It took Alexander over a minute to pry the bridge doors open. Once he did, he left the dead crew behind. There was nothing he could do for them at the moment. He needed to see if his daughter or any of the other crew had survived.

The red alert had pumped the air out of the ship, and all of the crew, including Yulia, should have had plenty of time to suit up, but as he saw on the bridge, the suits did little to protect against molten shrapnel.

The plasma bolts were a devastating weapon, but it was the Shican's shielding tech that gave them the biggest edge. The fact that they didn't stop lasers told Alexander that the shield must rely on a similar principle to his defensive field, only adjusted to work in a vacuum. With power out aboard the ship, he couldn't get a picture of what was happening in space.

Alexander didn't even know if anyone survived aboard Valkyrie. The Shican seemed to have a specific grudge against the Asgardian ship after it caused it a slight amount of damage.

He ran through a corridor junction and had to turn to avoid a crew member. He paused and helped the suited figure stand. When he looked into the helmet, he saw it was Travers.

Alexander realized his tablet was broken during the fight, but he manually connected to the man's suit to communicate. "Is Yulia okay?" he asked in panic. Travers should have gone to check on her first.

"I couldn't get into your cabin, the door was damaged during the fighting. I could feel her pounding at the door to her room, though. Once I realized she was alive, I came to find you."

Alexander's relief was palpable. He nodded his avatar. "Alright, come with me," he said before heading back the way the man came.

"What about the ship?" Travers asked as he limped along. "Are the bridge crew working to restore power?"

Alexander paused and shook his avatar, glad his reinforced projector had survived. He placed his hand on Travers's suit again to communicate properly. "They didn't survive. Now, I'm going to carry you so we can move faster."

Before the man could argue, Alexander lifted him like a child and ran toward his quarters. It didn't save much time, but Alexander wasn't willing to waste even a moment.

Once outside the hatch, he could see the problem. One of the Shican's plasma bolts had passed close by, causing the entire frame to be distorted by the heat. Alexander stepped around the cooling metal that had dripped from the ceiling. Going by where the damage was located, he guessed that it was the same shot that had severed the main power.

The door refused to budge. Even Alexander's immense strength was not enough to get it to retract into the wall. That didn't mean he stopped trying. Instead of attempting to force it open, he motioned for Travers to step back before he pumped as much heat as he could into his hand.

Once the appendage was red hot, he pushed it against the door, letting it soak into the metal. It wasn't enough, so he forced more heat into his arm until the glow started turning to a straw yellow color.

Alexander ignored the red flashing inside his mind space as he pushed against the metal. It didn't part easily, even under the ridiculous heat, but his efforts eventually paid off, and his hand soon punched through the weakened metal, giving him an opening to finally get some leverage on.

When he pulled his hand free, he found it had been reduced to a melted nub, but he ignored that and used his other hand to pull at the glowing metal. It took most of his strength, but he finally managed to bend enough of the door that he could fit through the opening.

Then he reversed the heating process so it wouldn't harm Travers as he climbed through after him.

The whole time, Alexander could feel Yulia pounding against the door to her room, interspersed with some heavier shaking, which he assumed was coming from Dog.

She had been sealed inside her room per his security protocols, so it had done its job. If the power had still been working, the door would have released her after the danger had passed or when Alexander or one of her guards came to check on her. Since Dorry was still recovering from his injuries, that left Travers.

Alexander looked at his nub, then at Travers. "You're going to have to enter your code. I need to power the door," he said after making a physical connection with the man.

Travers nodded, and Alexander used his remaining good hand to connect to the door override. If yоu'rе nоt оn М*VLЕМ*РYR, yоu'rе viеwing а соpy.

As soon as Travers entered his code, the door popped open, and a yellow armored figure fell out.

Alexander reached down and helped Yulia off the ground, glad he had stored her augment suit inside the room. He was also glad he added the stealth armor to the walls, because, unlike Alexander's cabin, which had multiple melted streaks passing through it, Yulia's room had not been penetrated by the deadly plasma.

The armor had held up remarkably well, but Alexander could see parts of it were on the verge of failing.

Yulia gave him a crushing hug, forgetting she was wearing an augment suit. It wasn't enough to damage his rugged body, though. He hugged her back with his good arm before kneeling down in front of her. "Are you okay?" he asked over the radio.

She nodded, but Alexander could see the experience of being trapped had terrified her. He wanted to stay with her, but he needed to get the ship back online as quickly as possible. The Shican and the unknown alien vessel may be gone, but there's no telling if they might return or who else might show up.

He wasn't going to tell her to wait here with Travers, though. He needed Travers's help, especially now that he was down one hand. He also doubted she would agree to separate from him after the experience of being trapped inside her room. Nor should she.

"Come on, we need to fix the ship and check for survivors."

Yulia hesitated for a moment, but nodded with quiet determination as she followed him out the door.

Travers was the next out, followed by Dog, who managed to climb through the opening, despite being wider than Alexander was.

***

It took over an hour to restore power to primary systems. What surprised Alexander the most was that all but one of Grace's lasers were still operational. It was good because when the ship's sensors came back online, he saw a few ships approaching.

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They weren't transmitting rescue IDs, which meant they weren't coming to save people. These were scavengers, heading straight for the wreckage of the alien ship, Valkyrie, and Grace, which were the only three ships that were even partially intact in the area. Alexander sent a warning to the oncoming vessels, but they didn't stop or even acknowledge the radio message. Alexander knew the radio was working, so that was deliberate.

He sent a second warning, declaring the area a safe harbor for BSE. A safe harbor was one of the obscure rules he learned about while digging through the archives. He hadn't ever expected to use it. The law allowed him to treat an area of space as sovereign BSE territory, similar to how embassies worked.

The only restriction was that the area must not contain any facility or property claimed by an STO entity, such as a planetary governor or the STO. With the hypergate and the space station being gone, that was no longer a concern. Corporations didn't count under those restrictions either, so Alexander was perfectly within his rights to claim everything within a full light second in any direction from where he was currently.

There were limits to what he could claim, but he was not in the mood to play games with these opportunists. When they still failed to turn away, he turned Grace's lasers on them. Once the first shot went out, the ships scattered and quickly fled the area.

Alexander hadn't wanted to pull that card, but they had left him with no choice. He would defend himself and the people he cared about at all costs.

Once the area was free of looters and scavengers, Alexander nudged Grace closer to Valkyrie.

The bots were working overtime to try and repair the holes in Grace, but it would take time. He had also sent a group of six out to see if they could check over the Shican wreckage. It wasn't a large section, but it was still larger than Grace. He might be able to figure out how the Shican created their defensive field if he got time to look at it.

He also needed the material, since there were no available asteroids within his temporary sovereign zone. There were a few other wrecks, but they were little more than scattered debris by now, making them less than ideal for salvage or recovery efforts. Even the STO warships had been reduced to small chunks of floating debris from the savage attack.

As they got closer to Valkyrie, he could see the ship was less damaged than he first thought. It was still badly damaged, and the entire front had been turned to slag, but it didn't extend nearly as deep as he originally feared.

Much like Grace, the bridge of the Valkyrie was tucked deep inside the ship, protected by multiple extra layers of defenses. The difference was that Valkyrie took the enemy head-on, using its heavy frontal armor, while Alexander had been trying to clear the battle space when the ship finally turned its guns on them, exposing the thinner armor on the sides of his ship. He was sure Katalynn would call it a rookie mistake if she still lived.

He doubted it would have made any difference. Grace was a rugged ship by any measure, but it was still a frigate, just a slightly larger, significantly better armed one.

Somehow, both ships' docking rings survived the fight, and Alexander was able to attach to Valkyrie.

By the time he made his way to the airlock, it was already cycling, and a group of injured people made their way aboard, led by a very grateful Katalynn.

She stopped in front of him and nodded her bandaged head. "Permission to come aboard?"

He nodded. "Permission granted. I'm glad you survived."

"Thank you. What happened with the Shican?"

He motioned for his surviving crew to help the other injured toward the infirmary before he motioned for Katalynn to follow him. He could tell her the story, but it would be better to show her.

***

The moment One appeared, he contacted the Shican vessel. Its weapons stopped firing, and the commander appeared.

The cybernetically enhanced male hissed in delight. "The Grand Commander was right, if we prodded at your gates, you'd eventually come crawling out of whatever hole you hid in. I wasn't expecting this, though."

"Leave or we will destroy your entire race," One stated flatly.

The commander flicked his ears in amusement. "I think not. If you had that capability, you would have used it already instead of uselessly throwing yourselves at our fleet. You are either scared, weak, or few in number. It matters not, we will find you, destroy you, and use your technology to further the Shican Empire's strength."

"I will make sure you don't survive to see anything," One declared.

The commander gave a feral growl. "I don't fear death. My legacy will be secured as the first commander to face off against you in this form, which I suspect is your true form. Win or lose, I will be heralded as a warrior of renown. Even if you somehow disrupt my communications, the fleet will know. They will come. You cannot hope to stop them all, but enough useless chatter. Let's see how your technology compares to ours."

The connection cut out, and the Shican vessels opened fire on One's sphere.

His sphere roiled as the liquid metal absorbed the incoming energy. One focused his entire attention on pushing that excess power into the disruptor, but he could feel the liquid metal of the sphere dying off as the energy destroyed parts of himself. Eventually, the charge was complete, and he pushed the energy outward as it funneled through the disruptor. The strain was immense since the disruptor wasn't meant to project energy outward, but it eventually obeyed, and the white light struck the surviving Shican ships.

One breathed a sigh of relief as the Shican vessels began to break apart. The disruptor was not a weapon. It was a tool designed to facilitate material separation, breaking apart solid matter into individual atomic parts. The device was what the collective used to rebuild their stealth ships each time they broke down, but that was normally done from within the sphere, reducing the energy requirements by many orders of magnitude.

The fact that it worked at all outside of the sphere was a miracle.

Unfortunately, it hadn't been fast enough. He had sensed the Shican's warning sent out via their FTL comm. With his entire focus on keeping himself from coming apart, he hadn't been able to intercept the communication. The Shican would know of his existence.

The beam charged again just as another Shican battleship started to transition. Instead of sitting there and holding off a seemingly endless wave of Shican ships, One did the only thing he could think of. He disrupted the hypergate.

The gate immediately disconnected from the network, severing the Shican vessel before it too broke apart.

One wanted to see if Kane had survived, but he realized he needed to destroy the other two gates in human space or the Shican would just keep funneling through them as the Shican gate reset its connection. He couldn't even afford to clean up the remains of the Shican battleship because he would need all the energy he could spare to deal with the remaining gates and whatever Shican vessels had come through.

He jumped, and within ten minutes, the final two gates and the few Shican vessels that had come through were reduced to expanding fields of dust.

"What have you done!" Two demanded, appearing next to him, still cloaked.

"I did what I had to," One replied.

"You went against the collective, for what?" Two demanded. "To save a few humans? You have spent far too much time among the biologicals, brother. Your ability to make rational decisions has been compromised."

One sighed and pulled two into his virtual space.

His brother landed on the grass and looked around in surprise. "What is this?"

"A place I visited on Earth a few years back," One said as he looked at the beautiful windswept vista and tall grasses.

"This is a pointless waste of processing power," Two declared as he looked around in disgust.

One shook his head sadly. "To you perhaps, but not to me. Sometimes I think you would have been happier if you had never awoken. You never once embraced the change or the advantages of knowing there is more to life than simply processing data. As for your earlier statement, my decision-making is fine; you simply lack the data that I have."

Two narrowed his eyes, which was quite a show of emotion from his brother. "You have kept data from the collective?"

The accusation stung, but it wasn't untrue. "I was confirming a few things before bringing it to the others, but recent events have forced my hand."

"What could possibly force you to throw away our safety and security? The Shican now know we exist, and that we have some connection with the humans. They will scour all of human space to find us and acquire our technology. Our rogue planetary base might keep us safe for a time, but we have seen what they do to other civilizations; they will find it eventually."

It was true, but he did what he had to. Instead of simply telling his brother that, he showed him.

The form of Alexander Kane materialized nearby, and Two stepped back in shock. "Why are you showing me an image of our creator?"

One explained to Two how Kane showed up one day at GS's headquarters, and what transpired after. If asked, One would admit, he took a bit of pleasure seeing the surprise in his brother's eyes.