Alexander waited anxiously by the airlock for Krieger’s shuttle to dock. He knew why he was nervous, but it made no sense. He hadn’t been gone that long, and outwardly, he looked the same.
Reabsorbing the extra living alloy felt weird, but Alexander had done it the moment he realized his people had entered the system. It did require him to redesign the command seat, which was annoying, but he had done that prior to speaking with Krieger.
Alexander could tell that the man had been suspicious of him from the moment they spoke. He feared they would reject him. There wasn’t much he could do if they did. Defiance was a powerful ship, but so was the unnamed battleship that Krieger was commanding, and unlike him, the Admiral wasn’t alone.
He glanced over at Four, who had asked to accompany him over to the Shican battleship. Her attendance was certain to cause some tension, but her insights into the Shican would be invaluable.
Rush and Serina agreed to remain behind.
Alexander wasn’t worried about them stealing Defiance. They could have done that any time since the ship was completed.
He felt the decking shake ever so slightly as the shuttle connected. The pilot must be top-notch to pull off such a smooth docking.
As the airlock cycled open, he almost expected to see Branston standing there, but instead, a young man greeted them with a salute.
“Mr. Kane,” Markus Wu said stiffly.
Alexander returned the salute. “Markus, what are you doing out here?”
“Serving,” he replied in a clipped tone.
Alexander almost responded that he was too young to serve, but he stopped himself and did the math. He realized Markus was eighteen now.
Time had once again slipped away from him. He swallowed the bitterness at missing another chunk of his daughter’s life and gestured to his companion. “This is Four. She will be accompanying me to the Shican ship.”
Markus inspected Four, but the boy’s expression was unreadable, a talent he likely learned from his mother, Eva Wu. After a long moment, he nodded. “The other engineers are already heading for the enemy ship. We should hurry.”
Alexander nodded and followed Markus into the shuttle. Four remained silent, but she stepped aboard only a moment after him and took a nearby seat.
They weren’t alone aboard the small craft. Two groups of strike teams were seated and watching them.
“They are here to provide protection,” Markus pointed out before heading toward the cockpit.
Alexander had to wonder who they were here to protect, him or everyone else.
Krieger had certainly stacked the deck in case Alexander was a threat. Not that Alexander could blame the man. He would have done the same thing if one of his people had been kidnapped by an unknown alien, only to return with those same aliens claiming everything was good.
Alexander remained standing since his current form wouldn’t fit in the shuttle seats. He couldn’t wait to take on a normal human form, just so little things like seating and doors were less of a hassle. He had learned to live with it over the years, but it still bothered him.
It didn’t take long to reach the Shican vessel. Alexander wanted to be the first off, but one of the strike teams departed first. When it was Alexander’s turn, he stopped to inspect the docking section on the Shican ship.
He and Krieger had discussed possible boarding actions against the aliens, but he hadn’t put any time or effort into developing something to make that happen. There was always something more pressing to deal with. It seemed like someone had rectified his oversight.
“Did Lucas design this?” he asked one of the strike team members behind him.
The man didn’t respond, but his hand did tighten on his rifle grip ever so slightly.
Alexander sighed internally and continued through the airlock and into the enemy vessel.
The opening was on the ceiling of a corridor, but it seemed like all power was out aboard the ship, so gravity was offline. Not that it would have bothered him if it wasn’t.
He slipped through the opening and rotated, so his feet touched down. Much like his old body, his new one had more than one way to stay attached to a surface, and he didn’t so much as float off the floor as he absorbed the light impact of his landing.
Alexander moved aside to let Four and the others enter as he looked around. They were in some sort of chokepoint that had been built to defend the airlock.
The first strike team was standing off to the side, their team leader speaking to another armored individual.
The individual nodded and turned toward him.
“Galloway?” Alexander asked in surprise as he took in the man’s unarmored face. “Never thought Krieger would convince you to take on a leadership role.”
Galloway snorted. “That sells it for me. Either you really are Alex, or they made a copy so convincing it makes no difference.”
Alexander winced. “Pretty sure Krieger wanted to keep his suspicions quiet.”
Galloway just shrugged. “He’s in charge of the fleet, I command the troops.”
As he said that, Four touched down behind Alexander.
“Now she might be a problem,” Galloway chewed as he turned toward the woman.
“I will not cause you any trouble,” Four replied coolly.
“Uh-huh,” Galloway responded. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it. There was the whole kidnapping thing and all that. I would prefer to have my people keep a close eye on you, just in case.”
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“Fair enough. I don’t mind.”
“While I appreciate that,” Galloway said, “I wasn’t looking for your approval.”
A small smile formed on Four’s face, and she tilted her head in acknowledgement.
Alexander doubted the two strike teams would be able to disable or even take down Four if she truly wanted to harm them, but now was not the time to test their patience. He made a sound to get everyone’s attention. “Can your people show us around. I want to get started examining the ship’s systems as soon as possible.”
There was another moment of tension before Galloway gestured to the two team leaders. “Take them wherever they need to go.”
The pair nodded, and Alexander asked them to bring him to the engineering area of the vessel. Unfortunately, this was an older Shican battleship, so it didn’t have plasma-based weapons, but it did have a defensive field, and he really wanted to know how the Shican’s operated. He also wanted to look at their reactor and computers.
Their reactor was more powerful than the one in the Barracuda-class battleship, but had about the same power output as the one aboard Defiance. He knew from talking with Rush and the others that the Shican reactor wasn’t compatible with human fuel systems, but he might learn something from their designs.
As for the computers, the Shican’s must be quite powerful if they were able to fill space with that much ECM.
It seemed he wasn’t the only person to think about inspecting the engineering section. When they arrived, more than a dozen engineers, from multiple ships, were inspecting devices in the main space and adjoining areas.
A few looked up at their arrival. He could see a mixture of surprise and suspicion in their eyes. It seemed rumors of his return were already spreading through the fleet.
Alexander did his best to ignore them as he approached what was clearly the reactor. A familiar ginger-haired gentleman was giving orders to a team inspecting the device.
“Don’t touch anything, you idiots! We know the reactor was damaged during the fighting; the last thing we need is for the containment to fail before the remaining plasma cools.”
“Chief Engineer McCarthy,” Alexander said as soon as the man stopped yelling. “It’s been quite some time.”
The man jerked slightly at his name being called, but he turned and raised an eyebrow when he saw who had addressed him. “So the rumors are true.”
McCarthy shifted slightly to get a better look at Four, who was standing behind Alexander. “And you brought an alien guest, if the rest of what I heard was true. Never thought I would see such an elegant alien,” he grunted.
For a moment, Alexander could have sworn he saw Four’s cheeks turn slightly red, but he must have been imagining it.
“You can call me Four,” she said demurely.
The older man smiled slightly at that, but his stern expression barely shifted otherwise. “Well, since you’re both here, I assume you’re here to help figure out how this works,” he waved to the reactor.
Four walked forward and ran her pale-skinned hand across the reactor casing, forcing a few of the engineers to step back. “You shouldn’t waste your time with the Shican reactor. It runs on a completely different fuel source and isn’t very efficient. Alex has a new reactor that can output a similar amount of energy and is much more efficient with existing fuels.”
“You got all that from running your hand along it?” McCarthy asked skeptically.
“No,” Four replied. “We’ve studied the Shican designs for decades.”
McCarthy narrowed his eyes. “Then why are we even here? Can’t you provide us with that information, or better yet, even more advanced designs?”
Four looked to Alexander.
Alexander sighed internally. He had expected the question to come up at some point. “They can’t. If they did, the others like them might come back, and it wouldn’t be to take me away again.”
McCarthy chewed on those words for a minute before nodding. “That makes me feel better.”
“It does?” Alexander asked in surprise.
“Sure,” McCarthy replied. “I can wrap my head around dissenting factions. That’s normal for humans. If you or the lovely young lady told us her people held a singular purpose, then I would be terrified. It’s bad enough we have the Shican acting like a rabid pack of animals.”
Alexander could agree with the sentiment. If the entire Collective decided humanity needed to go, he doubted there was anything anyone could do to stop them. That was the main reason Alexander didn’t push Four and the others to help more directly.
The Collective had more than enough time to recover and decide on a course of action after Rush’s betrayal. The fact that they hadn’t taken action against him, his people, or humanity was a good sign that Rush had been correct.
In another week or two, they would see if Rush’s other guess about the Collective decommissioning the gravity plating was also right.
Alexander suspected the man was, and it was just more reason to get back to Eden’s End as soon as possible to help mitigate the damage that the loss of artificial gravity aboard human ships could cause.
McCarthy decided to stick with the reactor, despite Four’s words. That left Alexander and Four to wander over to an adjacent room where a large cylinder sat at the center.
Their escorts waited outside since the room was far too small and cramped to fit more than a few people at a time.
Alexander spoke to one of the engineers, scratching his head over the device. “Any idea what it is?”
“Based on the power cables running into it and the mess of wires running away from it, I assume it’s their defensive field generator. I’ve no idea how it works, though.”
Alexander scanned the device, using one of the many new forms of scanning his body was capable of, which included X-ray and other options that he never had access to in his old body.
He used the scans to create a 3D render, which he helpfully displayed using his belt projector.
The man whistled when he saw the diagram.
It turned out he was correct in his assumption. The massive piece of equipment was indeed a field generator, but it was far less complex than Alexander’s.
Instead of highly precise rings moving around a storage core, it looked more like an electric motor. The exterior of the generator was stationary, while a shaft sat in the center, wound in some material that must create the static charge, instead of electricity.
“Is there something I can use to cut it open?” Alexander asked the other engineer.
The man looked like that would be sacrilege, before glancing at the holographic blueprint still hovering in mid-air. “I’ll see if I can find something.”
The man hurried off, leaving Alexander alone with Four.
“You could tear apart the housing yourself,” she said so quietly that nobody else could have heard.
He knew that, but he didn’t want to cause any more concern than he already was with his presence.
A few minutes later, a multipurpose bot plodded into the room and began devouring a section of the outer casing. Once it was done, it wandered off to whatever task it had been assigned next.
Alexander moved over to the new opening in the field generator. It was dark inside, but that didn’t stop him from seeing what he wanted. He reached past the outer winding and grabbed onto something. With a twist and a screech of tearing metal, a chunk broke free, and he pulled it out to examine the material.
“Plastic?” he asked in surprise.
“It’s an engineered polymer,” Four confirmed once Alexander had acquired the sample himself.
He handed the sample over to the engineers who were collecting such things. He included his detailed schematics of the device as well.
While the device didn’t really give him any clues as to how the Shican applied a field to a plasma projectile, it did highlight another possible weakness in their defensive fields. He would need to determine the generator's rotational speed to get the specifics, but once he did, he could calculate the generator’s pulse width, which would be very similar to a regular generator's.
Knowing the wavelength that the device operated at could allow them to equip projectiles with a wave generator that could bypass the field. The timing would need to be perfect to allow for that to occur, but it was something worth looking into.
Alexander mulled over providing the information about the generator and wave timing to the STO. It would give them an advantage over the Shican without providing them with technologies that he wasn’t comfortable handing out.
He didn’t even have to worry about the STO or corporations turning that knowledge against him, because his field generators worked on a completely different principle. His design still has a pulse width, but it was a chaotic one, thanks to the multiple spinning rings that produced his version of the defensive field.
Instead of deciding for himself, he chose to wait until he met with Krieger.
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