disabling its beam turrets, is destroyed in the engagement. The Alliance Fleet soon resumes its efforts to track down Bosch, and discover that Bosch had built a device that enables him to communicate with the Shivans, which was the purpose of ETAK; the Alliance realise the jump gate was activated by Bosch, who had been stealing artefacts from archaeological sites looking into the Ancients, and had been hoping to meet and contact the Shivans. The Shivans respond to his transmission, and in turn board his command frigate, the Iceni, and capture him and fifteen other crewmen before attempting to destroy it. The GTVA manage to save the surviving crew of the Iceni and the ETAK device, but as they try to intercept the Shivan transport carrying Bosch, they discover a second jump gate in the nebula, which the Alliance destroyer, the GVD Psamtik, attempts to secure. However, it is destroyed by another Sathanas juggernaut shortly afterwards, forcing the GTVA to pull out. During this time, the GTVI and SOC launch a secret operation within the nebula, at great risk, to recover an operative and check the other side of the gate, discovering the threat posed to the GTVA by the Shivans is much greater than they had thought. The Alliance devises a plan to halt the Shivan invasion while evacuating civilians and others from the Capella star system, by collapsing the two jump nodes from Capella to the rest of GTVA space. The Alliance plans to recreate the same conditions that collapsed the Sol jump nodes—namely a sufficiently powerful meson explosion, using a number of Great War-era destroyers, including the Bastion, which the GTVA send out to collapse the Capella–Epsilon Pegasi node by detonating its payload while it is within the node. The plan works but it is pyrrhic victory, as the GTVA loses the Colossus, their only match for Shivan juggernauts, in a diversionary engagement at the other end of the Capella system. With not much left to do but escort the remaining evacuation convoys to the Capella–Vega jump node while a second payload is sent to the jump node, the GTVA soon begins to detect activity from the system's star, which is being bombarded with an intense subspace field by numerous Sathanas-class ships. This causes the star to go supernova, destroying the fighting GTVA and Shivans in system. The player can choose to flee the scene when the