Velkya
09-06-2007, 22:57
A monotony of sand, seas of tan grain broken only by the smallest diversion. If any sentence could describe Gratia Prime, that was a winner. As with most frontier worlds, Gratia Prime (simply known as The Grate by her inhabitants, individuals some would call ‘survivors’) was not a very pleasant place to live in, especially compared to verdant paradise worlds like Virallis or New Ohaui which lay only a few dozen light-years away. In fact, the only thing close enough to be considered truly a world and not acorporate backwater was Andreas II, located in, naturally, the Andreas System, which lay eighteen light-years away, a relatively short wormhole jump for civilian traffic, and an even shorter one for the portable faster-than-light drives onboard NSAC Defense Force vessels. Even so, Andreas II was not a summer camp, having been a frontier world herself until fifty years prior during the Fourth Sphere Expansion of NSAC’s member countries’ territories. Her terraforming operations were double-timed, allowing her to climb the scale from ‘swampy hell’ to ‘decently wet’, allowing her better to use her strategic position as a launching point for both military and civilian forays into then uninhabited (and unclaimed) space. Gratia Prime was a result of such forays. The third in line to be ‘terraformed’ and colonized by AUDC’s Colonial Command (C-Com) in the FSE, Gratia, in reality, looked nothing like the Terra it was supposed to be modeled after. Her roving sand dunes dominated nearby the entire planet, with hydration and thermal altering only making progress around the planet’s narrow equator, which now traded its tan hellscape for greenish pigment surrounding small fields of cerulean life. It was unfortunate, because the resources that made Gratia even worth colonizing were located far above its inhabited zones.
Gratia was a mining world, a concept popularized in the science fiction of the twentieth century, a world devoted entirely to the production of minerals with no regard for the local population, because, well, there wasn’t really much to speak of in that department. Frankly, no one wanted to live there, and those who were there numbering around one hundred thousand, extremely small even for a frontier world. Most were corporate employees, deployed to the backwater to oversee the otherwise independent mining and surveying operations. It was, on the surface, dangerous work, requiring the equivalent of a spatial EVA kit with cooling equipment for a local surface temperature that could reach one hundred twenty degrees Celsius. In reality, these suits were quite comfortable, if slightly claustrophobic, making the only immediate danger to these mining crews the extremely debilitating disease called boredom. Outside their protective armor, a more dangerous hazard. Well, really, underneath would be more appropriate. Worms, almost straight from the depths of Herbert’s mind, made the underworld of The Grate, although, they were not important in the least to the mining operations. They simply existed because” Diablo”, the nickname for the system’s sun, was slowly making progress toward the angrier stages of its life, and life as whatever Gratia knew was altered forever. These worms, once creatures not unlike Terran snakes, were up to ten meters in length, feeding on the fat sand bloaters that buried themselves during the long day, rising at night to mate and excrete waste, their bioluminescence a beautiful sight to those who lived to see it, as the worms also surfaced, a chance for a surprise kill and to mate. The bloaters supposedly numbered in the hundreds of millions, and always outnumbered the worms by a significant margin, surviving by, interestingly enough, a communal form of photosynthesis, drawing water and nutrients from the pools of moisture underneath the top layers of the surface of Gratia, and nutrients from the carcasses of male worms, who died after the mating process. The two species supported each other, prey and predator in perfect balance and harmony, giving some semblance of life to an otherwise dead world.
How quaint. If I was a fucking biologist, I’m sure I’d be impressed as hell.
That sums up the attitude of most miners on Gratia on the above information, and one such miner toiled away at his work, casting sparks of apathy from his wheeling grindstone of indignation, to borrow from Dickens. The shell of his modified military grade powered armor actually read, Z. DICKENS, and the bits of it that hadn’t been dulled shimmered brightly in the slightly crimson light. For an area the size of Manhattan on Terra, he managed his surveyor ‘teams’, each consisting of three simple collecting and one ground RADAR surveying robots, punching through the hundreds of meters of sand to find…
God damn it!
Bloaters. Hundreds of them. Bloaters had a nasty habit of interrupting surveying and mining operations, and dozens of spherical shapes appeared on his neural net’s sensory display, clouding the potential resource deposits he was searching for. He briefly considered using active SONAR to clear them, but then released that it would also attract the other half of indigenous life on The Grate. He carried an arm mounted needler with an accompanying rocket propelled grenade for self defense, the latter easily capable of punching through the thick carapace of an attacking worm. That is, one attacking worm. He neither had the will nor the ammunition to take on a whole horde of the creatures that would inevitably show up to feast on the subterranean buffet laid out below his feet. Worms couldn’t quite kill a man in power armor, at least directly, but life support didn’t last forever, and eventually the worms would pull him under, all picking at him with blood lust until his armor (and by extension, he) was torn to shreds, or the suit’s life support systems ran dry. He sighed, signaling the unmanned transport drone to pick him up.
Not much to do now, bu-
A thunderous boom filled his audio pickups, and Dickens turned in the direction of the sound, his suit’s enhanced optics scanning the sky for the source. Then, a brightly shimmering light, so far away it had to be in orbit around the desert sphere, illuminating a cloud of incandescent debris which proceeded to burn up in the atmosphere. Startled, he suddenly felt very naked in the middle of the open desert with naught but a modified infantryman’s power armor to shield him from whatever had caused this detonation. Seconds later, another boom, followed by a rapidly expanding debris field. This field, however, wasn’t as neatly finished as the first, and large chunks of alloy and composites glowed red hot as they crossed through the superheated gases of Gratia’s atmosphere, streaking a long snake of smoke as they approached the dune sea that Dickens resided in. He raised his armored, actuated hand above his eyes to shield them, forgetting that the suit lacked eyes, only direct feed video. It would be the last motion he would make in his life, as a two ton hulk of a fusion drive component turned the place where he stood to a crater of blackened glass.
They never had a prayer. Someone, something, had come through those long-dormant gates, and began a systematic slaughter of the system. First, contact with outlying asteroid miners, then the science installation on Gratia IV, and finally, them. Three frigates, lead by an aged cruiser, rose from a local Defense Force space dock to investigate, their active sensors sweeping the area while activating their missile and torpedo cells, the pilots displaying a clear lack of experience as they crossed the void on approach to the last point of contact. This proved to be their downfall, for as soon as the cruiser’s powerful electromagnetic spectrum Omni-array began pounding away into the void, they fired. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty contacts moving faster than any known torpedo pattern emerged from all vectors, sending the point defenses of the four vessels into frenzy. Lateral launch cells ripped open, as payloads of small point defense missiles streaked in fiery clouds towards the rapidly approaching contacts, achieving, as designed, almost one hundred percent accuracy, but downing only a single enemy contact, which took six ‘Drone-IIA’ missiles before being torn apart in a sickly green cloud. Displaying a lack of skill again, the AUDC Pilots broke formation, attempting evasive maneuvers as their laser and particle beams attempting to kill the incoming using their wide beam lenses. Whereas normal missiles would have been neutered, their guidance systems fried and useless, these missiles charged on, actually increasing velocity towards the broken AUDC vessels. Another was downed by more concentrated laser fire, its surface covered in what appeared to be cauterized burns. The remaining thirty eight contacts converged on the desperate warships, which emptied everything from their anti-shipping missiles to ECM system, all having absolutely no effect other than seemingly angering the enemy, and the milliseconds before their impact revealed a horrible truth. These weapons were no such thing; they were living creatures, slamming through the battle screens and armor of the vessels to deliver something far more terrifying than a warhead, the tortured screams of the devoured echoing into the dark void. Emerging from beyond the destroyed asteroid bases was something terrible, an object so massive it dwarfed the nearby fields of wreckage, two points of crimson luminance emerged from the side closest to Gratia, sneering like demonic eyes before overtaking the image in crimson light.
The image died down, and a voice pierced the darkness.
“Gentlemen, we have a situation on our hands.”
Gratia was a mining world, a concept popularized in the science fiction of the twentieth century, a world devoted entirely to the production of minerals with no regard for the local population, because, well, there wasn’t really much to speak of in that department. Frankly, no one wanted to live there, and those who were there numbering around one hundred thousand, extremely small even for a frontier world. Most were corporate employees, deployed to the backwater to oversee the otherwise independent mining and surveying operations. It was, on the surface, dangerous work, requiring the equivalent of a spatial EVA kit with cooling equipment for a local surface temperature that could reach one hundred twenty degrees Celsius. In reality, these suits were quite comfortable, if slightly claustrophobic, making the only immediate danger to these mining crews the extremely debilitating disease called boredom. Outside their protective armor, a more dangerous hazard. Well, really, underneath would be more appropriate. Worms, almost straight from the depths of Herbert’s mind, made the underworld of The Grate, although, they were not important in the least to the mining operations. They simply existed because” Diablo”, the nickname for the system’s sun, was slowly making progress toward the angrier stages of its life, and life as whatever Gratia knew was altered forever. These worms, once creatures not unlike Terran snakes, were up to ten meters in length, feeding on the fat sand bloaters that buried themselves during the long day, rising at night to mate and excrete waste, their bioluminescence a beautiful sight to those who lived to see it, as the worms also surfaced, a chance for a surprise kill and to mate. The bloaters supposedly numbered in the hundreds of millions, and always outnumbered the worms by a significant margin, surviving by, interestingly enough, a communal form of photosynthesis, drawing water and nutrients from the pools of moisture underneath the top layers of the surface of Gratia, and nutrients from the carcasses of male worms, who died after the mating process. The two species supported each other, prey and predator in perfect balance and harmony, giving some semblance of life to an otherwise dead world.
How quaint. If I was a fucking biologist, I’m sure I’d be impressed as hell.
That sums up the attitude of most miners on Gratia on the above information, and one such miner toiled away at his work, casting sparks of apathy from his wheeling grindstone of indignation, to borrow from Dickens. The shell of his modified military grade powered armor actually read, Z. DICKENS, and the bits of it that hadn’t been dulled shimmered brightly in the slightly crimson light. For an area the size of Manhattan on Terra, he managed his surveyor ‘teams’, each consisting of three simple collecting and one ground RADAR surveying robots, punching through the hundreds of meters of sand to find…
God damn it!
Bloaters. Hundreds of them. Bloaters had a nasty habit of interrupting surveying and mining operations, and dozens of spherical shapes appeared on his neural net’s sensory display, clouding the potential resource deposits he was searching for. He briefly considered using active SONAR to clear them, but then released that it would also attract the other half of indigenous life on The Grate. He carried an arm mounted needler with an accompanying rocket propelled grenade for self defense, the latter easily capable of punching through the thick carapace of an attacking worm. That is, one attacking worm. He neither had the will nor the ammunition to take on a whole horde of the creatures that would inevitably show up to feast on the subterranean buffet laid out below his feet. Worms couldn’t quite kill a man in power armor, at least directly, but life support didn’t last forever, and eventually the worms would pull him under, all picking at him with blood lust until his armor (and by extension, he) was torn to shreds, or the suit’s life support systems ran dry. He sighed, signaling the unmanned transport drone to pick him up.
Not much to do now, bu-
A thunderous boom filled his audio pickups, and Dickens turned in the direction of the sound, his suit’s enhanced optics scanning the sky for the source. Then, a brightly shimmering light, so far away it had to be in orbit around the desert sphere, illuminating a cloud of incandescent debris which proceeded to burn up in the atmosphere. Startled, he suddenly felt very naked in the middle of the open desert with naught but a modified infantryman’s power armor to shield him from whatever had caused this detonation. Seconds later, another boom, followed by a rapidly expanding debris field. This field, however, wasn’t as neatly finished as the first, and large chunks of alloy and composites glowed red hot as they crossed through the superheated gases of Gratia’s atmosphere, streaking a long snake of smoke as they approached the dune sea that Dickens resided in. He raised his armored, actuated hand above his eyes to shield them, forgetting that the suit lacked eyes, only direct feed video. It would be the last motion he would make in his life, as a two ton hulk of a fusion drive component turned the place where he stood to a crater of blackened glass.
They never had a prayer. Someone, something, had come through those long-dormant gates, and began a systematic slaughter of the system. First, contact with outlying asteroid miners, then the science installation on Gratia IV, and finally, them. Three frigates, lead by an aged cruiser, rose from a local Defense Force space dock to investigate, their active sensors sweeping the area while activating their missile and torpedo cells, the pilots displaying a clear lack of experience as they crossed the void on approach to the last point of contact. This proved to be their downfall, for as soon as the cruiser’s powerful electromagnetic spectrum Omni-array began pounding away into the void, they fired. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty contacts moving faster than any known torpedo pattern emerged from all vectors, sending the point defenses of the four vessels into frenzy. Lateral launch cells ripped open, as payloads of small point defense missiles streaked in fiery clouds towards the rapidly approaching contacts, achieving, as designed, almost one hundred percent accuracy, but downing only a single enemy contact, which took six ‘Drone-IIA’ missiles before being torn apart in a sickly green cloud. Displaying a lack of skill again, the AUDC Pilots broke formation, attempting evasive maneuvers as their laser and particle beams attempting to kill the incoming using their wide beam lenses. Whereas normal missiles would have been neutered, their guidance systems fried and useless, these missiles charged on, actually increasing velocity towards the broken AUDC vessels. Another was downed by more concentrated laser fire, its surface covered in what appeared to be cauterized burns. The remaining thirty eight contacts converged on the desperate warships, which emptied everything from their anti-shipping missiles to ECM system, all having absolutely no effect other than seemingly angering the enemy, and the milliseconds before their impact revealed a horrible truth. These weapons were no such thing; they were living creatures, slamming through the battle screens and armor of the vessels to deliver something far more terrifying than a warhead, the tortured screams of the devoured echoing into the dark void. Emerging from beyond the destroyed asteroid bases was something terrible, an object so massive it dwarfed the nearby fields of wreckage, two points of crimson luminance emerged from the side closest to Gratia, sneering like demonic eyes before overtaking the image in crimson light.
The image died down, and a voice pierced the darkness.
“Gentlemen, we have a situation on our hands.”