NationStates Jolt Archive

Proto-Sarmatia, Trailers

They came from the Deep.

They knew no hatred, but they would soon lay a waste to several worlds, and entire races would bleed before them. It would not matter that they felt no hatred, for does it matter to the flesh why the teeth rend it, or does the sheep fear the wolf less since it does not feel hatred towards it? The butcher may love the cows, but when the knife is in their, his love matters not.

They knew no fear. Soon they would be dying by the thousands and millions, impaling themselves on the bayonets and swords of the Chaos Space Marines, and yet push on, inexorable, upon the wide road, paves with the corpses of the fallen.

They knew no pain – and so they would accept it without stopping, and inflict it without pause, pushing on like a nightmare of claws, teeth, symbionts, jaws. They were a living horror from your childhood dreams, the creature under your bed and in the dark corner of your room – except that now the creatures were many, and they wore armor, and your mother would not come to turn on the lights, no matter how you cried in terror and despair as the many-limbed atrocity closed on you.

They knew only hunger. Hundreds of drone ships tore into realspace, the first harbringers of the doom that was expecting the Proto-Sarmatians. Dozens of cruisers and Leviathan hive ships come through next, and soon enough the Hive Fleet would be in the outer reaches of the system.

The hunger would soon be sated.

OOC: Just a note, this is closed to outside IC involvement. Anyone is welcome to comment ICly however.

They had come. Beasts from the Blackness.

In the skies of Sarmatia, principle world in the Traileric agricultural sector, thunder rolled. A storm was gathering on the horizon. In the distance, a siren wailed. Air raid. The Gatherers ceased their toil, spindly spider-like mechanical legs lowering the cockpits so that the farmers and the foremen could flee to their homes. Confused, sluggish activity reigned in the streets of the cities that were sporadically seeded across the flatlands of the prime continent. Was this a drill? No one new. What was to be done? Many just ignored it as a wiring problem. At least, at first.

That changed when the Fifth Legica stirred from dormancy.

In the skies above, a few "Campher" strike craft were always present, but a few minutes after the siren began, those onlookers who turned to the cloudy sky began to notice a few more. This increase in military activity was worrying. Then civil craft began the emergency grounding of their ships right in the crops!A din of the worried mobs in the streets and fields began to drown out the automated message to remain calm and return to their homes. By now, the trickle of Camphers had grown to a torrent, and grounded frigates could be seen and heard reaching escape velocity.

On the outskirts of cities, large blast doors in the ground slid aside. The pointed tips of warheads raising to a ready position. At this point, panic had driven the mobs to stampede to their homes, trampling those who were slow to move or unable to remain upright. The fields were soon abandoned, the streets empty, civil craft dotted the landscape and every available rooftop. In the skies above, ships of war darkened the distant binary stars, and churned the clouds with the fury of their engines.
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"How in the FUCK did all of THAT get past Legica Iotora??" Bellowed World-Holder Niesthenas.

"They didn't come from the core mighty lord. They came from beyond the Rim." answered a rather cowed subordinate.

"Then how did they slip by Ferraverta? God DAMMIT I don't CARE where they came from, all I know is I have..what..half of Tyrannos here?" Raged the rather pudgy ruler.

"My lord, Legica Rapax has declared that they are gathering at Peleponna and on their way, E.T.A, two rises..and that we must hold the line for the glory-"

"Hold the LINE? There are over..over six hundred and fifteen vessels tagged as capital class or above only a day sublight from my PLANET! We HAVE no faster than light inhibitors in this system! How the hell do I hold them for two days with HALF of Tyrannos?" The man raged around in a circle, flinging cutlery and ceramic eating implements this way and that.

"My Lord, surely others will come. I mean, it is but six-hundred vessels. The rest of Tyrannos will be here within a few hours, I'm sure, thats..lets see..carry the two..over a hundred capital class vessels."

The Holder looked so purple he may actually blow an important vein or artery. He raised a fist to the sky to say something blasphemous when a lesser communications officer burst into the Hall.

"Majesty! Majesty! It's Europa, and they've brought Configurations from Gennia Nikitis! The rest of Gennia is en route, along with some of Iotora!"

Shocked, the Holder slumped back to his chair. Murmuring to himself. At last, he spoke, "How many do they bring?"

"A few over..two hundred and fifty to three hundred capital vessels, thirty hiveships..Ah..about a hundred frigates of carious flavors..perhaps even a Quireme." The officer was reading figures off a stretchpad that bhad been tucked under his arm.

The Holder's head was in his hands. "Outnumbered by a foreign enemy that we know nothing about..Typical engagement for Europa.."

The words hung in the air as yet another sonic boom crackled through the sky.
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There, in the emptiness of space, a single thin line of ships, ninety or so in all. Together they faced the coming storm. In the distance, the first EM signatures of the coming horde were being picked up. There were woefully few super-capital vessels: A pair of Hippo-toxotai cruisers, a dozen or so destroyers..only one Hiveship. It was a pitiful sight to behold.

Aboard the third Trireme Destroyer, a young deckhand, newly assigned, sat trembling before his array. Six PD guns were his, and he just couldn't steady his hands. The dots in the prime cauldron were getting closer to that thin green line of friendlies.

"Nervous, boy? Sorry. You won't have enough time to ride the drug cocktail, you'll have to steady those guns on your own.", the voice came from behind him, a seasoned gunner, two hundred years in Tyrannos, half of them on this ship.

"I just..I don't fucking get it, how are we supposed to stop THAT?", the boy gestured to the swarm of red dots but an hour's flight from their battle line.

Laughter echoed through the small cabin, then the seasoned veteran spoke again, "You've got a lot to learn about tactics, son. Unfortunately, you'll have to learn them all on the Stairway to Olympus. Ha. Stop them..My young friend, we're just here to slow them down. Now buck up, you've got killin' to do."

A grim smile came across the boy's face, his hands steadied, and his PD turrets aligned with the others.

The first Tyranid ships approached rapidly. The vanguard fleet spread out, as if trying to envelop the enemy. The Tyranid cruisers were the centerpiece of the assault, giant, disturbing, pus-leaking monstrosities, as though a blotted cancerous growth on the body of reality itself. They stayed lightly back, allowing the light scout ships to deliver the first blow.

And they did. They skimmed past the enemy ships in attack passes, passing them time and time again to deliver a hail of spore-gun and kinetic cannon fire. The kinetic cannon delivered the usual metal rounds, but the spore cannon delivered explosive biological-based shells.

Of course the enemy would fire back. Of course ships would be lost.

And then the cruisers fired.

A salvo was released – not of shells or energy beams, but of creatures, each perhaps a hundred tons in size, speeding towards the enemy like living cruise missiles. Rapidly they began to claw, burrow, bite their way through the shields and – where shields were too weak – hulls of the Traileric ships.

As the enemy drew near, the heavier ships began to unleash their fury. Primarily, these were heavy kinetic slugs, composed of tungsten and exotic composites. These puncture weapons targeted the closest and largest enemy ships, firing until one was destroyed and then moving on.

Small, zippy vehicles flew near, and were met with a wall of explosive flak unleashed by the flak frigates, which had drawn into a defensive circle around the less easily defended ships. There were no Traileric strikecraft present with this fleet, those were reserved for later tactics.

Enemy fire fell upon Traileric shields as thick as rain, causing a constant rippling in the blue-green auras around the clustered vessels. The occupants were surprised at how little the enemy were throwing at them, considering the Traileric navy was accustomed to large kinetic slugs, waves of plasma, and the generic turbolaser. Light caliber fire was something they associated with strikecraft, not the behemoths floating before them. At the fringes of the clustered resistance, however, a few frigates had been cut off, gunships and long toms firing blindly into an overwhelming cloud of enemy signatures. Eventually, the light fire was more than the relatively weak frigate shields could handle, and perhaps ten minutes into the battle, those who had not clustered together near the Hiveship and the heavy craft were lost.

Still, those who had taken up a defensive sphere together held strong. Enemy fire could not be as concentrated as it was on those unfortunate souls who had not formed up in time, and thus the attrition on frigate shields was not nearly as severe. Furthermore the destroyers and cruisers were able to regenerate lost shielding in between volleys from the mammoth vehicles of destruction that seemed to be flinging living shells at them.

The kinetic slugs have their effect. A cruiser turns, as if a giant injured beast, blasting the cosmos with a last psychic cry – if one didn't know better, one would think that Tyranids can feel pain.

They can't.

The scout ships continued, pass oafter pass, even as dozens of them are completely vaporised by traileric fire.

And then the Tyranids change tactics.

Suddenly, all their fire is focused on a single Traileric ship, Tyranids firing salvo after salvo, spores, shells, and hullgrinders coming in a thick cloud of death – until it is destroyed. Then, another ship.

But that comes at a price, and, even as the Fleet keeps firing, another cruiser is torn apart. And another. And another. And another. And five more.

It's just that the Tyranids can afford this loss.

For hours the battle raged, at first neither side giving an inch. But the attrition was draining the Traileric fleet. Vessels that were key the the battle line, such as the flak and PD frigates, were running out of ammunition. More and more of this unidentified enemies smaller craft were slipping through to the heavily gunned (but poorly defended) destroyers and gunboats. It seemed that every one a gunner destroyed only invited ten more to take it's place.

The peoples of Proto-Sarmatia watched in hushed horror as their first line of defense first buckled, then fell apart. What had once been a confident battleline was now nothing but burning husks and shattered chassis.

Only the Hiveship, the core vessel a Traileric Configuration is built around, still lived. It had not yet fired a shot at the enemy, in fact, it had done nothing through the entire firefight but slowly turn on it's axis, compression field at it's maximum density. Now, the gaping maw of the primary hangar faced the nameless horde once more, the dark green hull bathed in the sickly orange glow of the nine dimensional shield between it and the enemy. Across it's surface, in letters the size of a football field, marked it's name. Today, that would become the name of martyr.

The crew of the vessel remained silent, this was no time for petty talk. The Speakers had given up on hailing these nameless vessels before them, and had focused on internal communication. At every launch bay, there sat not the nose of a Campher, but the slim, flat arrowhead shapes of hundreds of high-yield offensive ship-to-ship ballistic missiles. The launch catapults had been reconfigured to sling the things out of the Hiveships gravitational field so that their navigation and "skipper" software could function properly.

Deep in the bowels of the primary reactor, sappers were hard at work making the SAFD (sub-atomic force disruptor) ready for use. Once the primary reactor switched it's power relay from the compression field to the SAFD, it would be ready to fire in mere minutes. In the mean time, the thousands of men and women crewing the vessel waited in hushed anticipation for the order to drop shields and commence fire.

The Tyranid vanguard was decimated, and worse. Space around the surviving Traileric ship was littered with the remnants of the dead ship-beings, and still they came on. Even as the Sarmatians prepared to fire, subspace rippled again – and the main body of the Tyranid fleet came into view, prepared to complete the death blow.

Click

The switch was made, dormant circuits blazed to life, and that nauseating glow that protected the Hiveship simply melted away, exposing the vessel to direct fire. The ship's armor was thicker than it's conventionally shielded lesser vessels, but it would not hold out for long in this fashion.

"All friendly vessels clear firing vector."

Thus came the order, words to the dead. The AI that broadcasted it had no way of knowing this however, and thus obediently ran through it's program. The firing solution was across a wide swath of space directly in front of the Hiveship, intended to do max damage to the remaining Tyranid horde..

..And then, those battered few became nigh numberless, right before the Traileric vessel's one shot of fury.

The skin of the vessel appeared to glow from within, the glow gathering and compressing to one small groove at the front of the ship. Tyranid vessels were closing in, the firing vector of the SAFD a red blanket of overlapped enemy vessels. Already, shots were rebounding off of and stripping away the armor. Then, hell itself escaped from the Hiveship's skin, a sickly yellow torrent that splashed like a liquid over the nearest Tyranid vessels, before spilling into the heart of the newly arrived Tyranid horde. The Traileric flagship had only had time for one full shot, as it would take hours for the thing to fully recharge. Thus smaller bolts were already spilling from it's every focal point, each one barely powerful enough to eat away a few square meters of matter. It was the death throes of the Hiveship, she would not go quietly..She was, after all, a ship of Trailica.