NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: This is closed, unless you can TG me with a good reason to be in it. And yes, Burninatonia approved it. It's a result of this (http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=112899) thread. Anyhow, the IC stuff.

"...Vehicles glided in quiet motion in whatever direction they were travelling. Space vessels continued forward, some crashing into land and sea..."

It's pilots dead or devoid of thought, the Burninatonian vessel fell unhindered into the grasp of Earth's gravity. But that was not the greatest of it's problems, and could have been corrected if there had been any aboard to think and command.

Years of space travel to and from the third planet had left a ring of debris in low Earth orbit, a hazard to vessels descending to Earth, and even more so for one whose pilot was no longer doing his job.

Sirens wailed as some unnoticed former shard of ship punched through the double hull, liberating the vessel's precious atmosphere to spill into the void.

Crew died, and the ship tumbled, falling faster towards the Earth below. The atmosphere reached up to take it, and friction stripped it of protrusions, ripping the jagged wound in the hull wider.

Now it passed, cherry-red, from air to sea, and the waters quenched it's fires. The thick mud of the seabed claimed the battered ship hungrily, sucking it down.

Division Ten Naval Base, Nlabj-Sfamb, E Anlabj/Katai Archipelago

A very specific light lit up, for the first time, on Ksarai keiYvhana's boards.

Foreign vessel down. Down in a very literal sense; that was the board which monitored space traffic over the Archipelago.

The satellites put it's point of impact in the nearby ocean, a reasonably convenient five hundred kilometers East of the Katai Archipelago; outside the Dominion's territorial waters, but close enough to be claimable, if supramines were sent soon. It was Dominion policy to claim downed craft as salvage, if possible, although that policy had never before been used.

Ksarai opened a commlink to the supramine crew recrooms and the troops idling there.

"Hey boys, this is keiYvhana up in Monitoring. C-031 and 032 need to scramble; we've got an Epsilon Twelve situation off East. I'll feed the data to ship's comps."

Things here in the Katais were considerably more relaxed than in Pearl; the native population would react badly to strict enforcement of discipline.

Down below the command tower where Ksarai sat, the crews pounded down the ramps to the docks, where the Dominion Supramines C-031 and C-032 lay in their cradles.

Ksarai watched them depart, and turned back to her boards. This day had seen more action than most weeks; there was no telling what might happen next.

International Waters, East of the Katai Archipelago

The C-031 and C-032 slipped through the undersea murk, down in the depths of the ocean where no light reached.

"Coming up on the impact zone, Commandant!" the C-031's sonar officer reported.

Captain-Commandant Hra-Lingh ralTaeren stared out the narrow viewport at the surrounding waters, as if he could see the downed spacecraft through the surrounding dark.

"Slow to fifty KPH," he ordered, "Stopping completely when we reach half-kilometer range."

"Affirmative, Commandant."

The supramine drifted onwards for several more minutes, until the sonar model of the wreck grew large on the screens, and the C-031 drew to a stop.

"C-032 is circling the wreck to provide a full model," the sonar officer said; sure enough, the wireframe rotated as the other supramine progressed, filling in the blanks that the C-031 could not see.

The ship was large - certainly larger than the Catfish-class Supramines - and half buried in the thick sediment of the sea floor, tilted at a crazy angle; one aerodynamic fin and a thruster nozzle pointed upwards towards the surface.

"Check the model against the international spacecraft registeries," Hra-Lingh said. "Get me a nationality."

That task required a commlink back to base and the recievers there; the spacecraft registeries weren't exactly something the Naval Division required often.

"That's a Burninatonian-model ship," the commtech told him, "A short-range clipper. Designed for atmospheric flight and for rapid delivery around the Earth-Moon system - Terra, Luna, and the Lagrange points."

That was an odd stroke of luck; with the collapse of the Burninatonian Imperium, there was little chance that that government would be able to claim it's vessel, even if it had had the legal rights to it.

But it didn't; Tsaraine could legally claim this wreck as salvage. Hra-Lingh set about doing so.

"I, Captain-Commandant Hra-Lingh ralTaeren of the Catfish-class supramine C-031 of the Naval Command Division of the Second Dominion of Tsaraine, having found this Burninatonian Ash-class short-range clipper derelict upon the high seas, do take command of, and claim possession of, aforesaid vessel, in the name of and for the government of her Ladyship Rene Seingult, Domina and Arkhora of the Second Dominion of Tsaraine, Division Commandant of the Fifth Division of Tsaraine, and Abnatr A'abnatratj E Anlabjatj, in this the Thirteenth day of the second month of the year 1160 after the founding of the First Dominion."

That, and the records the ship's computers made of it, legally settled the claim in favour of Tsaraine. He found the archaic formula (drawn up in the short time when Rakenno, on the Ekatorik coast, had been a possession of the First Dominion) somewhat amusing.

"Looks like we're going to need a marine archaeology team to get it out of that mud," Hra-Lingh remarked. "Commtech, open a link to Naval Command."

Wreck Site, International Waters, East of the Katai Archipelago

Far above, where the sun was shining and the seabirds were wheeling, the Dominion Ship Stonefish lay at anchor on the waves.

Down here, however, the waters were blacker than midnight, cold as ice, under a crushing pressure. The marine archaeology Researchers brought by the Stonefish had to wear heavy suits to survive against the weight of the ocean above their heads.

"Lots of garbage here," one remarked over the radios, "Dumping, perhaps?"

"Burninatonian junk cannons," another replied, more familiar with the workings of the fallen Imperium. "Anti-sat stuff."

"Hmm. Interesting."

"We've got much the same ideas in the tube, or so the Space Command tells me. Retrograde shrapnel."

They continued to pick through the scattered debris around the downed ship, looking through the shards broken from it in it's crash; any one of them, or all together, could provide some new breakthrough back on land.

Eventually, they'd be able to dig the ship itself from the soft seabed muck, and, barring accidents, bring the entire craft back to Tsaraine.

Wreck Site, International Waters, East of the Katai Archipelago

"Last line attached, C-031."

On the ventral screens Hra-Lingh saw the marine archaeologists climb down the side of the wreck, brightly lit by the C-031's floodlights.

C-032 was standing by to pick them up; for now the actual job lay to the C-031.

"You know the plan," Hra-Lingh told his crew. "Slowly, now; we don't want to lose this thing!"

The helmsman nodded, and switched the altitude controls from the foot pedals to the keyboards.

"Now raising altitude," he said, with one nervous eye on the ventral screens which displayed the wreck.

The crashed Burninatonian ship had been carefully dug from the enveloping seafloor muck, and turned as much as possible onto it's belly; now the dozens of spun-diamond cables set around the wreck pulled taut and began to lift the craft from the seabed.

"Everything's looking steady, Commandant," the commtech reported. "C-032 reports that the Researchers are on board and they're ready to depart."

"Excellent," Hra-Lingh said. "Let's lift, crew - slowly and carefully. And keep one eye on that wreck at all times!"

Burninatonian Artefact Repository Core, Nova Reio, Tsaraine

Deep under Nova Reio, Tsaraine's second city, were the great warehouses where alien technology from those races the Dominion had encountered was kept; the near-extinct Kymnari, the enigmatic, malevolent Invaders.

Now there was a third Core, as yet almost entirely empty. The stenciled letters across it's doors proclaimed it the Burninatonian Vault, and it held as yet only one artefact, the Ash-class Clipper recovered from the seabed off the Katai Archipelago.

Right now that vessel was dissassembled in pieces across the floor, with researchers attempting to match the mangled parts to the schematics like some giant jigsaw puzzle.

"It stinks!" Rekhan Sche'daya exclaimed, waving his hand before his nose futilely. "What is that smell?"

Zvegdi ralShai, his fellow Platoon Commandant, shrugged expressively. "Unsure," he replied. "You get used to it, though, after a while. We thought it might be the crew, but we're pretty sure we found all of them."

"You mean they survived that crash? I saw the recordings from the Setnet, nothing could survive that!"

"Of course not," Zvedgi said, "They were dead, of course, and beginning to decompose; therein lies the explanation, of course. Though with big overmuscled creatures like Burninatonian Hordesmen, one expects that they didn't smell too nice to begin with; something to do with removing cranial capacity to provide more space for muscles, I suppose. No personal hygiene."

"We may never know," Rekhan replied, feeling glad that the Invaders, with whose artefacts he usually worked, had been runty little things with overdeveloped brains and less body odour. "Now, leaving the personal habits of the Burninatonians aside, there was something you wanted my opinion on?"

Zvegdi nodded. "It's over there; came out from near the atmosphere recyclers - which are rather more advanced then ours, I might add. This thing is a gift from God Above. It's marked as "environment support" on the schematics, but we're not sure what it does."

"Hmm." Rekhan examined the artefact, which had the blocks-and-tubes look of most revealed machinery. Aside from a large dent in one corner, it was more or less intact; it's position in the downed spacecraft had shielded it from greater damage.

"Got a screen?" he asked. "Thanks." Taking the computer Zvegdi passed him, Rekhan called up the databases of his own Core, looking for anything remotely similar; the same design requirements might develop twice, after all.

The search came back with no matches, but Rekhan had the niggling feeling that he should have recognised it.

"Broaden search," he told it, "All non-human artefacts on file."

That came up with results; an old Kymnari something, taken (according to the accompanying text) from the crash-landed Kymnari warship which had originally brought that race to Earth.

Item was one of several apparently used to provide artificial gravity to cushion the effects of acceleration at high gravities, Rekhan read.

"Zvegdi, my friend," he said, "You've hit the jackpot. I do believe you've found an inertial dampener."

Earth Orbit

The probe was simple, little more than a fusion reactor, antimagnetic core, and testing equipment, but nonetheless it had been sent upon a recoverable orbit; none of that equipment was technology the Dominion wanted to see in foreign hands.

Rekhan Sche'daya and Zvegdi ralShai stood carefully in the zero gravity of High Stone with the caution of groundsiders, and watched it's progress on the screens.

"Artificial gravity due to acceleration and artificial gravity due to the dampener are currently equal at one Gee," Zvegdi read. "That's standard cruising acceleration for the Horus-class freighters. Oh - acceleration is increasing."

The green numbers on the screens that showed the acceleration of the probe inched up, from 1.0 to 2.0; however, the accompanying numbers showing the subjective gravity, under the influence of the inertial dampener, remained steady at 1.0.

"It looks good," Rekhan noted. "Now, if it will remain the same at higher accelerations..."

They waited edgily for the probe's acceleration to increase further, and found happily that the subjective gravity stayed steady at one Gee even at twenty times Earth gravity, the highest acceleration that the antimagnetic cores could safely reach.

"This is going to revolutionise the Space Command!" Rekhan exclaimed happily. "Imagine! We could get to the Belt colonies in hours, not days! To the outer planets in a few days! To the kuiper belt in a few weeks! Zvegdi, the Dominion is about to get a whole lot bigger because of us!"