Once the internal repairs were completed aboard Grace, which took another three days, Alexander found himself with some free time while they waited for the exterior damage to be repaired as much as possible.

They weren't sticking around until the ship was completely repaired. That wouldn't be possible until they returned to Unokane and had it stripped down and rebuilt, but the bots were doing their best to restore all the damaged sensors and external systems to ensure they could navigate and monitor their surroundings properly.

Alexander used that free time to hang out with Yulia, or he tried to. She spent some time with him, but he could tell she grew annoyed with his hovering. He understood that part of growing up required children to spread their wings and do things themselves, but it still hurt to see her slowly pull further away from him as the trip progressed. He blamed that on a lack of peers she could interact with. Studying, doing her classwork, hanging out with Dog, and playing with her designs were really the only outlets she had.

Yulia had also become more withdrawn since the attack back on Earth. She had never really liked to open up to Alex about her concerns, but he could tell she was even more closed off now. If she had some friends aboard to share with, that might have helped her. Then again, maybe not. It was bad enough that Yulia had to experience two attacks. He wouldn't want to scar more children like that, especially Yulia's friends, Sarah and Claire. Those girls were extremely caring, but they didn't have the same sort of steely resolve that Yulia did. Alexander would give her some time to process, then he would speak with her about what happened.

He knew Yulia had already shared the information about the attack with her friends back on Eden's End since he removed the comm node restrictions. He wasn't spying on his daughter's communications. Jacob Tallan, Sarah's father, had contacted him shortly after to see if there was any way the Council could help.

He appreciated the man reaching out, but there was little he could do to help at the moment.

In fact, Alexander fielded quite a few calls after word got out about the attack. He was genuinely touched by the outpouring of support. His efforts to become accepted within Eden's End's society seemed to be paying off after a few rocky starts. Sure, not everyone liked him, but wishing for unanimous approval was a pipe dream. Some people would hate him simply because he was him, and he was fine with that.

With Yulia keeping herself occupied, the ship being as well off as could be expected under the current circumstances, and Katalynn monitoring local space, he decided to take a look at the alien wreckage.

Alexander left the cabin and made his way to his now much more cluttered workshop. Normally, he preferred to keep things rather tidy, but broken pieces, spare bots, additional printers, and smelters lined the walls and most open spaces, leaving just enough room for him to move through the area to get to his workstation.

Most of the excess material was slated to be smelted at some point, but there really wasn't any more space aboard to store it. The empty storage rooms had already been filled with excess material from the smelter, most of which would be used by the two Stingrays that were under construction.

As he passed by a few of the chunks of Shican hull material that he had taken for study, he picked one up and took it with him using his one good hand. He had been keeping track of the progress of his other hand since shortly after the attack. At the rate of regrowth, he estimated it would be another two months before the appendage was restored fully.

The Shican material was a weird composite, Alexander knew that much by what came out of the smelters, but he wanted to know exactly how it was made. The material might be the key to understanding the Shican's shielding tech, but he doubted that. Alexander was more interested in its ability to disperse heat.

With the Shican's shields and the heat dissipation features of their armor, it rendered most conventional weapons useless against the aliens. He would need to overcome that issue before the aliens entered human space, or there would be very little anyone could do against them.

Nuclear weapons were certainly an option, but that meant creating an enrichment facility on Eden's End or somewhere in Unokane, and that would be a very in-depth process, considering he didn't even know where to start.

If he knew how the silver sphere managed its little trick, that would be even better, but Alexander wasn't even sure what had transpired after the unknown alien fired its weapon. He had guesses based on what he witnessed, and even if he was right, he had no clue how such a thing was possible.

That left him with the weapons he had, which meant finding a way past the Shican's defenses or overwhelming them with sheer numbers, which was a valid option.

He placed the chunk in the scanner and started the device. The scanner was an interesting little device that Alexander had cooked up during the trip. He had taken a ship's scanner and scaled it down while increasing its resolution, giving him a full picture of what an item looked like from the inside out. The process worked similarly to how a scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope work, but better. Especially after he concentrated the scanner from the wide field that a ship used to a single beam.

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Alexander built the machine in hopes that he could finally peer into his own body and unlock some of its secrets, but the new scanner had been similarly blocked by whatever was inside his body that interfered with other scans. Considering how much power he must use on a daily basis, he was pretty sure it was likely what caused the interference.

As the piece of scientific equipment came online, Alexander spotted an issue. The focused beam was scattered. It must have been damaged in the battle.

With a sigh, Alexander moved some stuff around so he could get at a drawer of spare parts and dug around until he located the backup projector. The projector looked intact, safely tucked away in its padded case. He was glad for that, because he didn't have a nano-assembler aboard to produce a new one, and the time and space to build one of them would take too long.

In a few minutes, he had the old head out and the new one in. The entire projector had cracked, which was what caused the scattering issue. He wasn't surprised by the damage. The material needed to focus the energy of the scanner was extremely dense, but also extremely brittle.

Alexander restarted the machine and watched the light as it played across the surface of the material as the head moved slowly along the surface. The light acted as a visible guide for where the machine was passing over, as well as a light source for the 3D modeling program as it scanned the surface and entered it into his program.

Slice by painstaking slice revealed itself within his holo display, and he quickly noticed a structure appearing within the sample. Not very far below the surface of the armor were thin tubes. They weren't made from nano-tube carbon, but they were close to the same scale. Better yet, there was a tiny bit of some substance inside the tube.

The device registered it as salt. Once he saw that, he realized how the Shican must be transferring thermal heat away so quickly. They were using some sort of molten salt capillary action brought on by the sudden heating of a section of armor to quickly spread the thermal energy across a much wider area.

It was ingenious, but also extremely complex. Alexander couldn't imagine how difficult it would have been to produce armor with so many tiny channels. He was having a hard enough time producing the alien carbon armor, and he was just starting to implement the diamond pathways and carbon nanotubes into that process before he left. He wasn't sure how far Lucas had gotten on that project.

The Shican armor, while significantly more advanced than human armor, was not as complex or as strong as the alien armor used to make his body. Alexander wasn't sure how much longer that would be the case. It looked like the Shican were quickly catching up to the aliens who had built him.

That was not a good sign; the Shican were significantly more advanced than humanity just based on their shields and plasma weapons. Now he had to add armor to that list as well.

While the armor was complex and would be able to soak up laser fire quite a bit better than anything Alexander had, there was an upper limit to the amount of energy anything could withstand. Now that he knew what type of system the Shican used to mitigate heat, he knew he could overwhelm the Shican armor with either sustained fire or more powerful lasers like the ones aboard Vanguard and Tempest. That was a relief. It meant they had an immediate solution to the Shican threat, even if its effectiveness was reduced.

As he was lost pondering the implications of the design, the scan finished, and the machine's soft chime brought him back to the present. Alexander looked at the newly finished model and manipulated it so it was significantly bigger, while also breaking it into slices. He applied what he saw inside the structure to the much rougher scan that had been taken of the Shican wreckage.

It wouldn't be a perfect fit, but as the model updated, he began to see points on the debris scan that stuck out.

When he zoomed in on those areas, he saw small metal rods that stuck out at equal intervals along the surface. He had missed them at first because they only protruded a few millimeters from the hull and were the same color as the rest of the armor.

The piece in the scanner didn't have any of those protrusions, so Alexander hurried over to the remaining samples he had taken and dug through them until he found one that did have the protrusion on it.

Once he ran that through the scanner, he found that the protruding material differed from the armor and continued through the foot-thick sample.

That knowledge didn't tell him how the Shican were producing the field, but it did give him an idea. If the aliens required external projectors to create the field, it meant it couldn't pass through solid objects like his suit fields could, but it could also be projected into a vacuum. It had to be based on the same static field generators a ship normally used.

Based on information gathered by the STO and Union during their wars with the Shican, he knew the aliens used static fields to deflect space debris, similar to human designs. Alexander was pretty sure humans had taken that knowledge to improve their own static field deflectors, even though he didn't have any proof of that. The Shican's defensive field had to be a generational improvement on that base technology.

Now that he knew a similar shielding could be produced in space, he had a pretty good idea of how to go about creating the field, thanks to his work on the field generators in his augment suits and shuttle.

There would be downsides to using such a method. The ship would no longer be able to cast a static field ahead of itself to knock debris away from its path. At least as long as the defensive field was online. Having both would be optimal, but also impossible, as the fields would clash. He would need to figure out a system to swap between the two as needed. VisitMyVirtualLibraryEmpire(M_VLEMPYR)formore.

The other issue was that the field would do nothing against the Shican's plasma bolts, which were arguably the most dangerous weapon they had deployed during the short fight, even if they also used missiles and projectiles from their smaller ships and fighters.

Even the Shican's armor would do little to mitigate the damage that the condensed plasma bolts caused. Alexander realized he needed to push production of the alien carbon armor. That was the only material that seemed able to absorb some of the ravenous damage that the Shican weapons were able to dish out.

On another note, Alexander was almost certain that if he figured out the shielding technology, he could also reproduce the containment fields that held the plasma bolts together. The other parts of the weapons might be a bit more difficult without an example to study, but he had ideas that he could test.

With a focus bordering on obsession, Alexander spent the next week lost in simulations and small-scale testing to try to reproduce his ideas. He even reached out to Lucas and asked the man to produce some of the designs he had come up with and test them.

He was not going to be caught unawares the next time the Shican attacked.