Forced to abandon their campaign against the Sylnari, and faced with setbacks the Cylovans had set their sights on the Orilias belt. Their initial invasion was met with significant success until a combined armada sent by the Union and the Alliance combined with several fleets sent by worlds in the belt including Ilyatria fought them to a standstill. Since then, the forces have been locked in a bloody stalemate. While on the other front with the Sylnari the Cylovans have actually lost ground. Their inability to replace their ships quickly enough to hold against the Sylnari has allowed more and more Sylnari attack fleets to slip by their defenses and strike at their more vulnerable industrial core. This has led to an ever-increasing urgency to the Collective’s activities in the Orialias belt. As such the Collective has sent every resource it can spare into the Orialias front.

During the last five years, the Alliance and the Union have signed a formal treaty, and have begun large scale military cooperation and technology trading. Already the benefits of this new treaty have allowed both powers to field larger more powerful ships that can face the Cylovans more evenly. Most of the nomadic tribes have pulled out to more remote parts of the belt to avoid the heavy fighting in the belt. As for the Refuge they have not been seen since after their encounter with the dreadnought in the belt. The fleet was last seen entering a region of space that is now deep within Cylovan held space. None of their former friends have had contact with them since then, and only the Ilyatrians have the technology to search that remote part of the belt, but their fleet is stretched thin protecting their few worlds. In order to ensure their safety against Cylovan advances, they have joined the Alliance who has sent ships, supplies, and even medical aid to their world to help protect them from the advancing Cylovan fleets. In exchange, they have shared advanced weapons and shields with the Alliance.

Elsewhere in the belt, the Cylovans have recently brought a new shipyard online, and soon they will have more heavy capital ships to defend their space. Ships that they are desperately in need of because even though they have managed to prevent the Sylnari from outright destroying their remaining shipyards, they have not been able to prevent them from hitting them. The war has been going so badly in fact that the Cylovans have been rushing what ships they can to the Sylnari front often incomplete with systems not yet installed. In the meantime, they must support their war in the Orialias belt entirely with cheaper more easily fielded cruisers, and destroyers. They have also begun fielding significantly larger numbers of these ships on the Sylnari front in recent years, often at the expense of other fronts, but if things don’t change soon the Collective will be forced to surrender.

However, the collective has recently developed a new improvement to its shield technology allowing it to enter the Ikar Radiation Belt. Already ships have begun to enter this region in search of valuable resources to fuel its failing war machine.

The admiral glanced at the latest report. The Cylovan attacks had been stepping up of late, and Ilyatria was becoming less and less defensible. Losing the planet would be terrible, as it was the lynchpin of the entire defensive line for this part of the belt. Not to mention it was a major supplier of the valuable mineral of Erentium. Recent advances allowed it to be synthesized. Mostly thanks to data purchased from the Refuge shortly before they disappeared. However natural sources were cheaper and produced in larger quantities.

Thinking of the Refuge, he had no idea where they had gone, but he hoped they had escaped the sudden Cylovan onslaught. He doubted that they would have allowed themselves to be caught unawares. If they were somehow in the Ikar Radiation Belt they would likely have been fine as the Cylovans so far seemed to avoid it. At least that was the case until just two weeks ago. As a cruiser had attacked miners in the belt just two lightyears from this base. It was a sign that they were adapting their technology to work in the belt now. He wasn’t surprised, the Ilyatrians had joined the alliance a year ago, and already their shield technology was in widespread use throughout the alliance. Its value allowed ships to use the belt as route to get around Cylovan battlelines and hit them where they are more vulnerable.

He had also received reports of them intercepting and engaging some of their attack fleets in the belt’s radiation fields as well. The results of said battles were mixed. Some had favored the Alliance and others had ended in defeat for the Alliance. Tossing the report on his desk, he picked up a request form. If the Cylovans were intensifying attacks in the sector he was going to need more ships, and with them now in the radiation belt, he needed warships to patrol that sector of space as well as to protect their Ilyatrian miners in the system. They could not afford to lose the strategic materials those miners provided the fleet. Without them, they wouldn’t be able to engage the Cylovans as evenly as they had been without ships outfitted with Erentium enhanced weapons. Not to mention this belt had small but valuable deposits of a mineral that the Ilyatrians had previously had no use for, but the Mydorians did. The Mydorians identified it as Rydium, and their scientists had been able to produce a composite alloy using it that was twice as strong as conventional hull materials. Apparently, they learned of the mineral and its uses by studying Refuge technology, but they were unable to fully replicate the Refuge technology.

He wasn’t surprised about that, they were trying to replicate something with only a shallow understanding of how it worked. The Refuge was very familiar with the mineral, and could likely do far more with it than anyone else because they fully understood its properties and knew what to do with it. His own people had opened labs to investigate other uses for it, but so far they had not made much progress. Outside of armor, they had found no uses for it so far, and while they had heard that the Refuge apparently used it in weaponry, and propulsion as well they had yet to figure out how. In fact, the propulsion claim was the one that had them utterly baffled as no one had figured out how they could extract thrust from a lump of crystal.

Regardless this was their only source of the material, and even if it only proved useful for making sturdier hull plating it was a great help for the war effort. Especially considering that it allowed a ship to absorb more punishment, giving it a little more time to restore its shields or get out of the line of fire. He finished his request and highlighted his own opinions on why it was vital that he received these additional ships, while heavily stressing the strategic import of maintaining control of this sector.

Ikar Radiation Belt Spatial Grid E-871-023/V-023-907 Cylovan Stardate 3490217-3 Scoutship 221904302-37A 0320 hours, 2.3 lightyears out from I-22 Star system.

The scoutship’s main drive suddenly cut out. Its sensors registered increasing amounts of spatial flux in the area and quickly determined that the flux was disrupting its warp field. Near I-22 it detected a massive energy anomaly. The readings were fluctuating rapidly, but they were increasing more than they were dropping.

Its scans detected increasing fluctuations in hyperspace readings. Increasingly intense energy reactions were emanating from subspace. If the Cylovans were capable of panic or anxiety they would be suffering attacks of it right now, especially when they saw what was happening to I-22 itself. The entire star was destabilizing. Unusual spikes in local gravity had been detected, and several massive energy spikes preceded solar flares more than a hundred times more intense than those previously recorded by long-range scans. In the last five minutes, the radius of the star had shrunk by nearly seven percent, and output had risen by twenty-three percent. Even more, concerning was that background radiation had spiked 782% above normal and was continuing to increase at rapid levels. The deadly radiation spikes were now draining the shields as they strained to protect the ship from the detrimental exotic radiation in the local area. All of this however only left the ship with mild concern over what it was seeing.

Another energy spike showed up near I-22, and suddenly the star let off a massive shockwave. A massive wave of deadly plasma erupted from its equator in a perfect circular ring that spread out as moved away from the star. The wave hit the spatial flux in the area and gained strength and speed as it propagated into hyperspace. The distortions it caused in hyperspace affected the wave in normal space, and within minutes it was traveling at FTL velocities.

The ship only had minutes before it was hit by the FTL shockwave, and unable to make an emergency warp out, did the only thing it could do. It dumped every last unit of power it could into the shields and sent an emergency report to the primary consciousness.

The shockwave hit about a minute after it finished sending its report. The front wave struck the scoutship with incredible force rocking it about but its shields held. Then the second shockwave hit, and the weakened shields buckled. The outer hull was instantly heated to massive temperatures and liquified the very hull of the ship distorted as the shockwaves tore it apart. The ship fell silent moments before its liquified hull was ripped apart. The very ship scattered across space as the shockwave continued outward on its journey into deep space. With every second it continued to gain power drawing it from subspace.

The Cylovan consciousness was very concerned after studying the report its lost scout ship had sent it. The data showed clear artificial patterns before the wave erupted meaning that someone had done this deliberately, but that was unimportant at the moment. What was important was the shockwave. It calculated that the wave would keep drawing power from subspace until it grew too powerful to be fueled by subspace energy reactions. Being an FTL wave it would reach the nearest inhabited system in fourteen hours. That system being a Cylovan mining colony located on the edge of the Ikar Radiation Belt. That was only the first of hundreds of systems in its path.

It calculated that the wave would hit every system within four thousand lightyears of I-22 before dissipating. There was little it could do, but it began devoting every resource it had to find a way to stop the wave. A very old protocol left in by its creators activated as well, and every Cylovan ship sent a burst transmission of the report on every frequency. Attached to this was its analysis of the danger zone.

The admiral was just about to send his request when suddenly the door to his office was flung open with great force. The door slammed into the wall so hard he expected something to be broken, and the resulting crack of the impact made him wince. A young woman flushed red, and panting stood in the doorway, she quickly said stumbling over the words, “Sir! We just received a communiqué...” then she paused to catch her breath.

He was a little confused as those were pretty normal, they received communiqués all the time. Nothing all that unusual about those, and certainly not so urgent that she needed to rush here, and break his door for. At least until she caught her breath, and declared, “From the Cylovans.”

That really caught his attention as they normally didn’t send anything to his office. They never really spoke with anyone. Curious he asked, “well what does it say?”

He was hoping it was something for the diplomats, but that hope was quickly shattered, “They sent us a scouting report and an analysis. A star they labeled I-22 has exploded and has sent out an FTL shockwave. Their analysis says that every system in a four thousand lightyear radius is in danger. The wave will hit us in about two weeks.”

With every word, he could feel panic welling up in his chest, and it was clear that the young aide was also distressed a bit about this message. He turned to his computer and began typing up a second request. This one intended for the only group he could think of that might be able to help, The Sylnari Remnant.