't sure it was worth the extra effort. Sure, being able to pass light through a ship and practically disappear was amazing, but it wasn't much better than the armor's passive ability to absorb sensor readings.

Alexander sighed internally and put the project on the back burner. It wasn't immediately necessary to have a working solution to the problem, because even if he had one, it would take months to crank out enough of the material to armor anything larger than a gunship. The Kitsune had required every panel they had on hand, and they barely had enough for the corvette, even though Lucas had been stockpiling them for over half a year.

The process was slowly improving, but Alexander could tell their current approach would never reach anywhere near industrial scales.

He left the room behind and headed for his workshop.

An idea had been kicking around in his mind about how to overcome one of the limitations in Lund's gravitational folding equation. If his idea worked, it would also require an enormous amount of power, but nothing on the scale of what the drive needed.

With a much greater handle on the extremely complex mathematical equations of Lund's, Alexander got to work proving out his idea before he threw himself blindly into trying to test it. He could have done the math inside his mind space, but after studying Lund's notes and methods for so long, he had started to copy her approach, and doing it any other way felt wrong. He pulled up a blank virtual whiteboard.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Unlike Lund, he didn't need a stylus. His finger blurred across the holo as the complex mathematical formula began to take form. After only a few minutes, he stepped back and looked at the calculations.

"Hmm. More than I had hoped."

If he wanted to bring his idea to life, he needed to improve the energy output of his reactors by twenty percent. It wasn't an insurmountable issue, but it wasn't a small one either. A twenty percent increase in reactor output was a generational leap. He was going to have to design a reactor from the ground up.

That could wait, though.

Now that he knew his idea was plausible, it was time to throw himself into the blind testing portion to see if he could make it work the way he needed it to, on a smaller scale.

The design for Alexander's defensive field generator appeared on the large center holo, and he dismantled it until all he was left with was the internal workings. He increased the size of the orb and layered six more sets of rotating rings onto the device. The tightly packed rings and larger size would give the design a full minute of activity before the capacitor would run out. He didn't want to power it like he did with the shuttle's defensive field, because he had a different use for this field generator.

Alexander could increase the size further or add more rings, but a minute should be more than was necessary for what he had in mind. He wrapped the inner workings in the same black diamond coating as the augment suit ones were encased in, and housed it inside an armored container that made it look like just another piece of spaceship tech.

Alexander's idea was to utilize the static nature of the defensive field as a way to lock items into place to prevent them from being moved during violent acceleration. Almost like how his nano-assembler worked, but on a massive scale.

It was not an inertial dampener. He wasn't breaking physics. What he was doing instead was preventing physics from coming into play.

There were a lot of things to test before he would ever deploy such a device with living people involved, however. To work properly, the field would have to lock every atom in place, essentially turning a ship and everyone aboard into one solid object for a short time, which is why it required an absurd amount of power.

Alexander's printers began pumping out tiny spikes with a fiber-optic cable running between them and a strong magnet on one end. The Shican field emitters were required to form the field to the ship's dimensions, instead of just a circle around the generator.

He began placing them at even intervals around a section of his workshop, leaving his workstation clear. By the time he was done placing the emitters, the basketball-sized defensive sphere was complete.

Alexander moved it into a nearby cradle that he had also printed over the last… apparently, it had been eight hours. Even though his daughter wasn't likely to respond, he still sent her a comm text.

"I'm not going to make it for supper. If you'd like to have dinner with your friends, you can."

Surprisingly, she did respond.

"K."

"It's something," he muttered as he locked down his workshop.

Before he did something foolish, he also contacted Lucas to let him know to cut power to his workshop if he didn't hear anything from him within the hour.

"You're not doing anything dangerous, are you?" Lucas replied only a moment later.

"It's not going to be dangerous to me," Alexander replied.

It shouldn't be at least. He was outside the area he set up, so the field shouldn't get near him. Then again, he never expected to be thrown across his workshop when the prototype field generator cracked back during his initial experiments into the field generation.

Alexander also had the test rig for his computronics set up, and the robots would be moving around it in a circle, going in and out of where the field should end.

A few sensor probes got littered around the area, and when he was sure everything was good to go, he stepped outside the testing zone and fed power to the orb.

The slowly spinning rings had been collecting power passively, but they rapidly spun to life, producing a vibrant pinkish-purple glow despite the black diamond covering the surface.

If it wasn't for the glow, you wouldn't be able to tell that the device was active. It was completely silent, and each ring was perfectly balanced to prevent any weird oscillations.

Alexander waited for the glow to stop increasing in intensity. He knew from his other experiments that meant the orb was fully charged. Then he activated the field.

There wasn't any visual tell that the field had been triggered, but Alexander cranked his processing speed up to max and was able to track the ripple of energy as it temporarily slowed the machines inside the testing area.

There was an awful grinding of metal as the back half of one of the bots, trapped half within and half outside the sphere, was paused. That went away as soon as the field stabilized and the bot continued like nothing had happened.

The robot, heading into the field, didn't even slow. It wasn't moving fast enough for the field to affect it. That wasn't ideal, but stopping all motion wasn't the purpose of the initial test.

Alexander wanted to see what effect the field had on mechanical components and if the field could be shaped to his whim, and it appeared that it could. The problem was that the field only extended about a foot from the emitters. He needed to figure out a way to both condense the field to make it stronger while expanding the field so it had even coverage between the entire transmission area.

Awful buzzing noises started emanating from inside the affected area, and Alexander traced the issue to some of his robotic assemblers. He cut power to those devices from his workstation, and the buzzing stopped. He had likely just burned out some of his printers and industrial robots with the test. Apparently, some of the components were moving fast enough to get caught in the field.

Alexander made a note that power would need to be temporarily cut to any system under the influence of the field. He was glad he learned about the problem now; a few broken machines were easier to fix than a person.

With that in mind, he needed to find a test subject. A non-human one. Thankfully, rats and cockroaches were prevalent, even on Eden's End. It's too bad they didn't have any pirates locked up.

The field eventually faded, and he took stock of the damage. It wasn't nearly as bad as he feared. A few actuators and motors had overloaded, but those were wear parts anyway, so they were easy to replace.