Chapter 7

Behind the cloak I forged a diamondillium and BP structure 63 by 63 meters, and 75 meters tall, giving me a building with 5 meter ceilings in 10 floors, and 2.5 meter ceilings on another 10 floors. The upper floors had their own elevator access, and were reserved as housing for humans.

The trade buildings, I had discovered after it being explained to me, were almost embassies for both systems, and their primary commercial consortiums. On a system level, any member system could acquire the rights to bring a habitat module to Poolnar for housing, and support for their specific species. On the trade floor anyone could rent a space, but the trade floor was the only legal place to meet and do business across systems and species. Long term rentals included authorization for buildings, for an extra fee.

I signed a contract for the space, as I wanted to keep it, even if I had to give the station back at some point. I used the seized ships as collateral to pay for it. I also froze all the Federation accounts, freezing the Federation’s balance of tokens on Poolnar.

Righteous was scooting around retrieving the drifting ships and towing them back to Poolnar for repair. The shipyards were all busy building replacement needle spars. Once repaired, I was allowing traffic not previously owned by the Federation to leave.

Incoming traffic was required to drop shields before approaching so I could scan them. The six Executor class ships now sat in a circle around Poolnar, all pointing outward. Ships that had not tried to flee, or had been in dock, had been released to leave as they chose. There had been an initial flurry of exits, but when I announced that Poolnar was now a free trade station, with no limits on sales, and no taxes being charged for the next sixty days, business picked back up. I instead set Hera up with Pendar to find places we could charge fees in the interim. Docking fees, fund transfer fees, resident fees, repair fees. Poolnar controlled the automated ship yards, so that now belonged to me as well.

My new office and residence opened after just a day of construction, having been built behind an energy absorbing cloak. I had one product to sell, a communicator that could transfer data from anywhere to the Poolnar Hub network. I demonstrated it by hiring Menbar to fly ten light minutes from the station and hold video calls with potential customers. Poolnar verified, as did he, that he really was that far away, the lack of lag was obvious.

Interstellar messages were currently all carried by ship, and it was about 2 weeks to get a message to another world. The average safe jump distance was 30 quadrillion kilometers from a star’s gravity well. At 200 times light speed, it was a week to that distance. Then after a near instantaneous jump, it was another week at that speed to reach the planet, and finally you would be close enough to transmit the message to the local planetary network, or in some cases, land and deliver a letter.

The first year’s connection fee, that I split with Poolnar who would run the message routing AI, was 1000 tokens, and I had a line around the building with people ready to buy it. They didn’t even balk at the power requirements. The five megawatts they had to continually power the device with was simple on a planet. It was more difficult on a starship, but there were now people offering specialized five megawatt generators just for ships.

The power and data cables ran into a solid steel box, with an internal Kempu shield. The power ran into one pearl where it was distributed across a network, and into the grid on Earth. The idea had been Hera’s, and for every communicator we sold, ZZ Power sold another 5 megawatts to the grids on Earth.

It was desperately needed, as a number of power plants were badly damaged by the shutdown, and countries were looking for immediate power solutions. ZZ America had fifty nine power plants all running non stop, to keep the grid up. Between the solar, the gas turbines, and the batteries we were producing way more power than we were supposed to, but nobody cared, they just needed the electricity.

As the first star systems came online, so did other hubs in the galaxy. The first established hub, on the opposite side of the galaxy from Poolnar, refused to allow the installation, so I figured the armed response force from the Trade Federation was coming there first, and they hoped the perceived communication blackout would help them take me by surprise.

I’d go search them out if I could, but Poolnar only had jump coordinates for the stars in this galaxy, and the 5 other hubs. Extragalactic trade all came thru the first hub, if I wanted to get coordinates, I would either need cooperation from the AI there, or to capture it. Poolnar was having more fun than he had in the past 40,000 years, but he warned that the first hub was 65,000 years old, and not known for having fun.

I finally decided it was just going to be a waiting game. If they sent troops, ships, or negotiators, I was ready, but I’d have to wait for their next move.

On Earth I was very busy as Robert. 280 of the 359 coal fired plants in the US were still offline, and not expected to be back online before summer. He was negotiating deals where our equipment would be brought in and connected to the existing transmission lines. In some cases I was just renting access to the transmission lines for the companies that were convinced they would get the equipment back up and running. In others, facing the expensive repairs, the companies had started to file for bankruptcy so I had purchased them.

The gas powered plants didn’t have the same problems that the coal plants had, and were back up and running in just a few days. China, Japan, and India were the hardest hit, with parts of those countries still without power. In Zurich, I called my good friend Po.

“Mr Barkley, how may China help you?” he asked as his secretary transferred the call.

“I’m going to offer to help you again. I’ve got a solution to your power problems, but it’s going to be a little crazy. Can you come to my office?”