LOCATION: EDEN'S END

SYSTEM: UNOKANE

DATE: 2404

"What do you mean they're stopping the search!" Yulia demanded.

"Yulia, calm down," Lucas sighed in exhaustion.

He had been working overtime to try to keep all of the projects on track ever since Alex had been abducted. The last thing he needed was an irate teenager to deal with.

He thought he had a lot on his plate before Alexander was abducted. He was mistaken.

Lucas wasn't the only one who stepped up to fill the void left by Alex. Pembrooke took over running BSE and Unokane, but to be fair, he had been doing most of that for Alex already. Admiral Krieger was handling final fleet preparations for the oncoming Shican armada, which had been spotted engaging with a large fleet of unknown military vessels.

Pembrooke said they appeared to be from multiple corporations, but none of the vessels were running active transponders, so he couldn't say for certain. They weren't faring very well against the Shican either. Either way, they had bought the Union time, time that was used to rearm and upgrade the capital ships with the new defensive fields and energized armor.

"It's been six months, Yulia," Lucas continued. "We have a good idea of where Alex might be, based on where the Shican are raiding inside STO space, but we can't send the fleet to find him with the Shican Armada nearing the border."

The STO had given up a large chunk of space after trying for months to deal with the Shican within their borders and failing miserably. If the largest human political entity in the universe couldn't handle a few Shican ships, what chance did anyone have of stopping the armada? He kept those thoughts to himself, however.

"If you're not going to help me, I'll find him myself," Yulia huffed, before turning around and storming off.

Lucas wasn't sure how she thought she was going to go about doing that, especially with the printers all locked down and dedicated to the war effort, but he was way too tired to go chasing after her.

Once Yulia left Alex's workshop, Lucas turned his bloodshot eyes back to what he had been trying to figure out. It was the last project Alexander had been working on before he was taken. Lucas was not even going to try to understand the math behind the work; he had seen enough of Dr. Lund's notes and research to know it was beyond his expertise.

The only part of the project Lucas understood was the design. Once again, Alexander had come up with something exceedingly crazy. Whether or not it would be functional was another matter. It was unfinished, and Alex had left numerous notes on issues that needed to be understood or overcome before the project could become a reality.

Still, a gravity ring was a fundamentally interesting way to overcome the power limitations that prevented fold space travel. It would require rings on both ends, and there was a distance limitation of twelve light-years, but that was still almost three times as far as a standard jump drive was rated for. It was also instantaneous, cutting almost two weeks out of a trip of that length.

Alex wasn't recreating the hypergates; those relied on wormholes according to Lund's research. The only real similarity between the two was that they both used rings.

The power and drive units would be on the rings, which needed to be placed close to a star. The whole point of the device was to momentarily disrupt the star's gravitational pull to elongate it toward the gate. That was probably completely wrong, but that's how he understood it. That would allow the additional gravitational mass needed to offset the power requirements to fold space while ensuring both the gate and the ship transiting through would be just far enough from the star not to burn up or fall in.

The gates would be vulnerable to attack, but they had their own positional thrusters. If the Shican tried to secure the technology, the gates would just push themselves into the star's corona. That was another reason to place them so close to the star.

There was also the issue of inertia to overcome. Considering Lucas was the second-most human expert on static fields, the job fell to him to complete. He knew it was possible, based on Yulia's testimony to Damien after the attack, but he hadn't gotten there yet. He had spent almost every waking minute of free time working on that problem. He had even read the note left behind by the aliens and had that entire section torn apart to see if there was some technology hidden inside the walls. There wasn't. Whatever the aliens did, they did it remotely.

The other engineers on the defensive field project were assisting as well, but they weren't Alex, so progress was slow. Lucas left them to it while he worked on a testing algorithm for the research core, so it could assist with the work.

Hopefully, they figured something out soon. Alex's improvements to production may have netted the BSE fleet two new battleships, a pair of heavy cruisers, based on Katalynn's Valkyrie design, but augmented with the new upgrades. There were also three additional destroyers with similar upgrades, but that wouldn't tip the balance of power against the armada that was bearing down on human space. They might have had more, but the loss of the miners had broken spirits and hurt their manufacturing efforts. Losing Mingyu and his crew had been especially tough because they had been well-liked on Eden's End.

The automated ships and bots had been easy to replace, but they couldn't replace the lives that the Shican had so callously destroyed. It was now widely believed that the Shican had only attacked to draw out the aliens, who had been hiding under everyone's noses. Otherwise, they should have pushed the attack. Why fly to STO space to attack random systems in what was clearly a search pattern?

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Those actions only made sense if the Shican were after the silver aliens. That didn't mean humanity was safe. Lucas wasn't a tactician by any stretch of the imagination, but even he could see that the Shican Armada was a full-scale offensive against humanity. If humanity didn't come up with an answer against that threat, they were going to die out, just like the dinosaurs.

***

LOCATION: THE COLLECTIVE'S REFUGE

Alexander woke up in a void. It was impossible to describe, because it was the absence of everything. There was no color, no light, no dark, yet he could tell there was no end to where he found himself.

Other than not quite recalling how he had gotten there, the place was rather peaceful.

At least he thought that until his memories started to return to him. His most recent memories came first, or he assumed they were his most recent experiences, since they involved him running from the alien going by Rush. That's when the void started to fill in.

A kaleidoscope of color erupted around Alexander, soon joined by rays of both light and darkness, which added depth to the place. As his memories returned, the light, darkness, and color seemed to solidify into actual objects. That started with a floor.

Alexander had been inside his workshop enough times to recognize every scratch and dent in the floor. Soon, more parts of his workshop began to fill in as the light continued to grow from where he was standing.

He looked down and saw he had a body as well. It was the same black as before, with the occasional sparkle from the light reflected off the buried fiberoptics as it had always been, but something felt different about it.

It wasn't real! He knew what this space was. It was similar to his mind-space. A digital rendering for his mind to process. Even the colors of light were similar, he realized as the last of the walls formed and the lights winked out, leaving him trapped inside the room.

"You're not trapped," a voice said from behind him.

Alexander didn't react to Rush's presence. He had felt the man appear, despite not having access to his normal mind-space and ability to see all around himself.

"If I'm not trapped, then let me out so I can return home."

"I'm sorry, we can't do that. We have only extracted you from your previous body. It will take time to complete a new body for you."

Alexander finally turned toward the man. "You say sorry a lot. I don't think you understand the meaning of the word. If you did, you would stop doing stuff that would make you sorry."

Rush tried to say something, probably another useless apology, but Alexander cut him off. "I'm not interested in anything you have to say in defense of your actions, unless it's an agreement to let me leave. Since you've already established the answer to that question, we can move on to other issues. What did you do to my body, and why have you brought me into this digital space? Was it to make me feel comfortable so I would be more agreeable? If that's the case, you don't know me at all."

"This is what your mind constructed. We had nothing to do with what appears when someone first enters this space."

"But you did bring me here," Alexander reiterated.

"It's part of the standard interface," Rush said in exasperation. "Your old body was on the verge of failure. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. That form was a prototype and never designed for extended use."

"Why should I believe anything you say? You abduct me, and then forcibly change me against my will."

"I understand how that might seem, and why you have misgivings toward us. Believe me, I wanted to handle this reunion a lot differently. The Shican forced us to act before we were ready. You don't need to take my word for it, however," Rush said, waving his arm, "you can see for yourself."

A second copy of Alexander's body formed in the weird virtual space. It was held up by a soft white glow and surrounded by delicate-looking machines. Alex knew what he looked like, but this was the first time seeing himself from the outside. His body still held the armored holo-projector around his waist, but the body looked lifeless. Seeing it like that sent a shiver through his current self.

"What are you doing to me?"

"That's not you any longer," Rush said. "Your memories and self have all been extracted. We needed to do that so we could perform a more invasive scan on the body to determine the level of damage it sustained."

Alexander took a closer look at the body, but didn't see anything off. "Damage? What damage. It looks fine to me."

"From the outside, certainly," Rush replied before making another gesture that created a duplicate image of the body that pulled away from the first copy. It was almost like watching cells divide. The outside of the new body vanished, leaving behind a large sphere. "This is the core of that frame. Notice anything?"

He wasn't sure exactly what he was looking at, but he could guess. It had a striking similarity to a reaction containment vessel for a ball reactor. Only it was smaller than anything he had ever built. Small enough to fit inside a standard anti-ship missile. It looked off, however.

"Why does it look discolored?" Alex asked.

"Radiation damage. In less than a year, it probably would have leaked through the outer lining and killed anyone near you instantly."

"Wha—" Alexander began to ask before his question trailed off as his focus was brought back to the original body surrounded by the machines.

They started to move over the body, and he watched as the utility belt and projector fell away, sliced cleanly through as the delicate appendages moved across the frame, separating the sturdy material like soft butter.

The two halves of his body were moved away, leaving a blackened sphere suspended in place by a gentle white light.

Rush sucked in a breath. "That's worse than the scanner predicted."

Before Alexander could respond to the comment, the image went white. "What happened?"

Rush switched to a satellite view, which showed an expanding fireball across a barren surface. "It appears that removing the core from the body was enough to trigger the damaged reactor to overload."

"Was—Was anyone hurt?" Alexander couldn't help but ask as he watched the ring of fire race out across the surface at tremendous speeds.

"Thank you for asking. Nobody was hurt. We moved the extraction to the opposite side of the planet, and we were running it remotely."

That was a relief. These aliens may have abducted him, but they seemed willing to talk, which was more than he could say for the Shican. He didn't need the added complication of deaths getting in the way of a diplomatic resolution to his capture.

"That wasn't a fusion reaction," Alexander replied, fishing for information. "What sort of reactor was that?" These aliens obviously had some connection to him, and that reactor was far more powerful than any fusion reactor of that scale. If he could find out what it was, he could use it.

"No, it wasn't, and I have no clue."

"What?" Alexander blurted out. "How can you not know what type of reactor that was? I remember what you said back on Eden's End. Are you going to pretend that we aren't connected in some way?"

"It's a bit of a long story, but we have time until your new body is ready."