LOCATION: HYPERGATE DEBRIS FIELD

SYSTEM: EPSILON ERIDANI

DATE: 2402

After Alex stopped smothering her with worry, Yulia was finally free to roam in the undamaged–mostly undamaged–parts of the ship, not long after the attack. She did her best to stay out of the way as people hurried about to fix the damage. She even got to watch as the survivors from Valkyrie came aboard. Yulia was glad to see Lagertha Char was okay, even if the woman terrified her.

Yulia had never let a little fear stop her from doing something; if she had, she would have never spoken to Alex, or made friends with Zorina, or done any number of other things she had done in her young life.

Even now, she was afraid, even though Alex had assured her that whoever attacked was now gone. He hadn't told her who had attacked them or why, but she knew it was bad because even though she was allowed to roam, some rooms, like the infirmary, were guarded, and she was turned away.

Even if the infirmary wasn't damaged, she knew why she wasn't allowed inside. She had seen the dead man carried onto the shuttle a few weeks ago during the attack, despite Alex trying to prevent her from noticing, which was why she knew people had died aboard Grace. That made her sad, but she knew death was just a part of life.

Yulia didn't know why Alex was so adamant about her not seeing the corpses. It wasn't like she hadn't seen death before. She recalled seeing motionless forms when she was rescued from her parents' ship. She hadn't understood the significance at the time, but she did now. There were also the bodies of the pirates who attacked Eden's End.

She did admit that it gave her anxiety to see someone she knew motionless on the ground, so maybe that was what Alex was trying to protect her from.

She kept walking through the ship's corridors, looking for something to do. Normally, Travers would be keeping an eye on her, but he was busy working with the others to try and get the ship operational again. She wanted to help because she felt like she needed to do something.

Yulia rounded the corner in a corridor and was stopped by an arm waving from inside a nearby access panel.

"A little help," a gruff voice said, before snapping their fingers and pointing at a plasma torch nearby.

Yulia hurried over and picked up the heavy pack and tool, carrying it over to the man. If she hadn't been wearing her augment suit, she wouldn't have been able to lift the thing. She wasn't exactly tall for her age, and even with the training she had been given by Damien, she wasn't that much stronger than an average thirteen-year-old.

She placed the torch in the man's hand, and it vanished back into the hole.

After a moment, she heard the torch cutting something and waited to see if the person needed any more help. After a short time, a hot piece of bent metal was tossed from inside the hole, and the man crawled back out.

He dusted himself off before turning to look at her. "You're Kane's kid, aren't you? Thanks for the hand, but you probably shouldn't be wandering around. Parts of the ship are still in a vacuum."

She tapped on her helmet, activating her speaker. "My name is Yulia," she said with a huff. "Alex locked my suit, I can't take it off until the ship is sealed, and it's probably tougher than the overalls you're wearing."

The man looked down at his dirty clothing and chuckled. "I can't argue with that, Yulia. My name is Elrik. I'm the Lagertha's Chief Engineer."

Yulia's eyes sparkled at that. "What were you fixing inside the junction?" she asked animatedly.

He barked a laugh, which startled her slightly. "I wasn't fixing anything, young lady, I was simply cutting away some damage so we can slap a patch on it to get us home."

"Can't Alex's bots do that?" she asked.

"Probably, but they're all busy making repairs to the exterior of the ship as well as assembling one of your pa's smelters."

"Oh," she replied. She had wondered what the robots had been doing since she hadn't seen them a single time since she had been freed from her room.

"Do you know who attacked us?" she asked.

The man shook his head and waggled his finger at her. "Don't think I don't know what you're trying to do. I had children of my own. If your father hasn't told you yet, then you need to wait until he does."

"Sorry," she replied in embarrassment.

The man chuckled softly. "I have some more work to do. If you want to be useful, grab that plasma torch and follow me."

Not willing to waste the opportunity to do something productive, she retrieved the heavy tool and hurried after Elrik, who was already striding down the corridor.

***

While it pained him that Yulia wanted to be on her own instead of sticking by his side, it did make his current job easier.

It didn't take long for Alexander to relay what happened after the Valkyrie had been knocked out of the fight. Katalynn took longer to ponder their current predicament than it had for Alexander to explain what happened.

When she finally spoke, it wasn't anything good. "The archives have no reference to Shican vessels of that size, nor of the plasma bolt weapons you described."

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"Then how did you know they were Shican?" Alexander asked.

"I recognized the other ships in their formation. As I said over the comm, those were Shican destroyers and carriers. Those always made up the bulk of their fleets back during the First Shican War."

Alexander winced at that, knowing she was probably correct in naming the previous conflict the first, as a second conflict was likely on the horizon.

"What worries me more is the other alien ship," she continued. "You said it was just a silver sphere?"

"It looked like a ball of mercury floating in space."

"And the weapon?" she asked.

Alexander shook his avatar. "I have no clue, but if I had to guess, it does something that disrupts the bonds between materials."

"Do you think it was the gate builder?"

He shrugged, not having an answer for that. "Their technology looked nothing like the hypergate, but who knows how long it's been since the gates were built. For all we know, they advanced far beyond that point. I can tell you that their FTL capabilities are far in advance of ours."

"How do you figure?" Katalynn asked.

"While I didn't see the ship appear, I did see it leave. There wasn't a flash or bubble distortion like you might see with a normal jump. One second the ship was here, the next it was simply gone."

"After it destroyed the hypergate and the Shican," she added.

"Yes," Alexander confirmed.

Katalynn sighed. "While it seems like they were trying to protect us, we can't say for sure. Is your comm node operational?"

"The node is intact, but the comm system linking to it is offline. I need to make those repairs before I can reach out and request help."

"It sounds like you should focus on that, then."

"It was high on my list, but my entire bridge crew died during the attack, so I decided to prioritize seeing if anyone aboard Valkyrie survived."

She nodded. "Thank you for that. The few compartments that survived were running low on oxygen. A few more hours and there wouldn't have been anyone left to rescue."

"How many?" Alexander asked. Themostup-to-dateversionisonM(VLEMPY)R.

"Focus on the present, Kane, we can talk about the dead when we're safe and secure."

He nodded, knowing she was right. "Can you spare a few people to watch the sensors and monitor weapons while I'm working? We already had to chase away some opportunistic scavengers, and soon enough, the STO Navy, corporations, or local defense force might decide to move in and see what they can recover from the Shican wreck."

Katalynn sneered at that. "Disgusting vultures. I'll stay on the bridge with a few of my people and monitor local space; you focus on getting us home."

With that, they left the conference room.

Alexander headed to the comm center and began tracing the damaged power leads, while Katalynn made her way to the bridge. She had donned her suit helmet as the bridge was still open to space.

It would take time for patches to be applied over the holes in the hull, and he had prioritized the living spaces to allow the rest of his crew and the Asgardian crews to rest, recover, and relax as needed.

The fact that Katalynn's remaining crew could fit aboard Grace at all told him that she had lost over half her people.

That was less than it would have been prior to his upgrades to the Valkyrie, but it was still over a hundred people. Grace had suffered casualties also. His entire bridge crew of six people, as well as four more, had died, but he had far fewer people to begin with.

Working with a single hand was frustrating, but Alexander made do. He could already tell that the hand was regrowing because the melted nub looked less matte and melty and more like its normal outer coloring, but it was going to be a slow process, he could tell.

He wished he knew how to speed the process along, but he had never figured that function out.

As he was testing the wires inside the wall, he connected through the tablet cradled in his damaged arm and checked on the progress of the bots.

Alexander knew as soon as he saw the front part of the alien ship get severed and left behind, that people were going to try to claim it. His goal was to record what he could from the wreckage of the alien vessel as quickly as possible, before his bots cut it up and fed it through the smelter to feed repairs for Grace.

Doing that would earn him a lot of enmity, but he was not about to let whatever tech the Shicans deployed fall into corporate hands.

The smelter was taking shape quickly as a horde of bots crawled over Valkyrie, stripping it apart and ferrying the parts back to Grace to run through the smaller smelter it carried. As robust as Katalynn's ship was, it was a total loss. It would take far too long to restore it to its previous condition, and he couldn't exactly tow it away.

Doing things the way he was would expose a few of his secrets, like how efficient his bots were and his ability to recycle large objects, but he had no other choice. He wasn't about to let the Asgardian ship fall into corporate hands either.

After an hour, he finally found the break in the power cable going to the comm node. He ended up having to print a small helper bot and send it in through a floor grate between two decks to run another line. The original line and passage had been melted completely closed when one of the plasma bolts passed alongside, making cutting it back open a waste of time.

Alexander used the bolt's passage as the new space to run the power cable. He only had to cut a small opening on either end to pass it back through into the undamaged section.

Other tertiary ship systems flickered to life as power was restored to that section. The other systems had redundant backups; it was only the comm node that relied on a single connection. He had built it like that to hide the comm system from anyone who might not know about it. That decision seemed like a dumb idea now, especially since he was publicly releasing the Kcomms.

He made a mental note to add backup power cables in his designs in the future and outfit the existing Orcas with a secondary run. None of his retrofitted ships would run into the same issue, since Alexander had tied the comm nodes directly into those ships' main comm systems.

He thought making a separate comm node room would ensure backup communications in case the main comm system went out, but he never figured on losing ship power or taking so much damage.

As soon as the comm came online, he contacted the Hawks. They were the closest allies he had.

"Alex!" A frantic Captain Bloomright answered. "I don't have time to talk. Ganos is under emergency orders. Something came through the gate and attacked anything nearby before another ship appeared and destroyed those ships along with the hypergate."

"I'm in Epsilon Eridani, and a similar event just occurred. The ships that came through the gate were Shican. The same unidentified alien ship destroyed them and the gate here, but not before the Shican destroyed most of my fleet, Valkyrie, and any STO ships within range."

The link was silent for a long moment before Bloomright spoke up once again. "The Shican. Are you sure? Is everyone alright?"

"We're sure," he replied. "As for being fine, not exactly. Yulia is unhurt, but a third of my crew and over half of Lagertha Char's are dead. The STO ships that were defending the gate were obliterated with no chance of survivors."

"That's awful," Captain Bloomright said. "I'm sorry for your loss. I would offer to help, but we've been called in to defend Ganos until more STO ships show up. With the two gates being down, I don't know when that will happen."

"Thank you for the offer. If you have any contacts in Tau Ceti, see if they can confirm whether the gate there was also attacked. I need to contact Eden's End and give them a heads up, so I'll let you get back to your defense. One thing before I go, I'm sending you a data dump of our fight with the Shican ships. Please forward it on to your governor or any STO vessels you see fit to."

She thanked him for the information and disconnected.