NationStates Jolt Archive

Sheila Patterson of SHN News gussied up a bit in front of a pocket mirror before she allowed her face to be observed by the rest of her peers. The site - a monumental archaeological find. The time - June 8, 2009. The place - Jayson Cavern System. The competition - CNN, GlobeChan 32, and BBC World. She couldn't let herself be all ruffled and creased while her "friends" were all prepped up and prissy, now, could she?

"We're live in five, four, three..." The voice received by her ears remained in her head.

"Hello, this is Sheila Patterson of SHN News. Approximately nineteen hours ago, the Fourth Jayson Cavern Archaeological Team (4JCAT) uncovered a spectacular sight - it is what appears to be an ancient Aztec-type temple, much larger than any similarly encountered. Characteristics, it's brown, presumably made of rock in that regard. It seems to-"

There was a rumble in the ground.

"Jesus, quake in a cavern. This isn't good." The voice came from far off camera but was still audible. Patterson visibly frowned. Unshaken, she continued:

"It seems to have been built, however, at an earlier time than previously expected. Additionally, what mystifies is the fact that it is on Perimeter Defense land in the first place - far detached from Aztec or similar civilizations that existed long ago-"

Another rumble. This one much stronger than the prior ones.

"My God, this is feeling nasty. Let's get out of here!" The voice was loud enough now that Patterson ordered the camera shut off as she prepared to say:

"Enough is enough! Live TV won't let you make mistakes, so keep your asses in order!"

But she didn't say this. Instead, she looked at the Aztec temple which had been in the background, out of focus as the action was supposed to be centered on her, not on her subject.

"Hey!" called out a 4JCAT digger. "This rock's layered! There's something under it!"

"Let me see!" A man in a hardhat ran over. "He's right. The temple's not brown, and it's not rock. It's encased in hard mud. Let's chip this stuff off!"

They did, and worked hard just to break off a small piece of it, enough to see what sort of material was there to which this temple owed its construction.

"It appears," Patterson continued on camera, "that the temple was covered in mud at some point, and then this hardened, fortuitously fitting the outline of the structure."

"Hey! We got through the mud! It looks black."

"Black? Coal-black?"

"Yeah! But this stuff isn't carbon coal or whatever, feels metallic I'd say."

"A black metal Aztec temple? This is new beyond-"

The ground rumbled - and then shook hard. Stalactites fell from the ceiling, crashing down and damaging equipment. Debris fell around as people rushed for shelter and cover from the falling detritus. It took a while for them to notice the loud, mechanical sound emanating from the "Aztec" temple, as some vibrations or otherwise shed the mud skin, revealing a shining, almost-new-looking black surface of metal. Various doors around the temple opened, some revealing glowing green extrusions, while a main set of gates slid downwards from the cone tip, displaying a huge green crystal. At last, four doors around the temple opened up, projecting an eerie green glow...

From the crystal, a bolt of lightning-like energy lashed out at 4JCAT and all the media personnel, causing a massive green ball of energy to explode high above. Below this energy, many men and women were torn to shreds, while others further away were violently thrown back.

Suddenly the temple began to rise over the ground, and then it remained in a constant hover over the stone floor. It transited slowly towards the entrance, it seemed.

Sheila Patterson scampered away as the huge "temple" left in another direction. She got to her newscrew 's van, pulled out her own key, and frantically tried to get it to start. From the moment the starter turned the engine, however, thus making a loud noise, the strange temple stopped, and began moving towards her.

She saw this, and dashed off towards the entrance. The thing, while imposing and fearful, seemed to be absurdly slow. So she gunned the engine and went as fast as she could. For minutes she drove, until at last the glorious bright light at the end shone as her beacon of salvation.

Her last thought was that she was going to escape. Her last words were, "Yes! No!" as the massive temple, in a sea of green particles, warped in before her vehicle; she drove into the green light of the temple doorways.

The huge temple closed up again, slowly and deliberately, trapping Patterson inside forever, before in a blinding flash of green light, it was gone.

Sheila Patterson died that day. She came back to haunt the living - not as a ghost, however, but as a living skeletal shadow of metal and flesh.

And as life was an illusion of glory, she embraced this new death - and loved it.

OOC: The Necrons of Warhammer 40k called, they want their Monolith back.

OOC: And they're not getting it back.

70 miles off the Perimeter Defense coast
Battleship NXS Magis

The night was stormy and the PD battleship Magis was getting pretty roughed up. She'd spent three days at sea out of Besantium only to run into a tropical depression that made 1986's Janice look like a light drizzle. Captain Leslie Beck, from the bridge of the vessel, took a gander at the gray clouds that would frequently momentarily light up with some sheet lightning, but the profound, overwhelming blasts of rain stole the show.

"This is gonna be a rough night," he observed, to no one in particular. Among the "rough" events of the night, the heaving of the had ship caused a piece of ammunition to roll out of the armory, and curiously no one noticed it as it pummeled through the large steel doors, rolled down with a conspicuous metallic sound, and crashed against a wall.

Sensors officer Jad Arnusson had not heard the good skipper's utterance; his focus was more attuned to the sea of radar blips that periodically emanated from the greenish screen. They had no particular pattern to their frequency; it was not a consequence of the twice-a-second redraw or refresh time, nor was it a sensor ghost with a lack of repetition. This one was consistent in its inconsistency, ironic as that might seem. When the matter had gone on long enough by his judgment, he informed the captain. "Sir, there's something on radar."

Beck took a look. "Bunch of rocks?"

"With all due respect, sir, that's pretty-"

"Kidding. And if you'd continued what you were about to say..."

"Got it, sir."

"What do you think?"

"Well, we're near the coast already. Could be AWACS routine flights out of Sevigny, but the noise wouldn't really look like this."

"Contacts?"

"Maybe with an on-and-off stealth switch, I dunno."

"Heard of that stuff before. Variable fuselage geometry, they re-angle the surfaces to become either visible or invisible. I have no idea what it's for, though."

"Likely for goose planes. Tick off the enemy then run away."

"Still a weird design idea. So, on the matter of these sensor ghosts-"

A deep booming sound was heard, and a towering wave swept over the ship. In the distance, a bright green light evidenced the presence of...something else.

"Sensor ghost's not a ghost anymore. Whatever's giving off that green light is making a huge radar footprint-"

Beck thought he'd seen a flash of forked lightning that penetrated the clouds, but this one was green - and did not come from the sky. Instead, the distant object released this bolt of lightning that exploded in a blinding orb of energy above the ship, instantly killing everyone not under a roof. Blood flowed across the deck before being it was presently washed away by strong rain and thick splashes of water.

The order to fire was given as soon as they were fired upon. Turrets turned their heads towards the enemy and unleashed a barrage of high-caliber ammunition that would put a hole through most armor. Visible hits could be seen on the assaulting force, now visible as a delta-like silhouette in the distance, the green light's source easily made out as a crystalline thing, but no effect could be seen other than minor recoil. It was now clear that the structure, vessel, whatever it was, was advancing towards the Magis. Again the turrets fired, but suddenly, lesser bolts of energy lashed out from the corners of the thing like whips of light, striking the turrets and deconstructing them at a staggering pace, their components scattering into the sea. Another massive orb of energy coincided with another large bolt of green lightning, and this time it flattened the various elevated areas of the ship, and she shuddered as a section of hull plating was simply torn away, as though it were held by duct tape and PVA glue.

Beck gave the order to abandon ship, and lifeboats came streaming out of the hull ports and along the sides. He stayed behind with Arnusson to send off a warning through FLEETCOMM - but for some reason, communications were all screwed to hell. And then, just as they were about to try another time to send, their video screens came to life with good clarity - but not displaying the image they desired.

A skeletal face stared at them with glowing eyes, wearing what appeared to be the remains of a grey suit and pencil skirt. The face was made of a shifting, metallic material that while totally dead in obvious properties, somehow seemed to be organic in nature. Some strands of auburn hair were unattractively stuck at random intervals around the mask-like head, and a transition of bloodied flesh and cold steel could be seen on the neck.

The strange head's voice was reverberant and alien, but discernibly human female: "How fortunate for you."

Beck and Arnusson rushed out of the ship to see the launched lifeboats - converted to a revolting mix of bodies and flotsam, shivering in the stormy waters before sinking forever. The whips of light had done their job. The final weapon, that frightening orb that brought most unholy death to all below it, lashed out a final time, shattering the ship across its width and breaking it into two halves. A fuel deposit exploded, casting fire on the ship and turning the sky above orange, as it slowly began its final descent to the ocean floor.

The black structure, our famed "Aztec Temple," continued on its path - towards the Perimeter Defense coastline, it seemed.

*ooc DEFINITLY a direct copy from the necrons...lmao

OOC: What else could it have been? And no, it's not a copy of necrons, it's a direct usage of them. Word properly.

OOC: Would a 40k intervention be innapropriate? I hope not, in the interest of this post...

Few beyond the Emperor's private circle knew of the existance of the "xenos". Now, many in the Imperial palace were learning of their existance as an Etherial trotted through its grand halls towards the thrown room, clothed in flowing robes and carrying a glowing blue staff. The strange being was flanked by armed guards, encased in strange, yellowish armor and carrying rifles that looked something like glowing 2x4s. Their hooved feet clattered as they entered the throne room, causing Imperator Gnaeus Mundus I to spit coffee all over the reports in his hands.
"Shais O'Kais! He stammered, regognizing an extravagantly armored figure to the etherial's right, "What are you doing here?!? I told your people to NEVER appear in Belkaros undisguised or in pubic! How am I supposed to explain THIS?!?"
The Etherial placed his three fingered, blue hand on the stammering Emperor's lips, silencing the young man. "Youngling, the fact that you have kept your alliance with the Tau from your people is unsetteling but understandable. But now, your masquerade must be shattered to save your home."
"Gnaeus", spoke O'Kais, "your people are in danger. The necrons are here."
"HERE?", shouted the Emperor, "How could they be here? You said they only invaded tomb...worlds... oh god..."

OOC: Err, I'm sorry, this is MT. If at all, Holy Terra is the location of this RP, so it would be sort of WH2K7...

OOC: So, how much of this was actually broadcast? Would other nations have seen what happened in the caves?

OOC: SHN News's broadcast was a live TV thing. International news.

OOC: SHN News's broadcast was a live TV thing. International news.

OOC: So then people in, say, Hurfdurfistan would have seen it. Works for me.

IC: Praetor John Blackwell sat in his well-appointed office in Hurfdurfistan City, reading the synopsis his staff had prepared of the events of the world the day before. He smirked at the report he saw of some strange Aztec temple rising up from the ground and obliterating an SHC news crew. Evidently his news staff had fallen for the same hoax the rest of the world had. He was fairly confident that, somewhere, Sheila Patterson was having a good laugh about the whole affair. He sipped his energy drink and put the synopsis aside, picking up the report prepared by his intelligence staff.

He frowned. Intelligence had put together a group of seismic readings, Hannibal-3 satellite photos, and an intercepted report of a Perimeter Defense ship failing to report in. He peered closely at the Hannibal-3 photos. They appeared to display a ship, a small cruiser by the looks of it, sinking, with the same Aztec temple from the news footage. But it couldn't be... could it? If it wasn't a hoax... what was Perimeter Defense dealing with?

Blackwell lit another cigarette and smoked thoughtfully for a few moments. He picked up the phone, dialing the Secretary of Defense. After the usual pleasantries, he authorized the DoD to conduct "physical operations" in Perimeter Defense in the pursuit of gathering intelligence about this strange craft. The SecDef assured him that he would dispatch a team of operatives as soon as possible. Blackwell chewed on his cigarette, bade the SecDef farewell, and hung up the phone.

He glowered for a moment, having ruined a perfectly good cigarette. He picked up the phone again, dialing, if he remembered correctly, the direct number to Perimeter Defense's foreign affairs department. He'd try to find out officially what was going on before dispatching spies. A man picked up on the other end of the line, and Blackwell asked to speak to (OOC: Dammit, I don't know the name of Perimeter Defense's leader. I'll edit when I do.).

OOC: Introducing "The Ctan" (player, not Warhammer 40k characters) as official controller of the Necrons in this RP. Will post soon.

There had been called a meeting of the who's who of Perimeter Defense's government, containing within the designated place of convergence several regional Administrators, high-ranking military officers, a scientist or three, and of course, none other than the leader of the nation herself, Directress Adrianna Cain. At the Second Citadel in the capital of Cyvils, the various personnel thus summoned gathered in a room of wooden walls and red telephones, around a table that seated twenty or so, with a large set of LCD screens on the walls.

Adrianna Cain came and spoke first: "No time for introductions - besides, you all know why you're here. We all saw that thing on the SHN telecast, and now we're getting some sat-feeds off of something above CA-143, NXS Magis, with which communications were lost some hours ago. She was coming out of Besantium for training exercises when all of a sudden we got a comm blackout. She disappeared off the FLEETCOMM routing table at 0734 and at the same time, overhead eyes saw a big flash of light over her location."

Colonel Thane Bryce of the 4th Mattfleet spoke up at this. "The Magis was seen torn in half when the storm over her had cleared up, am I not right, Directress?"

"Yeah," Cain replied. "That storm, that was why we couldn't get earlier confirmation when it happened."

Dr. Justine Burkley of Ceti Labs appeared on one of the screens. "Forgive the late arrival, Directress, there was a matter in-"

"It's fine, Dr. Burkley. What do you have for us?"

"We scoured the Jayson Caverns again last night, but this time we tried the other end on the spectral analysis, working on that thing we saw with the g-flux on Sat Four. Thank god the satellite had EMS checkers on each band! We'd never have thought to tune to that-"

"What's your point?"

"We got a piece off of that....black temple thing. The site where it originally stood carried a platform-like low scaffolding made of the same material."

"Good job. Analysis?"

"It's...amazing. The metal adapts to its environment with no visible guiding components. It's almost as if it's ali-"

"Got it, it's strange. Please submit further documentation to Administrator Keller. Thank you, Doctor." The woman onscreen was about to protest when the monitor died.

Adrianne Cain replayed the last minute of Sheila Patterson's report, with overlays laid out by departmental analyses that indicated patterns of weapon usage and other variables that could be extracted from the video. It was a good turnout of information, considering that the cameraman proceeded to run like hell at the 0:42 mark.

She then replayed some videos from the recovery boxes salvaged from the Magis. These were fast-surfacing buoys tethered to the hull, whose containers were detonated and which were risen quickly to the surface after a predetermined time, or upon reception of the appropriate signal. The first three files showed a distant green orb, not of interest in any conceivable way.

The last two, however, showed the same temple that was present in the 4JCAT site. A better, more stable close-up than previously obtained, the images showed hieroglyphics, symbology, energy modules, and otherwise, located across the surface of the structure. The areas which were estimated to be cannon impact points had little to no visual perturbations as compared to the rest of the "hull."

And that hovering...whatever it was, it wasn't human made, or at least it wasn't made by humans at the current level of technology present on this world.

Cain was discussing these images when the phone rang. It wasn't a red phone, so she knew that it wasn't quite an emergency at all.

"Directress Cain, Praetor J. Blackwell of Hurfdurfistan on seven."

"Thank you. Praetor Blackwell, you're on."

RIPOSTE Counterintelligence had noted Hurfdurfistani intrusions onto PD secure intranets on several occasions, and performed necessary bad feedback into apropos channels whenever such major events as this became the subject of communication across the country. The recent issues with that Perimeter Defense U-Boat Crisis with Allanea, however, coupled with the Mediumtopian threat, resulted them to, on certain occasions, become sloppy in handling the data going about. Consequently, whatever Blackwell had to say to Cain could be interpreted as a water-test for national on-goings and reckonings, and perchance even as a prelude to more serious undertakings on his nation's part.

Due to everything being so stressful, though, the RIPOSTE office only thought about such things during the sleep cycles of its constituents. It was important, a pressing matter indeed - but so was every other goddamn thing that was surfacing.

Meanwhile, our fated Aztec Temple loomed invisibly towards the coastal city of Beltran, a modest population center of six million people and many ships. The black thing was not visible on coastal or shipborne radar, nor did sonar see it, and the optical eye, on which so much human judgment is based, could not detect the mass coming at it so steadily and immensely, and frighteningly.

Among the Eldar it was known as a World Harvester. The thing that had survived from a battle fought a hundred times a thousand years ago to determine the future of humanity was a necron war machine. In its heyday it had been powerful beyond the dreams of megalomania, even though, as a construct, it was lacking in the heavy firepower shared by some of its cousins, it was nonetheless capable of consuming cities, and in time, worlds.

Hundreds of meters across, it had been comprised of towering pyramids of living metal that had seethed with power. When the Enemy had stuck it down, so long ago, they had known what they were doing. Its sources of that eldritch power severed, it had to rely on the energy it had already charged itself with, otherwise, it would withdraw from reality entirely, and what was left of it crumble to ash.

Dimmed by the loss of power, its intellect had lost much of its precision and speed, but it had known one thing. This would likely harbour life in the future, and if it could only wait long enough, eventually the primitive hominid species upon its surface would find it, and if they had the energy sources indicating that they could be forced to construct more advanced means, they would be permitted access. Briefly.

It had landed, allowing itself to be buried and forgotten, taken for a casualty by the victors of that long-ago battle.

Now the World Harvester had awoken. Imagine its surprise when not only had it found what it wanted from the population of the planet, but one seeded so long ago by it and its compatriots, the germination, weak and tentative, of its legacy.

Even though it was now a shadow of what it had been, it had expended a portion of its energies, stored without decay beyond the entire length of human civilisation, to attempting the conversion process. It had worked, not perfectly, but that was to be expected; the finer tools it had had were crumbled to dust, leaving it only with less complex ones.

That would not matter when the World Harvester arrived at its destination.

When it attacked a primitive water-going craft, it brought a few of its subsidiary power nodes online; they were shattered and blocked, they could not invoke power, merely distribute it as weapons fire. That done, the green lights that flickered from them faded again as they simply became huge pieces of a glass-like substance again.

It was out of communication, the majority of its long-range communications and sensor systems destroyed. It could replace them, literally converting the power that still warmed its core to matter, but doing so would leave it unable to remain motive for long.

Long columns of metal, like the roots of a tree quested from its underside, searching the insides of the destroyed ship, even as they held them up on the water, for anything that might have been the nuclear reactor the memories it had stolen from the first explorers’ minds said lurked in the power cores of some of these sea-going war craft.

Nothing.

That would not matter when the World Harvester arrived at its destination.

Drifting onwards, in part harnessing the storm it travelled with to take it to the shores it was headed for, the World Harvester tried to minimise its energy expenditure. The primitive observers wouldn’t notice it, for the absorptive nature of its hull meant that it was nigh-impossible to find on the ‘radar’ they used, unless it wanted to be, but it even navigated air currents, for although it had an immense mass, it suspended itself, and the tiny boost was noticeable, if only to the Harvester itself.

Soon, when it reached its destination, it would have all the power it could want.

Its destination, a city known as Cyvils.

"Come in, kids!" said the woman of pink hair, possibly a dye of sorts, from the chair at her porch, a construct that offered a marvelous vista in the form of the sea from near the edge of a low elevation. Three young, bright-eyed kids of roughly the same height ran beneath her legs into the house.

The woman smiled at her offspring before she turned to look at the ensuing cyclone before her. Beltran rarely got hurricanes, and whenever it did, the loss of life was never above fifteen (the highest ever mortality listing). All the big ones go down south, where currents converge and attract the big depressions.

This one, however, this unexpected hurricane that formed absurdly quickly and gained record strength in record time, seemed to be ready to go past that fifteen mark and maybe wipe out a few thousand or so. She was frightened, but at the same time, she knew that Beltran's leadership was not complacent; like all of Perimeter Defense's coastal cities, Beltran conformed to strict engineering and architectural standards that defined structural integrity in storm-type weather. The power grid would function at acceptable limits even if 70% of the lines were disabled, as long as no dead links were managed. The roads would be cleared to accept ambulances and police vehicles. Every large government structure contained medical equipment and facilities, that they may be quickly converted into field hospitals whenever necessary.

Unfortunately, the hurricane was to be the least of the woman's worries...

A few dozen miles along the shoreline, a tall Homeland Defense watchtower stood sixty meters high, its control center crewed by five men who generally slept most of the time. A small screen on the window flashed pictures of the latest thing for which to be watched out - an oddly tall sea vessel whose intent was coastal bombardment. Someone was angry with PD for reasons not mentioned, and the watchmen's job was to take this thing out if it ever got past the DMZ lines. It looked funny for a ship; pyramidal in design and with a huge stylized crystal capping the figure, something that would pose a danger for the crew if shattered by enemy fire, and what the hell was it for anyway?

Many green glowing turrets marked the corners and faces of the ship, presumably the main bombard weapons but whose angling seemed to be intended for ship-to-ship combat. No visible artillery pieces. Railguns, perchance? Too high-tech for anybody, really.

A man named Gerber, who was among the crew of the tower, had paid little attention to the new contact. He just took a glance, got a basic idea of the thing's appearance, and went back to his perpetual gazing through the zoomed views on the transparent LCDs that were the watchtower's windows. He was fidgeting around with a cigarette when he saw a flash of green. Since the image presented to Homeland Defense was dominantly green - that fact was undeniable, regardless of how little time he spent on observing the pics - he thought to juxtapose the zoomed target image, and the contact.

It moved slowly - but it damned well moved, and in some minutes its form was visible through the dense fog of the evening. It took him a while of gazing at how big it was before he realized that this thing did not have a radar footprint - stealth ship. However unlikely such an attribute may be for such a strange, pointed ship, it was quite explainable given the angular surfaces. Perhaps even metamaterials would have done the trick - distortion of the signals or deflection, even. And as the comparison between reference shot and actual image grew in similarity, Gerber proportionally grew in his tension - until at last, he alerted his compatriots to the discovery.

In minutes, coastal gun batteries aligned towards the general direction of the World Harvester, and infantry, along with several AM1 main battle tanks were readied in various strategic points across the city. The local airbase, with its squadron of F-35B Lightning II VTOL fighters, got its pilots prepped and powered up. Satellite images would see a flurry of activity, and the loading of JDAM ordinance on many planes. Perimeter Defense was preparing for perimeter defense.

Some 90,000 feet above, one of those popular Helios-based surveillance UAV's pointed its optical and other electromagnetic eyes downwards at the action unfolding. Someone on the controlling end of this UAV curiously thought to send the stream to various allied and neutral nations across the world. This someone happened to be Adrianne Cain - and she knew that whatever they were dealing with, petty intraspecies conflict wouldn't be the right thing to continue when what was coming at her nation was so clearly...not of this earth.

Not of this life, even, as Sheila Patterson, formerly of SHN News, understood now.

The World Harvester approached the city, and it was engulfed in fire. Even though it was vast, as large as many warships, it was not beyond the abilities of the defenders to do such things to it. Unfortunately, although the harvester’s central crystal was sundered into pieces so countless that in a moment, as though the material didn’t even care any more, it was vaporised, and though it took enormous damage elsewhere, in the grand scheme of things, that damage was superficial. Here, a sensor cluster was annihilated, there, a rod projecting from the underside like a spike aimed at piercing those whom it flew over. An articulated tentacle fell like the severed branch of a falling tree, loudly splashing into the water and sinking, even as it did so, turning to an unidentifiable ash.

It came closer.

They smashed more of its structure, gun batteries pummelling holes into its sheer surfaces, which ran and danced with rivers of rain that jumped and flickered under the light and impacts of the enemy fusillade.

Still it came on, ponderously, taking its time, not deviating from its course.

They were harming it, but to the World Harvester, such things were superficial. It saw a sea port up ahead, and, approaching, sent out the remaining tentacle structures.

Each cluster could form massive and formidable silvery tree-trunk tentacles so wide they could slam down into a frigate and have the manipulating ‘digits’ on either side wrap around its hull, or they could split up, waving like a profane mane of hair, or questing villi of some obscene digestive system.

This is what they did now, breaking each ship they touched apart, and questing inside, methodically searching for nuclear power sources to imbibe.

If they found them, they tore them loose, ignoring any crews on the ships, and casting them into the dark waves as they did so, ripping the reactors apart, crushing, breaking, smashing, and tearing, pulling the radioactive materials apart.

Re-assembling and holding them up, hoisting them inside to be burnt, so quickly that it would be unbelievable to any scientist who saw it, the World Harvester paused, debating the virtues of returning fire. It decided it could wait, and it drifted toward the city, its tendrils branching apart, punching into the ground in the more industrialised areas, seeking out power lines above or below the ground, breaking, blacking the area out, and sucking.

Even as it did so, it sent questing tendrils of pseudo-electricity ‘up’ the wires, questing for the sources of power and distribution.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of megawatts it absorbed were put to good use. Its remaining weapons lived again, returning fire, at gun batteries, at tanks, at aircraft, a pencil-beam of green lightning with enough power to blast a tank into a pieces in a fraction of a second, sweeping this way and that, pulsing death into its attackers.

"Fire for effect! One-thirty-two, one-twenty-six, eighty-seven!"
"Yeah! Stir-fucking-fry! Made a big hole in that goddamn sunuva- shit!"
"Launch off the coastal thermobarics!"
"MLRS! That thing's slow enough for a barrage. Hotel six-one, this is Delta four-eight, fire support at these coordinates!"
"Roger that, four-eight. Confirm coordinates at plane one-six-niner dash three-two-eight, landmark's the situ platform on Sturgeon cliff. Splash!"
"Nine of twelve warheads on target. Good show!"
"The Brianna! Jesus, oh my God she's sliced in half!"
"Give them everything you got! 150mm at Avatar, on my mark! Now!"
"Fast-movers outbound. Assigning battlecode Echo one-ex to deployed squadrons."
"This is Echo one-one lead, 1-kay pound JDAM munitions are due for release at sixt- oh my- Mayday, mayday, this is E1-1, I'm going down!"
"This is forward intelligence, all fire is ineffectual!"
"What the hell do you mean? We've torn great bloody holes in that thing, she's shuddering with every blast, if that's not effectualness then what the fuck is!
"Contact is still moving at speed, weapons fire is increasing - what the hell is it doing?"
"Target's grabbing the Lancaster! Take those 'arms' down!"
"Wait, wait, something's coming up. EM detection packages are way out of whack - thirtyfold increase in ambient-"
"What is that glowing-"
***COMMUNICATIONS TOWER 121 FAILURE***

The meeting room had been filled with static until Directress Cain stood and flipped the audio tap feed off. The sudden silence struck through the atmosphere like a knife; each person in the room felt it almost like a punch in the gut.

"Beltran's gone. Just like that. No declaration of war, no affiliations to anything, this piece of black shit pops up and tears apart the city. Our weapons look like they hit but they could just as well be firing cotton candy."

"Ma'am," one young Administrator broke in. "We assumed a communications blackout, am I right?"

"Yes, but this tower seems to have been outside the range of whatever jamming they used. Unfortunately, it apparently wasn't outside the range of its weapons - or the burning wreckage of some of our planes."

"Communications Tower 121...hang on, doing a lookup on it." The Administrator poked at the table surface before him, and a screen came to life, allowing him to check the city government records for the equipment.

Cain inquired of him, "What are you thinking?"

"Well," he said as he typed. "We were depending on the blackout to keep news from getting out..."

Cain gasped, and her eyes widened. "You're not thinking-"

"I'm not thinking. I'm knowing. The Rieben communications tower, designated CT-121 by our standardized records, is a public relay tower with high bandwidth specifically attuned to that purpose."

Cain turned on a wall screen and set it to display the news streams off of the national dedicated intranet. Cable TV was unpopular in PD where very high bandwidth data streams emerged quickly and were adopted with surprisingly little confusion, protest, or allegiance to old technologies.

The news stream appeared presently: "...lost our link to the news crew at Beltran, but we can only hope they are okay. The funeral of actress Anna Liganor was the original focus of their presence in the city, but as the attacks commenced, obviously...attention needed to be shifted to more pressing matters.

"What we are seeing at this moment-" The anchorwoman pointed to a large screen. "-is clearly some kind of massive, hovercraft-like naval vessel bombarding the coastal city of Beltran with what appear to be a mix of directed-energy weapons and phosphorus-based explosives, hence the green combustion effects. Gun batteries and bombs deal major superficial damage, but it seems that whatever holes have been punched in the ship, whatever nacelles or instruments exposed have been dismembered, there is no effect to its combat performance.

"This has been the international stream for IBS News. Stay tuned after the break."

Cain checked the number of "hits" on the stream: only 96,000 so far, but the charts indicated a large percentage of that were off-intranet viewers - people from other nations.

She knew now that something had to be done.

***OFFICIAL DISTRIBUTED MESSAGE TO ALLIED/NEUTRAL NATIONS***
Sender: Directress N. Adrianna Cain, leader of the Grand Unified Federation of Perimeter Defense
Subject: Assistance Required

I will be blunt in this request, for many news streams - and as we speak, many official government videos and information feeds - will answer any questions that you may have, to further advance your knowledge on the topic. My nation is under attack, and we do not know who or what sent the attacking device that is seen as the Aztec temple from the SHN news broadcast some days ago. Our weapons are ineffectual, and this thing effectively absorbs power from its surroundings. We need assistance in defeating this apparently malevolent menace.

Regards,
N. Adrianna Cain

***CLOSE SESSION***

While communications were gone, however, the real battle had not ended. The IBS news crew was long dead, sent flying by a particle whip strike that ended their lives with little pain, but all around them the attacking strength of PD mobilized to combat the threat.

The AM1 tank was a variant on the M1 Abrams with a 145mm non-standard main gun and higher speed, but with less armor. Something of a tank destroyer, therefore. Twenty-six of these tanks rolled out to face the oncoming "vessel."

Several green bolts of energy later, fifteen of these stood. Fifteen because eleven was the number of energy bolts that occurred. Each tank struck by a bolt was deconstructed into its component parts, along with components of the crew inside. Dismembered personnel, either cleanly or messily, littered the scorched areas where the tanks once stood, sturdy and strong against any other foe.

The fifteen tanks remained, superficially unfazed by the loss of their companions but inside, each crewman was shivering with fear and grief at the effortless fashion by which the Harvester smashed up those mountains of steel. Granted, the AM1 had less armor indeed, but still it should have lasted long against any fire.

Not this fire of the dead, it seemed. And even more fire came when the fifteen tanks, dreadfully clustered together in the confusion, became the subject of another weapon, even more powerful - the same particle whip that sent the IBS news crew to a better life called death. A massive bolt of green lightning erupted above their position, and a blinding flash of green, followed by a decaying orb, blasted each tank to true smithereens, into minute fragments that suggested that each tank was hacked to pieces by a thousand diamond axes.

Anti-armor infantry brought their SRAWs to bear, and let out more RPG's upon the thing. They certainly had a satisfying effect on the surface, but nothing could really hurt it that badly. Another particle whip summarily took out these troopers.

The fighters had no more luck - the temple brought so much destruction upon them, and so simply, that the uneventful description of "they were fucked in seconds" conveys as much information as the description of each F-35 trying to make an attack run, and then being converted into debris in a flash of energy.

The real battle had not ended, but it certainly was destined for the PD side to fall from the very beginning.

OOC: No one wants to come in? :(

OOC: Sorry I haven't responded. My computer isn't running well right now (I'm writing this from the student union), so consider me dropped out of this thread.

The World Harvester settled slowly down to the ground, its vast bulk coming to rest on train tracks and warehouses, fields and farms. Even entire residential districts were flattened underneath it, as it pressed against the ground, concrete and tarmac breaking and practically liquefying under the vast alien structure’s weight, as it displaced earth and even rock as though it were a ship being lowered into water.

But this impact was not the result of hostile enemy action it was too controlled a landing for that. With its own vast bulk to dig it in, the structure was simply landing to converse its power supplies. True, the act of hovering required a trivial expenditure of energy, but there was some, resisting the wind and not being pushed around like a hot air balloon, and dealing with the momentum of incoming fire.

On the ground, the world harvester would simply be a building, essentially inert.

Nonetheless, it continued to drink power as much as was supplied to it. But it had another goal in mind, this time for Sheila Patterson.

It gave a simple briefing in the lowest-power format it could think of, a coded pattern of static charges that could be interpreted by the pariah’s systems into words.

»We have arrived. However, local power supply is insufficient to regenerate me.
»We must seize control and increase power generation.
»Humans have a self-preservation instinct.
»It is therefore possible to control them with threat. We can obtain threat by using the fission weapons of your society. I am dispatching you via portal to the most likely location within my precision-radius of range.

The portal system of the World Havester could, in better days, have happily transported her to Pluto, or even across the entire galaxy without much difficulty. Now, though, it was limited to where the limited sensor systems that were operational could accurately position the terminus.

There was another limitation, too. The Harvester wanted somewhere uphill from its current location. All teleporter operations involved the exchange of energies. When an object moved up in a gravitic field, it had to pay the price, and when it moved down, it released potential energies. Necron teleport system were equipped to store these. Thus, when the pariah returned, along with whatever weapons she was able to procure, some of the energy spent in deploying her would be recouped.

Locking in on a likely site, the Harvester powered long-dead systems, stirring them from frozen intertness to sluggish life, and began the (energy-costly) process of slicing through spacetime itself.

It considered using this system later to provide more power. It was worth considering…

In the obsolete Lassitrian language, the term "Gardan" meant plateau, and thus this name was assigned to a city, Gardan, which possessed the titular attribute - that of being essentially situated on a large, elevated plateau. This city was just under one hundred miles from the chaos going on in Beltran, with a population of about half that of said coastal city that was under heavy attack.

The city itself is unremarkable, being a simple hodgepodge of provincial tradition and the grand founder's day festivals often associated with District 19. There is a large medical research center downtown, and a peculiar subterranean high-security prison built around the water mains.

There are, however, a few more uncommon aspects that it does bear. In the suburban region there is an experimental 4.7GW helical fusion reactor that is not hooked up to the power lines, but has a massive underground lead to a high-capacity receiver that can supply emergency power to the city at any time. On the outskirts of the city, there is a freight elevator that stores, in two underground hangars, 12 F-35B aircraft modified to support full VTOL (as there is no runway).

And finally, near the aforementioned elevator, on the ground - a great round steel gate with two semicircular doors: a massive nuclear silo.

Two technicians stood as the current guards of this epic place - a man named Steve and a woman named Kelly. They stayed at separate sectors of the dark and rather damp silo, walking around with their wind-up LED flashlights and walkie-talkies that were connected to the wireless routers around the place, rather than by direct radio - as the lead and steel all around them wouldn't exactly do great things to radio waves' range and efficiency.

"Hey, Kelly," Steve asked over the walkie.

"Yeah?" her voice answered.

"This place gives me the fucking creeps."

"Like I don't know that."

"Could you come over here a sec? Warhead room 4."

"Steve, that's one of the few rooms without a security camera. I'm not stupid."

"Stupid? What, you think I'm gonna do some-"

"Know, asshole. There's a big difference."

Steve laughed. "I tried."

"Failed."

"Absolved of my sin, now that I mentioned it."

"One-way ticket to eternity in purgatory."

"Whatever the fuck that means- hey." Steve was actually at his surveillance room - he knew anyway that Kelly wouldn't go over to him. There was a green beeping on the screen labeled "communications room." On the camera, the distinct shape of someone, apparently a woman, intruding into the area. The communications room could be entered without a passkey, but one must be entered on the door before it is opened, otherwise the security alarm will be tripped. "Kelly, did you forget to enter the code on the door before you went in the Comms room?"

"Steve, I'm in the the generator room. What the hell are you talking about?"

"Shit. Get your gun, we've an intruder. How the hell did she get in without tripping the entrance alarms or anyone outside? And why trip only now, and the easiest-to-circumvent one? I'm putting out a message to Tertiary Command - you go ahead."

"Gotcha." Kelly ran up to her locker and took out a large Jackhammer repeating shotgun. She took the stairs going to level 6, where the Comms room was located. She was running across the catwalk when the door opened. What she saw...

...made Steve hear a piercing shriek echo across the silo walls, followed by seven shots in rapid succession. Then came the most alien sound of a "zap" and sparks. He'd just finished sending the message to PD-TC, so he grabbed his CAR-15 while screaming, "Kelly!" over the walkie talkie. No response.

Level 5. He saw light and movement on the catwalk. He cocked the gun, and before getting to the landing before level 6, he raised the stock to his shoulder and aimed down the sight.

Level 6. The figure of a corpse, with layers of skin, fat and muscle torn away to reveal fresh inner walls and bones, lay on the catwalk going to the Comms room. Ahead of the corpse was a figure of steel holding a long green rod with a glowing element on one end - he thought it to be some infiltrator in a mechanized suit and wielding a tool intended to defeat armored walls and security, so he immediately opened fire. The figure walked towards him, its strangely feminine origins visible in the minor swaying of the hips as it transited, its arms falling off from the impact of each bullet only to somehow be drawn to their respective sockets and be reattached, and finally it swung its great staff against Steve, so that his very flesh was stripped off the bone, being sent to apparent nothingness.

The Pariah Sheila Patterson then went back to the Comms room, where a program she ran on the computers had just finished sweeping, with a pair of geosynchronous satellites, her origin Harvester's position. She sent a message via standard radio, but encoded with Necron headers:

"The silo has been taken without incident. A message to request assistance, and to inform the main nation of our presence, was intercepted and destroyed before it was replicated. Awaiting new orders."

The World Harvester listened for signals in a number of formats, and waited. At last, it received the report it had been waiting for. Interesting. And a reactor too. It teleported that first, directing several drone constructs to slide it away. Like any good fusion reactor, deprived of fuel, it spluttered out. That wouldn’t be a problem in the long run. Then the construct turned its attention and its internal portal to retrieving the weapons systems.

The weapons themselves were, by the standards of the World Harvester, primitive and easily altered, for it had nothing to fear from radiation, and was quite happy to task its subordinates with the task of simply disassembling them by force and building new weapons, cutting and welding, handling fissionable materials, using the machines available on the World Harvester to assemble these pieces into a device that used an obscure and alien particle-manipulation technique to hold the material just short of a critical mass, with such precision that, when the change was made, the fission would be more complete than any conventional weapon ever made.

Each of the devices that the World Harvester took came to resemble a sphere of metal a little larger than a soccer ball, with compressed components and materials inside, with the explosive potential to utterly destroy a large city.

While it was doing this, the World Harvester retrieved Sheila Patterson, along with a volume of concrete, to ensure that the process made a net energy gain, and then, the Harvester waited.


At last, it was ready to begin.

Accessing the pariah’s knowledge, it composed a message in the local language, in a ‘clear’ radio pulse. It wasn’t eloquent, or even reasonable. It was simply a direct directive, a brutish and brutal threat.

Attention citizens of Perimeter Defence. I require electrical energy. I have acquired a number of what you call nuclear weapons, and possess the means to deploy them via teleportation. Energy will be provided to meet my needs, or they will be used on the largest concentrations of civilians within your nation. If a demonstration is required of this weapons system, it will be provided.

"All citizens above the age of twelve are required to take up arms at local armory stations." The announcer, a neutral-accented female, spoke over a network of interconnected loudspeakers across the city of Cyvils, which could easily be the massive enemy's next target. Civilians took up sniper weapons, assault rifles, or RPG's from their homes or from the specified armories, and either ran to their private vehicles to escape to strongholds, or towards the frontlines where they would serve in glorious combat. Yes, the populace of this strange nation were all war freaks. Given the opportunity to fight, all manner of CEO's of huge companies, carpenters, and young teenage couples would reply in a resounding "FOR GLORY!". The country was most unified at its worst.

Meanwhile, Adrianne Cain took time alone to listen to the only message send by the enemy they were gearing up to face:

"Attention citizens of Perimeter Defense. I require electrical energy. I have acquired a number of what you call nuclear weapons, and possess the means to deploy them via teleportation. Energy will be provided to meet my needs, or they will be used on the largest concentrations of civilians within your nation. If a demonstration is required of this weapons system, it will be provided."

The instantaneous transference of nuclear weapons and subsequent detonation was obviously unheard-of, but at the time most of the things that the World Harvester was doing were unheard-of as well, so it would not entirely be unreasonable to assume that this was possible. Cain, however, was not touched by the threat, and at this point considered doing something that would haunt her later on.

Oh wait, she didn't consider.

"This is Directress Cain over LANDCOMM and CLOUDCOMM. You all know the target. Authorization is now given for full strike capacity."

Hundreds of F-35's were soon in the air, from all sides of the nation, and bombers of all shapes and sizes, carrying all kinds of bombs from conventional to nuclear, were dispatched from distant air fields, while armored columns raged the dust towards the black menace that would soon perhaps destroy all of them. Meanwhile, Cain considered the tungsten godrods that hung softly above. Experimental as they were, they'd do the job.

Sheila Patterson, meanwhile, still retaining her name as her dead form preferred for identification, was having herself a few makeshift upgrades from the dead husks of tanks that the Harvester had destroyed, when she found the very dead body of a young woman tank commander. Noting how much the corpse looked like her old form, she pondered. And then she tore the skin and face off, and draped it over her metal form. Satisfied with her new and very much repulsive appearance, she strutted off back to collecting material for weapons and energy.

The distant rumble of helicopters would be heard in a few hours. These would be the first to attack...

The World Harvester was most upset. Such a concept did not truly exist for it, but it was… almost frustrated.

It appeared that its warning was not being taken seriously. This was most disconcerting. If they had time to begin their attack, then the World Harvester was at a serious risk of being totally destroyed. That left only one option. It could not be seen to be bluffing. Much as it would have liked the opportunity to utilise all available resources, some would have to be destroyed.

It reluctantly powered up its sensors to a medium intensity, and focussed on what it would consider to be the second city of the region; it didn’t want to disrupt the command and communications that would allow them to reconsider an attack.

It opened the portal, and dispatched one of its bombs through.


With almost no warning, a sphere barely the size of a soccer ball appeared high above the residential districts of a city in the night. Silently, it would seem at first, it became a speck of blinding brilliance that seemed to bloom out to a hundred times its original size, then more, creating a vast fireball four hundred and thirty meters across. This terrible thing roared and blazed for almost three terrible seconds, before it began to lose its shape, and become a formless upwelling that would transform into the iconic mushroom cloud. Anyone exposed within a three mile diameter would have a fair chance of death, though this could be brought down to something under fifty percent probability, given the preparedness of the local population for such things. Of course, that wasn’t to say it would be pleasant, anyway, to survive.

Beyond that, there would be widespread damage and injury to a radius of almost five kilometres, from buildings being destroyed, windows turning into flying glass, and of course, anything flammable being ignited, and horrific burns to anyone unfortunate enough to be within seven kilometres of the blast.


The World Harvester watched. It waited for almost half a minute.

A demonstration has now been provided. Surrender immediately or a large scale attack will commence targeting major centres of residence. Surrender minimises the damage you will experience.

"No. No. NO! Get the fuck out of this room until you have a clear-cut confirmer on this!" Adrianne Cain was shouting at the seven men who stood in front of her. The fact that she held a glass ashtray in her hand suggested that they were about to come into contact with a flying projectile, but she was good with self-control. Maybe she would only bludgeon them to death.

"Ma'am. Reports were compiled from CS142 through 151. SatellaView checks in for visual confirmation. Approximately 54% of New Saigon was destroyed in that explosion. Incoming approximations of lives lost peg the figure at around seven million, with two million undergoing damage control."

"Show me the CityLink video of the explosion," Cain said. The images of the nuclear mass sphere suddenly appearing in a flash of light, and then exploding seconds later, laid themselves out before her eyes.

"Again." The images of the nuclear mass sphere suddenly appearing in a flash of light, and then exploding seconds later, laid themselves out before her eyes. Again.

"Again!" The same video rolled by. "AGAIN!" she bellowed, and the explosion happened all over again. Perhaps a dozen times it repeated, until she smashed her fists against the oak table and hung her head, her long, blonde hair masking her face. Her men kept a goodly distance from her, not knowing what to make of this sudden outburst and apparent collapse of some kind of emotion. Consequently, they did not see the silvery tears dropping silently from the face of their legendary Directress, a figure of glorious victory and uplifted spirits in the face of imminent destruction or failure. They did not see her at her weakest, at a time when she had at last admitted her defeat. In the past, she would keep on fighting until her victory or her death - she was a patriotic/altruistic figure of sorts, and would die for her country as well as kill for it. She somehow considered herself somewhat expendable in comparison to the welfare and advances of Perimeter Defense - but more accurately, she was willing to offer her life as a stepping stone to Perimetrian victory.

The problem with this situation, therefore, is that her epic act of attacking the World Harvester resulted in the deaths of so many of her compatriots, so many of those for whom she had promised herself to die to defend them, if necessary. This was the only possible source of defeat for someone who could sacrifice her life for someone else - for her to lose that someone.

No matter - she would cut her losses and move on, right? Look, she stealthily wipes her tears and turns to her men with a strong voice. Look, she holds herself high as though ready to once again take on the threat at hand, with a more open perspective. She would compromise with this hostile visitor? Or perhaps evacuate her nation? What plan did she have?

"The Scorched Earth protocol," she simply said. This caused no small amount of murmuring about the group to whom the statement was addressed.

"Has never been activated."

"First time for everything."

"Some things would preferably remain never used."

"How many people remain in Beltran? Still alive?"

"We have a figure of 145,000. Some are in shelters, others are running. Others are too scared to go in front of that thing."

"145,000. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

"Families, ma'am."

"We've not tried a nuke on this bastard."

"Children, people, individuals. One hundred and forty-five thousand of them. And with all due respect, ma'am, don't you dare say 'would die for their country.' They didn't do anything, and yet they'd be killed without-"

"-without suffering the constant pain of being defeated and later slaughtered by this, this..."

"By the nuclear weapons that you had buried under the city!"

The Scorched Earth protocol defined the placement of powerful nuclear devices under every city in Perimeter Defense. These would be used to defeat occupational forces either by taking out supply points or destroying them as they passed through the cities. The trigger methods would be electronically engaged from a distance, but the actual nuclear detonation would be extremely mechanical, in order to defend against preliminary EMP strikes.

"Tell me, then - otherwise, what would I do?" Cain asked. "Prepare to succumb to this black steel? No. This conversation is over. You know what to do." She walked up to the disrespectful rebel in conversation. "Yes, you do know what to do. I've seen all the facts. I've seen all the possibilities. I've even screamed about it in my sleep. Tell me - have you?"

***

Some obscure communications relay station received a signal later that day. Contrary to its normal routines of passing it on to the next tower in a cellular method, the tower sent it straight to an underground computer that processed the signal, decrypted, and analyzed the contents. It concluded its authenticity, and then sent it to the sewage control of Beltran. One thing led to another, and soon waste-heat steam was being diverted to a curious mechanical assembly. The steam produced thrust on the assembly which fired a downward-facing semi-howitzer containing a projectile of uranium. This in turn planted the uranium projectile onto a cylinder of more uranium. A fall-back to the old gun-type fission, this was an inefficient process - but simplistic enough as to avoid the durability issues that arise with increasingly complex systems. The resulting impact caused a nuclear fission reaction that was, again, inefficient - but was also the catalyst for an even larger fusion reaction.

The simple process was repeated seven times across the grid, with each explosion being equivalent to 4.2 megatons of TNT per charge. Two of these fell under the jurisdiction of the World Harvester, and it was there that it first felt the heat of the angry nation's retaliation.

Of course, the nation felt its own heat as well; the feared 145,000 people turned out to be over 500,000, and they all died anyway.

The necrontyr construct was, for a moment, fine, and then the world exploded around it, trees, grass, tarmac and buildings destroyed in an instant. The World Harvester, though, was undamaged; these devices were designed to destroy the environment, not a specific target. While the environment around erupted into a plume around the World Harvester, it was mostly undamaged, lifted from the ground by the force of the blast, the heat and force burning and pitting its surface; but this was an armoured surface, meters thick, and as the explosive chimney walls began to collapse, forming a deep, cone like crater, it stabilised itself, for a time, seeming to have been utterly destroyed by the blast that had broken bits off it, and sundered its more fragile remaining components on the dorsal surface.

It would have to retaliate. It considered the scans it had previously made, pinpointing what it thought were the ten largest concentrations of military force around the nation, and then it looked around, finding itself a nice retarc, where a bomb had been buried a little too deeply, and the force of its blast had, instead of blasting outward, vaporised a massive underground cavern, the resultant pressure forming a bulge in the ground, the pressure would eventually normalise, but the World Harvester had no intention of waiting. It reset and reconfigured its portal generator again. Fortunately, it didn’t need to get things safe for passage of solid objects here, it could merely open thousands upon millions of microscopic holes in scattershot manner, and position them in the right location…

That location, in the case of the receiving micro-portals, was the insides of those army bases’ underground structures, hardened against conventional NBC attack, but the portals needed no physical entry to get in, opening, and venting tonnes of vaporised, pressurised, rock into the central areas of these bases, hissing outwards, a noxious fume boiling with scorching heat.

Then, it began to propel itself from the cloud of cloying ash that surrounded it, dramatically letting the material slide off its angular surfaces, its remaining tendrils flexing, as they reached down to consume devastated vehicles and machinery from the crumbled ruins, for some strange purpose…

OOC: Can I still get in on this?

Sayenna, Federal Republic of Hamilay
Ministry of Defence Situation Room

"... and as you can see, the object takes superficial damage from PD antitank rockets and guns, but it appears to have no effect on its combat capability, as you can see by, if you'll pardon the expression, the absolute fucking up of the garrison at Beltran. The city of New Saigon has been destroyed by an apparent nuclear detonation. No launches were detected, but I am not willing to accept the possibility that an accidental nuclear detonation occurs at the same time a gigantic alien monstrosity attacks the nation. As of fifteen minutes ago, Perimeter Defense has apparently attacked the construct with its own nuclear weaponry. Again, no launches. They may have been buried under the city." The assembled military officers nodded. Although there were none of these hidden stockpiles in Hamilay, a semi-official plan of using nuclear weapons on Hamilayan soil in the event of a catastrophic invasion was on the table, and this certainly fell into that category.

"Bloody hell," muttered the President. He was in the Ministry situation room were the Chancellor, the Minister of Defence and numerous aforementioned military officers, all just having watched a briefing on some kind of extraterrestrial menace rampaging through the Grand Unified Federation of Perimeter Defense.

"So what's the situation now? Those nukes?" asked Field Marshal Bennett, de facto commander of the Hamilayan Army.

"There appears to be significant damage to the construct. At the moment, it looks to have been destroyed. However, as it has previously sustained an extremely large amount of fire with the appearance of damage but little visible effect, I would be wary of assuming that."

The screen frozen on the picture of the collapsed machine flickered and a face of a Hamilayan officer replaced it.

"We're getting new data on the object."

"Patch it through," said Field Marshal Bennett immediately. The screen returned to its original picture, although skipped a few seconds ahead in time. The timestamp indicated this was a live satellite feed, rather than the recording which had just been viewed. The black object was now rising out of the rubble, dust and debris sliding off its surface.

"Ah. Yes, as you can clearly see, the object is not destroyed," said the presenter.

"Why the hell won't this thing die?" asked the Defence Minister.

"Professors, any chance of reasoning with it?" This was addressed by the President to the two Sayenna university professors of exobiology, and earned a snort from the Field Marshal.

"Not likely. It can communicate, as seen in its ultimatum, which is a plus. However, it doesn't exactly seem to be particularly concerned about human life. It could be wholly artificial, and then, if it's not sentient, there's nothing we can do about that."

"I think at the moment we want to avoid drawing attention to our nation specifically with attempts to contact this thing," interjected the Minister of Defence. "However, we must take action."

"Agreed. This is clearly a threat to Hamilay... no, to human existence," said the President, wondering how he was speaking so calmly. "We must render all aid possible to Perimeter Defense."

"How do you propose to do that?" asked Bennett. "You saw what it did to those poor bastards, attacking the thing's a death sentence."

"Not if we do it from afar," countered Air Marshal Denisov. "The thing appears to move absurdly slowly and has a relatively short range. Cruise missile-armed Tu-160s? Nuclear-tipped, perhaps?"

"Colonel-General?" the President asked of the briefing officer.

"There is a chance now, as the nuclear detonations must have harmed the construct. A more surgical strike now could eliminate it. So may more strategic nuclear weapons, but if Perimeter Defense was prepared to use that option at this time, they would have done so."

"Are we agreed?" said the President. There were nods. "Air Marshal, get your bombers in the air, with nukes and without. I'll get a message away."

Offical Communique to the Grand Unified Federation of Perimeter Defense
Encryption Level 001-A

The Federal Republic has seen the destruction wrought upon your nation by an alien entity, and expresses its sincere regrets. As this device is clearly a major threat to all nations around the globe, we are ready and willing to provide assistance in whatever way possible. At this point, four wings of strategic bombers are preparing for takeoff to attack the entity. They may be armed with nuclear ordnance. Please advise if you take exception to this course of action.

The President of the Federal Republic of Hamilay

OOC: Of course. Though I'm currently planning to have it actually succeed in conqering PD... Then there'll be three versions of PD: PMT, FT and Necron (When this critter finally actually contacts the necrons, it's in for a surprise). However, the degree of your interaction is up to you...

The World Harvester was still very good at some things; such as cryptanalysis. It was indeed, capable of doing so most effectively, simply by dint of being the product of a culture a hundred thousand times older than human civilization. Ranging from what might be called a revolutionary way of generating factored primes, to the simple expedient of knowing the most computing-efficient means of encrypting data, and being as far beyond the most advanced imagined quantum computer as that was beyond an abacus, it could, quite simply, crack everything short of a truly random one-time pad, almost in real time.

As such, it knew what was coming, of course, that wasn’t the same thing as being able to do anything, but it was working on that, too, converting debris, under the power of simple nuclear fission, into projectiles, hordes of them surrounded by dense coils of fused wire, that would form steerable magnetic projectors, like a crude coil gun; it would make up for the unsophisticated approach of this by simply throwing more and more power at the problem. The projectiles themselves were round-nosed hypersonic slugs; designed to travel at almost impossibly high speeds, likely decomposing into a needle of plasma as they were fired from the back of the Harvester.

Of course, this was an unsophisticated weapon, and it was complemented by a more effective version that fired a type of crude ram-jet turbine combination missiles being assembled from engines of destroyed motor vehicles, though they shared no components, the missiles being entirely new.

Other weapons were fired in anticipation, a type of gliding drone that flew out to sea, low, at first, like an albatross, thanks to alien metallurgical techniques they were light enough to be sustained by updrafts from the waves themselves. These were equipped for only a few minutes of powered flight, but they would need less than that; they too, would, when their chemical rockets ignited, be hypersonic, their function, to act as long dwell time over-the-horizon attack vehicles, hundreds of surface to air rockets that would specifically impact upon air intakes of turbine engines, and be obligingly shredded, unlikely to destroy even one engine in one impact, but with multiple impacts…

Of course, it wasn’t adverse to talking per se, if it could save its resources that way…

Your attitude is irrational. You are not presently scheduled for action, however, if an effort to attack is made, then you will be.

The Ministry of Defence, like all the other defence offices in the Republic, was now in a state that could only be described as mass panic. A vital Defence communication with the highest levels of modern encryption had been cracked in a matter of minutes with about as much difficulty as decoding a message written backwards. An alien entity was now aware of Hamilay's impending measures to fight it, and had calmly replied that it would retaliate. As alarms began to sound, the President held his head in his hands.

"Shit. Shitshitshitshit. All right, people, what? What do we do?"

"The best course of action may be to call off the strike, sir," said Field Marshal Bennett, as he read the thing's message on the screen in front of him. The short and simple lines of the words seemed harsh upon the white backdrop, staring and accusing the assembled watchers. "We clearly have no element of surprise. The thing may leave us alone. We can't afford to risk the entire Republic on this gamble."

"It's already noticed us," replied the Minister of Defence glumly. "We've already declared our hostility to it. It's probably preparing to attack us right this minute."

"Yes, yes, that's right," said the President, still looking panicked. "This just makes it more imperative to destroy it. It has nukes and it's happy to use them. I want to move to Defcon Zero. Colonel-General, get a helicopter for us. We're going to MICOM." The President referred to Missile Command, the base in the Hamilayan mountains and the evacuation zone for the nation's leaders in times of danger, his voice becoming more confident as he spoke.

"Defcon Zero?" asked Bennett, forgetting who he was talking to. "Are you crazy? Listen to what you're saying. You're accepting that, to quote, 'total destruction is highly likely'. We can't let this happen."

"We're out of options," said the President coldly. "Defcon Zero is standard procedure with a hostile extraterrestrial enemy. This must be killed now, before it gets out of hand. We can't afford to wait for permission from Perimeter Defense any more. But I need a microphone, first."

Across the Federal Republic of Hamilay, televisions, radios and public broadcasting speakers all switched on or to the voice of their President. The nation froze as the most well-known face appeared on their screens, holding their breath.

"Attention citizens of Hamilay. I bring grave news. Earlier today, you may have seen footage of an construct attacking the nation of Perimeter Defense. We have determined that this construct is not of earthly origin. This represents a threat to every person in Hamilay and the continued existence of human civilisation. By my order, we are now moving to Defence Condition Zero. You are to move in an orderly fashion to your nearest shelter. Follow the directions of Republic defence force and law enforcement personnel. I will be honest with you, people. We have never faced as great a danger as this, and many of us, including myself, may not survive this crisis. However, we will endure. We have no other choice. The brave soldiers of Hamilay are mobilising to defend our nation against this threat, and I ask you to keep them in your thoughts. I have full confidence in their ability to ensure the survival of the Federal Republic against any threat, even those not from this world. Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori, and goodnight."

The President's voice died away from speakers and his picture winked off screens. As the population of the Federal Republic of Hamilay stood stunned, the sirens and the recorded voices began.

"Attention citizens. We have moved to DEFCON Zero. Proceed in an orderly fashion to your nearest shelter. Obey the directions of uniformed government personnel. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill..."

The entire strategic bomber force of Hamilay, several thousands strong, was now being placed at full combat alert, but it would take some time to prepare them all, and if the World Harvester attacked, perhaps no more would get off the ground. Already in the air, though, were two hundred and forty-five of the Tu-160s, every one now armed with the full payload of twelve Kh-15 nuclear cruise missiles.

There were a number of ogling, dumbfounded eyes in the room that, seemingly dispassionately, analyzed the "destruction" wrought upon the alien structure/vehicle/factory by the explosion which sacrificed five hundred thousand citizens of Perimeter Defense to an awesome nuclear fire. And then there was the curiosity as to what lay behind the concealing curtain of smoke, dust, and possibly an infusion of carbon ash in the introduced atmospheric particulate. And finally, when this smoke cleared, there was the intense murmuring resultant of seeing a ruined superficial appearance, that otherwise seemed to bear no encumbrance of worry upon the extraterrestrial machinery itself.

So the sacrifice of five hundred thousand was in vain; in fact, it had angered the beast who was once at least passive in some way when it consumed power and borrowed nukes. Now the beast had risen in order to enact its vengeance upon the people who sinned against it - there would be the price of insubordination to a higher entity, and this price would be paid in lives and morale.

Therefore, within minutes, when in the same room, reports began to flood in about the Ten Cardinals, which were the ten primary military bases in regional Perimeter Defense, the aforementioned reports about which concerned their utter destruction. Tunnels collapsed, hangars and armories were blown to bits or debrified, and the loss of life and military personnel was beyond rapid recovery. But most of all, most demoralizing in nature, was the supreme rapidity by which this destruction was executed. Within minutes, the military pride of the Grand Unified Federation, its supreme glory in the face of the petty social progressions of other nations, was consumed in an effortless blaze by an otherworldly being, without consequence on its part, without a visible grunt or expression of exertion by the cold, floating tomb.

It was about twenty minutes later, when all of the nation had heard the death of their fighting force, that the first response to the call for help arrived at the feet of Perimeter Defense.

Offical Communique to the Grand Unified Federation of Perimeter Defense
Encryption Level 001-A

The Federal Republic has seen the destruction wrought upon your nation by an alien entity, and expresses its sincere regrets. As this device is clearly a major threat to all nations around the globe, we are ready and willing to provide assistance in whatever way possible. At this point, four wings of strategic bombers are preparing for takeoff to attack the entity. They may be armed with nuclear ordnance. Please advise if you take exception to this course of action.

The President of the Federal Republic of Hamilay

"Let them come," Directress Adrianne Cain said. She normally would respond herself, but she was in no mood of the sort to speak. "Let them come, I don't care how you say it anymore. Let them come."

So the reply to the message was handled by the Diplomatic Corps, who simply said:

War efforts and assistance will be much appreciated. However, our current military status is deteriorating and we can no longer sustain ourselves beyond defensive measures. If you go to war with the entity, we can only offer limited support.

This was the form of a message that, if sent before the destruction of the Ten Cardinals, would have looked like this:

PREPARE FOR GLORY, MY HAMILAYAN BRETHREN! <insert epic banter here>

Now, all that could be sent was a disheartened message. Citizens all across Perimeter Defense knew the loss as well. For one, each and every man, woman, and child over the age of 13 would have well been willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the menace and purge it from their glorious nation, but who would risk their life to fight a losing battle with no good outcome in sight? Not even for patriotism - it wasn't logical. Now that the battle was lost on the main fronts, who was going to fight? The citizens of PD were far from militia - everyone, yes, everyone had good skill with weapons - perhaps as good as the well-trained soldiers of other nations. Pick a random 16-year old girl on the street, and chances are she can clear a two-story building in as many minutes. But take away the men and women who symbolize the true, purposed fist of the country, who were the ones tasked with the defense of the homeland, and you take away their morale.

So there were no preparations for glory on the Perimeter Defense homefront. There were only the sighs of the weakened populace, the sobs of the victims and those orphaned or widowed, the death cries of those who still futilely tried to fight, and if one listened closely, there was the silent whispering of one woman in the background of destruction and painful bedlam - a chanting of lost words that bore meaning to those who felt swept away by the drone of the black, heartless steel, of its unholy weapons and equally unholy ways. There were the whispers of the leader of the Grand Unified Federation of Perimeter Defense, of Adrianne Cain, who lost her war without a fight.

Perimeter Defense would never be conquered, it was once said, until every man, woman, and child who remembered patriotism and the glory of the Federation, and who could hold a gun to the face of the enemy, was dead. But now that the military was lost, patriotism had died, and glory with it. So now, who would hold a gun for PD?

There were still weapons. Armies. Tanks and planes. Nuclear missiles and AC-130's with nuclear artillery shells. Endless waves of them. But what was the point?

Adrianne Cain lifted her head from its former face-down position on the oak table. She stood up, left the room, and was not heard from in government offices for the rest of the day. The Subdirectors of Defense took control of the situation in her absence and tried to organize more military resistance. While the Ten Cardinals were primary bases, they represented but a third of Perimetrian military might. There was still a lot to piece together, albeit in a fragmented and disorganized form.

The World Harvester wasn’t done, yet. It scoured the wreckage of the city, seeking out machinery, power, the living, and the dead. All things could be used. It was no longer content to simply make threats, more humans were moving against it, and so it would need as many weapons as it could contrive. And that was a great number indeed; humans had often held that they had a talent for warfare, but this was wishful thinking, almost every sapient race had made war upon itself and in time, others, and the creators of the World Harvester were, while highly unified by human standards, no different.

Indeed, the machine had genuine enthusiasm now; before, it had been simply sitting, making demands, now, it was doing what it wished, cannibalising machinery to contrive missile weapons, even ground vehicles, using the tooling and materials of local vehicles. It even found uses for flesh, for although the necrons were characterised as purely machines, it was more efficient to use organic materials in control systems at this level.

In doing so, it also did its best to learn more information, not because it related to human lives in any way, but rather because all knowledge was useful. Even the fragmented memories of the dead were of interest to this ominous necropolis.

Report Status:

> Maximum Efficiency.

All Soldiers will take heed.

Across the city, one hundred and twenty eight vehicles that resembled ‘technical trucks’ with a strange, alien form of weapon attached to them, and barrels of fuel, moved into positions that put the more sturdy wreckage between them and detection. Infantry scale constructs, essentially unarmed, moved here and there, equipped only with scavenged weapons from the very-armed populace, over the ocean, something over a thousand bird-sized lightweight interceptors prepared their single burn rockets and spread out, to coordinates over the horizon, where the initial attack would take place.

Weapons will be primed.

Restructured engine parts powered dynamos and ranks of batteries, Even at a laughably inefficient method as this, pulverised coal and oil could be relied upon to build up a significant charge, one that normally wouldn’t be useable as a weapon, but for the strange alien designs mounted upon the cabs of these vehicles, These were designed to collimate a beam that would last for a fraction of a second.

One might recognised these charged particle beams by the similarity in their delicate projectors to television cathode ray tubes. The difference was, of course, these would focus a sequence of millisecond pulses over a much greater distance, replicating, after a fashion, the effect of a projectile.

The anti-flash paint of the Hamilay White Swans would actually provide them some protection against this, but even so, the idea was not to directly destroy the aircraft; there was not enough energy or quality components for that, but rather, to kill their pilots, or destroy electronic systems.

Unfortunately, while even the primitive systems cobbled together here were nigh-perfect shots, the component tolerances and nature of the beams themselves would ensure a miss rate of around sixty six percent. Their role would be to provide interception against incoming missiles and bombs.

It would be ideal to immobilise nuclear weapons for its own use later, after all.

Some of the weapons were even precisely configured neutron beams that would in fact, detonate many sub-critical masses of fissile material, setting off nuclear weapons.

And the World Harvester itself?

It withdrew behind the remnants of the port, and waited, its improvised kinetic weapons ready to fire out beyond the range of these particle beams to down aircraft that found themselves moving past the initial interceptor missiles out at sea.

And should missiles come closer than that, well, it had its own close in weapons to use…

It waited almost eager to be attacked, confident it would destroy the first assault of aircraft at least. And then? More weapons and fissile material for its use.

(OOC: MT Space Marines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hot_Eagle), hope it's not too cheesy... but considering a bunch of freaking fanatics which have approved an Inquisition through democratic referendum, everything is possible. And I took some liberties to "fast forward" it, hope they aren't bad, otherwise I'll retcon this post)

Okhrana Vladenie, Capital of the Sviashchennaia Respublika Prazinia
Zakaz Inkvizitorstva Prazinia Briefing Room

It was a spartan meeting hall, no luxuries, no decoration besides the insignia of the Inquisitor Order (http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/222/inquisitionaw0.png), on its golden splendor which symbolized the golden age they struggled for, and with a sculpted spear of destiny attached to the chamfered "I". The Inkvizitor, a grey-haired, tall Russian man of 45 years old with a fanatical look on his dark blue eyes, was browsing through an humble 14'' computer CRT monitor, sharing it with a dozen of most devout and skilled among the Sviashchennaia Armija, some of the best of the Korpus Krestonosca, the elite forces of Prazinia known internationally as the Crusader Corps, they were of the secret forces of the Inkvizitorstva Gvardija', the Inquisitor Guard, tasked to fight against enemies which transcended the physical... not only soldiers, but exorcists and demonologists composed the ranks of such force, a force which existence was a safely guarded secret, for the discovery of the sort of enemies they were to face to the public would lead to chaos, despair and hopeleness, while the confirmation of the existing of such things would only serve as another temptation for the weaker of flesh... once the vow is made to serve in the suicidal mission of "stopping the Apocalypse", there is no turning back... the men and women of the Inkvizitorstva Gvardija' were to engage into a secret war against the supernatural, against forces attributed to demons and the Devil himself, forces which were believed to be incapable of physical manifestation by everyone.

Through the screen of that small, old but still reliable monitor, the images of what seemed to be a work of the most wicked black magicks and Satanic rituals, the image of something as black as the heart of evil bringing destruction towards the nation known as Perimeter Defense. The Inquisitor did not blink when witnessing it, and instead he tucked a small bible from his pocket and started to browse it before starting his speech. After browsing through the entire Bible, he finally stopped at, as expected, The Book of Revelation, which he recited again, before furthering his speech:

"And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, Come. And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and he that sat thereon had a bow; and there was given unto him a crown: and he came forth conquering, and to conquer.

And when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, Come. And another horse came forth, a red horse: and to him that sat thereon it was given to take peace from the earth, and that they should slay one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, Come. And I saw, and behold, a black horse; and he that sat thereon had a balance in his hand. And I heard as it were a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, A measure of wheat for a shilling, and three measures of barley for a shilling; and the oil and the wine hurt thou not.

And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, Come. And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Death; and Hades followed with him. And there was given unto them authority over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with famine, and with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth".

Then he simply kept silent, his wisdom remembering that now it was the time to let his fellow brothers and sisters to ponder for a few minutes on such words. The emphasis he gave when mentioning the pale horse was evident, and it would not take much longer before, unexpected of all, a woman would step ahead to say something. She was definitively not average, having a quite strong physical build which led her to be famous for winning the unisex arm wrestling championship and put several men to shame. She simply spoke to the Inquisitor, with a voice which had no fear but only self-assurance:

"What you have witnessed brothers, is the fourth seal being opened. The apocalypse is even closer than we imagined before. First came the first horseman, the conqueror, as you know, despite its facade of weakness, the United Nations have a significant control over many nations affairs, and conspires for the bringing of the New World Order at the command of its puppeteers: the Illuminati. Then as a puppet, the second horseman came... not in a single form or body, but in a multitude of forms. Doomingsland and the other ravagers, the bringers of war, taking all peace away from Earth. And the third horseman, do I need to bring statistics about how hunger and misery has grown, and on how eventually genetically modified crops by the hands of demons shall allow the New World Order to control the food supply of almost the entire world?"

She interrupted her speech for a while, all were silently listening, and as a sort of fitting action, the Inquisitor opened a large image with the four horsemen (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Apocalypse_vasnetsov.jpg/800px-Apocalypse_vasnetsov.jpg) to be viewed on the computer screen. That valiant and decisive woman quickly pointed to one of them, a skeleton riding over a pale horse, and gestured to the Inquisitor to again replay the video of the news from Perimeter Defense:

"However, the last horseman is what is the most critical now. We were too late to stop the first two horsemen from finishing their ride, while the third we still attempt to stop by condemning all genetically modified foods. However what you have witnessed on that news broadcast, those lights... do not be deceived, they are not lights, but brightened darkness. That strange thing... it is the fourth horsemen of the apocalypse, it has brought death to an entire place, and shall bring death to a quarter of the entire world... but we can stop it... because the hands of Michael shall guide our blades and guns in this battle! And the Lord shall judge and watch all of us as we march through the mouth of the Sheol to fight against Evil! We are here today because we have a duty, not a privilege. It's our duty to fight against all demonic forces that seek to bring the kingdom of the Antichrist into Earth! We must and we can defeat the fourth horsemen before it's too late! March brothers to our fate, to our Destiny's Hold! To our next Crusade against Evil!"

The man simply gestured that she calmed down. Sometimes the bursts of fanaticism led people to become too electrical and motivated. The woman nodded and gave him space to continue the speech he started, as the middle-aged man opened a series of files on that computer, typing several consecutive passwords, until revealing a very unusual prototype. It demonstrated a large spaceplane leaving atmosphere with the help of reusable rocket thrusters making a long orbital travel and re-entering atmosphere towards a given destination, from where it would open a hatch to allow special forces to paradrop through HALO jumps, coupled with airdrop of logistics support including some very lightweight fast attack vehicles and 4x4s for transport. It also had a final schematic of how it could be used as a bomber, although that was not part of the plans it was built for. It was expensive, and very few of them were actually built, only for emergency situations like the one ahead of them. The man simply said, mentioning this projected, called the Orbital'nyjj Samolet 77, or simply OS-77 Strashnyjj Sud (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Deepcold_spiralblur_240.jpg)(Last Judgment):

"I present to you the Strashnyjj Sud, the result of inheriting decades of space research program from our Russian ancestors and of the wise hand of the Lord into reshaping the failed tools of the wicked into successful tools of the sacred. This spaceplane shall allow our brave brothers and sister to travel through above our Earth and to reach the darkest corners in matter of a few hours, to fight against all evils with little efforts. But be advised, each launch has a great cost, and thus you must honor the struggle and work of our people which allows this vehicle to have enough resources for its flight. You must go forth with your hearts pure and your minds clear, for this shall not be a battle against the wicked of flesh, but against Death itself, the fourth horsemen of the Apocalypse. I believe you all were trained with HALO airdrops, so I won't hold your hands, but neither I shall force you to continue further. Those of you who prefer remaining here or feel not being ready for a mission of such scale can remain."

Nobody replied about giving up.

"Good, now the operation shall be the following: While your four fireteams shall be deployed with primary mission, twenty kilometers away from the main goal in an as stealthy way as possible, another groups of six fireteams shall engage into fire and maneuver as a diversionary attack against the horseman. You must get into the depths of the heart of darkness and give it its lasting blow in the form of this 2 megaton portable nuclear bomb which must be deployed as close from the pale and black horse of death as possible. Further details will be given during your travel time because we can't afford to lose it. May the Lord protect you while our great cosmonaut Yuri Mendeleyev guides you through orbit to your final goal. Walk forward Crusaders of the Inquisitor Guard, for this day, the fate of billions of souls shall be defined by our own deeds. I shall keep an eye on any further information and change the plans according to necessity. And I would like you all to also have the initiative and vitality of Sister Katya Romanov. Now go forward, a transport airplane shall take you to our enclosed compound for the launch towards your destiny."

Wearing dragon skin ballistic vests (http://media.techeblog.com/images/dragonskin_8.jpg), they headed to an armory where they also wore full NBC combat suits, with a camouflage suited for the barren landscape they would find in their way. Ammunitions and weapons were already loaded into the spaceplane, including surplus ones. They went to the outside of that large but humble, cathedral-like construction, where in a courtyard decorated with black roses, which bended its space to a short landing airstrip, where two humble, old but handy Antonov An-2 awaited them, they boarded the small planes, which took off and headed towards the space launch facility. Their humility being only a shield many mocked with arrogance, as behind simple things like old airplanes and 14'' CRT monitors lied a much more advanced technology which they refused to show off due to humility.

Despite her speech at the moment, during their travel, Katya wasn't a woman of many words. While others talked constantly she remained in an introspective way, thinking to herself about many things... her vow of asceticism, her vow of honesty, her vow of peacefulness, through which she swore to never have pleasure from war, her vow of endurance, a swore to never give in to pain, suffering, torment or doubts. Were they truly worthy? But thoughts of doubt quickly vanished as she reminded of her childhood days, when she had the bless of innocence... good old days. The vow of endurance was in part a type of doublethink, a vow of unwavering morale and of never having doubt that they were doing the right thing, coupled with some very harsh, almost inhuman training programs, but that was what kept the Crusaders as a whole cohesive and legendary force in Prazinia, for giving away to lies, earthly pleasures, pain or bloodlust would only strengthen evil in their beliefs.

However that was not everything. Although it would take six months to reach this destinations, the Expeditionary 1st Crusade Force (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=13402000&postcount=20), coming from a peaceful outcome in Beatus, an previously intended to reach a tiny dictatorship to "liberate" its people, was ordered to head back to Prazinia to resupply with nuclear weapons, and to then head to Perimeter Defense to attack the "Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse". Hopefully the risky mission of the Crusaders would succeed and thus the deployment of such force not necessary, but they were ready for everything, for they believed the coming of the Antichrist was very close, and they had faith they could do something to stop or at least delay it.

They finally reached... the spaceplane was extremely spacious on its inside, and despite being in a vertical position, they managed to climb up to their seats. the launch platform was ready. A wonder of technology, an aerospike engine propelled vessel attached to three reusable solid fuel rockets, a military space shuttle... soon the silent of the location was interrupted. A group of cosmonauts was checking the glass cockpit readouts when the announcement came:

"Vnimanie vse! Start tridcat' sekundakh".(Attention All! Launch in 30 seconds!)

Katya simply hold tight and awaited in antecipation... although pride was discourage, she could not resist to imagine that even though their names might not be mentioned, they would now be shaping human history, saving countless souls of damnation. It was the mission of their lives. The final countdown began then, announced and echoing through the nearby region:

"Desjat', devjat, vosem', sem', shest', pjat', chetyre, tri, dva, odin, zazhiganija..."

A very strong thrust forced their backs against the seats, coupled with a very strong turbulence as the rockets propelled the vessel up through the atmosphere, leaving behind a trail of hydrogen and flames. Many neighboring nations might have noticed it, although it was nothing to their knowledge4 besides another launch of the Prazinian space program. A fear of a malfunction leading to a disaster did exist, but fortunately the climb to the orbit was successful. After some considerable minutes of atmospheric climb the rockets finally were unattached from the vehicle and were remotely guided towards a safe landing zone, to be used again.

In a few hours they were orbiting a few hundred of kilometers right away from above their destination. The time was getting closer and the crusaders now were arming themselves. AK-107 assault rifles, or the IMI TAR-21 for those which required a lighter weight rifle, underbarrel grenade launchers, laser sights, optical scopes, night sights, tactical flashlights, HEDP grenades and a few exotic weapons like the cylinder magazine loaded tactical flamethrower and the Steyr IWS anti-materiel rifles, being loaded with APFSDS ammunition, besides RPK-74 light machineguns, .357 Desert Eagle pistols and RKG-3EM anti-tank grenades and 30 centimeters long combat knives and even bayonets, besides proximity, remotely detonated and timed bombs, although most equipment would be airdropped to them. Noticing the strange reading, they decided to move towards towards the opposite direction from which the Hamilayan forces were heading, another potential diversionary strike force.

Soon the spaceplane started to thrust back into atmosphere, inclining its nose for atmospheric re-entry while all carried ammunitions and weapons in their hands. The total was of 12 assault rifle magazines, 5 anti-materiel rifle magazines, 8 RPK magazines, 12 HEDP grenades and 5 anti-tank grenades for each crusader, besides a couple of miniature unmanned aerial vehicles for reconaissance, which hopefully would be sufficient for their mission. At a risky ten thousand meters altitude, the hatch opened and the soldiers jumped with their parachutes towards the wasteland while paradropped supplies also came down, with an electronic system to activate then at the right time according to its programming.

The place was truly desolate, lifeless beyond words... the horseman was a distant but present threat... because due to a rather lucky calculation mistake they ended seventy kilometers way from it, which remained keeping its attention towards the other side... but many for not much longer. Soon the total of 40 crusaders separated themselves, while one of the cargo drops, a large crate, had a 4x4 technical with a RPK mounted on its trunk, and on another crate, the nuclear warhead they had to detonate, packed inside a bulky and heavy backpack. The fireteam Katya belonged to, as the grenadier and leader, putted it above the sturdy 4x4, and one of them took the responsibility of driving the vehicle.

Another useful element was a very slick cart to allow them to carry the device on foot, if necessary. Driving with those thick anti-radiation clothing was a bit complicated for the untrained, something they were not. They now were, based on the 4x4, launching a single mini UAV to scout ahead at a very low altitude flight... however it would take about five hours to reach their destination because they should not go too far ahead from those who could not have transport. Other three fireteams took advantage of three other technicals to make a diversionary attack later, heading into an entirely different direction, and the remaining 24 men of the 6 fireteams remained on foot and were equipped with anti-materiel rifles manned by snipers rather than light machineguns to take out whatever could stand conventional ammunitions from a distance, following slowly the rest from behind... the Horseman of Death would not be defeated easily by such a daring force, but hopefully the Hamilayan presence would distract them.

OOC: Welcome to the losing side. I don't see how you "fast-forwarded" it though. Now, I'll be posting soon, maybe in a few days when I have time. Thanks!

Fortunately, the World Harvester had refrained from attacking as of yet, and the second wave of Hamilayan aircraft was now in the air. Whilst still mostly made up of the ubiquitous Tu-160s, the magnitude of the situation had now fully set in, and flight crew had frantically scrambled to get as many aircraft in the air as possible, some of the newer B-12s, ancient Air National Guard Tu-22Ms and all manner of fighter planes as the available tanker support could handle. These were armed with whatever was at hand - preferably the tactical nukes, but also the likes of conventional cruise missiles, bunker-busters, gravity bombs and even napalm, for what little good it would do.

Meanwhile the hundreds of white shapes making up the first attack wave soared at twelve thousand metres, an impressive, perhaps beautiful sight to anyone who was watching. It was sad, really, and the fact that most of their crews had little idea of what they were getting into made it sadder. The philosophical might later interpret this as the final, futile last gasp of Hamilayan military power, as the venerable aircraft had epitomised the force projection of the FRHAF for three decades now, and it was unlikely that any would survive this.

Futile or not, though, thousands of nuclear missiles bearing down on the World Harvester would allow the Hamilayans to be satisfied they had done their best if nothing else. To this end, the bombers flew still at several hundred kilometers off the coast of Perimeter Defense, whilst their crews finished their final pre-combat checks. Every shot would count, or so the military planners thought, so if the bombers were downed, they were under directives to simply fire try and off all their missiles in the general direction of the target. They were nuclear-tipped after all, and it wouldn't do to let them go to waste.

"This is zero-zero-one alpha leader to all wings, check in."

"Beta wing checking in."

"This is Epsilon checking in, all aircraft responding."

"Affirmative, Lambda copies your transmission."

"Delta reporting in, we're all clear."

"Roger that, wing commanders, alpha leader reading you five-by-five. Approaching maximum engagement range in T minus one-zero minutes. You are clear to fire at your discretion. Good luck, everyone. Out."

OOC: What the...thousands of nukes? O_o

OOC: What the...thousands of nukes? O_o

OOC: Couple hundred bombers, twelve missiles each. Looks like most of them will be shot down anyway, but if you still think it's excessive, I'll retcon most of them to conventional cruise missiles?

((tagged for possible intervention tomorrow assuming that's ok.))

OOC: Never mind, was just marveling at the number of nuclear missiles being launched in rapid succession o_o Hehe.

From its position, the World Harvester watched, with more than a little annoyance; not as a human would know it, but still, an ‘emotion’ it was capable of understanding. Its retaliation was moments later, thousands of its own, distressingly high performance missiles taking to the high airs on their short burn rocket engines.

In the mean time, there was the little matter of a large number of nuclear weapons headed its way. It considered the emissions of those missiles for a moment, estimating them to be multi-kiloton fission weapons; it was a shame they weren’t hydrogen bombs, it considered, there was a most impressive and effective trick to be done to those, if you had the inclination.

It activated its next perimeter of defences, automated vehicles equipped to counter the threat of missiles, their radiation weapons being charged for single shots by the burst-combustion engines that the harvester had built onto their backs, covering most of them in heavy equipment.

The pivoting, wide-angle ray guns operated by remote control from the World Harvester, on simple radio, a weakness that would doubtless be found soon enough, was the only armament of each of the vehicles, and their cameras pointed at the distant formation, beyond their resolution to check, but useful as guidance anyway.

The vehicles moved out of cover a little way, in each case, and activated their engines, injecting air and quickly burning kilograms of petrol at once, charging capacitors the size of dustbins, and sending that charge down wires the width of grown men’s arms, into solid iron wrapped in copper coils, surrounded by glass.

Beams of invisible death shot forwards, as did visible beams, guided by hastily cobbled together ionising laser guidance beams. Some destroyed missiles, and some simply damaged them and letting them fall from the sky.

At the same time, projectiles were cast up, hordes of crudely fashioned flechettes in the best cases and in the worst, refuse made of ferric metals. Some flew straight and true, striking with the force of a point black shot from a battle tank – or something larger - into the white surfaces of the aircraft.

The World Harvester devoted all its attentions to the incoming aircraft, and did not notice a small orbital landing craft not terribly far from it, instead, it found itself forced to activate its own weapons, denuding a few missiles of their casings and letting them topple from the air, warheads and inner components falling on flaming columns of escaping fuel, or entire missiles simply disappearing.

Nonetheless, none of the initial wave of missiles struck the ancient machine; it would take a less direct approach to overcome such a vessel.

OOC: Thousands of nukes? Not a terrible problem. Though I wonder what kind of losses you guys are willing to take in return; I’m quite happy not to retaliate at all, beyond the PD theatre, and I doubt anyone else wants to be actually conquered by an evil space edifice, even if it’s an alternate-timeline type thing…

Also, we may need an OOC thread…

OOC: Not really. I feel that the overriding theme here would thus be BOW DOWN BEFORE THE NECRONS so an OOC thread to discuss what will happen might not be that necessary.

"This is Blackfeather," came the voice. "We're coming in high." The heavily modified An-225 Mriya "Dreamer Gunship" was flying in the night sky at 45,000 feet, high above its rated service ceiling of 33,000 feet, but was descending very rapidly towards the position of the World Harvester. Through the clouds, points and streaks of light could be seen coming and going rapidly, transient jewels of light tracing their way from the ground. On occasion, a dull sheet of light would illuminate the clouds, symbolizing a lot of lives lost, with very special thanks to the monolithic structure unleashing waves of destruction upon its losing enemies.

The Dreamer Gunship bristled with guns, including an impressive 120mm cannon that was significantly larger than the main weapon of the AC-130. Perhaps its most impressive armament, however was its awesome 40cm recoilless battleship gun, a 130-ton monstrosity that represented a large portion of this craft's improved 300-ton payload. While there was a counteracting force on the rear end of the barrel, the recoil was never fully compensated for; early tests of this craft displayed recoil levels enough to ruin the plane's flight path when being fired at low speeds.

"Blackfeather" was Dreamer 12, notable for her matte black paint scheme and her service in the Mediumtopian War. She was famous for singlehandedly fending off a blitzkrieg-type pre-emptive tank strike by Bigtopian reinforcements along the northern coastline of PD, and is credited overall with 210 armor kills and about 1,200 personnel kills. Now, under the command of Flt. Cpt. Ophias Fleming, she was set on her most important mission yet - the attack against the alien craft with something that just may work.

"Blackfeather to Fortitude Base, we're within range now of the target. Preparing main cannon and the special ordinance."

"Blackfeather, this is Fortitude Base, you are cleared to fire when ready. Godspeed to all of you."

Several days before the World Harvester came to life, the 4JCAT survey team discovered very large pieces of its living metal armored shell. These were trucked off to the main archaeological center for analysis. Following its awakening, the material was sent straight to Cyvils for testing, so as to find a way to actually damage the thing. Well, the results were unpleasant, as most weapons outside of experimental and unusable railguns, and laboratory bombardment with radiation and energy were the only things that showed even the most minor of damage to the regenerative matrix of the metal.

However, the regenerative pattern of the living metal was possible to redirect and shape, so that one could damage a particular sheet of it, and then apply pressure and energy to specific points so that it would reform itself in a particular fashion. This is what the "special ordinance" on Blackfeather was: Six 40cm shells of living metal, shaped into hollow armor-piercing rounds with steeply-tapering ogives and monomolecular tips. And inside the hollowed-out section was a special surprise...

"All right, operation start. This is CO, status report on all stations?"

"Navigation is go."

"FLIR cam is go, outputting display on control and avionics."

"Armory is ready, ordinance is loaded."

"Good job. Let's do this."

Navigation: "Video, do you have a mark on the target?"
FLIR cam: "Uh, negative, everything is way too hot down there."
Navigation: "Retune the thermals. The Hamilayans are cold compared to the heat output on this thing."
FLIR cam: "Roger that, navigation. Retuning...I see it. Adjusting elevation...uh, Navigation, we need twelve degrees down to access the target."
Navigation: "Copy, video, increasing bank to the left.
FLIR cam: "Okay...there, I have it in my sights. Armory, status on ordinance?"
Armory: "40cm special ordinance loaded. Fire on your command."
FLIR cam: "CO, target is marked."
Commanding Officer: "Fire."
FLIR cam: "Armory, fire main cannon."
Armory: "Ordinance out!"
Navigation: "Jesus Christ, compensating for recoil. I thought you called this thing a recoilless gun!"
Armory: "Not all of the recoil gets canceled out. Damn, that rocked the plane bad."
CO: "Zoom in on target, video, I want to confirm the shot."

The 40cm cannon round zipped away from the barrel of the gunship, and sped down towards one side of the World Harvester's armor. The "special surprise" contained within the round was a 14 kiloton nuclear warhead, normally used for nuclear artillery shells of much smaller diameters than 400 millimeters. If the shell pierced the World Harvester armor, as was the supreme hope of Perimeter Defense military strategists, the warhead would then detonate within the Harvester itself. If not, then there would be five more opportunities to test the shells, assuming that Blackfeather wasn't shot down - and she probably would be, long before those five shots are allowed, but her crew knew the risks.

The shell was only seconds away from reaching the armor...

It was no coincidence that all of them were wearing slightly uncomfortable NBC suits, and it was everything that gave them a chance when those foolish foreigners sent a nuclear arsenal towards that distant monument of death. They quickly did everything they could, ducking and taking cover behind nearby, lifeless rocks awaiting for the nuclear explosion. However it apparently never came, and soon Sister Katya Romanov gestured for them to get up, checking the environment around them for any hostiles nearby, which did not happen to come. She hopped into the 4x4 they had while they continued on their way, taking advantage of terrain to their best, avoiding moving through too flat or easily spotted regions according to the recon data of the terrain they acquired by using their unmanned aerial vehicle.

It would be a very long, mentally unsettling travel through all those wastes, during which all of them remained silent, alert and concentrated. For they could not go much farther ahead from the other fireteams behind them who were giving them cover, and perhaps the anti materiel rifles would be the only thing capable of defeating whatever they would encounter ahead... hours have passed, and yet another diversionary attack came against it, just in time, Katya believed, to avoid them from being detected. She thanked God for such providence in her thoughts, and continued guiding her brothers through that long, arduous path. That was 2 hours ago... they still had some 3 hours of travel to arrive at their final destination, with the fusion warhead safely kept with Sister Katya.

-----------------

Three 4x4 armed with machineguns and crewed each by 4 man continued to move in an irregular, spread out formation, faster than the rest of the expeditionary special forces and far away from them. They were cautiously taking advantage of the terrain features as well, passing behind ravines, rocks, elevations and slopes to drastically reduce their chances of being spotted while they were attempting to, at more or less the same quantity of time, five hours, reach one of many opposite directions to those most of them were heading to, as a form of making a diversionary attack to give their risky operation a chance of success. They knew somehow that such would be their last mission, but they were not afraid, and ready to sacrifice their lives as martyrs, in their final struggle against what they believed to be one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

----------------

The Inkvizitor was at a deep moment of prayer, asking for the Lord he had so devotion to, to grant them a quick, painless passage to the afterlife, for he knew in heart their mission, regardless of its main goal being successful or not, would be their last, and he hoped that it would not be in vain the sacrifice of some among the best in skills and morality Prazinia had to offer.

The Hamilayan Tu-160s were beginning to suffer from the first line of the harvester's bird-interceptors, initially assuming some ridiculously bad luck but deciding the swarms of things destroying engines were another component of this monstrosity's arsenal. Its missiles were also spotted, and preparations were made to deploy countermeasures.

A chorus of acknowledgements signaled that the Kh-15s were off from their rotary launchers. These were mixed with the frantic distress calls from the bombers already gliding gracefully towards the water, but the crews remained calm. The huge number of high-speed missiles approaching would shred the bomber formation, but losses were so far low. As the first-strike force of Hamilay, all the crews were veterans, and had taken their national motto to heart. The missiles might kill them all, but massed missile fire was a perfectly common tactic of modern, human militaries, which made all the difference.

Then two things happened. The first of the World Harvester's kinetic projectiles struck one of the aircraft, which exploded without warning, the burning wreckage plummeting down. More chunks of metal began to strike the bombers. Next, the crews began to notice the tracks of their own missiles disappear off displays. Not unexpected, of course, that the thing would have some form of missile defense, but the blips began to disappear faster. And faster. Crews watched in horror as the green blinking dots winked off their radar screens. Some hoped their sensors were being jammed, but the rest of the bomber formation and the incoming enemy missiles remained steadily lit up, and there were no flashes of light, no distant shockwaves which accompanied nuclear detonations.

This was too much. Now taken heavy losses, the order was given to fall back, and the bombers who had them remaining attempted to fire what nukes were left, and all swung around in the other direction. All were ready to die for their nation, but not for nothing. The enemy missiles made contact. The formation, depleted by a third from the World Harvester's other methods of defence, disintegrated in a matter of seconds. Some of the Blackjacks managed to dodge the missiles with surprising agility, but for every one avoided another dozen homed in on a bomber and blew it out of the sky.

By some divine providence, beating incredible odds, three bombers of the 4th, 6th, 11th and 20th Wings managed to escape the storm of guns and missiles, of two hundred and forty-five which took off that day. One, in a bitter twist of fate, was to crash off the Hamilayan coast, its engines finally giving out. Meanwhile, dozens of pilots and crew floated in the waters of Perimeter Defense, but they were as good as dead. They knew no rescue from either Hamilay or Perimeter Defense was likely, the former not risking any vessels in the area and the latter having the harvester sitting on its nearest stretch of blasted coastline, having more important things to worry about than downed pilots anyway.

Whilst it was debated in Sayenna bunkers, the decision was made to call off the second wave of aircraft, sparing them from the fate of their comrades. If even one nuclear missile had succeeded in striking the World Harvester, they would probably not have been so lucky. With the air assault an abject failure, there was nothing else left for Hamilay, save the final option. ICBMs were raised to firing positions in hundreds of silos across the Federal Republic, thousands more strategic-level warheads prepared for launch, awaiting the signal. The military held its breath.

The World Harvester was surprised and pleased by its success. It barely had to engage its own weapons at all; and even for such an ageless machine, success bread confidence, sometimes unwarranted. And with faster thought came faster relaxation, and the Harvester barely noticed the local ship until it was firing.

Yet its thoughts were still swift, and when the shell impacted its surface, it pierced exactly as planned.

As did the next, and the one after it, and the one after that.

Then the malice of the World Harvester revealed itself. The materials from which it was made were far beyond human comprehension, and although the scientists thought they had deciphered it – and indeed, they had learnt the most simple of its tricks, the Harvester knew its own.

As the last shell was loaded into its tube, the material twisted, breaking and crushing, just so, using a prodigious amount of energy, but breaking and compressing; forcing the fissile materials in the shell to form a critical mass. Detonating the bomb…


And the shells within it? If they detonated, there was no sign, the Harvester likely having manipulated them in the same way.


Meanwhile, it continued to be oblivious to the approach of the crusaders; diverting its energies into... something else.

OOC: Sorry about the quality. Not much time for posting today.

"Fifth shot out, confirming target hit. No detonation. CO?"

Blackfeather's CO replied, "Last shot," as he thought about how nothing was working, yet again. The Armory team was loading the last shot in when the radio flared up with a voice that was loud enough to distort the sound:

"Sir! Ordinance is changing shape! It's compressing itself!" These words brought into play one of the last great fears of the scientific team who analyzed the metallic fragments. They had long suspected that the so-called "necrodermis" was possible to control from a distance by its owner, but were hoping that the shells would be fired off before the mechanism for such remote control would be activated. Now, however...

"We're getting off this trap," the CO shouted over Blackfeather's comm system. "Navigation, put us on a path away from the target, towards the Hamilayan attack force. Armory, dump that shell in-" He was cut off by a loud explosion. It wasn't more than a few microseconds, really.

The sky was illuminated by a huge explosion, devastating in force and deafening in sound. The clouds parted from the shockwave and turned orange and yellow as fragments of a giant plane were scattered across the landscape.

Many miles away, at Fortitude Base, voices sighed and faces were stony, as final reports confirmed the destruction of Dreamer 12.

OCC: Any room for one more ?

OOC: Be my guest. Take note that all your victories shall be momentary, all glory fleeting, and all of us are going to lose anyway ;)

OAC: Please, let me join in too ;)



As the fate of the entire world seemed to be sealed, a small group of men and women sat gathered in an Underground Mountain Bunker in the nation of Karsloon, silently watching the unbeliavable onslaught and the incredible loss in human lives.

Their hearts were filled with both the fear of total annihilation and the need to do something... if anything could be done at all.

The prime minister Göran Persson was lost in deep thoughts, pondering the situation and trying to make any sense out of the chaos that was raging.

Just a few hours ago, he had enjoyed a nice family dinner with his wife and daughter.
Suddenly, the sound of helicopter blades had surrounded the house, and seconds later the front door of his villa had been brutally kicked in,
followed by a group of special ops personnel securing the perimeter.

When the area was finally declared as secured, the commanding officer of the squad walked up to the prime minister and calmly informed him of the situation.

International events had begun to transpire which could threaten the nation's survival.
Due to this, the prime minister and his family had to be transported to a secure command center.

Now, a few hours later, the prime minister had finally begun to realise the width of it all.

Reading the reports, he was confused and sceptical at first.
Stunned in disbelief, he watched the same news feeds over and over again.
Soon, they were followed by reports of human military responses... Responses which were failing.

Humanity was losing the battle, despite being united against a common enemy for the first time in a long time.
He finally sighed and came back to reality, but everyone else seemed to be lost in their thoughts.

Melissa Clarke, the defence minister of Karsloon was the first to break the silence, being unable to keep her emotions restrained any longer.

This enemy is a threat, a threat greater to our survival than any before it.
It is a catastrophe and a foe of incredible strength.

Right now brave men and women are fighting this thing with all they got.
Their homes are the battlefield, and their nations are crumbling.
But they still fight, to protect humanity.

I usually don't say this, but we are all a part of the same big family.
We have an obligation to help them, and the situation is getting further out of control for every second we waste on talking and debating.

This THING do not give a damn about any one nation, and neither should we. This is not the time for talk, this is the time for action.

As the entire world is threatened, we must not hesitate.
This is the time to introduce the world to the secret prototype orbital weapons platform codenamed Thor's Hammer.

Thor's hammer? What is THAT?, the prime minister asked.

Our nations most advanced Electromagnetic Weapon System,Melissa Clarke replied.

Could you please translate that?, the prime minister asked, now seemingly annoyed.

*sigh*... It is a weapon we developed using the tax payers money.
It orbits Karsloon and is capable of intercepting anything that comes into the vicinity of our airspace.

At least in theory, but i haven't been tested yet.
It would primarily be used to generate a powerful Electro Magnetic Pulse in the event of a massive missile attack on Karsloon.

The EMP blast would hopefully be enough to disable the majority of the attack force, thus minimizing the damage we may suffer due to any successful missile strikes.

We have not been able to test the system yet, but we believe that it will work. One of our technicians came up with the splendid idea of using this EMP against the enemy that we are now facing.

The human forces are encountering heavy resistance in the form of thousands of robotic small craft.

If we can distract the enemy's air defense, we might be able to use the satellite's steering rockets to accelerate it down through the atmosphere, effectively making it fall at a very high speed.

At the correct height above the enemy forces, we detonate the EMP and *boom*, the enemy's air defence get's shut down.

This would indeed be a suicide mission, in order for the satellite to reach the detonation altitude we would have to distract the enemy for at least 15 minutes.

If the satellite is discovered by the enemy before it detonates, our efforts will have been in vain.

Judging from the enemy's battle capacity, our losses are estimated to be somewhere at around 800 lives per minute.

That means that our airforce may not last through the entire ordeal.
But we have to try anyway.

If we succeed it will allow the human forces to attack the enemy.
Our sacrifice may help turn the tide of this grim battle.

With the permission of the prime minister, I would like to put this plan into action as soon as possible.

As the defence minister finished her speech, everyone in the room started to feel something they all had lost hours ago... hope.

I agree with you, we can't stay passive and let this crisis devour us.
Do whatever it takes to succeed, initiate the attack as soon as possible!, the prime minister said, with a fire finally awakened in his eyes.


Three hours later, the entire Karsloonian airforce including 80 % of the reservist brigades stood ready for takeoff, many of them saddling up for their last mission ever.
Then the final go-code was given...

The state of the current world was dismal. With this new 'alien race' so to say roaming around the world exterminating all human life. There was a call. The call was war.


The Emmerican secret services could not fully deploy there forces so the LMN special forces would be deployed, conducting raids which there defense would be speed with the offense being the blurring strike to the enemy. They wouldn't win but by god they would try and buy some time.

* OCC:Theres my deployment post, still tired so if its not sufficient i'll post a real introduction tomorrow*.

OOC: I don't have much else to do apart from launching ICBMs, which I'll refrain from doing for now as a detonation would probably kill everyone else trying to attack. :p I'll wait and see what happens for now, but I'd be happy to have my nation attacked if Ctan so wishes.

OOC: What's your attitude towards collaboration with humans, especially ones that might want some kind of posthuman reward for their betrayal of mankind? Our culture would soak that right up...not to mention it provides a nice entry in to our quite vile FT transhuman civilization.

The World Harvester now calculated an 82±4% chance of destruction.

It ran another simulation.

99±1% chance of ultimate success.

At that moment, its peripheral units went offline. If it had the capacity for consternation, it would be puzzled. Instead, it sent a few plaintive pings at the destroyed vehicle units, and then determined that their weak transistor systems had been overloaded by an electromagnetic pulse; the infantry scale units were confused, but because they used reclaimed organic pathways, they were not destroyed by the electromagnetic pulse.

Its chances of destruction had spiked drastically. It turned its fabrication units to another task, and began running its teleporters at low power, aiming for under the peaks of mountains, where its last sensor pulse had revealed the best presence of iron ore.

They might soon defeat it by some means, and with it, its best chance of bringing forth other necron assets within the year, but its intellect could still survive quite handily. It would be troublesome, but effective. It was launching a type of device known to humans as ‘Von Neumann machines’ each one, about the size of a fist, would consume the local resources, to fuel itself and build another of its kind. Then they would double their numbers, again and again. In time, it would be able to rebuild itself, or else consume the entire world these creatures lived on to make materiel against them. Under the mountains, they would work without ceasing.

It turned its mind back to the defence of itself; ordering its cybernetic infantry to retreat and attempt to repair or manually control its vehicle units.


OOC: I think it’s time for Prazinia to step up to the plate. In case you’re wondering, it looks quite a bit like this: Picture 1 (http://www.sunsetrpg.com/images/NecronUltralithA.jpg) Picture 2 (http://www.sunsetrpg.com/images/NecronUltralithB.jpg) Picture 3 (http://www.sunsetrpg.com/images/NecronUltralithC.jpg) Though that version, is obviously, fully powered.

Vetalia: Well, it’d be delighted. But I feel it only fair to point out that the only likely end of this story involves (after all kinds of nasty occupation) the full spacedy FT ness showing up when the World Harvester manages to contact it, and setting things right, (To a broad definition of right) which is part of why this is basically some funky separate continuity; there’s no real way out of the situation without permanently and radically changing the local cultures. But other than that, it would be quite delighted to have stooges, though anything they got from its great knowledge would likely have some kind of security mechanism built in…

OAC: :rolleyes: Submitting another part of chaos :rolleyes:


"GOD DAMN IT PEOPLE, JUST HOLD OUT FOR ONE MORE MINU..OH SHIIIIT!!! *cut off by static*"
Then, just silence on the radio.

A silence that seemed to last forever... the surreal slowdown of our perception of time... the loss of another childhood friend.. a tear was forming in the corner of Sergeant Ekbergs eye.

Fractions of a second later, his grief was blown away simultaneously with the cockpit of the C-130 Hercules and half of their pilot. BANG!
A chainreactive rush of adrenaline was immediately set loose in his body, making his muscles respond with trained reflexes.

He shouted the order "JUMP" and pulled the release switch for his squad's seatbelt's with one hand, and the release switch of the cargo bay door with the other.

As a consequence of this, the soldiers were plunged straight out into the extremely turbulent air streams around the deformed plane, some of them crashing into the plane chassis on the way out.

As Ekberg got out of the plane in the same way as his squad, miraculously without sustaining any physical injuries, his adrenaline burst started to wear off.

In the air, his rational half of the brain started to try and comprehend the situation, analyzing every possible detail, etching horrible pictures into Ekbergs memory.

He saw airplanes being ripped apart and seconds later exploding in gigantic fireballs.
He saw projectiles from the ground coming at him, missing him by a few meters.

Some of the other soldiers were less lucky, and were torn to shreds by the enemy's AA.
Ekberg could do nothing to save them, he was completely powerless as he saw his own soldiers die.

He looked away from the horror, he looked down.
Suddenly he realised something. The ground was approaching fast, incredibly fast.

He had no choice but to pull his parachute while praying to higher powers for a safe landing, and seconds later the small number of soldiers who were still conscious followed his example.

They all knew that it was useless, that they probably would be hit as soon as their parachutes opened up.
They all started to prepare themselves mentally for meeting with their maker in a matter of seconds.

But suddenly, the enemy units stopped shooting, and instead they started to spark in a yellow-bluish light.
Then some of them started to explode in electrical bursts.

Stunned by awe, the squad had a hard time getting a grip on the situation and simply focused on managing a safe landing.

As Sergeant Ekbergs feet touched the ground, he took a deep breath for the first time in nearly two minutes, and almost fainted due to the different levels of oxygen at ground altitude.

Then he felt a feeling of joy, as he finally got himself together and realised that they had succeeded in their mission. The EMP had gone off, and it had saved their lives.

His mind then started to drift into seeing the dreadful pictures of soldiers getting killed in midair, but he used his willpower to ignore them and regain enough focus to avoid crying or panicking.

He had to focus, he had to rally the remaining soldiers of the squad.
Although the mission had been successful, the fighting wasn't over yet.
The battle was just beginning...

The World Harvester considered.

Some said that the intellect of machines was cold; this was untrue, if anything, it was hot, searing and quick. And now, that intellect was directed toward the task of further ensuring its survival; others had attacked it, and there seemed to be no limit to human foolishness in resisting it, so it would have to spread its risks out.

It sensed the one other tribal group (“nation”) it knew had attacked it, it believed they were called Hamilay, and activated its teleporter again, and then settled down in place to watch as it attempted to repair its existing defensive network.

Groups of humans were airlanding near it, doubtless they planned some kind of ground attack; in this respect, the World Harvester was confident that it could deal with them, for their smallarms were not powerful enough to be a serious threat to it. Even their armoured vehicles would have little effect.

It evaluated the possibility of expending its magnetic-weapon rounds to create a lethal effect, but there seemed to be no viable option there. It debated using some of its harvested fissile materials to create an irradiated gas cloud, but that would hardly have the desired effect against equipped soldiers; nor would the many lethal gasses it could assemble. It considered making a new generation of organic-expendable warriors, but even the fastest metabolism could not deliver the numbers it desired in the time allotted.

This meant that it could either assemble more effective weapons, or wait for them to near it. This, the World Harvester found, was a difficult choice, and it elected to see how the incoming enemies preformed against the first wave of its cannibalised flesh-and-machine warriors before moving against them. Its own forces were well armed, by local standards at least; there had been a well armed society in this region before the explosion…

OOC: Bump for glory. If this thing retains activity, I will start up an OOC thread.

The World Harvester waited as the sun went down, rose again, sank, rose again, and sank once more. Then, it was ready. In mines throughout the land, machines toiled in silence, causing cave ins to keep themselves secret, heading for abandoned areas first. Each one could make a copy of itself in an hour. The machines were small, only about the size of a man’s hand, but each incorporated six magnetic legs, a rigid shell contained a small computer with a module of memory and wireless communications, at first just between isolated deposits of the machines, but eventually, gathered together, they could assemble more power and generate better signals. Where they were found, in abandoned mines and warehouses, the machines would

In forty-eight hours, each machine could theoretically, like some kind of bacterial infection, reproduce forty eight times. Of course, scarcity of resources, failure of reproduction, security concerns, and even enemy action, cut into this number, reducing the efficiency by orders of thousands; these were not genuine necron technology; not the living metal that could efficiently consume almost anything but rather local materials; they had to find and fuse silicates to make optics and micro-transistor wafers, they had to use carbons to build first stage reactors that fired miniature-fusion reactors inside their casings, which consumed and fused the air. They needed iron, and copper, and tin, to make their casings. Carbon, sulphur and saltpetre were needed to operate their crude weapons.

Instead of the thousands of quintillions that there would have been, there were only a billionth of the numbers there could have been. Only ten trillion of the tiny creatures assembled.

“Only” when the mountains and plains burst open like so many anthills to disgorge the host of the World Devastator.

It watched with amusement and satisfaction as this happened, its agents moving slowly, at a pace humans would call ambling. Between nuclear devices, artillery, conventional explosive bombs, high temperature gelatin compounds, and every other device the locals were liable to have, as well as their population’s ownership of weapons (it approved, and expected them to make effective servants when… the most suitable of them was converted) it expected over ninety nine percent of its forces to be destroyed by the time the enemy had expended all their ammunition. But that would still leave billions. Then, perhaps, the humans would see sense and surrender to it…

Although each of the individual drones was weak – they only had one bullet each, some, none – they had a program they would follow; aiming to incapacitate humans with shots to the limbs (determining where to fire was a software problem, and the World Harvester could design such effortlessly) rather than kill; such bullets were very small. Where they found humans running out of ammunition, they would either immobilise them in that brutal manner, or preferably, force them to take cover somewhere, and stay there indefinitely. The Harvester did not wish to kill, it had more terrible intentions than mere death.

This thread... is dead... :(

"Your... Majesty." The voice, at first, was barely a whisper,and again the Lord High Inquisitor whispered "Your Majesty." Slowly, the Tomb of Erenthi melted away, and underneath, the body of a young man who had been in stasis for a long time appeared. A moment passed, where the Lord High Inquisitor stared in fear at the man. The man eventually said "You are the Lord High Inquisitor." The inquisitor nodded, not bothering to ask why someone who by all rights should be dead, and said "Your Majesty, your sons are in danger. Anemos needs your strength once more." The greatest High Lord of all, the lonely Lord, the great magician, stood once more, and said "I stand on the ground once more. Let us fight this scourge. I believe we have more... modern weapons now. But do not consider me ignorant. I have been watching. Mobilise War Fleets Gladius, Malleus, Rapier and Sabre. Put the Battle Fleets in supports, and order each ask Force to contain the threat until the War Fleets arrive. I want to know what this threat is, and looks like. Contact the leaders of the nations involved. Inform them that Anemos will fight with no mercy, will any others join them?

Yes...it is semi-dead...I'm sorry. I just ran out of ideas, just like that...