After dealing with the whole Shall incident and ensuring there were no immediate problems that needed his attention, Alexander spent the next week with Yulia during her time off of school.

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He would have loved to spend more time with her, but by the end of the week, he could see she was growing frustrated with him constantly being around. She was a child, she wanted to hang out with her friends again. Not wanting to undo all of the effort he had gone into to improve her mood, Alexander obliged her. He knew that children didn’t view time the same way adults did and they tended to change their minds on a whim. Yulia wasn’t quite as flighty as some of the children he had met: her ability to stay mad at him the entire time he was gone was a good example of that: but she was still a kid.

With Yulia’s mood improved, Alexander went in search of Dr. Lund. It had been far too long since they last spoke. The room he had offered to her for her research wasn’t huge, but she didn’t need a large space. The two items that took up the most space in her room were her desk and the holo-projector she had asked Alexander for.

The projector was mounted to the ceiling and covered the entire room with an array of virtual boards from which she could work. Lucas had designed the program that allowed Nova to harness every inch of space and more for her notes. As far as Alexander was aware, she had provided the young programmer with the design specifics based on a similar room on her science vessel.

The older woman glanced at him as he entered, but she didn’t stop writing a complex equation with the light pen. “I’ll be with you in a moment, Alexander, I’m almost done with this.”

A moment turned out to be an hour as she put the finishing touches on a complicated mathematical formula. Alexander had watched her write it, but he only understood the bare basics of what it was trying to prove. The woman set down the writing device and flicked the virtual board. It floated away until it landed against the wall, pushing other boards out of the way. Some even vanished entirely, saved out of sight. It was an interesting way to work, but a bit too cluttered and messy for his tastes.

“So,” Nova began as she slowly stood from her desk and stretched. “I heard you returned the lost lambs and their ship. I’m honestly surprised the STO let you leave. I assume it was because they wanted something from you?”

“The Vice Admiral wanted me to produce a small number of engines for some of their other stealth ships. The offer was a bit too generous to turn down.”

She snorted and walked out from behind her desk, the boards filled with notes and other equations turning to follow her, but kept out of the way. “I imagine it was. That’s how they get their hooks in you. They like to throw money at problems they know they can’t solve any other way. In your case, that’s good, it means this Vice Admiral wasn’t underestimating you. Be wary, Alexander, don’t let them pull you in with honeyed words.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Do you think I did the right thing by accepting the offer?”

She shrugged. “What I believe, doesn’t matter. Do you believe you did the right thing?”

He had plenty of time to think about this on the way home. “I do. I might have changed some things or asked for more money, but I think overall, I’m fine with the outcome. The only thing I’m concerned with is Omni finding out about our deal.”

“It is bound to happen sooner or later, there’s no point worrying about it until it happens. Now enough about Omni and the STO. I assume you didn’t come here to waste my time with that nonsense.”

He smiled at the woman’s brusque attitude. “No. I actually wanted to ask you if you knew anything about static field generators. I purchased a learning module on them but thought you might be able to provide some insight.”

“I know what they do,” she said, making a gesture to pull up a clear board. After it floated in front of her, she took out her light pen again. With the device, she drew a crude ship with a crescent dome in front of it. “An energized field is projected ahead of a ship. This field is designed to interact with matter heading toward the ship, providing a charge to that matter which interacts with the second field. The second field helps redirect items away from the ship's path. The faster a ship goes, the more power the fields require. They either adjust further out to increase the projected distance of this field or the strength of the field itself. It’s a rather simple solution but not a perfect one. However, it works well enough. I could probably figure out the math involved if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Oh, no. I was wondering if it was something you could use in your research?”

She shook her head. “There were a couple of members of my scientific team looking into improving static fields to help push compressed plasma ejection closer to the theoretical limit, but it’s a dead-end technology as far as I’m concerned. Those scientists were too limited in their goals. Light speed is still light speed. While you would see quicker travel through systems with that as your goal, you are barely even scratching the surface. The hypergates show us that near-instantaneous travel across vast distances is possible. Maybe not that technology specifically, but if it can be accomplished one way, who's to say it can’t be done another?”

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“So… a hypergate generator?”

She chuckled at that. “Something like that, yes. I’ve done all the math, and it's theoretically possible. If you could somehow fit a neutron star inside a spaceship, you might even be able to power a device that could make it happen.”

Alexander’s avatar winced at that. “If the power requirements are so ridiculous, how are the hypergates powered?”

She smirked and waggled her finger at him. “That’s a good question, isn’t it? The gates can’t be drawing power from their local stars. It would be detectable. The only other possibility is some sort of power transfer system located elsewhere. Maybe orbiting a black hole or neutron star. Heck, maybe the aliens who built the gates figured out how to tap into higher dimensions to power the devices. Either way, the technology is way beyond us. And until someone gets brave enough to take one of them apart, we will never know.”

“What about antimatter?” Alexander asked.

Nova threw her arms up in the air. “Antimatter this, antimatter that. Why is it every time a new technology comes along that requires an absurd amount of energy, everyone points to that as the magic fix-all?”

“It would work though, wouldn’t it?”

She sighed in exasperation. “With enough of it sure, anything’s possible. But we’re talking about the antimatter mass equivalent of the entirety of Eden’s End; the building, not the planet. And that’s only for one trip. There’s a reason I abandoned that line of research. While the math proves it is possible, the energy requirements make it wildly improbable. Most of my research has been focused on improving warp drives because we have already overcome the technological constraints that made faster-than-light possible. Why reinvent the wheel when we already have a technology that works? All I need to do is make it faster and more reliable in a gravity well, not an easy task, mind you. Knowing how the gravity plating works might help point me in the right direction, but I haven’t been able to figure that out yet. I don’t suppose you have those learning modules, though, do you?”

“I’m afraid not. The company that owns the patent on the technology has set such a ridiculous price on it that it's not practical to purchase at the moment.”

“I’m aware,” Nova grumbled. “I’ve been trying to buy it from them since it was first introduced. I’m not even sure who’s producing the plates. The company has managed to remain anonymous, even though that should be impossible with the laws in place that govern patents within the STO. My only guess is that it belongs directly to the STO Navy.”

“I tried to reverse engineer the plates,” he admitted. “They don’t make any logical sense and shouldn’t even work.”

She laughed at that. “Join the club. I imagine every single company and government in the STO has attempted what you did. None of them have managed to figure it out either. And I can guarantee some of those institutions have purchased the learning modules that explain how the technology functions. What does that tell you?”

“That my money would be better spent elsewhere.”

She nodded and patted him on the arm. “Maybe one day you’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I have something I need you to build for me and I have the calculations you asked for. I would tell you to focus on one technology at a time, but I also didn’t think you’d already have an Omni equivalent engine ready. You’re progressing faster than I thought. I will warn you. You are going to need zero-g manufacturing to pull off the compressed plasma ejection. The math shows that the tolerances are much more critical.”

“That’s not a problem,” Alexander declared proudly. “I already have a sort of orbital factory. I’m sure I’ll need to make some adjustments, but I can probably figure it out.”

She didn’t look at all surprised by his declaration, which took a bit of the wind out of his sails.

“If you’re using the designs I gave you for the omni clones, that’s not going to cut it, at least not for some parts of the delivery system. You’re going to need to tighten those tolerances down to ten nanometers. Tighter would be better.”

Alexander couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “You’re joking, right? Why do they need to be so precise? I would have thought the magnetic fields would be enough to contain the plasma.”

“They are, but if the pump housing deviates even a little in thickness, that weakens the field that is generated through it, causing turbulence in the plasma stream, which can quickly become an issue. The last thing you want to happen is for the plasma stream to fluctuate enough to touch the inner lining. If that happens, the entire system could become compromised.”

“Point taken. I’ll work on trying to improve my printers, yet again.”

“And don’t forget my project,” she added happily, holding out a data chip. “No hurry, but it will require the same accuracy as the compressed plasma systems, so the timing is rather perfect, wouldn’t you agree?”

Alexander just stared at the woman. She had no shame and had obviously planned for her project to coincide with these improvements, which meant she knew he would have to make them at some point anyway. She could have told him this months ago, and he would have simply continued trying to improve his printers and manufacturing instead of pausing at his current level.

He plucked the chip out of her hand. “Yes, I would say it is.”

She gave him another pat on the arm. “Excellent. Run along now, I want to get back to my work.”

Alexander sighed internally. It was easy to forget this old woman used to lead her own research group. She was probably used to getting her way any time she wished.

He was annoyed with how she waited to tell him the requirements of her project until after getting him all worked up on the requirements of his own, but he couldn’t be mad at her. He had agreed to help her when it came to making some of her theoretical work a reality. She probably wouldn’t have anything functional for years to come, but any step towards turning that theoretical work into something real was a good sign in his book.

Another reason why he wasn’t mad with the elderly scientist was that he would benefit from her work as well. She couldn’t exactly take her designs to the STO, Omni, or Sinorus and have them build them for her.

That made Alexander her only real ally when it came to making her dream a reality. He would just have to put up with her eccentricities in the meantime. He supposed it could be worse, he could be some mindless drone working for Omni.