NationStates Jolt Archive

(OOC: This is NOT the Kaia mentioned in the signature, this is the flesh and blood Captain Kaia Mæow.)

The Starship Augusta (MCC-101). The second Atlantic Class to be built, she has had a long 18 year history, and continues to add to that. However, someone isn't taking well to the ship in their space.

Captain's Log, May 8, 2207. Stardate 39086.4: The Augusta has just arrived in a system with a confirmed space-faring civilization on it. We have moved into orbit of the life-sustaining planet to get better scans.

Science) Now entering orbit of the fourth planet in the system.

Kaia) Excellent. Begin sensor sweeps of the planet's surface. Keep an eye out for hostiles.

(OOC: The plan is the space-faring civilization (the first person to post here as that civilization) won't take well to the Augusta in orbit.)

(And bump.)

(Okay. Thirty views and nobody to take the place of this civilization?)

(I've been wanting to do an FT RP. How about a machine civilization?)

(Sure, what the heck? It just needs to be space-faring.)

((What's the story, Birkaine? Are you almost ready?))

(OOC: Erm, sorry. Was busy)
The planet didn't show the characteristics of anything remotely habitable. The atmosphere was thin, and the magnetic field was almost nonexistant. Judging by the geology, there had once been large seas covering a large portion of the planet, but now their size had been halved, leaving only a shadow biosphere behind. Spectrography of the atmosphere revealed the planet had no biological life at all.

However, the inhospitable planet was misteriously far from inactive. Enormous coral-like formations covered a large portion of the surface of the planet, and what looked like megacities hid the surface of most of the nothern hemisphere; And enormous towers dozens of kilometers high sprouted from the middle of these completely dark cities. The black towers themselves seemed like solar equivalents of wind turbines, designed to produce energy from solar wind. The crew of the Augusta finally got radio tranmissions, although it sounded like a long data burst.

To the Augusta, all it got was a loud squeal on its speakers.

SCREEEEEE!

Kaia) What the heck was that?

Comms) A radio burst from the planet, Captain.

Kaia) Scan for the source. Bring us to Yellow Alert, just in case.

The source of the radio transmission was from one of the towers, to which the other towers quickly replied with similar transmissions, and the Augusta ended up caught in a very dissonant conversation between the huge towers, that suddenly seemed to deploy thousands of smaller vessels that started orbiting them.

After some minutes of complete silence, three different towers started to broadcast a loud beeping noise to the Augusta in a very low radio frequency. While the Augusta got this transmission, it seemed the towers were starting to scan it, and try to decrypt their programming language to remotely access their computers.

The constant squealing was starting to foul up (for need of a better term) the mental abilities of the Mews on board.

Kaia) Turn off the speakers!

Science) Captain! They are trying to decrypt our computer!

Kaia) Shoot! Lock out the computer controls, then shut it down. Try and tell whatever is broadcasting those bursts that its transmissions are destructive to us and our ship's systems. Have an away team meet me in Transporter Room 1. We're beaming down.

The strange entities realized they had been locked off from the computer. That confirmed it was not part of it, but the strange towers started to deploy long, geometrical and extremely complex branch-like structures that reached hundreds of kilometers to link up one tower with the other, and projected a strong magnetic field on the Augusta to try to nail it in a single spot. Four ships were deployed -or rather, grown- from the towers.

These ships had a very simple structure, which was a three-point star as a prow, with a very long and thin tail coming from the center of this structure, but no recognizable engine, crew quarters or anything else. The 3 kilometer-long constructs were semi-transparent, colored indigo blue.

(OOC: Probably accompained with something adequately mind-destroying like Floe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GAWOupyR-Y&feature=related))

Science) Augusta to Captain Kaia. A magnetic field has just tried to form on our vessel. Our shields are holding it off.

The large unindentified vessel approached the Augusta and started to hover around it, extensively scanning it. Trough cryptic transmissions, it identified its race as the SVE, apparently an acronym predating the species itself. Scans from the Augusta revealed a large energy peak was coming from the ship, which started to communicate via flashing patterns like a Sepia.
The sensors onboard the Augusta managed to decrypt something in the middle of the messy radio, laser and microwave broadcasting that covered the planet.
-unindentified. hostile.-

Tactical) We are about to come under attack! I am taking command while the Captain is on the surface! All hands, battle stations!

A potent beam was fired from each of the tips of the three-point star to the sides of the ship. After travelling a few hundred meters, the beams bent and targeted the Augusta.

BANG!

Tactical) Return fire! Get the captain back!

Transporter) Can't, sir! Those beams disrupted our transporters!

The prow of the SVE ship morphed from a three-point star to a six-point star, and fired a second volley of its seeking laser beams, this time aimed at the engine modules.

BOOM!

Engineer) She's packing quite a wallop! Shields weakening!

The ship ceased firing, and instead started to deploy a forcefield of similar properties than the Augusta, and projected it into the Mewsland ship. The idea was to disable both shields trough destructive interference. While this would leave the SVE probe vulnerable, it had enough hull strenght to afford to battle the Augusta without shields.

A few more probes approached the ship from different sides, although they kept their distance.

Science) They are firing a forcefield at us.

Tactical) Reverse the shield polarity, then return it to normal once it's through. Simplest trick in the book. It will create constructive interference.

The probe fired again, but this time the shields suffered little damage, partly thanks to the probe itself. Seeing the strategy wasn't working, it resumed its normal attack patterns by firing another volley of its beam weaponry. Several red squared patches appeared troughout the ship, and its flashing communication patterns ceased.

OOC) Are they ever going to notice the Captain's team on the surface?

IC) Augusta suffered little, thanks to its doubled shield strength.

Tactical) Firing phasers and torpedoes at those beam weapons.

OOC: Whoops, I was distracted.

Several smaller vessels sporuted from the probe's surface. These ships looked vaguely like the human bacteriophague virus, measuring at least a hundred meters in height, and had only a basic laser cannon for weaponry. At least twelve of them appeared from the larger probe.

A small group of crystal-like SVE aircraft did a sweeping run close to the position of the scouting team to inspect the machinery that covered most of the planet. The surface felt like glass, with several enormous power lines running from one installation to the other. There seemed to be a very high concentration of simple nanomachines in the planet's atmosphere, and the radiation was also pretty high.

OOC:And the virus-like spaceships look like this (http://i44.tinypic.com/5ze0qt.jpg)

OOC) All of the away team are in space suits

IC)

Tactical) Let's get away from those! Fire torps at them!

OOC: I assumed

The ships started firing their laser cannons at the shields of the Augusta, while they started to mindlessly head towards the ship like if attracted by magnetism, with their claws aiming at the vessel they were attacking. The probe extended its shields so that they covered the smaller virus ships, but two of them were destroyed by the torpedoes before that.

Meanwhile, the aircraft seemed to detect the Augusta's scouting team, and started circling them to confirm their location.

(OOC: Kaia died in a stabbing, so... you get the idea)

IC)

Tactical) Let's keep moving and keep those things off of us. Fire phasers, they'll have most effect on their shields.

Meanwhile, on the surface...

Kaia) What is this place?

AT officer) Who knows?

Then, they saw the probe and its virus-like ships.

Kaia) Shoot! We forgot about the Augusta! Kaia to Augusta, what's your status?

Tactical) We are under attack, but everything is under control. You're probably safer down there, however, I am creating a constant comm link between all of you and the Augusta.

Kaia) Understood. Mæow out.

The other two probes started to move in front of the Augusta to block its path and deployed their own infector craft, who started to head straight for the spaceship. The first one turned again into a three-point star, and fired its powerful beam weapons at the Augusta.
The spaceship found itself surrounded by the smaller craft, although it managed to shoot off the shielding of a good portion of them. The ones closer to the Augusta opened their claws, extending a sharp proboscis from between their claws.

(OOC: Warp Space is unaffected by anything in normal space, so a ship can travel in a straight line, or rather, a warped straight line.

Tactical) Okay! Prepare for Warp Space jump! It's the only way to get out of here! Head to the other side of the planet!

One of the ships boosted to the Augusta and with the help of its own shields it passed trough the Augusta's shielding and attached itself firmly to the prow. The proboscis punched trough the outer hull of the spaceship. The probes stopped firing as the rest of the infector craft entered their terminal phase and prepared to cling themselves to the unknown ship.

In the surface, the scouting team of the Augusta was seeing how the level of activity in the surface skyrocketed. There were fleets of smaller ships, no larger than a jet fighter, swarming trough the skies left and right. The small squad of aircraft that had been stalking them dropped what appeared to be a beacon.

Kaia) Let's have a look at that beacon.

(Augusta)

Engineer) We have evacuated engineering as they are drilling into our superluminal matrix!

Tactical) All hands abandon ship!

The proboscis started pumping nanomachines inside the ship. These seemed to deconstruct everything they got in touch with and assimilate it into structures similar to the ones that covered the surface. Soon, the thick metallic fog was consuming everything at an alarming pace, and spreading to other sections of the ship.

The beacon looked like a small flashing red octahedron buried into the ground. Soon, other machines answered to the call, and they started to hear a distant, deep buzz.

Everyone had long since evacuated the areas around the proboscis, and the last escape pod was launched toward the planet. Everyone had space suits.

The Augusta started to bloat and its hull creaked. The electricity went down, and more infectors attached to it. Finally, the outer hull burst like a balloon, and a new, relatively small SVE probe came out of the wreck.

Engineer) By Jove! What the heck have they done to her?

Tactical) Kaia. The Augusta has been destroyed.

Back on the surface....

Kaia) Darn. They probably didn't even leave the recorder buoy that you launched.

Tactical) They did. It's halfway to the brass back in Mewsland Galaxy by now.

(OOC: Don't go after it. It's three million light years away and moving incredibly fast.)

The four probes resumed their usual flashing communications, and the remaining infectors assimilated the scattered remains of the Augusta into themselves, then the whole group of vessels scattered to return to the towers. Several small fighter ships started to head towards the area, to scout for any survivors.

Meanwhile, on the surface, a group of 4 SVE monitors (http://i42.tinypic.com/6xua76.jpg) floated to where the beacon was. The strange machines were about as tall as an adult human without counting their tentacles, and were equipped with large optics to scan for any intruders.

(OOC: Just so you can get an idea, here's the entry on Kaia's death in the computers of Voyager in 2544:

Kaia Mæow, and the crew of the Augusta, were killed when they were absorbed into the machine beings of a strange planet in 2207; the machines, the planet, and the Augusta's crew were later destroyed in 2211, thus ensuring whatever they had been turned into would not advance into other systems.)

IC) Kaia) What are those things?

Science) Apparently, they are monitors.

Kaia) Monitors of what?

Science) Who knows?

OOC: What gets destroyed in 2211? The SVE (Sentient Viral Entity, btw. FT Birkaine was taken over by machines), the planet or Kaia?

(OOC: All three. Since the SVE was on that planet, or rather, they were that planet, and Kaia was absorbed into them, wouldn't that kill all three?

OOC: Absorbing someone? Don't think so. After all, the assimilation involves the molecular recombinators -the basic nanomachines of the SVE- deconstructing something by ripping the molecular structure apart and making something else with it, so absorbing a human being would be the same as absorbing a ship, a planet or a block of concrete; except easier given that the molecular integrity of a person is lower than the integrity of steel. The SVE are essentially a more self-controlled version of Grey Goo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo) with weaponry, in the sense that both are rampant nanomachines.

(OOC: That's what I meant. "Absorb" is just the term that was used in the databank.)

OOC: Ah well, that would probably just kill Kaia, and use her atoms to improve the infrastructure of the planet. Thought this could make for a good war on a larger scale.

OOC: The way I saw it when I made the thread, their minds were used to enhance the processing power of the machines once absorbed, and they themselves were transformed into machines.

OOC: Well, that's essentially what happened. Don't know how would that kill the SVE though. Anyways, I gotta go. Talk to you tomorrow.

(OOC: Okay. No, the SVE was destroyed four years later in a battle.)

(OOC: Just so you can get an idea, here's the entry on Kaia's death in the computers of Voyager in 2544:

Kaia Mæow, and the crew of the Augusta, were killed when they were absorbed into the machine beings of a strange planet in 2207; the machines, the planet, and the Augusta's crew were later destroyed in 2211, thus ensuring whatever they had been turned into would not advance into other systems.)

IC) Kaia) What are those things?

Science) Apparently, they are monitors.

Kaia) Monitors of what?

Science) Who knows?

OOC: Retarded me, I hadn't noticed that IC post.

IC:The Monitors approached the crew, and the membranes that were over their many eyes uncovered as they scanned the intruders. Suddenly, one of them latched at Kaia's leg and the others prepared to fire a basic laser gun onto the rest of the crewmembers.

Kaia) Yikes! Let's get out of here!

Everyone) With pleasure!

They had to maneuver trough the desolated landscape, which was similar to rocky cliffs, but made of the same glassy matter that covered the rest of the planet. The monitors quickly outran their targets by flying above the many obstacles, and started firing onto them.

The squadron of SVE fighters flew rocketed above the area in a straight line, then started to turn back and head towards the survivors.

Kaia) EMP emitters. Fire!

The away team fired electromagnetic pulse emitters, which (with hope) should fry their attackers.

The outer layers of the Monitors were peeled off by the EMP burst, exposing the sensitive but EMP protected insides. However, it had no effect on the fighters, who dropped a set of six bombs each. These bombs detonated in midair, spraying the area with nanomachines.

Kaia) Fire phasers, wide band!

The phaser hit a good portion of the nanomachine fog that had been dropped, making the cloud catch fire. That, along with the EMP burst destroyed most of the billions of fragile nanites in the process, although some still managed to stick to their suits and started eating away the outer layers at a very slow pace.

The Monitors called for reinforcements, and started quickly floating towards them.

(OOC: The phaser blast was supposed to knock out a good chunk of the fog. And wouldn't eating away the suits of the crew kill them?)

OOC: I thought they fired them at the Monitors. In any case, that'd had to be one enormous blast to take out all of them, and they spread rapidly. So yeah, burned out a good chunk of the nanovirus, but there's still some floating around, which corrode everything non-SVE they stubmle upon at a rather slow pace.

(OOC: Oops. Edit posts accordingly and we'll get back to it. Would what's left of the fog be able to corrode a 3" thick suit? Relax if you think it's too heavy. That's why they have anti-grav boots.)

(OOC: Ok, so I'll pick up after the aircraft dropped their payloads, the monitors started to shoot at them and they fired the EMP. And if it's 3 inches thick, then the surviving nanomachines are not enough to do significant damage. And edited my last IC post.)

(OOC: Okay. IC post to come soon.)