LOCATION: XIN PRIME

  DATE: 2404

  Thesska coughed, spitting up amniotic fluid from the cloning tank. He growled in annoyance and sat upright on the cold metal table. The last thing he remembered was preparing to strike the human’s planet, where he suspected the majority of their recent technological innovations stemmed from. Obviously, if he were here, things didn’t go as planned.

  It seemed he was right to create a memory backup. The thought of a fresh clone of himself taking over to finish his grand hunt sickened him. His brother must have had a clone as well, but his uncle had been quick enough to stop the former emperor’s sycophants from restoring him, thus cutting off that problem at the roots. Eventually, he would cede power to a new clone of himself. Minds tended to unravel after centuries of life, even if they were just a copy, but he would not accept that until long after he celebrated his victory over the humans.

  “Status of the armada,” he ordered as he stood on shaky legs. Being in a freshly cloned body made him feel weak. He would need to restore his cybernetics as soon as possible. It was too bad they couldn’t be implanted during the cloning process. The Shican had attempted that early on, and it led to psychosis whenever the clone was awakened. Every few years, they would try again to see if the technology and understanding had improved, but it was the same each time.

  “All lost,” came a female voice, as his chief technologue and lover entered the chamber. He planned on making her the matron of his new ascendancy once they returned to the empire, but plans would need to change.

  “Have you withdrawn all the technology from the surface?” he asked as she handed him a towel.

  “It was completed, as you ordered, my Emperor, my love.”

  “Then let us leave this system before the humans realize their mistake.”

  She nodded and sent a signal to the bridge.

  The ship shook slightly as it began rising out of the planet’s orbit.

  “How long did it take you to upload my memories to this new body?”

  “A few hours. Why?”

  He froze and turned to her. “We need to move faster!” The words barely left his mouth before the combat lights flashed red. It was too late; the humans had come.

  ***

  Katalynn’s fleet took less than an hour to check every single system once controlled by Xin. They found the Shican at Xin Prime, which was hardly a surprise. It consisted of a small fleet of Shican battleships, along with a few of their mobile construction yards. In the past, it would have been a daunting fight.

  Things had changed, however. Her fleet launched a series of missiles to act as decoys while the gravity bomb approached their fleet. Once the weapon got close enough, the enemy ceased to exist.

  “Should we head back?” Vyrik asked.

  “No, we make sure they haven’t planted other cloning facilities on the Xin worlds. Order the fleet to bombard the surface with the gravity bombs.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” Vyrik asked. “If we do that, this world will no longer be habitable.”

  She turned to her tactician. “This is the Shican, Vyrik. We take no half measures.”

  The man hesitated for a moment before nodding and ordering the strike.

  ***

  LOCATION: EDEN’S END

  DATE: 2404

  The next few days were rather tense with the Shican survivors being corralled so close to the facility. Alexander assured everyone that it would be fine. They had round-the-clock guards watching the single ship, as well as temporary laser emplacements, all facing the vessel. If that wasn’t enough, the entire fleet had a lock on that ship, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.

  The precautions weren’t enough to assuage everyone, but it was the best he could do at the moment. He was more worried about the people who died during the fighting. Atrium C’s collapse brought about the most casualties. One hundred and twelve people died when the Shican destroyer collapsed the dome.

  Another seventy-five men and women died defending that side of the facility due to the barriers being destroyed by the shockwave, as well as most of the enemy vessels landing or crashing in that direction. Without the additional defenders, they barely managed to hold the Shican at bay.

  The side Alexander had been guarding received the least number of enemy combatants, which he still found hard to believe, but twenty people still lost their lives before the Shican withdrew. He would call it a surrender, but it really wasn’t. At best, it was a tense stalemate.

  He would need to address that soon, but not until they recovered the rest of the bodies trapped inside the ruins.

  The gruesome work took another two days, but they finally pulled the last body from the wreckage. Alexander knew who the body belonged to long before they recovered him, but it still broke his heart seeing Dorry, Yulia’s former bodyguard, removed from the rubble. The man had been a stalwart guardian for his daughter up until she joined the Academy. He even defended them during the Willard attack back on Earth, losing a leg for his efforts, but fully recovering in time. All of that, only to be killed by the damn Shican.

  It was such a senseless waste of life.

  He helped carry the body to the morgue, then went in search of Four. It was time to speak with Kynel, who turned out to be not just a commander, but the new grand commander after Thesska was elevated to emperor.

  Alexander didn’t pretend to understand all of the intricacies that went into becoming a grand commander, and he didn’t care either. All he wanted was answers and a way to get the Shican off Eden’s End without risking any more of his people.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  He found the AIs inside his partially collapsed workshop, cleaning up. They had stayed out of sight since the battle, because the blame people held toward them had grown. Most thought they did nothing to help once again. The blame was misplaced, but people tended to be irrational during times of stress.

  The truth would get around eventually, but it would take time for people to believe that it was only thanks to their help that the facility remained at all.

  Alexander didn’t know if the entire enemy fleet had been intending to kamikaze into the facility, but it didn’t matter. If only one more vessel had struck a dome, the Shican would have overrun the facility, and the people hiding in the shelters wouldn’t be alive to complain.

  “Good, you’re all here,” Alexander said. “We need to discuss what to do about our prisoners.”

  Four gave him an unreadable expression before responding. “I hope you don’t intend to do the same thing that you did with the last ones.”

  “They were too dangerous to keep around,” Alexander replied. He hadn’t made the call to dispose of the prior Shican prisoners, but he was in charge, so any decisions made by his people were ultimately his, good or bad. In that case, he agreed with Krieger’s decision. “And these are even more dangerous. Give me options if you want them to live.”

  To her credit, Four didn’t argue the point. She turned around, picked up something small off a desk, and flipped it toward him.

  He caught the small copper-colored disk and looked at it in confusion. It looked like a data disk at first, but he turned it around and saw it had circular impressions on the opposite side, radiating out from the center.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s a device that will nullify most of the Shican’s cybernetic functions. Once it is placed on their exposed hardware, it’ll be impossible to remove,” Four replied. “That should make them less of a threat.”

  “What if they damage it?” Alexander asked as he ran his thumb around the ripples.

  The last thing they needed was the Shican to play possum until they hauled them aboard one of the fleet ships.

  “It’ll release a fatal shock to their cranial implant,” Four responded without hesitation. “We’ve used them in the past to study some Shican we captured.”

  “You had these the entire time?” Alexander demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have used them during the battle or on that other cyborg we captured.”

  “They wouldn’t have done any good,” Rush cut in to try to ease the building tension. “They may look sturdy, but they are rather delicate devices. You can’t fire them or slap them on willy-nilly. They need to be gently pressed into place. Not a lot of time for that in a fight. All of the subjects we used them on were rendered unconscious first. As for your former guest, we didn’t have time to produce the devices. They are on par in complexity with the nanoform lattices that your processors require.”

  That would definitely make them difficult to produce, but Alexander wasn’t happy that they kept the information from him.

  Getting mad wouldn’t help matters, so he blew out a breath and asked another question. “Do we have enough for all the captured cyborgs?”

  “We did,” Rush said before glancing around the ruined workshop. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  “You left them in here? But you knew the roof over my workshop wasn’t protected.”

  “They are in a special crate,” Four replied. “We just have to dig it out.”

  Alexander helped the trio, and eventually they located the crate that Four had spoken of. “You made a crate with energized armor? How? The power requirements alone would be staggering.”

  Rush chuckled as he and Four dragged the crate to an open spot. “We’ve been playing around with your field generator design. It might have performed the same function as the one on your old body, but it was fundamentally different in how it went about producing a field.”

  Alexander knew that, but he hadn’t spent much time looking at his old design. It wouldn’t have worked in the augment gear anyway, and he wasn’t sure if it could scale up for a ship, so it was low priority.

  “The design was inferior to your old design, especially in duration, but it did have some interesting aspects that your old one didn’t.”

  “Such as?” Alexander asked as the pair popped open the lid on the perfectly preserved crate.

  “Modularity and power draw,” Rush said with a grin as the open box exposed four small spheres nestled at each corner of the metal crate.

  The rest of the crate had foam separating hundreds of the bronze-colored disks.

  Rush plucked one of the grape-sized spheres from its pocket, exposing an intricate lattice of connectors below. “There are four more field generators on the bottom in the same spot. Each is capable of protecting three faces of the crate, giving an extreme amount of redundancy. We did it as an experiment, but it’s completely unnecessary. It turns out that if you only project the field a small distance from the contacts, it can provide the same molecular stabilization benefit at a fraction of the power. One of the orbs would have been more than enough to protect the entire crate, even if the roof caved in on top of it.”

  “You ran nano-mesh through the entire crate?” Alexander asked, before shaking his head. “No. Stop, don’t say anything else. As interesting as this topic is, I need to stay focused. Do we have enough of the devices?”

  “Yes,” Four replied.

  “Good. Four. I would like you to come with me to speak to Kynel.”

  “Very well,” she said. “But I will be approaching them as a Shican matron.”

  Alexander nodded. She could approach them as the devil for all he cared. He just needed them to cooperate long enough to ship them back to one of their surviving worlds, and he didn’t particularly care which one, either.

  It didn’t take the pair long to reach the Shican’s crashed vessel. A few of the guards gave Four odd looks as they passed since she was now in her Shican matron form. They would have stopped her if Alexander hadn’t been escorting her.

  Soon enough, the partially crushed hulk of the Shican battleship loomed before them. Alexander idly wondered if the ship even had an atmosphere aboard, but quickly dismissed his concern. The Shican had seemed perfectly capable of fighting without breathing gear during the battle. It could have been due to their bloodlust overwhelming their rational minds, but he couldn’t know for sure.

  Maybe he would get lucky and find them all dead from lack of oxygen, and this headache would have solved itself. It had been days since he last spoke to Grand Commander Kynel. It would certainly save him a lot of headaches if they were.

  Luck wasn’t on his side as a hatch near ground level popped open. Kynel stood in the opening, his gaze fixing on Four for a moment before turning to him. “Would you allow me to depart my ship to speak? I cannot guarantee your safety if you board.”

  Alexander motioned for the Grand Commander to come forward. The man dropped the twenty feet to the surface and landed in an easy crouch before slowly approaching.

  As he got closer, he tilted his head ever so slightly and flicked his ears. “I recognize you,” he said to Four.

  “I would be surprised if you did,” Four replied in Shican.

  “You were the Matron of the Tarrhyn line, but that’s impossible. The Tarrhyn were expunged from the empire over a century ago.”

  Four chortled. “Well, color me surprised. You do know me. If I may ask, why bother remembering the name of an expunged line?”

  “You were an example to my family of what not to do. Studying your failures allowed us to remain hidden from the emperor.”

  “Hmm. Not the most auspicious of legacies, but I’ll take what I can get. At least our work helped someone.”

  “You’re not Shican, are you?” Kynel asked.

  Four didn’t answer the question, but Alexander could see that was enough of a confirmation for Kynel.

  She did ask a question of her own, however. “That can’t be the only reason your clan remained hidden for so long. I can tell you are different than the other Shican I have met.”

  If Kynel was upset by the accusation, he didn’t show it. He simply answered her question. “Even before cloning, the Shican clan was obsessed with warrior culture, breeding more fervent warriors to the point that they became beholden to their baser instincts. My clan took a different approach. We selectively bred out the emotions that tied us to our past. We learned to mimic them to remain hidden, however.”

  Great! Alexander had to choose between psychopaths and sociopaths. At least Kynel seemed willing to talk; it was more than he could say about the former Grand Commander.

  f you'd like some more sci-fi adventures, go check out my new series, Corebound.

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