NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: IC posts here only please, for questions, entry requests or additional information, please see my FT OOC Thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=554761).

“So what did you need Commander?” Captain Alexei Vyshinsky’s question was directed to his executive officer, Anna Akhmatova, as he entered the Redeemer’s command center through the open blast doors.

Turning to face him, Akhmatova responded to her Captain simply; an eyepiece clearly active over her right eye, “Sir, seems we missed something on this world’s moon. Check out gun camera three-three.”

She paused a moment as he stepped forward to pick up and don the extra eyepiece sitting on the command console before she continued, “I made some, inquiries, to the Indrii, it seems they were a little too focused on the inhabited world and overlooked running any detailed sweeps of the entire moon.”

He raised an eyebrow out of curiosity as he flipped the eyepiece down over his eye and tapped a few keys on the console, adjusting its display. His look of curiosity quickly turned to a frown as he saw what had been missed, “Just how unkind were these, ‘inquiries’?”

“Very unkind sir. Though scans with the extended arrays have proven of little use, the hull appears to be covered in heavy armour, giving us nothing more then a general shape, and even that’s not very telling; it’s obviously taken a lot of impact damage to its outer hull. It would also appear to be upside down if we’re interpreting this data correctly. To be fair for the Indrii though, it appears this moon is made of a very dense, but ultimately uninteresting material, thus it drew little interest. It does have a higher then average gravity rating as a result, along with a rather wide orbit around this world and a very slow rotation, as such it would seem that until now, this wreck was always facing away from us anyway.”

Vyshinsky sighed slightly in frustration as he looked upon a large metallic hulk half sticking out of the moon’s surface, the exact design of the vessel was difficult to discern given obvious damage to its outer hull. A kilometer long impact trail denoted the fact that the craft had struck the moon at high velocity and angle, imbedding itself into the surface and hiding nearly half it’s total size.

“How long do they think its been there?”

“Not long sir, if they’re right, it struck the surface less then a week before we arrived in system.”

He snapped his head over to look at her in surprise, but he didn’t say anything; she continued, “While we can distinguish it from the material making up the surface of this moon, they can’t be sure of its actual size or original shape given the damage it’s taken, still, they estimate it may have been as much as nine hundred meters long and six hundred meters at its widest point.”

“That’s a big sucker. Any indication of why it’s partially buried in a moon?”

“None that we can be sure of from a simple visual scan; if it took weapons fire, its obscured by the impact damage of the moon itself, but from the sections of this craft we can see, there doesn’t seem to be any signs of battle. Do note that fairly large opening near where the visible section of the ship appears to get slimmer, we think that was meant to be a hangar.”

“Interesting … I presume Major Alekseev has been informed.”

“He has, and he’s putting together a force to go see what they can find.”

-----

“Well this is pleasant.”

Despite the matter of fact tone from Sasha Davydova, Svetlana Kubasova chuckled at the sarcastic undertone she recognized in her friend’s voice.

Once again the reconnaissance section found them selves in a decidedly alien environment that wasn’t truly all that different from one they were familiar with, and it set off warning bells to be cautious as world below had. The hangar they found themselves in wasn’t particularly noteworthy; that was to say it was reasonably large, but nothing contained within was in good condition, their shapes all but gone in the piles of ruble from their violent collisions with the walls of the hangar, leaving much to the imagination.

With her LRD in hand, Svetlana slowly looked about her, while some form a power was clearly still running through the ship; as evidenced by a handful of active lights, artificial gravity was gone, and they were unmistakably standing on what was meant to be the ceiling, which seemed to lay at roughly a ten degree angle; fortunately the moon had a strong natural pull; if still less then they were used to, allowing them to move in a somewhat normal fashion.

Nearby, two Assault Droids thumped along on patrol near their Beta type shuttle; had there been air in the hangar, she might have heard them, nor did it seem to carry through the ‘floor’ for her to feel in her feet. A single platoon had been brought down, allowing for two of the regular sections; which had set up a perimeter, and their two reconnaissance sections, which were finishing up sweeping the area for openings of any kind.

The only potential opening they could access was fortunately near a median level, accessible by a gangway that lined one side of the hangar’s wall, leading to a somewhat different experience; taking the stairs from the opposite side they were intended for. While it featured a mid sized, closed and armoured door, it had all the appearances of an airlock as far as they could tell from looking at it.

Through her helmet’s communication’s system, Svetlana could hear the engineer from Redeemer who had been sent with them, addressing their Lieutenant. Looking over towards the two, she could see him gesturing towards the hangar opening above them, “I figure there must have been an atmospheric shield active up there at some point, as I don’t see anything that indicated solid doors, so any poor bastards in here when that failed was likely blown out with whatever atmosphere may have still been in here at the time.”

Much like Akhmatova had been on the world below during her meeting with Captain Lingun, the engineer was clad lightly in the KINI uniform and armour, only a sidearm on him, which still gave him the benefits of its closed system and independent air supply. The tone in their Lieutenant’s voice clearly indicated it was not a death he would have liked to experience, “Fun. Right then, do you think you can get that airlock door open over there.”

“No guarantees, but I’ll take a look at it, there’s obviously some power in this ship, so maybe the doors still work.”

Minutes later, Svetlana and her section were standing on what was supposed to be the underside of a gangway as the engineer examined the panel next to the door, all the while overlooked by their Lieutenant. Svetlana herself was amused slightly by their location, looking down at the safety rails on the opposite side and looking ‘up’ out of the bottom of the ship towards space; the limited angle didn’t allow her to see the world the moon orbited.

As the moments drew on and they continued to wait, Lev’s voice came through clearly, “So, how many clichés do you think we have right now? I count at least three; derelict spacecraft with no sign of life, low light levels and no one come to claim it, am I missing any?”

Their section Sergeant grunted in amusement, “Oh probably Lev, just be glad we don’t need to rely on flashlights to see, otherwise that would be four.”

As Svetlana chuckled, their Lieutenant addressed the engineer, “What’s the hold up?”

Without taking his eyes off the panel, he replied lightly, “This is an alien control panel Lieutenant, for all I know this button here will open the door, this one will close it, and this one here will overload the main reactors and blow us all to hell.”

Though she couldn’t actually see his face, a smirk came to Svetlana’s as she saw her Lieutenant simply look at the back of the engineer’s head in silence for a moment before he replied, “It’s a bloody airlock control panel, I doubt it’s that complicated, common sense dictates it would open or close the bloody door.”

The engineer glanced back towards the Lieutenant, “Sir, we’re in an alien spacecraft that’s about the same size of the Redeemer that’s also upside down and half buried in a moon for no apparent reason, what about that makes sense to you? Do you really blame me for being a little overly cautious here? Besides, if there’s air on the other side of this, do you really want me to just open this door and potentially on the opposite end of an explosive decompression?”

The Lieutenant grumbled, “Point taken, but I’d rather not stand out here all day please.”

Looking back at the door, the engineer muttered, “Aw hell with it,” and tapped the upper key, the sudden movement caused them all to hold a breath before the realization struck that nothing happened beyond a small red light that blinked on for a moment, “… Well that was anti-climatic.”

Svetlana suppressed a laugh as she heard the Lieutenant sound like he let loose a growl while the engineer tried the next button down, which responded with a green light, though still nothing happened. Obviously a little frustrated the engineer grumbled to himself, unsure what to do, he took out his frustration by striking the third button, which promptly lit up green and opened the door.

Despite the surprise, Svetlana’s weapon, and those of her section, snapped up and took aim at the sudden opening. Peering in, the engineer exclaimed, “Hah! I am the king of the intergalactic doormen, bow before me,” after a moment of silence where he perceived the odd looks as the Russkyan joke passed over their heads, he spoke again with a slight gesture of his hand, amusement still evident in his voice, “It’s just an empty airlock. I think I understand how this works now,” to confirm his theory he tapped the third key again and the door closed.

Ignoring the outburst, their Lieutenant spoke up, “Good, a little progress, alright gentlemen, up here on the double.”

Five minutes later, thirty Kilrany infantrymen had transited through the airlock in groups of six; the size of their fire teams, and into the ship’s corridors, leaving both regular sections on guard duty; one near the shuttle while the second broke into their fire teams and stood guard on either side of the airlock. Inside they found breathable air; allowing them to conserve their limited independent supply, and that the corridor went straight in for nearly ten meters before breaking in a T-junction; where one of the regular fire teams would take up station, it was also here that the two reconnaissance sections went their separate ways, beginning a careful search of the seemingly abandoned starship.

As Svetlana’s section moved off cautiously on their own to the right, they were split slightly into two columns, each six-man fire team moving at a walking pace along either side of the wide corridors; as they had ample enough room for five to walk abreast. Walking slack for her fire team, she was in a good position to see the dimly and sporadically lit passageways through the clarity given to her by her helmet’s low light display from behind Lev, who was on point.

It was from this position in their particular column that allowed her to be one of the first to see the shape lying on the ceiling turned floor ahead of them as they came around a bend in the corridor. They approached cautiously, and as the sight of the corpse became clear, they were none too happy with what they saw.

Lev put their thoughts into words, “Oh now that’s a shitty way to go … cue the dramatic and creepy music … what, you were all thinking it.”

Their gaze had indeed shifted to him as he spoke; the sight of the shredded and nearly torn in half body was an unpleasant one. Despite the obvious and thorough damage done to the upper body, the head was still intact, if sitting at an odd angle, from this they noted that he looked human and had been dead for some time. They also noted that he had been wearing a simple uniform, but they could not tell what colour it had been due to the damage done to the body, and the dried blood that covered him. With nothing they could do for him, their section Sergeant reported the discovery before moving on through the corridors once more, a sense of unease continuing to build on them in the face of the unknown.

A minute later, as they continued their advance towards another T-junction some forty meters ahead of them, they began to notice a resinous material built up upon the wall, which got slightly thicker as they moved forward. This latest discovery heightened their unease even more then the corpse, and from behind her, Svetlana heard Pavil speak up through their internal communication set, “Sergeant, I hate to state the obvious, but something is seriously screwed up here.”

“No shit Pavil, any other pearls of wisdom?”

Despite his words, there had been no ire in the Sergeant’s voice, “Oh yeah, don't rely on chance, immortality is a rose with a thousand thorns, and the eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend, but nothing that really relates to our current situation.”

Whatever their Sergeant’s response may have been, it was cut off when they were nearly twenty-five meters from the junction by Lev when something caught his gaze, “Ping front!”

Instantly coming to a halt, Svetlana could see just as easily what Lev had, and she was at a loss for words at the sight before them. Standing around their own average height, was a large, darkly coloured creature, and while the body was roughly human in shape in some places, it was the massively elongated and smooth head with freakish looking jaw that drew their gaze, leading them to initially miss the tail.

It appeared to see them at the same time and it turned its head towards them, Lev quickly added, “If that thing’s friendly then I’m a God damned Indrii.”

The creature suddenly let out a loud hiss and darted towards them just as Svetlana heard their Sergeant call out, “Fuck him up!”

As Svetlana took a step out from the wall and went down on one knee, she brought her LRD up into her shoulder, slipping her finger off the trigger guard. She didn’t have the opportunity to fire however as both Lev and the point for the other fire team were each already unleashing a burst of fire from their weapons. The bolts of energy impacted the creature’s upper body and head before it had even taken three steps, and it let out a short, shrill scream as it dropped to ground, their weapons having an identical affect on it as they would have had on themselves.

They didn’t have time to notice that some of the blood from the creature seemed to scorch the ceiling plating slightly; but do little else, as their Lieutenant came in over their communications a second later, “We have multiple hostile alien contacts, fall back to the hangar!”

Promptly, Svetlana heard her Sergeant reply, “Copy that LT, we’ve had our own run in and are pulling back now,” shifting back to section level he continued, “Withdraw by fire team, Lev go!”

As the second team spread out slightly on the left side to all three to fire forward, Svetlana was already spinning around and kicking upwards into a jog back the way they came. Her fire team kept to the right and moved for five seconds before they halted and spun about, giving her just enough time to see their Sergeant toss a fragmentation grenade underhanded down the corridor towards the junction, followed a moment later by Lev calling out, “In!”

With the fact that they were now spread out three deep and covering both directions voiced by Lev so simply, the second fire team spun about and ran back towards them. Stacking back up into a column as they moved, they kept to the left of the corridor, allowing a clean firing lane for the first fire team to cover their movement.

As the second fire team was passing by the first on their left, the grenade exploded, sending its shrapnel in all directions at the junction, quickly followed by a number of shrill screeches; indicating some unseen loses. A second later several more creatures became visible as they came racing into the corridor regardless of the earlier detonation, some moving along the wall, apparently able to cling to the resinous substance.

Lev fired a controlled burst that struck the head of one moving towards them along the wall while Svetlana, weapon solidly in her shoulder, squeezed off a three-second long burst from her support weapon. At three times the rate of fire compared to the carbines, the directed energy pulses coming from her LRD looked almost like a continuous beam as she swept it slowly from left to right, cutting through two of the creatures and a third behind the first two.

Two seconds later she heard the point man for the second fire team call out, “In!” and mirroring the scene only ten seconds prior; it was her own fire team’s turn to fall back while the second covered their movement. This process repeated itself a dozen more times with several more contacts before they caught sight of the hangar junction where the regular infantry fire team had taken up defensive stances until both reconnaissance sections reached them.

Two more times and they were close enough to let the regular unit cover their final withdraw, allowing both fire teams to cut to their right, sprinting past the regulars and down the corridor towards the airlock. Only twelve seconds behind them came their Lieutenant and his own section past the regular unit, by which time Svetlana’s fire team had set up a firing line along the right side of the corridor three men wide to allow the remaining forces to pull back past them on their left, and still cover the approach. In the front line and kneeling, Svetlana found herself between Lev and Pavil, while the remainder of their fire team, which included Sasha, formed a standing second line right behind them as her Lieutenant’s section came running past them on the left.

Getting behind them, her Lieutenant addressed the regular fire team still holding the junction, “Peel back left!”

All six of them, three watching each direction, remained where they were for four seconds longer as they unleashed a torrent of fire on full automatic down the corridors beyond Svetlana’s sight before they fell back one by one. Each tapped the remaining soldier on the shoulder before sprinting back towards them with the last two tossing their own fragmentation grenades down the corridors before sprinting back in turn.

More screeches echoed after the detonation of the fragmentation grenades, though while they were clearly deadly, they were not enough, as when the last two from the regular section’s fire team came running past Svetlana’s firing line, they caught sight of several more creatures chasing after them around the corners of the junction; unable to cling to the armoured walls in this section that lacked any resinous material. Controlled bursts of fire continued to be the order of the day as they unleashed their fire upon the hostile creatures, once more taking their fingers off their weapon’s trigger guards and squeezing their triggers.

Fire team by fire team pulled back through the airlock as Svetlana’s section began to pile up bodies in the corridor, and despite the desire to do so, it was too close to risk using anymore hand grenades.

Next to her as he attempted to squeeze off another burst, Lev’s weapon failed to fire, prompting him to call out, “Loading!”

Quickly he pressed a release on his Carbine that allowed the spent power cell to drop out from within the grip of his weapon, which looked similar to an old pistol magazine. Equally as quickly he dropped the cell inside a drop bag and pulled a fresh cell out of one of his pouched, and snapping it into place he called out, “Up!” as he took aim once more and unleashed another series of rapid bursts.

After what felt like an eternity, they were finally the last fire team left in the corridor, plus their section Lieutenant who had stayed with them, and added his own weapon to the fight after all the regular fire team had pulled back. With the airlock finally clear for them, he tapped them on the shoulder one by one, having them pull back into the open airlock with the first ones in taking up new firing positions within on either side of the door.

Svetlana felt the tap on her shoulder a second after Pavil had peeled away from her left and she was up and gone in an instant, sprinting in past the others. Turning she saw Lev come in just behind her followed by the Lieutenant as the two at the door unleashed a torrent of fire; the Lieutenant slammed his hand into the control panel inside and the inner door closed.

Before the air was completely removed from the airlock, they could hear the thumping on the heavy inner door, which fortunately for them was too strong for the alien creatures to damage. Despite the lack of casualties, there was a collective sigh of relief as they exited the airlock and back into the hangar a few moments later. Svetlana held her hand out and saw it shaking slightly, clear signs of the after effects of the adrenaline rush.

Unsure as to the full intelligence of the creatures they were dealing with, they didn’t let their guards down as they moved back towards the shuttle. Their Lieutenant felt it best to withdraw back to the Redeemer given the latest revelation, as even though they had held their own in the withdraw, they had no idea just how many more were in the bowels of the ship, coupled with the fact they had barely scraped past the surface of one single deck.

The rest of the withdraw went without further incident as the creatures appeared to have no access to the hangar, allowing them to climb back aboard the shuttle as the Assault Droids continued to provide local security. The shuttle’s gunners kept their own eyes open through the light gun turrets on the shuttle’s wings, adding their own potential firepower to the task. Lifting off from the hangar, the shuttle pilot took several seconds to recover both the droids before rocketing off back towards the Redeemer.

-----

Captain Vyshinsky watched with concern through the eyepiece from the command center as the shuttle made its return trip towards the KIN Redeemer. Nearby Major Alekseev had joined them after they received word from the shuttle that the infantry had run into difficulty, keeping them informed as best they could from what they overheard from the infantry chatter.

Alekseev spoke up a moment later, “I’ll get them debriefed immediately Captain, then I’ll let you know what happened.”

“Please do that Major,” Alekseev acknowledged with a nod of his head and left the command center, aiming to meet with the platoon as they disembarked the shuttle.

-----

Some twenty-five minutes later, the three highest-ranking officers on the KIN Redeemer were holding an impromptu meeting a few hundred meters back from the command center in a common room. Here Vyshinsky and Akhmatova watched a recording from one of the infantrymen’s helmet for the first time on a large wall display typically used for playing movies for the crew.

Major Alekseev had been informing them as to the account of the infantry, though the video was more telling, “The Indrii I spoke with figures they must be cold blooded, or their ‘skin’ insulates them, as they give off no noticeable heat signature, apparently blending in with the surrounding environmental temperature.”

Akhmatova raised an eyebrow, “They’re certainly, ‘pleasant’ to look upon … ugly bastards.”

“Aren’t they though. I sent this video along to some other Indrii specialists and the med techs; they’re going to see what they can discern from them visually. As you saw the corpse they encountered earlier, the original crew appeared to be human, or at least human-like, whatever these things are, they apparently did one hell of a number on this ship.”

Vyshinsky spoke then, “And you still want to go back down when they clearly took out a ship our own size?”

“That remains to be seen Captain. For all we know these aliens could have relied too heavily on automation and had a small crew, perhaps they were just caught off guard, whatever the case we wont know from simply sitting up here. This is a prime opportunity to get out hands on an alien starship, and regardless of this infestation, we should seize it, who know what we could find in there.”

“Who knows what we could find indeed, Major.”

“Don’t misunderstand me Captain, I know there are risks here, we’ve already covered that we know they took out whatever crew was on this ship, but at the very least, given our previous experience with them, we can conduct a more forceful search of the vessel.”

“So what do you have in mind then?”

“I intend to assemble three companies and send them back down, this time they’ll go in full force and bring along several of the Assault Droids for heavy fire support, at which point they will cleanse that wreck of these creatures and we will see what other secrets it holds. If it should prove to be too heavily infested then they will simply withdraw once more. I don’t make this suggestion lightly Captain, I simply believe that the potential gains outweigh the potential costs.”

“Very well then, assemble your men. Akhmatova, I’m sure by know our new friends up here have realized we found something, why don’t you go inform them specifically as to what, and our intentions, perhaps they’d like to be involved.”

“Are you sure about that Captain? We don’t know how capable they are.”

“They’re capable enough to have survived multiple encounters with hostile alien species Major, I’m sure they’re more then competent, if we agree to share anything we find then our task of exploring this wreck will be all the easier.”

“Very well then Captain, I shall have my men briefed and ready to go back down in a half an hour.”

“Very good Major.”

Five minutes later Akhmatova was back in the Redeemer’s command center and sending a message to both the GAS Belldandy and the Termaindale in an open signal. She quickly intended to bring both up to speed on what they had encountered and their intent in detail, as Vyshinsky ordered, including the offer to share anything they found if they were interested in sending their own force down.

214 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Computer R&R Construct



The beach was perfect, clear blue water stretching out as far as the eye could see, bright white villas spread across the rich green grass behind the clean white sand of the beach itself. Nearly one hundred metres from the beach Dox could see a swimming figure, easily pulling through the calm sea. He rolled his head, before turning to head back to his villa. He nearly jumped when he saw the figure waiting behind him. It appeared to be female, long black hair, a roman nose and light blue eyes. He frowned slightly, he was sure that he hadn’t seen this figure around before.

“Captain, I am the briefing construct. Do you wish to receive the briefing here or in a different environment?” Her lips didn’t seem to quite synchronise with the words. Evidentially the AI processing power wasn’t quite as high as it could be.

“Standard briefing construct please.” Instantly he was in a non-descript briefing room, grey metal walls surrounded a table with a built in holoprojector. The AI construct was once again standing in front of him, dressed as she had been on the beach in a simple grey uniform, that of the Imperial Federation Intelligence staff, the rank of Major on her epaulette.

“Is there anything you require before we begin the briefing captain?” He shook his head.

“Very well. It has been three months since your last assignment, which has been judged sufficient time during R and R. Poteque pharmaceuticals have lost a freighter in one of the outer ring systems and we have been tasked to investigate.”

“What the hell? Since when do we do pick-up tasks for corporations?”

“That is part of the briefing captain. Please calm down and let me continue with the briefing.”

The construct paused, when he didn’t reply it continued,

“The freighter managed to transmit a single distress call before it stopped reporting in. In this distress message it claimed that ‘monsters’ were over-running the ship. We have no idea what these ‘monsters’ are; the only unusual items on the cargo listings were undefined biological samples. They were discovered in one of the outer ring asteroid belts. Because of the undefined nature of the threat and obvious danger involved it has been decided that an ODT team is going to be deployed, with support in the form of a full company of marines. We already have a fleet in the area, a Leviathan class Titan leading, the Swift. You have a month of virtual training on the ship layout before you are hyper-cast to the ship. They are picking up a full load of special operations sleeves before they reach the area, when they arrive then you will be deployed to search the area. Are there any questions?”

Dox thought for a couple of seconds,

“Will I have access to the briefing construct during my training?”

“I will be available during the entire length of your training to answer any queries you have.”

“When will the rest of my team be arriving?”

“They are scheduled to arrive in one hour objective time, two days subjective.”

“Start the training then,” Dox sighed, he had been hoping for a slightly more interesting assignment.

The world around him blurred, becoming the bridge of a freighter, the lights on, computers operating but nobody in sight. He sighed again, before beginning to explore, learning his way around the ship.




228 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Swift Leviathan Class Titan



To a human eye there was little to see, if someone had been watching the area of space where the wormhole opened up they would have seen a faint flicker and if they had been watching very closely they might have seen a faint ring, encompassing a massive ring of space.

To a sensor array it was a vastly different matter, a new energy source seemed to appear, micro-meteorites appeared where there were none before and then suddenly there was a massive group of anomalous readings, first through the wormhole were a pair of Rook class recon ships, each immediately powering up its long range sensors, the gravitometric sensors searching through the immediate area and both LADAR and RADAR searching further into the system.

It took them less than three minutes to decide that the immediate area was safe and signal back through the wormhole for the rest of the fleet. The next through were fifteen of the small Harpy class assault frigates, the little 70 metre long ships adding their scanning power to that of the Rook class ships, their little 150mm Railguns scanning through the area, supported by the pair of light neutron blasters mounted lower on the hull. As the smaller ships stopped, kilometres away from the open wormhole, the bigger ships started to come through; two Flycatcher interdictors, their warp disruption launchers powered down, retracted into the hull; eight Moa class cruisers, their heavy Railguns moving slightly in their powered cradles; next came the four Rokh class battleships, each of the 120000 ton vessels lazily swinging its armament out, running through a quick weapons check as they added their scanners to the fleet’s search power. The wormhole shut down, the vessels slowly shifting away from its previous location before stopping again, nearly 300km from the original wormhole. They waited for nearly an hour before it opened again, two raven class battleships sliding through, broadcasting the apologies from the Titan, one of the capacitors had gone down, forcing them to close the hole. Three Wyvern class carriers were the next through, each deploying a series of Vespa II drones that headed further into the system, searching for signs of the Mayfair. The next ships through were the biggest so far, the 4km long ground bombardment platforms, the Phoenix class dreadnaughts, each with their massive missile bays covered, only the dual 1000mm Railguns still active. As soon as the five dreadnaughts had moved away from the wormhole the largest ship moved through, the 1800000000 ton Leviathan class Titan, its capacitor banks nearly drained from the effort of maintaining the stable wormhole.




229 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Swift Leviathan Class Titan
Sensor Systems Station 3



Johannes Dvorins had been a member of the Titans crew for nearly seven months, the fourth assignment since he had finished the Federal Naval training. He was lying back on the operations chair, immersed in the virtual reality simulation of the sensor readings fed to him via the cable linked to the port on his temple.

He was floating out into the dull green of the sensor sweep. Next to the faint blue shapes of planets and other non-powered astronomical objects were several red shapes, symbolising unknown space vessels. He willed himself towards them, examining their shapes, noting their locations. Deep in his networking trance his body frowned, he hadn’t seen vessels like these before. Whatever they were they weren’t of any type that he recognised. He selected one of the shapes and ran a full database search, when the ‘No result’ tag flashed up he searched for the other two, with the same result. The mental conditioning and hypnotherapy he had undergone to allow him to function in his role meaning he completed all the tasks in slightly under a second, the time dilation effects due to the high quality computing construct he was in.

With another thought he shunted the location of the ship contacts to both the ships pilots and the command deck, allowing them to sort through the possible implications.




228 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Swift Leviathan Class Titan
Command deck



The unknown vessels pulsed slightly in the large holographic display, their red icons hovering next to the planet.
“Magnify third planet.”
The planet swelled until it filled nearly half of the view, the unknown vessels still throbbing slightly, their red colouring easily showing up against the blue of the planet. The colouring was identical to that of the sensor systems, the captain had programmed it like that, he had been a sensor operator in his early years and the memories that the colour invoked always made him feel more relaxed.
“Computer, suggest possible locations for Mayfair.” The captain said, eyes scanning both the magnified holographic display floating above the room and the smaller system map on one of the large computer screens on his tier, above the rest of the command deck.
“Projected locations for the Mayfair are unoccupied. The Mayfair is designed for deep-space haulage only, so the lack of sensor returns indicates the ship has crash landed. From the information received, it is most probable that the ship is either on or around either the fifth or the forth planet system. It would be most logical to search the fourth planet first; the unknown craft may provide us with further information.”
The captain thought for a second, running through his options.
“Okay, we’ll do that. Transmit the waypoints to the other ships in the fleet and to our pilot. Make sure the pilots transmit greetings to the unknown ships. Have the new arrivals been sleeved yet?”
“No, they have just finished downloading them; they should be waking them in less than a minute.”



228 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Swift Leviathan Class Titan
Cloning Vat 3A




Light, fuzzy white light, so bright that it is nearly painful. Sudden shocking images and memories; close range blast to the stomach, blood, pain, anger; his hands traced across his stomach, nothing. He had been shot, the back-up team had been quicker than they had thought, bursting in as he had been leaving, a shootout, the wound, the bleeding, the death.

He arched his back, drawing a deep breath, filling his mouth with gel. He coughed, retched and felt himself choke momentarily before he swallowed the mouthful of gel. He went back to breathing through the tube in his nose. His name was Dox. The memory came back suddenly, I am Dox. His hands stretched out, touching glass in front of him. His fingers traced the glass to the edges of the, of the what? He experienced a moment of panic before the neural jack in the base of his skull uploaded that part of his knowledge, it was a maturation tube. He had been resleeved after the last one had died.

Minutes later Dox knew who he was and what was going on. Personality upload completed he floated, waiting patiently for the biomimetic suspension to be drained from his tank. He didn’t have long to wait. He saw a white suited figure approach the outside of his capsule and look at a monitor attached to the side of the tube. The figure wrote something down on a data pad before tapping some keys on the computer screen. The gel started to drain through a sieve at the bottom of the tube, being replaced by air.

As the last of the gel drained through his toes and then disappeared through the grate the glass screen raised itself, allowing him to stagger out. He took a deep breath of the air and fell to his knees, gagging, after a couple of awkward gags he vomited a large quantity of the gel, the mouthfuls he had swallowed earlier. He began to shiver, still curled up on the floor. The doctor carefully helped him up and handed him a large robe and a number of towels.

“There is a cleaning area and fresh clothing in the next room, I am afraid I will not be able to brief you on the capabilities of the sleeve, I have to ensure that your team-mates have come through as successfully as you have.” The doctor gestured to a door at the far end of the row of clone tubes and Dox acknowledged the hint, heading off for the shower system.

The shower was a wonderful luxury, first a quick wash in a real water shower instead of the ultravibe models that were more standard on star-ships, then a chance to have a real bath, admittedly in a cleaning medium rather than water, but still a nice relaxing few minutes. Dox took the time to sort through his thoughts, his memories of the last mission, the one where it had gone wrong, where he had died. He didn’t dwell on it; it had happened before and would undoubtedly happen again, so there was no point in worrying.

His training had taught him how to deal with the mental distress of dying, something that most people had real trouble with. The invention of cortical stacks had meant that in theory people could live forever, resleeving whenever they died. Though with extensive psycho-conditioning people could accept it, though most people couldn’t afford to go through the four or five virtual years of conditioning before they could reliably resleeve indefinitely. Most people could afford to resleeve once, the richer middle-class twice before they were stored, then sometimes pulled out short-term for family events. During the ODT training they had undergone virtual years of psycho-surgery, preparing them for years of re-sleevings before the potential mental illnesses began to kick in. This meant that years of working together meant the teams were usually strongly-bonded, the oldest team working together having officially been a single team for two hundred and thirty one years before the member of the team suffered from re-sleeve psychosis and had to be put into storage.

After nearly twenty minutes relaxing he put on the clothes they had laid out for him. A black t-shirt, thick black combat trousers with built-in knee protectors and a pair of heavy duty boots, designed to link with the floor in case of artificial gravity cut-outs. He glanced in the mirror before he left the room.

He barely recognised the body he was now in, short blonde hair, green eyes, though if he ramped up the neurachem he could see a faint web of wires across them. The rest of the body was relatively well muscled, though the way that the body felt seemed slightly heavier than normal. He rolled his head, feeling the smoothness in the joints down his spine. He grinned; it was a high quality sleeve. He walked through the door and followed the arrows painted at head-height on the wall to a briefing room.

Inside the room were four more people, three sitting down around the centre table and one standing behind a control desk for the display system. The three sitting around the table could have been siblings of the sleeve he was wearing, two males and a female, all with blonde hair, green eyes and a neat line of quick-jack sockets along the back of their skulls, across their parietal bones. From somewhere inside the sleeve he felt a burst of companionship, of belonging. He recognised it from some of his other sleevings as the feeling you got from close biological links, so those sleeves were probably biologically his relations. With a slight effort his conditioning buried the feeling, getting back to the matter in hand, the briefing. He turned his attention to the figure at the front of the room, a cheap synthetic sleeve, a broad barely human face sitting on a oddly proportioned body. The legs seemed slightly too short for the body, with the tips of the fingers almost reaching to the knees of the figure. It had hair arranged in some sort of style designed to emulate an old fashioned executive hair-cut, conservative but not overly so. He wondered why they were being briefed by one of the cheapest sleeves available on the ship. The figure began to speak,

“Dox, sit down and don’t make any comments about the damn sleeve, I was in a hurry and needed to be sleeved and the synthetic ones are the easiest to control, especially when you don’t have a chance to sleep.”

Dox grinned; he recognised more the tone of voice and the way that he was talking, one of the Federal Intelligence Office military liaisons.

“Marcus! Your mood hasn’t improved since we last saw you! How are you mate?”

“I have been worse. Though this mission looks slightly odd, you want me to tell you about it?” There was a twitch on the face of the sleeve; the lack of fine motor control in the sleeve stopped him doing his customary sneer at Dox’s comment.

“If there are no more interruptions?” He paused, the rest of the team stayed quiet while Dox slid into one of the seats at the end of the table.

“Right, while you lot were still in transit we received some new information. As you know, the Mayfair is a full-size Charon freighter, with nearly 790000 cubic meters of storage. From what we understand it was recently purchased by a small deep space exploration company. Since the entire of the company’s board were on the ship when it went missing and they haven’t been heard of since, we have no real idea what is onboard. You have all become familiar with the layout, so this meeting is more about the sleeves details rather than the mission itself.” He tapped a button on the lectern and a holographic rendition of the clone body they were all wearing appeared, floating above the table.

“First the cybernetic systems; as you can probably tell, the sleeves have the latest designs incorporated. They all have head-up display chips installed, alongside chrono-chips, so you don’t need to wear a helmet to link to smart-rigged weapons. The rest of the body is more interesting, we have Zainou designed marrow alloy and carbon-reinforced tendons and Ishukone poly-bond ligaments. These were on the ship for a work-up tour along with the ship itself, so you probably won’t have experienced anything quite like this before. They have full neurachemical assists in place and a full combat assist system, smoothing out the neuromuscular facilitation and increasing nerve transmission speeds. On your right forearm is a skin screen, reading off both chemical and radiation detectors that are built into your nose and throat. Both your palms have smart weapon links, bio-alloy plates with interface links built in. Of course you have the traditional four quick-jack sockets mounted along the back of your skull as per normal, they are slightly faster than you are used to, but that shouldn’t cause any problems.” He took a breath, as he had mentioned each different upgrade the appropriate portion of the holograph flared red, showing the enhancements against the rest of the green coloured hologram.



234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Swift Leviathan Class Titan




They had waited for the capacitors on the Titan to fully power up before they started to move deeper into the system. The AI systems they were using had computed the most likely position for the wreck of the cargo ship, thinking that it was likely to be somewhere in the region of the fourth planet, though since there were no sensor returns, it was deemed likely the ship had crash landed somewhere, though the automated AI pilot system should have prevented any collisions.

The fleet powered up their warp engines and jumped in system, heading for the fourth planet.

Nisa and Seli were in the mess hall with Captain Lingun eating breakfast. It was delicious meal fixed up by Nisa, who produced that wonderful meal at the dinner meeting with the crew from the Redeemer. She insisted on cooking herself instead of letting Chef Olag make it, a habit of living alone while her father and brothers were fighting the war in Cazelia.

"My my Miss Olgander, this very very delicious. As expected from that wonderful meal you made for our guests."

Nisa blushed at the comment while Seli leered at Lingun, who was smiling by the way. "Thank you captain."

"You can call me James you know, you're my friend."

"Alright, James. Please in turn call me Nisa." she smiled.

"Yes of course, Nisa

"Why can't I call you James?" he mumbled, feeling left out

"Well Sergeant, since we are still on duty it would be against military protocol for a superior to be called by his first name." Seli was surprised he picked up what he said.

God he has good hearing. he thought

"Why thank you Sergeant, its gift you learn in war."

"What you can hear my thoughts too!"

"No you were just thinking aloud."

Seli bobbed his head and looked over at Nisa, who giggled. He immediately perked up and smiled back at her. He couldn't help it, just looking at her you cannot help to smile. Suddenly Captain Lingun's commlink rang in his pocket. He took our and activated it.

"Yes?"

"Captain we are receiving a message from the Redeemer. Please return to the bridge." Commander Jilneas said.

"Alright I'll be right there," he turned off his commlink and looked at the couple, "if you may excuse me Mis- I mean Nisa and Sergeant," he walked out of the mess hall.

"Well Seli do you want seconds?"

Seli immediately raised up his plate as fast as lightning to a smiling Nisa, "Yes please!"

"Alright!"

Meanwhile on the bridge, Lingun sat in the tactical display and listened to what the Kilrany's message. He leaned back and wondered what was brewing inside that ship.

"Sir we are detecting unknown vessel coming into the system, once again a new contact."

An image of the system was on the Tactical Display, or TacDis, blue triangles represented the unknown vessels. Lingun leaned forward, "Well it seems we have more visitors. Maybe we should establish an outpost here since this area seems to be attracting visitors left and right." he smiled, "send back a message to the Redeemer.

This is Captain Lingun, we are very interested in the find and will offer our assistance, we are sending in a strike team along with five Arm Slave units for support. Give us thirty minutes to prepare."

Nisa was in the mess hall, giggling as she gave Seli a fifth plate of food. "My my you must've been hungry."

"Very much so, they say I'm the blackhole of the kitchen."

"I see!"

"All SRT members are to report to the hangar, I repeat all SRT members are to report to the hangar, that is all."

Seli looked up at the intercom then quickly looked down at the food. He began to scarf everything down then immediately got up, "Sorry Nisa, I have to go. I'll be back before dinner."

"Oh, alright. Seli you be careful now, I don't know what I'll do if something happens."

He looked at her and blushed, then immediately followed up, "Don't worry I'll be fine, and thank you Nisa," he smiled.

Nisa looked on as Seli left the mess hall then looked down at the plate, "Well! Time to wash the dishes!" she smiled.

In the hangar Seli and the rest of team was briefed on what was going on so far on the moon. They were to support the Kilrany while they investigate the ship and gather intelligence on what it had and what was on it. They were also given awareness of an unknown force coming into the system, and were given a time limit for extraction should that time come. Sergeant Major Polis asked if they had any questions. Everyone unanimously said no and began to gear up.

Seli powered up his Arm Slave and made the necessary triple checks. "This is Phantom Five ready to go." he chimed in.

"Alright Phantom Five, standby for prep, over."

Conveyor belts started to move the kneeling Arm Slave to some sort of bay. He looked to the right monitor to see the strike team load up into the shuttle. He finally stopped and, from the kneeling position, Seli stood the Arm Slave and walked into the area. Captain Lingun sent another message to the Kilrany.

"We are ready to begin the operation just give us the signal."

“Do you think they’ll accept that offer ma’am?”

Within the command center of the KIN Redeemer, Commander Akhmatova shrugged her shoulders slightly at the question posed to her by the officer at navigation, “When were aboard it seemed like they had a decent compliment of dedicated military personnel, and they could stand to gain from the search as much as we do, though its possible they may not be interested anyway.”

A few moments of relative silence passed after that; content with the reply he received from Akhmatova, the officer turned back around and the quiet murmur of voices as crewmen and officer alike carried out their duties filled the background. Akhmatova herself merely waited for a reply of some kind from either ship to pass on to the Captain who had gone down to one of the hangars to see off the men.

Much like when the GAS Belldandy had first arrived in system, the Redeemer once more missed the initial arrival of Caldari ships; though this time it was less because of distraction, and more because they continued to run their active sensors at low output, combined with their range from the latest arrivals. This lack of awareness did not last long however as their passive array quickly picked up the telltale signals of the Caldari long range sensors.

“Ma’am, we’re picking up new signals on passive originating form outside the current range of our active array.”

There was a momentary pause from the Commander; with the detection of the new signals, a small yellow triangle appeared at the border of the eyepiece she wore, and before she replied to the officer monitoring sensors, she turned in place until the she could look directly at it, the icon shifting to a small circle as she looked in the appropriate direction, with the addition of a little ‘unknown’ next to it, “Go to full power on the tactical array, see if you can get a clean reading.”

As the Redeemer’s tactical sensors went to full power, Akhmatova saw the single blip suddenly change to three as it picked up on the wormhole and the two scout ships, though they remained unknown on their displays. Slipping on the small headset, she tapped a key on the command console, addressing the ship, “All hands, set condition one in all spaces, this is not a drill. I repeat, set condition one in all spaces.”

-----

Not far from the hangar entrance, Captain Vyshinsky and Major Alekseev stood next to each other watching the naval infantrymen prepared for their second trip down. Taking a rough count of the numbers, Alexei glanced over at the Major with a slight smile, “Three companies? I thought I must have misheard you.”

The Alekseev’s expression remained neutral, “Indeed Captain, I did mean to say platoons, perhaps it was that I merely wished to be able to send down three companies.”

Alexei merely grunted in amusement as he knew full well that Alekseev had an overly serious personality, “In any regard, they look just about ready … I see you’re sending along the same unit that went down the first time.”

“I am, they have a bit more experience with the layout, and we still need the reconnaissance elements down there, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the heavier support with them this time around.”

Vyshinsky was about to shrug, but his attention was quickly drawn away from the naval infantry when Commander Akhmatova’s voice came out over the ship’s intercom, “All hands, set condition one in all spaces, this is not a drill. I repeat, set condition one in all spaces.”

Instinctively looking upwards, Alexei let out a little curse, “You have got to be freaking kidding me,” before taking off at a jog out through the hangar entrance, he glanced towards Alekseev, “Hold on their launch, but keep them ready.”

The Major gave a slight nod of his head in acknowledgement as Vyshinsky turned and took off towards the ship’s command center.”

-----

By the time Vyshinsky had jogged his way from the hangar to the command center some five minutes later, the bulk of the Caldari task force had apparently existed their artificial wormhole. Glancing towards the Commander, he addressed her quietly, “What the hell do we have now?”

“We have multiple contacts exiting what we figure might be a kind of hyperspace gate, we’re not exactly sure given the range. Count is currently at twenty and climbing.”

“Son of a – right, what of the Belldandy and the Termaindale?”

“We received a reply from Captain Lingun that they’re happy to work with us to search that wreck below, but no mention of these new contacts, I don’t think they know who they are either, no reply yet from the Termaindale.”

Picking up a second headset that was sitting on the command center, the Captain of the KIN Redeemer quickly donned the small device and took a look towards the latest batch of arrivals, “Have they done anything more then just sit there?”

“No sir, what you see is what they’ve been doing.”

Several minutes passed before it appeared that all of the Caldari ships had exited their artificial wormhole, and still they had not yet attempted to send a communications signal, “They must know we’re here. Commander, contact Major Alekseev, tell him he’s got permission to send his men down towards the moon when they’re ready. If these bastards turn out to be hostile, they can make a break for it in their shuttles while we cover them.”

While it wasn’t quite as powerful as that on the Athena class vessels, the shuttles the Kilrany employed had their own hyper drive engines, which would allow them to flee the system themselves if it became necessary. After a confirmation message from Commander Akhmatova to the Belldandy that their message had been received, and that the operation was still a go, three beta type shuttles were dispatched from one of the Redeemer’s hangars roughly fifteen minutes later, while the Caldari warships continued to sit and wait.

-----

Sasha Davydova glanced about the now familiar hangar, keeping an eye open for any movement in the vacuum around them; still unsure as to the full capabilities of the creatures they had run into earlier. It didn’t bother them to be sent back down to wrecked vessel so soon after having left it rather quickly, in fact a few of them welcomed it now that they had a slightly better understanding of what had apparently transpired aboard the damaged craft.

Their landing was slightly different this time around though; as while the hangar was reasonably large, they knew it wouldn’t be large enough for all three shuttles and anything sent by the Ganoxa to be held within at once. To that end, only one shuttle would remain inside and on the ‘ground’ at any one time, the other two would hold station above and outside the hangar, monitoring the situation in space above them and the approach to the hangar below.

Most of the three platoons and the six Assault Droids kept off to one side of the hangar near their remaining shuttle, leaving clear room for the Ganoxa to land, as they intended to await them before going back in.

"We have a go for launch. We have a go for launch. All Arm Slave pilots please prepare yourself."

Seli cringed at the mention of launch, this would be his first time performing this sort of deployment. Although the simulators prepared him for what would happen he was still a bit anxious. The advice he received from Lewis, one the squad members, was to go to his happy place. He went to his happy place, the memories of being together with Nisa. That time at the beach, the day they first met in Iolia, on the planet Relkas. He was calm.

"Captain all launchers are ready and shuttle team will lift off in 10 minutes after," Jilneas reported.

"Commence launching procedures."

"Yes sir."

Seli heard a loud hissing noise, so loud he had to ask his AI, Ghost, to filter it out. Then suddenly the cockpit began to shake and a sudden force of gravity pushed him down his seat. Five, twenty meter long, missiles exited the ship and descended upon the moon.

"I think I shouldn't have ate all that food," he began to turn green, making faces.

"Calm down Seli, ETA 20 seconds. Phantoms get ready." Jim said.

A unanimous "Yes sir" was heard in Seli's cockpit. About that time the rockets landed on the moon and launched out the hatches to let the pilots get their Arm Slaves out. Seli saw the Kilrany vessels near the hangar of the unknown ship.

"Move! Move! Set up a perimeter around the Kilrany, Dorian set up a flare for our shuttle." Jim ordered.

"Yes sir," Dorian did as he was told and jumped about 20 meters away, popping a flare.

"This is Phantom one to Kilrany team, our shuttle will be on route in 5 minutes. We will setting up positions behind your ships to set up a perimeter."

Inside the hangar, the three platoons of naval infantry did not have a particularly good view of the incoming ‘missiles’ that contained the Ganoxian Arm Slaves, but the pilots and gunners of the two shuttles ‘hovering’ above did. From this vantage point the copilot of one in particular commented to the pilot seated next to him, “What do they plan to do with those?”

The pilot grunted in amusement at his colleague, “Likely the same thing we’re doing with our shuttles.”

A brief moment of silence followed before the copilot responded, “Ah, yes, stupid question on my part.”

“Yes it was.”

The copilot grunted in amusement at the sarcastic tone of the pilot.

-----

It was at about the same point that the Arm Slaves’ rockets were striking the moon that a sudden realization struck the Kilrany infantry commander, one Captain Matvei Levitan, with the force of a hammer to the face. The simple fact of the matter was, the communication systems employed within the helmets of the KINI was not set up to send or receive on anything other then from their own encrypted signals.

This quite understandably prompted an extremely frustrated curse from Levitan, who quickly came up with a solution a few moments later within the vacuum of the hangar by addressing the crew of the landed shuttle. Unlike the infantrymen’s system, the shuttle’s communications equipment was more then capable of sending and receiving the kind of open message the Ganoxians would have been transmitting, and from here, he had a relay set up.

“This is Black One, I acknowledge your message Phantom One, we await their arrival, we’ve got plenty of room in here. I advise caution if you bring your mechs directly atop the ship’s hull, we’re not able to get a clean reading off it, so we don’t know how strong it is given the rough landing it had.”

After he finished speaking, he considered for a moment if he had stated the obvious a bit too much, but dismissed the thought just as quickly, deciding that in this kind of situation, nothing should be taken for granted.

As the median level airlock was still the only one their team could access, he sent two sections up towards it in advance of the Ganoxian shuttle, though they did not go in. One section included Sasha, Svetlana and Lev once more, and from their all too familiar view, saw a pair of Assault Droids standing in wait on the ‘floor’ almost directly below them.

Holding her Carbine loosely, Sasha felt a pang of anticipation as they held potion on the gangway, their life thus far on the Redeemer had been al too routine, and despite the earlier action on both the ship and the world, it was still a welcome change of pace.

As the shuttle landed the strike team came out with their armored suits on, holding their gauss assault rifles. Sargent Major Polis saluted the Kilrany and awaited their signal to begin the investigation, ordering the men to take up positions for rapid insertion, ten men lined up on each side. Polis turned his head to the Kilrany in charge, "Ready."

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal



The ships dropped out of warp close to the planet, with the Swift staying the furthest away from the planet, the Gallente Titan incident at Goral ensuring that Titans stayed far enough away to avoid changing the tidal patterns of planets.


Zest Harpy Class Assault Frigate



Ieris floated in his pilot pod, suspended in the biomimetic filler inside the pod, the neural rigging and training he had undergone allowing him to feel the ship around him, using the twin camera drones flitting around his ship for eyes. As the ship dropped out of warp he lazily moved the camera drone around to face the gathered ships, since the ship had been missing for almost ten days it was likely that somebody was here to root the wreckage and steal anything worthwhile, or if there was something truly unique in the ship then one of the other corporations may have sent a research unit, a few frigates maybe.

He was surprised, truly surprised for the first time in a long while by what he saw in front of him. Three ships hanging above the world, differing in size, apparent origin and even design. The smallest was only three hundred metres long, almost half the size of the Raven’s that had jumped in with the fleet, there was also an oddly shaped craft only slightly larger than the Raven’s and a massive ovoid shape, only slightly larger than the Phoenix class dreadnaughts.

He opened one of his communication channels, linking to the network between the entire of the battle fleet.
“What the hell is this? Who are these guys?” He attached a series of photos to the message, pictures of each of the unknown craft. He grimaced, more trouble that they could do without. But he had been ordered to treat them cordially, so he did.

He opened a public channel, disabled the encoding with a thought and began to transmit, allowing the computer to translate it into a wide variety of different languages, Caldari, Gallente, Amarrian, a few of the tribal Minmatar dialects, on a hunch he also translated it into a variety of old earth languages, English, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and French.

“Greetings to you all, I am Captain Ieris Avtar, captain of the Zest. As a legal representative of the Ishukone Corporation I am here to claim possession of the Mayfair and all its cargo. My scans indicate that it is on the moon below, do any of you have any questions?”


Pike Rokh Battleship



Captain Davin rolled his eyes as he received the general communication message. He opened his own personal channel to the Zest.

“Ieris, you are here as a guest of the Caldari navy. You would be well advised to shut up, you have no idea what you may be getting us in for if you offend them, we know nothing about them.” Ieris started to respond but Davin closed the channel as he was about to start talking, he had no time for the idiot.

He opened his own public channel, using the same translations as Avtar had.

“I apologise for the forthrightness of my fellow captain. I am Captain Davin of the Caldari navy. We are here in response to a distress signal from a freighter that was received nearly ten days ago. We request that no unaccompanied boarding actions take place. If you would like to discuss this further then we can arrange for a meeting face to face if you desire, at a location of your choice.”

He frowned, he wasn’t particularly happy with how the message sounded, but it would have to do, he couldn’t ignore the Ishukone interests in the ship, but equally he had to avoid starting a diplomatic incident with a selection of unknown forces. He calmed himself down, there would be nothing he could do, at least, until they replied and things began to happen.

Lingun was looking at the TacDis overseeing the operation on the moon below. He pondered about what is on that ship, it didn't look like much, but he was interested on what had infested it. Although he was intrigued, he was a bit anxious, a new species to record yet needed to avoid.

"Sir I am detecting the same contacts. They're a bit close." Lieutenant Park reported, from the Intel bay

"I see they finally arrived."

"Sir we are receiving a message from one of them," reported Lieutenant Illidem, from the communications bay.

"Upload it to the TacDis." Lingun ordered.

"Yes sir."

“Greetings to you all, I am Captain Ieris Avtar, captain of the Zest. As a legal representative of the Ishukone Corporation I am here to claim possession of the Mayfair and all its cargo. My scans indicate that it is on the mood below, do any of you have any questions?”

I see the rightful owners of the ship have arrived, I should have known but why such a huge fleet sent for one tiny ship? What could be so important that a whole fleet was needed to reclaim a cargo vessel?

"We are receiving another message from them, different ship sir." Ilidem reported.

“I apologise for the forthrightness of my fellow captain. I am Captain Davin of the Caldari navy. We are here in response to a distress signal from a freighter that was received nearly ten days ago. We request that no unaccompanied boarding actions take place. If you would like to discuss this further then we can arrange for a meeting face to face if you desire, at a location of your choice.”

Still doesn't explain why the large fleet is here, but I guess I'll bring that up in our meeting.

"Get me the ground team,"

Polis was about to charge in when his commlink chimed. He tapped his helmet to activate it.

"Stand down! All units, stand down."

"What?! After all this trouble!"

"Captain's orders, something has come up."

"Well goddammit! Alright men take five,"

Lots of groans could be heard, while Polis looked very depressed.

"Send a message to them." Lingun ordered.

"We are complying with your request and halted our boarding procedures. If it is alright with our colleagues here we wish to hold the meeting on our ship unless they would like a change of scenery. I'll let them decide."

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Pike Rokh Battleship

Thrust into his role as unofficial spokesperson for the group Ashley Davin rolled his shoulders, in the pod they never got tired, but it had been a habit of his since childhood and always seemed to calm him down.

He opened the public channel again,

“Do you speak for all the parties present? We are happy to agree to a meeting anywhere, though unless you can extract our pilot pods I am afraid we will have to insist on the meeting taking place on the largest of our vessels, it is the only one capable of removing the capsules. If this is acceptable please inform us and we will prepare for your crews.”

Market District, Parliamentary Lands, within the Boundless Realm

A tall dark grey humanoid creature with a horse’s head fell into a murky pool of water with a splash. Another victim of the crowded streets surrounding the Market. Creatures of the Realm filled the streets and thoroughfares of the bazaar, creatures of every imaginable description bartering for products that defied belief.

...here a brown-skinned creature with too many joints and skin that resembled bark offered handfuls of glowing silver threads in exchange for a twisted glass bottle filled with a purple fluid being sold by a cyclopean man with feathers instead of hair...

...here an armoured man purchased a shield of shimmering crystal in return for a porcelain head whose mouth screamed in silent agony...

...there three vials of golden liquid were traded by a human man wearing a tabard bearing the sign of the Lily for a small book bound together with string...

A figure dressed in red silk slashed with white stepped over the prostrate monochrome form with its horse’s head. White knee-high boots left no imprint in the mud, nor did the mud cling to the leather. His companion crouches down beside the fallen creature struggling to rise.

“Be glad your clumsiness did not stain the young one’s coat, I am not in the mood for blood sport.”

The grey head reared back, tossing its mane and tensing muscled arms as it rose up to its impressive seven-foot height.

“Insolent! You dare cha-“, the creature’s eyes had caught sight of the distinctive red and white slashes of the companion’s clothing. The glaring eyes darted downward and focussed upon the floor, head angled downward in submission, “This one humbly offers apologies, no offense intended, æthelu, just angry at mine own clumsiness.”

The other rose slowly, cat-slit eyes looking the grey creature up and down. He turned and walked off to rejoin the other of his kind, so silently that his passing comment comes as a whisper in the wind somehow clearly audible even in the throng of the bazaar, “Accepted”. The horse-headed creature remained where he was for a good few minutes before daring to look up and discover that the other had vanished.

The diverse creatures in the market parted before the two in red-and-white almost without seeming to notice them. Their eyes avoid looking at the pair although never in an obvious manner – they just did not happen to be looking at them. They walked the roads and alleys for a good few hours, pausing at times to examine the merchandise displayed in stalls only to turn away with bored expressions. A very few times they engaged the sellers in conversation, halting whatever sale or discussion was underway at the time. In these cases items were exchanged, a gemstone for a painting, a marble with a purple mist swirling within it for a telescope that saw the weather due over the next few days, and other similar trinkets. In each case the stallholders promised to deliver the items in person, swearing over a silver coin with a head upon each side.

“No sign of his stall. He was supported to be here, Æthelgád.”

“We have only been in the Market for a few hours. Keep looking.”

The former nodded slightly, frustration creasing his pale brow as they continued through the market.

It was some hours later that they finally discovered what they were looking for. A beautiful example of craftsmanship that outdid most of what the lesser branches of the High Houses were producing for their nobles...certainly beyond what the individual seeking it would have been granted by his House – the Whites were not the senior branch of High House Rose. The individual behind the stall was similar in appearance to the two in white-slashed red. Impossibly slender, his height made him appear almost stretched out. Fine bone structure suggested a delicacy that belied an impressive strength although spoke truth about the fragility of those bones. His clothing was of a similar material to that of the other two but was a riot of different colours that in any other place but this, and upon any other species but his, would have appeared gaudy. Here, and on his, it seemed right.

“Honoured Smith, tell me of this item.”

A nonchalant hand indicated the object in question, court-schooled face perfectly impassive.

The smith picked up a spear, seven feet from sabreblade tip to smooth end. His hands caressed its shaft not as a master inspecting his craft, but rather as a man would touch his lover’s body.


“The b3ade is pure starlight, captured in the home glades of the nation Silver Charging Against the Wind and strands of their hair are woven into the shaft. Technology from beyond the Realm is fashioned into the spear along with the blood of Innysfaer and the tears of a newborn sun. She is beautiful, Child of the Rose, she makes her length suited for circumstances she finds herself in.”

As he spoke the spear shrank, reducing it to the length of a sword. The smith placed it back upon the stall as the bargaining began in earnest.


Compound of the High House Rose, Metropolis, Parliamentary Lands

Vast towers rose above the pair as they passed through a gate in a wall covered in blooming roses. They were met by another figure, this one in red slashed with pale blue.

“My dear cousins Æthelcǽg and Æthelgád! Welcome back from the bazaar. A successful day, I trust?”

The two brothers looked at each other, each raising an eyebrow.

“Cousin, I assume you want a favour?”

The one in blue and red effected a shocked expression. “How could you think such a thing?”

“Because you only call us dear cousins when you want something.”

This brought a faint chuckle and a nod. “I was wondering if you two young White Roses would care to join Father and myself on a hunt through the woods in Blackened Sun. Some of the briar creatures have been turning up as we could use whatever company the pair of you can drum up.”

The two brothers smiled faintly as they declined the offer, continuing their walk into the compound.

“Briar creatures? I thought the Azure branch had better taste in their hunting.”

“Little brother, they still need to be kept down like any pests.”

The twist to Æthelcǽg’s lips suggested that he did not accept this as an excuse for a boring hunt.

It was a few hours later, after their cousin had left by Candlelight for the estates of the Azure Branch of High House Rose in Blackened sun, that the elder of the two brothers departed to the Parliament of Blooms after a summons from their father. The younger of the pair twirled an empty wine glass in his fingers, his whiteless eyes (i.e. all iris and pupil) staring listlessly out over the Metropolis, the beating heart of the Everlasting Empire. He idly watched an flock of one of the Lesser Kindreds turn in the air above the city before his eyes dropped down to the five towers of the High House Violet’s compound before following the curve of the city district around to the elegantly delicate designs of the High House Snowdrop’s main holding in the city. A voice whispered inside his head.

...a message for you from your father, Honoured One...

As the hob spoke the young Onarrán made a vaguely acquiescent sound and opened a cupboard. Sure enough a scroll was resting inside on an engraved plate. He slipped off the ribbon and read about events There. A number of the leahtorlic’déathbǽrlic’nicor had been found some time ago and marked for a hunt. Apparently something, or someone, had moved them but the tracking wards still echoed from There to [Here[/i]. Æthelcǽg’s lips twisted in a faint smile. A hunt worth the effort...something fast, numerous, and probably involving meeting new wealh. Not that he could announce himself before the hunt began, of course.

“Hob, have a small transport readied for me. I will be travelling Beyond the Realms.”

...does the Honoured One require a vessel under the Protocols of War..?

“I do.”

...one such shall be prepared in Burning Skies Beneath Ivory[/i], your rig and equipment await you there, do you wish to go to the Chamber of Voyages...?[/i]

“Yes, hob.”

So saying he picked up his new acquisition and opened the door to the chamber, to be faced with a plain corridor that glowed a faint white.

...first left turn, second door on the right...

He walked confidently down the corridor until it branched in two. Taking the left road he passed one door and opened the second finding himself in the underground room known as the Chamber of Voyages. Like many places in the Realm it seemed to change in appearance from one moment to the next.

Ignoring the peculiar features of the room the Onarrán walked over to a cabinet and removed a black candle. Stepping over to one of the braziers in the room he lit the wick, closed his eyes, concentrated, and stepped forward three times.


Burning Skies Beneath Ivory Province, Lands belonging to the High House Rose

He opened his eyes. Above him were vast, complicated cumulous cloud patterns, whilst the sky beneath them glowed with the vibrant reds and yellows of the sunset. He was standing in the courtyard of a vast complex stretching beneath those ivory-coloured clouds; kilometre-tell needle-like towers played docking facility to the sleekly built ships of Rose’s warfleet, which floated effortlessly in the air. The vast majority were the three-hundred metre long Warcraft that formed the staple of Onarr’s almost surgical war machine. With strategy built upon the principle of hit-and-run, and the single, perfect strike, the Onarrím rarely built the behemoths seen in the fleets of other nations. Quite apart from that, they lacked the population to risk so many lives in a single warship.

A human Bondsman saluted him and showed the young Rose into one of the building where his hunting rig awaited him. Greatly resembling ridged and segmented power armour it was a product of the forges of the High House Rose. The pinnacles of the artificer’s craft, hunting rigs were not mere products. Each was constructed for each individual who wore it and the lesser Houses would sometimes beggar themselves in their construction...without a Rig it was all but impossible to be respected enough to enter hunts Beyond the Realm, and thus difficult to gain prestige and influence. Designed with much the same principles in mind as the Onarrán military it was not designed to shield the bearer from a great deal of damage...the sort of conflict that involved trading fire seemed to those of the Houses as being primitive and uncivilised. Rather they were built for speed, stealth, and to increase strength. Each house built their Rigs in a different manner, the Rosean design appearing to be made of numerous small segments, compared to the more fluid designs of Violet or the mailed appearance of Lily.

A short while later he seated himself in the small one-man transport craft. Only fifteen metres long it was designed specifically for one and two-person hunt runs. It possessed nothing in the way of offensive weaponry and the vast majority of its size consisted of engine and stealth systems.

A hob whispered in his ear and the craft slipped away from its tether, rising up past the graceful forms of the Rose fleet and accelerating across the skies of the Realm. Five districts were crossed before a suitable thinning of the Wall was found. The transport winked out of sight.


Unknown system, Their side of the Wall.

The tiny ship winked into existence in the system, hull material and stealth technology helping hide the Onarrím vessel.

...numerous other craft in area...

‘Keep us hidden. Move in toward the echo.’

It was not out of disrespect that Captain Levitan did not return the salute offered him by Sergeant Major Polis, instead he did so for altogether pragmatic Kilrany military doctrine, “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t return the salute, it’s SOP not to do so in the field, though admittedly there aren’t likely any snipers about.”

Levitan paused for a moment as he considered asking the soldier his name and rank as well as giving his own, but he quickly decided it was irrelevant and chose to get straight to the point, “Alright then, I don’t know what you’ve been told, so I may sound redundant, but here’s what I know. Roughly an hour ago we sent down a small reconnaissance force to examine this wreckage and shortly after getting inside that airlock over there,” he gestured with his left arm towards the median level airlock with the two KINI sections on either side, “they found themselves under attack by some really ugly … things, we’ve never seen them before. From the video I was shown they’re about as tall as we are, have freakishly elongated heads,” he then approximated the size with his hands for emphasis, “a strange skeletal structure and a tail, in other words, you can’t miss them, and from that one corpse we found, you don’t want them anywhere near you.”

He paused again for a moment to take a breath, “Now, we don’t know how intelligent these bastards are, but they did manage to infest this ship, whether before or after the crash I don’t know, but they have so far done little more then try and charge my men. Now, there are two entrances that we know of from this hangar, we have that one over there that my men are about to go back into, and a second one,” Levitan then gestured up towards the opening to space first before pointing more specifically to another airlock like door that had obviously originally been the ‘ground level’ entrance, “as you can see its away from that gangway we can use there, so I’ve got no means or reaching it with what I have. As such, unless you can reach that entryway, I guess you’ll need to come in behind us and we can go from there.”

As Levitan was addressing the Ganoxian Sergeant Major, the two reconnaissance sections up on the gangway prepared to re-enter through the airlock. Standing on the right side of the armoured door, the stock of Sasha’s Carbine sat snuggly in her shoulder and aimed towards the door, while her left hand slowly came off the vertical foregrip towards the control panel. Behind her and just out from the wall, Lev held his own weapon at the ready while the second section was lined up to the left of the door in a similar pattern along the gangway.

Farther out from the wall and below them, a regular KINI section took up a firing line with a clean line of sight into the airlock upon her opening the door. Cautiously her left hand reached out from under her weapon and tapped the appropriate key they had determined during their earlier visit, and the outer door snapped open. Returning her left hand to the foregrip, she carefully sliced around the corner until the she could confirm that the lower section of the airlock, which was out of view of the regular section on the lower level, was clear.

Backing away from the airlock she made a quick gesture with her left hand, which prompted a Lieutenant standing near Levitan to tap him on his shoulder, “Sir, they’re ready to enter.”

He acknowledged the internal communication with a nod of his head before re-addressing the Ganoxian, “Looks like we’re ready to go back in. We’re sending in a pair of Assault Droids first, if it’s clear, we’ll follow them in.”

Levitan half turned then to face the airlock and gestured with his right hand; promptly his order was acknowledged and carried out by Sasha’s platoon Lieutenant, who gave the first Assault Droid the ‘go’ signal. Taking a step back and away from the wall, the machine increased the power output to its anti-gravity system contained on its back, initiating a short jump upwards and towards the gangway, where it landed lightly considering its actual weight. To reduce stress on the gangway, this heavy machine opted to maintain a higher output for several seconds longer, until it was able to step forward and in to the now open airlock, though in spite of this, Sasha and Svetlana still felt the shake of the gangway in their feet.

From its new position it began transmitting a video feed from its primary visual sensors, which was picked up by the shuttle and monitored by the copilot, “Signal’s coming through clearly, let him through.”

Acknowledging the order, Sasha less cautiously tapped the key again, closing the outer door, followed by the second to fill the airlock with air and the third to open the inner door. A moment later the neutral voice of the Assault Droid came through indicating it was clear, followed by the copilot who watched the machine walk deeper into the initial corridor, “It’s clear, but that’s some mess you fellows made in there.”

A second Assault Droid quickly followed up the first and passed through the airlock with ease, and one behind they other they moved forward and set themselves up to cover either direction. With the first two Assault Droids in place, the two reconnaissance sections went through the airlock themselves, once more passing through by fire team, as the airlock could have handled only eight at most.

As a regular section used a battered looking crate to gain access to the gangway to eventually follow the reconnaissance elements, Levitan addressed the Ganoxian again, “If you’d like, you can take your men through now, or if you have the means with you, you can use that other airlock, I leave that choice to you.”

As the first fire team through the airlock this time around, Lev found himself on point once more, which he had long ago accepted begrudgingly as his lot in life. With both Assault Droids firmly in place and guarding the approach to the junction coupled with their need to await the rest of the unit before they could move off, they halted near the end of the corridor to examine one of the fallen creatures.

Crouching down next to it, Sasha could now see the affect of the creature’s blood on the plating that they had missed in their earlier withdrawal, the scorch marks clearly not from their weapons fire. Reaching down she pulled free her combat knife with her right hand and slid the tip of the blade in to the green liquid they assumed was the creature’s blood, the silver coloured metal blackened after several seconds, “Oh now that’s not encouraging.”

Standing only a meter off and partially facing the junction, Lev activated his comm. set, “Sergeant, we’ve got a complication, these things appear to have corrosive blood, enough so that it’s charred Sasha’s knife at least, and whatever material this ship is built of.”

Their Sergeant, who had not yet transited through the airlock initially sounded a little skeptical, “That seems unlikely, are you sure Lev?”

“Absolutely, it’s their blood.”

They heard their Sergeant curse lightly before he acknowledged Lev again, and with an understandable haste, passed the message on to Captain Levitan, who was none to pleased with their latest discovery. Nonetheless, he was quick to use the open channel provided by the shuttle to inform the Ganoxian soldiers of this new revelation.

Still crouching near the dead alien as their Sergeant came walking through the airlock, she heard Pavil speak up from behind her, “These ugly fuckers just keep getting better and better don’t they, next thing you know the bastards will be able to fly or some shit like that.”

As Sasha chuckled he continued, “I mean really, these things are like some kind of bastardized crossing of a … a … hell, I don’t know what fucked up things you’d have to mix to get these. It's like ugly fucked fugly and got really fugly.”

Coming up from behind them, their Sergeant addressed them, “Just be glad chemical and biological weapons were kept in mind when our body armour and under suit was designed.”

After he stopped a moment to take a close look at the corpse himself, and await the last of their movement unit, he gestured for them to move forward once more, Lev leading off as they took a few more steps towards the junction. Here they waited for a minute until the decision by the Ganoxa was made clear to them, initially unaware that Caldari ships had jumped in closer.

This left Sasha, who was now at the tail of the column, to look about the scene of death that practically surrounded them in this corridor, where at least ten of the creatures lay dead, most of their wounds left cauterized by Kilrany Disruptors from their final withdrawal less then an hour earlier. It gave her a certain sense of satisfaction, much like one had after killing a cockroach that surprised you in the middle of the night.

Back in the hanger, Levitan was caught off guard by the sudden change in demeanor of the Ganoxian soldiers, as he had not yet received any word from the Redeemer to hold position, as such the Kilrany infantry continued to prepare to move deeper into the ship. After a moment he chose to simply ask them, “Phantom One, is there a problem? We await your decision on entry.”

-----

Aboard the Redeemer, Vyshinsky looked at the various new contacts that had jumped in near them through the eyepiece he wore, and the first thing to come to mind was, That’s a lot of ships, “What’s the final tally?”

The officer at sensors responded to his question, “Forty, maybe more, hard to get clean signals, we think they must have some sensor drones out, they’re making it hard to get an accurate count.”

His executive officer broke in a moment later, “Forty or a hundred at this point we’re horribly outnumbered. Unless those ships are a lot weaker then they look, which I highly doubt, we might want to consider returning to silent running.”

Vyshinsky grumbled slightly, “Wouldn’t be much good to the Belldandy if we did, and there’s no guarantee that will work, besides, as long as our men are still down on that moon, we aren’t going anywhere, and no one is going near them without our permission.”

Akhmatova raised an eyebrow at her Captain’s bold statement to which he responded with a sly grin, “If you’re going to bluff, show no fear, communications, give me an open channel, go with English.”

His order was acknowledged by the communications officer and after a quick signal; he tapped a key a moment later on the command console as he placed his earpiece in place. Clearing his throat he spoke in the most authoritarian, if still neutral tone he could manage, “This is Captain Alexei Vyshinsky of the Kilrany Imperial Naval vessel Redeemer, assuming this vessel is yours, then perhaps you’d kindly like to explain why we’ve found it here, of all places, infested with highly aggressive creatures? Or perhaps why this lone derelict, so close to this world, would require the involvement of a task force to investigate a simple distress call? But I do not wish to be difficult, a simple discussion should be able to resolve this situation, though I do not see why this cannot be discussed as we discuss it here and now, on our communications channel.”

Akhmatova glanced at him with an intrigued look upon her face as he finished speaking and he released the key and gestured fro the communications officer to cut the signal, which he did. Smiling he looked towards her and responded to her unspoken question, “Firm but not threatening, ideally, if I’m very lucky, they’ll either think I’m over confident, and wonder why, or that I know something they don’t, and still wonder why.”

“Or they might just think you’re a fool and open fire thinking they can swat us out of space.”

“There’s that possibility, yes. Regardless, I don’t intend to simply abandon that wreck, something happened there and I need to know what, Alekseev was right, we need to know what happened on that freighter, if it really was one, and we need to know more about those things that infest it.”

“Oh I understand sir, I’d just rather have a fleet backing us up right now given we’re just a tad outnumbered.”

“Yes, I would too, but by the time we got a signal back home, any conflict here will be long over I suspect.”

“Assuming they are as big a threat as they appear to be.”

“Indeed, and we cannot simply assume otherwise. In any case, let’s see how they react to that message, as I have no intention of sending anyone to their ships, not with the situation as it is.”

-----

The arrival of Æthelcǽg’s ship went unnoticed by the KIN Redeemer, and even more so by Dionisy, who still ran his small Spectre on full silent running mode, relying on his passive array to warn him of danger, which it did. The arrival of the Caldari had been a major incident for this AI, so many vessels dropping in and pounding the area with sensor scans was hard to miss, but he kept his ship close to the inhabited world still, continuing to rely on Kilrany stealth and cloaking systems, whether they were truly doing the job, he could not be sure.

With this latest activity, both Nikolai and Larisa were in the small command center, quietly debating their choices and the potential of the biological life forms found on the derelict craft below.

“Should I wake them?”

“No Nikolai, I don’t believe that would be advisable, let them remain in stasis, I will let you know if I believe their skills are required. For now we will continue to watch, there is little else we could do for the time being. There are too many of those creatures down there if the reports are correct to risk sending our own team in, and it’s far to high profile just now.”

“Unfortunate, hands on time with an alien starship would be useful.”

“Oh I share that sentiment, but I do not believe now is the best time. In this scenario, it is best to let the naval infantry do their job, they will find anything we could, and they have more firepower if something goes wrong.”

Dionisy spoke up just then, “Seems we have some messages going back and forth, playing them now.”

They fell silent then as Dionisy played the messages first from the Caldari, both Captains, then from Lingun, and finally from Vyshinsky, leading Larisa to add at the end, “Most interesting.”

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Pike Rokh Battleship



“So they don’t speak for all the people present, well isn’t that just wonderful?” Davin muttered to himself as the indications of a second message touched his mind through the neural rigging.

The message made him pause for a second. Caldari society was based around military tradition, the state itself coming into being as a product of a bloody war, where they even had to surrender their home planet. Part of this tradition touched upon bravery in the face of near overwhelming odds, something he was relatively certain that the captain of this ‘Redeemer’ was presently facing. Almost grudgingly he grinned, either the captain had hidden reserves, and with the Titan nearby they would be extremely well hidden, or he was trying to stall for time, which was something that he couldn’t allow.

He opened the public channel again, this time transmitting both the audio and a digital avatar, encompassing his features and body language, but leaving out the fact that he was floating naked in a near featureless pod. He thought it best to try to allay some of their suspicions about his intentions and a human face was often easier to get along with than the blank face of a ship, especially an armed, unknown adversary.

“Very well captain, we can discuss this over this channel if you wish. There is one condition to this however, you will remove any boarding parties you have on the ship, either to shuttles or back to your vessel. If this is acceptable we can talk further, if not then it is likely this situation will become slightly, fraught, as it were. If it is any help I give you my word as a captain of the Caldari Navy that we have no aggressive motives here, we are simply here to collect the property of the Ishukone Corporation, and I am sure we would all be much happier if this could be done with no further loss of life on either side.”

Both the Rook class recon ships realised what would be coming next and powered up their sensor arrays, scanning first the freighter itself and then the area immediately around it, before transmitting the data across the command network.


228 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Swift Leviathan Class Titan
Docking Bay



The two Jovian frigates were still stored at the back of the bay, out of bounds to all personnel unless specifically informed otherwise, with a series of automatic weapon systems preventing any violations of this rule.

“We can’t afford to have anyone looking around the ship unaccompanied.” A male voice, careful to avoid the occasional pools of light cast by the Jovian engineers as they carefully checked the systems of the two Wraith frigates.

“Nor can we afford to go to war over this matter. If they push they will be allowed to join one of the teams. Deploying marines rather than an ODT team would be best. The ODT teams can be used, but unaccompanied would be preferable.” This voice was definitely Jovian, it barely sounded human, nothing you could quite put your finger on, but it was different somehow, something that was uncomfortable to listen to.

“Very well. Captain Antilles will not be happy, but she will follow orders. We now rely on these Kilrany to accept that the ship is ours and that we have the right to bring this force with us. Though I would suggest that we don’t explain the whole truth to them.”

“Point taken. We would suggest explaining the Titan as the only reliable means of transporting the remains of the freighter, which has the advantage of being entirely true and attempt to play down the more, unique, nature of this,” The voice paused, then returned with a steely undertone, recognisable even through the Jovian accent, “Regrettable incident. If necessary we can simply eliminate the source of this infection, we have more ships attempting to locate the origin of this species, with success expected sometime within the next forty-two hours. The Directorate is adamant that we should recover the specimens.”

“Very well.” The more human of the two speakers left, the rank pips on his shoulder flashing slightly as he passed out of the darkened Jovian area of the bay, unnoticed by all the workers, heading back to his room.

OOC: Apologies for the slight delay on this, long work schedule yesterday and my niece was over today, she's kind of a loud one and makes it hard to concentrate on writing, heh.

From his position next to the first Assault Droid, which was ten meters down the right corridor of the junction, Lev growled slightly in frustration, but did not transmit it. None of the Infantrymen had yet received word from the Redeemer as to the latest events above them in space, and those who had already entered the freighter were left waiting, and holding their position, something none of them were happy about.

They were arrayed somewhat simply and still near the airlock, formed up along the sides of the corridor in column formation with the Assault Droids slightly in the lead, which were centered in the corridors between infantry sections. As in their earlier trip into the crashed vessel, Svetlana’s section would be taking the right; though this time with heavier support, and she was again right behind Lev with her LRD.

With little else to do for the moment other then look at the traces of their previous engagement, she looked slightly over towards the Assault Droid and watched it for a few moments, taking note of the occasional small movements of its ‘head’ where its primary visual sensors could be found. Much like their own, the armour used on the Assault Droids had in it, an additional material meant to shield them from sensors; at least this was the case for their own, and in the case of the Assault Droids, block out any potential power emissions.

Out of the corner of her eyes she noticed Lev half turn around to face them a few moments later, “With all due respect Sergeant, just what the hell are we waiting for anyway? I mean, I know we wanted to let the Ganoxians in on this, but it’s a big ship, and we’re not going to be moving all that fast, I humbly suggest we move on.”

A grunt of amusement came over their communications a moment later, but the voice that spoke followed it was not their Sergeant’s, and was instead their Lieutenant’s, “It’s a rare moment Lev, but I agree with you, we don’t-”

Svetlana cut him off abruptly as she glanced back forwards past Lev, “Contact front!”

Farther in front of them, where the corridor bent to the left and out of sight deeper into the ship, she caught sight of one of the creatures seemingly leering at them as it hugged up against the left wall just out of sight of the Assault Droid. Without a clear shot though, she could only watch as Lev snapped around to face forward, raising his weapon and seeking out his target, only to then see the creature back away down the corridor and out of sight before Lev could pull the trigger.

She spoke a moment later, “That’s … different, damnit, I think these things might be a little more intelligent then we first gave them credit for.”

A few moments of silence followed as they shifted their positions slightly to let a few near the front have a better angle of fire in anticipation of another full on charge, as they had experience the first time. When this ultimately didn’t occur, their Lieutenant grew annoyed and lacking orders to the contrary, “Right, enough of this, move forward, start the sweep.”

A chorus of acknowledgements followed, and a moment later he quickly addressed Captain Levitan, “Sir, we made contact but it retreated without incident, Blue Platoon is beginning sweep and clear now.”

Oblivious to the situation above them and no reply from the Ganoxian soldier yet, he replied simply, “Acknowledged Blue One, Green Platoon will follow you in shortly.”

As the reconnaissance elements began a slow advance at walking pace step by step with their respective Assault Droids, a regular platoon prepared to enter the airlock behind them with another pair of Assault Droids.

-----

As the moments passed aboard the Redeemer, Alexei patiently awaited the reply from the latest arrivals to their recently discovered system; a reply for which he did not have to wait long. The officer at communications had a few words to add however before he played the message through, “Sir, looks like they’ve added a visual to the message, do you want me to display it?”

Alexei thought for a moment before he replied, “Hmmm, may as well, play it through.”

As the sound began to play properly, the visual signal; displayed where Redeemer’s AI avatar normally would be, was initially seen in half its intended height, promptly a quick and quiet, “Whoops,” from the officer at communications before he had a crewmen adjust the signal to play the visual properly.

As he listened to the message, Alexei frowned slightly, Either this really is their freighter and they have something to hide, or they just want whatever’s on it for themselves plain and simple.

He glanced towards the communications officer, “Let their messages play through as they come in Lieutenant for now, might help speed this along,” as the officer replied with a nod, he tapped the key on the command console and spoke, “Captain Avtar was it? I do not mean to be rude, but you have yet to offer any proof that this freighter belongs to you, and these creatures that have come to inhabit this wreck; however they came to be there, are dangerous and must be destroyed, I will not let this ‘nest’ remain in this system. Surely you can understand our concern that this threat not be permitted ‘anywhere’ near the planet it is already dangerously close to,” here he tried to let a little anger creep into his voice in his last sentence to add the appearance of a personal tie to the lone inhabited planet before he continued again with a more neutral tone, adding a slight pause before he did, “Captain, I have no more desire for any undue friction between our two forces, and I would prefer our first contact to end on a positive note, but I simply cannot comply with your request, this threat will be dealt with quickly and decisively, it will not be allowed to grow. Are you willing to consider other options?”

With that he tapped the key again to mute his side of the open channel and glanced towards Akhmatova, “Too much?”

She shrugged slightly, “Possibly. Might I suggest a possible addition to your ‘bluff’?”

“What might that be?”

“Well, as you know, we don’t have the equipment on board to create any false echoes to create the illusion that there are more ships in the system, but we could send out of the encrypted data link signal, make it look like we were sending information to a fleet around us. Admittedly though such a communications pulse could be taken the wrong way.”

He considered her suggestion a moment, knowing that she referred to the system used to keep a cloaked task force in formation; one ship ran point on active and transmitted a communications burst in all directions that contained all their active sensor returns while the other cloaked ships maintained a formation relative to the active ship. After a moment though he shook his head slightly, “No, I don’t want to risk them mistaking it for a possible attack order, let’s keep it all implied for the moment, as long as we can make them think there’s something more then they’re seeing, we should be alright for the moment.”

After a slight pause he looked back at his communications officer, “Prepare a burst signal to send out to the relay, keep it ready to send if anything goes wrong here, don’t wait for my order, if we have to start shooting, send it.”

The officer nodded his head and set about the task, acknowledging with a simple, “Aye sir.”

"Whats with the communications?" asked Polis, "I can't contact the boarding party."

"Short range communications can't get through, I am increasing power to it!" about a minute later, "okay try it now."

"This is Polis, we have been ordered to stand down by our superiors in compliance with our new visitors in the system, however stupid that may be."

From under the cover of his helmet, Levitan raised an eyebrow in curiousity, So Polis is your name - wait, what? Compliance with the new visitors? Ultimately he chose to speak with Polis first under the assumption that Captain Vyshinsky would contact them if there was a problem, “Understood Polis, though be advised we have received no such orders ourselves, as such, we will be carrying out our original orders until told otherwise.”

Shifting frequency he addressed the pilot in one of the shuttles hovering over the hangar, initially considering that the hangar itself affected their long range communications, “Echo One this is Black One, have there been any transmissions from Redeemer?”

“Negative Black One, we have received no messages.”

“Strange, our friends down here have informed me that they’ve been ordered to stand down in compliance with the recent arrivals to the system, can you tell me anything about what’s going on up there?”

“Hmmm, not too much, this part of the moon is facing more towards the planet at this time and the shuttle’s sensors aren’t powerful enough to give me a clean reading in their direction.”

“Alright, thanks anyway Echo.”

Shrugging his shoulders slightly, he glanced back towards Sergeant Major Polis before shifting his gaze towards the regular infantry platoon that was preparing to transit through the airlock with two more Assault Droids, considering whether or not he could have them hold for the moment. In the end he decided not to chance it and readdressed Echo, “Echo One, contact the Redeemer, inform them what our friends down here have told us and request a situation update.”

“Will do Black One,” after a few moments pause, he continued, though he sounded a little confused himself, “Uh, Black One, Redeemer informs to continue as ordered, but asks how secure is the channel with the Ganoxian.”

“Say again Echo?”

“I think they want to know if we can arrange for secure communications between Redeemer and the Belldandy through you and their men down here.”

“Huh, very well, stand by and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Acknowledged Black One.”

Shifting back to the relay signal with the grounded shuttled, Levitan once again addressed Polis, “Polis, would you like you join us in our shuttle for a moment, we can take a seat there and get out of this vacuum around us, chat a little while we wait.”

If Polis accepted, Levitan would lead him and anyone else who wished to follow from his team to the shuttle, there they would board, and in the closed compartment re-filled with air, be able to speak without using the wireless and open signal.

Polis simply nodded and took five members from his team with him. He instructed Sergeant Wilson to take control of the team. Polis' group followed the Kilrany into their shuttle, resting their rifles on the wall and taking off their helmets as soon as the air filled in. Polis breathed in the sweet air, and sat down at the table, along with the rest of his men.

"So whats going on?

With the Ganoxians in tow, Levitan led them towards the landed Beta type shuttle, using his internal communication set along the way to inform the shuttle what was going on. With ease they all passed through one of the side hatches, which was promptly closed behind them by the flight engineer before moving over to a control panel to refill the compartment with breathable air.

A handful of Kilrany infantry were already inside, but they sat comfortably near the rear-left quarter of the craft, their weapons with them, but resting on their tactical slings. Levitan kept his weapon with him as well, but shifted it on its sling to rest more behind him before pulling off his own helmet coupled with the distinctive sound of the seal on it releasing.

Taking his helmet under his right arm, he chose to get right to the point, “Well here’s where we,” he stopped abruptly when he realized he was speaking in Kilrany and not English, prompting him to first release a sigh, then grumble to himself at his own stupidity. He then raised his hand to signal Polis to wait one moment before giving the flight engineer an order. Quickly he passed through the hatch into the cockpit and returned a moment later, carrying a small PDA like device that the Kilrany delegation had used aboard the Redeemer a few days earlier and handed it to Levitan.

After fiddling with it for a few seconds he spoke again and this time his words were translated a moment later into English, “There we go, sorry about that. Now then, here’s where we stand. I don’t know what’s going on up there above us, not what I deal in frankly, but Captain Vyshinsky wants us to set up a secure means of letting them talk to Captain Lingun. In other words they’d like to use us as a relay, as the Redeemer can send me messages securely, and you can no doubt to the same with your own ship. Do you see any problem setting up a sort of ‘liaison’ relay station here? We can both leave a man in here to do the work, I simply don’t trust an open channel, even if it was short range and confined to this hangar."

"Eh!?" Polis was a little surprised about this request.

So they really don't trust these guys, thats good I don't either he smiled.

"I believe that could be possible, although knowing the Captain he might want to just come down here himself, but I'll inform about this plan."

He pulled out a commlink and configured it to a more secure line, "Ghost team to Bell, Ghost team to Bell. I have something for you that will be very interesting."

"Copy that Ghost, I am directing you to the captain."

Thirty seconds later Captain Lingun chimed in, "This is Lingun, what do you need Sam?"

Polis relayed what he heard from the Kilrany team leader to his superior. "And thats about it sir."

"I see for the time being I cannot come down there to see them myself."

"What? Is it that bad up there?"

"With this many ships I cannot leave the ship unattended, sorry Jilneas."

"No sir, no apologies needed." Jilneas said in the background.

"We'll commit to this plan, but through your commlink,"

"Yes sir," Polis turned to his colleague, "alright we're with ya."

Levitan nodded his head slightly in acknowledgement as Polis went about contacting the Belldandy, he was pleased the Ganoxian thought there wouldn’t be any problems, though he was initially surprised at the suggestion their ship’s Captain would come down to use their relay. The Latter based of his own assumption that whatever was going on up above them in space was serious enough to lead to fighting.

Patiently he waited until Polis addressed him once more a few moments later, activating the little PDA’s translation function only as he spoke to the Ganoxian, “Good, it shouldn’t be hard to set this up, we’ll use this shuttle as our side of the relay,” he turned then to the flight engineer once more, “Inform Echo One that you’ll be handling the relay and let Redeemer know we’ve got a go.”

As the flight engineer did as he was instructed, disappearing through the cockpit hatch, Levitan turned back to Polis, “I don’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on up there? I suppose it was a little unrealistic of us to think we’d find a wreckage that would go unclaimed, but it sounds like things could be quickly getting out of hand.”

After another few moments the flight engineer returned and spoke to Levitan for a moment, who then turned back to Polis again, “Well, this isn’t encouraging, Captain Vyshinsky has a message he’d like to relay to your Captain. He wishes to offer his apologies if his bluff is putting him in a bad position, but he does not trust these new arrivals given the infestation on this freighter, and he certainly doesn’t have enough trust in them to risk boarding one of their vessels given their numbers. He would like to know Linguns opinion on the matter, since you’ve all had more experience in such things, he’s concerned he might be acting a little two aggressively in front of an unknown alien species.”

The Infantry Captain paused a moment before shaking his head slightly, “We’ll, that’s the extent of this relay message, sounds like I should have my men prepare to withdraw, if things go bad up there, I don’t want my men caught in the bowels of this blasted wreck,”

Polis set his commlink on the table, changing the setting to speaker mode. On the bridge of the Belldandy, Captain Lingun sat back in his chair in the TacDis, listening to the relay message. He leaned forward, trying to think of something to say.

"There is no need for apologies, I also express concern on why such a large force is needed to reclaim a freighter and why such creature have come to reside in it. You are completely within your jurisdiction to protect this underdeveloped planet from foreign threats, I commend you on this.

Your concern about boarding the new ship is justified, I suggest we meet with them on the same island our two parties met on."

Polis leaned back and put both his hands behind his head, "I'd say we just nuke it!"

...lots of communication between the non-being ships...

‘Does it concern us?’

...they are still unaware of it, and their bickering should supply enough time to begin the hunt...

Cat-slit eyes closed for a moment, the red iris flecked with white vanishing from sight for a moment as the helmet was placed over Æthelcǽg’s head. The ornate faceplate’s eyelids snapped open to reveal opaque lenses as the Onarrán opened his eyes. The helmet was more a work of art than anything, showing the features of a laughing sprite whose features changed from moment to moment.

...your descent pod is prepared, Honoured One, we are in position and ready for fall...

‘Thank you hob, you have found a suitable point of entry?’

...visual magnification has shown the method used by the non-beings, airlocks open fairly simply. Scans suggest an appropriate entry point a reasonable distance from the others...

The slender being moved back through the ship and slid into the odourless gel that filled the passenger section of the descent pod. Images appeared before his eyes of predicted trajectory, target location and information of the surrounding area. The hob whispered information into his ear as it split itself, both controlling ship and remaining with the Rose. The pod slid out of its parent’s vehicle’s cloaking systems with its own equipment running as it began the descent.

Planet fall was very rapid and it was only a few moments before the small object’s gravatic engines whirred into action to halt the pod just above the downed freighter some distance from the airlock used by the non-beings. The Onarrán slid out of the descent pod, hunting rig preventing any body heat from escaping, the inertial dampening gel providing a thin odourless layer over the armour and active camouflage hiding the ornate bejewelled red and white hunting rig.

He walked over to the airlock located by the hob and spent a moment examining the unfamiliar entry system so alien to the designs of the Boundless Realm. Less than a minute later Æthelcǽg was inside the ship, starlight-bladed spear held lightly in his right hand as he began the hunt.

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Pike Rokh Battleship



“Shit!” Davin muttered as he received the latest message. He hadn’t understood the subtext in the first few messages, the computer leeching all the human tones from the message, but the wording on this message had been much less imprecise, clearly stating their interest in the planet nearby. Though the sensor power of the two Rooks put it to rest quickly, their initial in-system scans had revealed no satellites around the planet, odd for any space going race and the closer scans revealed no evidence of manufacturing facilities capable of producing any of the ships that were above the planet.

He was about to open the channel again when a private message came through, tagged as originating in-system, Commodore Ugai transmitting. He opened the video file, watched it and absorbed his latest orders.

“Prove the ship belongs to us? We are the ones pointing hundreds of weapon barrels around in deep-space.” Davin grinned to himself, even if the new orders were slightly odd he would get some lee-way, though it was probably best not to needlessly threaten the newcomers.

He opened the public channel again and started to transmit,

“Captain Davin actually sir, Avtar is the captain who first addressed you. Right, let’s cut the crap shall we? The planet hanging below us belongs to neither of us. We didn’t know it was here, if we had then the freighter wouldn’t be here. But it hasn’t shown any signs of serious spaceflight attempts, so it isn’t directly related to you. The ‘creatures’ as you call them are part of a series of biological specimens that were en-route to a lab system. We have come to retrieve both our ship and the specimens. The fleet here is just the escort for the Titan we have, which we brought so that we could transport the Mayfair if we needed to, which from the looks of it we do. There is little I can do to prove ownership of the Mayfair, the best idea I can come up with it sending you the blueprints of the area immediately around the docking bay and instructions for some of the basic structures in the bay itself. Would that be acceptable to you?”

He closed the channel; he hoped the alien captains would begin to calm down; Ugai had been relatively specific in parts of his sentiments. They would either agree or the Caldari would be forced to destroy the freighter with everyone and everything still onboard.

Unfortunately there were no tables within the shuttle for Polis to place the commlink, however there were an inordinate number of rather simply but reasonably comfortable seats, as the shuttle was optimized to carry as many KINI as possible. Regardless, Levitan listened to the message passively as it was translated through the little PDA he had borrowed while the flight engineer used a feature in his own helmet to record the message and relay it to the shuttle cockpit, where they in turn transmitted up to the Redeemer.

As they awaited an inevitable reply from Vyshinsky, Levitan chuckled lightly at Polis’ statement, “If only it was that simple no?” he then added a slightly sarcastic tone, “But then again, we’d miss out on the fun in systematically clearing out this decrepit old scow infested with freakish predatory creatures in an enclosed environment.”

After a slight pause where he added an equally sarcastic smile to finish his last sentence, he sighed and took on a more neutral tone and visage, “Perhaps an orbital strike would be more efficient and less risky, but that’s not my call, though holding up for moment is.”

Slipping on his helmet for a moment, he used the internal communication system to address all his forces on the moon, “Blue Platoon and Green Platoon, you are to hold position and prepare to withdraw from the interior, there have been some developments above us and we may have to leave quickly.”

As he spoke privately, the flight engineer made a gesture with his hand and he tossed the PDA lightly towards the soldier who caught it deftly, then addressed Polis, “I have a reply from Captain Vyshinsky. He appreciates your kind words Captain Lingun, he’s however concerned this might turn into a shooting match, and he’s not too thrilled with that idea. Is it safe to assume you’d never had any contact with either this Ishukone Corporation or the Caldari?”

-----

Down on one knee, Svetlana held a neutral expression under the cover of her helmet as she unleashed a two second long burst of fire from her LRD, which she rested in her shoulder as she fired past Lev who stood next to her on her right against the wall. To her left the Assault Droid held a commanding position in the center of the corridor while an almost mirror image was seen on the other side of the corridor by the lead element of the second section with them.

Initially dimly lit, the corridor they were in was lit up brightly in a flurry of weapons fire as their energy-based weapons filled the air with their distinctive green flashes, each green bolt of energy traveling at superluminal speed towards their targets. A mere thirty meters from the junction they had first spotted one of the creatures from, they found themselves charged once more by just over a dozen of the creatures.

It was however the Assault Droids that was truly filling the corridor with fire; on its right arm it held a light weapons module, which contained a pair of LRDs one above the other, while on the left arm, it had a medium weapons module that contained a single MPATD. Laying down a base of fire, it mercilessly fired off one LRD for three seconds before switching to the second for three seconds in a seemingly never-ending stream of fire it directed with its right arm in a sweep back and forth through confined space. It was somewhat more judicious with the left arm however, firing the anti-armour MPATD at specific targets; had Svetlana not been occupied firing her own weapon, she would have laughed at the sight of one creature exploding brilliantly when struck by one of the lone, heavier pulses.

Less then fifteen seconds after it had begun, the engagement was over, and not a single creature had come within twenty meters of their position in the corridor. Had it not been for the confined spaces and the fact that there was only one avenue of approach, it would have clearly been a more dangerous encounter, at it was, the creatures’ blood lay over the floor among their corpses and the walls were covered with scorch marks.

Their Sergeant was about to give to order to advance once more but Captain Levitan cut him off, prompting him instead to curse a moment later, “For the love of … right, you heard the Captain, we hold here.”

Svetlana sighed slightly in annoyance and heard a few others grumble over their section frequency, but ultimately little more was actually said as they stood their ground within sight of the junction.

-----

“Upping the stakes now aren’t they.”

Vyshinsky released a sigh, but not because of Akhmatova’s rhetorical question, “That they are.”

“Perhaps we should request assistance.”

He knew she was really only talking to herself, but he replied to it anyway with as slight nod of his head, “No, it would take a good, what, half hour?” the officer at communications held his hand up and wavered it in a so-so manner in reply when Alexei glanced at him, “I don’t think we can stall that long, unless we can lead them to believe we are willing to talk about the situation, perhaps do as Lingun suggests, meet on that island, that will take time to carry out.”

“It may be the best option, we can get the signal out no problem, unless they were between us and the relay, and they’re not, they wont see it.”

Again Vyshinsky sighed, “I don’t want to escalate this, I really don’t.”

“They’re not leaving us any option sir.”

“The Empress wont be pleased if we start a war out here over a crashed freighter. Perhaps we’re sticking our noses in where it doesn’t belong.”

“Or perhaps we’re being realistically skeptical of the intent of an alien species.”

The Kilrany Captain thought about his options for a few moments, carefully weighing them not happy with a single one thus far. Finally after several seconds he looked towards the officer at communications, “Send the signal.”

“Yes sir.”

Reaching forward he tapped the key and addressed the alien task force, returning to a neutral tone, “Apologies Captain, we’ve had to deal with so many new arrivals here lately that sometimes the names run together. While I admire your directness, your assumption is incorrect, you have overlooked something of critical importance, I did not say this system belonged to us, and I would not make such a claim. The Kilrany Empire does not go about threatening alien species and absorbing them as one might infer we do by our chosen title, we have had many protectorates over many millennia, and we have defended them all zealously, as our honour demands. But I do not take offense to your harsh words, you could not know that, we have never met before, a sad thing, but all together unfortunately common.”

He paused slightly to take a breath, and while he did the Lieutenant at communications gestured to one of his crewmen after arranging the signal Vyshinsky had ordered. Promptly a highly directed communications pulse shot out from one of the arrays on the ship to a relay a few systems back in the direction they had originally come, away from both the Belldandy and the Caldari.

He continued, “In the past four days we’ve met three new alien species in this system Captain, including your own, just because we have chosen not to directly influence matters on the world below or allow our presence here to be seen fully, do not think we haven’t been watching it, and that what you see is all that is here.”

He let a weary sort of sigh transmit then, “But I can do no more to prove that as the situation stands any more then you can your intent, at least not from here. I believe I was wrong to think we could resolve this through this impersonal means of communications; perhaps a face-to-face meeting is indeed required. There is a neutral location we have used in the past for such a thing; a small isolated island on the world below has proven ideal, if you are agreeable to this, then I suggest we meet there in fifteen minutes, one transport each, small escort, and we resolve this peacefully. I will additional honour your request to have my forces on the moon withdraw to their shuttles.”

He tapped the key and sighed again, content at least that nothing he said was exactly a lie, and if the Caldari accepted the offer, he would have the coordinates sent.

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Pike Rokh Battleship



Where is the money? Was an old Caldari saying, especially relating to investigations of any kind. Put more simply it meant; see who would get the most out of any deal, in this case the meeting down on the planet. While the delay could give the aliens time to call in reinforcements, it was also likely that if they were reasonable then a peaceful solution could be found. Ashley gave up, he would have to ask the others what they thought would be best.

“What do you think we should do?” Davin asked over the ship-net.

Rather predictably captain Avtar was the first person to speak up,
“Open fire. We outnumber them, it is our ship and they have no right to it.”

“Ieris, if you don’t start to think before you speak then you are going to die soon. If they don’t kill you I will.” Captain Garhoune Vyne spoke, a deep voice even over the network, prompting several awkward grins. The captain of the Phoenix class dreadnaught had a formidable reputation already, someone not to be irritated and he had a well known dislike for corporate pilots, a relatively unique trait among the Caldari.

“The time we wait will only allow the aliens to dig in further. This would not be wise.” Captain Maryl of the Wyvern class carrier, Counterguard, said.

“No however we can’t drop a force in without the Kilrany knowing and it is unlikely that they will take kindly to it.” Davin replied, having already weighed up the downsides to that idea.

“I have just received my orders gentlemen. We are to agree to their request. We will dispatch a single shuttle to the surface. Captain Davin, you are to return and dock. You will be out spokesperson. We will also send marines with you in case the situation deteriorates.” The voice of the Swift’s captain, Viola Antilles, put an end to the discussion.

It took them eight minutes to load up the shuttle and launch it, the twin engine shuttle taking only five minutes to reach the meeting point, following the directions from the Kilrany.

The first out of the ship when it touched down were the marines. They were still dressed in their ship-board armour, matt black trousers and a shirt. Over that they wore their armour, the AMLBV, or armoured modular load bearing vest. The base layer was a single piece of hardened ceramic, shaped to the individual, with slots for three inserts to provide extra protection, which were all filled in this case. The chest rig had a pair of straps going over the shoulders and a pair of straps on each side under the arms of the operative, holding another hardened ceramic plate on the persons back. The belt was connected to both the vest itself and a pair of fibre drop-down thigh pads that held a series of equipment seals. In addition to these armour components all the marines had opted to have the shoulder pads and both knee and elbow protection.

Unusually for the marines they were all wearing the APCIBH, or advanced protection computer integrated battle helmet, completely enclosing their head and neck with a transparent ballistic face shield and gas mask, with a visor over their eyes, showing them the display from their battle computers, providing both overlays and vision enhancement modes.

The weapons and equipment they carried were also identical. On their right leg they had a pair of variable fused smoke grenades resting on the front of their thigh, with a NY pistol in a holster on the side. Their left leg held a pair of magazines for the pistol and a small pouch for their battle computers. Their belt held a pair of fragmentation grenade on the right and a knife in an angled scabbard. Their abdomen armour had six magazine pouches, arranged in a double layer pattern, each pouch holding one of the forty-two round magazines for their M12 rifles. On their upper chests they had another four magazine pouches, with an identcard in a transparent holder on their left and a small double bladed knife next to it. They all had a personal Medikit on their right hip and a general pouch on their left, apart from the squad medic, who had attached a full size trauma med-kit to the rear of his armour.

All the marines were carrying full-size M12 AMAWS rifles with reflex sights, loaded with a even mix of armour piercing, full metal jacket and jacketed hollow point rounds, not that they expected trouble, just that they thought it better to be ready and equipped than being surprised by the Kilrany.

As soon as the marines had decided the area was secure Captain Davin walked out of the shuttle, he was dressed in a set of simple black coveralls, no identifying rank tabs on his uniform, looking remarkably pale in the sunlight, his neural jacks visible under his short blonde hair and at both his temples and the base of his skull.

Now they were just waiting for the Kilrany to turn up.

Polis' reacted in surprise at the Kilrany's comment, for the Belldandy did have a few 30 mt nuclear warheads in its armory, but he let it slide. Overhearing the message he answered immediately for Lingun, "I can tell you we have never even heard of them."

"Thanks for answering for me Sam..."

"Hey we haven't, have we?"

"Yes...but there is things that you don't know, just sit there and shut up. I heard that nuke comment."

"Shit!"

"Excuse my Sargent Major here, no my people have not made contact with them before. This is our first time as is yours."

"Captain!" Jilneas was heard in the background.

"Excuse me."

Lingun turned his chair towards Jilneas, "What is it?"

Jilneas played the message Vyshinsky sent on Lingun's TacDis, he leaned back in his chair lost in thought. He immediately got up and headed out the bridge, "Prepare an escort for me, as you always want one to go with me." he smiled.

"Wait? You're going down there?"

"Yes."

"Alright."

Waiting at the island, Lingun enjoyed the nice sea breeze of the island once again. The weather was nice like before, and he smiled as the cool air touched his skin. The salty smell reminded him of his days in the Severail Naval Academy. Suddenly he saw a small ship land near the spot the Kilrany landed last time. The marines piling out, not noticing him at the beach. "Looks like I have to take my leave."

He walked away from the beach and towards the meeting area.

Vyshinsky had to consciously refrain from lowering his head slightly and putting his hand upon his forehead in annoyance; not so much with the Caldari, though they were partially to blame in his mind. He hadn’t wanted to call for assistance and risk an engagement, assuming of course his command received the message and were able to respond.

Keeping up a commanding air within his command center, he turned to the Lieutenant at communications, “Send the signal to infantry, tell them to stand down and return to the hangar.”

“Yes sir.”

Turning then to face Akhmatova, he didn’t even need to speak, she already knew his orders and spoke before he could, “I’ll go get ready now sir.”

He nodded his head, “You know how I want this to proceed, do whatever you feel is nessesary.”

“Yes sir.”

-----

Roughly nine minutes, later his executive officer had jogged the distance down the length of the ship towards the starboard hangar, briefly avoiding a pair of Minotaur droids and taking a short stop at an armoury. Suiting up quickly in a KINI uniform and armour, she left out only some of the heavier equipment, such as tactical vest, assault bag, or a heavier firearm then her pistol.

Much like before with the meeting on the island with Lingun, she met with Lieutenant Peter Levitan, who despite his name shared no immediate relation with Captain Levitan on the freighter below. Only half a platoon would go down with her this time in the Beta type shuttle, as they did not wish to appear overtly threatening given their current situation with the Caldari.

Following similar procedures as with the earlier shuttle departure, it was not long before the Beta went shooting out from within the hangar and down towards their intended destination, and much like the first meeting on the island, the shuttle did not attempt to use its cloaking device nor did it carry a module. With a minute to go before the meeting was scheduled to begin, the Beta came in towards the beach as before on this ten square kilometer island.

While they had chosen to take only two sections of infantry with them, they ultimately still had a pair of Assault Droids in the shuttle’s stern compartment, and out of their paranoia, made use of them once more. Passing in through the rear hatch the flight engineer addressed the two machines, “Close in perimeter security, engagement condition green, potential hostilities.”

Their deep, synthesized voices boomed around him, “Acknowledged.”

Similar to the threat condition levels on a KIN warship, the engagement conditions for Kilrany combat droids was fairly straightforward and had three primary levels. Green was hold fire and engage only if ordered, yellow was similar, though it included the freedom to engage any target that became hostile, and red was equally simple, often jokingly described as, ‘kill everything that isn’t us’.

Just before the shuttle set down, it released the two Assault Droids from their restraints and they fell freely to the beach below where they thumped slightly more lightly then their actual weight would have called for. Quickly they moved out from underneath the shuttle and took up positions close by and the transport landed some seventy meters from the Caldari where the two infantry sections exited cautiously from the hatches on either side.

Commander Akhmatova exited last and took several long strides out from the hatch before coming to a halt with Lieutenant Levitan as her side. After a quick glance around her, she again reminded of the Russkyan joke she had once heard in regards to the KINI, and their habit to look a lot like machines when fully outfitted as they all were.

At nearly two meters tall, she blended well, height-wise, with the other faceless throng of infantrymen around her, though she was clearly less heavily equipped. Levitan followed her closely, tightly gripping his Carbine as she moved to a position halfway between her shuttle and the Caldari, sending a greeting nod of her head towards Lingun.

Here she waited for them come the rest of the distance while they were watched closely by the remaining infantry by the shuttle, the shuttle’s gunner crew, and the two Assault Droids.

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Planet Surface


The two robots that fell to the surface raised eyebrows throughout the marines that were already located on the beach, the marines hadn’t come equipped for damaging anything that heavily armoured, instead they were relying on either the Kilrany not bringing anything to heavy or if the faeces hit the air circulator then precision strikes from one of the orbiting dreadnaughts.

“If they are the normal troops then I reckon we could just let them clear out the freighter.” A voice said over the marine’s squad network, prompting nervous grins from most of the marines present.

The squad were much happier when the shuttle landed and even happier after that when human figures approached, even if they were dressed in combat clothing reminiscent of their own. As the infantry sections opposite them watched, one of the squad raised his hand in greeting, more as a joke than anything else, right hand still firmly holding the weapons pistol-grip, but allowing the weight to be carried by the sling across his body. He waved slowly a couple of times before lowering his hand again.

“Idiot. That could have been unwise, or even a threat in their culture.” The sergeant’s voice carried no hint of the mild amusement that he felt, he knew that one of the squad would do something like that, so he might as well have it over and done with early on in the mission.

On the other side of the shuttle, the lone figure of Lingun was watched, by both a pair of marines, and the captain of the shuttle, who was using his sensors to scan the area around the meeting ground.

Captain Davin crossed to the mid-ground between the two ships, his arms held out at waist height, hands open to show he wasn’t carrying any weapons. He waited until he reached the Kilrany commander before introducing himself,

“Captain Davin ma’am. Hope you had a pleasant trip down here.” There was a slight trace of irony in his voice, it was unlikely that either of them were incredibly happy to be down here on the planet he thought, there was too much of a chance of a double cross. He extended his hand slowly, trying to ensure that neither the woman opposite him or her escorts could interpret the gesture as hostile.

Akhmatova smiled in amusement from underneath the cover of her helmet at the Caldari soldier who waved at them, and probably would have laughed had she been privy to the scolding given him by their Sergeant. A similar reaction was had by the other Kilrany soldiers on the ground as well who saw it, but none of them returned it, still a little on edge because of the sheer number of Caldari ships they knew were above them in space.

Standing next to Akhmatova, Levitan slowly scanned his head around the area, mostly focusing on the Caldari Marines who stood guard nearby. He was particularly interested in the fact that they didn’t show up on his infrared display setting, though this didn’t surprise him greatly, as their own uniforms did the same.

Intrigued by the pale face of Captain Davin, Akhmatova extended her own hand out and accepted the handshake with a firm, but not crushing grip. Her reply was translated by the helmet from her Kilrany into English and transmitted with a slightly noticeable distortion, clearly indicating it was in fact a re-transmission, “Greetings Captain Davin, I am Commander Akhmatova, Captain Vyshinsky’s executive officer. The trip was uneventful.”

She paused for a moment as she withdrew her hand and held it behind her back as she took up a seemingly relaxed stance, “Well Captain, shall we get straight to the matter at hand? How can we avoid an ugly situation given we both clearly have different objectives in mind. Though I should mention we have no desire to keep your freighter from you, these creatures however are of grave concern to us.”

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Planet Surface



“So, they aren’t that friendly then.” The marine who had waved muttered, more to himself than anyone else. He went back to watching the figures opposite, they seemed slightly ill at ease, but not overly so and were acting professionally, which was reassuring.

The English still sounded slightly odd to Davin, though he had a translation chip in one of the quick-jack sockets in his skull, allowing him to sub-consciously translate the language and speak it, though not with an exact understanding of the words themselves.

“Though the aims are different compatible they should will be. Creatures of interest to Caldari. What is interest of Kilrany?”

The speech was delivered in a fully human voice, though the spacing between the words was almost identical, a slight pause as the chip attempted to convert the Caldari desires into English words, it wasn’t helped that English hadn’t been spoken among the Caldari for several centuries.

Had the Kilrany Imperial Naval Infantrymen been aware or the Caldari Marine’s thoughts on their demeanor, they would have appreciated the thought about their apparent professionalism and most likely returned it in kind. They would however have only grudgingly accepted that they were perhaps not being as friendly as they could have, but at that point, one would likely have commented on the fact that they weren’t Russkyans; who were known to be able to joke about anything, and that for them, when heavily outnumbered by a potentially hostile force, friendliness was a rare commodity.

Truly however it was not out of contempt that the Kilrany made no overt signs of friendship towards the Caldari, for unlike their initial encounter with the Belldandy, their current situation was far more stressful. Thought without knowing what the Caldari were thinking, the Kilrany infantrymen could only stand at their assigned positions and keep watch.

Both Akhmatova and Levitan were taken completely off guard by the different manner of speech in Davin’s reply, prompting both to raise an eyebrow from under the cover of their helmets. Currently set for internal and not broadcasting, Levitan was free to speak his mind, “What the hell was that?”

The Commander on the other hand remained silent for a moment, picking apart the words the Caldari had used and trying to piece together what she figured he had meant to say. After a few more moments of silence, she replied, “What is our interest in these creatures? Well, let’s just say that we Kilrany have an extreme distaste for biological weapons of any kind, and one could consider these ‘things’ much in that light. They are hostile and clearly dangerous to have been able to seemingly so thoroughly infest the freighter, plus their proximity to this world it not something we are fond of, shall we say. It is our desire to exterminate them, and if we can do this without destroying your freighter, all the better.”

Lingun finally came near the meeting place, walking up to where Captain Davin and Commander Akhmatova. "Sorry I'm late, I took the scenic route. Well, anyways, I am James Lingun, Captain of the GAS Belldandy, GSF Exploratory Fleet." he saluted.

As Lingun approached, Akhmatova once more nodded her head in acknowledgement of his presence and much like Captain Levitan within the freighter; she did not return his salute for much the same reasons. Choosing to play intermediary for the moment she addressed them, and gestured to them both, respectively, “Captain Lingun, welcome, please meet Captain Davin, Captain Davin, Captain Lingun.”

She couldn’t help feel a sense of redundancy as she finished, but she knew the introductions were more then necessary given the situation. After another moment she continued, “Captain Lingun here also dropped in on use here in this system rather unexpectedly, we chose this island for that meeting as well, it seemed appropriate. It is our hope that this meeting goes as well as the last.”

Briefly she mentally cursed the impersonal nature of the armour she wore, in particular the helmet that concealed all her facial features, for while it had its uses, for this moment it prevented her from subtly letting Lingun know she’d prefer it if he didn’t let on that they weren’t being entirely truthful about their presence in the system. As it was, she couldn’t do that without being obvious, so she merely added one more thing, “I should note though, Caldari English appears to be a little different then our own.”

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Planet Surface



The pause before the response surprised Captain Davin slightly, not understanding the inherent errors in the translation that the data chips were providing. For ease of communication the ship-board translation software would have been best, having been designed though years of trial and error, with the expertise of members of all five empires adding to its abilities.

“Biological weapons not they are. Hostile they are, belligerent changelessly. Understanding mistake made. Destruction them appropriate, convenient both us. We desire samples of, testing use. Accomplice we become?”

He looked around when Lingun addressed them; he didn’t salute in return, but did respond.

“Greetings captain.”

When Akhmatova mentioned the difference between the Kilrany English and Caldari English she prompted a question from Davin.

“Original talk easy more?” He asked, in both types of communication, the pod translators and the quick-jack implants, the actual translation was done without any conscious effort, so the different wording and sentence structure had gone unnoticed.

There was a considerably longer pause from Akhmatova at Davin's latest choice in words, and this time she had a much more difficult go at figuring out the intent in them. Perhaps in writen form she could have pieced them together and worked it out somewhat quicker, but spoken as they were, she only had one go at it without a perfect memory; the added distraction of introducing Lingun did not help in this regard either.

Davin's question a moment later however sparked her memory of the earlier conversations she was witness to aboard the Redeemer, and realizing there had been a difference, she said as much, "Now that you mention it, yes, the first conversations had been much easier, here your words are a little less ... clear, shall we say. Though I believe I can still answer some of your last question, extermination of these creatures would be mutually benificial, though I do understand your desire to take samples for study."

"Ah Captain Davin, its a pleasure to meet you. I see the meeting has started, so I'll just observe for now."

Lingun was initially confused as to why Davin was speaking in such a way, was his translator malfunctioning or is this how they really talk like. Lingun stayed quiet as his thoughts might insult their intelligence, until Akhmatova. Thank god she said something.

"Yes I believe it would be better," adding to Akhmatova's reply. He returned to his corner, observing the meeting once again, speaking only when spoken too.

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Planet Surface



At Akhmatovas response Davin held up a hand, palm held outward, the Caldari gesture for ‘wait a moment’. With his other hand he removed the small communicator from his belt.

“Davin to shuttle, do you read me? Over.” He spoke quietly, but since he was speaking Caldari he deemed it unlikely to matter if either of the accompanying captains heard him.

“Shuttle here, reading you five for five. What can we do for you captain?” Over.”

“Send one of the marines over here, without his rifle. Then connect my personal communicator directly to the pod translation systems, feeding it back to the marine’s external speakers. Over.”

“Will do. Out.”

One of the marines next to the shuttle slowly removed his rifle, the gestures deliberately made as unsuspicious and unthreatening as possible. As soon as he handed the rifle to one of his squad mates he began to approach the smaller meeting between the Caldari and Kilrany shuttles. As the captain had he held his arms out at waist level, his palms open, calmly walking towards the group.

Captain Devin spoke up again,
“Translation changed system. Attack marine not, me speak he.”

As the marine arrived Davin tried his new communication system, speaking quietly into his personal communicator, but hearing a computer generated voice emerging from the external speakers of the marine’s helmet.

“I hope this is better, I apologise for the mistake, English hasn’t been spoken for several hundred years, so updating the translation chips wasn’t a high priority. Since it appears that we all have compatible aims I suggest an alliance of sorts. We can provide manpower and equipment for the assault on the freighter, so long as you will allow us to remove several live samples, though this time they will be stored more securely. What do you think?”

Once more Akhmatova acknowledged Captain Lingun with a nod of her head, as was customary for the Kilrany, tending to be people of few words the majority of the time. She was tempted to re-assure the Ganoxian that his presence was desired, and his opinion important to the Kilrany, but she could not think of an adequate choice of words to convey it without potentially giving away their full intent in this system, for right now, appearances were everything.

Next to Akhmatova, Levitan made note of the gesture Davin used, the age old, wordless signal to wait, it led him to wonder just how common such things were given among the myriad of races given how suspiciously common humans seemed to be. The Kilrany Lieutenant continued to watch the Caldari Captain as he spoke, and though he was close enough for his helmet to adjust the audio to an understandable level, it was all gibberish to him anyway.

His gaze was drawn from Davin moments later by the movement of the Caldari Marine near the shuttle, but it elicited no undue reaction for the Kilrany infantry. While there was little doubt they were tense, they were not so on edge as to snap their weapons up at every little movement from their counterparts across the stretch of beach from them, as such while the Marines were watches closely, there were no hostile reactions from the Kilrany. Additionally, they hardly felt they could complain about the approaching Marine given that they had sent along one of their own with Akhmatova in the first place, and he was armed.

By this point, when it was clear that Davin hat not intentionally been speaking in that manner, and he addressed them once more to ensure they didn’t consider the approaching Marine a threat, Akhmatova couldn’t help but smile in amusement under the cover of her helmet. Much like their initial meeting with Captain Lingun, the Kilrany slowly warmed up to the Caldari, but their growing more friendly demeanor, did not change their continued lack of trust.

As he spoke again, she listened quietly, any trace of amusement gone now that they were back to more serious matters, and when she replied, her tone continued to be neutral, “No apologies necessary Captain, English has not been in use by our people in some time either, it’s understandable, and yes, it is much easier to understand you now.”

She paused a moment to take a breath, “It’s good to hear you say that Captain, our primary concern lie in these creatures, and though I think the term ‘alliance’, is perhaps a little grandiose for what a pair of military commanders in the field could create, we would have no objection to working together to remove this threat. I will say this however, if you wish to take a live specimen, then you do so at your own risk, we will not order our men to try and take one of these things alive, I would no more order this then I would order them to try and take a-,” abruptly she cleared her throat, then continued, “to try and take any predatory animal alive.”

Another breath and she went on, “But do not misunderstand me, while we will not help in that regard, we will not hinder you either, as long as they are removed; one way or another, from this system, then you may do as you are willing to risk with them. You and your men however may quickly change your minds on this when you see these things first hand, and their charging you in a confined space.”

Noticing the improvement in Davin's speech, Lingun (http://s13.photobucket.com/albums/a287/GeneralZhukov3333/?action=view&current=CaptainLingun.jpg) solemnly nodded with approval. He noticed Ahkmatova's nod towards him feeling that he was really needed here, he answered with his own nod. After hearing her reply Lingun added, "I will have to agree with my counterpart here, my men will only deal with these creatures with lethal force. I will not endanger them with the capturing of these creatures, but if we so find one being neutralized but not entirely dead, we will call your men to the location. Again if said specimen attacks it will be met with lethal force. Thats all I can give you."

234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Planet Surface



“Grandiose? I am afraid that that word is not in the language banks. My best estimation would be that she doesn’t feel that she has sufficient rank to agree to a permanent alliance. You may want to reword your last statement.” The voice came through the small communicator that Davin was holding, prompting him to rethink his sentence.

“I meant that we would work together for this objective. The retrieval of a specimen is considered too dangerous for any organic forces, our initial plan called for two insertion points to be secured, one for conventional marines and the other for a specialised drone retrieval unit. If you agree to us working together would you object to us landing our forces in the docking bay for the military commanders to discuss the details of the operation between themselves? On the ground as it were.”


234 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Titan Docking Bay



The docking bay had quickly become a hive of activity, a full marine boarding company preparing for dispatch. The nature of the freighters docking bay had effectively ruled out the more exotic types of insertion, and with remaining space inside the bay believed to be at a premium it had been decided that they would be dropped in with one of the smaller vessels available, the TH-84 Stork, just over five metres high and seven metres long, it was the smallest vessel designed to carry troops through deep space. Its modular design allowed it to carry several different loads; most of the 84’s were carrying troop transport containers, though several reactors systems were being carried, along with some AI transports.

The marines were easily spotted among the crew members assisting with the loading, most were in similar sleeves, based on Nordic stock, quite tall, blonde hair and uniformly among them all blue eyes. But closer to them, when they didn’t have their helmets on at least, you could easily tell them apart, on their right cheek, just below their eye they all had a tattoo, their name, number and blood type were all marked on. Below their left eye they had their rank tattoo, the plain black markings standing out against their pale flesh. At the base of their skull they all had a barcode, the markings allowing instant battlefield readouts if they were injured. They were all grown in nearly identical maturation tubes, steroid grown musculature covering reinforced bones, toughened ligaments and enhanced nerve axons and larger, more advanced mylineated sheaths.

The pilots were all drawn from the marine ranks; most had served with the same unit for years, albeit sometimes in different sleeves, so the relationship between the pilots and the squads they regularly transported was usually extremely friendly.

“Hey fly-boy, your flying improved yet?” A call from one of the corporals in the shock infantry, his M3 rifle dangling from one hand.

“Only in so far as your shooting abilities have, what is this? Your seventh sleeve in how many years?” The reply came back, even as the pilot worked through the pre-flight checks. The meeting on the ground had been transmitted back to the Titan, where it had been decided to prepare for the landing; to that end the three hundred and thirty five human members and the twenty automated combat units had begun their loading, getting ready to land on the freighter.

Green blood hissed as it melted the passageway floor. The dissected bodies of half a dozen of the space-coloured creatures lay spread across the section of corridor with the green liquid pooled about them, the cuts through their bodies almost surgically precise. In the middle of the carnage a short spear hovered, acidic blood falling through the glimmering blade as if it was not there.

“Hob, drop the veil and vent a small quantity of heat. This is not sport.”

An armoured hand appeared, holding the spear. Like water falling off an object the cloaking devices shut down to reveal the Onarrán in his hunting rig. The sprite-faced helmet appeared to possess an expression of faint disgust. Tiny vents opened across the ridged suit and vented out a portion of the accumulated body heat into the air. Nowhere on the armour was there any sign of the slightest damage or even blood-spatter.

“Find me more.”

...vibrations through the ship’s walls suggest additional leahtorlic’déathbǽrlic’nicor a distance to your left...

The figure moved on as his rig’s vents ceased bleeding heat. Now fully visible there was perhaps a small chance of a challenge.

A pleasant surprise, assuming he’s not lying, or his commanders aren’t lying, but I suppose he’s likely thinking the same of us, Commander Akhmatova was genuinely pleased with what she considered to be an unexpected development. Mostly out of their own natural paranoia and mistrust of strangers, she had expected their meeting down here on the beach to be far less productive and laced with either subtle or even blatant threats in regards to the freighter, ownership, and what would be done with it.

She was also pleased to hear Lingun mirror her sentiments, and made a mental note to thank the Ganoxian Captain later; whether it was his true feelings on the matter or merely an attempt to add subtle pressure to the Caldari to keep things peaceful, she didn’t know, nor did she care just then. Despite the militant nature of Kilrany culture, and their self proclaimed title of Empire, they were not a people who sought to rule through force, nor did they have any great desire to be a galactic superpower, thus a peaceful conclusion to the negotiation was their current preference.

Unaware of the private conversation Davin had in regards to terminology, she was somewhat confused when he apparently felt the need to clarify his original statement given she thought she had done so already. Regardless of this, she nodded her head slightly to emphasis her response, “Then I believe we have an agreement Captain Davin. I will see to it that our infantrymen already upon the moon will be informed that you are sending a team as well.”

She took a few moments then to switch her communications set from external to internal and raised the shuttle, giving them a quick message to relay to Redeemer before switching back to address Davin once more, “Given we have the immediate situation remedied, was there anything else you felt you’d like to discuss before we return to our respective ships to await the results from this world’s moon?”

Nearby the two Assault Droids watched the entire affair impassively, having little concern for the words bandied back and forth between the three parties, they merely watched the Caldari and Ganoxian for signs of hostility. Even with their lightened loads as a result of the low power anti-gravity fields, they left noticeable tracks as they rhythmically thumped across the beach in a patrol near the shuttle, only occasionally stopping to orient themselves fully towards the Caldari to monitor the situation closely before continuing on again.

-----

“Sir, we’ve just received a message from the Commander.”

Finally, turning from the console he looked towards the communication’s station, “What does she have to say Lieutenant?”

“She believe she’s come to an agreement with the Caldari, they have agreed that the creatures are a threat and that they need to be removed from the freighter, to that end we can continue with the original plan while they send an additional detachment of their own to assist. Though there appears to be something more, the Caldari wish to take a few specimens alive.”

“Fantastic.”

“She does however add that the terms of their agreement in this regard is that while they’re free to do this, they are on their own in doing so.”

“Very well then, contact Captain Levitan, inform him we’ve rectified the situation up here and he’s clear to continue with the original plan, though make sure he knows he’s to expect more visitors to that hangar.”

“Yes sir.”

Could be worse I suppose, don’t like it though, these things caused havoc on one of their ships once and they want to risk it again, oh well, nothing to be done for it now, clearly they just don’t have the experience with this kind of thing as we have, do not fuck about with large, live predators, momentarily lost in his own thoughts, he sighed in frustration. Despite his thoughts he was still pleased that and agreement had been reached without further threat of force, implied or otherwise, and ultimately he could live with it if they felt it that important to take live specimens.

“Lieutenant, send another burst transmission to the relay, if they’ve dispatched a reaction force then we’re going to need them to remain outside the system lest their arrival destroy what progress we’ve made, include the latest set of logs and ask that they remain nearby if possible.”

“Yes sir.”

-----

OOC: I figured Polis might still be in the shuttle, if that’s a problem I can edit this.

As Vyshinsky’s train of thought shifted over to the possibility of a friendly fleet jumping into the system and startling the Caldari, Captain Levitan had long since sat down and made himself relatively comfortable in the back of the shuttle with all those who had remained within. He figured it had been at least twenty-five minutes since the last message was received from the Redeemer, which itself came only moments before the meeting on the inhabited planet had been arranged, leaving him and Polis to wait until the situation in space was resolved and their orders updated.

Not much for small talk, unlike a couple of the other Kilrany within the shuttle’s passenger compartment, he was pleased to hear the flight engineer step forward to pass on the message from Redeemer, “We’ve just received an update from the Redeemer sir, they report that an agreement has been reached to mutually clear out the freighter and that the Caldari are sending down their own team to join us.”

At that point Levitan couldn’t have cared less that more forces were going to join them as he slipped him helmet back on and the seal engaged; he was just happy he could get his men moving again. After quickly sending along an order to the rest of the KINI on the freighter as he stood up, he used the little PDA to pass on what he’d just been told to Polis almost verbatim.

-----

“It’s about fucking time.”

Lev chuckled slightly as he heard Sasha put into words what they were all thinking and feeling as the order to move out had finally come through. Rather then fully withdraw from the freighter when the order had come to stand down, they had instead pulled back to the junction by the airlock, once again taking up positions with the Assault Droids in the center until their situation was decided, one way or the other.

Unlike the Onarrán deeper in the ship of whom they were not yet aware, the Kilrany soldiers were not particularly concerned over how sporting it was to mercilessly gun down the creatures from afar, but they weren’t hunters, not in that sense of the word at least. There were some in Kilrany who would have enjoyed it as a hunt, but real hunts were an uncommon event now on Mir, with most being done within the safety of the simulation units by the ‘weekend’ adventurer. Those brave enough however would partake in a special hunt on Mir, held every five years as a means of population control by the government on a species that while dangerous, was held in high regard. It was a species that by some would have been deemed more dangerous then the creatures infesting the freighter, although in a slightly different way.

Regardless of their frustration at the wait they were happy to finally get underway once more, this time figuring there was little more that could get in the way, and this feeling was voiced by Svetlana, “I concur Sasha, now lets exterminate some fugly bastards.”

Almost eagerly they started forward again, walking slowly to the sides of the corridor in a column with a slight shift near the front to let the soldier walking slack fire forward as well, while the Assault Droid took up the center. To his left, Lev could hear the rhythmic thumping of the Assault Droid’s feet, while out of the corner of his eye he could see the large machine kept pace with their movement.

Like most of his unit he was only using the low light display, allowing him to see the sporadically lit and often darkened corridors with daylight clarity. Only the Assault Droids and a handful of the infantry bothered to also use the infrared imaging in case they spotted a survivor, as on their original trip in they’d discovered the creatures gave off no detectable heat signature.

It wasn’t long before they found themselves approaching the second junction again where the resinous material could be found upon the plating and where they had run into their first encounter. Here Lev hesitantly walked through some of the green blood left by the creatures, regardless of the fact that while they had already determined that the blood was corrosive by nature, their equipment suffered no significant effects as a result. This fact didn’t surprise them greatly though, as chemical weapons were still considered a very real and lethal threat; in particular those that could eat away at their protection and had been taken into account in the design of their equipment; it gave them very little comfort all the same however.

Had it not been for the consistent noise from the Assault Droid, these infantrymen would have found the lack of sounds around them somewhat eerie as they approached the second junction. Roughly ten meters out for the junction, both Lev and the recce soldier on point for the section opposite his own along the left side of the corridor took an extra step out from the wall.

In conjunction with his counter part, Lev carefully ‘sliced’ around the corner he was on until he could see clearly down the length of the corridor, “Clear right.”

Near simultaneously his counterpart called out, “Clear left.”

Quickening their pace for a moment, Lev’s section set up a defensive position facing the right corridor while the other section set up for the left with the Assault Droid once more in the center. Here they chose to wait for additional forces from Green Platoon who would be coming up behind them, along with any of the alien forces that had agreed to come down with them.

235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Planet Surface



“I don’t believe that there is anything left to discuss. If you wish to contact us at any time then feel free to send a message to any of our ships. Please ensure that your troops are prepared for our landing, it is likely that our troop contribution will be slightly larger than yours.”

Davin pulled the short range communicator from his belt and began to talk in Caldari,
“Relay a message to the marines, they have agreed to us landing troops on the freighter. Go ahead with the mission as originally planned and encourage the marines to be friendly if at all possible.”

“Yes sir.”

A couple of seconds later the reply came through,
“Message sent and acknowledged sir.”

“Prepare the ship for leaving.”

Davin mentally turned his translation chip on,
“If there are no objections I am going to return to my ship. Once our respective missions are complete then a further meeting could be arranged? Hopefully our next meeting will be in better circumstances.”

He waited to see if either of the other two parties at the meeting had anything to say.


235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Titan Docking Bay



The TH-84 had a full “glass” cockpit, a completely transparent bubble mounted on the front of the blocky looking transport. Instead of any of the more common instrumentation the pilots wore an advanced helmet, similar to the CIB helmets of the Caldari army, a modified version of the APCIBH of the marines, without the ballistic face shield or gas mask. It retained the heads up display however, which was directly wired into the TH-84’s computer systems, projecting all the speed, altitude, attitude and a variety of other information directly onto the eye shield that was attached to the helmet. It was directly onto this display that the mission go-code was beamed, a large blinking “Mission Go” written in thick green letters.

Marine Sergeant Isaac Shuah fed more power to his engines, feeling the heavy Stork begin to lift from the deck of the landing bay. The mission had already been planned as far as was possible, his was to be the first craft into the Mayfair’s landing bay, dropping off the first off the five shock infantry squads that were in the first wave of transports as well as the captain of the company and his command squad. As his Stork left the black ceramic of the landing pad he allowed it to float towards the permea-shield that covered the landing bay entrance, watching as the rest of the marine boarding company began to embark on the transports below him, while drones loaded several of the other Storks with specialised modules. With a burst of power to the engines he flicked through the landing bay shield and headed towards the moon.


235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Mayfair Docking Bay


The ten minute journey had been less than overly comfortable. The troop transport module that was attached to the Stork was made to transport a single ten man squad, but they had managed to fit fifteen men into the container, making it a tight fit, five of the men had to travel the entire journey standing, clutching the emergency straps that dangled from the ceiling. As soon as the craft landed in the Mayfair docking bay the marine emerged from the transport module, their weapons in their hands, but pointed at the floor, being careful not to ‘sweep’ any of the men still in the landing area.

Captain Abrams walked towards the Kilrany shuttle, he had been told to make contact with them as soon as possible, so he was taking the other four members of his command squad over to the shuttle to liaise over the elimination of the aliens on board the ship.

"No I have no further questions, I'll be returning to my ship now," he gave a signal with his hand to his escorts. The two 14-meter tall Arm Slaves came out of ECS and began to walk with Lingun back to the shuttle.

Polis pciked up his helmet and tightly secured it to his suit, so did his men. They picked up their rifles and walked out of the Kilrany shuttle to meet up with the the rest of his men. An Arm Slave walked by doing a routine patrol of the area, carefully holding its 57mm shotcannon.

"Alright squad, lock and load. We're going in!"

"Its about fucking time!" cried Sergeant Relis.

"Hmm I wonder where I heard that before?" said Corporal Ulton

"GO! GO! GO!"

The men began to make there way into the ship, Polis gave some hand signals to the team, three go right, three go left, the rest follow him.

As she stood there without moving for a moment, Akhmatova considered if there was anything else she should speak of, but nothing immediately came to mind. Their primary concern had always been the situation of the freighter on the moon, even if the inhabited world had remained a major variable in the back of their minds; in any case it seemed as though the Caldari were not particularly interested in it anyway, at least for the moment.

“Very well then Captain, it’s been interesting meeting you.”

With that said both the Commander and Lieutenant turned and walked back towards the Beta type shuttle while the infantry carefully watched the Caldari Marines, and now the Ganoxian Arm Slaves. They weren’t exactly in a hurry to leave the planet, but nor were they particularly interested in remaining any longer then they needed to.

As such, in quick order the Commander re-boarded the craft and was followed up by the KINI who had come down with them. Initially as always, it would seem as though they were about to leave the Assault Droids behind as the shuttle lifted off, and as always, the shuttle instead hovered above the ground, allowing the two machines to ‘jump’ up into their holding bay before it rocketed off back into space.

-----

Already Green Platoon, a force made up of forty-eight regular KINI personnel, had transited through the airlock with two more Assault Droids with the purpose of rendezvousing with Blue Platoon, which was compromised of the reconnaissance elements and another pair of Assault Droids. This left only Black Platoon; commanded by Captain Levitan, still within the hangar of the crashed Caldari freighter.

Almost the entirety of Black Platoon; along with their two Assault Droids, wearily watched the arrival of the Caldari Marines, each from their varying positions spread around the shuttle and hangar, already somewhat accustomed to the sight of the Arm Slaves. They weren’t alone in their observations however, as from their positions above the hangar, the ever-paranoid shuttle crews monitored the approaching Caldari transport.

-----

After Polis made it clear it he wished to move on, it had only taken a moment for Levitan and the handful of Kilrany within the landed shuttle’s troop compartment to don their protective helmets and once more allow them to survive the vacuum outside. Once that was done, the flight engineer was able to take a moment to have the air removed from the compartment to let them safely leave the shuttle.

Exiting behind Polis, Levitan watched the Ganoxian force make their way towards the airlock for a moment, taking note of one of the Black Platoon fireteams up on the gangway keeping an eye on this side of the airlock before he turned to looked towards the Caldari. Unsure initially of their intent, he used the open frequency relay he had setup to address them, gesturing with his left hand to ensure they realized it was him speaking, “Afternoon gentlemen, I’m Captain Levitan, what can I do for you?”

-----

At the junction just inside the airlock, Polis would find another six-man Kilrany fireteam holding a position as a rear guard element in spite of their current belief that the creatures lacked a means of getting behind them, as they had yet to find any breaks in the deck plating or any suspiciously oversized air ducts. Belonging to Green Platoon, they stood somewhat casually, as they knew they were in for a long hull, though they still kept a watchful eye down three avenues of approach, which included that from the airlock.

From behind the anonymity of her headgear, the Corporal in charge of the fireteam watched their approach, with simple orders she was to inform them of what they knew thus far; a task made relatively easy by the presence of air in the corridors and a simple Kilrany to English translation addition to her external communications set. Simply put, she would inform them that they were the rearguard and that currently nearly two full platoons of Kilrany infantry had split and gone in either direction of the junction, each with the support of two Assault Droids.

Shortly after her prepared speech, she turned to look to the right corridor when the sound of weapons fire for Kilrany Disruptors echoed down towards them.

-----

There was a decided sense of satisfaction for Sasha as she took her finger off her weapons trigger guard and squeezed the Carbine’s trigger in quick succession as another of the alien creatures came into sight. It fell to the ground with several cauterized wounds in its upper body, but not entirely content it was dead, she fired two more into its elongated head without pity.

Behind her the Assault Droid held its position in the center of the junction, its fire arcs cut off by their section as they waited for the arrival of the Green Platoon elements coming to join them. This wait lasted only a few moments longer as their reinforcements doubled their pace at the sound of weapons fire and arrived behind them a few seconds later.

Holding her position for the moment in the firing line, she heard her Sergeant make a few quick plans with the senior Green Platoon Sergeant with them before they split their forces again and continued down the branching corridors, again leaving a fireteam as rearguard. They knew they wouldn’t be able keep it up for long before they had to call these fireteams up behind them, but it would serve them for now, especially given the simple and logical layout of the freighter.

While they were unsure just what the right corridor held, they knew the left would connect them with the other forces that had originally gone left from the airlock. Luck would have it however, that Sasha’s squad would be going to the right, and this was carried out after a moment of reforming with the Assault Droids.

As before they moved out slowly in column on either side of the corridor with the Assault Droid in the center, this time however, one reconnaissance section went with one regular section. This time however Sasha’s squad did not move very far before they came upon a partially open hatch on the right side, which they prepared to breach and clear.

235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Mayfair Docking Bay


Captain Abrams moved forwards, raising his hand, still holding his rifle.

“Just wanted to ask if you could make sure that your men stay near the walls of the hangar. We are going to be bringing in some heavy equipment and since we are going in full military speed it would be unfortunate if any of your troops were in the way. We also intend to repower the shield for this place and set up a full mobile command centre, I have been told to extend you full courtesy for this mission, so is there any way you think that we can effectively liaise then please suggest it. The full landing operation should be complete in less than twenty minutes, then we can begin full scale termination of these creatures.”


Mayfair Drone Access Hatch S-12

Two ACU-HDU 3’s were crouching over the hull, their four legs spread wide, their upper bodies lowered, making them look like some odd growth, the twin 20mm Railgun barrels appearing to wave slightly in an unfelt breeze as they scanned the opening carefully, while their chin mounted Gatling cannons stayed steady, focused on the small 2 metre by 2 metre opening on the hull of the ship. It was through this hole that four of the ACU-BU 1’s had entered, they were slowly making their way down, further into the ship before they would begin their hunt for a live specimen.

It had not occurred to any of the Kilrany soldiers down on the moon that despite their initial ignorance in regards to the Caldari claim on the freighter, their actions could have been taken as extremely arrogant. It was not a trait they were often known for, and while it could be claimed they were acting in that manner in this situation; placing demands upon the Caldari to exterminate the alien creatures and refusing to back down, it was far from their intent, despite their less then altruistic initial intentions.

In the hangar, Captain Levitan was merely nodded his head slightly, longing for the moment where he wouldn’t have to deal with the slight delay in their relay, “That wont be a problem,” he paused abruptly for a moment as he realized the Caldari hadn’t introduced himself, though with nothing he could do about it for the moment, he continued, “My men are clear of the area as you can see, they wont get in your way.”

Here however his paranoia crept back in, “What kind of shield are we talking about here? Is it merely an atmospheric one?”

Shaking his head only slightly, he pushed aside such thoughts for the moment and continued again, “I’ve already got two platoons with heavy fire support in through the airlock beginning a sweep and the Ganoxian section just passed through a few moments ago, how would you like to play this?”

As he awaited a response, he reflected on the additional orders passed through to the infantry not long before, mostly coming after the revelation that the vessel was merely a downed freighter. Being a commercial freighter, they didn’t expect to find any valuable intelligence beyond the craft’s logs and star map, which they assumed would contain lists of trading ports and inhabited worlds, and as much as the Kilrany would have liked to get their hands on this data, they were to refrain from doing so as it was felt they could not do so without alerting the Caldari to it.

-----

Svetlana looked suspiciously at the hatch sitting half closed, too small for the Assault Droid, the infantry would have to go in without their heavy fire support to clear the room, and they had no intent on leaving it un-secure behind them. With this in mind, her fireteam prepared to breach and clear with their other fireteam in support, at the same time the Assault Droid and the section from Green Platoon would hold the corridor behind them.

They had three primary options for dealing with the door, the first and simplest for them would be to chuck in a large number of grenades before entry, but because they didn’t wish to damage anything inside, and they didn’t quite know just how large it was, they discounted this option for the moment. The second options called for their fireteam to activate their stealth field generators and slowly enter through the hatch, but this was also discounted because they had not yet figured out just how the creatures saw, seeing as how they seemed to have no eyes, and if they were forced to quickly start engaging, the extra time to shut them down to prevent friendly fire would be an extra difficulty.

Ultimately they went with the slightly riskier third option, and to that end, Svetlana currently knelt with the corridor wall at her back and the hatchway to her front while Lev stood next to her. The rest of her fireteam was stacked up alongside the corridor wall in preparation to enter with Sasha at the front.

Anticipation hung heavy on Svetlana as she peered down the sight of her LRD, and gripped it tightly with stock firmly against her shoulder. Instinctively she whispered, transmitting to the rest of the section, “Ready to fire.”

As she kept her aim on the hatch, Sasha leaned forward slightly and reached out with her hand, placing a gloved right palm upon the smooth surface of the hatch, she abruptly shoved it inward before snapping backward again and gripping her weapon. In the end there was nothing there to be seen initially, and Lev said as much, “Looks clear, but it also looks to be rather deep.”

Their field of view was somewhat limited, but they could tell the room went in from the hatch a considerable distance, perhaps even as far as to wall of the hangar, though this they could not be sure of. Quickly though they followed this up and Svetlana saw the rest of her fireteam, starting with Sasha, snap forward in through the open hatch one after the other and take up a position on the other side.

Following suit, she pushed with her right foot and moved forward towards the hatch as she rose from her initial position, moving in through the hatch just behind Lev where she took up a position just inside and to the right. Here she got a good look at the room, not only was it deep; in that it ran a considerable distance back from the hatch, it was also fairly wide, though it wasn’t any taller then the corridor behind them. It was however, an absolute mess, with containers and what looked like drones smashed all over the room as they had come free from their holds in the crash and their unplanned for position upside down.

Had it not been for their low light equipment in their helmets, they would have also found themselves in a nearly pitch black environment, as not a single light was on within the room, leaving the only source of light coming in through the hatch. It was perhaps because of this darkness that some of the creatures thought they had an advantage, and planned an ambush for the Kilrany in this room.

Needless to say this failed for them, as despite the fact that some of the containers concealed them in some areas, the Kilrany soldiers could easily see the darkened shapes of the creatures as they crawled towards them with an almost unnerving grace. One in particular caught Svetlana’s eye as it gripped some sort of shelving unit still attached to the floor-made-ceiling, and she singled it out as her target.

Nearly simultaneously as they saw the movement, each member of the fireteam called out, “Contact!” before they promptly opened fire.

Expecting a smaller room, those in the fireteam with Carbines had their selector switches set to automatic fire, and making use of this, they fired short controlled bursts. Svetlana had no such option on her LRD; that was to say she had an automatic setting, but the only alternative for her was safe, so when she squeezed the trigger, a devastating and spectacular stream of fire lashed out and lit up the darkened room with more ferocity then the weapons of her comrades could muster alone.

By chance the creature Svetlana was trained on had to shift slightly in its chosen path to keep its grip just as Svetlana pulled the trigger, leading to her aim going slightly off, though it was no less deadly. Rather then impacting directly on its head, her stream of fire almost neatly sliced off the creatures left arm and severely damaged its left leg, causing it to topple to the ground below and unto the top of several containers, where it thrashed about in pain as the residual effects of the Disruptor worked its way though its nervous system before Lev put two rounds into its head.

The Jig was up and the creatures quite readily new it, quickly they shifted their tactics from crawling to full on sprint, and jumping over containers they charged the six Kilrany without any apparent concern for their well being. Just how many had been laying in wait, Svetlana was not sure as she swept her fire through the greater concentrations to thin their numbers, and between the six soldiers and two more from the second fireteam firing in through the hatch, the room was awash with light as their combined fire filled the room with a green tinge.

Though there was little time to make note of it, Svetlana did notice that some of the creatures dodged and weaved as they made their way towards them, some even recognizing that they themselves were targeted and they made attempts to dodge the round. In the end this did them little good as the bolts of Disruptor fire moved at superluminal speeds, much like trying to dodge the tip of a lightning bolt, once the target was in their sights and they squeezed the trigger, the Kilrany rarely missed their targets.

Twenty-four seconds passed before it seemed as though the last creature had fallen after having seemingly crawled out of the woodwork, and though the Kilrany were hesitant to move forward at first, they eventually did, and the rest of their section joined them in sweeping out the rest of the room. Ultimately the rest of this sweep proved uneventful, finding no more living creatures to eradicate and no other means to enter the room other then a hatch opening to space, they rejoined the Assault Droid in the corridor and prepared to move out again.

Alone in the corridor, Polis was scouting ahead of the teams, who were clearing out rooms for any hostiles. He walked further down the corridor, pointing his rifle every which way, keeping his guard up at all time. He was tense, not knowing what could pop out and attack him viciously. To no surprise to his own, there was nothing, nothing to see, nothing to attack, just nothing. To reaffirm this his sensors weren't picking up anything either, except for the green dots with designation numbers on his screen that represented his men. He switched to the Tactile Sonar mode, suddenly an object appeared on his screen, it showed that the object was behind him. He slowly grabbed his GA-05 gauss assault rifle and quickly turned pointing his rifle upwards.

"Jeez Colson, I almost blew your head off!" Polis sighed.

"Eh, sorry SM." he laughed nervously knowing that he was lucky that Polis showed restraint.

"You got something to report?"

"Ya rooms are clear, the team is organizing and proceeding down the hall."

"Well goddamn it! I was expecting a fight down here. Did we somehow find the green part of this damn rig?!"

"I don't kn-" he paused, "do you hear something?"

"No, What?"

"Like a his-ahh!" Polis looked down to see a spike impaling Colson's chest, no it was a tail of some kind coming from the cieling. Polis reacted quickly pointing his assault rifle into the ceiling and fired several rounds. Suddenly the tail ripped out of Colson's chest and the creature slumped down onto the floor. The blood, gushing out of the creature's body, started to corrode the floor, and soon the deformed body that was once the creature fell through. Polis quickly rushed to Colson.

"Colson! Colson! Medic! I need a goddamn medic over here!" Polis began to put pressure on the wound, he didn't think it would do any good, but he had to do something.

"SM, I'm...not going to...make it..."

"Shut up! Telleman where the fuck are you?! Get over here now!"

"Te...Tel...Tell my girl.."

"Shut up, save your strength Colson."

Telleman and Likoyuron entered the room carrying their rather large medpacks, "Holy shit! What the fuck happened here!?" Telleman quickly took out his medical equipment and began to operate on Colson, "We're going to have to use the vacbandages, this wound is too serious for our other stuff. Colson this is going to hurt like hell. We'll give you enough anesthesia to nullify some of it, brace yourself alright?"

After applying the bandages to both sides Telleman gave the go ahead to Likoyuron, "Alright Colson on three, one...two...three."

The bandages started to suck themselves into the wound, "AHH! AHH! SHIT! GODDAMN IT! AHH AHH." Colson cried out in almost complete agony fainting in the middle of the procedure.

"Colson! Colson! Aw shit! SM we need to get him out of here quick! Olias get the stretcher."

Colson was put on a stretcher and carried through the hall. The men that were coming up looked at Colson, nodding there heads at him, wishing him luck. "Alright! Lets get moving!" ordered Polis.

Seli noticed two men carrying another man on a stretcher. He zoomed in on the man, who had blood all over his armored suit, with a rather large bandage over his chest. Seli gulped at the sight, his stomach becoming uneasy at one of his own looking messed up like that. "Sargent, you'll be seeing alot of that. Keep up with the patrols and pay no attention to the wounded, they'll get good treatment. Just stay focused on your mission, that is all" Jim reassured him.

"Alright sir."

235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Mayfair Docking Bay



“Just a normal landing bay shield, weird designed thing, you’d have to ask one of the techies about the details, but basically it keeps the air in here, the random space junk out there and let’s ships move through it. We are going to stick it on a separate circuit to the rest of the ships power, then stick a generator on it, so we can get some atmosphere in this place.” He paused and reached behind him, pulling a ruggedized computer from the connection patch on his back. He flicked a switch and a floor plan spread across the screen.

“The way I would like to play this? Pull all your teams back; ask the Ganoxian leader to do the same. You guys have no idea what the layout of this freighter is, my troops have had a week to familiarise themselves with it. Once we receive word that the second team have managed to retrieve one of these buggers live we can move out again, either linking our communication nets together or moving out in mixed units. If we get to the control centre then we can access the ship systems, which will make it easier to hunt them down. Then from here we can control the teams, meaning we can run rings around them.”

The Caldari flyers were a well trained group, the entire of the marine shock infantry platoon had been delivered in less than five minutes, the sixty men spreading throughout the landing bay, their suit helmets indicating the soon to be landing zones, making sure they avoided getting in the way and attempting to move any of the Kilrany troops who were in the landing zones out of the way using basic sign language.


235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Drone landing Team



The four automated combat units that had dropped into the Mayfair were having little luck in their search for the aliens, none showed up on their initial sensor sweeps, so they had begun to make their way deeper into the ship. They had been moving down a corridor when they had seen their first sign of alien inhabitation, a odd, organic looking substance coating the entire corridor, their feet cracked through the covering as they moved, a faint crunching following the four figures as they moved down the corridor.

Unaware that anyone had suffered any casualties yet, Captain Levitan was focused again on the Caldari, and he was quite simply, none to pleased with the latter half of their current conversation. Already he had been forced to pull his men back from within the freighter on two other occasions and the thought of doing so for a third time frustrated him, though it was not alone in this, as many other little details conspired to combine and annoy this infantry officer.

For the longest time the only other military force the Kilrany had to deal with were the Russkyans, and they had long ago been proven to be highly reliable. Here, their cynicism; in particular Levitan’s cynicism, didn’t let him trust either the Ganoxians or the Caldari military units.

Once more glad to be wearing a fully concealing helmet, he sighed slightly within the privacy it allowed before he replied to Abrams, “While it’s certain good news to hear we’ll have a breathable atmosphere in here shortly enough, with all due respect, I will not be ordering my men to pull back, again. Unless your engineers had one hell of a convoluted design sense, it’s a bloody freighter, and while a layout would be useful, it is hardly necessary. Besides, what makes you think the control center survived the impact enough to still be useful, or useable for that matter given we’re standing on the ceiling?”

Not far from these officers, several Kilrany Imperial Naval Infantrymen looked back from under the cover of their own helmets in annoyance at the Caldari who attempted to wave them off from their landing zones. Already they had given the Caldari plenty of room to land before their first group had done so, and their apparent desire for more room along with their apparent belief that the Kilrany weren’t intelligent enough to clear a landing zone; at least as some of the Kilrany were inferring from their actions, led many to give the Caldari dark looks. One Assault Droid in particular who received the less then verbal order merely stared back indifferently at the Caldari Marine, though fortunately for all, it was not quite sentient enough to take offense, and it was ordered to move closer to the shuttle a moment later.

Ever since their initial landing in the freighter, the Kilrany had not considered the alien creatures to be intelligent, and though they were beginning to develop some suspicions in that regard, they did not connect the following event with the creatures. Only moments after Levitan finished speaking, every last light that had been running within the hangar shut down as they lost power, plunging in into partial darkness, along with the rest of the ship beyond their view.

This led the infantry Captain to glance about before cursing within the privacy of his helmet, “What the hell? Now they go out?”

A quick movement of his hand and he activated his low light display, allowing him to see once more, only to receive a message from the fireteam on the gangway by the airlock a moment later, “Captain, the panel is not responding, I think it lost power as well.”

“God damnit, alright, I’ll see what these guys can do.”

Looking back at Abrams, Levitan switched back to the relay, “Well, I don’t suppose you can fix this too then?”

-----

“That’s different.”

Lev’s tone was rather mater of fact as he looked upon yet another hatch just a few meters in front of him, which while similar to the last hatch, was fully closed and appeared to have numerous deep gouges that looked suspiciously like claw marks. Only a moment before hand the lights had dropped out in this section of the freighter as well, but as they were already prepared for low light conditions, none of them noticed as their helmets automatically adjusted.

With their formation halted for a moment, he cautiously moved up the side of the corridor ahead of where the Assault Droid waited with Svetlana half a meter behind him. After a quick check of the hatch, he half turned to address his Sergeant through his internal communications system, “Hatch wont budge Sergeant, could be locked, or it could have just jammed in place due to the crash landing, do you want me to breach it?”

“Don’t want to risk it Lev, could be something flammable in there for all we know. Red here might be able to force it open.”

A small smirk came across Lev’s face as he caught the Sergeant’s plan, and while he and Svetlana backed back up to their position in the formation, the Assault Droid with them thumped forward in the corridor. The machine came to a halt just in front of the door and half turned its body to face it, rotating its right arm weapons module up and out of the way so it could use a closed fist on the hatch like a battering ram. In quick succession three loud clangs echoed through the corridor as metal struck metal, and though it did not force the hatch open, it left three deep impressions that surpassed the ones they assumed were left by the creatures.

“Alright Red, enough,” convinced they weren’t going to get through that way, Lev heard their Sergeant order the Assault Droid to stand down from that avenue of approach. Thinking for a moment, Lev heard him speak again, “We could get a torch and burn our way through, but that might not be any safer.”

He then heard Pavil’s voice, “Think any of the Caldari Marines might have a reliable manifest? If there’s nothing supposed to be in there but containers, we could just breach the door.”

Before any further discussion could continue, Lev caught sight of a creature turn a corner of the corridor ahead of them, and before he could call out, “Contact!” the Assault Droid, who had also caught the movement, unleashed a single aimed round from its left weapons module, which contained an MPATD. The effect on the creature was rather instantaneous as the bolt of energy impacted the upper body around what was presumably the creature’s chest and exploded, causing the elongated head to fly forward through the air several meters from where the body fell down.

It would have been an extremely comical scene if a stream of creatures didn’t come racing around into the corridor directly behind it, initiating another charge on their position. Instantly as the Assault droid snapped its right weapons module down into firing position, allowing it to unleash the twin LRDs contained therein in short, staggered three second bursts, several of the infantrymen took up their own firing positions, including Lev and Svetlana.

It was hardly a fair fight, in those relatively cramped quarters the Kilrany were able to lay down a tremendous amount of fire and quite literally create a flood of energy-borne death, which was hardly according to the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry, not that you’d catch the Kilrany complaining. But while the creatures had a sense of self-preservation that was quite decidedly sporadic at best, they were not mindless, and they were learning, though not fast enough for this latest engagement with the Kilrany forces.

235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Mayfair Docking Bay



The reason the Caldari had been motioning for the Kilrany to move back quickly became evident when the transports began flicking through the landing bay; instead of landing they released their transport containers in mid-air. A small AI drone controlled the descent using a powerful artificial gravity repulsor, though ‘controlled’ was possibly an overly strong description for the high speed drop onto the deck. As each of the containers hit the floor they shook the floor around them, the high speed impacts cratering their landing sites.

Inside all the troop containers the scene was the same, there were ten capsules along each of the side walls, filled with an electric orange gel. Floating in this impact resistant gel were fully equipped marines. As soon as the container settled on the ground the containers opened, their doors sliding to one side, releasing a small flood of gel and one of the marines. As they stepped out of their impact capsules a series of sprinklers on the ceiling began to release a fine mist, this mist was a mixture of chemicals, a selection to break down the gel that still coated them and some of the Caldari manufactured neurachemicals, designed to increase the nerve transmission speeds and decrease pain transmission, allowing the first wave of troops to function better during the initial boarding actions.

As the troops began to swarm from the containers they started to organise their own perimeter, four of the ACU-SD 3 combat units crawling out from their specialised drop container. Each of the droids looked decidedly odd, standing only 1.4 metres from the floor to the top of the it’s weapon rack, each of the units clicking across the floor, six legs carrying it’s heavy form across the floor, the oddly designed head section making the entire structure looking almost insect like as the four drones crawled across the floor before splitting into two different sections, one guarding each of the two entry hatches.

“Perhaps then you should not have asked how I wanted to do it? Did you mean to ask something else? The control centre is likely to have survived because it was designed to do so. It will be useful to find the control centre because it will have the flight recorder, which will have a record of what happened. This will be useful in discovering what went wrong with the containment systems on this ship.”

The lights suddenly went out, plunging the hangar into darkness. Each of the marines was wearing one of the latest helmets, which automatically adjusted for lower lighting levels, but the sudden change in lighting levels didn’t help their stress levels, the marines quickly raising their weapons. The unspoken worry being that the Kilrany had something to do with the sudden change. This worry was quickly allayed by the actions of the Kilrany, their body language portraying their shock relatively effectively.

“I would advise that we simply light the hangar until we are prepared to move out in force. The reactor is buried deeper in the freighter; it would be unadvisable to attempt to move there before we are prepared to make a dedicated thrust towards it. There are too many side passages and areas that may be open to ambush and flanking manoeuvres. We have a reactor container enroute, when that arrives we will be able to power the hangar, both the lights and the landing shield.”

"Move, move, move!" yelled Polis giving some covering fire for his men, "Where the fuck is Lawson."

"They got him sir, they fucking got him..."

"Get some cover. Sargent, check for any other entrance that they can flank us."

"Right away."

Polis looked around the room and saw a hatchway, "Wheres does that go?" he nodded towards the hatch.

"Scanners show it goes outside sir."

"Get to work on that if we can open that we can get some support."

"Support SM?"

"It looks like a 40 mm can fit through there. Get to work on it."

"Yes SM."

Skittering could be heard outside, loud hissing and clawing sounds. Nekilo came back with a report, "Theres no other way in other than that hatch and--" suddenly the lights went out.

"Fuck..." his visor switched to night vision, "this isn't good."

"They're coming through!"

"Open fire men!" Polis ordered.

235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Storage room B-26



The room had been dark even before the power had died to the entire ship, though the single glow strip on the ceiling had shed little light at the start. The room had originally been a secure store, but for the past week had been the safe haven for three of the original crewmembers from the freighter. The room had originally been filled with equipment for the landing mission, self inflating tents, cooking equipment and various other camping supplies in crates neatly stacked around the walls of the room. The doorway had originally been left clear, though someone had pushed a crate against the door, before lodging it in place with a pair of metal support beams.

Inside the room the contents of several crates had been spread around, sleeping bags nestling on mounds of cardboard packaging, the remains of high density meal bars strewn around the room. One of the crates had been opened to expose rows of amphetamine cola, empty cans of which were spread around the room.

The inhabitants of the room looked barely human; all the sleeves were from the same manufacturer, a small company that produced synthetic sleeves, designed primarily for lab work they were extremely dexterous, their fine motor muscle control smoothed out and of high quality, while the rest of their muscle-nerve grafts weren’t as smooth. They all had the same pale off-white synth-skin, cheap fake black hair and colourless white eyes.

All three had originally been lab technicians, part of the research team assigned to the alien while it was in transit. When the screams had begun they had all thought of the same hiding place, they had made it in their and managed to block the door, only to hear the screams slowly die out, followed by the massive impact as the space ship hit the moon, throwing them around the room. The hardy construction of their sleeves had prevented any permanent injury baring a single broken rib, which happened when a fast moving body had slammed into the side of a non-moving crate.

The sound of the Kilrany weapon fire outside had raised their interest, though not enough for the three individuals to actually make any effort to contact the outside, simply putting it off as something new that the aliens were doing. When the three loud clangs came through into the room, slightly muffled by their travelling through a 600kg crate of bedding materials all of the figures looked up, the aliens had never made that much noise, they had made some, but not that much. The sudden resurgence of the firing was enough to convince them that the people out there could well be friendly. The man nearest the door, a senior lab technician called Jamie Payne picked up a length of metal panelling, originally part of one of the crates they had raided and began to smack rhythmically on the door way. Two quick beats, two slow, two quick and so on, waiting for a response.

In the hangar, Captain Levitan was just about livid as the Caldari drop pods came to a rest, and there was no need to read it off his body language as it was more the evident in his voice as he glared at Abrams from under his helmet, “The hell do you think you’re doing, are you trying to get people killed here?”

He gestured then with his left arm towards the exiting Caldari Marines, “What if those things had cracked the floor and fell through into the next God damned level, huh?” just as he finished he actually turned his head to look at the impact marks that had been created, causing him to do a quick double take before stopping for a moment and staring at the five to ten centimeter deep ‘craters’ made in the hull.

After a moment with his anger subsided slightly and replaced with curiosity, he continued, “Just how bloody thick is that anyway?”

He sighed again, though this time it transmitted through as he placed his hand upon where his forehead would have been if he wasn’t wearing a helmet, “Just how many of these things do you think have taken over this ship-” the infantry Captain abruptly paused then as he realized that Abrams had not actually told him his name or rank yet, and lacking anything to use in its place, he merely continued, the trace of anger coming back into his voice, “Is there something about these creatures you know and haven’t told us, because holding out on information would not be a good idea.”

Whether deserved or not the Caldari had thus far earned the infantry Captain’s ire not only through their actions thus far and a perceived sense of arrogance, but also for being responsible for preventing Levitan from proceeding in with his men. He wasn’t the only one developing this sense of resentment however as the other Kilrany Imperial Naval Infantry began to develop similar feelings for the same reasons, seeing the Caldari as the reason why they weren’t in helping their comrades.

As he started to calm down once more and regain his wits, he activated his internal communication system, “Black One here, power’s been lost to the hangar, airlocks appear to be non-functional, is it confined just to the hangar do you know?”

“Green One here, negative on that Black, didn’t notice it at first, but now that you mention it, there appears to be no power inside either. Think it could be the Caldari quietly telling us to leave?”

“That’s a distinct possibility given their attitude back here, but somehow I doubt it all the same. They’ve told me though that they’ve got a back up generator of some kind on the way down, hangar should be operational again shortly with the addition of a atmospheric force field.”

“Oh glorious Black, then you can feel all that hot air afterwards with greater ease no doubt.”

“Heh, copy that Green, keep moving, inform me of any changes-oh, by the way, anything from the Ganoxa, they haven’t contacted me since they went in.”

“Negative on that last Black, I’ve not seen them.”

“Alright then, keep at it, kill a couple of those ugly fuckers for me while you’re at it.”

“Will do.”

-----

Despite their use of energy-based weapons, the Kilrany were still quite familiar with the sounds of more conventional firearms, especially due to their prevalence in civilian life and their use by the Russkyan military. Though with this in mind, when the sound of Ganoxian weapons fire echoed down through the corridors to one of the Kilrany infantry sections, there was little initial concern.

Forced to split off from another section with one of the Assault Droids in order to complete a proper sweep of this level, this twelve man section was walking rather casually down a corridor split into their fireteams, one on either side in a column. Unlike their colleagues on the other side of the ship, they had thus far not encountered any of the strange creatures that had thus far, yet to be named.

“Sounds like the Ganoxa are seeing a little action, should I consider that a good thing or a bad sign,” the Corporal on point on the right side of the corridor chuckled lightly, referencing their lack of engagement, though he likely wouldn’t have been so amused if he had known the situation the Ganoxa were actually in.

“It’s a big ship, I’m sure we’ll see some of these ugly bastards before this day is out, besides, if they needed assistance I’m sure they’d call for it.”

Their Sergeant’s words made sense to them, thus far the reports they’d heard from other sections had been rather dismissive of the creatures as unintelligent and suicidal, posing little threat to them. It had led some to wonder why they were bothering with this ‘pest control’ as it was.

As the gunfire droned on, the Sergeant spoke again, his tone a little less confident, “Though I don’t suppose it would hurt if we went and took a look.”

Under the cover of his helmet the Corporal smiled slightly as they increased their speed, yet stuck to a walking pace in the direction they could hear the weapons fire coming from.

-----

“Do these bastards ever give up?” Svetlana shook her head slightly as she stepped forward to deliver a solid kick to the jaw of one of the fallen creatures in disgust, its head perforated by over a half dozen bolts of Disruptor fire. Shifting her glance down the corridor she felt no pity for the array of dead creatures that were piled upon the ground.

As Svetlana finished commenting on the completion of their latest engagement, their section Sergeant spoke up, “Status report, how’s everyone for ammunition?”

For the most part the rest of the unit called out over eighty percent, but being on point the longest, Lev had a different account, “Down at least half.”

“Alright Lev, swap out with Sasha and see if Red here can do anything for you.”

“Gotcha,” Sliding out of his position at the front of the column, Lev stepped in behind their Assault Droid, and knowing the drill, the machine caused two small panels to slide downward on either side of his back. Neither were large, but they revealed one slot in each where Lev was able to place two of his spent power cells, here the small fusion reactor powering the machine could slowly recharge them. While this would not be as quick or convenient as from one of their armoured personnel carriers, it was better then nothing.

It was at about this point that the rhythmic tapping from within the room to their right became noticeable, drawing the gaze of the soldiers, “Well, I’ll be damned, do you think someone could be alive in there?”

“I suppose if the ship’s inertial dampners held long enough into the crash someone could have survived, still could be the creatures trying something new, Sasha, tap back, but be careful of hatch.”

Nodding her head, Sasha took a step forward and slammed her fist sideways into the door three times, waited a moment, then repeated it before setting her helmet to external and trying to call out, “Hey, anyone in there!” before striking the door three more times.

"Shit! Relis do you have that hatch open yet!?"

"Just give me thirty more seconds!"

"Alright, you heard him thirty more seconds men. Hold your positions," he got out his commlink, "attention Phantom one, come in Phantom one. This is Ghost one over. I need you to find our location and send one of your guys to it."

"Copy that. I'll send over Phantom Five."

A few seconds later Seli jumped over the freighter from where their shuttle was and landed just a few meters away from the airlock the squad was near, "This P-Five I am at the target location, what do want me to do exactly?"

"Alright Grostin, this is time for you to shine and change my mind about you. The airlock is directly across the pathway that these fuckers are getting through. I need you to stick your assualt rifle into the airlock and just plug away do you got that?"

"What? Are you cra--"

"No time to argue son," he paused to fire at another creature," do you understand or will you let us die here!"

"Yes Sargent Major!"

"Good, Relis open the fucking hatch," the Sargent pried the airlock open with all his might before it finally budged, some atmosphere began to vent from the room but it wasn't too long to suck anyone out of the compartment, "Get clear! Get clear! Now Grostin!"

Seli stuck his 40mm Gauss assualt rifle in the airlock and fired away at the creatures piling into the room. The large rounds obliterating entire groups with one or two rounds causing massive punctures into the walls behind them. Blood from the creatures corroded and ate through the path way until their was a big, gaping, mess of a hole no one in the squad has ever seen before. Thirty seconds later Grostin caught his breath when he stopped firing, his heart beating in his chest. "Sargent Major! Sargent Major are you alright?!"

"Whoo! Goddamn! Thats some fucking nice shooting there Grostin, not a single one of them left! Telleman get me a casualty report within the hour."

"Yes SM."

Polis grabbed his commlink, "Phantom One you can have Grostin back now!"

“Bloody hell, which direction is it coming from?”

Corporal Carlo Rastrelli was the first of the twelve-man Kilrany infantry section to put into words the question upon all their minds at that moment as they held a position at one of the many junctions the ships seemed to have. Having quickened their pace to investigate the sounds of gunfire they heard; which only seemed to intensify to their ears as they drew closer, they were unsure of the direction to take as the sound echoed down to them from both corridor options.

After glancing both to the left and right down either corridor and taking a moment to listen, Sergeant Robert Korovin made a snap decision, “We go right,” and with that both of his fireteams moved forward again at a brisk walking pace. While he had the option, he was wholly unwilling to split his respective fireteams to either direction, preferring instead to maintain his sections cohesion and firepower given their limited knowledge of the freighter.

While they maintained their column formations with the fireteams on either side of the corridor, several seconds after committing to this direction, the atmosphere was suddenly pulled in the opposite direction as the vacuum of space beckoned to it. Had their uniforms and armour not been airtight to protect against both the vacuum of space and the threat of chemical and biological weapons, they might have felt the pull of the thin atmosphere and realized they had taken the wrong path, though it may not have helped regardless unless they had made the connection between the firefight they were attempting to investigate and the movement of the air.

After only a few more seconds in, the distinctive thudding sound of an autocannon firing reached their ears despite the slight rush of air around them, causing them all to stop dead in their tracks at that familiar noise.

Rastrelli was the first to speak, “What the hell was that? I don’t remember them carrying any heavy weapons with them.”

Sergeant Korovin cut in quickly, “We’ll find out soon enough, keep moving.”

Just as quickly as they had stopped they started moving again down the corridor towards what they initially thought was another junction wall, but as they got closer, they began to realize it wasn’t. Within twenty meters of the ‘wall’, the point man for each fireteam started to slow down, causing the rest of those behind them to do the same, fifteen meters out one of them cursed, “Shit, that’s not a wall is it.”

Now that they were close enough to make out the details with their low light displays, it was quite evident that what they thought was a wall was in fact a piece of ceiling plate that had collapsed down from above them. Not only that however, it had smashed through the deck they were on and into the one below, blocking off the corridor and opening the deck they were on to the one above and below it.

Unleashing a quiet curse himself, Korovin then activated his platoon level frequency, “Lieutenant, we have a problem. We were investigating some gunfire and we’ve just found a collapsed section here that’s opened this deck to the ones above and below it.”

As the Sergeant spoke, several of the lead soldiers in each fireteam cautiously stepped forward and spread out slightly, including Corporal Rastrelli who was on the right side of the corridor. Splitting responsibility, two of them kept their eyes and weapons trained upwards to the ceiling; which was really the floor given the vessel was upside down, and the other two kept an eye to the ground.

About the point where they were a scant four meters short of the gap in the floor, and at about the time their Sergeant was finishing his last sentence, one of the creatures leapt from the deck below them, and taking hold of the ledge attempted to launch itself towards the soldier to the left of Rastrelli. Before it could secure its grip to do so however, the soldier to the left of its target squeezed back on the trigger of his Carbine and unleashed a short burst into the creature as he snapped his weapon slightly to the right and centered it in his sights.

Instinctively Rastrelli brought his own weapon down towards the target that had presented itself immediately in front of him; this turned out to be a mistake as another creature made a running leap from above at that moment right towards him. He was able to snap his head back into time to see it coming, along with a burst of telltale light from a Disruptor flash over his head as several rounds were fired from behind him by a comrade who had kept their weapon trained up high.

While this managed to kill the creature mid leap, it did nothing to stop its flight through the air as there was no physical impact from a Kilrany Disruptor. This in turn led to Rastrelli taking the full brunt of the creature to his upper body, knocking him backwards off his feet only to slam into the floor with the creature on top, which abruptly knocked the wind out of him. With a great deal of inertia still in it, the creature’s body almost bounced off Rastrelli and first rolled, then slid across the center of the corridor straight into Sergeant Korovin’s feet, slamming into them and sending him sprawling to the floor before it finally came to a halt.

Anticipating further attacks, the remaining soldiers near the front began to fire off single rounds and short bursts into the opening to discourage any further creatures from coming through while they slowly backed away from the gaps. At the same time, two soldiers who had been behind the lead group came forward out of concern that Rastrelli was likely injured, and allowing their weapons to hang by their tactical slings, took hold of the webbing on his shoulders and hauled him back away from the gap.

As they let him go near where the creature that had struck him had come to a halt to get their weapons back into the fray, he took several moments to try and force the air back into his lungs. Their weapons fire died off after a moment when no further contacts were seen for the time being, and while Sergeant Korovin cursed loudly as he got back to his feat, their section medic quickly came over and knelt next to the Corporal.

“Are you alright Carlo, stay still for a moment.”

He was just starting to get the air back into his lungs as their medic started checking him over, specifically first to see if any visible damage had been done to his uniform. Waving him off slightly, Rasrelli groaned, “God damned that bastard was heavy.”

The medic couldn’t help but chuckle slightly as Rastrelli glanced to his left to see the dead creature staring back at him, which understandably startled him slightly, “Gah, fuck sakes, that is not something to wake up next to,” and before propping himself up with his arms, he struck the creature once with his fist in annoyance, and partially out of paranoia that it might not be dead.

“Contact rear!”

Rastrelli twisted his head around in time to see one of the trailing soldiers in his fireteam open up on another creature as it came charging down the corridor towards him. Three quick, single rounds to the upper body and the creature slumped to the floor and slid to a halt some distance from them.

Coming back to a full stand, but clearly in a bit of pain, Korovin addressed his unit, “Time to fall back, Rastrelli, can you move?”

Forcing himself up to a stand, the Corporal replied, “Can do Sergeant.”

“Good. Right then, fall back by fireteam, Rastrelli, you’re up first.”

In similar display much earlier in the day, Corporal Rastrelli reformed his fireteam and they broke at a jog down the right side of the corridor before halting and taking up a quick position watching either direction, “In.”

Peeling off from near the gap in the floor and the ceiling, Sergeant Korovin led his fireteam down the left side and past the Corporal, though not before having several of his men toss fragmentation grenades down into lower gap. Both exploded in a flash of light, shredding everything within fifteen meters of them with high velocity shards of metal, which included two more creatures.

As they fell back, they didn’t go terribly far, in fact Sergeant Korovin chose to have them hold at the same corridor junction they had halted at less then five minutes earlier and take up defensive stances so he could contact the Lieutenant safely from there.

“Lieutenant, we encountered a number of the creatures at the gap I mentioned, we have a few bruises from the encounter, but nothing serious. I’ve fallen back slightly and we’re holding a junction not some fifty meters away.”

“Hold that position Sergeant, I’m coming with some heavier support.”

“Copy that Lieutenant.”

With that said, Korovin ended the transmission and bent over slightly, taking this moment to curse again slightly as he tried to work the pain out of his legs from the sudden impact. Regardless, he did better then the Corporal, whose back and entire chest still stung, but fortunately for him nothing was broken.

With nothing else to do but wait, they remained fairly quiet, their encounter with the creatures having pushed their curiousity at the sound of gunfire to the back of their minds as they now had more important things to do given the lack of any call for assistance.

The clone bank in the Titan followed all the official rules concerning embryo enhancements. All the official clone facilities were required to maintain a series of completely enclosed sections, installed by a series of government technicians. Along the two walls there were twin lines of closed maturation tubes, ten tubes along each wall, each with a closed locker mounted on the metal wall to their right hand side.

A long range needle cast had been transmitted as soon as the freighter had been located, the long range message being transmitted almost instantaneously through what could be considered a separate dimension. The signal rejoined the more normal reality deep in the systems regulating the clone maturation tubes. The door to the enclosed section hissed open, the first time that any of the technicians in the Titans clone room had seen inside the section since it was installed. A pair of automated robots moved into the section, each emerging with a clone tube clutched in its segmented arms.

The two technicians looked on with interest, watching as the two robots started working in relay, each carrying five tubes to a reception chamber down the corridor. As was normal for the clone bay it had been a relatively boring day, there had been a visit by a member of high command, decanted into a synth sleeve for a face-to-face meeting with the command staff, a single fatality due to user error on one of the weapons ranges decanted into one of the combat custom marine bodies and now this, ten unknown bodies, now waiting for them in the reception chamber. The two technicians exchanged glances, while it was an interesting break in routine; the sealed chamber meant one thing. The Envoy Corps.

The development of cortical stacks and the digitization of personalities made military work more scientific. Muscle memory could easily be implanted into combat sleeves, the bodies themselves upgraded, strengthened tendons with installed servo motors to prevent injuries; dense muscle groups courtesy of a mixture of steroids, hormone treatments and nerve stimulation; enhanced senses, courtesy of genetic manipulation and even equipment can be directly implanted below the skin through varieties of surgery. The problem emerged when you thought about it, all the physical attributes of a body remained with the body itself, while all the inhibitions, the fears, wants and loves moved with the mind, the personality itself.

This would be completely acceptable if it wasn’t for one fact, space is BIG. Travel time between systems usually extended into several years, with the shortest distance between a pair of systems being a month and a half. If someone started a rebellion, throwing thermonuclear or bio weapons around, anything that threatened the biosphere, then dispatching troops wouldn’t be enough. The time it would take to respond with an enough troops to make a difference would be somewhere in the region of decades, the troops arriving to question the winners children. Instead a unique force was designed, the Envoy Corps. It was made up of members from all works of life, recruiting mainly from various military forces.

Each member of the Envoy corps underwent virtual years of psycho-surgery, changing their psycho spiritual make-up permanently. All inhibitions regarding the taking of life were removed; combat training was fed to an instinctive level; they had virtual months of counselling to prepare them for high speed repeatable resleeving; training for near perfect memory recall and there was a more unique side effect of the conditioning; something commonly referred to as ‘Envoy Sense’, an oddly bundled collection of subconscious conditioning, the ability to read people, making it hard to lie to an envoy, even harder for them to protect themselves with the layer of lies and self deception that normal humans used.

The massive upsides were matched with large downsides, membership of the envoy corps immediately ruled out any political or police job and the rumours that surrounded the Envoy Corps ensured that most high-level corporate jobs were also out, most executives not trusting the retired Envoy to solve promotion competitions in a non-violent manner. This usually meant that retired Envoys went into one of two separate path; either crime, a vocation to which they were almost ideally suited or low level work, either for a corporation or a smaller company, usually in some form of security work.

The two technicians made their way to the reception chamber, instead of the strictly utilitarian appearance of the military resleeving chamber the receiving chamber was much more luxurious, gold-flecked black decor with the ships emblem and name marked on the ceiling above the baths of tank gel. The room was filled with ambient subsonics, designed to engender a sense of comfort, allowing the new arrivals to greet the ship with less a chance of severe dislocation conditions. It was here that each member of the envoy corps was woken, wearing a Kumalo bio systems sleeve, full combat set, holding a wide variety of custom extras, notably a serotonin cut-out to increase the capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf genes for enhanced speed and savagery with a tendency for near painful pack loyalty. Before they were woken they were pumped full of chemicals, this mixture a military hospital speciality, endorphins, hormones and more, this patriots cocktail meaning they woke feeling great, a pleasant headrush that mixed with the subsonics was one of the more pleasant sensations regularly experienced on the ship.

All of the Envoys woke up within three minutes, each towelling themselves down with the towels laid out before demanding an immediate meeting with the captain. All ten moved through the Titan towards the bridge as a single unit, there movements choreographed nearly identically, their intent and origins obvious; the Imperial Protectorate had taken an interest in this misadventure.

235 hours after the Mayfair sent the distress signal
Mayfair Docking Bay

Captain Abrams frowned under his helmet as the question about the floor came through the translation circuits.

“They won’t go through the floor, they exert less than half the breaking force for these floors and the scans have indicated that the hangar bay is relatively undamaged, with no structural damage detected by any of the scans. How thick? It is seventy three centimetres of strengthened pollalloy plate with a surface layer of seven centimetres of impact resistant ceramic. It takes a force of nearly seventy eight tons per square inch when it is unpowered and with full power supply it is reinforced to roughly two hundred tons per square inch. These craft have been designed to land safely on decks made according to protectorate standards, even when they are unpowered. The number of creatures is unknown, as are their reproduction methods; the present prevailing theory surrounding their reproduction requires a host organism for the initial stages of life, if it is assumed that one creature is produced by each human being on board we would be dealing with six thousand three hundred and twenty one alien organisms”

The threat was met in kind for the first time,
“As for your threats, stop them, they do nothing but serve to underline your essential powerlessness. You have no means to carry out any significant harm, which you seemingly no since you have yet to threaten anything in specific. The fleet outside is much more powerful than your ship and you are doing nothing to help this situation apart from the occasional threat. Just because you didn’t expect anyone to come for the freighter doesn’t mean you have any rights to it. If it came down to it we could ask you to leave, something your captain seems to acknowledge, and you are onboard because we chose not to argue about it. If we did so you would have no choice but to leave, so here is what we will do. I will continue to answer all the questions you ask, though judging from your reaction you may want to be more exacting with your questions wording. If you do not wish to work together then that is acceptable, though any fatalities among your troops will be uncompensated or replaced and since your ship is not large enough for a clone facility this will cause more problems for you than us.”

Abrams dug back into his self control, clutching the shreds of his temper and reining it in,
“If you wish then we can both use this hangar as a base and assign separate areas of operation. Your captain has already agreed that we are allowed to capture a specimen sample, once we have that then we are happy to eliminate the threat that this ship poses, from orbit if necessary. Is there anything else you wish to know at this time?”

He had just finished talking when there was a sudden flicker from the open hangar entry, a faint blue green glow emanating from the newly engaged entry shield. Two marine engineers had managed to connect a fusion generator to the shielding, powering the hangar, the doors sealing themselves and the vent system completely closing, turning the hangar into a sealed environment. The fusion generator module had been specifically designed for this task, in addition to the generator itself the module was carrying a series of compressed gas canisters, as soon as the room was secured, the engineers simply pressed a button and the gases were released, pressurising the massive hangar in a matter of moments.

As Captain Levitan was the only Kilrany tied in on the relay from the shuttle, none of the nearby infantrymen were aware of the degenerating situation, as body language was next to non-existent with everyone concealed under their environmental suits and body armour. Thus it was that as Abrams finished speaking, none of them noticed that for several long seconds afterwards, Levitan merely stared at his slightly shorter counterpart in silence through the darkened visor of his helmet.

In those few seconds the Infantry Captain’s mind raced, with so much said by Abrams all at once in his ‘lecture’ that could be taken in many ways, he didn’t know where to begin and was running the gamut from anger to amusement. There was one visible action from him however, and out of context, one Sergeant looking on at the scene thought nothing of seeing Levitan’s index finger lightly tap the trigger guard of his weapon twice in rapid succession, pause a moment, then repeat.

Ultimately though Levitan focused on one thing in particular that Abrams had mentioned that seemed the most inconsequential, and with his communication system still set through on the open relay, he suddenly burst into long, deep laughter. It was a strange kind of laughter though as there was neither amusement nor malevolence in it, in fact as the officer buckled slightly in his stance and took a single step back from Abrams, the tone in it could almost be described as disbelief.

With his left hand he momentarily disabled his communication system, silencing the sound of his laughter despite the atmosphere that was rapidly being created around them. He continued to shake slightly in silence for several moments more, drawing a number of quizzical looks from his men before he finally straightened up to look at Abrams once more.

Gone was his earlier expression of wariness that had come about from being required to deal with a military force they’d had no previous experience with, it was now replaced with an expression of disgust, and with three simple words, he managed to cause that same look to come upon the concealed faces of every Kilrany soldier in the hangar as he switched over to the company level, contempt evident in his voice, “They’re fucking clones.”

It was a strange reaction no doubt, as the Kilrany showed the utmost respect and equality to men, women and even artificial intelligence, but with clones; at least a very specific type of clone, they had as much disdain for them as one had for a piece of gum found stuck to the bottom of one’s shoe. It didn’t even matter at this point if not all of them were clones, the assumption had been made, the damage had been done, and as they were already tense and on edge, there was no change in the demeanor of the Kilrany beyond the looks of disgust and contempt upon their concealed faces.

Completely unconcerned with the confusion he was no doubt causing and about to increase for the Caldari, Levitan shifted back to the relay to address Abrams once more, his tone even and indifferent, “You assume a great deal more then you should, but I’m not here to debate the question of property ownership on a moon that belongs to neither of us, or who’s giant metal phallus is bigger. You clear out ‘your’ freighter and take your specimens; my soldiers wont get in your way. In fact, I tell you what, I’ll even do as you asked earlier and pull my men back here to the hangar. You, have fun in there.”

With that said, he closed the channel to the shuttle and turned to walk towards it, leaving the Caldari to speculate as to his sudden change in temperament, a task made a little more complex by the sheer volume of Abrams’ speech. As he moved, addressed the men under his command, “Black one to all units, fall back to the hangar on the double and prepare for immediate withdrawal to the Redeemer. Black platoon with hold position until all units have returned.”

A simple chorus of acknowledgements followed as Levitan returned to the landed shuttle, and without delay thanks to the atmosphere provided by the Caldari, opened the hatch and climbed inside while a simple overpressure system ensured no airborne contaminates came in with him. Closing the hatch behind himself, he promptly headed for the cabin and addressed the pilot within with his exterior communication system, “Get me Major Alekseev.”

-----

Where just moments before they looked upon the door with sympathy and concern for those they thought were inside, now Corporal Davydova and her section looked at it with callous disregard. Just like their comrades in the hangar, their reaction to the word that the Caldari were clones was just as negative, and any reply that may have come from within the room at this point would have been ignored.

Most of their thoughts were put into words a moment later by their Sergeant, “Screw ‘em, let their copies bail them out. Back to the hangar.”

Without any word of complaint at leaving the survivors behind, both sections made an about turn and started quickly walking back down the corridor in the direction they had come from, leaving those who had been on point watching their back. At the same time the Assault Droid started to backpedal rather then turn around, easily keeping pace with its human counterparts and providing a far more permanent rear watch.

-----

With power restored to the hangar and its airlocks, a few of the Kilrany soldiers just inside the ship decided now was a good enough time as any to secure their own specimen, and just as Levitan was closing the hatch behind him in the shuttle, the inner airlock door in use by the Kilrany opened. This revealed a pair of Kilrany infantrymen with a single lifeless creature held partially upright between them with little effort, gripping it from what looked to be under its shoulders.

Dragging it forward and out onto the little catwalk, they received a number of odd looked from the other Kilrany near them, and from several who were across the hangar. Without any word they hefted the creature right up to the edge and let it drop down unto the ceiling plate below them where it thumped loudly on impact.

“What the hell are you doing Petrov?”

One of the two soldiers turned to look at this section Sergeant who had been holding position on the catwalk with the rest of his fireteam and replied simply, “We thought the Indrii would like one of these things to dissect Sergeant.”

For a moment the Sergeant looked at him with disbelief, not sure whether he should be amused or annoyed with the Corporal. Glancing down at the creature he could easily see that its elongated head had taken a substantial amount of punishment, with multiple cauterized wound tracks, “Are you sure the thing is dead?”

Snapping his Carbine down slightly while flicking the safety off with his thumb, Petrov squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, creating two new deep wound tracks with fresh ash and steam within. Then looking back at his Sergeant, he shrugged, “I’m pretty sure Sergeant.”

The Sergeant merely shook his head slightly and after a quick glance at the creature, he looked back at Petrov, “What if they wanted to have more of a head to study there now?”

“Oh don’t worry about that, Anna has that covered.”

Just as he finished his sentence, the airlock opened again and a third infantryman came strolling out and up next to them with the elongated head of one of the creatures tucked under her left arm. Close inspection of it would reveal that it had been severed rather cleanly at the neck by several additional Disruptor bolts, and unlike the one that was now sprawled below them, this head was intact, its body having taken the killing blows.

Shifting the head around and holding it out in front of her self, she addressed her Sergeant, “Do you have any idea how hard it was to find one of these that hadn’t been shot to pieces?”

Lacking any words, their Sergeant merely shook his head again before gesturing to the shuttle, “Just get them stored away.”

Hiding the smiles concealed under their helmets with a simple shrug of their shoulders, the three dropped down to the level below them to recover the full body and started to make their way to the shuttle, taking a path along the wall and their own men so as not to pass close to the Caldari.

"You want what!?" Sergeant Major Polis was a bit pissed at his new orders from Captain Lingun, halting his squad at the bulkhead that apparently blocked their way out. The 40mm that was fired earlier may have caused the damage, but Polis was uncertain. "Can you tell me that again? Slowly?"

Commander Jilneas was sitting in for Lingun at the time, sitting straight and firmly, "Sargeant Major, I want you and your men to pull out of that ship. From our scans we can see that they are all gathering in the hangar area.."

"Oh they are now! Fine, fuck it. Alright men out the airlock, this way is blocked."

"What?" she showed some perplexity across her face.

"Nevermind commander, Polis out," he ended the transmission and switched to the landing shuttle's frequency, "Rezil, come in Rezil."

"What the hell you want?"

"Sergeant, I KNOW you're not disrespecting me!"

"Oh! OH! Sergeant Major, I didn't recognize ya."

"Yea right, I need you to fly near this area right now," he transmitted some coordinates of the layout to the pilot's HUD.

"Right sir, I'll be there in a few."

After a few, the shuttle began to settle near the airlock that Relis forcibly opened some few minutes ago, the team began to file on the two sides lining up for evacuation. As soon as hatches opened on the shuttle a small ramp protracted towards the airlock landing firmly on the bulkhead. The team began to file into the shuttle and sit in their seats. "Alright Sergeant, lets get the fuck out of here."

"Aye sir."

"You're not thinking about just leaving us are ya?" Jim said.

"Well Grostin I don't mind."

"Hey!"

"We're not leaving, we're just going to reenter the hangar area. Polis out."

"Okay then, 'cuz I was contemplating on shooting you down." he chuckled.

"Real funny tough guy..."

Mayfair Docking Bay


The brief pause after Abrams sudden diatribe was broken by one of the Caldari engineers, his voice transmitting throughout the hangar,
“Pressurization complete, the hangar is completely powered. Helmets can come off.”

The choice as to whether they would remove their outer helmet remained with the individual marines, but the men who knew that they would be remaining in the hangar began to remove the ballistic face shields and gas masks, exposing their faces.

Their faces were slightly odd looking, similarities between them all showing through, making them all look superficially similar. There were a variety of different basic types present. The four engineers all had broad, oriental faces with epicanthic folds at the corners of their eyes, slightly flattened noses with broad nostrils. The actual marines that chose to remove their helmets exposed long faces, roman noses and ice blue eyes throughout. The single pilot was different again, this face was narrow, a hawk-nose alongside two neat lines of wire-jacks, each a small hole for a hardwired connection. The raw skin around the wire-jacks was slightly inflamed, showing that they were recent implants.

The attitude of the Kilrany was understandable; the years of cloning had produced hundreds of new laws and thousands of new customs on the different planets that made up the newly formed Imperial Protectorate. The one key law that underlay the others involved ‘double-sleeving’ the informal name for an activity that confirmed some of the worst fears of science fiction writers from the late 20th century and early 21st century. The advent of DigiHu chips or ‘cortical stacks’ as they were more commonly known, meant that with the proper technology somebody’s personality could be directly copied by computer and inserted into a new body. If it is proved that someone has willingly double-sleeved they are sentenced to mandatory erasure, all recovered data-stacks fed into an EMP chamber, where their patterns are permanently erased.

The Kilrany dislike and contempt for direct copies of personalities was rather ironically mirrored in the attitudes of the Caldari marines onboard, possibly with even more contempt. The sudden change in the Kilrany behaviour, namely the withdrawal of the troops into the docking bay was met with a cool disinterest, treating the actions as if they had been expecting them. The sudden retreat of Levitan merited a raised eyebrow, though it was hidden by his helmet, which he had not yet removed.

Corridor near Drone Access Hatch S-12

Deeper in the ship the automated combat units had successfully completed their mission, although two of the large units were badly scarred by the corrosive blood from the aliens. The alien specimen they had obtained was being carried by one of the units, still thrashing as it attempted to escape from its confinement.

The four units were moving down a corridor, the first unit moving along was slightly damaged, mainly cosmetic scarring from the acid, but its right upper arm was slightly damaged, three deep gouges in the metal where a claw had managed to rip through the heavy material. The second unit was transporting the specimen, both arms occupied by the captive. The third unit was completely undamaged as well, both its arm mounted weapon units constantly scanning the corridor as it moved along. The final unit was moving much slower than the other units, slowly dropping behind, both its motor legs badly damaged by repeated alien attacks.

The alien attack was nearly completely silent, the only noise being that of the alien’s claws impacting on the deck plating. This sound was enough to trigger the proximity sensors on the AI units however, the three units not carrying specimens turned and opened fire. Unlike the Kilrany, the Caldari relied mainly on projectile weapons, with the occasional particle beam weapon system. For ship-board actions they relied on specially designed projectiles, designed to prevent any risks of hull-breaches.

The ammunition was still deadly; each shell was a small unjacketed fragmentation round, each individual fragment edged with mono-molecular blades. Each round detonated roughly half a metre in front of the target, allowing optimum dispersion of the fragments. The multiple detonations of the shells shredded the first wave of aliens efficiently, corrosive blood spraying across the corridor walls, the metal beginning to dissolve. The four AI systems linked briefly, running through possible decisions and methods of execution for their primary mission. It took slightly under two tenths of a second for a decision to be made. The slowest unit stopped moving, rotating its upper body to face the oncoming tide of aliens, weapons ripping to life, muzzle flare lighting the entire corridor.


Storage room B-26


The repeated knocks on the door raised the spirits of all the people inside the storage room, after three repetitions of the Kilrany knocks they were answered in kind. Jamie slamming the metal pole into the door with as much force as he could exert, the sound echoing throughout the room. As he carried on hitting the pole on the door he shouted over his shoulder,
“Guys, there is someone out there!”

From his position at the rear of his section’s column, Lev twisted his upper body around to survey the corridor behind them, doing this routinely in spite of the knowledge that the Assault Droid keeping pace immediately to his right was doing a rather commendable job of it itself. Even though they had already moved a considerable distance from the storage room, he could just barely hear he the tapping from Jamie over the rhythmic thumping of the heavy machine effortlessly walking backwards beside him.

Lev couldn’t say he felt any guilt at the thought of abandoning the survivors behind in the storage room; though to be fair this wasn’t entirely the case as the Caldari Marines were expected along shortly, and it was a sentiment silently shared between the two Kilrany infantry sections in that corridor. It wasn’t exactly common behaviour for the Kilrany; being so callous, but it was not unheard of, and even the Kilrany were not above a little prejudice, which in this case was highly specific, and resonated strongly within them.

Had the full extent of their feelings been made clear on the subject to the Caldari, then most likely Abrams would have reacted with far more concern then curiousity at Levitan’s rather sudden departure in the hangar. As it was though, there would be little further warning of the abrupt change in Kilrany behaviour that was to come.

In the hangar, the situation wasn’t helped at all by those Caldari who chose to remove their protective headwear, revealing their similar natures and seemingly confirming the suspicion of some Kilrany that they were in fact all clones. In the case of minor discrepancies, their minds, which were already clouded with prejudice, chalked it up simply to either imperfections in their methods, or intentional aberrations for identification purposes.

Regardless of this though, there was little else for them to do at this point but continue to watch with their usual level of paranoid suspicion as their colleagues slowly trickled back into the hangar. Before the arrival of the Caldari there had been more then enough room for these three platoons and their shuttles, but now the situation was considerably more cramped, and to help make a little more room, Black Platoon; which had been holding position in the hangar since their landing, withdrew to their landed shuttle while their positions were replaced by infantry from Green Platoon.

Even the Kilrany machines were on edge at this point; if you could make the comparison, though in this case it had nothing to do with the cultural differences between either race of ‘humans’. By this point, four of the Assault Droids were now present in the hangar, and their rudimentary minds grew uneasy with the relatively cramped conditions, they were not exactly pleased that their engagement ranges had dropped so drastically with so many potential hostiles around them; potential hostiles being anyone, or anything, not of Kilrany.

-----

An absurdly considerable distance away by infantry standards, Captain Vyshinsky was as of yet unaware of the latest developments on the moon that had unexpectedly become the focal point for at least three military forces, and one unknown hunter. Unsurprisingly though, all this tension and drama was almost completely lost on the Indrii who continued to happily study the plant and the two alien space forces as best they could with the equipment available to them.

“Captain, I’ve got a strange report for you,” there was a sight pause from the officer at communications as Vyshinsky turned to face him, “I’ve confirmed it now with the Indrii team – the ones specializing in communications,” he paused again as he sought the right words before finally choosing to start from the beginning, “We first noticed it shortly after we entered the system, well technically we didn’t notice it just then, it was there, but it was initially lost amongst the usual background noise we expected from a system like this and paid it little heed, but we’ve since singled it out and it’s not quite proper, we’ve not seen it before, not in our home system or any of the dead systems we’ve been through thus far.”

Another paused followed as the officer was clearly having difficulty with what he was trying to say, over-qualifying himself across the board, which brought a raised eyebrow from the naval Captain prior to the officer continuing, “The thing is though, it’s not consistent, it fluctuates in a seemingly random fashion up and down in pitch and in frequency, both just enough to be noticeable. We thought at that point maybe it was some band radiating from the planet that we weren’t familiar with, but we can’t seem to isolate it, it’s like it’s coming from the planet, but also other sources in the system, confusing the hell out our sensor array when we try to track it.

Vyshinsky wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to what his subordinate was telling him at first, as obviously they hadn’t considered it a threat, or it would have been brought up much sooner. Finally he asked a question that sounded simple enough, but was at its heart quite a bit more complicated, “Any educated guesses?”

The officer merely looked back at his Captain for several seconds before he replied, “Quite frankly sir, we just don’t know. We know its there, but like I said, we can’t isolate it, it’s like white noise, but varying in frequency and output from one moment to the next. It’s confounded the Indrii, and that’s saying something.”

Vyshinsky raised both eyebrows at that, “That is saying something, can-”

He was abruptly cut off when one of the crewmen at communications spoke up, “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Major Alekseev needs to speak with you, said it’s urgent.”

Gesturing with his left hand to the crewman to ‘wait one’ while reaching into his a pocket on his uniform with his right, he spoke to the officer first, “Keep the Indrii at it and let me know if anything changes on it,” he then turned to the crewman as he pulled his earpiece out of his pocket and slipped it unto his ear, “Put the Major through.”

There was a brief pause as the both the officer and the crewman acknowledged with a nod before turning around, the crewman taking the added measure of tapping a few keys before he gave a thumbs up sign over his shoulder.

With a half-hearted tone preceded by a sigh, Vyshinsky spoke into the little boom microphone, “You know I don’t like bad news Major.”

The usual even toned voice of Major Alekseev came through clearly in his right hear, “Sorry Captain, but you need to here this first hand, go ahead Captain Levitan.”

Vyshinsky raised an eyebrow as he recognized the name of the infantry officer who had a trace of annoyance in his voice, “Sir, we have a problem down here. These ‘Caldari’, have made it known that they’re Padonvirii, and they’ve made threats against us and the Redeemer.”

Several moments of silence followed as Vyshinsky’s mind processed the revelation that Levitan had just used a very derogatory colloquial the Kilrany had; in this case the plural form of it, which roughly translated as ‘memory clone’, with a colourful addition. As he replied, his face contorted slightly into a frown and his voice hid none of his disbelief, “What? How do you know this?”

“Their ‘representative’ who spoke with me let it slip, and he was quite clear in his wording, I don’t think they even give it a second thought, making threats about not ‘compensating’ us for any loses or how the Redeemer is too small by their standards to hold a cloning facility.”

Vyshinsky’s disbelief turned into frustration, “What ‘exactly’ did he say Captain?”

Levitan cursed slightly under his breath as he tried to recall verbatim what Abrams had said to him, and after a moment he replied, “Just a moment,” at this point he his voice was still audible, but it was clear he was speaking to someone else, “Were you recording the conversation? Good, play it back up to five minutes ago.”

While Levitan was speaking to the shuttle pilot, Vyshinsky leaned in towards Command Akhmatova and whispered to her, “When you were down there, did that Captain you spoke with give you any impression whatsoever that he was a Padonvir?”

She looked back at him rather suddenly with a puzzled expression clear upon her face, but recognizing that he didn’t want it broadcasted throughout the command center she shook her head just in time for the recording to begin playing through his earpiece. Having taken a moment to find the proper time index, Levitan had the pilot play the entirety of Captain Abrams tirade; at least as Levitan saw it, for Captain Vyshinsky.

Taking the moment of silence following as Vyshinsky was at a loss for words, Major Alekseev spoke again, “Captain Levitan tells me that he’s ordered a withdrawal back to the hangar and has requested permission from me to begin immediate extraction back to the Redeemer.”

This rapidly drew Vyshisnky back into the conversation, “Do you now Captain? And then what would you suggest?”

Taken slightly off guard by the hostility in the naval Captain’s voice, Levitan replied quickly nonetheless, “Sir, there’s nothing of value we can contribute down here anymore, with these Caldari here we can’t even attempt to search computer terminals for useful information, such as why this freighter ended up here of all places and alone at that. It would take too long just to translate any interface, something I somehow doubt they’re just going to sit back and let us do, so I see no reason to risk our lives down here around these ‘things’.”

Major Alekseev’s somewhat indifferent tone interrupted, “I share my subordinates opinion Captain, to a point. We can no longer achieve anything particularly useful down there, but I don’t advocate a full withdrawal. At this point I believe we should leave a single platoon down there to monitor their progress, and ensure they’re not hiding anything from us, I didn’t trust them before, and that certainly hasn’t changed, as I somehow doubt it was a mere accident that brought this freighter to this system.”

A few moments of silence followed as Vyshinsky took this time to restrain his frustrations and look at the situation clearly, as while their prejudice towards memory clones was one of those rare generalizations that truly extended to just about every Kilrany, the extent to which they felt this varied between individual. As such, while Vyshinsky was not above this feeling, it was not as strong in him as it was in Levitan, which was perhaps for the best given their current situation.

Finally Vyshinsky released a slight sigh, “Alright Major, pull back some of the men, but Captain, make sure everyone down there knows that I’ve told the Caldari that this system is a protectorate, I don’t want any accidental slips in our ‘story’ down there.”

While Levitan replied with a simple, “Yes sir,” Major Alekseev was a little less brief, “Very good then Captain, I’ll make the final ‘arrangements’ then,” and with that the infantry officer ended the conference call.

Pulling the eyepiece off, Vyshinsky returned it to his pocket and leaned in towards Akhmatova again, speaking slowly, clearly, and above all else, quietly, “Commander, Major Alekseev is pulling out some of the infantry from the freighter. I want you to be there when they land, and I want you to make it absolutely clear that under no circumstance are they to discuss with anyone the ‘suspicion’ that the Caldari are Padonvirii.”

While the Commander raised an eyebrow, she merely nodded her head in understanding a moment later before spinning on her heel and heading out of the command center through the open blast doors. Vyshinsky wasn’t sure where she stood on the subject, but he was confident that it wouldn’t get in way for her as it was for him.

-----

After their conversation had ended, Captain Levitan made his way out of the shuttle’s cockpit and through the troop compartment that was rapidly beginning to fill with members of Black Platoon. Exiting back into the hangar, he stood near the hatch for a moment and watched as another fireteam came passing through the airlock before stepping out from the craft to differentiate himself from the ‘horde’ of nearly identical Kilrany infantrymen.

As he came to stop slightly out in the open, he got his first good look at the unmasked Caldari Marines for the first time as his Disruptor Carbine hung by its tactical sling in front of him. It didn’t really change his opinion on them however; instead it merely acted as further confirmation in him his mind to what the Caldari were.

He needed to do several things at this point, notably he needed to inform the Caldari and the Ganoxa of their intent, but since the Caldari officer had never identified himself, he chose to make a general message known over an open channel through the shuttle that would ideally be picked up by both forces. It was fairly basic and general in content, letting it be known to both that two of the Kilrany platoons were planning to withdraw shortly, and that he would be remaining out in the open until then if any questions were pending.

Only moments after this, a powerful transmission burst slammed into the area, nearly wide enough to cover the entire solar system, though due to the position of the moon in its rotation, the three shuttles did not pick up on it. Highly encrypted and not the same frequency as those used by the Kilrany Imperial Navy, it was nonetheless readily identifiable to the crew manning communications aboard the KIN Redeemer, and though the message would be unreadable, it would no doubt be easily picked up by anyone within the system with any halfway decent receivers.

The Caldari fleet seemed to have folded in on itself, most of the ships having moved in and docked in the huge docking bay of the Titan, a small number remaining in deep space as a piquet force, deploying probes and other scanning equipment to help maintain a fairly secure perimeter. The effect of the sudden transmission burst was the greatest on these ships. All of them were listening for anything, actively pumping energy out in search patterns, so when the burst came through it was immediately stored in its entirety, hardcopy versions spooling off in the different ships.

The sheer terror this caused in the Caldari would be nearly incomprehensible to an outsider, for the Caldari were not quite what they seemed. Despite their big words and even larger ships they were a relatively small group, off shoots from the Frieden forces, the corporate masters of the Unified German Republic. After their loss in the interplanetary war they had left Earth behind, massive ships travelling millions of light-years from Earth, all in a vain attempt to dodge the scrutiny of the United Earth Government and the United Nations Space Command.

In the years that they had been unnoticed by the UNSC they had steadily built up their forces, designing new weapons and equipment before they had fallen foul of the very things that had made them leave the UN, the control of political parties. The end result mirrored the early days of the UNSC, separatists appearing as if from nowhere, five different ‘Empires’ being quickly fought out, massive battles becoming common place. It was then, at the worst possible time that the UNSC struck. Organised by a number of UNSC Prowlers the UNSC fleets struck quickly and efficiently, eliminating nearly all resistance in a matter of months. The few remnants of the once mighty fleets fled, most trying to preserve their customs and their ways of life even as they ran, jumping from system to system. Unluckily for the Kilrany they had encountered the largest group of remnants that had survived, encountering one of its several fleets. Despite the size and strength of their surviving fleets they were nothing compared to that of the UNSC, which was why, when the unknown, but extremely strong, signal came through they began to panic. Although the frequency was one that they had yet to attribute to any of the UNSC forces the unknown communication caused a sudden change in attitudes and marked the start of the end for the Caldari fleet that were presently holding position near the small moon.

-----

The first overt signs of the sudden change in the Caldari mindset came as quite a shock to the people sharing the orbital space with them. From the two massive hangar entry-ways ships began to appear, all the frigates, interdictors and cruisers that had been sheltering in the massive bay exiting as quickly as was possible. One of the frigates tried to push its way forwards, trying to squeeze between one of the exiting Rook class Recon ships and the side of the exit passage. There was a sudden bright flash of shield feedback as the three shields began to interact with each other, a massive static charge building up. The Rook managed to escape from the entry way in time, but the Harpy Class assault frigate was skewered by a large bolt of energy, reminiscent of the lightning from Earth before the weather satellites were in full working order. The charge detonated the stored ammunition for the Frigates rocket system, the rockets that were stored ready to fire in the launcher exploding as they were deigned to, the small frigate exploding as it attempted to escape.

“Calm down! We have no evidence that the signal is anything to do with our enemies.” Maryl’s call for calm came too late, the panic that had gripped the mainly inexperienced pilots was too deeply entrenched for simple words to calm them.

The change in attitudes caused something else, an entirely different problem, one that should have been anticipated by the commander of the Caldari forces, but hadn’t been. The inexperience of the pilots, mixed with months of running at the very sign of UNSC forces had left many of them with a deep seated anger, ashamed that all they could do was run from a force many of them considered their lesser, even if they were stronger in numbers.

What happened next could probably have been predicted by any psychologist, or even a sociologist. The loss of the Frigate wasn’t attributed correctly by most of the pilots, admittedly the more experienced passed it off for what it was, pilot stupidity, but the younger pilots, the ones that had flown with him since he had passed flight school, laid it directly at the door step of the only force present that had made any move that could be considered hostile, the Kilrany.

“They got the Echo! I am engaging.” Predictably the first person to respond was Ieris Avtar, blaming the Kilrany for the death of his friend.

Before anyone could tell him not to he opened fire, his 150mm Railguns each spitting out rounds, joining the brief blasts of energy coming from the two blasters mounted in their cradles on either side of the cockpit. On its own it was unlikely that this would do any serious damage to the Kilrany ship, but it wasn’t intended to. The small ship had opened fire simply to push the Kilrany vessel back, to distract them from the quick moving troop transports that would soon be leaving the freighter below.

-----

On the freighter things were steadily getting worse, though they had yet to deteriorate as far as the situation had in deep space.

"Withdraw your forces. We are evacuating the system." The message came through the to the pilots of the Storks, hovering near the landing bay and waiting for any sign of upcoming action. Immediately they began to move in, swooping into the hangar and picking up the pods they had earlier dropped, once again filled with troops. This caused another problem, because of the nature of their insertion it had been necessary to make two trips to move everything across to the freighter. When the time came for them to move out it had been hoped that the situation would have calmed sufficiently for the movement of troops to not be a great problem, but when it came to it the problems had been fully realised. The first wave of pods had left the deck within seconds of the communications pulse arriving, but that still left all the Caldari automated combat units and a significant proportion of the Caldari marines waiting for evacuation. The sense of distrust had quickly become mutual, once again, through a regrettable misunderstanding. The main thing that had prevented a blood bath before, the Kilrany soldiers fiercely held command structure, was mirrored in the Caldari ranks, though with the new fear in the front of their minds it would take little to cause a blood bath for all concerned.

OOC: As warned Kilrany, the start of the end for the Caldari and their irritating cloning problems.

OOC: Well now, this is in interesting revelation. But now I lose the point of cultural contention, heh. Bah, this is rushed, I hope it does the job regardless.

It had been easy for the Kilrany to take the origin of the communications burst for granted, wholly unaware of the predicament of the Caldari, the worst that Vyshinsky had expected was a suspiciously worded hail. As it was, to say that the latest development was unexpected would have been considered a colossal understatement by the officers within the KIN Redeemer’s command center.

While it felt to some as though ages had passed, it had been a relatively short time since the Redeemer had sent out its message about the arriving Caldari and their own current predicament, a message that had since reached its destination. Having been relayed to what amounted to the Kilrany Imperial Navy’s Admiralty, it was quickly relayed once more, as currently; aside from the five Athena class vessels, they did not have the authority from the Empress to send their warships beyond currently controlled Kilrany space.

Thus it was that the call for aid from Vyshinsky fell ultimately on the 4th Division of the Kilrany Imperial Guard, and reacting quickly, they had dispatched a small task force to take action. Fortunately though, Vyshinsky’s second message had reached them before their last jump into the system in question, and choosing to listen to the senior officer on the scene, they held back, waiting in the last system the Redeemer had explored.

Unfortunately though as it would seem, they had chosen to transmit a message towards the Redeemer, and unsure of the ship’s exact position, widened the transmission and upped the power level. It was this innocuous message that Vyshinsky was listening to when the Caldari vessel exploded, initially having paid little heed to the redeployment of Caldari forces as he already had his ship on condition one, and there was nothing else he could do. Additionally there had been some conjecture among the senior staff that they perhaps needed to refuel, and they had merely completed this task.

“This is Admiral Nazarova, your last message is acknowledged Captain Vyshinsky and we will hold our position in your last explored system. Be advised however that-” whatever else said beyond that point was lost to Vyshinsky as his eyes caught sight of the incident in the Caldari task force.

The details weren’t as clear as if he had been physically watching the incident up close, but the computer generated image he saw in front of his right eye was enough to tell him something serious had just happened, though the full extent of it was not quite clear to him. As other officers snapped their heads over to look in the direction of the explosion upon the flashing warning in the corner of their displays, he raised an eyebrow and spoke quietly, “What the hell?” and then Avtar opened fire

Now this alone could have been disastrous, but what the Kilrany lacked in true experience, they made up for in discipline, and while the gunners aboard the Redeemer snapped forward, ready to give permission to their batteries to open fire, they still awaited their Captain’s order. This order didn’t come however as Vyshinsky; understandably caught off guard by this sudden attack, felt something was wrong when only one small Caldari vessel fired on them.

He did not however stand by and do nothing, and his orders reverberated throughout the command center as he bellowed quickly, “Hold fire! All weapon stations hold fire, con clear the planet and make use harder to hit, engineering, fire up the cloaking system!”

In quick succession the officers and crewmen responsible carried out his orders at furious speeds, but Vyshinsky was not entirely done, “Communications, tell the infantry to get off that damned moon now and hide themselves until this is over.”

At this point there was little doubt that Avtar was successful at distracting the Redeemer, already aimed away from the moon and the planet, the ship’s main engines flared as the crewman in the pilot’s seat slammed what amounted to his throttle fully forward. Nearly at the same time the large ship’s shields flared in turn as they took repeated; but relatively minor, impact, as in her previous position she had hardly been making herself a difficult target.

As she accelerated relatively rapidly away from the moon, the planet, and at a roughly perpendicular angle to the Caldari, the Athena class vessel began to visibly disappear from the stern section. It only took a few seconds in all for the ship’s cloaking device to power up fully and mask its presence, but Vyshinsky knew this wouldn’t hide them with their sensors blasting out at nearly full power, as anyone with even rudimentary sensors would be able to track them, but that was part of the point now.

Vyshinsky had no idea how powerful the Caldari warships were, and he certainly couldn’t afford to assume they were inferior to his own, but he also had three platoons down on the moon to worry about as well as the inhabitants of the planet that had been behind him. So much like Avtar who sought to prevent him from interfering with their troop ships, he intended to fix their attention on him as long as he could while making the Redeemer a slightly harder target. Whether the situation was still salvageable at this point, it was hard to say, the Caldari had fired on the Kilrany for no apparent reason; at least to them, but an order Vyshinsky gave less then an hour before would soon come back to haunt him.

While all the crew had been carrying out their recent orders, one crewman at communications had been carrying out his own, one given to him earlier by the officer on duty, who had in turn received it from their Captain. Tapping in a quick series on the keys in front of him, he called up and copied the latest logs made in the last half hour, and with one last ominous push of a button, signaled an escalation to the situation.

Just as the Redeemer disappeared fully from view, a launch cell along the ship’s narrow centerline punched out at great speed a long object that looked a great deal like a missile. Roughly a half-meter in diameter and seven meters long, the object broke free from the ship’s cloaking field and rocketed off towards the vessel’s stern, orienting itself along a specific trajectory.

To make up for the slow nature of current Kilrany communication systems, their ships were outfitted with a small number of emergency communication relays that were capable of being ejected to serve as a static relay point, or to be sent through hyperspace to quickly deliver a message. In this case the intent would be quite clear to those who knew what it was, but as to what the Caldari thought, they hadn’t even considered.

Within a few seconds the relay decided it had oriented it self properly and activated it’s fairly basic hyperdrive, jumping off in the direction of the last system the Redeemer had explored. After a few seconds it dropped back into normal space and its simple sensor system found itself dangerously close to a Tyemniy class Battlecruiser.

Though in this case dangerously close was a relative term, as it was still nearly a lightsecond out from the warship, but a fraction of a second longer in hyperspace and the relay would have impacted. Regardless of this, recognizing the emissions from the 4th Division craft, it angled itself in towards them, its thrusters doing their job properly as it began transmitting towards them.

-----

Down on the moon’s surface, within the hangar of the crashed freighter, the Kilrany were confused as to why the Caldari were suddenly falling back, but as they made no overt move against them, they made none in return. This didn’t however stop them from continuing to glare at them from under the cover of their helmets, their weapons held low in a less-threatening manner, but still ready to snap upwards and be fired.

It was perhaps for the best at this point that Vyshinsky’s message to the infantry, in particular Captain Levitan, had been as brief and uninformative as it had been, as it left him unaware of the engagement in space. This has obvious advantages, as it didn’t change the Kilrany stance of distrust and disgust, to outright hostility, and even potentially turning the hangar into a mutual slaughterhouse.

Regardless, Levitan passed the order along and the Kilrany prepared to leave quickly, and as it was his shuttle that was ready first, he turned away from the Caldari and moved back into it, where the rest of his platoon was already waiting. Lifting off quickly, the pilot only waited long enough for the two Assault Droids to leap up into their berths before carefully clearing out of the hangar past the other two hovering shuttles.

Corporal Sasha Davydova was just coming through the airlock and out onto the underside of the catwalk with her fireteam as the second shuttle moved in to land, readily accepting another platoon from both side hatches. While they had obviously heard the order to withdraw, this was their first trip back into the hangar since the Caldari had arrived, and they were left partially confused as to, as Lev put it, “Just what the hell is going on?”

Things were not going well on the Belldandy's bridge as it was alive with staff buzzing in between bays. There was a loud chattering as techs began yelling out contacts like no tomorrow, all of them being displayed in front of Lingun on his TacDis. He began to stroke his beard at the unfurling situation, a serious concern to him. The previous communications burst may have triggered an alert from the Battlegroup that was escorting the 117th Exploration Fleet through this sector.

"Sir! One of the vessels has broken away from the main group! They are firing!"

Lingun sat silently, his hand resting on his mouth, as the display showed a small window of the lone ship's weapon flaring up and grazing the Redeemer. "Shields up!"

"Temporal shields online, sir!" a tech said.

"Set status to Blue Alert, have pilots get ready for mobilization. Man the guns"

"Sir, Polis has his men in a shuttle shall I tell them to pull back." Jilneas reported.

"No. I don't want them to get caught in a potential crossfire. Have them hide for now," he ordered.

"Yes sir."

"I am detecting something in hyperspace sir."

"Don't tell me..." Lingun stood up.

Suddenly a group of ships exited out of hyperspace and settled about a few thousand kilometers away from the moon. Lingun sat back in his chair, with his mouth gaping. He didn't send any messages back, why were the here?

"Captain we are receiving a message from Admiral Torensal."

'Patch it through."

"Good to see you again sir," Torensal said, with much eagerness in his voice like a fresh recruit hoping to see some action in the middle of war, something Lingun saw most of his life in service to his country.

"Torensal what the hell are you doing here?"

"Well Admiral, we detected a large communications burst in this area. I thought it was some sort of distress signal so I decided to investigate."

"By sending the whole fleet!?" Lingun retorted loudly.

"Well I don't know what to expect out here sir. Judging from the looks of thing I think I made--"

"Made a bad situation goto extremely worse!" Lingun interrupted, looking very pissed at the ignorant subordinate.

"Uh..."

"I guess it can't be helped now..." he shrugged letting out a huge sigh, "relay a message concerning our resolve for a peaceful end to this situation," he leered at Jilneas, who backed away from Lingun. Never in her five years serving with Lingun has she seen this behavior from him. Glad I'm not as incompetent as Torensal, she sighed.

Concerning our arrival of our escorts, we are still hopeful for a peaceful conclusion to this situation. Is there a possible avenue where we settle this in a civilized manner somehow?

"They want us to do what?" Polis screamed at the pilot.

"You don't have to yell you know..." the pilot narrowed his eyes.

"I'll yell at whoever I fucking please Sergeant. Now tell me again of what the fuck does command intend us to do now!?" he yelled right in his ear almost deafening Rezil, who cringed.

"Hide out here..." he said quietly but still audible.

"Oh thats just fucking great. Just fucking great. First they fucking tell us to get off this gods forsaken moon and now they want us to stay. I rather die in a fight then in some fucking hole." his face reddened with anger, waving his hands.

"Shit! SM calm the fuck down man! I'm trying to fly here!" the shuttle rocked back and forth before Rezil straightened out, "so what are we going to do?"

"Ignore it! We're going back! Set your course for the 'dandy."

"Alright..." Rezil cringed again knowing the captain was going to be pissed for sure, of course he didn't know how t'ed off he was now.

The Shaw-Fujikawa Slipspace Drive was the UNSC’s only faster-than-light drive, it had been steadily improved from its initial design, incorporating so much from the reverse-engineering of the Covenant drives that it was barely recognisable as a human designed piece of engineering. Compared to the large Caldari fleet the UNSC tracking fleet was almost insignificant, only two Halcyon class cruisers, supported by five destroyers and four frigates.

They had located the Caldari ships almost entirely through luck, one of the Office of Naval Intelligences Section 1 Prowlers had picked up the signs of Slipspace travel. The Caldari fleet had jumped from one of their remaining systems, the UNSC had dispatched a larger fleet towards the system, but the small reconnaissance fleet had followed the Caldari fleet.

UNSC Aegis Fate – UNSC Frigate
Bridge

Captain Reys stood in the bridge, watching the weird patterns that flowed past the ship as it travelled through Slipspace. Most of the crew were in the middle of their sleep period, the night watch being slightly surprised when the captain had joined them on the bridge. He was standing behind Lieutenant Junior Grade Kieman, the ships sensor operator. Reys had one hand on his right shoulder and was leaning forwards, watching the large sensor read-out screen.

“How does it go Kieman? Any luck tracing the buggers?”

Kieman blinked in surprise, the only contact he had had with the captain prior to this had been at the inaugural address as he had joined the ship’s crew. His eyes quickly flashed across the screen in front of him, checking to see if he had missed something, nothing appeared out of place.

“Sorry sir, no new signs. All we know is that they exited somewhere in this system. We can launch some Clarion drones if you want? If we get a sensor return from them then we can emerge from Slipspace in formation within MAC range, with the element of surprise.”

“Great minds think alike Kieman, I have just got of the COMNET with the rest of the fleet. We are to drop a couple of drones to scan the system, and then drop out ready to engage.”

“How long until we are at the system?” Keys asked, addressing the Lieutenant who was manning the conn.

“We have slightly over an hour before we drop out of Slipspace Sir.”

-----

Zest – Harpy Class Frigate

Ieris watched as the enemy ship he was firing at began to disappear. None of the other ship pilots had chosen to engage, leaving his weapons the only ones firing as the Redeemer began to accelerate forwards, choosing not to fire as it moved away from the moon. This lack of Kilrany response was unexpected to say the least, it was expected that they would return fire, an outcome that would result in them focusing their attention on the Zest. When the ship began to accelerate away the frigate stopped firing the railguns and neutron blaster; instead firing a barrage of OE-5200 rockets, most of them targeting in on the engines that had powered up to force the Redeemer away from the frigates.

As the Redeemer began to cloak the Caldari assumed that it was running, leaving the system. That would have probably been the end of it if the Kilrany hadn’t then launched a communication probe, the missile like appearance of the probe meaning that it was taken for a directly offensive act. The Caldari sensors suddenly upped in power, trying to hold a target lock on the intermittent returns they got from the cloaked vessel. The launch of the probe had caused a much larger problem than simple sensor sweeps however. The probe launch and size had been close enough to that of a torpedo to trigger the automated warnings. Klaxons began to sound throughout the fleet, triggering automated fire control systems. The escaping Kilrany vessel suddenly became the centre of the entire fire pattern, the idea being that with a sufficient firepower enough would hit the Redeemer to cause it to drop the cloak.

-----

As the final Caldari troop transport left the hangar the crashed freighter became a target. Two Rokh class battleships were hanging over the freighter, their heavy assault missile launchers launching relays of missiles towards the freighter as soon as the Storks had flicked out of the bay. The Kilrany troop transports received the same treatment as their Mothership had, the two one kilometre long battleships firing at the shuttles, their four massive 350mm railguns firing their depleted uranium projectiles at incredible speeds.

-----

The sudden appearance of more ships, these in the form of the supporting fleet for Lingun sealed the matter for all concerned. The now completely cloaked Redeemer was ignored, sensors still gaining intermittent returns from the retreating vessel, but the new fleet quickly captured their attention.

The two Rook Class recon ships were the first to recognise the signatures of movement in hyperspace and they followed the laid-out plans for hyperspace attacks perfectly. They transmitted a series of target coordinates to the other ships, highlighting the area where the new arrivals would be coming through then they began to fire.

The massive Leviathan class Titan was fitted exclusively with missile weapons and a single Citadel Torpedo launcher, designed to eliminate enemy capital ships with one or two hits, especially once the shields were down. The rest of the fleet separated, four Harpies spinning back on their axis, moving to protect the two Rokh class battleships, lending their smaller, but more accurate, weapons to the task of eliminating the shuttles that were now trying to leave the crashed freighter.

The four phoenix class dreadnaughts were of slightly less use; they were designed primarily for long-range bombardment, not fast moving space combat. All four lined up, slightly under 100km between them, feeding all the power from their reactors to their weapon systems, ready to fire as soon as the ships dropped out of hyperspace.

The rest of the Caldari fleet aligned themselves around this line, one end anchored by the Titan, the other by the massive bulk of the moon itself. As the Rook’s reported in the time until emergence the fleet began to fire their missiles, their tactic intending to meet the new arrivals with an immediate hail of missiles, everything from the full size torpedoes or heavy assault missiles, each packed with enough explosive to destroy a capital ship, to the smaller rockets launched by the frigates, designed to destroy space fighters and other smaller craft.


The 8 cruisers that had been attached to the fleet fulfilled a slightly different job, completely unarmed they relied on their massive drone bays to protect them, along with the shields they all had mounted. They released drones by the dozen, repair drones hovering behind ships, ready to dart forward to repair battle damage, fighter drones to provide an added point defence capability, ready to take on enemy missile strikes and any small fighters that tried to break through.

The enemy ships finally slid out of hyperspace, the size of the enemy fleet seeming to confirm the Caldari mistrust of the new arrivals. The whole fleet seemed to pause for a split second, the calm before the storm. Suddenly the void was filled with firepower, railguns firing shaped rounds, blasters launching blue-green bolts and flickering lasers lighting the void with a pale red. The new arrivals were in for a nasty surprise, that was for sure.

"Captain, I mean Admiral! We have incoming enemy missiles at our fleet." Jilneas reported to Lingun who watched the freighter light up into a massive explosion on the moon. The fleet was shown to have their shields up along with cruisers racing out to meet the missiles with their massive number of point defense turrets to take them out. Those missiles that were successfully penetrated through the defense screen caught some of the destroyers by surprised instantly destroying them. While most of the other missiles were caught in the temporal shields disintegrating as they moved in.

"Now its our turn! Launch MDBMs!" Torensal said

The ten carriers opened up each of their 864 missile tubes and fired their Multiple Dispersal Ballistic Missiles. Missile pods that had a deadly payload of ten 30 megaton nuclear warheads within each, firing them off in either a omni-directional or shotgun like pattern, especially the latter prematurely if the missile's AI detects it is going to intercepted.

"Move the fleet to engage, and tell the Keitaros to fire at will."

"Yes sir!" said one of the tactical officers.

Sixty Keitaro-class Artillery Ships charged up their Super MACs and lanced out with massive slugs against the hostile fleet at near lightspeed, while fighters launched out of the ten carriers streaming ahead of the fleet towards the hostile force. Thirty Battleships and sixty destroyers opened up with their MACs and "mini" MACs, respectively, absorbing hits within their temporal shields. Ten cruisers were moving with the fleet to protect them from missiles while the other ten stayed behind with the carriers, who were still launching now conventional missiles and fighters.

OOC: Under normal circumstances I’d likely be a little disappointed that the RP degenerated into a fleet engagement, but in this case I’m rather pleased that it compliments the story we were building.

While all hell was breaking loose in space above them, in the hangar of the crashed freighter, a certain level of civility was still being maintained, as it was clear that the Kilrany and Caldari soldiers had no intention of shooting at each other. This was sadly however the only location in the solar system that this appeared to be the case.

Quietly but quickly the Kilrany re-boarded their shuttles, a task that was made all the easier by the withdrawal of many of the Caldari pods that had previously been taking up space. Thus while the warning from the Redeemer had been vague, the intent in it had been taken with deadly seriousness, and by the time the Caldari transports had returned to make their second pick up run, the Kilrany and their shuttles had long since completed their own evacuation.

With such little information on the situation though, the pilots had to make several snap decisions that were based heavily off the fact that several large Caldari warships had taken up position above the wreckage. As a result, rather then try and immediately break for space, it was decided that each shuttle would head off in three separate directions from the freighter while hugging the surface of the moon.

Primarily using their repulsors, they did use a brief burst from their main drives to kick start their journey while at the same time activating their own cloaking devices. With no atmosphere on the moon, they were able to skim along the surface at high speed without any wake kicking up an observable trail behind them, this coupled with their complete radio and emissions silence, made them all but non-existent.

-----

In space this was not so easy for the KIN Redeemer to achieve, as while their cloaking device also masked their engine output; it was simply incapable of accomplishing this while the main drives were operating at a hundred percent power. Under other circumstances Captain Vyshinsky might have considered that a problem, but they were far from invisible with their active sensor output running at over seventy-five percent power as it was, highlighting their position like a flashlight in the dark, which is exactly what he initially wanted.

While she was classed as an exploration vessel, and much of her heavier weapons had been removed to accommodate a more robust sensor suite, the Redeemer was still based off a Battleship, and she benefited fully from that origin in her armour plating and shielding systems. Thus the relatively light fire from the Frigate that made contact with the ship’s shields did little damage to the larger craft, and had it stopped there, Vyshinsky could have been happy, but of course it didn’t.

He had initially held off on firing for several reasons, first and foremost there had been a glimmer of hope that the situation could still be resolved peacefully if he took no offensive action, and second, even the lighter weapons on his ship had tremendous range, and a miss on any incoming projectiles or missiles could have easily struck a Caldari craft. The Kilrany Captain however lost that hope as Avtar continued to fire, adding what looked to them to be missiles, and at just about the same time, he lost his concern for accidentally striking a Caldari warship.

With less then half a lightminute between the Redeemer and the bulk of the Caldari task force, they were within what amounted to knife fighting range by Kilrany naval standards. A double edged sword, this not only meant that they had less time to react to enemy weapons fire, it made their own far more accurate as their Disruptor bolts traveled at the speed of light, whereas projectiles and missiles did not; a fact that unfortunately for the Kilrany, reduced none of their lethality.

Just prior to the momentary concentration of fire on the Redeemer, space immediately around it appeared to ripple as the vessel’s cloaking device attempted to compensate for the flashes of green erupting from its weapons batteries. With most of its weapon positions spread out evenly, nearly a third of the Redeemer’s batteries were capable of bringing fire to bear on the direction of Caldari due to the sloping nature of the ship’s design.

Curiously though, an outside observer might note that the Redeemer’s Heavy Disruptors remained silent, while their little brothers; the Medium Disruptors and the Medium Repeating Disruptors, unleashed their deadly fire at a rate of two rounds a second, and ten rounds a second respectively. To the gunners aboard the ship who were assigning targets to their computer controlled targeting systems, this made perfect sense considering the given orders to concentrate all their fire on incoming fire only, making any impacts on the Caldari unintentional, but inevitable due to the wall of energy based death being created.

Regardless of this, the lone ship couldn’t hope to stop everything, and whether it be missile, projectile or energy based, not all would miss, which lead to numerous impacts on the Redeemer’s shields as it stubbornly tried to draw attention away from the moon and the inhabited world. Aboard the Redeemer though, only the AI had the time to seriously wonder what those people on the inhabited world below them were thinking as their night’s sky was filled with the flashes of three separate forces slugging it out with each other in close proximity to them.

While she was originally intended to engage in fleet combat, and remain in an active engagement for hours if need be, this rather generous estimation of its abilities did not however take into account its current situation; that being the sole target for a small fleet of hostile ships. As it was, there was a tremendous silent sigh of relief when Lingun’s reinforcements arrived in system and quite quickly drew fire away from fleeing Kilrany warship.

As his ship appeared to momentarily be in the clear, Vyshinsky’s concern for his ship and crew quickly began to change into anger at the Caldari for firing on him. He didn’t want to abandon Lingun, who had thus far shown extraordinary promise as a friend, but he knew that the Redeemer simply wasn’t equipped for an engagement of this scale beyond that of a picket ship given his small number of dedicated anti-capital ship weapons, and he held no illusion that that they could somehow supplement the Ganoxa with open communications beyond merely getting in their way. So it was that he made the only choice he felt he could, and as Commander Akhmatova came jogging back into the command center, she could hear the anger in his voice as he gave the order to go to silent running.

This order wasn’t quite carried out immediately though, but as the last enemy round was either intercepted or impacted the Redeemer’s shields, her weapons fell silent, as well as her active sensor array. Only moments after the last shot had been fired by her own weapons, the crewman at navigation nearly cut all power to the main drives, relying mostly on their momentum to continue on while using a small amount of thrust to alter their course away from their last known heading.

As Vyshinsky looked on at the simplified image that came only from their passive array as the two fleets engaged each other, he silently apologized to Lingun for his actions, even if at the same time he knew the Ganoxa were far from helpless, it was simply not in his nature to run away. There was one other bright side though, but it left him also hoping that they would recognize the Ganoxa as friendly when he saw the new contacts appear in his eyepiece, the image of which suddenly became much more detailed again as the Redeemer picked up upon the encrypted datalink they were transmitting, which included their active sensor returns.

-----

Roughly one half of an astronomical unit out from the moon; nearly four lightminutes, thirty-eight ships of various sizes from Admiral Nazarova’s task force dropped out of hyperspace already in a formation. Much like the Redeemer before them, each ship had its cloaking device activated to hide their shape and precise position, but all of them were slamming out their active sensor signals, making their presence well known, and while visibly they could not be seen, their power output in their sensor arrays would have given anyone a decent idea as to their general size. Their entry trajectory had also placed them in a position so that the inhabited planet was not within their line of fire for either the Caldari, or the Ganoxa.

Formed in what could be best described as slightly curving wall, the heart of the formation sat around two Ares class Dreadnoughts that held a spacing of half a lightsecond between them. Above and below them, also spaced at nearly half a lightsecond where four Havoc class Battleships, though those that could be considered below the two Ares would have appeared to be upside down if they were visible. Anchoring out the wall of four by three capital ships on the left and right with equivalent spacing, was a total of six Tyemniy class Battlecruisers.

Interspersed evenly in a vertical star formation around the Ares and Havocs in groups of four, were sixteen Vigilant class Frigates, serving picket duty for their assigned capitol ship. Finally, formed in two vertical arrowhead formations located half a lightsecond to the left and right of the capitol ship wall in two groups of six, were twelve Vangard class Destroyers, which held their formation with roughly two thirds of a lightsecond between the upper and lower Destroyer.

The exact position of each ship in these formations was not quite permanently set however, and the distances varied slightly as leeway was permitted for maneuvering purposes, which was done to ideally make them slightly more difficult to hit.

As the battle continued to rage near the moon, this task force; whose Captains were rather confident their presence was quite well known, initially took no action, including retaining their drones for the moment. It was hardly surprising though given they had only just arrived, it would be easy to assume they weren’t fully aware of what had happened, but to any competent sensor operator who was paying attention, it would be clear that their active emissions nearly matched those of the KIN Redeemer.

In truth they were merely awaiting the arrival of their senior officer, Admiral Nazarova, and she wasn’t long in coming, though curiously the emissions from her ship appeared to be nearly eight astronomical units out from the system’s sun. Oddly enough for even Vyshinsky, it wasn’t transmitting a datalink signal and his systems were picking up multiple, almost overlapping, sensor signals that were clearly operating at low power, leading him to assume she was up to something, and her ships in that position where holding a dangerously close formation.

Nonetheless, a few moments after the arrival of her ship, an open signal was transmitted from that direction and her voice came through clearly, and evenly, in flawless English, “This is Admiral Nazarova of the Kilrany Imperial Guard, this system is a declared protectorate of the Kilrany Empire and you will stand down immediately, or we will be forced to open fire. We have no intention of attempting to detain you, but you must cease your hostile actions now, please.”

-----

Aboard the Redeemer, both Captain Vyshinsky and Commander Akhmatova raised an eyebrow in both surprise and curiousity, both wondering if this Admiral really thought her words would work, or if she was merely going through the motions. Regardless, the Kilrany Captain made no attempt yet to raise his fellow officers, unwilling to risk disclosing his position just yet if he could manage it.

Any battle is hard to imagine unless you are there, space battles more than ever. Few space-craft designed for combat have windows, most relying on sensors that can feed to large screens, with the actual decisions often being made by people who are viewing sensor data only, often in its raw form.

This was certainly the case with the Caldari fleet, their pilots were floating in the ‘pilot pods’ small spherical control systems, linking their mind and consciousness directly to the ship they were inhabiting. Aside from the pilots all the ships had a regular crew compliment, but mostly they were true Padonvirii, flash clones based from a single stock, mentally stunted beings, who understood how to do their jobs and little else. This meant that only the pilots were important crew members and with the full clone labs aboard the Titan they could be revived almost as soon as they dropped out of the fight, this tactic meaning that the Caldari were perhaps slightly reckless, but since they could always live to fight another day.

The easiest way to describe a space-battle is from what you can see from a distance away, in this case from the planet below. Imagine, if you will, a single solitary observer, staring into space, through the cloud layers that had formed, through the faint smog of civilisation and into the heavens, where beings beyond his comprehension exchanged bursts of fire and projectiles the size of his village, some with the power to render his entire continent uninhabitable, all with the power to eliminate him and everything he knew if they so wished. But what would he see? The first thing he would register would probably be the Caldari missiles, small bursts of fire and light from the small frigate launched missiles mixed with the occasional brighter flash from the larger missiles. The detonation of the Swift’s Citadel torpedoes blotted everything out for a second, organised in a similar way to the ‘photon torpedoes’ of early 21st century science fiction they relied on matter/anti-matter interactions, an experience that was never safe. Each of these explosions produced a new burst of light for this observer on the planet below, outshining all the stars in the nights sky, each burst powerful enough even at this distance to ruin the night-vision of a human, akin to a flaring match in a darkened room.

The impact of these weapons produced several more lights in the sky, burning ships, small, slow moving lights, trailing light behind them and before long there would be meteorite storms as the remains of the ships began to move into the atmosphere, everything from the metallic remains of bulkheads to lifeless bodies making the short trail across the sky.

The problem with most things in space is the sheer size of it. Distances measured in light years, light days, light minutes even light seconds. This meant that most projectile weapons were less than useful against a prepared enemy, expecting the attack. This was what led to most of the Caldari tactics, launching missiles at the emergence locations for FTL travel or launching missiles at close ranges or at targets that would in some way be unable to avoid them.

The launch of the MDBM’s surprised most of the Caldari captains, the near light minute range meant that projectiles were unlikely to hit unless they had some kind of extra abilities, something the MDBM’s attempted with their multiple warheads. Despite the added bonus of the shotgun like affects the missiles proved to be mainly useless, most destroyed in the massive beams of the energy weapons unleashed by the Caldari, those that survived the gauntlet of energy filled space being assaulted by the combat drones that floated in the space around the Caldari vessels.

The near light speed attacks from the MACs were more effective, though the heavy shielding present on the larger ships prevented them being destroyed, instead the kinetic energy imparted to the massive lumps of metal was released by the shields in two forms, the first was a bright flash of light, similar to that of the Citadel Torpedoes; the second release was done by changing the kinetic energy direction, instead of allowing the projectile to breach the shields they allowed the slug to ‘push’ the ship, moving it out of the way, allowing most of the energy of the slug to continue on its way

Not all the ships were so lucky however, two of the Zest class Assault Frigates each absorbing a full size slug to the centre of the ship, a lucky shot indeed to hit the small vessels, each less than one hundred metres long. Storm and Ruler weren’t the only ships that were destroyed in the first barrage; Stalker, a flycatcher interdictor took a glancing blow to the rear of its engines, blowing out all the exhaust vents, the reactor having to shut down with nowhere to eject the excess heat, the members of its crew still with enough mental competence to attempt an escape launching an escape vessel, five of the seats occupied; Goliath, felled by a stone again, the Moa class cruiser breaking up as first a MAC slug destroyed it’s shield then the remains of Ruler slammed into it at high speed, no survivors from either vessel. The larger vessels fared better, most suffering some damage, mainly injuries due to the sudden manoeuvring but their larger shields and better crews saved them from an untimely demise.

The Leviathan was another matter entirely, the sheer size of it meant that it was likely to be hit, but here the true genius of some of the Caldari engineers came out. The guerrilla nature of their war with the UNSC had prompted development of new technology at a stupendous rate, this inspiration bleeding over into the fleet personnel, in this case, the senior engineer on the Swift. Almost single-handedly he had converted the shields and linked them directly to a wide series of capacitors, spread throughout the ship. The impact of weapons on the shield would do what a shield would normally do, convert the incoming energy to another form of energy, then instead of allowing this energy to bleed off slowly it would store it in the massive ranks of capacitors. The impact of the massive slugs at speeds approaching light speed was enough to begin to charge the capacitors, nearly filling them by the time the Kilrany fleet broadcast their message, declaring the system a protectorate and ordering them to stand down.

The years of fighting the UNSC had imbued the Caldari with a large self-preservation instinct, in this case it was triggered by the realisation of exactly how outnumbered they were. The power that had been absorbed by the Leviathans power systems was enough for a short jump, moving as much of the fleet as possible out of the system, stopping somewhere in deep space, where they wouldn’t easily be found.

The orders were given and actions taken, something that would forever remain in the planet’s myth and folklore, though it wouldn’t be truly understood for years, if ever. The simply spoken declaration by the Kilrany, the declaration of the system an imperial protectorate, had sealed the fates of thousands of the people on the world below. First came the massive strikes from the Caldari energy weapons.

Imagine once again, the observer on the surface, this time looking directly towards the strike point of one of these blasts. The first sign of anything happening would be the sudden light show, a single beam, seemingly from the heavens, pale red, bathing the countryside around the point with this light, enough to unsettle even the hardiest person, if you looked carefully at the impact point, usually a small site, often less than a metre across, then you would see the effect of extreme temperatures on whatever happened to be underneath the beam. Then came the sound, the sudden heating of the air lowering its density considerably, creating a sudden rush of air into this space once the beam flickered out of existence, a shockwave quickly forming, spreading destruction across the landscape as the wave expands.

Then came the waves of torpedoes and other launched weapons, targeted primarily at cities and other population centres, they were fired under near perfect conditions, unprotected targets, no large satellite networks or the like to interfere with them once they had launched, they reaped a heavy toll. Luckily for the planet these weren’t specialised planet bombardment weapons, just weapons designed to destroy capital ships. Each massive explosion was enough to completely destroy a small town or gut a city, spreading destruction across kilometres of cityscape, the primary blast followed by the fires completely levelling several of the cities.

The Caldari then turned to run, something else that would cause problems for the planet below, though in a much longer term than before. As the Titan shifted its massive bulk to place a jump-hole outside the moons gravity well it began to exert its own pull on the moon. The pull wasn’t large enough to register on any but the most sensitive instruments, but it put a slight kink in the orbit, something that would come to haunt the planet in years to come. An entirely unintended outcome from a situation rapidly heading from bad to entirely terrible.

The jump-hole was a short range one, but it served its purpose, the Caldari fleet quickly began to move through it, shields flaring as the fire from the other fleets hit the ships. The last thing the system saw of the Caldari was the tail of the Leviathan moving through the hole, its last action being the release of even more missiles and torpedoes, all aimed at the planet below. A final sting to remind the galaxy, the Caldari have been here, don’t threaten us.


UNSC Dusk
Outskirts of the system

The Office of Naval Intelligence, more commonly referred to as ONI, is a division of the UNSC that is responsible, surprisingly, for intelligence of all forms, electronic, naval, counter-espionage, human and even for limited propaganda. On paper it reports to the UNSC Navy, in reality it reported direct to HIGHCOM and due to its wide remit recruits from across all the forces and even select civilians.

One of the tasks that ONI is known for is the operation of the Prowlers, the electronic intelligence gathering arm of the Navy. One of these Prowlers, the UNSC Dusk, had been following the Caldari fleet for months, waiting to see if they had any bases that they didn’t know about. The jump to this system had been the only unexpected jump they had observed so far. They had observed with interest the battle, their sensors on passive, energy production floating just above minimal, waiting to see what would happen. The sudden battle had taken them by surprise, they had assumed that the other two ships were here to meet with the Caldari, though from what they could pick up with their sensors, fragments of radio traffic and video links, it seemed they didn’t know who or indeed what these people were.

They had been told to keep as close to the Caldari as possible, but as always with ONI the captain had a wide amount of discretion, in this case choosing to exercise it by waiting, thinking that once the remaining fleets had calmed down they may perhaps manage to gather some information from the debris or indeed the fleets themselves.

OOC: Once again, apologies for the delay, but I couldn’t seem to write anything I could be happy with all week.

Aboard the Redeemer, Captain Vyshinsky looked on with a mixture of horror and disbelief as the realization struck him that the Caldari weapons fire had shifted intentionally; at least partially, from the Ganoxa to the nearby planet. Still rapidly retreating by using the momentum in their brief full power burn, she was by now at least fourteen light-seconds out, well within range of their weapons, but still too far away to do more then curse the name of the Caldari, as there was simply not enough time for anything else.

The simplified computer generated image in his eyepiece may have shown him a great deal, including small icons representing missiles, projectiles and even energy based weapons, but it did nothing to highlight the true devastation the planet was feeling. Left to fill in the blanks though was his imagination, and it did its job well, with vivid imagery of death and carnage flashing in his mind, all supplemented with the knowledge of his own people’s destructive firepower on an unshielded world.

This brought an unbidden thought to his mind a moment later, though it had less to do with this planet now suffering the malice of the Caldari as it did with his own. In that moment, he wondered if this was how those Kilrany military officers had felt as they watched their monitors and received the reports as a mass of nuclear tipped warheads struck populated centers across Kilrany all those years ago. With surprising ease, his face contorted slightly as his horror and disbelief changed to rage, and unfortunately for all, he wasn’t the only Kilrany officer to experience this feeling, but that was another matter altogether.

-----

Much like Captain Vyshinsky, the 5th Division AI known as Dionisy also cycled through his own disbelief, frustration, and rage, but unlike his human counterpart, he had already moved on to acceptance by the time the first of the Caldari weapons fire was striking the planet below. It wasn’t so much that the AI actually cared about the inhabitants, but he had heard the Admiral’s message, and that made the situation perfectly clear, namely that he was now just as responsible for the safety of the planet as the reaction force, but he could do little more then start making casualty estimates and environmental impact projections.

The problem for him was that even if he had been in control of a vessel ten times greater then his Spectre’s current weight class, he would have had a hard time preventing all the missiles and projectiles from impacting, which didn’t even take into account any of the energy based weapons. As such, acceptance was the only possible end he reach knowing that given the proximity the Caldari had to the moon; which due to its density held a wide orbit that was just over one and a half light-seconds, left him too little an engagement time.

With that in mind, his weapons remained silent as he did little more with his relatively small assortment of weapons then use their gun cameras to take additional detailed visual recordings of the entire incident for 5th Division records. There was an additional potential for evaluation of the material for use in determining the effectiveness of the Caldari weapons, but this was perhaps of dubious nature given the current engagement would no doubt make that clear.

He wasn’t alone in his observations though, as from the command center of his Spectre, both Larisa and Nikolai also watched the rain of destruction as it ravaged that particular section of the planet, and somewhat coldly, Larisa spoke what was mostly on their minds, “This is going to be a nuisance to clean up after.”

-----

Nearly seven astronomical units out from the inhabited planet, aboard the command ship of the 4th Division task force, a quiet rage built within its armour-plated hull. The Admiral of this force had jumped into the system holding no animosity towards the Caldari, despite full knowledge of the suspicions held by the Redeemer and the ship’s crew, something that couldn’t be said in regards to the Captains under her command.

It was true that she was perhaps mildly annoyed, having been called away from Mir to deal with what at the time seemed like a minor dispute over an inconsequential freighter, was not exactly something she considered demanding on their time. Regardless, the call for aid from one of their comrades from the Kilrany Imperial Navy could not have gone unanswered, and with the information available to her, she had believed a simple, and open call for a peaceful resolution would have been answered and the situation resolved.

However the unknown variables conspired against the Admiral, had she known the predicament the Caldari were in, and perhaps had some insight into their state of mind, she would have taken a different approach, but there was no going back now, the damage had been done. Unlike Captain Vyshinsky though, when she had made the declaration that the planet was a protectorate of the Kilrany Empire, she had not been bluffing, as based off of reports on the situation, prior to their arrival, the Empress had used her authority to officially declare the system an actual protectorate, with all the rights and privileges that entailed.

To put it simply, while the Kilrany declaration had apparently sealed the fate of the planet, the actions undertaken by the Caldari had sealed their own. For while the Kilrany may not know the people on the planet, they took their duty seriously, even to a fault, and this blatant act of pure spite was as much an insult, as much an assault on them, that to them, it was no different then if the Caldari had just bombarded Mir itself and killed their families, which was a dangerous thing indeed.

There would be no further contact from the Admiral, no further negotiation attempts of any kind, the Caldari had slapped the Kilrany in the face and conducted themselves poorly in their eyes in their act of genocide. To put it simply, the Caldari had earned the wrath of these Imperial Guardsmen, and with the authority granted to them by their Empress, between the two of them, only one fleet would leave the system this day, as the Admiral intended for her flagship, the lead of the Imperial Guard’s Vengeance class, to live up to its name.

This didn’t quite take into account the Ganoxians however, but in great part due to the reports from Captain Vyshinsky and the logs from the Redeemer, they were still considered potential friends. This did however leave them with limited options, as 4th Division was not a trusting lot to foreigners period, let alone aliens, and would still hold their presence with a degree of distrust, but at least it would not be outright hostility, as they would now be showing the Caldari.

It was already clear that the Vengeance was not alone, even the Redeemer could tell this from their passive sensors picking up on the low power emissions from the second group of ships farther out from the system. What wasn’t clear was their number and composition, and it was this unknown variable that would now conspire against the Caldari, as their predicament had done for the Admiral.

As the Caldari weapons fire rained down upon the planet, the quiet rage radiating off the Admiral was almost palpable to the crew of the Vengeance class warship, even to those who had no knowledge of the action yet, but knew something had changed. This may have seemed unlikely, but one had to understand that the Admiral, who’s chosen name was Anya Nazarova, had originally been known, as Vengeance, and the crew readily noticed when their ship’s AI changed in demeanor so drastically.

As far as the Admiral was concerned, there were no other options at this point; a view shared by her Captains had she the time to converse with all of them, and quite predictably, the order was sent out, declaring the Caldari hostile. The reaction was near instantaneous as the various Captains received the signal and its details from Nazarova, ordering them to engage the Caldari with all due prejudice, something they were quite ready to carry out without a second thought.

But as task force’s Captains were issuing the orders to open fire on the Caldari warships, an unexpected thing happened, they began to turn in an attempt to flee the system. At first this wasn’t the initial assumption, as most came to conclusion that the Caldari where attempting to shift away from the gravity well of the planet to increase their maneuverability in the face of their actions and to bring their weapons to bear on the Kilrany. Their true intent only became clear when the Leviathan opened the jump point, and the Admiral’s reaction was immediate.

Unlike a human Admiral, she had no support staff, no subordinates taking in information, passing it along to her and then relaying her orders, being plugged directly into the ship meant she could do that all herself, and much faster. Thus it was that as the jump point opened, she sent a signal to the Sliven, which was promptly passed from officer to crewmen, and within two seconds a button was pushed aboard the vessel.

Keeping formation with the larger Vengeance, the Sliven would have appeared to be a Kilrany Combat Transport if she was visible, a larger scaled variant of the Assault Shuttle intended to carry an entire Regiment of ground forces, including armour, artillery and support personnel. In this case it’s massive bay held a significantly scaled down and simplified version of the same equipment used aboard the Damocles space stations.

This quite simply made the kilometer and a half vessel a rather large interdictor, though she did not use artificial gravity well generators to accomplish this. Just large enough to carry one massive emitter within, omni-directional pulses began to rapidly slam out into space, but curiously not in normal space.

This pulse was aimed at subspace; at least as the Kilrany referred to it, some called it by different names, even referring to it as other dimensions, but the result was the same, striking into these alternate layers, the pulse disrupted it, rendering FTL drives suicidal and forcing the craft back into normal space, regardless of the size of the craft, or power used. The major drawback was obvious though, as such an omni-directional pulse was completely incapable of any form of discrimination between friend and foe, preventing the Kilrany from using their FTL drives either.

This had another significant drawback to its use, namely that while the effect of the pulses prevented FLT drives within nearly twenty AU of the source, it also nearly completely cut off FTL sensors and communications with two AU. Beyond that point the disruptions caused by the pulses were lessened enough that the miniscule size of near constant communication and sensor signals were small enough to slip through, and those that didn’t, wouldn’t be missed.

If by some miraculous event the Caldari were capable of avoiding this and continuing on through their jump, then the Kilrany would be left with but one option, shut down the interdiction field and follow, tracking their movement with the same ease the Caldari had in tracking the Ganoxians in their transit into the system. Whatever the case may be, the next step would be dictated by the Caldari, and the results achieved from the Sliven.

To understand what happened next then you would have to understand how the Caldari jump-hole technology worked. Putting it simply, the ‘Jump Generator’ forced a hole in subspace using force fields to hold back the energy that filled this alternate dimension. The extra-dimensional aspects of this system meant that a distance of light years became a distance of mere kilometres, speeding up space travel dramatically. Most Caldari vessels could withstand a moderate level of sub-space interference, but usually interference simply resulted in the field shutting down. The Caldari FTL interdiction methods focused more around shutting the exit area down, forcing the vessel to appear further away or preventing the vessel from entering FTL travel. The interaction between the force fields and the Sliven’s pulse was particularly unlucky; the shield harmonics synched perfectly with that of the pulse, the interactions creating a perfect feedback loop, collapsing the shields.

The effects of the pulse were still to be truly felt however; as the force fields collapsed they allowed the energy to feed through into real-space. It appeared to the sensors as a sudden expanding burst of energy, engulfing the Leviathan whole, with a series of smaller bursts of energy flickering into real space as the disruption destroyed the force field, enough stability in the force field allowing energy to feed through into real-space, appearing as small balls of blue-white light.

The random bursts of energy obscured the Caldari fleet for nearly four minutes before the energy dissipated enough for clear sensor readings to come through. When it cleared it showed a large field of debris, of the Leviathan there was no sign, with the ships nearest the collapsed jump-gate neatly cleaved by the expanding energy cloud, decks exposed to deep space. Nothing remained of the parts of the ships that had disappeared; the field was entirely made up of part ships, all missing sections that had been closest to the Leviathan.

The rest of the ships, the ones that hadn’t been to near to the Leviathan had suffered varying amounts of damage; the randomly released energy had taken the form of small spheres, each with the same destructive power as the larger cloud. The smaller vessels had been pretty much written off by the small spheres, most were less than five meters in diameter, but five meter holes in a space vessel were pretty much destroyed any use a smaller vessel had. Some of the larger vessels had been destroyed by multiple impacts, or a single rampant sphere but most had just been damaged.

The side effect of the attempted jump had been unexpected to say the least. The destruction of most of the ships had shocked the Caldari, though the various ship captains began to flee. They learnt from the previous experience, instead of immediately trying to open jump-gates they tried to boost away, flicking their engines into full-power and trying to escape from the two approaching fleets.

OOC: I’ve done my best to describe everything in as clear an IC manner as I could, but if you have any questions or concerns, just ask in the OOC thread or MSN, and I can explain my intent/discuss them.

As seemed par for the course on this particular day, Captain Vyshinsky found himself bearing witness to yet another highly unexpected turn of events, though in this case he wasn’t quite sure just what exactly he was seeing through his eyepiece. In the considerable length of time since their current means of interdiction had been created; designed originally to permanently collapse a natural, albeit highly unstable wormhole in the system currently known to them as Midgard, they had never experienced any incident even remotely similar to the catastrophic reaction the Caldari were now experiencing, as such he didn’t immediately make the connection.

Instead, like most other officers throughout the Kilrany task force, he simply made the assumption that it was a mere trickery of some kind; an overly elaborate attempt to conceal their forces. Even had they known the reality of the situation though, none of them would have shed a tear for the Caldari, as the Kilrany were still out for their blood, retaining their intent to exterminate every last Caldari in the system for their bombardment of the planet.

While Vyshinsky was understandably distracted by the energy engulfing the Caldari task force, the 4th Division task force was not quite so idle, as Commander Akhmatova took note a moment later. Acting on the orders received from Admiral Nazarova prior to the activation of the Sliven’s interdiction pulse, all thirty-eight warships holding their formation and slowly approaching the Caldari, opened fire with every energy-based weapon on their forward arc.

Due to the lack of enemy fire coming towards them, this even included the lighter weapon emplacements that were; on their own, of limited threat to any remaining Caldari Capitol ships. They were however still around four light-minutes out, as such their first rounds wouldn’t come flashing through that area of space until the energy current surrounding the Caldari was beginning to dissipate, ensuring a continued threat.

To compensate for the time it would take for their weapons fire to travel the distance to their intended target, Kilrany targeting computers would typically use their batteries to spread their weapons fire over a wide area based off where they thought the target would be by the time it reached them. While hardly a unique concept, nor did it even guarantee a hit, it still greatly increased the odds of one over their alternatives at any serious range, and when used across an entire fleet, it covered a great deal of space.

Much like it had for the Redeemer, visual distortions flared around the forward sections of the 4th Division warships as their cloaking devices worked in vain to keep them hidden as their weapons fire passed through. While this would make brief contact returns off them possible, their position would already be known thanks to their active sensor in any case, as they continued to rely on their cloaking devices purely to keep the appearance of their ships secret at this point.

While their medium and medium repeating class armoured emplacements would only be of moderate threat at this range due to the low change of repeated strikes, the heavy emplacements; especially the small number of from the super-heavy category, were the dedicated capitol ship killers, though they still lacked the power to kill any capitol ship in one strike, small unshielded craft were another story. An additional threat for the Caldari would be the typically forward mounted heavy beam Disruptors, which featured an elongated bolt of energy a full three light-seconds in length, though still carrying the combined power of their shorter, cannon brethren, as their menace lay in the fact that they were swept over their limited firing arc in a curved, knife-like manner.

Focusing then on friendly forces, Vyshisnky noticed that while the larger formation of 4th Division warships were opening fire, they continued to approach at a slow rate, only twenty percent the speed of light. While he could only guess as to why this appeared to be the case, he would have been correct as he surmised that they were being cautious in light of the mass energy ‘cloud’ that had enveloped the Caldari, still anticipating further treachery.

It was only due to the continued benefit from the omni-directional data-link being broadcast from the friendly task force that those aboard the KIN Redeemer were able to bear witness to all this, which included the sudden departure of the drones aboard the 4th Division warships. Scythe and Wraith class drones swarmed out of their ship’s hangar bays to take up positions alongside and slightly ahead of their parent vessel, ensuring that they remained reasonably close, but well outside formations forward firing arc.

Admiral Nazarova had no such benefit, being so close to the Sliven she was effectively cut off from communicating with her forces, or even bearing witness to the unfolding events; such was the risk of activating the Sliven’s pulse so close to her own ship. She wasn’t entirely blind, deaf and mute however, as the constant sensor and communication signals were occasionally able to slip through to and from them occasionally, but such things were intermittent at best, leaving the next senior officer in the larger formation to issue orders until she could do so reliably once again.

This was another effect Vyshisnky could ‘see’ thanks to the data-link, as the larger 4th Division formation was unable to obtain their own consistent returns off the Admiral’s ship, or those next to it as their signals were either deflected, or outright lost due to the interdiction pulse, with very little getting through. As a result of this, it took nearly two full minutes after the Caldari FTL attempt for them to conclusively notice that the Admiral’s flagship, the Vengeance, was closing in on them at high speed, though she was still over six AU out.

The four minutes it took for the energy to finally dissipate from around the Caldari seemed like a painfully long eternity to Vyshinsky as his ship continued to put some distance between themselves and their unexpected adversaries. It did however give him plenty of time to both watch the unfolding situation and contemplate just how they came to this very unpleasant situation.

Mulling it over in his head, he couldn’t make sense of the sudden change in attitude from the Caldari, as he couldn’t have been expected to know their actual situation. Everything he had seen and heard from them up until the point of the transmission from 4th Division had failed to prepare him for their choice to briefly bombard the planet and attack them, especially given their willingness to cooperate earlier, leaving him to guess wildly at why everything seemed to change with that transmission.

Vyshinsky wasn’t alone in considering the situation, the AI known as Redeemer was also formulating possible theories as to the change in the Caldari, which he attempted to put in order of most to least likely due to the sheer number of them as he anticipated his Captain’s eventual request. Despite the capabilities of AI, the Kilrany knew full well that even they weren’t infallible; as Nazarova proved, even they couldn’t take a course of action to cover every possible contingency, especially when critical pieces of information was unknown to them.

As the energy finally began to dissipate from around the Caldari and the Kilrany weapons fire was entering the same area, Vyshinsky momentarily put aside his confounded thoughts and focused back on the scene at hand. Looking quickly between the Admiral’s intermittent signal to the other 4th Division warships, then towards the Ganoxian to see their reactions and finally falling back to the Caldari.

The Kilrany Captain and his executive officer were both at a loss for words as the individual Caldari warships became visible again; at least those that still remained. Still not aware of the reason being the mass of energy or trusting to what they could ‘see’; they expected their mass of weapons fire from the past four minutes to reveal a bevy of cloaked vessels despite the debris field, what they didn’t expect however was for the Caldari to break and run, further complicating the situation.

If one were to have looked at the current scenario as a simple depiction upon a piece of graph paper, using the compass points for direction and the Caldari fleet as the center-point, one could have more easily taken it all in. With the planet located to the West along with the bulk of the Ganoxian fleet between it and the Caldari, the larger formation of the 4th Division reactionary force could be seen to the North, the Admiral and her smaller group to the East, while the Redeemer was somewhere to the South-southwest.

Of course though this was an extreme over-simplification, and space was not such an accommodating two-dimensional piece of graph paper, opening up further routes for the Caldari to use. Regardless of this, the Caldari who were now in retreat still only had three primary directions to take; all with their various alternate sub-trajectories, lest they try to take on an entire hostile fleet while scattered, or head deeper into the interdiction field, neither of which were wise options at this moment.

There was another additional factor, much like another well known solar system; to some at least, this one also held within it a large asteroid field, and much like that other known system, it ranged roughly between two point three and three point three AU out from this system’s star. It only provided a fool’s hope though, as it was not exceedingly dense and was made up of uninteresting material that would do little more then block line of sight, though one could suppose that anything was better then nothing at this point.

For the first twenty seconds after the remaining Caldari ships began to scatter, Vyshinsky could see that the 4th Division task force initially took little action beyond momentarily ceasing their fire. After that twenty seconds had passed, in which time he figured a choice was made that it was genuine retreat, the ships began to increase their speed and break from their earlier formation in keeping with their intent to destroy the Caldari utterly.

The four primary capitol ships; the two Havocs and the Ares, each went their separate ways to seek out the largest of the Caldari ships, bringing along their four Vigilant class Frigates for escort. The six Tyemniy class Battlecruisers broke into their hunter pairs and went after larger groups, leaving the twelve Vangard class Destroyers to break into four smaller arrowhead formations to hunt after smaller, lone escaping ships.

While this was the general plan of Nazarova’s second in command, it was still subjective as to exactly how the Caldari broke and ran, but regardless, the weapons fire would resume. Even Captain Vyshinsky considered adding his ship to the fray dependent on just what happened to break in his general direction.

Lingun looked at his tactical display with most intrigue, pulling up several windows that show statistics, possible tactical positioning, and other such resources vital for strategic. Although not shocked as to what had occurred, he was a bit surprised at the fortunate event. Without hesitation, he eyed every ship in his fleet as they closed with the fleeing enemy ships. He looked over to the group of tactical officers surrounding the holo-bars, "Reposition artillery and corresponding ships and fire on the largest of ships," he ordered.

"Right away."

"Battleships are to close in on smaller vessels and target engines and possible power supplies to disable them. After that boarding procedures. Cruisers and destroyers are to proceed as they normally would." he ordered.

"Yes sir."

"Carriers are to keep up a constant missile barrage within their escape trajectories and order their bomber wings to support the battleships in disabling fleeing ships." another officer saluted and went to relay the order.

"Right!"

A few moments later the various ships within the fleet started to act according to their commander's orders, unleashing all sorts of weaponry on their opponents. Missiles started to stream out from the carriers' numerous missiles tubes as they kept up the constant barrage to harass the enemy, as heavy and light bombers raced out of the carrier's hangar bays. The artillery's Super MACs began to charge and fire their 600-ton shells at their same near light speed velocity, firing about six per second to hopefully score some hits on their engines.

Meanwhile amidst the battle, the shuttles carrying the Phantom and Ghost teams were making their way back to the Belldandy. After witnessing the event, Polis began to cheer, "Take that you backstabbing motherfuckers!" flipping them off through the viewport.

"SM can you please fucking sit down, I'm tryin' to fly here!"

"What?" he looked at him with a very cold stare.

"Watch it!" a missile flew past the shuttle, too close by Rezel's standards as he cringed with the controls, "Goddamn!"

"I'll say."

Seli looked out the viewport and saw Polis antics, "God, Polis is a bit rambunctious today isn't he."

"Its his nature I guess," Jim shrugged,"it can't be helped," he looked over at Halenska and Lewis who were also performing the same ritual Polis seems to be conducting.

"Whoa!" Seli yelled as the shuttle roared as a missile exploded in front of them. He looked out the viewport to see that the Belldandy was getting close, Don't worry Nisa, I'm coming back.