The shuttle touched down, and Yulia did her best to hide her nerves and excitement as she unbuckled from the seat. She had remained in touch with Sarah and Claire during her trip, but it wasn't the same as talking in person, and she was worried that they might no longer want to be her friends.

As the ramp descended, she was surprised to see a group of people waiting. Yulia even recognized two of them. She waved to her friends, her worries quickly fading as she walked down the ramp. She didn't even finish making it to the bottom before her friends practically tackle-hugged her.

It was hard to talk with the breathing masks on and while being crushed, so she didn't. The girls released her, then quickly dragged her toward the facility door.

"Feel better?" Claire asked once they were inside.

"Huh?" Yulia asked in confusion.

Sarah gave her a squeeze again. "Your messages have been getting rather concerning lately. We could tell you needed a hug."

Yulia's eyes started to tear up, but she blinked them away and nodded. "I did need a hug, thank you."

The pair squished her again as they led her out of intake. Normally, Sarah and Claire were consummate chatterboxes, but they stayed quiet and waited for Yulia to speak. All her concerns and worries tumbled out as they walked through the halls, and she felt so much better getting it all off her chest.

Alex would have listened and hugged her if she had asked, but she felt awkward about asking, which is why she appreciated her friends so much.

***

Alexander smiled as he watched Yulia's friends drag her away. His daughter's entire demeanor changed as soon as her friends appeared. She had been opening up a little over the final leg of their journey, and he hoped her reconciliation with her long-time friends would bring her back to her old self.

"Alex," Lucas waved, pulling his attention away from the retreating trio.

"You didn't need to meet me in person, Lucas."

The man shrugged, and Alexander noticed he had filled out in the last year. Then the man smiled, but his eyes were on someone behind him.

Alexander groaned internally. Lucas was looking at Katalynn and puffing himself up a bit. The Asgardian leader quirked an eyebrow when she spotted Lucas' transformation.

He decided it was best if he ignored that interaction. "Lucas," Alexander called, getting the man's attention again.

The man was caught off guard as he went slightly red before clearing his throat. "Ahem, right. I wanted to go over what we've figured out so far… Um, is Lagertha Char going to be joining us?"

Alexander rolled his eyes at the man's obvious request. "Katalynn, care to join us?"

"Is this a meeting about the Shican discoveries?" she asked.

"Yes," Alexander confirmed.

"Very well. My fleet isn't scheduled to arrive for a few more days to take us home, and I'm curious to learn what you've discovered about the Shican's advantages."

Lucas smiled broadly and led them to the research center. On the way, he began to fill them in on where he was. "After you sent the data and research notes to us, I've had the entire team working diligently to try and reverse engineer the defensive field. Those emitters you discovered within their armor are definitely a key factor in making the field work, and we have had some success with small-scale tests." Forasmootherreadingexperience,visitMV&LEMPYR.

"You have?" Alexander asked. "Why didn't you mention it during our calls?"

Lucas turned and smiled. "I wanted it to be a surprise. Also, I knew it wasn't a practical success. We connected an array of those posts to one of the defensive field orbs, and instead of the field manifesting in a sphere around the origin of the orb, it shaped along the emitters."

"That's huge," Alexander exclaimed. "Does it use less power or last longer if deployed that way?"

"A bit," Lucas admitted. "But I'm not sure how you would add the posts to the augment suits. We've tried making them with other materials, but the Shican's alloy is the best we've found so far to transfer the field."

Alexander had focused on Lund's research for the past two months, leaving Lucas and the engineering team on Eden's End to handle the research into the Shican tech. It was clear that it was the right choice, because Alexander hadn't even considered using his defensive field orbs to test his hypothesis out.

"Now that I know it's possible, I'm sure I can figure out some way to integrate it," Alexander replied confidently.

Lucas pulled open a heavy door that looked like a bank vault. The door led to a large open workshop that hadn't been around when Alexander had left. Lucas gestured for everyone to enter ahead of him.

Around a dozen engineers were talking and working around what looked like a mad scientist's wet dream. The porcupine-like object was attached to the stripped-down frame of a Stingray.

"As you can see," Lucas gestured after joining them, "we're working on setting up a proper testing rig."

"I can see that. My question is, how do you plan on moving it out of the room?"

Lucas smiled. "Pretty much the same way we got it in here, piece by piece, but we won't have to. When the new workshop was being created, I asked Yi to make it strong enough so we could turn the entire room into a vacuum chamber."

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"Hmm," Alexander said. "I guess that explains the door. This will certainly speed up some of our testing."

"With as much focus as you've put on engineering space ships and other items designed to work in a vacuum, we probably should have had a large vacuum chamber a long time ago."

"You're probably right," Alexander admitted.

He had cobbled together chambers for small-scale testing, and everything else he just produced in orbit, which was not very efficient for testing. Then again, he did most of his testing live or with stuff he understood quite well. Turning the static fields into a defensive layer was a relatively new concept, and even his little spheres had given him problems.

"Just how strong is this chamber?" Alexander asked, remembering what had occurred when he was doing his initial testing of the defensive field on the augment suits.

"The inner wall is composed entirely of the corporate composite, and then a foot of space filled with shock-absorbent material between a second layer of armor, which is tied to the first through interlocking triangles. Covering all that is five feet of concrete. Pretty sure this dome could survive multiple direct anti-ship missile impacts without failing," Lucas replied.

It was complete overkill, but it did make Alexander feel much better about running the tests.

"We designed the test rig to be adjustable as well, so we can see if the distance between the transmission posts matters," Lucas continued. "We should be ready for a test in a few minutes. I delayed our first test until you got back."

"While I appreciate the sentiment, that wasn't necessary," Alexander said.

"Oh, I didn't do it so you could see it in person. I figured if anything went wrong, it would be better to have you here to help deal with any of the aftermath."

"Thanks," Alexander said dryly, earning a quiet, choked-off chuckle from Katalynn.

He glanced at the woman, and she shrugged. "What? It was amusing."

Alexander shook his avatar at the woman before turning back to Lucas. "Are you using one of the shuttle generators for the test?"

"Yeah, but we can't really test the field strength against anything stronger than a flechette."

Alexander looked around but didn't see anyone in vac-suits, or any gun platforms ready to be moved into place for the test. There was another door off to the side, which was presumably for the engineers to monitor the test. He groaned. "You want me to wait in here and fire the gun, don't you?"

"It would speed up the testing," Lucas admitted.

A few minutes later, Lucas came back with an FE rifle that had been modded and locked down so it could only use the lowest setting. At least he had taken precautions not to have a full-power rifle inside the test chamber. The man also handed Alexander a tablet, linked to the instruments inside the monitoring station.

Half an hour later, Alexander was standing alone in the chamber as the last of the air was evacuated.

The tablet lay on the floor in front of him, while he held the rifle in both of his hands. Thankfully, his missing hand had rebuilt itself over the last few months. He had been concerned it might not. A green light on the tablet caught his attention, and he glanced down. The air had been evacuated, and the field was being charged.

The charge light turned green, and a few seconds later, the light showing that the field was operational turned green. If Alexander didn't have access to the monitors, he wouldn't have even known. There was no visual indication to show that the field was turned on.

Alexander raised the rifle and fired. The first test was a monumental failure as the rounds ricocheted off the metal frame and protected power systems of the test platform.

The system lights turned red, and Alexander lowered the gun and waited.

"Well, that was less than ideal," Lucas said after exiting the monitoring center once the air had been pumped back in. "We aren't producing enough power for the emitters to form the defensive field. I was hoping using the Shican's spacing would work, but it seems like their power delivery systems are quite a bit stronger than ours."

"What about cutting the distance between them in half?" Alexander asked.

"Sure, we can do that, but each break in the armor is going to reduce the armor's effectiveness. Too many, and you might as well not use armor at all. I'll get the engineers on modifying the test. Sorry for wasting your time, Alex. I really thought everything would work."

"Tests fail. Look how many times I failed before some of my projects got off the ground. Keep working at it, but get a mobile weapon platform set up so you don't have to wait for me. I'm probably going to be quite busy for a while."

The man perked up at that. "I almost forgot you were working on Nova's research. How's that coming along?"

"Slow. Although not without some good news. I don't think the STO or anyone really understood how brilliant the woman truly was. I came across an improvement that allows for much larger warp bubbles and a fully developed model for an FTL generator, which requires exacting gravitation points to produce a near instantaneous travel to any point across space, so long as you have a computer powerful enough to do the math involved. She called it a gravitational tunnel."

"Wait! So she already had a solution?"

Alexander shook his head and looked around to make sure nobody else was close enough to overhear him. It wasn't that he didn't want to share Nova's discovery, but it hadn't been realized yet, so he didn't want to give anyone false hope. Lucas would understand, and Katalynn had left right after the failed test to check on her people. "No, she ended that line of research twenty years ago when she quickly realized that solution would be deadly to anything biological. Doesn't mean we can't figure out how to use it for our automated ships. I'm already working on a design for the FTL generator, but that form of travel would still be limited. She was onto something even more astounding called a gravitational fold."

"Folding space?" the man asked in quiet shock.

"Not exactly. I'm still wrapping my head around the math, but I believe her solution results in pulling two points of space into gravitational alignment to form a sort of slingshot tunnel that would essentially suck the ship through instantly. The theory is sound, but certain portions of the math weren't adding up, pardon the pun. The two main issues she was running into were power generation and acceleration. The power required to punch through spacetime and align the endpoints needed to activate the drive is astronomical."

"How much power?" Lucas asked, latching onto a problem he could understand.

Alexander chuckled. "More than the sun produces in an entire day."

The man deflated. "Oh."

"Yeah, but we can ignore that problem for now. Back during the 2050's humanity thought warp drives were inconceivable due to the power required. That bottleneck was overcome, and I believe the power issue can be solved here as well. The other issue is keeping people from turning into red paste as soon as the connection is established. The ship doesn't near light speed or anything like that when it's sucked into the hyperspace connection, but the pull produces enough inertia to kill a human, and damage sensitive ship systems."

"Is that all?" Lucas snorted. "Stars above, Alex, those are some serious issues. You might be better off building your own hypergates."

"Yeah… about that. Lund also had a completed mathematical theory on how to create a hypergate. Her model hypothesized that they used a wormhole, and if she was correct, a permanent connection between two or more points would require three orders of magnitude more power to remain active. Essentially, I would have to figure out how to siphon power from an entire star to maintain an active connection."

"Wha- How did she even guess at that without being able to look at or disassemble one of the hypergates?" Lucas stammered.

"Like I said before, I don't think anyone truly understood just how brilliant Dr. Nova Lund was."