(This is now a closed thing. For your safety and the safety of others, please refer to the OOC thread.)
A year has passed since the end of the civil revolt that shattered the Hellenic Empire into a score of inter-warring states. A tentative peace has prevailed under the newly-ascended Aspect-Emperor Haleandorix I, but the process of recovery is slow. The individual confederate kings and regents are still hesitant to return to their old co-dependent habits, and the people suffer. Vast tracts of territory have fallen into anarchy, and the reunited navies of the Greek cities are struggling to oust local warlords and militias. Many systems are desolate, and the infrastructure is in tatters. Only two major shipyards survived unscathed and operate at full capacity. This great nation which was once post-scarcity has devolved into disarray, and famine is prominent in many sectors. Even though the Trailarii have avoided utter destruction, they are but a shadow of the galactic power they once were.
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High orbit above planet Ortus, Nicaea Star system, Kingdom of the Attalids
A single military cruiser re-fitted for rescue operations floated in the void, the planet Ortus filling her starboard view panels. Ortus had once been an agricultural staple of the Pergamian Worlds, her vast wheat fields had stained the surface continents a pale gold and they had fed countless billions. Now in the aftermath of a thermonuclear bombardment that had taken place over a stellar cycle ago, the firestorm still raged. Survivors still dwelt in massive underground emergency facilities below the surface, but they were dangerously low on supplies. Had the great conflict continued, they would have perished in their bunkers, forgotten. After the armistice was concluded, the Attalids had scrambled every asset still capable of flight to rescuing survivors such as these. That was the mission of the Ikonik, and the eight mining barges in her wing. The atmosphere was deteriorating rapidly on the surface, and the oceans were boiling. With concerted effort, this small fleet could save hundreds of thousands of lives before the victims of the assault starved to death in underground tombs.
"E-611, green line confirmed, proceed with docking and offloading of civil cargo with all due haste."
A pretty, young Phrygian woman manning a traffic control console spoke into her communications unit, orchestrating the comings and goings of rescue volunteer craft. Some of these civlian ships were little more than luxury craft, only able to hold a few dozen passengers.
Behind her Al Bin Gregos, Kattevios of the Ikonik, paced from station to station on his bridge, always keeping an eye on the timer centered on the bridge's main display for all to see. It was a timer counting down an estimation of how much time was left before surface conditions were too hazardous for most civilian craft to participate in rescue operations. They had perhaps a week until death by starvation was a serious issue, but without the assistance of the swarm of volunteer pilots, it would take months to rescue all those refugees with the handful of landing craft allocated to his command. Many of the volunteers and military personnel were working on the brink of exhaustion at only an hour or so of sleep between shifts, and all of them were hungry in their own right. The entire Empire was in the grip of one of the most devastating food shortages it had known since it's founding thousands of years before. Most of the agricultural centers, like Otus, had been subjected to similar bombardment at the crescendo of the civil war.
Al Bin Gregos was fending off despair by focusing on the task at hand. However, nagging doubt plagued him. Even after he had rescued as many of the refugees as he could, how was he going to feed them? He didn't have enough rations to keep his own crew well supplied let alone the volunteers. It was as if the starving refugees were trading a tomb beneath their own soil for a tomb in the belly of a starship. The captain's attention was pulled away from his dark thoughts by an alarm sounding from one of the monitoring stations on the far side of the bridge.
"Report."
He made his way around the cauldron set in the middle of the bridge that displayed their relative position in space.
"Unscheduled Cynosural field, single frequency path, bearing minus three-oh-six, one-six, azimuth thirteen. Distance is one-tick two-five. No new breaks from the cyno, EM signature stable, no exit wounds. It's small. Couldn't be anything larger than a frigate."
Other heads on the bridge turned toward the information analyst, a junior-grade officer, as he reported the information.
"Get our main eyes on that eggshell, dial to maximum resolution, contact the rear fleet find out-"
"Break, multiple exit paths, six..no, eight contacts initiating a burn on closing vectors. Hull design and electromagnetic signature consistent with Beirot class swift-ships. No flags flown. Relative measure is seven-gee acceleration and rising."
"Initiate unencrypted communications with those vessels. Advise them this is an unarmed, peaceful rescue operation. We are retrieving refugees from the surface, and the Attalid Navy makes no official claim on this territory.
As the Uttovios relayed this new information, the main panels around the fore of the bridge replaced the planet they orbited with positional data of the closing contacts, one and a quarter second old information. At just under four hundred thousand kilometers, their position would be compromised in mere hours, assuming the vessels decelerated enough to meet them. As the resolution of the long range scanners increased, the ships slowly came into picture on the cruiser's main screens, and the massive glare of their drives was filtered out. The banners and markings ordinarily associated with a recognized Greek naval force had been painted over with new, unregistered markings. They were either deserters or worse, the private strong arm of some local despot who did not want to see this system inhabited by legitimate Greek naval forces, despite their rescue operation.
Hails were ignored, and the captain went to Plan B.
"Set condition black. Deploy countermeasures and cycle up ECM, cold-start the secondary reactor.."
Gregos hesitated. He had no interceptors, only a single salvo of warheads, and many of the ship's defenses had been stripped as a partial retro-fit to make this a rescue vessel.
"Contact the barges, alert them of the situation and have them prepare a defensive grid. Initiate a shield transfer chain, and bring to dock all civilian craft, and launch distress beacons!"
Klaxons began sounding, and the lighting shifted from the cool synthetic daylight to a dimmer hue as power was cycled into the communications array.
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Situations such as this were commonplace in the rescue and rebuilding efforts taken on across the Empire's vast territory. The navies of the individual city-states were depleted, and spread too thin to safeguard every operation. Helot territories and the frontier had been outright abandoned for years, and despots had set up their own minor principalities to fill the power vacuum. These warlords were not going to give up their new found power easily.
It was for this reason that the new Aspect-Emperor had re-opened the Hellenic Empire's old diplomatic channels, seeking assistance in the effort to rebuild from old allies, trade partners, and power blocs with which it had once associated. The civil war was over, but the Hellene's darkest hour had not yet passed.
