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 soone attacked the hypergates."
"No," Alexander admitted. "We were getting ready to transition from Epsilon Eridani to Ross 128 when a Shican task force ca 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 so 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 et 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 assud they would understand given the current circumstances.
"I sent him with four Sharks and a dozen Stingrays. If you need more, I could pull so 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 sa."
"I'm happy to hear you agree. With the gates being out, it's going to take ti for Ramirez to get to you. Will you be okay until they arrive?"
Alexander did so 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 so 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 . 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 ss, 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 slter, but if you've already heard about the fighting, we can assu 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 sothing break on your end?"
It seed 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 a mont to gather myself, and we can talk about why you called. I assu 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 assu you called because you want 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 co, they are going to co 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 co in and destroy everything they please like last ti."
"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 inco to keep production going. I would work on this myself, but I don't have the equipnt 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 ho in his workshop, but he wasn't. Eden's End had much more equipnt 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 an 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 ans, but he understood the general concept of what she was going for now.
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He doubted he would co 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 ssaging 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 sche 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. Sotis 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 involvent 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. ReadaheadandgetupdatesatM*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 ti to monitor them personally.
The vessels were extrely temperantal, 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 thod. 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 developnt 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 involvent or maybe mitigate the damage by forcing Kane into that contract was wrong. He had an unfortunate accident in his ho 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 t. 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 beco 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 sa to Willard, despite the man's connections, but soone had beaten him to it. That was less comforting than it should have been. It ant soone 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 soone 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 soone had eliminated the entire Willard household, leaving only a single sar of blood behind. That was a ssage, and considering it happened soon after Kane was attacked, it was pretty clear what that ssage ant.
Once Benning figured that out, he sent a non-interference ssage 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, soone 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 soone 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 assud they were safe.
When humanity first stumbled upon the hypergates, they were active. It was reasonable to assu 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 ca 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 ant the Shican understood far more about the gates than humanity.
The large ship that had co 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 ca 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 ant 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 ntal manipulation. Those experints 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 co to light by accident when one of the Omni teams captured a small Shican vessel. During autopsy investigations, Omni's dical 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 agreent that the new alien didn't have any connection to the gates other than destroying them. Benning had to assu the AIs were correct in their assessnts 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.
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