The Taian 1st fleet had been established shortly after the Great Revolution to serve as the vanguard of the ITF. When Taian expansion had essentially halted thirty years previous with the last Atrin capitulation, the 1st's role had shifted from being the Directorate's spearhead to being its security force. As such, the Godspeed and the rest of the Fleet found themselves on a constant series of patrols throughout Taian space, rounding up pirates and other undesirables.
Now, however, they had a real job. Elements of the Central Fleet in orbit over K'arhnos III had reported an aggressive alien raid on the planet itself. The enemy's scouting force had apparently been destroyed, but not before hitting the densely populated K'arhnos III with some type of high-energy beam that had caused, estimates said, over 15,000 civilian casualties.
As soon as the distress signal had come in, the fleet, currently docked at *redacted*, powered up their engines and weapons systems, expecting a distress signal from a freshly attacked planet to come in at any second. When they did receive it, they were ready.
Admiral Khran'ist paced back and forth over the bridge, a habit of his that, while helping to clear his thoughts, typically served only to distract his bridge officers. But today they were utterly focused--their fear forced them to such a state of panicked concentration that the tension on the bridge was almost palpable. There was none of the typical chatter that filled the bridge, only silence.
Suddenly, a burst of static shattered the bridge's self-imposed quiet. ****, this was it, wasn't it? The admiral glanced at the comlink and affirmed his suspicions. A distress signal from Hoarem, an agricultural planet on the edge of known space. As the bridge crew listened, to the explosions and the shouts audible in the background more so than the speaker, they became aware--truly aware--that this wasn't just some small incursion. This was a full-scale invasion.
When the speaker's transmission finally cut off, the admiral knew what he had to do. He picked up his comlink and quickly rattled off a list of ships--30 ships; 5 Retribution-classes, including the Godspeed, 15 Kronos-classes, and 10 S'takk classes--that were to assist in the defense of Hoarem. Hopefully, they would be enough to move the invaders to sue for peace, at the very least. "Blood is honor," he said solemnly, in the customary Taian salute, and then he hung up.
The selected ships jumped to hyperspace. (Or whatever it's called.)
--
First Contact Site, Machweik Space
The brief silence that followed the first subspace transmission was followed by a burst of that hideous language grating through the speakers, causing several of the officers present to reflexively cover their ear-place-things. The beautifully rendered translation followed shortly afterward, pouring forth the sweet siren's song of the Taian in a somewhat miraculous transition:
" Unidentified vessels: Further advance is prohibited. By the hierarchs, we ask that your vessels alter course -- turn away from Hierarchy space. Once you have complied, we ask that your vessels come to a halt. Explorers or not, protocol dictates that all unidentified vessels within Hierarchy space are to be intercepted and escorted to a safe location until it is established that you are not with harmful intent. We are willing to send a diplomatic shuttle over if you are willing to comply."
Ramus nodded to himself. It made sense; he'd have done the same in his counterpart's situation. Pressing the "transmit" button, he sent an order about to the rest of his ships--a measly fleet of two S'takk-class frigates and a pair of smaller attack ships--to cease movement and change direction. Once he was satisfied that his order had been complied with, he returned the transmission. "We eagerly await your contact team," he said, and then hung up.
--
Lugoti planet
Arkhanis now found himself in the admittedly awkward position of holding a blade to his opponent's throat, or whatever would have been his--its?--throat if he hadn't been a walking oyster. The attack had gone fairly well, as, luckily for the group of cadets, the natives had proven fairly incompetent fighters. The rest of the group was fleeing, and the Taian had halted their attacks in a fit of exhaustion.
He looked around. His comrades looked on expectantly. Arkhanis had already bloodied his blade today--it was stained blue--but letting a wounded opponent suffer would be the greatest dishonor. So, pushing whatever doubts he had about the action aside, he shoved his Kag'nata cleanly through his opponent. Blood spurted everywhere, and, drawing it out and sheathing the sword in one clean motion, he stepped back into the Taian ranks.
Double Helix Nebula/GR-10 System/planet Fizz/Main zatrai central building 11:55, 9th may 2604
The hibrus, looking over the attack on its city was in shock over Raznat refusing to send reinforcements, but Raznat did indeed have a point. If Ivring wanted to keep its position, it had to fight for it and not rely on its emperor to do everything for it. As of now, Ivring must without help quell Ribbles who to the Hibrus are for some practically arbitrary reason are attacking the zatrai occupants on Fizz. The Hibrus reasoned perhaps it was over juicing, the process done to turn them to mush required for zatrai consumption despite only few ever needing to be juiced and those chosen are completely up to the Ribbles so they could have just sent over their mentally disabled or criminals. Perhaps their organic minds made them just hate zatrai, as just the Hibrus how's it supposed to know? Whatever the reason was, it is obvious that these things may actually kill all the zatrai here.
With no other option, Ivring decides to call in Arctek Aszig. Azing flies into the main Hibrus building at a fast speed slowing down inside the stadium like room the Hibrus resides in. Ivring tells Aszig, "We need new tactics, and we need them now. Please give me any ideas you have at hand." Aszig replies "Earlier on when the Ribbles went mad, I noticed their strategy that proved effective against our own. What they did was they kept spread out relying on tele communicative devices in their cities to conduct surprise attacks against some of our humble zatrai using their speeder missiles and snipers. They often spread themselves out and attack zatrai from all corners they can. I have done some thinking and testing with comrades and found an effective way to counter this." The Hibrus barks "What? I must know!", interrupting Aszig a bit, but Aszig proceeds to explain "By not being in the open like a idiot. We left ours selves to vulnerable to attack and forgot completely about ambushing tactics. If we spread ourselves out like they do and use less zatrai that are instructed to be more hidden and use the Repeaters we may be able to mount an effective way of stopping their attacks."
The Hibrus, happy to hear this replies "This is great news. Now let's put this into action. I shall use the built in defenses in the city to fend off as many of these Ribbles as I can." and proceeds to activate multiple turrets located throughout the city, popping up from underground in preparation for the Ribble attack. The zatrai who were at first in the open prepared to attack them quickly decide to find various nooks and crannies in the futuristic city scape to hide and attack from as the Ribbles come in welding their rocket based weaponry. They had spider-like walkers armed with seeker missiles and their infantry wielded with what can be best described as rapid fire explosive rifles.
Despite their 21st century level tech the low gravity of the planet clearly is a factor here in their technology. Either way it is likely the ribbles must have spent much time making this equipment behind the zatrai;s backs. They really don't like zatrai, not a single bit despite the zatrai imposing no laws on them, merely asking that they fulfill two quotas. heck, the zatrai sent by the Hibrus to interact with them even helped them mine for crystals and pick those who shall be sent to be juiced. They have no true justification to attack, none foreseeable at all.
Now it is time to show them not to be so cruel to their protectors and symbiotic partners. If these ribbles want war, they shall get war! A group of spider walkers with a brigade of Ribbles armed with speed rockets and explosive machine guns flooded into the main area causing multiple turrets to quickly pop up behind them and start spraying the legs of the spider walkers with a very sticky gel that the spider walkers got stuck in while other turrets quickly popped up in front of the infantry that starting spraying the gel onto the infantry encasing them rapidly suffocating them before they could react. However only some of the infantry was hit by this and they retaliated by blasting the turrets out with their speed rockets, blowing the modules right off.
However the turrets were just the start of the zatrai defenses.
A squad of zatrai hiding in multiple alley ways around the same area as the spider walkers and soldiers came out from the sides of the buildings where the spider walker that got its legs stuck to the ground because of the gel turrets was around, stuck by the gel and with their Z-Gausses the zatrai repeatably shot the spider walker's main body making large dents in it until the spider walker just slumped thanks to the power generator within the walker being crushed by the concussive force of the gauss weapons.
The Hibrus was very happy to see one of their spider walkers destroyed, but there was still three more. If Ivring had those reinforcements it could have just had a cruiser take these out, but this was not how this battle shall go. It shall go the hard way: Kill every damn spider walker on the ground using small arms. Ivring had more turrets pop up and the same process seen with the first spider walker was initiated on the other three.
Arctek Aszin decided to command one of the zatrai squads, having the zatrai on its command shoot the legs and not the body with the gauss cannon proving to be actually pretty effective in taking these spider walkers down because they just tilted over after a leg got shot off by the repeated shots from the zatrai's gauss weapons. The infantry however were an issue as well, with those speed rockets that can instantly kill a zatrai if they hit.
Aszin decided to have its three zatrai armed with dual repeaters quickly fly around their rocketeers in circles, like a vulture flying over its prey and keep shooting them giving the rocketeers on the ground no time to get in a shot in. With the far distance and constant movement of the zatrai, the rockets even with their rapid speed modifications just couldn't hit the zatrai as they just did some quick move to dodge around the missiles while hailing the infantry with dozens of gel projectiles hundreds of feet above them.
Thanks to Aszin, the tide of this skirmish has changed. Perhaps Raznat may now send in reinforcements after this event and the ribbles will think twice before trying to attack the zatrai central zone. However there still was the issue of dealing with the guerillas crawling around, but that's an issue that can be resolved later, now more zatrai are needed to lean from the Arctek and apply the new tactics against the guerillas.
Jester Nebula/Pariant System/On LP7-20B/Planet Artak in the Vito Nebula
8:00 Human time
4:00 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
The pods landed in an encircling position around the village. The footsoldiers quickly got out, raised their rifles, and walked into the village slowly. A rather large villager sporting crudely fashioned stone armor ran out of a large cabin and heaved a spear at one of the footsoldiers, quickly drawing his sword. The spear glanced off of the soldier's power armor, and he shot the villager in the face.
The rest of the small force was not far behind that one villager. They probably thought they would send him out as an intimidating scout, then follow up and beat the intruders down. Not so. One after another, the villagers had their faces melted off by plasma bolts, killing the little pink parasites inside. The Gerian scouts from earlier showed up in full power armor, scaring the soldiers at first. However, it seemed like the undead scouts hadn't turned the shielding on, and the plasma bolts cut through their armor like butter. As the battle escalated, the three stealth commandos slipped in, taking positions inside the town.
Meanwhile, Leos had found his own perch. A cluster of fairly level tree stumps. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. He lined up a shot on one slow-running villager, blowing his head off. Through his scope, he saw the others in his op slaughtering villagers in the center of the town. Dess and Vek went for the flashier approach. Dess embedded her daggers in the back of two villager skulls, twisting them to shred the little buggers inside. Vek was cleaving villagers in half with his sword, from the top down. Of course, he couldn't go all the way, but all the way through the head and neck was good enough.
Natalia, however, took the more effective route. She embedded her spikeblade into the side of their heads, quickly moving up the line. She dispatched five villagers in a matter of seconds, and continued on to the next group. The villagers were completely lost during this charade. They weren't expecting to be trapped between two superior forces, and therefore were simply swinging their weapons wildly, hoping to do some damage. They ended up injuring each other more than they did the Gerians.
That was more of a problem than you would think. Leos had to quickly take out any injured villagers, lest they die and release their parasitic hosts. One time he was overwhelmed with targets, and a pink slimeball actually did get out. However, the mass of soldiers firing on it took it out before it could do any damage. After a few hours, the warriors had completely subsided. Nevertheless, the soldiers searched every house for remaining survivors.
The villagers didn't appear to have any children, which was odd. No time to worry about that though. The soldiers assumed the ones wearing dresses or aprons were women, who they ended up killing just to be safe. For good reason too, as they found a dead pink parasite in every one. Some houses had hiding villagers, waiting to launch a sneak attack on any intruding Gerians. They just ended up dying more painfully.
Once almost the entire village was cleared out, one house was left. It was big, locked and reinforced, so they saved it for last, amassing a rather large force at the door before shooting out the lock and kicking it down. Inside was not a waiting army of soldiers, or even one of parasites. It was a massive hole in the ground, filled with thousands of murky green spheres. Eggs. Just looking at them, writhing and squirming, induced nausea. Intertwined between them were several thousand pink larvae, flailing about.
Most of the soldiers didn't even want to go near the eggs. Several were thinking rationally, and went to get explosives from the pods to blow up the eggs. At this time, Leos was approaching the town. Natalia told him about the eggs, just as the explosives detonated, killing them all. There was cheering and applause from most Gerian soldiers. Vek, however, did not cheer. He bent down and poked at a dead parasite with his gun barrel. Most had been incinerated or vaporized, but this one was almost completely intact, minus the slash wound through the top.
Vek himself had killed this one. However, that wasn't why he was observing it. Leos, Natalia and Dess walked up to where he was sitting. The footsoldiers were oblivious to their finding, as they were too busy celebrating. Inside the pink parasite were not veins, blood, or anything any of them had seen before in an organic being. What was inside them was circuitry, wires, and strange glowing blue rocks.
"They're machines." Leos stated what they were all thinking. But Vek looked worried still. "Not just any machines. I've definitely seen this circuitry before." He spit on the ground next to the dead creature, picking it up. "I have to get this back to Command." He started hurrying back to the pod they had arrived in. "Vek!" Dess called out. "What's wrong?"
Vek turned his head towards them. "They're Old Gods."
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
Remainder of 46th Fleet of the Emperor's Mighty Reign/Cluster X55-856/Some Taian star system 16:52 Human time
8:26 Gerian time
When all seven crafts had landed, footsoldiers immediately poured out, guns at the ready. They were forming a perimeter on the planet, expanding quickly as more soldiers clambered out of their respective ships. Others were dragging out large metal cubes from the cargo bay. They were meta-structures, collapsible walls, windows and doors that could be arranged to form buildings. They definitely weren't the best buildings, but they were a quick, temporary solution.
Once everyone was out of the ships, people rushed to unload the cargo bays. They were packed full, but a workforce of 350,000 Gerians can move equipment surprisingly fast. Once everything was unloaded, the pilots gunned their crafts' engines again. They were going on a suicide mission, and they knew it - being a craft operator in the Gerian military meant that more likely than not, you were going to die. However, the alternative would be spending your life fighting constantly, and while that's fine for some people, it's not for others.
The pilots were faced with troubling circumstances. They didn't know what they were up against. They could run a dangerous distraction operation against one measly scout ship, and leave their settlement open to attack. Or they could start firing head on at an entire military armada, and get blown out of the sky before they can even lift a finger. They were communicating over encrypted radio frequencies, and agreed they would send out pulses to get an idea of what the opposing force looked like. Until then, they would circle the planet, defending.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the soldiers were making good use of their supplies. Anti-spacecraft guns were being set up on top of the makeshift buildings. These guns had a primary and secondary barrel, the secondary fired first, blasting nuclear plasmoid to take out most electronics on a ship from the resulting EMP. It doesn't even need to be much, a lot of ships run on interconnected electronics and even taking out a few of those electronics can do a huge amount of damage.
The primary gun follows up with a particle beam. Particles can't exactly be created, so they only have a few particle beams. About 18-25 usually. The secondary gun only uses a very small amount of nuclear plasmoid for each blast, so they last a while. However, the primary gun has to be extremely accurate to do any potential damage. As for the range, the guns can easily punch a hole through anything within or near the atmosphere. They can hit at orbital range, but rarely. Beyond that, they are completely unreliable. In this particular fleet drop, the Gerians had about 150 of these guns.
The rest of the crates were supplies. Food, water, and lots and lots of military equipment. There were also a few atmospheric conditioners to absorb any nuclear radiation remaining in the air. Once things settle down on the colony, soldiers are to report to on-site med ops to be tested and treated for radiation poisoning. Only one of the many dangers of this type of operation. Once all the footsoldiers were in place, they held their ground, preparing for any resistance.
Double Helix Nebula/Resus Star System/Valis/Prime Center 2:00 AM, 13th May 2604 Earth Time ((Takes place in the future, wehr stay on track of time it is still the 8th or 9th of may for you))
Raznat hovers with its lev pack to a area of the room where a 3D hologram of the overall zatrai empire is activated. It notices two changes to its map. Ivring's empire is still there surprisingly enough while something odd has happened in the developing colony Raznat sent those reinforcements to. Raznat isn't pleased as the complete opposite happened contrary to results as the Hibrus with no reinforcements somehow made it while the Hibrus who got reinforcements somehow got replaced. How some obsidian tipped spear wielding creatures with no feasible way of destroying a zatrai managed to take out a Hibrus very impresses Raznat although the Hibrus of that planet must have been a very terrible Hibrus for letting itself be killed even with the reinforcements arriving practically in time for the new Hibrus.
Raznat decides to open communications with the new Hibrus, but the message may not reach for a couple days.
Jester Nebula/Pariant System/On board Craft 6, 53rd Fleet of the Emperor's Mighty Reign/Orbiting Planet Artak in the Vito Nebula
May 10 2604
13:24 Human time
6:42 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"Sir!" The messenger walked into the room, dipping his head in salute to Vek. "The samples taken were tested. They contain the same programming as the Old God machines. Command says to tell you that having a piece of their technology will be very useful should they ever return." Vek kicked a chair over, cursing. "That should be good news. But all I know now is that those ****ers are back again."
"What about the glowing blue rock?" Leos asked, interested. "I know an Old God has never been taken alive. Was it a power source?" The messenger turned and saluted Leos. "The blue rocks stopped glowing during transport. A power source, however, could not be found inside the machines. Command is assuming the rocks were a power source and that the Old Gods found a way to disable it after death."
Leos nodded. "Thank you." The messenger saluted again. "Sir." he said, and walked away down the hallway. Almost immediately after he left, another messenger walked in carrying a metal box. "The spare sample you asked for, sir." Vek took the box and dumped its contents on the table, handing it back to the messenger. Inside it was a dead parasite. It was mostly melted and had lots of loose wire ends.
Vek picked it up, dropped it on the floor and stomped on it with his steel boot repeatedly. When he was through, the remaining flesh was shredded, the wires were severed, and the circuitboards were smashed up. But the no-longer-glowing rocks were still completely intact. And they immediately began to glow blue again. Vek's expression changed from anger to fear.
"What's it doing?" he was clearly still terrified of these machines. Suddenly a voice sprang from the demolished remains of the creature. "Hello, Uru Vek." The voice didn't sound mechanical at all. It was clear and deep, the voice of a leader. It commanded respect or fear, or a combination of the two. Leos, Natalia and Vek gazed on it in awe.
"It's so nice to see you again, Vek. We've missed you. Face feeling okay?" The voice sarcastically asked. Vek again stomped on the already-broken specimen. "SHUT UP!" he shouted at it. The voice, however, continued talking. "Tell your friend thanks. You know, the one in your squadron who gave us all the info about your homeworld, what kind of defenses you have and how to disable them. Oh wait. You don't know, do you?" Vek picked up the remains and smashed them on the table, splitting the entire creature into pieces. The rocks remained without a scratch.
"You're bluffing!" Vek yelled at it. "There's no leak! The Gerians are far superior to your pathetic race. We killed you, remember?" The voice chuckled. "Well, you clearly didn't do a very good job, did you? As for what I remember, millions of your people were slaughtered by mere modified worker bots. Remember that, Vek?" Vek stomped some of the broken pieces again. "SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" The voice laughed again. "So tell me, Vek, how's your wife?"
He had had enough. Picking up a pistol from his desk, he shot up the remaining bits and pieces until only ash remained. And yet the glowing rocks still appeared completely unharmed. Vek's floors and walls now had melted holes in them from the gun's plasma bolts. "Well, it's nice to know we can put all that genocide behind us. We'll be in touch, Vek. See you soon." The rocks stopped glowing as the voice ceased.
Vek turned to Leos and Natalia. "Looks like we have a leak." he said bitterly.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Council Chambers, Gerald T. Watson Building, Arcadia, Rigel System, Ulysses Nebula 5:38 PM Local time, 12:55 AM GMT (approx.)
Chancellor Mayaan sighed, and leaned back in his chair. He wiped the sweat off of his forehead, and wondered why bureaucracy was so difficult to manage.
For three days now, the Council had been divided over how many ships they had to send in. Currently, it was three of them (Atax, Hajal and Yamasaki) trying to get the other three (Cytek, Redmond and Unecco) to send in their share of ships; but he was fairly sure the sides had been revered just half an hour ago.
He started paying attention to the conversation again just in time to hear Cytek roar,
"I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR MUM WOULD THINK OF ME! SHE CAN GO TO 'ELL FOR ALL I CARE!"
"SILENCE!" the chancellor thundered. Cytek turned pale, and the rest of the representatives chuckled.
"Thank you." he commented, before continuing, "Now then. You've been warring about how many ships you each have to send for three days. Have you reached any kind of consensus?" he asked.
"One battlecruiser, three normal cruisers, five destroyers, ten frigates and 17 million credits towards the Leviathan Project for each two systems controlled; as well as five more modules for building the next Navy battleship, sir." the Atax rep. read from his data pad.
"I see. Then why are you arguing?" the chancellor pressed, with an accusing tone of voice.
"Cytek is claiming that they shouldn't have to chip in as many ships because of the Alkonost Project; Redmond is too small to fill the order, and Unecco is being childish and refusing." the Atax rep. replied with a bit of a judgemental tone.
"Thank you." the Chancellor said to Atax in a considerably less accusing voice. Using said accusing voice again, he said to the opposing party,
"You each have ninety seconds to explain why you shouldn't have to give your share of ships. If it's a good reason, the vote will show our approval. If not, you will be mandated to give the required number." the commanded.
"Cytek, you first." he finished, and leaned back in his chair.
This is going to be funny. he thought.
The Cytek representative stood up, cleared his throat, and began:
"Cytek shouldn't have to build the quota of ships because the funding is needed for the Alkonost Project. Having to give that many ships would delay the completion of the project by nearly a year. As such, I believe that having it be that number for the entire State would be more reasonable, and not hinder research." he sat down.
"I see." the chancellor said, trying not to laugh.
"Tell me, Mister Carter; about how much money does your company annually spend on the Alkonost project?"
"Two-hundred-and-seventy-five billion credits." the rep. recited, as if by rote.
"And Cytek consistently reports over one trillion credits of profit each year. I think we all know how this will turn out." the chancellor said, and inwardly sneered.
"Voting time. Please press the corresponding buttons on your data pads." the chancellor announced.
Three buttons appeared on the touchscreens of the rep's data pads; a red one, a white one, and a green one. Each rep. pressed one, and the window closed.
A tally appeared on the chancellor's pad.
"It fails. Cytek, you are hereby responsible for contributing two battlecruisers, six cruisers, ten destroyers, twenty frigates, thirty-four billion credits for the Leviathan Project, three capital ship thruster modules, one MAC gun barrel section 500 metres in length, and seventeen thousand one-metre-by-one-metre layered plating. All must be Navy-grade, and will be tested upon completion. All are expected in forty-three weeks at the end of the fiscal year." the chancellor commanded.
He tapped the screen on his pad a few times, and the order list was sent to Cytek's headquarters.
"Redmond, you're next." he snapped.
The Redmond rep. stood up, and said:
"Redmond cannot contribute as many ships because Redmond only controls one system, and as such can only do some of the ships. We are willing to do half of everything, though." he said, and sat down.
"Well, that was relatively painless. VOTE!" he announced. Once again, the buttons appeared, and the representatives voted.
A tally appeared on the chancellor's screen.
"It passes. Redmond, you are required to send one battlecruiser, one cruiser, two destroyers, five frigates, 9,5 million credits and fifteen battleship reactor fuel rods by the end of the fiscal year." the chancellor commanded.
Once again, he sent the order to the rep's headquarters.
"Unecco!" he yelled.
The Unecco rep. looked around as if considering something, before announcing,
"Unecco will send in their quota, and no longer argue."
"Good choice." the chancellor commented.
"Gentlemen, I will send the orders to both you and your respective headquarters. Adjourned!" he announced.
The representatives left the chamber, leaving the chancellor alone. He looked over the notes, making sure everything was correct.
Total: 1/4 of a battleship, thirteen battlecruisers, 37 cruisers, 60 destroyers, 10 frigates, 391 million credits towards the Leviathan Project.
Send?
He pressed 'send', and the message went out after a few seconds of loading. He left the room shortly thereafter, whistling a bit as he made his way to his apartment on the top floor of the building.
We did not invent the Algorithm. The Algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The Algorithm killed Jeeves. The Algorithm is banned in China. The Algorithm is from Jersey. The Algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the Algorithm. This is Close.
Pentagon System, Sowcape, Pylorian colony A 6:50, 8th May 2604 Earth Time
Perspective of builder CZ
Alright builders finished snipers. Now builders can fight with a sniper. The giant fighters enemy has employed are acting odd. Builders have no idea why, perhaps they like to dance in the blood of flesh bags. Builders should try that one day. Builders are taking aim at new fighter class enemy has employed and NOT EVEN THESE ARE DOING ANYTHING AGAINST GIANT FIGHTERS. We are still shooting and we see no dents done in their armor. We have no idea what material they are using, but whatever it is it is real strong. We should have stuff like this, but we are stuck with graphene which has bullets that break if you shoot too fast meaning they shoot slow and we have to grease the tubes up by using the spit from stupid fleshies to make sure they fire out without breaking. These guns only good against flesh and lame armor and we have nothing else to use against these things.
Send in more fleshies while we stick to the back and throw them maybe that will work!
Perspective of flyer RRRR
There are enemy flyers. Lots of them and they look real angry for some reason. I dunno why though we did nothing! Whatever I am going to kill them with my other flyers let's go! I see bright lig- BZZZZZZZT- IM FALLING AND I CAN'T GET UP HELP HSHEDoidhioediohewhde
Perspective of flyer RRRS
They are zapping us with lightning! Charge at the plane and never stop just keep attacking with limbs maybe we can stop them if we try hard enough maybe we can slow them down and stop them from crashing into us. I got onto a plan and am hitting t and the metal is not breaking at all on these things. It is like they are made of super graphene or something. We need more flyers to help take this thing down!
Overall Perspective
Hundreds of flyer pylorians start to flood the sky coming from mines a bit off from here all charging at the planes attempting to hit them with their tendrils with not much avail. Electro lasers are somewhat thinning their numbers, but there is still many of the flyers flying at the numerous planes and another massive wave of fleshies is sent out on ground by builders who chicken away back into the colony realizing not even their snipers can hurt these PAIN tanks. The pylorians just keep on hopelessly fighting against a force superior to them in every way thinking that they may actually live through this.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
One day, there will be someone who looks at my signature and wonders "who gives a damn?"
Jester Nebula/Pariant System/On board Craft 6, 53rd Fleet of the Emperor's Mighty Reign/Orbiting Planet Artak in the Vito Nebula
May 10 2604
15:10 Human time
7:35 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"Sir, what is it?" Leos walked into Vek's office. He had been called down, alone. Natalia was currently sleeping back in their cabin. Vek held up his holopad. "Recognize that?" On it was a log transcript and a long string of numbers and letters. Leos couldn't make heads or tails of it. "No, I don't. What is it?" Vek started pacing.
"Well, we do have a leak. And that's it. An unverified, encrypted feed sent to some nebula near the black hole. This type of thing happens often, because Command needs to communicate with their scouts safely. But this encryption is different. It's a special algorithm, not in our system. Which means we can't crack it without knowing the encryption."
"And for that... we need the person who sent it?" Leos could now see where Vek was going with this. "Exactly. Which brings me to my next point." He pointed to the letters and numbers at the end. "The Gerian network can't be accessed without a verified identity, complete with ID tags and timestamp. There's no way around that. Our rat probably thought they wouldn't ever be caught. This looks perfectly legitimate unless you know what you're looking for. That's what they get for trusting those robot ****ers."
"All right." Leos said. "So what's the problem? Just run the ID tags, and you'll get a name." Vek nodded solemnly. "Yep. That's what I did. The prefix on the tags means they're a commando, and the suffix means they're..." he paused. "...in this sector." Vek looked him right in the eyes. "That narrowed it down to four people. The search didn't take long."
Leos felt his stomach sink. "Me? Sir, I didn't do this!" Vek's expression didn't change. "No, you didn't." He turned his monitor towards Leos. It clearly read "Natalia Rez" with the exact same tags underneath. Leos shook his head. "Natalia's the leak." He checked the timestamp again. "She said she was going to call her mom at that time. I didn't think anything of it."
Vek took the pistol off his desk. "And she's alone in your room right now?" Leos cursed quietly to himself. "Vaxc. Come on!" They ran down the hall to 7-207, and Leos slowly opened the door so as not to wake her. But she wasn't there. They looked at each other in despair. "We're floating around in space. Where could she have gone?" Leos asked. Vek thought about it for a while. "The cargo bay. I've heard stories about jumpers who hid in the storage containers and ended up being shipped to Earth."
"We're not docking for weeks, she wouldn't go so early. What about the escape pods? They're locked unless the ship takes structural damage, right?" Leos wondered out loud. Vek nodded, then groaned. "I guess I probably shouldn't have shot up my floors, should I?" They ran to Life Support, where the pods were stationed. All of them were intact. "That means she's still on the ship." Vek said. "I'll have this area sealed for now, then we'll need to spread out and look for her."
Leos nodded, running off. The first place he looked was the library. Crew members often studied military strategy there, something Natalia did often. Surprisingly, she was there, exactly where she always was, in a chair near the back of the room. In her hands was Lilen, the book he had lent her. She was already a good ways though the book, which Leos didn't expect with her limited knowledge of the Dukurian language. He quickly ran up.
"Nat." he whispered, so as not to draw any attention to himself, walking up to her. She looked up, smiling. "Hey! Check it out, I'm reading literature. Me. Reading freaking literature. Amazing." Leos just looked puzzled even further. "What? Nat, Vek knows everything. He sealed Life Support, there's no way off the ship." She gave him an odd look. "Oookay." she said, returning to her book.
"Wh... is it not you?" Leos was more than frustrated at this point. "Is what not me?" Natalia said, closing the book at last. "The leak. Vek found a message to the Old Gods in the logs. It was your ID card that was used." Now it was her turn to look worried. "Vaxc, are you serious? My ID card is in my drawer. No one knows where it is but me." Together, they ran back to their cabin, where Natalia frantically threw open a drawer.
"It's... not... here." she said, rifling through her other various possessions. "I've only used it once, and that was to get on the ship. Is someone actually trying to frame me? It could be anyone on the ship!" Leos shook his head. "Vek said it was definitely sent from this sector. Nobody from other sectors would be over here. But that only narrows it down to 10 people. 7 if you don't count you, me, or Vek. Who would want to do this?"
"I have a hunch." Natalia said, pursing her lips.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Double Helix Nebula/Resus Star System/Valis/Prime Center 10:00 AM, 10th May 2604 Earth Time
Raznat floats around its main center some more thinking about the accomplishments it has done, from the invention of the Razor craft to the successful conquests of Vargi-II, it feels like that Raznat's days are starting to become numbered. Raznat goes on a mental tangent in its head. It is a very repetitive tangent repeated at incredible speeds, once every 3 or so seconds thinking nearly the exact same thing again and again. If a human were to try to diagnose Raznat, surely they would find a mental disorder for the Visulik.
One day, even Raznat the Visiluk of the entire Zatrai race will be destroyed and replaced. Perhaps such an event would be one of the best things to happen to the Zatrai race as of now. After all, thousands of years of running this empire means it has been using the same, pathetic tactics again and again and eventually they will be countered and some other race may destroy all of zatrai civilization. They see the Zatrai race as monsters over some spilt blood, despite spilt blood being how all races live one way or another.
Being old has its consequences indeed. After all, why doesn't Raznat just use its zatrai to have a suicide squad sent into uncharted space and kill as much as possible? Why settle for this **** slow form of expansion? Why not do what zatrai were built for in the first place? Kill things! No, if it did such move the consequences would be dire. The zatrai empire on the brink by living at the center of galaxy, where if they struck they would be surrounded at all sides by civilizations who see zatrai as a threat to their existence, despite being a greater threat to our own.
However if the zatrai stay here, what stops these empires and civilizations from just going in and attacking zatrai anyways? One day some empire will want our turf, and one day they will somehow out beat even the greatest war machines this galaxy has ever seen thanks to how old we are. Millions of years ago we fought alien empires in the name of our suicidal creators. The zatrai race shall not end up like the creators before us. But the creators couldn't just one day regenerate due to luck like we can.
Stop.
It is very unhealthy to think about such negative thoughts. The zatrai empire is prosperous, controlling hundreds of worlds and the skills of the zatrai remain seemingly unmatched. The only times we ever have lost was when natives exploit the shortcomings in our defenses, but even than it is not so common. We are powerful, we are plentiful, we are unstoppable. Our creators may have only expected us to be useless war machines with the sole intention to kill, but we have evolved beyond that. Far, far beyond that. We created a society with rules and inventions of our own doing without them handing it to us like a vergusan mother hands milk pods to a baby!
Why... I should do something unthinkable. Something for the sake of it.
Raznat suddenly snaps out of its constant internal tangents as a Hibrus with its 3D holographic form appears.
It is Raznat's most respected Hibrus, Yizok, one of the descendants of Yizor. "Why hello there, Raznat. You may be interested to hear that the Vargins of Vargis-II want to speak with you. They are greatly honored to speak to what they have called, 'the Hibrus of all Hibruses'. Thanks to being one of our longest running colonies, they speak our language very well." Yizok happily tells Raznat, but Raznat a bit annoyed that Yizok is telling Raznat what it knows, barks "I am aware of that!" and Yizok quickly replies "Sorry!". Raznat. no getting down to business asks "So what do the Vargins want to say to me?" Yizok answers, "They made a letter of appreciation for you. They thank you for thousands of years of protection, and forgive you for your necessary 'taxes' with the juicing, understanding that they know it is what zatrai need to do to survive.". Interested, Raznat asks "Read it to me, I am curious.".
Yizor reads aloud the message. It goes as follows:
Dear Visiluk Raznat,
This marks the thousandth year you have aided us in our expansions in the galaxy. If it wasn't for the support of the zatrai, we never would have seen so much of space. We thank you for treating us not as slaves, but as equals. We thank you allowing us to reverse engineer your weaponry and allow us to utilize it in our own crafts, we would like to thank you for aiding us in our crystal mining efforts and for being fair enough to allow for us only to have certain Vargins juiced for zatrai feeding.
While some other races (some of which now for the better of this galaxy now extinct) tell us that the zatrai are these monsters who farm us like free-range animals, we know that in truth that it is more of a symbiotic relationship. Something common in nature and to see the zatrai as monsters for needing blood is illogical if not bigoted. You give the few we have juiced a very humane death, a quick shot to kill them before having them juiced meaning that they do not experience pain when killed.
It is a shame so few races understand zatrai like we do. A complete and utter shame. Perhaps one day, other races will be more accepting of the zatrai's nature. One day.
The Aleph of Vargis-II, EruKis
"That's the message, Raznat" Yizok finishes with. Raznat to Yizok's surprise replies "I appreciate the effort put into the message, but it seems impractical. Worshipping us as gods or treating us as these benevolent guardians is completely erroneous. It is a disgrace, complete disgrace." Raznat starts to rant, causing Yizok shut off communications with Raznat almost instantly.
For building as gargantuan and expertly-constructed as the Library of Ol'uesixajra, the great structure was unusually empty most of the time. The word "Library" is perhaps not the best descriptor for this particular structure, as it was more akin to a mighty stronghold or citadel than any repository of knowledge. However, despite the edifice's formidable outward appearance, Ol'uesixajra was indeed a repository of knowledge - one of unfathomable proportions. Within the mighty granite walls of this slave-built citadel was the amassed knowledge of the entire Hyxeran race stored on countless memory prisms contained within vast catacombs whose walls were filled from the floor to the ceiling with prism sockets. For a race whose very purpose was the discovery and cataloging of all knowable things, these halls were hallowed indeed. Hyxera rifted here from throughout the Hyxeran homeworld of Tla'muuxera and the other colonized worlds regularly to compare their research to previous volumes or perhaps sate their curiosity on a given subject. Due to its familiarity by all Hyxera, the Library was likely the closest thing the solitary Hyxera had to a capital city. For this reason - during rare circumstances - the library served as a meeting place for the Hyxera when such a place was needed.
Today was one such day. Within the library's vast interior rotunda was an amazing sight to behold: perhaps four to six hundred Hyxera had gathered, all silently communicating with themselves through mental manipulation. The crisscrossing magnetic fields concentrated in this small space vibrated some of the air molecules and caused the air to hum softly. A dim hum to human ears; roaring chatter to the Hyxera. All the while, bright flashes of bluish-white light occasionally lit the rotunda up momentarily as latecomers to the gathering rifted in from the colonized worlds like Mal'juur and Nahgiira. Before long, a crowd of eight hundred Hyxera had gathered around the circular dais of the rotunda; nearly half of the Hyxeran race was in attendance. It was an unprecedented gathering.
Suddenly, the humming of the air came to an abrupt stop as the mental conversations were interrupted. A rift flash left a single Hyxera "standing" in the center of the dais. Even by Hyxera standards, this individual was large and his "antlers" dwarfed likely every other Hyxera's. This was Max'ojar, an ancient, wise Hyxera that served as the caretaker of this library. If the Ol'uesixajra Library could be thought of as the Hyxeran capital, then Max'ojar could perhaps be considered the ruler of the Hyxera. His word was respected by most if not all Hyxera. Considering that it was Max'ojar that called this meeting to order, the unprecedented attendance of this meeting testified to his influence.
"Fellow scholars." Max'ojar began, vibrating the air of the rotunda to produce an audible sound for the crowd gathered all around him. "The circumstances that bring us together to this meeting of the scholars is dire. I shall allow Scholar Er'uzexyer to present the findings that concern each and every one of us." With that, a smaller Hyxera rifted into being right next to Max'ojar in the central dais.
"Hail, fellow scholars." The new Hyxeran on the dais began, speaking in the same manner as Max'ojar did. "I am Er'uzexyer. I operate the Observatory and Orrery of Mal'krujeza on the world of Nahgiira and focus my studies on astronomical matters, chiefly stars. Normally I study and catalog distant stars and nebulas, but recently I began to look closely at the cluster of stars that makes up our local cluster. As I trust all of you know, the cluster of stars our colonized systems float within are very old compared with much of our galaxy. There are several white dwarf stars within our cluster and one in particular, the one we know as Althu'ruujexera, shows troubling signs. Perhaps 800 years ago, I began observing a certain white dwarf in a distant part of our galaxy undergo the same processes which Althu'ruujexera is now exhibiting. Over the next three hundred years, I watched as this particular white dwarf cannibalized material from a supergiant star it was orbiting until it could no longer support itself. This triggered a powerful supernova that assuredly sterilized any nearby planets. I fear that the nearby white dwarf Althu'ruujexera may also do the same thing as it steals mass from her sister main sequence star. I am convinced that a similar supernova will occur in the next one hundred to five hundred years within our own cluster eradicate our civilization."
Intense humming ensued as the entire crowd of Hyxera chattered in feverish telepathy with one another.
"I have prepared memory prisms for everyone on this subject. After reviewing this matter for yourself, I trust that there will be no doubt among us that immediate action must be taken." Er'uzexyer added.
"If I may have permission to ask, Scholar Er'uzexyer, what steps can be taken to prevent this supernova?" A Hyxera from among the crowd asked.
"There is nothing we are capable of doing that can possibly prevent this. Some of us may have the ability to halt nuclear reactions on a small scale, but to deactivate an entire star is well beyond our capabilities. There is, therefore, only one thing we can do, and this is to prepare the immediate evacuation of our civilization from the cluster."
The air within the rotunda buzzed with magnetic energy as the Hyxera chattered wildly amongst themselves.
Jester Nebula/Pariant System/On board Craft 6, 53rd Fleet of the Emperor's Mighty Reign/Orbiting Planet Artak in the Vito Nebula
May 10 2604
15:22 Human time
7:41 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"I really hope you're right about this, Nat." Leos whispered as Natalia opened yet another drawer. "Not only are we out of our designated sector, but Dess is our senior officer. If she reports us, we'll be sent to a "correctional facility. You know, that place they torture miscreants?" Natalia waved the comment off. "Leos, relax. Vek is covering for us. Everyone else is at the brief, including Dess. They all think we're sick. If my card is here, we're in luck. If not, we can slip out before anyone finds us."
Leos sighed and stood guard nervously, not wanting to touch anything. He flinched at every noise made by Natalia's loud search, getting more nervous as the minutes ticked away. After about five minutes, he had had enough. "Nat, the brief's ending. We have to go." She ignored him completely. "I'm almost done looking. It's here, I know it is."
"Well, I've got to go. Like, now. I'd finish up here and run." He turned for the door, but immediately heard the unmistakable clacking of Corporal Srin's heels. He immediately turned back. "****, ****, ****!" he whispered. Quick, find a place to h-" he stopped as Dess herself walked in. "What's going on here?" she immediately demanded. Leos stood frozen, not knowing what to do, but Natalia continued rifling through drawers.
"Natalia!" Dess raised her voice. "You want to tell me what you two are doing in here before I report you?" Natalia suddenly laughed, pulling a card out of one of the drawers. "You want to tell me what you were doing with this, Corporal Srin?" The expression on her face was triumphant. Dess, however, looked worried.
"That's your ID card. What's it doing in my drawer?" She genuinely seemed to not know what was going on. Natalia raised an eyebrow, no longer smiling. "The same ID card that was used to breach the system and leak information to the Gerians' worst enemy? The same ID card that was stolen from me, and just happens to magically appear in your cabin?" Dess stared on in disbelief. "You can't be serious. I didn't do this! Why would I steal your ID card?"
"Well, you did seem to have a general disdain for me at our first meeting. And we don't really have any suspects. This was just a lucky guess." Natalia pocketed the ID card, beginning to pace. Dess stared at the ground, shaking her head. "Well, ****. Look, Natalia, I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. I don't have anything against you, honestly. But a minute ago you two were the guilty ones, and now it looks like it's me."
"It doesn't have to be like this. We can help each other." Leos said, trying to make sense of the situation. "How much do you know about the Empire's info system?" Dess walked over to her computer, looking slightly more cheerful. "Oh, tons. Everyone has something they study during pre-training. Well, for me it was Gerian tech. I learned about everything, from plasma fusion coils to AN\-* programming. I could hack the system myself if I wanted to."
"Great." Leos asked Natalia for her card, throwing it to Dess. "Is there any information about the previous entry made by this card?" Dess took the card, put it under a blue glowing scanner, then brought up the results. "You know how they tattoo a letter-number on your arm in pre-training? It's a complex algorithm, used to access secured information, to prove you're a part of the Gerian Empire. Basically, to keep outsiders from hacking our system."
"All right." Leos said. "So our leak is... in the Empire. Gee, you don't say." She shook her head. "That's only their primary purpose. Their secondary purpose is actually a very well-kept secret. Since not many people use the network, and even fewer know any technical details about it, it really hasn't gotten around. And even when it does, people don't care. Because of the way the info dump works with the algorithm, it can't give everyone a physical ID. However, it can tell you exactly which sector they are assigned to, which is why it's replaced when you are reassigned."
"So we can identify which sector the perpetrator was in? That definitely would be useful." Natalia walked over and looked at the screen. Dess was scrolling through a long list of directories, finally landing on one. "See right there? {53\6\7-20B}. Fleet 53, Craft 6, Sector 7-20B. Your sector. So it couldn't have been me. If you only had this information earlier, you wouldn't have had to sneak in here."
"All right, all right, you've made your point." Leos said. "Can you bring up a list of everyone in our sector?" Dess pressed a few keys, and another directory appeared, with a list of all 10 Gerians in their sector. "Excellent. We know it wasn't me, Nat, or Vek. And then there were seven." Natalia read off the names. "Iop Baeor. Je Daris. Lupe Drake. Graise Fera. Zie Galil. Mercado Oll. Kuba Slate."
Dess grinned. "The hunt begins."
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
UTDU sensor post Gamma-6342
May 10, 2604
10:34 PM, Earth Time
For many centuries, the UTDU had hidden themselves from the Altak Union. Finally, they had decided to reveal themselves to the Union. What better way to announce themselves than with an untraceable method? Rather than assault the Altak, the UTDU decided their entrance would involve light psychological warfare. A single video had been sent towards Mars from a lone sensor outpost outside of UTDU borders. The video consisted of a simple message from the UTDU PM, the video's background being nothing but a video feed which switched between views of the old Canadian Parliament, the White House, and Capitol Building every five seconds. "Good evening, corporate dirtbags. I'd like to tell you that you have another faction of your own people preparing to destroy your empire. Not only are we more advanced than you, but our people are far more intelligent than you. You cannot fool us. Why not just lay down your arms and give up? You can't hope to win. " The feed was timed so that It would arrive on Mars at exactly midnight unless obstructed, and any attempts to track the message would be futile, as sensor post 6342 had already been destroyed.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement."~Winston Churchill
((You forgot that first fleet was at Mars, didn't you.))
Admiral Norman Rockwell, ESS Do You Feel Lucky, in orbit around Mars 10:39 PM GMT, 5:28 AM Local Time, 10 May 2604
Rockwell finally finished signing the NDA papers (and had a serious hand cramp), when the intercom blared,
"Paging Admiral Rockwell! We have an unidentified probe nearing Mars, and broadcasting a message!"
Rockwell sighed.
Not another thing to deal with so soon. Please, just no.
Regardless, he turned his chair the the right to face his Comms Officer; and ordered,
"Well? Put the bloody message on, then!"
The main viewscreen of the bridge turned on, and after a few seconds, the black cut away to a video showing a few random clips of the leaders of long-gone countries, and a rather snarky message boasting of some bunch of rebels getting ready to blow up the AU.
Rockwell sighed. He probably should consider that there might be a threat, but he was annoyed to the point of being snarky himself.
"Bring in the probe for examination. I want to see if it's marked." he ordered, and began floating down the hallway at the back of the bridge to the lift shaft.
Admiral Norman Rockwell, Dropship Bay 3, ESS Do You Feel Lucky, Sol 10:58 PM GMT, 5:37 AM Local Time, 10 May 2604
Rockwell stormed (or at least did the zero-gravity equivalent of storming) into the bay, roughly ten minutes after the chamber had become breathable again.
The bay was a trapezoidal void in the ship roughly 2,5 times the size of a dropship, with metal walls, ceiling and floor. The far wall, while not apparently obvious, was actually a massive, armoured door that slid open to allow dropships to enter and exit the ship. Said door was rigged to both the alarms in the room, as well as the heavily-windowed control booth in the centre-back of the room near the ceiling.
The probe was laying on what appeared to be a massive gurney near the middle of the room; with a 5-man crew of mechanics, scientists and security personnel standing a few metres away. Another table-that-looked-like-a-gurney (this one regular-sized) next to the probe was covered in mechanical tools, ranging from powered drills to screwdrivers to spanners, and monkey wrenches to arc welders.
"Alright, so what are we looking at?" he demanded. Before anyone could react, he noticed that the crew members were all wearing what appeared to be magnetic boots, which explained why they were standing properly.
"Actually, scratch that." he said, and then demanded (for real this time),
"Where can I get a pair of those boots?"
A nearby non-five-man-crew-crewman floated over a few seconds later, with a pair of magnetic boots in hand. Rockwell took them, and did his best to sit down to put them on over his normal shoes.
Now that he could stand properly, he went back to his previous demand, namely,
"So what the hell is this thing?"
One of the two people in the lab coats replied,
"It's a message probe, serial numbered PRB-97177; containing a rudimentary ion drive, a five-gigabyte hard drive, a broadcast system, and a severely damaged radio system. It appears to have left Space2 somewhere outside the Kuiper Belt, as it has none of the plasma residue from exiting a wormhole on it." the scientist finished, before nodding at the other one to continue,
"The only file on the hard drive was a three-gigabyte MP17 video file, lasting one minute and thirty-seven seconds. Vectors for the probe's entry are unknown, as it entered the orbit of Mars at a trajectory indicating that Uranus' orbit had severely influenced it's path."
Rockwell thought for a moment, before turning to the scientist that had spoken first.
"It showed clips of people who appeared to be important leaders. Who were they?" he asked.
One of the scientists whipped out a slim, aluminium-backed datapad, and frantically one-handedly tapped away at the touchscreen keyboard for a few minutes, before replying,
"They were all civic and military leaders from the early 2390's, sir."
"So, what faction left during that time period?" he said with a slightly exasperated tone in his voice.
More frantic scrabbling noises from fingernails rapidly slamming into the glass surface of the datapad.
"Large parts of the United States and Canada, as well as most of the easy-to-get resources of the countries." the scientist replied.
"Thank you. Put the drone into the archive bay. Dismissed." he said, and walked towards the exit, the boots making slightly-irritating clop noises with each step. The boots needed work.
He took them off, and threw them into a collection bay near the exit, making a loud CLANG! noise when they hit the wall.
Floating freely again, he rocketed towards the lift shaft, and flew up to the crew compartments. Quickly reaching his stateroom, he glided over to his desk, before using the handlebars on either side of the (riveted-to-the-floor) desk to sit down in his (also riveted-to-the-floor) swivel chair.
He spun around, and opened up the small, extremely-thin aluminium netbook on the desk. An ASCII 'z/OS' logo made of zeroes flashed across the screen as it connected to the ship's mainframe. He brought up his email, clicked 'compose message', and typed:
A probe containing the attached message entered Sol at 10:34 PM GMT on 10 May, 2604. It is believed to originate from the empire apparently constructed by those who left in the North American Exodus of 2390; and it untraceable.
-Admiral Rockwell
--------------------------
I regret nothing."
He pressed the 'Send' button, and then watched the cheesy-but-helpful graphic that popped up, showing his message's travel through the Space2 communications network; eventually arriving at the dot labelled 'Rigel III'.
He closed the netbook, and floated back towards the door.
We did not invent the Algorithm. The Algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The Algorithm killed Jeeves. The Algorithm is banned in China. The Algorithm is from Jersey. The Algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the Algorithm. This is Close.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, ESS George Reese 1:00 AM, 11 May 2604
In the Marx R system, a small cult of terrorists have started an uprising on a very cold planet called Marx-Delta, a colony world towards the edge of the arcadia nebula and Altak Union space orbiting a F-Class star isolated from many other colonies. Their motives unlike most rebel cults are much... Different. Most of the time, innies try to become independent from the Altak Union due to nationalistic tendencies and wanting self sufficiency or just simple hatred of the corporate machine that is the Altak Union in the first place.
From a wormhole leading from a Mini-Dimension, a part of Admiral Sternum's Fleet reaches the Marx R system. This ship brigade is led by General "Cranium" who commandeers the George Reese, a Battleship that is part of the greater Sternum fleet. General "Cranium" has heard many reports of the psychotic and messed up rituals these cultist Rebels are doing. This is not right, as even rebels have standards usually. General "Cranium" quickly has his small group of hackers get into the poorly (by 26th century standards) blocked comm. channels these cultist innies have set up to get some detailed info, as some small amount of espionage is always good.
"General Sternum sir," one of the hackers after seven or so minutes of hacking pipes up, "We have successfully hacked into their channels. We are going through the information as I speak!".
General sternum, overlooking the hackers seemingly latched onto their computers like machines after a few minutes of quietly waiting barks "Well, what did ya get? Anything interesting yet?".
The hacker's faces are suddenly mortified at what they see, and the general annoyed by the lack of response outbursts "Anything interesting yet?!" causing the hackers to frightfully reply "Well-... We don't know if it is-""Spit it out corporal hacker, we haven't got all day!" "Okay... They are taking people from their homes, slitting their necks and spilling the blood into containers for some reason."
The general a bit confused replies, "What the hell? Anything else...?" "Okay... It seems they have contacted aliens as well."
"ALIENS?! Do you what this means?" General Sternum bursts out in anger.
"Yes, aliens. They even have a pic of one." the hacker responds as a holographic picture of a very segmented and centipede-like creature is seen.
It has five large rounded triangular segments that are connected by a circular tube in the center. Their head is very stream lined and has three tiny, yellow eyes on each side of the head. They have five sets of limbs, three insectoid arm limbs and two tendril-like leg limbs. "I think some of these things are actually on the planet" the hacker continues.
"This is just terrible." The general shouts to a comms. Officer, "Once we finish this operation, tell the Confidentials to cover this up as we do not need aliens spreading their influence among the rebels or else we might have a much worse issue on our hands. Much worse than some wishy washy rebels."
"Understood, sir" the comms. Officer complies, "So what is our first course of action, sir?"
"Tell the admiral about this. We are going to need to make sure no one on this planet gets out." the genral coldly responds, "Order 111 if the admiral chooses to, shall be put into action."
Arcadia Cluster, Mini-Dimension "Ruze", ESS George Reese 1:11 AM, 11 May 2604
Mr. Sternum, Admiral of the third fleet looks out the window of his dreadnaught into the bleak darkness of the mini-dimension as he floats around in the command station with a couple of captains being bored out of their minds. "So what are we exactly doing again, Admiral?" One of the captains ask. "Absolutely nothing while the rebel scumbags prepare to attack us like the scum they are. If that general doesn't get a response in three minutes I swear he will be getting a-"
You Have One Message The AI Mainframe states, interrupting the Admiral.
"Good." The Admiral happily thinks out loud as he tells "Play the message" to the AI mainframe.
From General "Cranium",
Admiral, We have a serious issue on our hands. There have been reported aliens helping the rebels in Marx-Delta. We may need to initiate Order 111 and destroy all records of this planet along with all alien influence of it.
"Well look at that!" The Admiral exclaims, "We got ourselves a Order 111, you know what that means!"
"We try to absolve things in a diplomatic way?" one of the captains incompetently asks. "**** no!" The other captains in unison cheer.
"It means we get to show these scum bags just who they are messing with." The admiral explains with a very evil looking grin.
Jester Nebula/Pariant System/On board Craft 6, 53rd Fleet of the Emperor's Mighty Reign/Orbiting Planet Artak in the Vito Nebula
May 10 2604
16:18 Human time
8:09 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"Okay, Vek, what do you know about this Lupe Drake character?" Leos took out his holopad, prepared to take notes. "Lupe? I've shared a cabin with the guy for the last few weeks. He's a footsoldier, a real tough guy. Spends most of his time out and about, doing who knows what. To be fair, so am I, but I have to run the entire sector. All in all, he's a pretty shady character. Scares the crap out of me."
"So if he was out at the time of the leak, you wouldn't know about it?" Vek shook his head. "No. But to be honest, whoever pulled this off is smart. Lupe may be dealing arms to some rogue faction, but I don't think he could effectively hack the system and plant evidence. He's all muscle." Leos sighed. "Well, I started with him because he's your cabin mate. We have the most info on him. From here on out it's mostly guesswork, and that's never fun."
"We'll get him eventually. But I still don't understand why we can't just call up Command and have them deal with this." Vek turned to his monitor, deleting Lupe's name from the list. "This guy's a snake. He's already proven he has means of escape, and he'll probably use them if he catches wind of an investigation." "All right. We have to accept the possibility that more than one person is involved. Dess, can you pair up the remaining names by cabin?"
"You got it." Dess went over to Vek's computer and types some commands. The names were separated into three categories, with two names in each. "Excellent." Leos said. "Let's start with the first group. Iop Baeor and Zie Galil. Vek, you trained them. Anything interesting?" Vek nodded. "Definitely. If I had to pick anyone out of this crowd who could pull this off, it would be Zie. She's an operator, so we know she's smart. She's also the only one in the sector, meaning she was here, alone, during the village mission."
"Which would give her plenty of time to plant evidence." Natalia pointed out. "Dess, are there any operators in your sector?" "Just one. But he keeps to himself, spending most of his time in his room. Really shy when I trained him for the campaign. Zie could have snuck into my room, no problem." Leos grinned. "Well, that's definitely a good lead. Let's go off of this. Vek, what else can you tell us about Zie?"
"Like I said, she's smart. I'd go so far as to say she's an evil genius. We spent most of our time in training talking about military strategy. She knows a lot of ways to kill people quickly and effectively. Always a good sign someone is dangerous." Natalia jumped up, loading her pistol. "All right. Let's go get her." Leos quickly snatched the pistol from her hand, ejecting the clip onto the ground. "The **** are you doing?"
"She tried to frame me and Dess, Leos. We would be off in some prison camp being tortured to death if this blew back to Command." Leos sighed putting the gun on a table. "I understand that. But shooting her with a plasma bolt won't solve our problems." Natalia relaxed, only slightly. "Then what do you suggest we do?" Leos took the clip from the ground and placed it on the table next to the gun. "Vek, can you put in a request to seal the life support pods on a provisional basis?"
"If I do, I'm going to have to tell them the situation." Vek started typing. "They'll soon place us all on probation, and open an investigation shortly afterward. But first they'll seal the pods just like we want. So we have a small window of time to solve this thing." Leos grinned at the thought of a challenge. "Great. How long will the request take to process?"
"A few hours at most. Not like this stuff happens every day. As soon as it does, we swoop in, knock out Zie and sneak her into a secluded, private area for questioning. There are storage areas on the lower deck that would work pretty well. Sound good?" The others shook their heads in agreement. "Let's get to it." Vek said, sending his message to Command.
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
???/???/???
May 10 2604
16:30 Human time
8:15 Gerian time
???
RK-907 stood at the head of a long table, surrounded by the members of its directory. Communications were set to begin. A panel on its hand slid open, and a wire extended out. It plugged into a port in the table, and uploaded the generated code. The contact had the algorithm programmed into themselves as well. They did well, disguising themselves as a Gerian and slipping into the Empire's ranks unnoticed. But RK-907 was not easily impressed, and it had yet to hear any good news from the mission.
Suddenly, letters, numbers, and symbols flowed through RK-907. It displayed the output as a hologram projected from the table. The directory members looked on as each corresponding character was confirmed, and lit up green. Their contact was online. RK-907 opened communications. "Update us, XE-557. Is this port secure?"
"It should be. I used a proxy." RX-907 smiled. "So everything is going according to the plan." XE-557 chuckled. "Indeed. They know about the leak, and are trying to find its originator. Progress is slow but sure." PW-831 spoke up. "Are you a suspect?" XE-557 was hesitant in its answer. "Perhaps. I don't believe so, but it's a possibility. Either way, if I am, it will only result in more dead Gerians. It will not hinder our progress."
"Right." RX-907 continued. "Remember, the only one we need is Leos. If you can bring Natalia along as well, do it. She can be used as leverage. Kill anyone else involved. Do you understand your mission?" XE-557 responded in a lowered voice. "I understand. Someone's here, I've got to go." It ended communications abruptly.
RX-907 unplugged itself and addressed the directory. "In a few days, the Gerian Empire will engage in a civil war. We won't need to destroy them. They'll destroy themselves."
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, ESS Steve Jobs- Comms. Deck 3:30 AM, 12 May 2604
Exiting the mini-dimensions a large amount of fighters, cruisers and destroyers coupled with some much larger ships including a orbital bombardment craft finally make it to their destination, the tundric planet of Marx-Delta filled with ******* terrorists and aliens of all things. The second the ships get 100,000 km away from the planet the communications officer and her lackeys get a message from the terrorists, a video one.
"Let's see this." Ravi Femur tells her group as the video feed is displayed largely in very high quality, around 2160 px with the screen being 10 feet in diameter and 9 feet tall, a true beast. It starts with some flickering before right before Ravi and her lackey's eyes a creature and a human are seen. The alien is the same one seen from the info hackers collected confirming in the absolute the alien presence on the planet although this alien is a darker shade of red with the connecting parts of it a very dark red with its eyes being a bile-like yellow. The alien than speaks in English.
"Halt, we do not mean harm. We have been on this planet for years, and only now to we start to telegraph our existence and the first thing you do is prepare to wipe us out! We do not intend death to humans or their great corporations, only to spread the wisdom of the-"
"Who are you?" Ravi interrupts.
"Excuse me? Why did you interrupt me like that, how improper. It seems most humans also have no manners." the alien in disgust responds.
"Who are you?" Ravi Femur sternly voices yet again.
"Fine, I shall say. We are the Vargins, a race of aliens who are under the intent to spread the presence of our race and our equivalent benefactor's race. We do not intend harm, never did." the 'Vargin' replies.
"Our files indicate the contrary, the rebels on this planet have been shown to drag people from their homes and gut them a like a fish!" Ravi debunks in response to the claim of them coming in peace.
"It is only what we do. It is only what our equivalent benefactors want, a little blood. Isn't that how your own corporations work?" the Vargin wonders.
"The corporations do not kill for no reason." Ravi again replies.
"That is not what the humans one this world have told us." the vargin refutes.
"Of course." Ravi in a not so surprised way replies.
"Ms. Ravi, you have no idea what has happened on this planet. Destroy us all, it won't matter. We will let you as a matter of fact, our lives are but specks in the massive overall place that is this galaxy." The vargin with a surprising burst of energy and passion tells the comms. officer.
"How did you know my name?!" Ravi questions in surprise as the screen suddenly cuts out, going on to say to her lackeys "Tell the Admiral to have those NOVA papers signed pronto, as if this gets out... We may find ourselves in one massive pile of ****!" "Got it sir!" One of the lackeys replying, typing in the exact same things the comms. officer told him to type.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, ESS Steve Jobs- Bridge 3:33 AM, 12 May 2604
Admiral Sternum looks sternly at the message he sees and tells his forces "Send in the orbital bombardment craft and multiple other crafts to make sure no rebels get out. We don't want even one of these alien bastards to leave this planet alive, let alone the rebels. If word of this gets out to other colonies, than we will look weak!"
"Got it sir!" One of his captains replies as he goes straight to the ship bay.
The admiral than looks out over the bridge deck and gets prepared to watch the fire works as multiple lackeys in the back sign the multiple NOVA papers required to bring about protocol 111.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, atmosphere of Marx Delta 3:50 AM, 12 May 2604
A single massive bombardment craft fitted with a massive ion cannon with hundreds of bombers stored in it starts to fire upon the major cities of the planet, annihilating civilian and terrorist alike without any care for any bystanders as all that matters is that no one gets out alive. The multiple bomber crafts fly down only thousands of feet above the surface conducting multiple combing runs of napalm against every area of the planet conceivable while the low orbit bombardment craft rains ionic death upon higher populated areas and star ports to ensure no one gets out alive.
The terrorists on the planet in response however, send out something they never expected. A group of crescent shaped marble material crafts start to fly out of some of the caves and with great speed destroy squadron after squadron of bombers with ease and start to blast the orbital bombardment station, but the auto turrets quickly return fire at their attacks lighting up the sky with each and every shot blasting some of these retaliation crafts while a couple destroyers enter the fray of combat and start shooting auto cannons and hunting down these crescent shaped crafts finding them to move incredibly fast.
The crescent crafts start blasting at the destroyers doing some damage, but the destroyers quickly destroy the rest of these crafts before they can do any more damage to the orbital bombardment craft. Suddenly, multiple AA batteries pop up and focus fire on one of the destroyer that was damaged earlier causing the destroyer to break in half and crash onto the planet.
However thankfully some of the bomber craft are still available and drop some ballistic bombs on the AA turrets in the group losing some bomber crafts to the flak of the AA cannons, but not so many that continued genocide of everything on this planet can continue.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, ESS Steve Jobs- Bridge 5:00 AM, 12 May 2604
The Admiral is not pleased with the rate this going.
"This is taking way too long, can't we just like have something to make everyone on the planet choke to death? This is getting boring even for me!" The admiral complains to one of his captains.
"Look, we have no idea what the labs are cooking up, it could be that, it could be some weird ass thing or worse!" The captain explains to the admiral.
"Well ****... How long until we kill everyone here?" He asks the AI mainframe.
"Est. Time: 120 hours." The mainframe replies.
Mr. Sternum is not pleased by this at all, as that is way too long to kill all this rebel scum, some on the other side of the planet may escape and someone thought it was a wise idea to only give one orbital bombardment craft to his fleet which is just plain idiotic as he's going to need lot more fire power than this.
Quite a lot more.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
One day, there will be someone who looks at my signature and wonders "who gives a damn?"
Council Chambers, Gerald T. Watson Building, Arcadia, Rigel III
0344 Local Time, 0500 GMT
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Spencer was rapidly propelled out of a rather nice dream as a noise that could only be described as depth-charge-like pulled him back into reality.
Fumbling madly for his iPhone (the new 42s model, in fact) on the table next to his bed, he grabbed it, and slammed the power button as hard as he could. The noise cut out instantly, and the screen dimmed so that he could actually read it in the otherwise pitch-black room.
ADMIRAL STERNUM HAS ENGAGED IN UNAUTHORISED WARFARE WITH AN UNKNOWN ALIEN SPECIES! the message read. It took a moment for that to register on Spencer's (still fairly groggy) mind.
And that means, what, exactly? part of his mind said in it's hypothetical conversation.
It means that we're probably at war! the slightly smaller, more rational side of his brain yelled (still hypothetically).
Does it? the larger of the two asked rather sleepily.
YES!
Really? Then OH GOD PANIC! the larger side yelled as mental klaxons started blaring.
THANK YOU! the rational side managed to spit out before Spencer, still groggy but rapidly becoming more aware (the wonders of panic!), mistook the lightswitch for his (non-existant, but the tired mind comes up with all sorts of strange things) glasses and bashed into said lightswitch at a dead-run.
"FU-" he involuntarily yelled when the knobby bit made contact with his forehead.
He heard footsteps racing down the hallway outside the room. The Councilmen must have gotten the notice, too, then.
Spencer hit the lights (this time with his hand), and remembered that he didn't have glasses. Odd. He took a brief moment to let that sink in, before stumbling back over to his bedside table. He threw open the top drawer, and took out a small, orange-plastic pharmaceutical bottle reading 'Caffeine, 300mgs'. He pressed the tab down, turned the cap, and quickly dumped out three small, yellow-coloured tablets. Not really caring about water, he simply swallowed them.
He ran over to the smallish apartment's wardrobe, and changed into a (Council-worthy) suit as fast as possible, not bothering with a tie (or a comb, for that matter). He stomped into his shoes, grabbed the iPhone, and ran out into the hallway. He didn't make it far before he walked right into a wall where the lifts should have been.
Oh yeah, wrong way.
Spencer spun around on his heel, and began running the other way, rapidly waking up as he did so (partially because of the caffeine pills, but mainly because he didn't want to look so much like an idiot). At the end of the hallway, he made a sharp left, causing lots of 'pop' noises to come out of his back; before just barely failing to make it into the lift on time, and getting smashed between the doors.
"Ow." he remarked when the doors had automatically opened enough that his face wasn't mashed together too much to talk.
Walking onto the lift, he noticed that three of the six councilmen were sleeping on their feet, and leaning against the railing on the side of the compartment is a strange effort to feel less miserably tired.
"'EY! WAKE UP!" he snapped, and the three sleeping representatives opened their eyes, and looked around, startled. The rest of them laughed, and fell silent.
DING! the little panel next to the door went (just barely loud enough to annoy him), the doors opened, and the seven of them shuffled out.
Spencer and three others went around the left walkway (the main area was surrounded by hallway, forming a sort of capital 'D' shape around it), and filed into the room, taking their seats at about the same time the main lights finally kicked in.
"Alright then, let's make this quick. What do we know?" Spencer said about as fast as he could and still be understandable.
"Admiral Sternum just ordered Strike 111 on a previously unknown alien species." the others said, more or less in unison.
"Right, so are we going to try and negotiate, or do we let him destroy them?" Spencer asked, and slammed his fist on the button on his desk that triggered the voting apps on the councillors' phones.
Unfortunately, no one else but Atax had their phones.
"Balls to it. All in favour of trying to negotiate please stand." he ordered.
Three representatives; from Atax, Cytek and Hajal, stood up.
"Dammit, it's a tie." he muttered, too quietly for anyone else to hear.
Thinking quickly, he said,
"I vote we negotiate."
Normally, there would have been astonished looks, and people yelling that the Chancellor couldn't vote, but thankfully those that would ere either too sleepy to realise what was going on, or on the side of negotiating.
"It passes." he remarked, and took out his phone.
He tapped the screen a few times, and there was a rather quiet ringing noise. Spencer whisper-yelled for everyone to shut up, and got out his best yelling voice.
"Yes Chancellor?" a voice that decidedly didn't belong to Sternum answered.
"STERNUM!" he thundered, not catching himself in time.
"This is his comms officer speaking. How may I help you, Chancellor?" the voice asked.
"TELL STERNUM TO STOP ATTACKING!" he yelled, without missing a beat from his previous yelling.
"Yes sir." the voice said, and all noise from the device stopped.
Spencer leaned back in his chair. Damn comms officers.
"Anything else going on that I should know about?" he asked, with a fairly exasperated voice.
The Atax representative quickly looked at his phone, looked away for a moment, and then immediately went back to looking at the phone. He turned pale.
"What is it?!" he snapped.
"Well, we've got a large battlefleet of unknown origin speeding towards us, as well as a fairly large non-nuclear ballistic missile heading straight at this building." he said, voice shaking a considerable amount.
"Well this is just ****ing perfect. ETA?"
"Fifteen seconds." Spencer was out the door before he could finish his sentence. The rest of them started running too as the unmistakable BOOM! of a ballistic missile hitting 200-floor building rang out. Four of them made it out of the room before the lights cut out, plunging everyone into darkness.
There was a rumble.
There was a crash.
There was silence.
Thousands of kilometres overhead, a rogue warfleet, headed by one of the largest ships ever built by man, silently plied through the system's asteroid belt on their way into orbit. A certain rebel admiral smiled as rubble cascaded down from the rapidly-collapsing capitol building.
We did not invent the Algorithm. The Algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The Algorithm killed Jeeves. The Algorithm is banned in China. The Algorithm is from Jersey. The Algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the Algorithm. This is Close.
Command bridge of the "North American" Superdreadnought, 0411 local time, 0600 GMT
Admiral Campbell grinned widely, as the first missiles collided with the surface of Rigel III. So far, everything was going as planned. "Sergeant, prepare the Antiproton Cannon. I want all ships to blanket that entire planet with EMP, and commence with bombardment. Target the capitol, and destroy any non-civilian ships that attempt to flee the planet. Any ships which are irrepairably damaged will eject their cold fusion reactors onto the planet's surface, primed for detonation, after Quantum tunneling their soldiers onto designted medical vessels." he said. The communications Sergeant in front of him nodded quickly, and conveyed the admiral's message to the rest of the UTDU fleet, which was just now arriving in orbit above Rigel III. Already, mushroom clouds were exploding in the atmosphere of Rigel III, blanketing the planet with radiation. For whatever reason, no nuclear ordinance had been ejected towards the AU capitol. Campbell had a certain surprise prepared specially for the center of their government. If their mission here succeeded, the AU would be open to attack. Nightmare torpedos and exploded in and around what the UTDU assumed was the center of the AU's government, although collateral damage on civilian sectors was limited as much as possible for such heavy weapons. Massive pulsing energy signatures erupted from the North American every few seconds, evident of some massively deadly attack to come. (Note: The antiproton cannon takes a helluva while to charge. It'll at least take another 1-2 posts before it can fire.)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement."~Winston Churchill
Chancellor Spencer Mayaan Ruins of Arcadia, Rigel III, Rigel, Ulysses Nebula 4:30 Local time, 7:20 GMT
BOOM!
Spencer was jerked back into consciousness by the same noise that sent him in. He gasped a few times, and randomly clawed at the air.
Rock.
Concrete, really. From what he could tell (not much, due to the complete lack of light), he was in an air pocket about half a metre tall, in the ruins of the Watson building. Rooting around in the darkness a bit more revealed that the 'roof' of the gap in the rubble was being held up by a lucky formation of fallen I-beams, which had most likely been in the ceiling above him when the missile hit.
Another boom. The rubble shook, but only slightly. He noticed that one of the beams had shifted a bit.
This is definitely not good.
Looking for a way out, he felt around again, this time searching the walls, and noticed a movable-feeling slab of concrete with a few rather-conveniet rebar poles sticking out of the sides.
He rolled over his left shoulder, and managed to turn himself to face the beams. Grabbing onto two of the steel bars poking out of the side of the slab, he pulled.
Something shifted. He pulled again.
The entire slab gave way, flooding the pocket with light. Looking around, he saw, for the first time, that what he had assumed to be another I-beam was, in fact, a severed human arm.
"AH!" he yelled, and quickly scrambled through the hole in the rubble moving the slab had created.
Spencer didn't stop crawling until he was a good three metres from the pile before stopping o properly figure out where the hell he was.
He was in the leftmost hallway of the floor the Council Chambers used to be on. The rubble pile was behind him, completely blocking off the way back (not that he wanted to go there, anyway). In front of him, the hallway continued to the lobby door, which was ajar, and letting in what he assumed to be sunlight. The ceiling lights, of course, were rather-permenantly out of service. Spencer ran for the door, and burst out into the empty lobby.
It used to be a mid-sized, semicircular room with floor-to-ceiling glass panes in the front, a revolving door, and the receptionist desk on the far wall from the door. Now it was a dilapidated mess, with the windows smashed, the door missing, and what was left of the potted plants that used to line the walls strewn all over the room. The receptionist (whom he remembered to be named Catherine) was, thankfully, not there (either alive or dead). Not really caring to investigate further, Spencer ran for where the door used to be, and into the morning sunlight.
The plaza was a wreck. The massive, 200-storey Watson building had completely collapsed, sending rubble all over the plaza that it had formerly dominated. The sculpture of a man holding up a wire-frame globe, which had, at enormous expense, been brought to Rigel from it's original home in Manhattan by a salvage team; had been crushed by a large pile of building materials.
The other eight buildings, who had been considerably less imposing and grand than the Watson building, were even less so, with only one still standing (and even then, only about half of it was still intact). Spencer randomly noticed the actual door part of the revolving door from the Watson building laying in the sunken, middle area of the plaza, near the statue.
He was suddenly distracted by more explosions, and noticed, for the first time, the sheer number of explosions and large orange-and-yellow flashes going off far above him. Had the battle already begun? He hoped so.
Spencer checked his phone, only to realise that it wasn't working.
Dammit.
He started walking towards the former entrance to the plaza (opening onto Manchester St.), hoping that the rest of the city was still fairly intact.
Somewhere in the distance, a large object that looked kind of like a massive flare; streaked down from a cloud bank, leaving a trail of white smoke behind it. It hit near King St., causing the pyramid-shaped, 150-storey-tall Cytek tower to crumble to the ground, collapsing in on itself on the right, and smothering several blocks of non-skyscrapers.
Looking around, he realised that the one that hit the Cytek tower was only the beginning of a massive hail of missiles, impacting indiscriminately around the city and causing massive damage to whatever they hit.
These bastards were going to have a lot to answer for.
Admiral Jacob Townsend Bridge of ESS Leviathan, Orbit of Rigel III, Rigel, Ulysses Nebula 5:45 Local time, 8:30 GMT
"Dammit!" Jacob yelled at the holo-map in front of him as yet another large red sphere formed over the dot signifying where Arcadia was. It seemed they intended to blanket the entire planet in EMP waves, considering the ridiculous number of nukes they were detonating in orbit.
After the initial attack, Second Fleet had fled to the (fairly extensive) naval base on Rigel IV, which the attackers seemed to be ignoring for now. Since then, they had been watching, and waiting for the bombardment to start slowing down, hopefully meaning they had run out of EMPs.
And what a ship it was. The enemy's flagship was the largest ships Jacob had seen in his life, bristling with weaponry, and, from what he could tell by the fates of the few frigates who didn't flee; extremely heavily-armoured. This was going to be tough.
"THERE!" he yelled, noticing that the bombardment was starting to slow down.
There was a near-deafening roar as the ship's engines activated, and went from nothing to full power in the space of only a few seconds. Looking out the small viewports on the bridge, he saw all the other ships in the fleet doing the same, leaving massive plasma trails in their wake.
"ETA: Two hours. Targets will be in firing range in one hour, forty-three minutes." the ship's AI chimed.
"Thank you, SARA." Jacob replied, before shouting,
"Alright men! We've got one chance at this, so we are NOT going to balls it up!"
"Order Toralen to take her formation and hit the smaller ships, and tell Wagner to use mass EMPs against the main group!" he ordered.
"We'll be going after the big one. Order all ships to load MAC guns, and make sure every missile tube is loaded. We hit hard, and we hit fast." he finished, and watched as the three communications officers on the bridge began relaying his orders through their headsets to the rest of the fleet.
We did not invent the Algorithm. The Algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The Algorithm killed Jeeves. The Algorithm is banned in China. The Algorithm is from Jersey. The Algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the Algorithm. This is Close.
The Taian 1st fleet had been established shortly after the Great Revolution to serve as the vanguard of the ITF. When Taian expansion had essentially halted thirty years previous with the last Atrin capitulation, the 1st's role had shifted from being the Directorate's spearhead to being its security force. As such, the Godspeed and the rest of the Fleet found themselves on a constant series of patrols throughout Taian space, rounding up pirates and other undesirables.
Now, however, they had a real job. Elements of the Central Fleet in orbit over K'arhnos III had reported an aggressive alien raid on the planet itself. The enemy's scouting force had apparently been destroyed, but not before hitting the densely populated K'arhnos III with some type of high-energy beam that had caused, estimates said, over 15,000 civilian casualties.
As soon as the distress signal had come in, the fleet, currently docked at *redacted*, powered up their engines and weapons systems, expecting a distress signal from a freshly attacked planet to come in at any second. When they did receive it, they were ready.
Admiral Khran'ist paced back and forth over the bridge, a habit of his that, while helping to clear his thoughts, typically served only to distract his bridge officers. But today they were utterly focused--their fear forced them to such a state of panicked concentration that the tension on the bridge was almost palpable. There was none of the typical chatter that filled the bridge, only silence.
Suddenly, a burst of static shattered the bridge's self-imposed quiet. ****, this was it, wasn't it? The admiral glanced at the comlink and affirmed his suspicions. A distress signal from Hoarem, an agricultural planet on the edge of known space. As the bridge crew listened, to the explosions and the shouts audible in the background more so than the speaker, they became aware--truly aware--that this wasn't just some small incursion. This was a full-scale invasion.
When the speaker's transmission finally cut off, the admiral knew what he had to do. He picked up his comlink and quickly rattled off a list of ships--30 ships; 5 Retribution-classes, including the Godspeed, 15 Kronos-classes, and 10 S'takk classes--that were to assist in the defense of Hoarem. Hopefully, they would be enough to move the invaders to sue for peace, at the very least. "Blood is honor," he said solemnly, in the customary Taian salute, and then he hung up.
The selected ships jumped to hyperspace. (Or whatever it's called.)
--
First Contact Site, Machweik Space
The brief silence that followed the first subspace transmission was followed by a burst of that hideous language grating through the speakers, causing several of the officers present to reflexively cover their ear-place-things. The beautifully rendered translation followed shortly afterward, pouring forth the sweet siren's song of the Taian in a somewhat miraculous transition:
" Unidentified vessels: Further advance is prohibited. By the hierarchs, we ask that your vessels alter course -- turn away from Hierarchy space. Once you have complied, we ask that your vessels come to a halt. Explorers or not, protocol dictates that all unidentified vessels within Hierarchy space are to be intercepted and escorted to a safe location until it is established that you are not with harmful intent. We are willing to send a diplomatic shuttle over if you are willing to comply."
Ramus nodded to himself. It made sense; he'd have done the same in his counterpart's situation. Pressing the "transmit" button, he sent an order about to the rest of his ships--a measly fleet of two S'takk-class frigates and a pair of smaller attack ships--to cease movement and change direction. Once he was satisfied that his order had been complied with, he returned the transmission. "We eagerly await your contact team," he said, and then hung up.
--
Lugoti planet
Arkhanis now found himself in the admittedly awkward position of holding a blade to his opponent's throat, or whatever would have been his--its?--throat if he hadn't been a walking oyster. The attack had gone fairly well, as, luckily for the group of cadets, the natives had proven fairly incompetent fighters. The rest of the group was fleeing, and the Taian had halted their attacks in a fit of exhaustion.
He looked around. His comrades looked on expectantly. Arkhanis had already bloodied his blade today--it was stained blue--but letting a wounded opponent suffer would be the greatest dishonor. So, pushing whatever doubts he had about the action aside, he shoved his Kag'nata cleanly through his opponent. Blood spurted everywhere, and, drawing it out and sheathing the sword in one clean motion, he stepped back into the Taian ranks.
11:55, 9th may 2604
The hibrus, looking over the attack on its city was in shock over Raznat refusing to send reinforcements, but Raznat did indeed have a point. If Ivring wanted to keep its position, it had to fight for it and not rely on its emperor to do everything for it. As of now, Ivring must without help quell Ribbles who to the Hibrus are for some practically arbitrary reason are attacking the zatrai occupants on Fizz. The Hibrus reasoned perhaps it was over juicing, the process done to turn them to mush required for zatrai consumption despite only few ever needing to be juiced and those chosen are completely up to the Ribbles so they could have just sent over their mentally disabled or criminals. Perhaps their organic minds made them just hate zatrai, as just the Hibrus how's it supposed to know? Whatever the reason was, it is obvious that these things may actually kill all the zatrai here.
With no other option, Ivring decides to call in Arctek Aszig. Azing flies into the main Hibrus building at a fast speed slowing down inside the stadium like room the Hibrus resides in. Ivring tells Aszig, "We need new tactics, and we need them now. Please give me any ideas you have at hand." Aszig replies "Earlier on when the Ribbles went mad, I noticed their strategy that proved effective against our own. What they did was they kept spread out relying on tele communicative devices in their cities to conduct surprise attacks against some of our humble zatrai using their speeder missiles and snipers. They often spread themselves out and attack zatrai from all corners they can. I have done some thinking and testing with comrades and found an effective way to counter this." The Hibrus barks "What? I must know!", interrupting Aszig a bit, but Aszig proceeds to explain "By not being in the open like a idiot. We left ours selves to vulnerable to attack and forgot completely about ambushing tactics. If we spread ourselves out like they do and use less zatrai that are instructed to be more hidden and use the Repeaters we may be able to mount an effective way of stopping their attacks."
The Hibrus, happy to hear this replies "This is great news. Now let's put this into action. I shall use the built in defenses in the city to fend off as many of these Ribbles as I can." and proceeds to activate multiple turrets located throughout the city, popping up from underground in preparation for the Ribble attack. The zatrai who were at first in the open prepared to attack them quickly decide to find various nooks and crannies in the futuristic city scape to hide and attack from as the Ribbles come in welding their rocket based weaponry. They had spider-like walkers armed with seeker missiles and their infantry wielded with what can be best described as rapid fire explosive rifles.
Despite their 21st century level tech the low gravity of the planet clearly is a factor here in their technology. Either way it is likely the ribbles must have spent much time making this equipment behind the zatrai;s backs. They really don't like zatrai, not a single bit despite the zatrai imposing no laws on them, merely asking that they fulfill two quotas. heck, the zatrai sent by the Hibrus to interact with them even helped them mine for crystals and pick those who shall be sent to be juiced. They have no true justification to attack, none foreseeable at all.
Now it is time to show them not to be so cruel to their protectors and symbiotic partners. If these ribbles want war, they shall get war! A group of spider walkers with a brigade of Ribbles armed with speed rockets and explosive machine guns flooded into the main area causing multiple turrets to quickly pop up behind them and start spraying the legs of the spider walkers with a very sticky gel that the spider walkers got stuck in while other turrets quickly popped up in front of the infantry that starting spraying the gel onto the infantry encasing them rapidly suffocating them before they could react. However only some of the infantry was hit by this and they retaliated by blasting the turrets out with their speed rockets, blowing the modules right off.
However the turrets were just the start of the zatrai defenses.
A squad of zatrai hiding in multiple alley ways around the same area as the spider walkers and soldiers came out from the sides of the buildings where the spider walker that got its legs stuck to the ground because of the gel turrets was around, stuck by the gel and with their Z-Gausses the zatrai repeatably shot the spider walker's main body making large dents in it until the spider walker just slumped thanks to the power generator within the walker being crushed by the concussive force of the gauss weapons.
The Hibrus was very happy to see one of their spider walkers destroyed, but there was still three more. If Ivring had those reinforcements it could have just had a cruiser take these out, but this was not how this battle shall go. It shall go the hard way: Kill every damn spider walker on the ground using small arms. Ivring had more turrets pop up and the same process seen with the first spider walker was initiated on the other three.
Arctek Aszin decided to command one of the zatrai squads, having the zatrai on its command shoot the legs and not the body with the gauss cannon proving to be actually pretty effective in taking these spider walkers down because they just tilted over after a leg got shot off by the repeated shots from the zatrai's gauss weapons. The infantry however were an issue as well, with those speed rockets that can instantly kill a zatrai if they hit.
Aszin decided to have its three zatrai armed with dual repeaters quickly fly around their rocketeers in circles, like a vulture flying over its prey and keep shooting them giving the rocketeers on the ground no time to get in a shot in. With the far distance and constant movement of the zatrai, the rockets even with their rapid speed modifications just couldn't hit the zatrai as they just did some quick move to dodge around the missiles while hailing the infantry with dozens of gel projectiles hundreds of feet above them.
Thanks to Aszin, the tide of this skirmish has changed. Perhaps Raznat may now send in reinforcements after this event and the ribbles will think twice before trying to attack the zatrai central zone. However there still was the issue of dealing with the guerillas crawling around, but that's an issue that can be resolved later, now more zatrai are needed to lean from the Arctek and apply the new tactics against the guerillas.
8:00 Human time
4:00 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
The pods landed in an encircling position around the village. The footsoldiers quickly got out, raised their rifles, and walked into the village slowly. A rather large villager sporting crudely fashioned stone armor ran out of a large cabin and heaved a spear at one of the footsoldiers, quickly drawing his sword. The spear glanced off of the soldier's power armor, and he shot the villager in the face.
The rest of the small force was not far behind that one villager. They probably thought they would send him out as an intimidating scout, then follow up and beat the intruders down. Not so. One after another, the villagers had their faces melted off by plasma bolts, killing the little pink parasites inside. The Gerian scouts from earlier showed up in full power armor, scaring the soldiers at first. However, it seemed like the undead scouts hadn't turned the shielding on, and the plasma bolts cut through their armor like butter. As the battle escalated, the three stealth commandos slipped in, taking positions inside the town.
Meanwhile, Leos had found his own perch. A cluster of fairly level tree stumps. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. He lined up a shot on one slow-running villager, blowing his head off. Through his scope, he saw the others in his op slaughtering villagers in the center of the town. Dess and Vek went for the flashier approach. Dess embedded her daggers in the back of two villager skulls, twisting them to shred the little buggers inside. Vek was cleaving villagers in half with his sword, from the top down. Of course, he couldn't go all the way, but all the way through the head and neck was good enough.
Natalia, however, took the more effective route. She embedded her spikeblade into the side of their heads, quickly moving up the line. She dispatched five villagers in a matter of seconds, and continued on to the next group. The villagers were completely lost during this charade. They weren't expecting to be trapped between two superior forces, and therefore were simply swinging their weapons wildly, hoping to do some damage. They ended up injuring each other more than they did the Gerians.
That was more of a problem than you would think. Leos had to quickly take out any injured villagers, lest they die and release their parasitic hosts. One time he was overwhelmed with targets, and a pink slimeball actually did get out. However, the mass of soldiers firing on it took it out before it could do any damage. After a few hours, the warriors had completely subsided. Nevertheless, the soldiers searched every house for remaining survivors.
The villagers didn't appear to have any children, which was odd. No time to worry about that though. The soldiers assumed the ones wearing dresses or aprons were women, who they ended up killing just to be safe. For good reason too, as they found a dead pink parasite in every one. Some houses had hiding villagers, waiting to launch a sneak attack on any intruding Gerians. They just ended up dying more painfully.
Once almost the entire village was cleared out, one house was left. It was big, locked and reinforced, so they saved it for last, amassing a rather large force at the door before shooting out the lock and kicking it down. Inside was not a waiting army of soldiers, or even one of parasites. It was a massive hole in the ground, filled with thousands of murky green spheres. Eggs. Just looking at them, writhing and squirming, induced nausea. Intertwined between them were several thousand pink larvae, flailing about.
Most of the soldiers didn't even want to go near the eggs. Several were thinking rationally, and went to get explosives from the pods to blow up the eggs. At this time, Leos was approaching the town. Natalia told him about the eggs, just as the explosives detonated, killing them all. There was cheering and applause from most Gerian soldiers. Vek, however, did not cheer. He bent down and poked at a dead parasite with his gun barrel. Most had been incinerated or vaporized, but this one was almost completely intact, minus the slash wound through the top.
Vek himself had killed this one. However, that wasn't why he was observing it. Leos, Natalia and Dess walked up to where he was sitting. The footsoldiers were oblivious to their finding, as they were too busy celebrating. Inside the pink parasite were not veins, blood, or anything any of them had seen before in an organic being. What was inside them was circuitry, wires, and strange glowing blue rocks.
"They're machines." Leos stated what they were all thinking. But Vek looked worried still. "Not just any machines. I've definitely seen this circuitry before." He spit on the ground next to the dead creature, picking it up. "I have to get this back to Command." He started hurrying back to the pod they had arrived in. "Vek!" Dess called out. "What's wrong?"
Vek turned his head towards them. "They're Old Gods."
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
Remainder of 46th Fleet of the Emperor's Mighty Reign/Cluster X55-856/Some Taian star system
16:52 Human time
8:26 Gerian time
When all seven crafts had landed, footsoldiers immediately poured out, guns at the ready. They were forming a perimeter on the planet, expanding quickly as more soldiers clambered out of their respective ships. Others were dragging out large metal cubes from the cargo bay. They were meta-structures, collapsible walls, windows and doors that could be arranged to form buildings. They definitely weren't the best buildings, but they were a quick, temporary solution.
Once everyone was out of the ships, people rushed to unload the cargo bays. They were packed full, but a workforce of 350,000 Gerians can move equipment surprisingly fast. Once everything was unloaded, the pilots gunned their crafts' engines again. They were going on a suicide mission, and they knew it - being a craft operator in the Gerian military meant that more likely than not, you were going to die. However, the alternative would be spending your life fighting constantly, and while that's fine for some people, it's not for others.
The pilots were faced with troubling circumstances. They didn't know what they were up against. They could run a dangerous distraction operation against one measly scout ship, and leave their settlement open to attack. Or they could start firing head on at an entire military armada, and get blown out of the sky before they can even lift a finger. They were communicating over encrypted radio frequencies, and agreed they would send out pulses to get an idea of what the opposing force looked like. Until then, they would circle the planet, defending.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the soldiers were making good use of their supplies. Anti-spacecraft guns were being set up on top of the makeshift buildings. These guns had a primary and secondary barrel, the secondary fired first, blasting nuclear plasmoid to take out most electronics on a ship from the resulting EMP. It doesn't even need to be much, a lot of ships run on interconnected electronics and even taking out a few of those electronics can do a huge amount of damage.
The primary gun follows up with a particle beam. Particles can't exactly be created, so they only have a few particle beams. About 18-25 usually. The secondary gun only uses a very small amount of nuclear plasmoid for each blast, so they last a while. However, the primary gun has to be extremely accurate to do any potential damage. As for the range, the guns can easily punch a hole through anything within or near the atmosphere. They can hit at orbital range, but rarely. Beyond that, they are completely unreliable. In this particular fleet drop, the Gerians had about 150 of these guns.
The rest of the crates were supplies. Food, water, and lots and lots of military equipment. There were also a few atmospheric conditioners to absorb any nuclear radiation remaining in the air. Once things settle down on the colony, soldiers are to report to on-site med ops to be tested and treated for radiation poisoning. Only one of the many dangers of this type of operation. Once all the footsoldiers were in place, they held their ground, preparing for any resistance.
The war had truly begun.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
2:00 AM, 13th May 2604 Earth Time ((Takes place in the future, wehr stay on track of time it is still the 8th or 9th of may for you))
Raznat hovers with its lev pack to a area of the room where a 3D hologram of the overall zatrai empire is activated. It notices two changes to its map. Ivring's empire is still there surprisingly enough while something odd has happened in the developing colony Raznat sent those reinforcements to. Raznat isn't pleased as the complete opposite happened contrary to results as the Hibrus with no reinforcements somehow made it while the Hibrus who got reinforcements somehow got replaced. How some obsidian tipped spear wielding creatures with no feasible way of destroying a zatrai managed to take out a Hibrus very impresses Raznat although the Hibrus of that planet must have been a very terrible Hibrus for letting itself be killed even with the reinforcements arriving practically in time for the new Hibrus.
Raznat decides to open communications with the new Hibrus, but the message may not reach for a couple days.
May 10 2604
13:24 Human time
6:42 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"Sir!" The messenger walked into the room, dipping his head in salute to Vek. "The samples taken were tested. They contain the same programming as the Old God machines. Command says to tell you that having a piece of their technology will be very useful should they ever return." Vek kicked a chair over, cursing. "That should be good news. But all I know now is that those ****ers are back again."
"What about the glowing blue rock?" Leos asked, interested. "I know an Old God has never been taken alive. Was it a power source?" The messenger turned and saluted Leos. "The blue rocks stopped glowing during transport. A power source, however, could not be found inside the machines. Command is assuming the rocks were a power source and that the Old Gods found a way to disable it after death."
Leos nodded. "Thank you." The messenger saluted again. "Sir." he said, and walked away down the hallway. Almost immediately after he left, another messenger walked in carrying a metal box. "The spare sample you asked for, sir." Vek took the box and dumped its contents on the table, handing it back to the messenger. Inside it was a dead parasite. It was mostly melted and had lots of loose wire ends.
Vek picked it up, dropped it on the floor and stomped on it with his steel boot repeatedly. When he was through, the remaining flesh was shredded, the wires were severed, and the circuitboards were smashed up. But the no-longer-glowing rocks were still completely intact. And they immediately began to glow blue again. Vek's expression changed from anger to fear.
"What's it doing?" he was clearly still terrified of these machines. Suddenly a voice sprang from the demolished remains of the creature. "Hello, Uru Vek." The voice didn't sound mechanical at all. It was clear and deep, the voice of a leader. It commanded respect or fear, or a combination of the two. Leos, Natalia and Vek gazed on it in awe.
"It's so nice to see you again, Vek. We've missed you. Face feeling okay?" The voice sarcastically asked. Vek again stomped on the already-broken specimen. "SHUT UP!" he shouted at it. The voice, however, continued talking. "Tell your friend thanks. You know, the one in your squadron who gave us all the info about your homeworld, what kind of defenses you have and how to disable them. Oh wait. You don't know, do you?" Vek picked up the remains and smashed them on the table, splitting the entire creature into pieces. The rocks remained without a scratch.
"You're bluffing!" Vek yelled at it. "There's no leak! The Gerians are far superior to your pathetic race. We killed you, remember?" The voice chuckled. "Well, you clearly didn't do a very good job, did you? As for what I remember, millions of your people were slaughtered by mere modified worker bots. Remember that, Vek?" Vek stomped some of the broken pieces again. "SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" The voice laughed again. "So tell me, Vek, how's your wife?"
He had had enough. Picking up a pistol from his desk, he shot up the remaining bits and pieces until only ash remained. And yet the glowing rocks still appeared completely unharmed. Vek's floors and walls now had melted holes in them from the gun's plasma bolts. "Well, it's nice to know we can put all that genocide behind us. We'll be in touch, Vek. See you soon." The rocks stopped glowing as the voice ceased.
Vek turned to Leos and Natalia. "Looks like we have a leak." he said bitterly.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
5:38 PM Local time, 12:55 AM GMT (approx.)
Chancellor Mayaan sighed, and leaned back in his chair. He wiped the sweat off of his forehead, and wondered why bureaucracy was so difficult to manage.
For three days now, the Council had been divided over how many ships they had to send in. Currently, it was three of them (Atax, Hajal and Yamasaki) trying to get the other three (Cytek, Redmond and Unecco) to send in their share of ships; but he was fairly sure the sides had been revered just half an hour ago.
He started paying attention to the conversation again just in time to hear Cytek roar,
"I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR MUM WOULD THINK OF ME! SHE CAN GO TO 'ELL FOR ALL I CARE!"
"SILENCE!" the chancellor thundered. Cytek turned pale, and the rest of the representatives chuckled.
"Thank you." he commented, before continuing, "Now then. You've been warring about how many ships you each have to send for three days. Have you reached any kind of consensus?" he asked.
"One battlecruiser, three normal cruisers, five destroyers, ten frigates and 17 million credits towards the Leviathan Project for each two systems controlled; as well as five more modules for building the next Navy battleship, sir." the Atax rep. read from his data pad.
"I see. Then why are you arguing?" the chancellor pressed, with an accusing tone of voice.
"Cytek is claiming that they shouldn't have to chip in as many ships because of the Alkonost Project; Redmond is too small to fill the order, and Unecco is being childish and refusing." the Atax rep. replied with a bit of a judgemental tone.
"Thank you." the Chancellor said to Atax in a considerably less accusing voice. Using said accusing voice again, he said to the opposing party,
"You each have ninety seconds to explain why you shouldn't have to give your share of ships. If it's a good reason, the vote will show our approval. If not, you will be mandated to give the required number." the commanded.
"Cytek, you first." he finished, and leaned back in his chair.
This is going to be funny. he thought.
The Cytek representative stood up, cleared his throat, and began:
"Cytek shouldn't have to build the quota of ships because the funding is needed for the Alkonost Project. Having to give that many ships would delay the completion of the project by nearly a year. As such, I believe that having it be that number for the entire State would be more reasonable, and not hinder research." he sat down.
"I see." the chancellor said, trying not to laugh.
"Tell me, Mister Carter; about how much money does your company annually spend on the Alkonost project?"
"Two-hundred-and-seventy-five billion credits." the rep. recited, as if by rote.
"And Cytek consistently reports over one trillion credits of profit each year. I think we all know how this will turn out." the chancellor said, and inwardly sneered.
"Voting time. Please press the corresponding buttons on your data pads." the chancellor announced.
Three buttons appeared on the touchscreens of the rep's data pads; a red one, a white one, and a green one. Each rep. pressed one, and the window closed.
A tally appeared on the chancellor's pad.
"It fails. Cytek, you are hereby responsible for contributing two battlecruisers, six cruisers, ten destroyers, twenty frigates, thirty-four billion credits for the Leviathan Project, three capital ship thruster modules, one MAC gun barrel section 500 metres in length, and seventeen thousand one-metre-by-one-metre layered plating. All must be Navy-grade, and will be tested upon completion. All are expected in forty-three weeks at the end of the fiscal year." the chancellor commanded.
He tapped the screen on his pad a few times, and the order list was sent to Cytek's headquarters.
"Redmond, you're next." he snapped.
The Redmond rep. stood up, and said:
"Redmond cannot contribute as many ships because Redmond only controls one system, and as such can only do some of the ships. We are willing to do half of everything, though." he said, and sat down.
"Well, that was relatively painless. VOTE!" he announced. Once again, the buttons appeared, and the representatives voted.
A tally appeared on the chancellor's screen.
"It passes. Redmond, you are required to send one battlecruiser, one cruiser, two destroyers, five frigates, 9,5 million credits and fifteen battleship reactor fuel rods by the end of the fiscal year." the chancellor commanded.
Once again, he sent the order to the rep's headquarters.
"Unecco!" he yelled.
The Unecco rep. looked around as if considering something, before announcing,
"Unecco will send in their quota, and no longer argue."
"Good choice." the chancellor commented.
"Gentlemen, I will send the orders to both you and your respective headquarters. Adjourned!" he announced.
The representatives left the chamber, leaving the chancellor alone. He looked over the notes, making sure everything was correct.
Total: 1/4 of a battleship, thirteen battlecruisers, 37 cruisers, 60 destroyers, 10 frigates, 391 million credits towards the Leviathan Project.
Send?
He pressed 'send', and the message went out after a few seconds of loading. He left the room shortly thereafter, whistling a bit as he made his way to his apartment on the top floor of the building.
6:50, 8th May 2604 Earth Time
Perspective of builder CZ
Alright builders finished snipers. Now builders can fight with a sniper. The giant fighters enemy has employed are acting odd. Builders have no idea why, perhaps they like to dance in the blood of flesh bags. Builders should try that one day. Builders are taking aim at new fighter class enemy has employed and NOT EVEN THESE ARE DOING ANYTHING AGAINST GIANT FIGHTERS. We are still shooting and we see no dents done in their armor. We have no idea what material they are using, but whatever it is it is real strong. We should have stuff like this, but we are stuck with graphene which has bullets that break if you shoot too fast meaning they shoot slow and we have to grease the tubes up by using the spit from stupid fleshies to make sure they fire out without breaking. These guns only good against flesh and lame armor and we have nothing else to use against these things.
Send in more fleshies while we stick to the back and throw them maybe that will work!
Perspective of flyer RRRR
There are enemy flyers. Lots of them and they look real angry for some reason. I dunno why though we did nothing! Whatever I am going to kill them with my other flyers let's go! I see bright lig- BZZZZZZZT- IM FALLING AND I CAN'T GET UP HELP HSHEDoidhioediohewhde
Perspective of flyer RRRS
They are zapping us with lightning! Charge at the plane and never stop just keep attacking with limbs maybe we can stop them if we try hard enough maybe we can slow them down and stop them from crashing into us. I got onto a plan and am hitting t and the metal is not breaking at all on these things. It is like they are made of super graphene or something. We need more flyers to help take this thing down!
Overall Perspective
Hundreds of flyer pylorians start to flood the sky coming from mines a bit off from here all charging at the planes attempting to hit them with their tendrils with not much avail. Electro lasers are somewhat thinning their numbers, but there is still many of the flyers flying at the numerous planes and another massive wave of fleshies is sent out on ground by builders who chicken away back into the colony realizing not even their snipers can hurt these PAIN tanks. The pylorians just keep on hopelessly fighting against a force superior to them in every way thinking that they may actually live through this.
May 10 2604
15:10 Human time
7:35 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"Sir, what is it?" Leos walked into Vek's office. He had been called down, alone. Natalia was currently sleeping back in their cabin. Vek held up his holopad. "Recognize that?" On it was a log transcript and a long string of numbers and letters. Leos couldn't make heads or tails of it. "No, I don't. What is it?" Vek started pacing.
"Well, we do have a leak. And that's it. An unverified, encrypted feed sent to some nebula near the black hole. This type of thing happens often, because Command needs to communicate with their scouts safely. But this encryption is different. It's a special algorithm, not in our system. Which means we can't crack it without knowing the encryption."
"And for that... we need the person who sent it?" Leos could now see where Vek was going with this. "Exactly. Which brings me to my next point." He pointed to the letters and numbers at the end. "The Gerian network can't be accessed without a verified identity, complete with ID tags and timestamp. There's no way around that. Our rat probably thought they wouldn't ever be caught. This looks perfectly legitimate unless you know what you're looking for. That's what they get for trusting those robot ****ers."
"All right." Leos said. "So what's the problem? Just run the ID tags, and you'll get a name." Vek nodded solemnly. "Yep. That's what I did. The prefix on the tags means they're a commando, and the suffix means they're..." he paused. "...in this sector." Vek looked him right in the eyes. "That narrowed it down to four people. The search didn't take long."
Leos felt his stomach sink. "Me? Sir, I didn't do this!" Vek's expression didn't change. "No, you didn't." He turned his monitor towards Leos. It clearly read "Natalia Rez" with the exact same tags underneath. Leos shook his head. "Natalia's the leak." He checked the timestamp again. "She said she was going to call her mom at that time. I didn't think anything of it."
Vek took the pistol off his desk. "And she's alone in your room right now?" Leos cursed quietly to himself. "Vaxc. Come on!" They ran down the hall to 7-207, and Leos slowly opened the door so as not to wake her. But she wasn't there. They looked at each other in despair. "We're floating around in space. Where could she have gone?" Leos asked. Vek thought about it for a while. "The cargo bay. I've heard stories about jumpers who hid in the storage containers and ended up being shipped to Earth."
"We're not docking for weeks, she wouldn't go so early. What about the escape pods? They're locked unless the ship takes structural damage, right?" Leos wondered out loud. Vek nodded, then groaned. "I guess I probably shouldn't have shot up my floors, should I?" They ran to Life Support, where the pods were stationed. All of them were intact. "That means she's still on the ship." Vek said. "I'll have this area sealed for now, then we'll need to spread out and look for her."
Leos nodded, running off. The first place he looked was the library. Crew members often studied military strategy there, something Natalia did often. Surprisingly, she was there, exactly where she always was, in a chair near the back of the room. In her hands was Lilen, the book he had lent her. She was already a good ways though the book, which Leos didn't expect with her limited knowledge of the Dukurian language. He quickly ran up.
"Nat." he whispered, so as not to draw any attention to himself, walking up to her. She looked up, smiling. "Hey! Check it out, I'm reading literature. Me. Reading freaking literature. Amazing." Leos just looked puzzled even further. "What? Nat, Vek knows everything. He sealed Life Support, there's no way off the ship." She gave him an odd look. "Oookay." she said, returning to her book.
"Wh... is it not you?" Leos was more than frustrated at this point. "Is what not me?" Natalia said, closing the book at last. "The leak. Vek found a message to the Old Gods in the logs. It was your ID card that was used." Now it was her turn to look worried. "Vaxc, are you serious? My ID card is in my drawer. No one knows where it is but me." Together, they ran back to their cabin, where Natalia frantically threw open a drawer.
"It's... not... here." she said, rifling through her other various possessions. "I've only used it once, and that was to get on the ship. Is someone actually trying to frame me? It could be anyone on the ship!" Leos shook his head. "Vek said it was definitely sent from this sector. Nobody from other sectors would be over here. But that only narrows it down to 10 people. 7 if you don't count you, me, or Vek. Who would want to do this?"
"I have a hunch." Natalia said, pursing her lips.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
10:00 AM, 10th May 2604 Earth Time
Raznat floats around its main center some more thinking about the accomplishments it has done, from the invention of the Razor craft to the successful conquests of Vargi-II, it feels like that Raznat's days are starting to become numbered. Raznat goes on a mental tangent in its head. It is a very repetitive tangent repeated at incredible speeds, once every 3 or so seconds thinking nearly the exact same thing again and again. If a human were to try to diagnose Raznat, surely they would find a mental disorder for the Visulik.
One day, even Raznat the Visiluk of the entire Zatrai race will be destroyed and replaced. Perhaps such an event would be one of the best things to happen to the Zatrai race as of now. After all, thousands of years of running this empire means it has been using the same, pathetic tactics again and again and eventually they will be countered and some other race may destroy all of zatrai civilization. They see the Zatrai race as monsters over some spilt blood, despite spilt blood being how all races live one way or another.
Being old has its consequences indeed. After all, why doesn't Raznat just use its zatrai to have a suicide squad sent into uncharted space and kill as much as possible? Why settle for this **** slow form of expansion? Why not do what zatrai were built for in the first place? Kill things! No, if it did such move the consequences would be dire. The zatrai empire on the brink by living at the center of galaxy, where if they struck they would be surrounded at all sides by civilizations who see zatrai as a threat to their existence, despite being a greater threat to our own.
However if the zatrai stay here, what stops these empires and civilizations from just going in and attacking zatrai anyways? One day some empire will want our turf, and one day they will somehow out beat even the greatest war machines this galaxy has ever seen thanks to how old we are. Millions of years ago we fought alien empires in the name of our suicidal creators. The zatrai race shall not end up like the creators before us. But the creators couldn't just one day regenerate due to luck like we can.
Stop.
It is very unhealthy to think about such negative thoughts. The zatrai empire is prosperous, controlling hundreds of worlds and the skills of the zatrai remain seemingly unmatched. The only times we ever have lost was when natives exploit the shortcomings in our defenses, but even than it is not so common. We are powerful, we are plentiful, we are unstoppable. Our creators may have only expected us to be useless war machines with the sole intention to kill, but we have evolved beyond that. Far, far beyond that. We created a society with rules and inventions of our own doing without them handing it to us like a vergusan mother hands milk pods to a baby!
Why... I should do something unthinkable. Something for the sake of it.
Raznat suddenly snaps out of its constant internal tangents as a Hibrus with its 3D holographic form appears.
It is Raznat's most respected Hibrus, Yizok, one of the descendants of Yizor. "Why hello there, Raznat. You may be interested to hear that the Vargins of Vargis-II want to speak with you. They are greatly honored to speak to what they have called, 'the Hibrus of all Hibruses'. Thanks to being one of our longest running colonies, they speak our language very well." Yizok happily tells Raznat, but Raznat a bit annoyed that Yizok is telling Raznat what it knows, barks "I am aware of that!" and Yizok quickly replies "Sorry!". Raznat. no getting down to business asks "So what do the Vargins want to say to me?" Yizok answers, "They made a letter of appreciation for you. They thank you for thousands of years of protection, and forgive you for your necessary 'taxes' with the juicing, understanding that they know it is what zatrai need to do to survive.". Interested, Raznat asks "Read it to me, I am curious.".
Yizor reads aloud the message. It goes as follows:
"That's the message, Raznat" Yizok finishes with. Raznat to Yizok's surprise replies "I appreciate the effort put into the message, but it seems impractical. Worshipping us as gods or treating us as these benevolent guardians is completely erroneous. It is a disgrace, complete disgrace." Raznat starts to rant, causing Yizok shut off communications with Raznat almost instantly.
For building as gargantuan and expertly-constructed as the Library of Ol'uesixajra, the great structure was unusually empty most of the time. The word "Library" is perhaps not the best descriptor for this particular structure, as it was more akin to a mighty stronghold or citadel than any repository of knowledge. However, despite the edifice's formidable outward appearance, Ol'uesixajra was indeed a repository of knowledge - one of unfathomable proportions. Within the mighty granite walls of this slave-built citadel was the amassed knowledge of the entire Hyxeran race stored on countless memory prisms contained within vast catacombs whose walls were filled from the floor to the ceiling with prism sockets. For a race whose very purpose was the discovery and cataloging of all knowable things, these halls were hallowed indeed. Hyxera rifted here from throughout the Hyxeran homeworld of Tla'muuxera and the other colonized worlds regularly to compare their research to previous volumes or perhaps sate their curiosity on a given subject. Due to its familiarity by all Hyxera, the Library was likely the closest thing the solitary Hyxera had to a capital city. For this reason - during rare circumstances - the library served as a meeting place for the Hyxera when such a place was needed.
Today was one such day. Within the library's vast interior rotunda was an amazing sight to behold: perhaps four to six hundred Hyxera had gathered, all silently communicating with themselves through mental manipulation. The crisscrossing magnetic fields concentrated in this small space vibrated some of the air molecules and caused the air to hum softly. A dim hum to human ears; roaring chatter to the Hyxera. All the while, bright flashes of bluish-white light occasionally lit the rotunda up momentarily as latecomers to the gathering rifted in from the colonized worlds like Mal'juur and Nahgiira. Before long, a crowd of eight hundred Hyxera had gathered around the circular dais of the rotunda; nearly half of the Hyxeran race was in attendance. It was an unprecedented gathering.
Suddenly, the humming of the air came to an abrupt stop as the mental conversations were interrupted. A rift flash left a single Hyxera "standing" in the center of the dais. Even by Hyxera standards, this individual was large and his "antlers" dwarfed likely every other Hyxera's. This was Max'ojar, an ancient, wise Hyxera that served as the caretaker of this library. If the Ol'uesixajra Library could be thought of as the Hyxeran capital, then Max'ojar could perhaps be considered the ruler of the Hyxera. His word was respected by most if not all Hyxera. Considering that it was Max'ojar that called this meeting to order, the unprecedented attendance of this meeting testified to his influence.
"Fellow scholars." Max'ojar began, vibrating the air of the rotunda to produce an audible sound for the crowd gathered all around him. "The circumstances that bring us together to this meeting of the scholars is dire. I shall allow Scholar Er'uzexyer to present the findings that concern each and every one of us." With that, a smaller Hyxera rifted into being right next to Max'ojar in the central dais.
"Hail, fellow scholars." The new Hyxeran on the dais began, speaking in the same manner as Max'ojar did. "I am Er'uzexyer. I operate the Observatory and Orrery of Mal'krujeza on the world of Nahgiira and focus my studies on astronomical matters, chiefly stars. Normally I study and catalog distant stars and nebulas, but recently I began to look closely at the cluster of stars that makes up our local cluster. As I trust all of you know, the cluster of stars our colonized systems float within are very old compared with much of our galaxy. There are several white dwarf stars within our cluster and one in particular, the one we know as Althu'ruujexera, shows troubling signs. Perhaps 800 years ago, I began observing a certain white dwarf in a distant part of our galaxy undergo the same processes which Althu'ruujexera is now exhibiting. Over the next three hundred years, I watched as this particular white dwarf cannibalized material from a supergiant star it was orbiting until it could no longer support itself. This triggered a powerful supernova that assuredly sterilized any nearby planets. I fear that the nearby white dwarf Althu'ruujexera may also do the same thing as it steals mass from her sister main sequence star. I am convinced that a similar supernova will occur in the next one hundred to five hundred years within our own cluster eradicate our civilization."
Intense humming ensued as the entire crowd of Hyxera chattered in feverish telepathy with one another.
"I have prepared memory prisms for everyone on this subject. After reviewing this matter for yourself, I trust that there will be no doubt among us that immediate action must be taken." Er'uzexyer added.
"If I may have permission to ask, Scholar Er'uzexyer, what steps can be taken to prevent this supernova?" A Hyxera from among the crowd asked.
"There is nothing we are capable of doing that can possibly prevent this. Some of us may have the ability to halt nuclear reactions on a small scale, but to deactivate an entire star is well beyond our capabilities. There is, therefore, only one thing we can do, and this is to prepare the immediate evacuation of our civilization from the cluster."
The air within the rotunda buzzed with magnetic energy as the Hyxera chattered wildly amongst themselves.
May 10 2604
15:22 Human time
7:41 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"I really hope you're right about this, Nat." Leos whispered as Natalia opened yet another drawer. "Not only are we out of our designated sector, but Dess is our senior officer. If she reports us, we'll be sent to a "correctional facility. You know, that place they torture miscreants?" Natalia waved the comment off. "Leos, relax. Vek is covering for us. Everyone else is at the brief, including Dess. They all think we're sick. If my card is here, we're in luck. If not, we can slip out before anyone finds us."
Leos sighed and stood guard nervously, not wanting to touch anything. He flinched at every noise made by Natalia's loud search, getting more nervous as the minutes ticked away. After about five minutes, he had had enough. "Nat, the brief's ending. We have to go." She ignored him completely. "I'm almost done looking. It's here, I know it is."
"Well, I've got to go. Like, now. I'd finish up here and run." He turned for the door, but immediately heard the unmistakable clacking of Corporal Srin's heels. He immediately turned back. "****, ****, ****!" he whispered. Quick, find a place to h-" he stopped as Dess herself walked in. "What's going on here?" she immediately demanded. Leos stood frozen, not knowing what to do, but Natalia continued rifling through drawers.
"Natalia!" Dess raised her voice. "You want to tell me what you two are doing in here before I report you?" Natalia suddenly laughed, pulling a card out of one of the drawers. "You want to tell me what you were doing with this, Corporal Srin?" The expression on her face was triumphant. Dess, however, looked worried.
"That's your ID card. What's it doing in my drawer?" She genuinely seemed to not know what was going on. Natalia raised an eyebrow, no longer smiling. "The same ID card that was used to breach the system and leak information to the Gerians' worst enemy? The same ID card that was stolen from me, and just happens to magically appear in your cabin?" Dess stared on in disbelief. "You can't be serious. I didn't do this! Why would I steal your ID card?"
"Well, you did seem to have a general disdain for me at our first meeting. And we don't really have any suspects. This was just a lucky guess." Natalia pocketed the ID card, beginning to pace. Dess stared at the ground, shaking her head. "Well, ****. Look, Natalia, I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. I don't have anything against you, honestly. But a minute ago you two were the guilty ones, and now it looks like it's me."
"It doesn't have to be like this. We can help each other." Leos said, trying to make sense of the situation. "How much do you know about the Empire's info system?" Dess walked over to her computer, looking slightly more cheerful. "Oh, tons. Everyone has something they study during pre-training. Well, for me it was Gerian tech. I learned about everything, from plasma fusion coils to AN\-* programming. I could hack the system myself if I wanted to."
"Great." Leos asked Natalia for her card, throwing it to Dess. "Is there any information about the previous entry made by this card?" Dess took the card, put it under a blue glowing scanner, then brought up the results. "You know how they tattoo a letter-number on your arm in pre-training? It's a complex algorithm, used to access secured information, to prove you're a part of the Gerian Empire. Basically, to keep outsiders from hacking our system."
"All right." Leos said. "So our leak is... in the Empire. Gee, you don't say." She shook her head. "That's only their primary purpose. Their secondary purpose is actually a very well-kept secret. Since not many people use the network, and even fewer know any technical details about it, it really hasn't gotten around. And even when it does, people don't care. Because of the way the info dump works with the algorithm, it can't give everyone a physical ID. However, it can tell you exactly which sector they are assigned to, which is why it's replaced when you are reassigned."
"So we can identify which sector the perpetrator was in? That definitely would be useful." Natalia walked over and looked at the screen. Dess was scrolling through a long list of directories, finally landing on one. "See right there? {53\6\7-20B}. Fleet 53, Craft 6, Sector 7-20B. Your sector. So it couldn't have been me. If you only had this information earlier, you wouldn't have had to sneak in here."
"All right, all right, you've made your point." Leos said. "Can you bring up a list of everyone in our sector?" Dess pressed a few keys, and another directory appeared, with a list of all 10 Gerians in their sector. "Excellent. We know it wasn't me, Nat, or Vek. And then there were seven." Natalia read off the names. "Iop Baeor. Je Daris. Lupe Drake. Graise Fera. Zie Galil. Mercado Oll. Kuba Slate."
Dess grinned. "The hunt begins."
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
May 10, 2604
10:34 PM, Earth Time
For many centuries, the UTDU had hidden themselves from the Altak Union. Finally, they had decided to reveal themselves to the Union. What better way to announce themselves than with an untraceable method? Rather than assault the Altak, the UTDU decided their entrance would involve light psychological warfare. A single video had been sent towards Mars from a lone sensor outpost outside of UTDU borders. The video consisted of a simple message from the UTDU PM, the video's background being nothing but a video feed which switched between views of the old Canadian Parliament, the White House, and Capitol Building every five seconds. "Good evening, corporate dirtbags. I'd like to tell you that you have another faction of your own people preparing to destroy your empire. Not only are we more advanced than you, but our people are far more intelligent than you. You cannot fool us. Why not just lay down your arms and give up? You can't hope to win. " The feed was timed so that It would arrive on Mars at exactly midnight unless obstructed, and any attempts to track the message would be futile, as sensor post 6342 had already been destroyed.
Admiral Norman Rockwell, ESS Do You Feel Lucky, in orbit around Mars
10:39 PM GMT, 5:28 AM Local Time, 10 May 2604
Rockwell finally finished signing the NDA papers (and had a serious hand cramp), when the intercom blared,
"Paging Admiral Rockwell! We have an unidentified probe nearing Mars, and broadcasting a message!"
Rockwell sighed.
Not another thing to deal with so soon. Please, just no.
Regardless, he turned his chair the the right to face his Comms Officer; and ordered,
"Well? Put the bloody message on, then!"
The main viewscreen of the bridge turned on, and after a few seconds, the black cut away to a video showing a few random clips of the leaders of long-gone countries, and a rather snarky message boasting of some bunch of rebels getting ready to blow up the AU.
Rockwell sighed. He probably should consider that there might be a threat, but he was annoyed to the point of being snarky himself.
"Bring in the probe for examination. I want to see if it's marked." he ordered, and began floating down the hallway at the back of the bridge to the lift shaft.
Admiral Norman Rockwell, Dropship Bay 3, ESS Do You Feel Lucky, Sol
10:58 PM GMT, 5:37 AM Local Time, 10 May 2604
Rockwell stormed (or at least did the zero-gravity equivalent of storming) into the bay, roughly ten minutes after the chamber had become breathable again.
The bay was a trapezoidal void in the ship roughly 2,5 times the size of a dropship, with metal walls, ceiling and floor. The far wall, while not apparently obvious, was actually a massive, armoured door that slid open to allow dropships to enter and exit the ship. Said door was rigged to both the alarms in the room, as well as the heavily-windowed control booth in the centre-back of the room near the ceiling.
The probe was laying on what appeared to be a massive gurney near the middle of the room; with a 5-man crew of mechanics, scientists and security personnel standing a few metres away. Another table-that-looked-like-a-gurney (this one regular-sized) next to the probe was covered in mechanical tools, ranging from powered drills to screwdrivers to spanners, and monkey wrenches to arc welders.
"Alright, so what are we looking at?" he demanded. Before anyone could react, he noticed that the crew members were all wearing what appeared to be magnetic boots, which explained why they were standing properly.
"Actually, scratch that." he said, and then demanded (for real this time),
"Where can I get a pair of those boots?"
A nearby non-five-man-crew-crewman floated over a few seconds later, with a pair of magnetic boots in hand. Rockwell took them, and did his best to sit down to put them on over his normal shoes.
Now that he could stand properly, he went back to his previous demand, namely,
"So what the hell is this thing?"
One of the two people in the lab coats replied,
"It's a message probe, serial numbered PRB-97177; containing a rudimentary ion drive, a five-gigabyte hard drive, a broadcast system, and a severely damaged radio system. It appears to have left Space2 somewhere outside the Kuiper Belt, as it has none of the plasma residue from exiting a wormhole on it." the scientist finished, before nodding at the other one to continue,
"The only file on the hard drive was a three-gigabyte MP17 video file, lasting one minute and thirty-seven seconds. Vectors for the probe's entry are unknown, as it entered the orbit of Mars at a trajectory indicating that Uranus' orbit had severely influenced it's path."
Rockwell thought for a moment, before turning to the scientist that had spoken first.
"It showed clips of people who appeared to be important leaders. Who were they?" he asked.
One of the scientists whipped out a slim, aluminium-backed datapad, and frantically one-handedly tapped away at the touchscreen keyboard for a few minutes, before replying,
"They were all civic and military leaders from the early 2390's, sir."
"So, what faction left during that time period?" he said with a slightly exasperated tone in his voice.
More frantic scrabbling noises from fingernails rapidly slamming into the glass surface of the datapad.
"Large parts of the United States and Canada, as well as most of the easy-to-get resources of the countries." the scientist replied.
"Thank you. Put the drone into the archive bay. Dismissed." he said, and walked towards the exit, the boots making slightly-irritating clop noises with each step. The boots needed work.
He took them off, and threw them into a collection bay near the exit, making a loud CLANG! noise when they hit the wall.
Floating freely again, he rocketed towards the lift shaft, and flew up to the crew compartments. Quickly reaching his stateroom, he glided over to his desk, before using the handlebars on either side of the (riveted-to-the-floor) desk to sit down in his (also riveted-to-the-floor) swivel chair.
He spun around, and opened up the small, extremely-thin aluminium netbook on the desk. An ASCII 'z/OS' logo made of zeroes flashed across the screen as it connected to the ship's mainframe. He brought up his email, clicked 'compose message', and typed:
"TO: Chancellor Spencer Mayaan '[email protected].
CC: The Admirals <[email protected]>, <****[email protected]>, <Town'[email protected]>
BCC:
SUBJECT: Possible first contact?
ATTACHMENTS: Dear_Corporate_Scumbags.MP17.23z, Drone_Specifications.docz.23z
Sir-
A probe containing the attached message entered Sol at 10:34 PM GMT on 10 May, 2604. It is believed to originate from the empire apparently constructed by those who left in the North American Exodus of 2390; and it untraceable.
-Admiral Rockwell
--------------------------
I regret nothing."
He pressed the 'Send' button, and then watched the cheesy-but-helpful graphic that popped up, showing his message's travel through the Space2 communications network; eventually arriving at the dot labelled 'Rigel III'.
He closed the netbook, and floated back towards the door.
1:00 AM, 11 May 2604
In the Marx R system, a small cult of terrorists have started an uprising on a very cold planet called Marx-Delta, a colony world towards the edge of the arcadia nebula and Altak Union space orbiting a F-Class star isolated from many other colonies. Their motives unlike most rebel cults are much... Different. Most of the time, innies try to become independent from the Altak Union due to nationalistic tendencies and wanting self sufficiency or just simple hatred of the corporate machine that is the Altak Union in the first place.
From a wormhole leading from a Mini-Dimension, a part of Admiral Sternum's Fleet reaches the Marx R system. This ship brigade is led by General "Cranium" who commandeers the George Reese, a Battleship that is part of the greater Sternum fleet. General "Cranium" has heard many reports of the psychotic and messed up rituals these cultist Rebels are doing. This is not right, as even rebels have standards usually. General "Cranium" quickly has his small group of hackers get into the poorly (by 26th century standards) blocked comm. channels these cultist innies have set up to get some detailed info, as some small amount of espionage is always good.
"General Sternum sir," one of the hackers after seven or so minutes of hacking pipes up, "We have successfully hacked into their channels. We are going through the information as I speak!".
General sternum, overlooking the hackers seemingly latched onto their computers like machines after a few minutes of quietly waiting barks "Well, what did ya get? Anything interesting yet?".
The hacker's faces are suddenly mortified at what they see, and the general annoyed by the lack of response outbursts "Anything interesting yet?!" causing the hackers to frightfully reply "Well-... We don't know if it is-""Spit it out corporal hacker, we haven't got all day!" "Okay... They are taking people from their homes, slitting their necks and spilling the blood into containers for some reason."
The general a bit confused replies, "What the hell? Anything else...?" "Okay... It seems they have contacted aliens as well."
"ALIENS?! Do you what this means?" General Sternum bursts out in anger.
"Yes, aliens. They even have a pic of one." the hacker responds as a holographic picture of a very segmented and centipede-like creature is seen.
It has five large rounded triangular segments that are connected by a circular tube in the center. Their head is very stream lined and has three tiny, yellow eyes on each side of the head. They have five sets of limbs, three insectoid arm limbs and two tendril-like leg limbs. "I think some of these things are actually on the planet" the hacker continues.
"This is just terrible." The general shouts to a comms. Officer, "Once we finish this operation, tell the Confidentials to cover this up as we do not need aliens spreading their influence among the rebels or else we might have a much worse issue on our hands. Much worse than some wishy washy rebels."
"Understood, sir" the comms. Officer complies, "So what is our first course of action, sir?"
"Tell the admiral about this. We are going to need to make sure no one on this planet gets out." the genral coldly responds, "Order 111 if the admiral chooses to, shall be put into action."
Arcadia Cluster, Mini-Dimension "Ruze", ESS George Reese
1:11 AM, 11 May 2604
Mr. Sternum, Admiral of the third fleet looks out the window of his dreadnaught into the bleak darkness of the mini-dimension as he floats around in the command station with a couple of captains being bored out of their minds. "So what are we exactly doing again, Admiral?" One of the captains ask. "Absolutely nothing while the rebel scumbags prepare to attack us like the scum they are. If that general doesn't get a response in three minutes I swear he will be getting a-"
You Have One Message The AI Mainframe states, interrupting the Admiral.
"Good." The Admiral happily thinks out loud as he tells "Play the message" to the AI mainframe.
From General "Cranium",
Admiral, We have a serious issue on our hands. There have been reported aliens helping the rebels in Marx-Delta. We may need to initiate Order 111 and destroy all records of this planet along with all alien influence of it.
"Well look at that!" The Admiral exclaims, "We got ourselves a Order 111, you know what that means!"
"We try to absolve things in a diplomatic way?" one of the captains incompetently asks. "**** no!" The other captains in unison cheer.
"It means we get to show these scum bags just who they are messing with." The admiral explains with a very evil looking grin.
May 10 2604
16:18 Human time
8:09 Gerian time
Leos/Natalia
"Okay, Vek, what do you know about this Lupe Drake character?" Leos took out his holopad, prepared to take notes. "Lupe? I've shared a cabin with the guy for the last few weeks. He's a footsoldier, a real tough guy. Spends most of his time out and about, doing who knows what. To be fair, so am I, but I have to run the entire sector. All in all, he's a pretty shady character. Scares the crap out of me."
"So if he was out at the time of the leak, you wouldn't know about it?" Vek shook his head. "No. But to be honest, whoever pulled this off is smart. Lupe may be dealing arms to some rogue faction, but I don't think he could effectively hack the system and plant evidence. He's all muscle." Leos sighed. "Well, I started with him because he's your cabin mate. We have the most info on him. From here on out it's mostly guesswork, and that's never fun."
"We'll get him eventually. But I still don't understand why we can't just call up Command and have them deal with this." Vek turned to his monitor, deleting Lupe's name from the list. "This guy's a snake. He's already proven he has means of escape, and he'll probably use them if he catches wind of an investigation." "All right. We have to accept the possibility that more than one person is involved. Dess, can you pair up the remaining names by cabin?"
"You got it." Dess went over to Vek's computer and types some commands. The names were separated into three categories, with two names in each. "Excellent." Leos said. "Let's start with the first group. Iop Baeor and Zie Galil. Vek, you trained them. Anything interesting?" Vek nodded. "Definitely. If I had to pick anyone out of this crowd who could pull this off, it would be Zie. She's an operator, so we know she's smart. She's also the only one in the sector, meaning she was here, alone, during the village mission."
"Which would give her plenty of time to plant evidence." Natalia pointed out. "Dess, are there any operators in your sector?" "Just one. But he keeps to himself, spending most of his time in his room. Really shy when I trained him for the campaign. Zie could have snuck into my room, no problem." Leos grinned. "Well, that's definitely a good lead. Let's go off of this. Vek, what else can you tell us about Zie?"
"Like I said, she's smart. I'd go so far as to say she's an evil genius. We spent most of our time in training talking about military strategy. She knows a lot of ways to kill people quickly and effectively. Always a good sign someone is dangerous." Natalia jumped up, loading her pistol. "All right. Let's go get her." Leos quickly snatched the pistol from her hand, ejecting the clip onto the ground. "The **** are you doing?"
"She tried to frame me and Dess, Leos. We would be off in some prison camp being tortured to death if this blew back to Command." Leos sighed putting the gun on a table. "I understand that. But shooting her with a plasma bolt won't solve our problems." Natalia relaxed, only slightly. "Then what do you suggest we do?" Leos took the clip from the ground and placed it on the table next to the gun. "Vek, can you put in a request to seal the life support pods on a provisional basis?"
"If I do, I'm going to have to tell them the situation." Vek started typing. "They'll soon place us all on probation, and open an investigation shortly afterward. But first they'll seal the pods just like we want. So we have a small window of time to solve this thing." Leos grinned at the thought of a challenge. "Great. How long will the request take to process?"
"A few hours at most. Not like this stuff happens every day. As soon as it does, we swoop in, knock out Zie and sneak her into a secluded, private area for questioning. There are storage areas on the lower deck that would work pretty well. Sound good?" The others shook their heads in agreement. "Let's get to it." Vek said, sending his message to Command.
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
???/???/???
May 10 2604
16:30 Human time
8:15 Gerian time
???
RK-907 stood at the head of a long table, surrounded by the members of its directory. Communications were set to begin. A panel on its hand slid open, and a wire extended out. It plugged into a port in the table, and uploaded the generated code. The contact had the algorithm programmed into themselves as well. They did well, disguising themselves as a Gerian and slipping into the Empire's ranks unnoticed. But RK-907 was not easily impressed, and it had yet to hear any good news from the mission.
Suddenly, letters, numbers, and symbols flowed through RK-907. It displayed the output as a hologram projected from the table. The directory members looked on as each corresponding character was confirmed, and lit up green. Their contact was online. RK-907 opened communications. "Update us, XE-557. Is this port secure?"
"It should be. I used a proxy." RX-907 smiled. "So everything is going according to the plan." XE-557 chuckled. "Indeed. They know about the leak, and are trying to find its originator. Progress is slow but sure." PW-831 spoke up. "Are you a suspect?" XE-557 was hesitant in its answer. "Perhaps. I don't believe so, but it's a possibility. Either way, if I am, it will only result in more dead Gerians. It will not hinder our progress."
"Right." RX-907 continued. "Remember, the only one we need is Leos. If you can bring Natalia along as well, do it. She can be used as leverage. Kill anyone else involved. Do you understand your mission?" XE-557 responded in a lowered voice. "I understand. Someone's here, I've got to go." It ended communications abruptly.
RX-907 unplugged itself and addressed the directory. "In a few days, the Gerian Empire will engage in a civil war. We won't need to destroy them. They'll destroy themselves."
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
3:30 AM, 12 May 2604
Exiting the mini-dimensions a large amount of fighters, cruisers and destroyers coupled with some much larger ships including a orbital bombardment craft finally make it to their destination, the tundric planet of Marx-Delta filled with ******* terrorists and aliens of all things. The second the ships get 100,000 km away from the planet the communications officer and her lackeys get a message from the terrorists, a video one.
"Let's see this." Ravi Femur tells her group as the video feed is displayed largely in very high quality, around 2160 px with the screen being 10 feet in diameter and 9 feet tall, a true beast. It starts with some flickering before right before Ravi and her lackey's eyes a creature and a human are seen. The alien is the same one seen from the info hackers collected confirming in the absolute the alien presence on the planet although this alien is a darker shade of red with the connecting parts of it a very dark red with its eyes being a bile-like yellow. The alien than speaks in English.
"Halt, we do not mean harm. We have been on this planet for years, and only now to we start to telegraph our existence and the first thing you do is prepare to wipe us out! We do not intend death to humans or their great corporations, only to spread the wisdom of the-"
"Who are you?" Ravi interrupts.
"Excuse me? Why did you interrupt me like that, how improper. It seems most humans also have no manners." the alien in disgust responds.
"Who are you?" Ravi Femur sternly voices yet again.
"Fine, I shall say. We are the Vargins, a race of aliens who are under the intent to spread the presence of our race and our equivalent benefactor's race. We do not intend harm, never did." the 'Vargin' replies.
"Our files indicate the contrary, the rebels on this planet have been shown to drag people from their homes and gut them a like a fish!" Ravi debunks in response to the claim of them coming in peace.
"It is only what we do. It is only what our equivalent benefactors want, a little blood. Isn't that how your own corporations work?" the Vargin wonders.
"The corporations do not kill for no reason." Ravi again replies.
"That is not what the humans one this world have told us." the vargin refutes.
"Of course." Ravi in a not so surprised way replies.
"Ms. Ravi, you have no idea what has happened on this planet. Destroy us all, it won't matter. We will let you as a matter of fact, our lives are but specks in the massive overall place that is this galaxy." The vargin with a surprising burst of energy and passion tells the comms. officer.
"How did you know my name?!" Ravi questions in surprise as the screen suddenly cuts out, going on to say to her lackeys "Tell the Admiral to have those NOVA papers signed pronto, as if this gets out... We may find ourselves in one massive pile of ****!" "Got it sir!" One of the lackeys replying, typing in the exact same things the comms. officer told him to type.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, ESS Steve Jobs- Bridge
3:33 AM, 12 May 2604
Admiral Sternum looks sternly at the message he sees and tells his forces "Send in the orbital bombardment craft and multiple other crafts to make sure no rebels get out. We don't want even one of these alien bastards to leave this planet alive, let alone the rebels. If word of this gets out to other colonies, than we will look weak!"
"Got it sir!" One of his captains replies as he goes straight to the ship bay.
The admiral than looks out over the bridge deck and gets prepared to watch the fire works as multiple lackeys in the back sign the multiple NOVA papers required to bring about protocol 111.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, atmosphere of Marx Delta
3:50 AM, 12 May 2604
A single massive bombardment craft fitted with a massive ion cannon with hundreds of bombers stored in it starts to fire upon the major cities of the planet, annihilating civilian and terrorist alike without any care for any bystanders as all that matters is that no one gets out alive. The multiple bomber crafts fly down only thousands of feet above the surface conducting multiple combing runs of napalm against every area of the planet conceivable while the low orbit bombardment craft rains ionic death upon higher populated areas and star ports to ensure no one gets out alive.
The terrorists on the planet in response however, send out something they never expected. A group of crescent shaped marble material crafts start to fly out of some of the caves and with great speed destroy squadron after squadron of bombers with ease and start to blast the orbital bombardment station, but the auto turrets quickly return fire at their attacks lighting up the sky with each and every shot blasting some of these retaliation crafts while a couple destroyers enter the fray of combat and start shooting auto cannons and hunting down these crescent shaped crafts finding them to move incredibly fast.
The crescent crafts start blasting at the destroyers doing some damage, but the destroyers quickly destroy the rest of these crafts before they can do any more damage to the orbital bombardment craft. Suddenly, multiple AA batteries pop up and focus fire on one of the destroyer that was damaged earlier causing the destroyer to break in half and crash onto the planet.
However thankfully some of the bomber craft are still available and drop some ballistic bombs on the AA turrets in the group losing some bomber crafts to the flak of the AA cannons, but not so many that continued genocide of everything on this planet can continue.
Arcadia Cluster, Marx R system, ESS Steve Jobs- Bridge
5:00 AM, 12 May 2604
The Admiral is not pleased with the rate this going.
"This is taking way too long, can't we just like have something to make everyone on the planet choke to death? This is getting boring even for me!" The admiral complains to one of his captains.
"Look, we have no idea what the labs are cooking up, it could be that, it could be some weird ass thing or worse!" The captain explains to the admiral.
"Well ****... How long until we kill everyone here?" He asks the AI mainframe.
"Est. Time: 120 hours." The mainframe replies.
Mr. Sternum is not pleased by this at all, as that is way too long to kill all this rebel scum, some on the other side of the planet may escape and someone thought it was a wise idea to only give one orbital bombardment craft to his fleet which is just plain idiotic as he's going to need lot more fire power than this.
Quite a lot more.
0344 Local Time, 0500 GMT
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Spencer was rapidly propelled out of a rather nice dream as a noise that could only be described as depth-charge-like pulled him back into reality.
Fumbling madly for his iPhone (the new 42s model, in fact) on the table next to his bed, he grabbed it, and slammed the power button as hard as he could. The noise cut out instantly, and the screen dimmed so that he could actually read it in the otherwise pitch-black room.
ADMIRAL STERNUM HAS ENGAGED IN UNAUTHORISED WARFARE WITH AN UNKNOWN ALIEN SPECIES! the message read. It took a moment for that to register on Spencer's (still fairly groggy) mind.
And that means, what, exactly? part of his mind said in it's hypothetical conversation.
It means that we're probably at war! the slightly smaller, more rational side of his brain yelled (still hypothetically).
Does it? the larger of the two asked rather sleepily.
YES!
Really? Then OH GOD PANIC! the larger side yelled as mental klaxons started blaring.
THANK YOU! the rational side managed to spit out before Spencer, still groggy but rapidly becoming more aware (the wonders of panic!), mistook the lightswitch for his (non-existant, but the tired mind comes up with all sorts of strange things) glasses and bashed into said lightswitch at a dead-run.
"FU-" he involuntarily yelled when the knobby bit made contact with his forehead.
He heard footsteps racing down the hallway outside the room. The Councilmen must have gotten the notice, too, then.
Spencer hit the lights (this time with his hand), and remembered that he didn't have glasses. Odd. He took a brief moment to let that sink in, before stumbling back over to his bedside table. He threw open the top drawer, and took out a small, orange-plastic pharmaceutical bottle reading 'Caffeine, 300mgs'. He pressed the tab down, turned the cap, and quickly dumped out three small, yellow-coloured tablets. Not really caring about water, he simply swallowed them.
He ran over to the smallish apartment's wardrobe, and changed into a (Council-worthy) suit as fast as possible, not bothering with a tie (or a comb, for that matter). He stomped into his shoes, grabbed the iPhone, and ran out into the hallway. He didn't make it far before he walked right into a wall where the lifts should have been.
Oh yeah, wrong way.
Spencer spun around on his heel, and began running the other way, rapidly waking up as he did so (partially because of the caffeine pills, but mainly because he didn't want to look so much like an idiot). At the end of the hallway, he made a sharp left, causing lots of 'pop' noises to come out of his back; before just barely failing to make it into the lift on time, and getting smashed between the doors.
"Ow." he remarked when the doors had automatically opened enough that his face wasn't mashed together too much to talk.
Walking onto the lift, he noticed that three of the six councilmen were sleeping on their feet, and leaning against the railing on the side of the compartment is a strange effort to feel less miserably tired.
"'EY! WAKE UP!" he snapped, and the three sleeping representatives opened their eyes, and looked around, startled. The rest of them laughed, and fell silent.
DING! the little panel next to the door went (just barely loud enough to annoy him), the doors opened, and the seven of them shuffled out.
Spencer and three others went around the left walkway (the main area was surrounded by hallway, forming a sort of capital 'D' shape around it), and filed into the room, taking their seats at about the same time the main lights finally kicked in.
"Alright then, let's make this quick. What do we know?" Spencer said about as fast as he could and still be understandable.
"Admiral Sternum just ordered Strike 111 on a previously unknown alien species." the others said, more or less in unison.
"Right, so are we going to try and negotiate, or do we let him destroy them?" Spencer asked, and slammed his fist on the button on his desk that triggered the voting apps on the councillors' phones.
Unfortunately, no one else but Atax had their phones.
"Balls to it. All in favour of trying to negotiate please stand." he ordered.
Three representatives; from Atax, Cytek and Hajal, stood up.
"Dammit, it's a tie." he muttered, too quietly for anyone else to hear.
Thinking quickly, he said,
"I vote we negotiate."
Normally, there would have been astonished looks, and people yelling that the Chancellor couldn't vote, but thankfully those that would ere either too sleepy to realise what was going on, or on the side of negotiating.
"It passes." he remarked, and took out his phone.
He tapped the screen a few times, and there was a rather quiet ringing noise. Spencer whisper-yelled for everyone to shut up, and got out his best yelling voice.
"Yes Chancellor?" a voice that decidedly didn't belong to Sternum answered.
"STERNUM!" he thundered, not catching himself in time.
"This is his comms officer speaking. How may I help you, Chancellor?" the voice asked.
"TELL STERNUM TO STOP ATTACKING!" he yelled, without missing a beat from his previous yelling.
"Yes sir." the voice said, and all noise from the device stopped.
Spencer leaned back in his chair. Damn comms officers.
"Anything else going on that I should know about?" he asked, with a fairly exasperated voice.
The Atax representative quickly looked at his phone, looked away for a moment, and then immediately went back to looking at the phone. He turned pale.
"What is it?!" he snapped.
"Well, we've got a large battlefleet of unknown origin speeding towards us, as well as a fairly large non-nuclear ballistic missile heading straight at this building." he said, voice shaking a considerable amount.
"Well this is just ****ing perfect. ETA?"
"Fifteen seconds." Spencer was out the door before he could finish his sentence. The rest of them started running too as the unmistakable BOOM! of a ballistic missile hitting 200-floor building rang out. Four of them made it out of the room before the lights cut out, plunging everyone into darkness.
There was a rumble.
There was a crash.
There was silence.
Thousands of kilometres overhead, a rogue warfleet, headed by one of the largest ships ever built by man, silently plied through the system's asteroid belt on their way into orbit. A certain rebel admiral smiled as rubble cascaded down from the rapidly-collapsing capitol building.
Admiral Campbell grinned widely, as the first missiles collided with the surface of Rigel III. So far, everything was going as planned. "Sergeant, prepare the Antiproton Cannon. I want all ships to blanket that entire planet with EMP, and commence with bombardment. Target the capitol, and destroy any non-civilian ships that attempt to flee the planet. Any ships which are irrepairably damaged will eject their cold fusion reactors onto the planet's surface, primed for detonation, after Quantum tunneling their soldiers onto designted medical vessels." he said. The communications Sergeant in front of him nodded quickly, and conveyed the admiral's message to the rest of the UTDU fleet, which was just now arriving in orbit above Rigel III. Already, mushroom clouds were exploding in the atmosphere of Rigel III, blanketing the planet with radiation. For whatever reason, no nuclear ordinance had been ejected towards the AU capitol. Campbell had a certain surprise prepared specially for the center of their government. If their mission here succeeded, the AU would be open to attack. Nightmare torpedos and exploded in and around what the UTDU assumed was the center of the AU's government, although collateral damage on civilian sectors was limited as much as possible for such heavy weapons. Massive pulsing energy signatures erupted from the North American every few seconds, evident of some massively deadly attack to come. (Note: The antiproton cannon takes a helluva while to charge. It'll at least take another 1-2 posts before it can fire.)
Ruins of Arcadia, Rigel III, Rigel, Ulysses Nebula
4:30 Local time, 7:20 GMT
BOOM!
Spencer was jerked back into consciousness by the same noise that sent him in. He gasped a few times, and randomly clawed at the air.
Rock.
Concrete, really. From what he could tell (not much, due to the complete lack of light), he was in an air pocket about half a metre tall, in the ruins of the Watson building. Rooting around in the darkness a bit more revealed that the 'roof' of the gap in the rubble was being held up by a lucky formation of fallen I-beams, which had most likely been in the ceiling above him when the missile hit.
Another boom. The rubble shook, but only slightly. He noticed that one of the beams had shifted a bit.
This is definitely not good.
Looking for a way out, he felt around again, this time searching the walls, and noticed a movable-feeling slab of concrete with a few rather-conveniet rebar poles sticking out of the sides.
He rolled over his left shoulder, and managed to turn himself to face the beams. Grabbing onto two of the steel bars poking out of the side of the slab, he pulled.
Something shifted. He pulled again.
The entire slab gave way, flooding the pocket with light. Looking around, he saw, for the first time, that what he had assumed to be another I-beam was, in fact, a severed human arm.
"AH!" he yelled, and quickly scrambled through the hole in the rubble moving the slab had created.
Spencer didn't stop crawling until he was a good three metres from the pile before stopping o properly figure out where the hell he was.
He was in the leftmost hallway of the floor the Council Chambers used to be on. The rubble pile was behind him, completely blocking off the way back (not that he wanted to go there, anyway). In front of him, the hallway continued to the lobby door, which was ajar, and letting in what he assumed to be sunlight. The ceiling lights, of course, were rather-permenantly out of service. Spencer ran for the door, and burst out into the empty lobby.
It used to be a mid-sized, semicircular room with floor-to-ceiling glass panes in the front, a revolving door, and the receptionist desk on the far wall from the door. Now it was a dilapidated mess, with the windows smashed, the door missing, and what was left of the potted plants that used to line the walls strewn all over the room. The receptionist (whom he remembered to be named Catherine) was, thankfully, not there (either alive or dead). Not really caring to investigate further, Spencer ran for where the door used to be, and into the morning sunlight.
The plaza was a wreck. The massive, 200-storey Watson building had completely collapsed, sending rubble all over the plaza that it had formerly dominated. The sculpture of a man holding up a wire-frame globe, which had, at enormous expense, been brought to Rigel from it's original home in Manhattan by a salvage team; had been crushed by a large pile of building materials.
The other eight buildings, who had been considerably less imposing and grand than the Watson building, were even less so, with only one still standing (and even then, only about half of it was still intact). Spencer randomly noticed the actual door part of the revolving door from the Watson building laying in the sunken, middle area of the plaza, near the statue.
He was suddenly distracted by more explosions, and noticed, for the first time, the sheer number of explosions and large orange-and-yellow flashes going off far above him. Had the battle already begun? He hoped so.
Spencer checked his phone, only to realise that it wasn't working.
Dammit.
He started walking towards the former entrance to the plaza (opening onto Manchester St.), hoping that the rest of the city was still fairly intact.
Somewhere in the distance, a large object that looked kind of like a massive flare; streaked down from a cloud bank, leaving a trail of white smoke behind it. It hit near King St., causing the pyramid-shaped, 150-storey-tall Cytek tower to crumble to the ground, collapsing in on itself on the right, and smothering several blocks of non-skyscrapers.
Looking around, he realised that the one that hit the Cytek tower was only the beginning of a massive hail of missiles, impacting indiscriminately around the city and causing massive damage to whatever they hit.
These bastards were going to have a lot to answer for.
Admiral Jacob Townsend
Bridge of ESS Leviathan, Orbit of Rigel III, Rigel, Ulysses Nebula
5:45 Local time, 8:30 GMT
"Dammit!" Jacob yelled at the holo-map in front of him as yet another large red sphere formed over the dot signifying where Arcadia was. It seemed they intended to blanket the entire planet in EMP waves, considering the ridiculous number of nukes they were detonating in orbit.
After the initial attack, Second Fleet had fled to the (fairly extensive) naval base on Rigel IV, which the attackers seemed to be ignoring for now. Since then, they had been watching, and waiting for the bombardment to start slowing down, hopefully meaning they had run out of EMPs.
And what a ship it was. The enemy's flagship was the largest ships Jacob had seen in his life, bristling with weaponry, and, from what he could tell by the fates of the few frigates who didn't flee; extremely heavily-armoured. This was going to be tough.
"THERE!" he yelled, noticing that the bombardment was starting to slow down.
There was a near-deafening roar as the ship's engines activated, and went from nothing to full power in the space of only a few seconds. Looking out the small viewports on the bridge, he saw all the other ships in the fleet doing the same, leaving massive plasma trails in their wake.
"ETA: Two hours. Targets will be in firing range in one hour, forty-three minutes." the ship's AI chimed.
"Thank you, SARA." Jacob replied, before shouting,
"Alright men! We've got one chance at this, so we are NOT going to balls it up!"
"Order Toralen to take her formation and hit the smaller ships, and tell Wagner to use mass EMPs against the main group!" he ordered.
"We'll be going after the big one. Order all ships to load MAC guns, and make sure every missile tube is loaded. We hit hard, and we hit fast." he finished, and watched as the three communications officers on the bridge began relaying his orders through their headsets to the rest of the fleet.
This was going to be good.
------------------------------------------
2nd Fleet Ship Count:
Townsend's formation:
1 Dreadnought
1 Battlecruiser
3 Cruisers
7 Destroyers
5 Frigates
1 Command Ship
1 Planetary Bombardment Vessel
Toralen's Formation:
1 Command Ship
1 Carrier
1 Battlecruiser
4 Cruisers
8 Destroyers
10 Frigates
5 Interceptors
Wagner's Formation:
1 Command Ship
1 Battleship
1 Battlecruiser
5 Cruisers
15 Destroyers
10 Frigates
Destroyed:
None yet.