Chapter 40 Substation.

The presence of the pirates in the vicinity was not a good thing but at least, they only had ships of the same class as the one Andrew destroyed, so they didn't pose any serious threat to his station, especially with the new shields and the railgun in his possession.

Since that was the case, and there was nothing he could do for now about conquering the system, he focused on a little project that had been on his mind ever since Aelita came to his station.

The idea was simple, but if done right it could greatly increase the amount of resources he would be able to collect and shorten the collection time as well.

The only thing that was holding him back a this moment was the research on the space engines.

It was required to build a space fighter, but it was also needed for the drones, to increase their range and speed.

In his case it would allow him to gather the resources much faster already, but if his idea worked then the gathering time would be reduced to a fraction of what it was now.

However, instead of waiting for the upgrade to finish, he decided to test the idea immediately.

Looking at the mining and geological scans, he found the perfect spot for the test run and began working.

He detached 4 solar power modules, 1 shield generator module, 2 resource processing modules, 1 resource distribution module, and 2 drone recharging modules from the station, which was easy thanks to the remodeling they had done.

When all the modules were detached, he put them together into a small substation and ordered the drones to move it to the spot he selected earlier, he also detailed 400 drones to the substation.

While the small station was on its way, he detached 4 midsized storage modules forming a 2x2 cube from them and ordering the drones to attach it to the substation once it arrived at its destination, which would take around an hour.

Right now the drones had to go back and forth, from and to the asteroid belt.

The journey was not that long, but if his idea worked, he could reduce it and let the drones stay in the belt while only swapping the full storage modules with empty ones, saving him a lot of time and increasing the amount of the gathered resources.

Of course, the movement of the small station didn't go unnoticed by the other station masters, and it wasn't long before Aelita asked about it.

-What are you doing?

She asked curiously.

-Oh, did the others detect it already?

He asked, faking a surprise.

-Yes they detected something moving away from our station and asked me what was going on.

She explained.

-I'm conducting a little experiment, so you can tell them to calm down.

The substation will stop around 10,000 kilometers from our station and stay there for a while.

He said, not disclosing any details of the operation.

This only made her more curious about the whole thing.

-Can I help somehow?

She asked, not that she was bored of talking with the other ladies, but she wanted to be useful to Andrew and that took priority over everything.

-Not right now, but depending on the success or the failure of the experiment, you might be a bit busy soon, so take your time to talk with your friends while you can.

Andrew said with a smile, then remembered the upgrade he was researching and sure enough it was ready to be implemented.

He paused the production in one of the component manufacturing modules and used it to produce the video call upgrade equipment.

The whole thing was ready in 15 minutes, as it only consisted of a camera and a data chip with the software to be installed into the communications module.

-Your video call upgrade is ready and it's waiting for you in the airlock of the communications module.

He informed her, which made her happy and she practically sprinted away to install the upgrade as soon as she could.

Her enthusiasm for this little upgrade, made Andrew laugh, the term, kid in the candy store came to his mind.

If it made her happy, then he didn't mind, and it would be useful to him as well.

But putting this aside, he focused on the task at hand.

This was just a small station he was using to see if the idea worked, and if it did, he wanted to assemble a bigger station to make the whole process even faster.

With any luck, this would allow him to gather resources at the speed necessary to use all of his research modules at once and still have more than enough for the merchant.

It didn't take long for the substation to arrive at its destination and a few minutes later the first four storage modules got attached to it, while the drones were hard at work, gathering the resources.

Andrew checked the whole thing and he discovered that the resource processing modules were already working at maximum capacity and the drones had to wait for their turn to drop their cargo into them.

Without the slight pause, which was caused by the distance between the station and the asteroids, the two modules could not process all the materials that the drones gathered.

Seeing this, Andrew detached another two resource processing modules along with 2 more drone recharging modules and 6 solar power modules to reinforce the substation.

While doing that he made another four storage cubes to be ready and waiting since the first one was filling up faster than he predicted.

At this pace, it would be filled within four hours and after the additional modules arrive it would be even faster.

While he was waiting for everything to be done by the drones, he wondered where Aelita disappeared to?

She was only supposed to install the upgrade, but that should not take this much time.

He opened an internal sensors display and found her in the communication module.

She was probably already using the upgrade while talking to other station masters and stayed there for privacy.

Too bad that she had forgotten about the possibility of connecting to the feed from the command center.

Andrew did just that and he was right, at the moment she was giving instructions to the other ladies about installing the upgrade.

It didn't take long for every one of them to be connected and they could finally see each other while talking.

-You have got to be kidding me.

Andrew said to himself when he saw the appearances of the other ladies.

If this was some kind of a joke, then it wasn't funny.

They all were from different species and had different colors and some other characteristics, but they were all humanoid, and they were all stunningly beautiful.

Most women back on Earth would burn with jealousy over their beauty, while men would burn with lust and desire seeing them.

-How the hell am I supposed to handle so many beauties?

He thought to himself.

However remembering how they made fun of him on the chat, he changed his mind as it would be quite fun getting to prove their assumptions were wrong and he would enjoy it very much.

Andrew listened in on the conversation for a few minutes, but they were just gossiping and teasing each other at this point so he focused back on the substation project.

The four cubes and the additional modules had arrived at the substation and the modules were just being attached by the construction drones.

The moment they came online, the capacity gauge of the first cube started to go through the roof.

With 4 resource processing modules and 400 drones, it only took a little over two hours to fill the first cube.

Once that was done he detached it and ordered the drones to bring it back and attach the next one in its place.

This one also started to fill up very fast and at the pace it was going it would be full in less than two hours.

Andrew did the math and it showed that with two more substations, he would be able to fill almost every storage module he had within 20 to 30 hours depending on the resource availability and adding the transport time.

That would get him around 63,000 tonnes of resources to do the research and produce stuff with.

While he was busy with this, the first cube arrived back and was being connected back to the station.

After some more thought, he decided to just detach another 4 mid-sized storage modules to form a cube, instead of emptying the ones that just arrived.

While he was at it he also detached more modules and got himself another substation, which he sent to a location a bit further than the first one along with another complement of drones and storage cubes as he dubbed the four connected modules.

This substation was sent to a distance of 40,000 kilometers from the station and it would also serve as the recharging station for the scout drones which would increase their operating time and range.

For the next six hours, he monitored the situation and since the beginning of the experiment he managed to gather around 20,000 tonnes of materials, from the substations alone and there were another two cubes filled with the resources on their way back.

This was an astonishing success.

Sadly there was no way for him to hide this from the other station masters and Aelita came to ask about the experiment, but he just told her that it needed more time to see if the results were constant or just temporary.

He hoped like all hell, that the ladies would decide to wait for the conclusion of his experiment, at which time he would be so much ahead of them that even if they copied his idea, it would be impossible for them to catch up to him.