NationStates Jolt Archive

This is a completely open RP.

OOC:
I'm a fan of The Covenant from Halo, so I made a puppet future-tech nation which is modeled after The Covenant, Covenant Forces. This thread is my RPing their discovery by Xessmithia. I will RP with the puppet and I won't do anything like selling my own stuff to them. I'm not that kind of person.

I'll write the first IC post tommorow. After that anyone can join in, but please follow the conventions I set down in my first IC post. For example, their planets are in the NFZ, so get there through Xessmithia or make it a freak accident or something.

The Archimedes deep-space array was preparing for it's next tachyon sweep. By some oddity of the NFZ tachyons weren't affected, the astrophysicists figured it was because of their negative mass. This was very beneficial as it allowed for excellent scans and communication at FTL speeds possible within the NFZ which would otherwise be impossible.

Louis Chapman sat at the control panel. He was working here gathering data for his graduate thesis, he was looking for other planets to colonize within the NFZ. He knew that optical telescopes could do the same, but it required a much more complicated system. With the tachyon pulse scan he just targeted a star and sent the pulse off. An or so later he had the results back highligting any object with a mass greater then 3.5x10^22 kg.

That hour turned out to be 51 minutes, and it had passed slowly as Louis waited to get his results on the system called EXSS-154. Louis scanned the data, he knew the star was a K3 already, but the system also had ten planets. Six gas giants made up the majority of the system, two had masses greater than Jupiter, one was about the same as Jupiter in mass, and the remainig three were far out in the system and equated with Neptun and Uranus back in old Sol. The terrestial planets were more interesting, one was far to close to the sun to be habbitable, but three were in the liquid water zone of the star. The first two planets were binary, orbitting eachother around their center of mass, they'd be a bit hotter than Xess. And one was just barely in the liguid water zone, it would be a frigid world.

This discovery was already notable and Louis was sure he'd get his doctorate now. But something odd was there as well. It wasn't a mass, it was something else. Louis ran it through the array's com[uter database. The search was taking forever so he started writing up his report. When the computer finally beeped it was done, over 3 hours had passed. Louis read the read-out carefully, his jaw dropped. That can't be right, he thought. He re-read the data, there was no mistaking it. The anomaly was a form of primitive FTL. Louis's face froze, "Oh my god."

The existence of another FTL using species in the NFZ was never suspected by the Xessmithian military or scientufuc community. No scientist had thought it impossible or course, just extremely unlikely. And as such the news that one did indeed exist was startling to say the least.

Captain Fitzgerlad didn't like his assignment. He had to take his Fermi class battlecruiser, the XNV Einstein and his attached supply freighter/troop transport to the newly discovered system, and that required a targeted gate jump inside the NFZ.

He frowned, even though hyper-tunnels were considerably more stable when launched from an anchored TCG gate, even more so when the destination was another gate or a location outside the NFZ, he didn't trust it to bring him where he supposed to be.

"Is the translation AI installed?" He asked.

"Yes sir, it's running smoothly." An officer answered. Fitzgerald smiled, the AI was standard equipment on all first contact missions. It wasn't sentient of course, it was just able to make quesses and get new ideas. It wasn't aware of it's existence.

"Then take us through the gate." Fitzgerald ordered, and helm promptly complied. The Einstein quickly entered the gate and after several seconds of tense travel for Fitzgerald, arrived.

"I've got a lock on the beacon pulsars sir. We're where we're supposed to be more or less." Astrogation said, Fitzgerald sighed with relief.

The Einstein had come out of the hyper-tunnel in the outer system, only three light-hours from the target co-ordinates. "Take us in-system helm." Fitzgerald ordered.

After a few moments the scanner officer spoke up, "Sir, we have a contact. Looks like a fusion engine propelled ship."

"Looks like we're getting a welcoming party. Let's not be late."

Ship Master Dara'Garamee stood on his raised command deck, his yellow armor imposing in the low light. He clicked his mandibles in disgust, "Curse light-speed delay. That intruder has been here for over an hour and we just found out about it. Take our ship to meet them, full burn, engines at one hundred ad twenty percent."

"Your excellency that will red-line our reactor in six minutes." A Jackal manning the helm said.

"Then do it for five minutes. Just get us going before I shoot you." 'Garamee yelled at the Jackal. He felt the rumble of increased reactor power and engine thrust through the deck plating.

'Garamee's ship raced through space at the intruder. He would show them what disobeying the prophets and intruding on Th Covenant brings.

The ship was approaching, fast. Captain Fitzgerald didn't like it at all. He was watching the alien ship in the main viewscreen, there were several brilliant blue flashes.

"Sir, we've been struck by several high-energy lasers. We've lost several millimeters of armor at the impact points." Reported the tactical officer. "I've begun charging the shields. But they won't do us any good against lasers."

"I know, lets hope they don't havy any nasty surprises up their sleeves. Return fire, try to knock out their engines."

"Yes sir." And with that the tactical officer sent twin blue beams of LinAc fire at the alien ships hindquarters. Fitzgerald anxiously awaited their impact as they shot across the light seconds.