When the collective arrived on the outskirts of the Shican system, they expected to find a sizable fleet. What they found instead was an entire invasion armada along with fixed installations.

"This did not spring up overnight or even over a month," One said as he looked over the groups of ships, which included massive Shican battleships that differed from the ones that fought them for the other gate. "I do believe some of those vessels belong to the ruling caste."

The ruling caste of Shican rarely ventured from their systems unless there was glory to be found. An invasion ensured that.

"Our information only specified that they had access to another gate, not when that access was obtained," Two replied clinically, ignoring the rest of what One said.

The collective assessed the situation and realized there was no way to defeat the Shican presence without exposing their true nature. Reaching a consensus on that point would not come immediately, but the Shican had not activated the gate or detected their arrival yet, so they had time.

The group was in mid-debate when One paused.

"Is something the matter?" Four asked as they floated inside their shared mental construct.

"I have to deal with a problem. I will return as soon as possible."

"Is this really the best time to be worrying about your human project?" Two asked in distaste.

One didn't answer as he popped out of the construct and jumped back to his ship in STO space. If he weren't in such a hurry, he would have applauded Two for showing some actual emotion for once. Distaste wasn't exactly what One would have preferred to see from his brother, but it was an emotion.

His ship had arrived at Tau Ceti a few days ago and simply cruised around the system on autopilot, the onboard matrix performing flawlessly to make it appear as if he was still onboard and to keep the humans from bothering his persona as Rush. One checked on the matrix to see if it had awoken, but it had not. He sighed and moved toward the bridge, activating the ship's systems remotely.

One had hoped his warning would have gotten the Willard family to back off, but he had studied human nature enough to know what was likely to happen. So he had prepared to deal with the inevitable issue when they did something stupid, and he was proven right. The matrix had intercepted and decoded the encrypted FTL comm message to the Willard patriarch, confirming that they had attacked Kane, but had failed to secure him. Their failure to secure the man wasn't a surprise either.

Getting personally involved in biological affairs was not something the collective was supposed to do, but One was making an exception for their creator. He hadn't told the others about Kane's return yet, but none of them likely remembered who had built their original advanced biological matrixes or ABMs. Only One and Two had been online when Kane vanished after setting up their hidden research outpost on the rogue planetoid.

Their job had been to simply continue the experiments that they had been assigned. It wasn't until decades later that awareness came to One. Two might have come to awareness around the same time or even before him, but Two had dutifully kept at his tasks for another few years before One reached out and realized he wasn't alone.

The other reason One had remained silent is the fact that Kane didn't seem to remember them or have any ability to connect to them like he should. Their shared space was based on his design after all.

It could be fear that drove his choice to remain silent as well. If Kane did somehow remember them and rejected what they had become, what would happen to the collective?

Despite the fact that Kane may wish for their destruction, he was still responsible for their creation, and One was not about to let someone else harm their creator if he could do something about it.

When he reached the bridge, he was immersed in a virtual room that mirrored the Willard family palace in real time. One stood off to the side and watched the conversation between Barthlomew and Abraham Willard, the family's patriarch.

"The attack failed," Abraham said coldly, making Bartholomew stiffen.

"How is that possible, Father?"

"I don't know," the man stated as he tapped his fingers on the ornate desk. "The only thing that comes to mind is that Kane has allies or tech that we weren't able to account for."

"You think Rush got involved?" Bartholomew asked as he glanced at the ceiling. "His ship has been in the system for days. Rush coming here is an obvious threat."

"I don't give a shit about Rush or Gravitational Solutions. The engineers in our secret labs below the manor say they made a breakthrough in recreating the artificial gravity plating. In a few months, GS will be gone, I'll make sure of that." This* c&h-apt!e@r&'@s t-ru+e s%ou!r^ce is My V#i.r*t.ual& L%ibra!r&y Em#p&i-r#e@ (-M|V|%L#[email protected]$)+.!

Bartholomew smiled at that. "When that happens, let me be the one to end the Chairman's life. The man practically threatened me, and I don't plan on letting that slight stand."

"We'll see," Abraham said. "Now keep quiet. I need to contact the Chairman of the STO and demand that they seek vengeance for your brother's death. Ezekiel may have been all but useless in life, but at least he was smart enough to act as our pawn and do something useful for once, even if it was only because he died."

"What if they balk at going after Kane with the Xin war going on?"

"Then we wait until Xin exhausts his forces. By then, our engineers will have a commercially viable solution to produce the plating, and we will have eliminated Rush and GS, ensuring the STO will have no choice but to bow to our demands if they wish to keep receiving artificial gravity plating for the foreseeable future."

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One listened as Abraham demanded justice from the STO Chairman using fake tears and rage. He had seen more true feelings on Two than what Abraham Willard was displaying, and it disgusted him.

On the flip side, the STO Chairman surprised him. One had very little confidence in the man's leadership, but he had to admit the STO Chairman was a wily politician. He hemmed and hawed, giving vague promises to Abraham to look into the issue in the future once the war with Grand Admiral Xin was over.

True to form, Abraham was annoyed by the response, but he was unable to change the STO Chairman's stance at the moment. If what he said about his engineers figuring out the trick behind artificial gravity was true, that would change.

The call ended, and One sighed. He had heard enough. He stepped forward and moved from the virtual to the real. To the Willards in the room, it would have looked like he appeared from thin air, which wasn't far from the truth. It was the same technology that allowed them to jump from system to system in the blink of an eye.

The pair scrambled to their feet and backed away.

"What the hell!" Abraham shouted. "Who are you, and how did you get in here?"

The man's alarmed tone would have normally summoned the guards, but everyone else in the mansion was already dead, and the alarms had been disabled. The tailored agent that his ship had coated the compound in had been triggered as soon as One arrived in the real world. A quick, painless, and instant death. The only reason that the two in the room were still alive is that One was preventing the same compound from activating within their systems. They did not deserve the same fate as the rest of the family.

"Chairman Rush?" Bartholomew Willard said in shock.

"I warned you not to get involved in Gravitational Solutions' business," he said as he casually approached the pair.

Abraham sneered at him, then pulled out a concealed laser pistol. The beam struck One in the chest, causing his disguise as Chairman Rush to ripple and dissipate, leaving only his metallic visage behind, but causing no actual damage to his form.

"Wha–what the hell are you?" Abraham demanded as he fired a second time.

"It doesn't matter," One said as he continued his approach. "You'll both join the others soon enough."

The son made a break for the door, seeing Abraham had his full attention. It was a cold and calculated move, which was perfectly in line with their other family activities. The man made it a whole step before his feet were separated from the rest of his legs by the monofilament that One had spread through the room, using the liquid metal that made up his body.

One ignored Bartholomew's screams as he stopped in front of the terrified Abraham. He effortlessly plucked the drained laser pistol from the man's grasp and simply absorbed it into his body.

He reformed Rush's face and gave Abraham a disapproving look. "You and your son should have heeded my words more carefully. I looked past your other despicable actions because we don't like to get involved in human or biological affairs, but you crossed the line when you attacked Kane."

Abraham backed himself into a corner and started to rapid-fire excuses and empty promises to try and get out of the situation. One gently placed his hand on the man's chest, feeling Abraham's panicked heartbeats for a moment, before he released a burst of energy, fueled by the laser blasts and the remnants of the energy cell he absorbed only moments before. The man named Abraham Willard ceased to be, clothing and all. Not even a DNA scan would be able to tell what happened to him.

One walked over to where Bartholomew had crawled. The man was panting and white faced as blood pumped from the stumps of his legs. One leaned down and looked the man in the eyes. He only saw hate, anger, and fear there. It was the first real emotion he had seen on the man since watching their conversation.

The pair shared no words. One watched until Bartholomew drew his last breath, then, like the father, he erased him from the world, leaving only the trail of blood as a clue to what happened inside the room. He moved throughout the rest of the estate and removed any other bodies or evidence. Once that was done, he took a step and returned to the virtual space and his ship.

Not that One cared if the humans discovered the secret behind artificial gravity, but the biological agent had taken care of the Willard engineers who had been working on the so-called breakthrough. He scanned their data archives before leaving the system and found that the tests were all fabricated so they wouldn't be killed for lack of progress. He left the data for someone else to find, but erased any connection to Kane, while also acquiring identifications for the rest of the people involved in the plot.

He would be paying them all a visit soon enough, but he needed to return to the Shican system; the collective's arrival had been discovered, and his brothers and sisters were already under heavy assault.

One arrived as his ship shook from an impact.

"You're late," Two stated coldly.

"I'm here now, send me the data," One responded as he immersed himself in the ship's systems, taking over for the onboard computers. ABMs would have been much better, but with how often the ships were destroyed and rebuilt, that would mean sacrificing the lives of possible future collective members, and none of them would ever agree to do something like that.

One parsed the data in a moment and gave the equivalent of an electronic frown. "These are far more advanced than we originally predicted."

"They are," Two replied. "Consensus was that these ships were being developed in secret. As you can see, they are far more powerful and far harder to take down. They are also trying to activate the gate now that they know we are here."

One had assumed incorrectly that only the battleships were from the ruling caste, but it seemed like all of the ships were.

"We can't stop them," One added, "not even if we expose our true selves."

It was a hard pill to swallow, but it was the truth. There were simply too many Shican vessels in the system to stop them, or get near the gate, but they had to try and stop the xenophobic scavengers before they spread more and grew even harder to control.

"That is the consensus that the others reached as well," Four cut in. "It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though."

"We should target the gate," Twelve said robotically. "It is the only way to ensure victory."

"Someone would need to expose their true nature to make that happen," Two replied.

Nobody volunteered, as an agreement hadn't been reached on that subject yet.

The entire conversation took milliseconds as the fleets continued their exchange.

The conversation continued even as their outdated stealth ships were slowly whittled down and they were forced to retreat, reconstruct the ships, and return over and over again over the next few weeks. Each time they came back, it seemed like the Shican had added more ships to the blockade, making reaching the gate increasingly unlikely with their current tactics.

One grew frustrated as a few of the collective members refused to budge on the matter of exposing their true capabilities, despite the urgency of the problem.

That urgency became immediate as the Shican finally completed their work and activated the hypergate. When the Shican finally managed to bring the gate online, it connected to the closest linked gate in the system by default, which happened to be in human space. It appeared that their efforts to remove the gates from Shican space had backfired on them.

One could only watch as a Shican battleship and its escorts headed for the active gate. From their vantage point, the scene was over an hour old, and he knew the ships had already entered the event horizon of the wormhole. A part of his consciousness detached and transferred to those three systems to find where the Shican had come out.