Alarms blared as Avesi ran down the hallway. She looked out the viewport as five Warp Conduits opened into their solar system within near-light range. A cylindrical ship emerged from one, a glowing maw at the front ready to reclaim raw matter and energy for reprocessing, flanked by armored sides, and heavy weapon emplacements.

From another emerged a bright glowing streak of plasmic slag, a second ship reduced to raw materials by the raw energies present in The Warp, what a terrible fate those on board must have suffered.

Two more jets of slag emerged, and finally a second intact warship, with unmistakable Human engineering. They arrived mere weeks after their armada had been sent on its relatively short 20 year round trip to the nearest star.

Avesi scrambled into the Control Station as weapons fire lit up the orbital platform. She fired up the automated defenses, then took manual control of a High Energy Canon. It was too late. They could detect intruders coming from dozens of light-years away, and had configurable defenses to repel any manner of invasion, but Warp Armadas were... suicidal...

She looked at the jets of plasmic slag that had already moved significantly far away, 3/5ths of the Human Fleet was in ruin before they even arrived. That kind of sacrifice was unimaginable to Avesi, but she pushed her horror away as she saw pods raining onto the Orbital Platform.

Armored humans ran out, many of them dying as their suits suffered breached seals and died in the very vacuum brought in with their breaching pods. But the rest ran forward, weapons belching plasma, tearing through metal, tearing through flesh.

It wasn't long before Avesi and a small number of other survivors were rounded up in the control room, the a Human captain overseeing their security.

Aveesi spoke up in Veelan, "Why are you so horrible to your own kind? Throwing so many lives away in the pursuit of a fast victory?"

The man turned to her, glancing at a translator module. He gave her a Grim tight-lipped smile. "You can afford to travel between the stars in safety, decades at a time between neighbors."

He stepped forward towards her. "For us to cross into your system that way, it sacrifices all of us. Traveling through the Warp is the only way any of us will ever live to see our destination."

Outside the viewport, the two surviving warships positioned themselves to catch the streams of plasmic slag, processors converting the energetic stream of matter back into metal, back into plating, back into new ships for a new crew.