The first person Alexander contacted in Unokane was Admiral Krieger.

"Alex, are you alright?" Krieger asked. "I'm not getting a video signal, and I've received concerning reports that someone attacked the hypergates."

"No," Alexander admitted. "We were getting ready to transition from Epsilon Eridani to Ross 128 when a Shican task force came through the gate and started firing on everything in sight. Another alien vessel appeared and dealt with the Shican, but it destroyed the hypergates in Borrus and Ganos. Most likely the one in Tau Ceti as well. I'll send you the data drop with the details, but what I could really use is some backup. The only ship that is even partially combat-capable is Grace, and just barely. I'm making repairs, but I would feel a whole lot better if you could send a few ships to meet us along the way."

"I'll do you one better. Captain Ramirez is on his way to Ganos to drop off the two Orcas for the Hawks. We can simply redirect him straight to you."

"That would be appreciated. How many ships does he have with him?" Alexander would have to apologize to the Hawks for delaying their delivery, but he assumed they would understand given the current circumstances.

"I sent him with four Sharks and a dozen Stingrays. If you need more, I could pull some of the Swordfish from picket duty."

Alexander might have chuckled at the excessiveness of the escort fleet, but he wasn't in a very jovial mood. "No, that won't be necessary. A destroyer, two heavy assault frigates, four corvettes, and a dozen gunships are more than enough."

"I wanted to ensure our ally's ships arrived safely," Krieger admitted.

"No need to explain yourself, I probably would have done the same."

"I'm happy to hear you agree. With the gates being out, it's going to take time for Ramirez to get to you. Will you be okay until they arrive?"

Alexander did some quick math in his head, estimating the jumps Ramirez would need to take to get to them. "It should take two to three weeks for Ramirez to get here. The repairs to Grace should be done in a few weeks, so we can leave after that. We can jump right now if we absolutely have to, but I don't want to risk it with how banged up the ship is. I've already scared off some local opportunists who were moving in to try and scavenge from the battle. I doubt those types will be back. Even if they did return, they don't worry me. The STO could be an issue, but I'll be having a chat with them soon to ensure they keep their distance. Considering what I offered them, they should. They also don't have any other ships in the system, which I find odd considering Borrus is a core system and the current seat of the STO Chairman. I'm guessing the fleets left to clear up the pirate mess, or were tasked to head toward the Xin border. The ships at the gate were only corvettes."

"What about the corporations?" Krieger asked.

"That is a concern. When the unknown alien destroyed the hypergate, it severed a portion of a much more advanced Shican vessel. I'm working as fast as possible to study what I can before I feed it to the smelter, but if you've already heard about the fighting, we can assume Omni and others like them have as well."

"I'll speak with Ramirez and get him moving in your direction right away. Do what you need to stay safe, Alex, but don't die over a piece of tech."

"I don't plan on it," Alexander added before ending the call. He didn't like the possibility of leaving tech behind that could give the corporations an even bigger advantage, but Krieger was right; dying over a broken chunk of ship would be a stupid way to go.

Alexander contacted Lucas next.

"Hey Alex," the man stated in his usual laid-back fashion. "Your video isn't coming through. Did something break on your end?"

It seemed Lucas wasn't as up-to-date on current matters as Krieger was. Alexander relayed the events of the last few hours to the man. Lucas went quiet on the other end of the line long enough that Alexander had to check on the connection. "Are you still there?"

"…Uh, yeah, sorry. That was just a lot to take in. Give me a moment to gather myself, and we can talk about why you called. I assume it wasn't just to chat."

"Alright," Lucas declared a few minutes later. "I've processed the fact that humanity may have just kicked off a second Shican War. I assume you called me because you want me to ramp up production again?"

"Can we afford to?" Alexander asked. "I don't expect them on our doorstep tomorrow or even in the next couple of months, but it pays to prepare."

"I'll be honest, I'm still ramping up from your last request, but I don't see any alternative. If the Shican do come, they are going to come straight through Asgardian territory on their way to the STO. Likely through Varlen, since that was a hotbed during the last war. With the STO having decommissioned Varlen, that only leaves us. And while I have no love for the STO, I'm not about to let an alien race come in and destroy everything they please like last time."

"If you have to pull from BSE's coffers to speed the process along, do it. I'll work with Pembrooke to ensure we have income to keep production going. I would work on this myself, but I don't have the equipment to manage it, so I'm also going to be sending you the data of everything I pull from the section of the Shican ship. I want all of the engineers working to figure out their new tech and reverse engineer it. I'll assist on my end as much as I can."

While he might be able to work through the information on his own, it would be much slower than if he let the engineers at Eden's End assist. The situation might be different if he were back home in his workshop, but he wasn't. Eden's End had much more equipment on hand, as well as dedicated labs and computing power to spare.

While Alexander might not be able to assist with the practical side of things, that didn't mean he wouldn't be doing any research. There was Dr. Nova Lund's research to go through. He had finally been able to pass all of Lund's training programs. Alexander wouldn't say he was an expert by any means, but he understood the general concept of what she was going for now.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He doubted he would come up with any solution that she hadn't already considered in a few weeks, but it would keep him occupied between his other duties. Duties like monitoring the recycling efforts, data collection on the Shican ship, keeping an eye out for trouble, repairing the ship, and raising his daughter.

"I'm already messaging the teams," Lucas replied. "Stay safe, Alex, we'll handle things on our end."

Alexander knew he would.

***

Benning sat in his lab, a look of frustration on his face. The last few months had tested his patience severely. First, he found out that one of the Omni executives had chosen to take action on his own initiative and work with Abraham Willard in a convoluted scheme to get rid of BSE, completely ignoring Benning's objections against such a targeted attack. Being the driving force behind a company, while remaining in the shadows, had its drawbacks, and that was one of them. Sometimes people forget who was truly in charge.

When the entire plan fell apart and Kane forced the executive into signing a contract, the man tried to hide his involvement in the plot by getting rid of a valued operative using more Omni assets. Benning didn't bother following every single contract signing that Omni had, so he hadn't known what was going on until the executive overreached when he used one of Omni's top-secret prototype autonomous jump carriers. Readaheadandgetupdatesat

M*V*L*E*M*P*Y*R.

Unlike the mountain of legal minutiae that a company the size of Omni dealt with on a daily basis, there were only three jump carriers to keep track of. Benning had tasked his AIs to monitor the use of those ships because they were a highly guarded Omni secret, and he didn't have the time to monitor them personally.

The vessels were extremely temperamental, requiring very specific gravitational conditions to open the hyperspace bridge that they used to instantaneously jump between systems. His AIs had stumbled upon the theory a decade ago, and Benning had spent the better part of five years teasing out the mathematics to turn it into a practical solution.

Such a leap forward in FTL travel would have been touted as an engineering marvel if it weren't for the fact that it killed anyone who tried to use the method. Technically, it destroyed all biological material, which was arguably worse. That was the reason the vessels were automated. Even the four gunships attached to the carrier had to be automated through a linked FTL comm aboard the mothership. He wasn't about to waste the money outfitting each gunship with a computronics array; that would have been wasteful.

Still, he knew an advantage when he saw one, which is why he had constructed the three vessels at Omni's deep space strategic research and development station.

After Benning discovered one of the ships had been used, he quickly looked into who had authorized its use and why. It didn't take long for the AIs to compile the information and figure out what had transpired between Omni and BSE. The executive who thought he could hide his involvement or maybe mitigate the damage by forcing Kane into that contract was wrong. He had an unfortunate accident in his home swimming pool.

Since that wasn't the first incident involving the executive team lately, Benning was in the process of replacing them when that impatient moron, Abraham Williard, struck at Kane once again. The fool had even been brazen enough to do so at the Navy headquarters on Earth.

Abraham had to be one of the most impatient people Benning had ever met. If he had just waited for things to cool off, Kane would have let his guard down, and the political planning that Benning had put into motion would have eventually led to Kane's downfall.

Now, all of that carefully laid planning had gone up in smoke, and the Navy was kicking over rocks to look for who else might be involved in the attack. That was another reason why Benning had acted swiftly to purge that idiot from Omni's ranks. They might find a connection there, but it would become a dead end. His people and the Omni AIs had thoroughly purged the man's residence of any possible connection back to the company.

Benning would have done the same to Willard, despite the man's connections, but someone had beaten him to it. That was less comforting than it should have been. It meant someone knew the Willards were involved with the attack on Kane even before he did, and Omni's data collection abilities were the best of the best.

So not only did someone know, they had capabilities that exceeded his in both data acquisition and the ability to carry out cleanup efforts. Benning knew that because he was monitoring the STO's communications around the investigation, or more specifically, what wasn't found at the Willard family property.

While there wasn't any real evidence to support his hypothesis, he knew someone had eliminated the entire Willard household, leaving only a single smear of blood behind. That was a message, and considering it happened soon after Kane was attacked, it was pretty clear what that message meant.

Once Benning figured that out, he sent a non-interference message to all Omni assets in the field. If they encountered Kane or any of his people, they were to leave and not engage them. While he knew Kane didn't have the assets to pull off such an attack, someone did, and until he learned who that was, it was safer to simply avoid Kane and BSE altogether. He was even tempted to dismiss the BSE contract that that idiot executive had managed, but he thought better of it.

If the people responsible for getting rid of the Willards were upset with the deal, they would have acted months ago before it was signed. If the STO ever connected Omni with the Kane attack, having the contract gave Omni a legitimate excuse to point to and say they weren't involved. While it was a flimsy defense, it wouldn't be in their best interest to attack someone who had an active contract with Omni. The contract was the only smart thing the executive did before drowning in his pool.

All of that was inconsequential in light of recent events. Benning needed to put the BSE and Kane issue behind him because the Shican had attacked, which was far sooner than his models had predicted they would. Humanity wasn't ready. Those damn gates should have been destroyed, but everyone assumed they were safe.

When humanity first stumbled upon the hypergates, they were active. It was reasonable to assume there were other active gates. The three gates in human territory never connected to any other systems, though, so most of his models predicted a low or even non-existent chance of those being used as a beachhead. Nothing ever came through them from other locations either. The Shican must have found a disabled gate and reactivated it. It was the only thing that made sense. That also meant the Shican understood far more about the gates than humanity.

The large ship that had come through the gate into Tau Ceti had belonged to a Shican caste group that Omni's surveillance people hadn't encountered. Going by its advanced weapons and shielding, it probably came from one of their upper castes within their society, maybe even the ruling caste. The Shican's highly restrictive society made learning about them rather difficult, but it also meant that capturing their lower-tiered citizens for questioning was rather easy. Not that they ever willingly gave up any information. Thankfully, Omni had plenty of experience with mental manipulation. Those experiments let Benning learn a lot about the xenophobic species. Like their rigid caste structure and the fact that they didn't even recognize other space-faring species as anything other than pests, which was why they never bothered to communicate.

The Shican's cloning had also come to light by accident when one of the Omni teams captured a small Shican vessel. During autopsy investigations, Omni's medical teams discovered that three of the individuals aboard the ship were exact copies. More digging showed that over ninety percent of the aliens aboard that ship were clones. The only ones that weren't were the command crew.

The unknown alien intervention was another concern. Benning had plenty of models about what the gate builders might be capable of, but his AIs were almost in complete agreement that the new alien didn't have any connection to the gates other than destroying them. Benning had to assume the AIs were correct in their assessments because he had nothing to go on regarding the unknown silver ship, other than that their technology was far more advanced than even the Shicans.