“Huh… I didn’t think acting like a wounded animal would actually work,” Rush admitted.

  Alexander didn’t either, but he figured it couldn’t hurt, especially after his new friends filled him in on how the Shican truly saw the universe. He didn’t say that out loud, however. He said something more profound-sounding. “It’s the nature of a predator to go after prey they think is sick or weak.”

  Rush hmmed at that before nodding toward the display. “Whatever the answer, it worked; they are lined up nicely. The human ships are lagging behind a bit, but not enough to make a difference. Looks like your timing was spot on as well. Are you sure you’re fine with just leaving the system instead of venting your anger more directly?”

  Alexander would like nothing better than to take revenge for his friends, especially since this group had been directly responsible for Mingyu’s death, but he had to be practical. “There will be plenty of Shican targets in the future. I’m just sorry we couldn’t wait for the last of their fleet. It would have been quite poetic to spring a surprise trap on them all.”

  Learning that neither of the two groups had the Grand Commander in them was galling, but there was little Alexander could do about that.

  “While I agree,” Rush commented, “I doubt the Grand Commander would have fallen for this trap. That man didn’t get to be in command of the entire Shican armada by being foolish, and you can forget about any sort of cronyism that might have put him in that position. The emperor’s line is a far more pragmatic bunch from what little we’ve been able to put together during our surveillance.”

  “He’s what?” Alexander asked in shock. “What the hell is someone like that doing out here then?”

  Rush shrugged. “Looking for glory, most likely. Can’t really distinguish himself at the head of a massive armada.”

  “If you two are done?” Four said flatly. “We are close to breaching into subspace. I’ve done what I could, but the bridge is going to be quite unstable with our guests being so close, so brace for a very uncomfortable ride.”

  Alexander did just that a moment before the space in front of them ripped open, and deadly radiation washed over them.

  The ship did a good job of stopping most of the radiation, but no vessel was designed to resist the ridiculous tide that flooded out of the opening. Enough got past the radiation shielding that it distorted Alexander’s vision into a riot of colors. The living alloy was an amazing piece of technology, but it seemed that even it wasn’t fully immune to the effects of that much radiation.

  Just before passing through the reality warping aperture, he wondered something. If it was that bad for them, what were the Shican experiencing?

  The radiation would be deadly to anything living, even aboard the Shican ships. Their radiation shielding wasn’t any stronger than his own. He knew that based on the armor and hull samples he had taken after their initial hypergate attack. The question was, how long would they suffer until the end?

  If it were anyone else, he would pray for a quick death. With the Shican, he hoped they suffered.

  ***

  The Shican vessels remained on course, passing the point where their prey had vanished, yet they didn’t turn or slow. They couldn’t because the deadly bath of radiation had killed off every single person in the fleet, except two.

  The two commanders wished they were dead as they writhed on the ground, their organic parts sloughing off to expose their cybernetics. Had they been less enhanced, like their crews, they wouldn’t have suffered. Their fate would have been over the instant the wave of deadly particles passed through their ships, but they weren’t, so they lived on, if you could call it living.

  Mercy was finally granted to them as the ships dipped into the gas giant’s upper atmosphere and were crushed under the massive planet’s gravity. The balls of debris left behind barely left a blip of their passing across the gas giant’s surface as they were swallowed beneath the swirling clouds of gas.

  ***

  “Where are they?” Thesska growled.

  The sub-commanders of the sensor ships didn’t quite blanch in fear, but Thesska could see their short hair stand on end at his implied threat.

  “We are working to untangle the subspace signals, Grand Commander,” one of the men responded, “but it will take time.”

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  “Work faster,” he demanded before cutting the connection. He turned to his subordinate, and the man stiffened slightly. “Any sign of Commander Veshaan or Nyjak?”

  “No, Grand Commander. The only jump signal we managed to pick up was from days before they should have arrived.”

  “So they have been destroyed,” he stated to nobody in particular.

  Thesska had suspected as much when he received a private comm call from his technologue back on the human world, but it was good to confirm the truth. He had fully expected Veshaan and Nyjak to try and steal his kill, so he had her monitoring their FTL communications pings in subspace so he could track them if that prediction came to pass.

  He would have preferred to hold them back, but even as Grand Commander of the armada, he didn’t have that type of sway over a commander and their fleets once they were on the trail of a quarry. The prey fixation would have taken hold by that point. Had he issued such an order, they would have turned on him and had every right to do so. He would have done the same in their place. Sometimes, he hated the thin line he had to walk to keep the fleet from tearing itself apart.

  He shifted his thoughts to what had happened in the system. It was clear their prey had played them, but how?

  Thesska ran through the issue in his mind, boosted by his augmented mental faculties, and came to a possible solution in only a few minutes.

  “Which commander’s sensor ship first discovered the subspace signal?”

  His subordinate, who had been standing there quietly the entire time, stopped to ponder the question. “Their communications came to us within only a few minutes of each other, but Veshaan’s fleet discovered the signal first.”

  “I don’t care about who was quickest to try and curry favor for the discovery,” Thesska growled once again. “I want to know what is in the actual logs. They sent them when they reported the incident, didn’t they?”

  His subordinate’s ears twitched slightly, and it looked like the man wanted to flatten them in supplication, but he used his limited cybernetics to halt the response.

  Thesska would have given a toothy grin at the man’s nerve if he weren’t in such a foul mood. Instead, he glared at his subordinate until he managed to retrieve and display the logs. The timestamps in the logs were identical, which was impossible. Even if subspace signals moved faster than the speed of light, they weren’t instantaneous. That was the whole point of placing those fools out here to help triangulate any subspace signals once they were detected.

  Their prey had compromised their systems somehow; it was the only answer.

  “Run a complete system integrity check and have the Commanders of the other Shican ships do so as well.”

  “What about the two human vessels, Grand Commander?” his subordinate asked as he began typing on his data pad.

  Thesska knew it was highly unlikely that their data and systems had been compromised, but he couldn’t say the same for the human ships. “Tell them nothing. Once they complete their reports, dispose of them if the rest of the fleet’s records show no infiltration.”

  His subordinate nodded and walked off to carry out his orders.

  The reports showed there was no infiltration within the fleet shortly before the sensor ships reported their findings. The subspace signal led back to the human space controlled by the Union. Thesska took that as proof that the enemy had compromised the human vessels. The sensor ships and their crews were vaporized shortly thereafter to prevent any further possibility of enemy infiltration.

  Afterward, Thesska sent a message back to his chief technologue to recall and reinforce the computer systems aboard the human ships to prevent something like that from happening again. It would slow his reinforcements, but it couldn’t be helped. He refused to allow the enemy to use the same tactic twice.

  Now he had a choice to make.

  Any data that came from the infected ships would be suspect at best. For all he knew, the silver spheres had never even come to this section of space.

  Thesska didn’t believe that to be the case, but he no longer had the forces needed to triangulate their location and keep up the search.

  He could head to where the subspace signal led, but that could be a trap, too. With a barely audible growl, he gave orders to join the armada. If these unknown aliens wished to play with him, he would play. He would burn the entirety of human space to the ground and hunt them to the end of the galaxy if that is what it took to get them to show themselves. A simple hunt had now turned into a slight against his capabilities, and he would not stand idly by and let that remain.

  ***

  SYSTEM: HULDRA

  DATE: 2404

  Defiance appeared above the distant gas giant, and Alexander was once again glad he didn’t have a stomach.

  If watching a ship enter subspace was bad, actually going through the experience was ten times worse, even if it lasted only an instant.

  “The Collective chooses to travel like this?” Alexander asked as his vision slowly restored itself, and the lingering effects of the transit faded.

  Rush shook his head and blinked his eyes rapidly before responding. “Yes, but it’s nothing like this. Even a normal subspace transit isn’t normally that bad.”

  “I did warn you,” Four commented as she rubbed her temple.

  “What system are we in anyway?” Alexander asked. “I don’t recognize it.”

  “It’s called Huldra. It’s an unimportant system, much like Drossfall, but it’s only five jumps from Unokane.”

  “Wait! If it’s that close to Unokane, we must have stealth satellites out here keeping an eye on things.” Alexander flew through the sensors aboard his new ship, quickly scanning space for any sign of them.

  His former self may have been behind the times in most of his technologies; three hundred years of stagnation will sort of do that, but some of his sensors were even better than the ones aboard the Barracuda-Class battleship, and that was given the best of the best.

  Despite that, he wasn’t able to detect the satellites.

  “Dammit,” he cursed quietly, before turning to Rush.

  The man shook his head sympathetically. “We can’t tell you how to detect subspace signals.”

  Alexander expected that answer, but it still stung. “Fine, we’ll make some noise. There’s bound to be a scout in the area, especially with the war heating up.”

  Even with a transponder, he didn’t want to go cruising around Union space in an unknown ship during an active conflict. That was a good way to get shot at.

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