NationStates Jolt Archive

Kronus, Funeral World of the Necrontyr

Alastanisatan walked down one of the countless wide boulevards of the planet, examining the bones preserved there. Kronus wasn’t a world of necrontyr bodies and remains, those were the homeworld and Seneschal, and a few other tomb worlds, in them glittering jewels composed of the compressed remains of trillions of dead necrontyr. Those worlds, no one but the necrontyr themselves visited, and lived to tell of it. This was different, this was a funeral world, a world that was essentially a global war memorial. The bones were those of those creatures the old ones had herded as living weapons at the necrontyr in the War in Heaven. A ‘crude’ Jokaero skeleton, in an alcove, draped in cloth of gold stared witlessly up at the ceiling.

Besides Alastanisatan, another necron lord equal rank walked beside him, past further remains, killed in battle and brought here as memories of the war. “So,” Arnran mused, smiling a little, “The hawkmen have worked out fairly well. That puts me one up…”

“What about those Krorks?” Alastanisatan said.

“They hardly count, you didn’t actually conquer anything.”

“Bah. Fine, one up to you, damned rules-lawyering.”

---
Later, Duat

Alastanisatan sat on the upper floor balcony of his home, attended by several of his ‘court’ you could call it a harem as readily, though it included both genders. It had become the ‘done thing’ among the necrons, since peace with the Eldar of Tor Yvresse, to have such groups of Outcasts about them, it was considered dangerous, in its way, yet enjoyable, by the elflike aliens, and so an experience to be relished. Alastanisatan was more popular than most, for he was known in the legends of the eldar, as ‘The Herald of the Storm’ and fame had its attractions. As well as this, there were numerous servants thereabouts.

He drew his fingers lightly through the golden hair of his favourite of these attendants, sitting beside his chair, reading intermittently from a piece of a glass like material, currently displaying one of the more praised works of ancient romantic literature written by the necrontyr, by the name of ‘Icirana i Shrina’ and leaning against his thigh. Far, though in the range that both could see, across the valley a snow leopard was hunting. A reclusive animal indeed, with a wide, bushy tail, jumping from rock to rock with a sure-footedness the equal of any mountain goat.

The fingers he trailed through her hair were blue skinned. Although the now-sapient (again) necrons were still machines, for civilian purposes they habitually transferred their minds to bodies layered with muscle and fat (in moderation, mind) and skin, after all, it was difficult to interact with people in a meaningful manner without facial expression available to one. He could, in the eyes of many, pass for a drow, his hair was white, though it shone with this whiteness as though made of ivory, rather than a more dull colour greyish-white that was common to necrontyr and many drow, and his skin, including pointed ears, was that colour not because of dark pigmentation, but because the alien blood that flowed beneath it was blue, not red. The Storm Lord was quite literally blue blooded.

He thought upon the matter of his ongoing rivalry as he looked down at several more of his retainers on the garden before him. The house was constructed upon a spar of rock from the side of the mountain of Sedamar, with a precipitous drop beyond. At about twenty-five degrees to the perilously vertical wall, it seemed to have been ground into position by glaciers, though perhaps the truth, on this terraformed world, was different.

Carved from this rock was a flat spearhead like garden, and below that, several tiers more of wildflowers, and outbuildings. Behind there rose the cliff face, reverting to the chaos of nature when it got beyond the house’s field emitters, that controlled which animals entered and left, and whether they could prey on each other. The sentimental settings of these systems by many of Duat’s inhabitants lead to larger mammals and birds delighting in being near humans (and elves, and necrontyr) because of this automatic protection. That of course, was often welcomed too.

Within his mind, the Storm Lord searched archives of information that had been collected over the years by the necrontyr. Endless information and knowledge. Billions of cultural-survey-drones monitored many thousands of different worlds and cultures. “Elarique,” he mused, pausing his hand.

“Yes?” she said.

“What do you think of drow?” he asked.

“I don’t really know much of them,” she frowned, “Why?”

“I’m considering conquering some.”

---
A world not named

Alastanisatan turned his now metallic hand over in the early morning light, opening and closing it slightly. Things were moving. It was a while since drones had detected drow activity they believed related to another group that had been monitored via non-governmental channels for some time. These were an expansionist group, not that anyone truly cared that they expanded into areas held by the krork. A few less krork was in everyone’s best interest.

Skeletal metal fingers drummed lightly on the haft of a warscythe as the necron considered his plan. Soon, very soon, it and its ‘friends’ – those he had chosen to involve in the plan. For now, they were purely those he knew that he could rely on in matters of confidence. Overhead, a great crescent moon passed, the necron warship Calastan. The necrons disappeared.

---
The Calastan

They were underway to the krorks’ system already. It took mere moments of travel before the deceptively spindly ship, a ‘Scythe-class’ cruiser, arrived, at the fringe of the target system. Its purpose there was twofold, be detected and fired upon, in order to generate a plausible ‘cause’ for the Storm Lord’s war, and to capture local drow for ‘interrogation.’

To do this, it lurked, as was said, but it also had techniques. It was conceivable, that with its heat emissions focussed outwards, and its sensor-fooling hull, it could go undetected for some time. But it didn’t just want to be detected, it wanted to be mis-identified as a small ship. For that end, it executed a sequence of course corrections, using both sets of engines, both the inertialess and the conventional drives. An anti-proton drive can be seen for many light years, when in operation, and it was on this principle that the Calastan used its drives. Emitting other energy as if from heat-sinks, and using shadow-fields and absorptive materials to camouflage itself, it disguised itself as some kind of warship – which it was, but far smaller than it really was. A frigate of some type, probably a spy ship. Using its drives to manouver itself, by artificially reducing its apparent mass, it drifted on vectors that would appear to be suspect, should any drow ships be lurking further in system.

With luck, they’d send a force to investigate, which would then be rather outmatched.

Mork
Spaceboss Junkah looked at the readings as the C'Tan ship wandered into the Ork system. He'd never seen anything like it before in his whole life (Of 42 years) and wondered why they had wandered in here.
"Sir, what should we do to dah new ship?' a Grot squeaked. Junkah thought for a moment.
"Well, dah Drow want us to contact anyfink dat comes in to our system...And we don't want tah piss off dah Drow...Even if dehy'r not Orky. So I wan' to talk to 'em. Uh...Wot did dah Drows tew me tah do in first soight situmicashuns?"
"Opening channel, sir."
The Ork ship just floated there, barely in one piece, waiting for the scanners to respond.

Sch'Naggio
Meanwhile, in the more reasonable portion of the Drow Empire, the Drow fleet was on alert. Several scanners had been detected in the Ork system (Which was only identfied by its two inhabited planets, named after their Gods, Gork and Mork. Nobody really knows which one is which, so everyone has their own definition of which is which. The Drow Navy identify Gork as the planet closer to the sun.) Of course as the new Drow navy is fairly new and the stored ships were very obsolete, the Drow navy consisted of about ten combat ships plus numerous frigates that individual Drow corporations bought to protect their cargo ships. The Drow were still paranoid about system defense, and used much more advanced sensor systems just about everywhere in their two systems. The Drow Planetary Defense Grid was now upraded to Xaser guns and now included an orbital defense system around several of the other planets. Even so, the Drow had spent so much time and money on the planetary defenses they hindered behind on their navy vessels, despite the Mage-Crusher II which was about the size of a large asteroid and armed with more weapons than the rest of the fleet combined. Needless to say it was rather difficult to repair when needed, but it was well-armed and well-commanded, so it was unlikely it needed it would need repairs any time soon. Or so they thought.

The necron ship watched as an alien ship approached. It would call the alien ship crude, bulky and unworthy of its attention, but it was here and it had to engage with the krork ship. Of course, that didn’t mean it had to talk, quite the opposite. It watched, curious to see if any of these drow would appear.

Instead of communication, it executed a course change, jimmying its inertia with systems reminiscent to gyroscopes. The antimatter drive blazed as it turned on its centre of gravity and pushed itself along. The ship the krorks seemed to be chasing seemed to be turning and running at the first opportunity

Meanwhile, it watched the interior of the system. Relatively fixed defences, it seemed. The necron ship, and the Storm Lord on board as they discussed the matter, agreed that the drow were liable to be new to space travel. Defending with fixed defences had a certain benefit, but only in certain circumstances. Otherwise, well, the drow would see, but first, the necrons waited for the irritable and short tempered krork to fire on them.

Space Boss Junkah, however, was more afraid of the Drow than he was impatient. He had seen what they could do, and shuddered at the thought of what they might do to his kin on Mork. The ship started to flee, and he ordered chase, not knowing what to do in this case. He was going with his insticts. Space Boss Junkah wasn't the greatest military mind, but he knew a thing or two about space movement and combat. Junkah was one of the most experienced Space Bosses in the Orken Fleet, although nowhere near as experienced as the Space "Admahruhls" or whatever. Orks called them Space Snots because of their high-and-mighty attitude about the Drow-given titles. His ship (The Junkah) was fast for an Ork ship and couldn't keep up to the Necron's speed, but it was held together well enough that just the sheer thought of the sturdiness of the ship held it together and kept it moving, so tehy were able to keep it in sight, continuosly hailing it (And a few other non-offensive things as buttons were accidently pushed) while trying to figure out what the instruction manual told him (Which was in Drow, not Ork.)

The Necron ship wasn’t quite impatient, but it could see that its effort to manufacture an ‘incident’ wasn’t working. It didn’t really mind. Popular support was a finicky thing. Most people paying for their support, though of course, it wasn’t exactly a significant cost to people, even though it was a large portion of the budget, felt rather annoyed if there wasn’t some kind of military operation (successful) of course, underway.

The Calastan turned, and as it did so, it shut down its secondary drives, venting the antimatter it had synthesised just to make a convincing show of using an anti-proton drive, and, increasing its change in speed by almost an order of magnitude, brought itself onto an intercepting trajectory with the Krork ship, one that would bring them almost to physical contact.

Then, with a power spike visible even to crude and rather unreliable ‘orky’ ‘sensers,’ it began preparing to open fire on the orkish vessel, as it approached two light seconds. The effective range of its gauss whips was somewhat less, at its current settings.

The weapon in question was its long-range armament, a gauss particle whip, capable of bypassing shields entirely, and obliterating even small cruisers in single shots, or being used to generate several simultaneous beams. In this case, it was preparing to fire a single blast, which should – but might not, there was an element of luck and guesswork in that – bypass the krork ship’s shields, and cut a hole through it lengthways, from bow to stern, hopefully holing the main reactor.

"We've taken a big hit!" the Grots squealed as the shot destroyed their shields and destroyed most of the upper decks, "We're losing air and the Ale! Closing off the Ale containers and sealing the decks!"
"Fiyah back!" Junkah shouted. Lasers spewed out of the ship to the Necron vessel, which fizzled out before they his the shit.
"Wot happened?"
And then the Ork ship exploded in a brilliant fireball, killing all those onboard. The fast-moving junk from the ship sped quickly to the Necron ship, quite on fire and quite incapable of doing a lot of damage.

The Calastan didn’t dodge the expanding cloud of debris and plasma, but instead, it allowed itself a moment of triumph. It expressed this triumph in communication with several of its kin.

“One shot. Yee-hah” about summed up the sentiment.

Then, it began using its teleporters. Not to try and pick up survivors, for there were unlikely to be any. But rather, to lace, with the debris, several short duration probes. Essentially batteries with some sensors and a low grade, one-time-pad encrypted communications system to pass on its findings. It attached some of these to larger pieces of debris, and let others float. Along with these, there were numerous jamming devices.

Then, the Calastan disappeared. It retreated, almost a parsec, to observe. Eventually, the loss of the krork ship would be noticed. And hopefully, a drow ship would come by, and it could see what it was up against…

The Drow knew about the attack-Even before the Orks did-but they didn't care about details. Some say it was an unprovoked attack on the newcomer's behalf, others state the Orks instigated a fight. Either way, the most that the Drow did was launch a few probes and theysent a freighter to the Ork system. The Ork Navies began to stop fighting each other and started to use their sensers to look for the unidentified vessel. The Drow cared little about what happened to the Orks-there was an unlimited supply of the beasts. They hoped that the presence of a superior vessel might instigate them to come out and establish contact or attack.

The Calastan discussed its options as the drow frigate moved in to the general area of the debris, showing the relayed data from its drones. The debris, enlarged, was shown above the ‘cyberspace’ field the two were presently occupying, the Calastan in its latest avatar, modelled on one particularly insane kook it had run across over the years.

Concentric spheres showed the points at which the jamming devices would best take effect, the innermost sphere with a chance of nearly one hundred percent of blocking signals out of its influence.

“Think you can take it?” the Storm Lord asked, and the ship looked annoyed.

“Can I cripple an escort ship? I’m insulted.”

“Without it getting out of the jamming.”

“Probably, but I’ll emerge from FTL behind it, in between it and the planet, and run my own jamming suite full power. Word oughtn’t to get out of who’s going to attack them.”

“Right…”

“Now, it’s apparently a small ship, so I wouldn’t expect much resistance. Even so, I plan to just cripple the engines and weapons, then let you board them. Hopefully you won’t kill any of the crew.”

“I’ll endeavour not to…” the Storm Lord mused, “I’ll have my group prepare non-lethal weapons. What about internal defences?”

“Well, if I get close enough, I’ll be able to counter their internal gravity for you, which will probably be fun, but they're bound to have more, assuming basic competance. I'd still take some gauss weapons if I were you, very good for cutting through stuff, and you'll likely need that. I’ll be using scarab swarms for the actual attack if I can, which should allow us to do minimal damage, and disable their control systems. Optimistically, we’ll be able to cripple their systems quite easily.”

“Then we take them under tow. Our normal prisoner regime should suffice. One of the lunar cities would be good for drow, if they’re unused to surface dwelling.”

“Best teleport them from their ship as soon as we can, in case they decide to self-destruct. And put some scarabs on interdiction runs in case they try to jettison logs or some such.”

“Right. I’m now having one of the drones emit a heat source, that should look like some kind of drone we’ve left. It’s positioned to draw them into our jamming, then we pounce on them. Be ready.”

((Frigate. It's a Frigate. Fucking F words. My mistake.))

((Frigate. It's a Frigate. Fucking F words. My mistake.))

((You know, I was wondering. ;) Edited.))

The Frigate wasn't the best in the Drow Fleet, but it was among the oldest, having been around since the Burning Trail. It was commanded by a peculiar Duergar named Sizzlehammer Darkstones, so technically it wasn't a Drow ship as it was commanded by a Duergar, who operated their own small fleet that acted within the Imperium's combined forces. The Duergar were particularly interested in the Orks, as they use technology that shouldn't work but does. The Frigate was armed with PPCs, Plasma Weaponry, and a colorful variety of anti-ship missiles. The Frigate wasn't the cream of the crop, but it would punch a few holes into an attacker. Its shields collided with a few fragments of Ork ships, which simply bounced off and eventually sizzled in Mork's atmosphere.

Jamming snapped on, and the Calastan appeared without warning, and struck moments after it did. Perhaps it would have reconsidered its actions, had it known the identity of the ship’s crew in advance, perhaps not. It was difficult to know…

There were ‘ways’ of dealing with shields. Some shields were bubbles around craft, some were planes angled towards attackers, some were hull-clinging forms of energy. All but the most exotic (and not necessarily the best) of these were susceptible to a certain pattern of shooting, aimed to impact shields but miss the ship beneath. This was what the calastan did, this time using its port ‘batteries’ rather than its longer-range weapons.

Fire that was eerily reminiscent of lightning flicked outwards, arcing between the necron cruiser and the frigate like the surging sparks of a Van De Graaff generator.

The necrontyr didn’t generally use shields, except in the form of manipulation of drive fields for shunting aside debris. Instead, they relied on armour around fifty meters thick in most locations, armour composed of materials best described as ‘insane’ indeed, people who attempted to analyse the living metals of the necrontyr without the right contextual scientific knowledge, had been known to become just that...

From the underside of the aggressor ship, hordes of small insectile constructs surged out. The biggest were about five meters, for the most part, from head to tail, they moved in flocks, and weren’t entirely unlike fighter-craft, though less individually formidable, and infinitely more expendable…

OOC: Ack. Sorry! This got buried somehow by my egosearch…

Shots rang out from the ship that began to shoot at the small incectile swarms, but they failed to destroy all of them. The Drow shields held strong at first, but soon fizzled away as the crews desperately tried to repair them. PPCs, lasers, and Xasers rang out, returning fire at the cruiser, but the frigate was outclassed and they both knew that the Frigate was doomed to destruction or capture.

The necron ship turned upwards and to one side, over one hundred and thirty degrees of yaw, before firing its engines once more to take it into a wide arc around its victim. The Calastan commanded its drones to continue with the plan.

They had a variety of functions, almost all were explosive, either for the purpouses of self destruction, or of damaging targets. Many could 'chew' throguh metal, using whickering vapourising fields around mandibles, and some of the more powerful emitted fields that disrupted the function of electronics around them.

Their objectives, to disable weapons, and engines, and try and cut off controls to any means of self destruction. As some tried to tear their way through hatches and other weak points, others prepared to generate atmosphere-retention fields around these areas.

Meanwhile, the Calastan prepared for the next phase of its plan...