Submerged in Hellfire (IC | Closed)

[Kasa Tkoth Sphere]

SUBMERGED IN HELLFIRE

OOC

---

One mildly-more-eventful-than-usual sort of day, two Kasa Tkoth Sphere operatives-and-or-spokespersons, Jisi 3A and Xac-Ton, were crashed on their beds in a dinky orbital hotel room watching the news on one of those old 2D vid-receivers. They'd wrapped up an ad campaign on a pre-spaceflight planet not too long ago, and before Holder of Dreams' fragmented decision network handed over their next assignment, they had found themselves needing a place to stay for a moment.

Chaos in Obek Palsag! read the screen above the ticker, as the central image shifted from the hosts to a crude series of video clips of what was evidently a space battle, judging by all the whizzing dots of light that flashed as they struck the cloud of various fuzzy shapes orbiting a central structure. It didn't seem to be doctored, what with the verification codes ticking by on a little annotation, but it at least looked like it was filmed from awfully far away — maybe half a parsec or so. A very sane distance away from a space battle to be, in all honesty, Jisi thought.

"According to a new report from the Rift Outlook —"

A claim to be met with immediate skepticism. The Outlook was an organization that didn't exist, not in any meaningful sense; it was one of a whole slew of bodies built out of paperwork and gentle lies that the K-Sphere ran under to help keep the sheer scope of its operations clandestine. Nobody needed to know there was an FI in every tenth system and an FTS every few thousand cubic parsecs; it was easier to pass off a lot of these automated ships as reporters, humanitarian agents, all the rest. But the news swiftly moved on to more accurate statements.

"— a militant group calling themselves the True Palsagi Response seized control of the system's orbital customs facility and spaceport yesterday in a lightning raid involving a number of fast corvettes and boarding craft. Even made centuries ago a vassal state of the Empire of Blades, the Palsagi people have historically resisted outside occupation, and with ongoing events drawing Imperial military attention, leading superforecasters had given high probabilities to an event of this kind happening again."

As the screen switched to show a series of graphs labeled with various pundits — generally ASIs and such — Xac-Ton started talking, prompting Jisi to look over at the reptilian man whose long head cocked sideways in careful thought.

"Yikes. You'd think if you had all the largebrains saying this stuff, we'd have seen people massing in the system by now."

Jisi, her frame tall and gaunt, sitting in a human-adjacent body but still trying to get used to being one mind rather than a cluster, rolled her eyes. "When they also tell you there's a good chance of getting bombed..."

"The Imperial sector administrator, in a briefing earlier today, promised to organize a fleet to 'stamp out the rebellion'; knowing the fates of large fleets in the current environment, time will tell what will become of —"

"Sounds obvious enough to me." Jisi counted the steps on her fingers as she shut off the screen. "Ask Big H to get us on a medical boat or whatever to Obek Palsag as soon as he can, help them get some sensors up before the Imperial fleet lands and explodes, use the immediate K-Sphere presence as our cue to start getting the locals onboard with uploading. Shouldn't even be hard."

Xac-Ton hissed in disbelief. "You're saying that as if we're sure the terrorists will even go after the response group. Yes, okay, the Bayesian on 'ships get nuked' given 'ships are Imperial' is something like five times higher than baseline. Still a long shot."

"Not for something this publicized. I think they're going to want the attention."

They looked at each other carefully, exchanging a few facial cues, and then, with their argument thus completed, started getting themselves ready to leave. Xac-Ton's eye flickered; he made a quick sequence of glances to open up its infosphere connection and start checking on a different set of news that he'd been setting alerts for.

"Looks like another fleet was just wiped. Some poor Narojian force out in the western quadrant. People are saying one-twenty, maybe one-thirty wrecks."

Jisi grinned and pulled out her data ring, navigating to a prediction market. "...ha! Knew the next big one would be west. Made fifty slices there."

---

Holder of Dreams had precisely no intention of using the Flower Ends Here detachment to start upload procedures or even make contact, but when one of its subroutines three levels down found itself tasked with arranging a way to get two "meatspace" operatives a quick flight to Obek Palsag, it didn't see fit to stop itself. There were too many factors all coming together here to rule secondary objectives out of the question, and at the very least these two had asked their local node for help in setting up sensors at the system in question, so at the very least progress could be made on that front.

On the outskirts of the comet cloud around Obek Palsag, FI The Worst Night Drowns The Day, a little innocuous-looking spacecraft retrofitted to mount the giant tachyonic CCDs it'd used to record the battle, now folded them like cloths into its hull, instead extruding a swarm of probes that zipped off into the positions necessary to set up an interferometer. An FI really couldn't tow terribly much into a situation like this — covering every option at once was the job of an FTS — but for now, whatever ships were able to look in the right direction from a close enough distance would have to do. Besides, it wasn't as if Holder of Dreams was alone. Something had clued off the superintelligence that an incident as publicized as this one would bring in more sets of eyes, and cooperation always had a few advantages.

---

"Do I need to show you the scattering data again? Three pings around five-oh-eight, another cluster on the far end of the spectrum... that's something reflective, no question."

"And if there's something valuable there, it hasn't been picked clean because...?"

"Because the galaxy is big and people don't care about every reading spike?"

"...not that big. Whatever. You're the captain."

Visible only as a stylized series of circles on the display in front of the salvage boat's two crew members, the Ertel system — a bright white A-class star, a hot gas giant, and the ring of asteroids scattered out beyond the pair — was marked off as the target of the Industrious Hecaton's next jump. The bridge, dark and quiet, with no windows or bright screens to distract its occupants from their task, had only the pair of them on it for now.

As they departed to make plans and check on systems, it was soon enough utterly empty.

[Olimpiada]

---

Cobalt, Gaia
NOF Music of the Spheres, Nautikos XVI Gaia

---

Eirenikos keeps his fleet in orbit just above the terminator between day and night. While the ship has no windows to watch billions of lights come to life across continents and rings alike, its external cameras and viewscreens provide enough resolution to make up for the lack of directness. Vast waves of people lived below, and this was his favorite way to kill time while waiting. A little reminder about why his job is important, regardless of how boring high orbit waits can be.

“Sir, the Chega de Saudade has matched orbit with the fleet,” said the comms officer.

“Excellent, send over the SOG.” He pronounced it as one word. “I’d like to meet who they’ve been cooking up in those labs.”

“Aye sir.” The officer typed a few things into his console, waited, then confirmed. “They’re loading into a shuttle now, should be over in twenty minutes or so.”

“Twenty minutes? That’s fast.” Most docking operations outside a combat or police context would take around an hour.

“These guys... aren’t exactly human, sir.” Eirenikos was still floating a little ways above his chair, watching a ceiling mounted viewscreen, but he could detect some nervousness in the young officer’s voice.

“You and I have augments and genemods, same as them. They’re just more integrated with it is all.” He was only partially correct.

He met the group and their handler in one of the ship’s receiving hangars, a rather small room with a large hatch that lead to the void above it, and a few more meters of armor below it. The first one to float out was the handler, a short asiatic man, who greeted Eirenikos with a salute. “Admiral, it is a pleasure to meet you. I am Koichi Sagasawa, and this is SOG Kaunaz-14.” A series of strongly built blondes stepped out. The phenotype was unusual in Olimpiada, but they were made from Varangian gene codes for thaumaturgical capacity, after all. What was more abnormal was their augmentations. Most soldiers had more subtle ones, the sort that were easily hidden under a uniform. These ones outright didn’t care. One woman had clusters of wide spectrum optical implants where her eyes would normally be. A man with a set of oriental styled knives across his body had a jaw composed entirely of carbon fiber and ceramic. Another had the shaved head and skull plugs of a pilot. They all saluted in unison before remaining perfectly silent.

“Do they have names?” Eirenikos was confused by them.

“Yes, but they prefer not to deal with people born at baseline if they can avoid it. They find us to be… slow.”

Eirenikos stiffened. “Do you mean to imply something about my intelligence, Mister Sagasawa?”

Sagasawa sucked air between his teeth. “Not at all. I mean to say that they’re used to direct brain to brain interfaces. They’re still individuals, just not all the time.” Maybe the officer was right. Maybe they weren’t quite human.

“Right. I’ve prepared quarters for them on Deck 31 while we talk. You five are excused.” They saluted again, and departed for the elevator. “Right. Those guys are what we’ve got on hand to deal with paranatural threats?”

“...They’re better than they look, they’re just not especially personable. Fortunately, I don’t believe that what we’re dealing with here is actually paranatural.”

“Go on.”

Sagasawa obliged, using the ship’s holographic projectors to bring up pertinent data windows as he spoke. “If we look at data from the attacks on the Empire of Blades and the Narojians, we can see that the ships explode.”

“Thanks, your genius is unparalleled.” Eirenikos rolled his eyes.

“Let me finish. This force clearly has the capacity to go around invisible to any sensors we’re stealing data from. Yet they don’t go and make their attacks quiet. That implies some sort of significant restriction.”

“Could just be looking to send a message. That sort of problem was pretty common during peacekeeping on Nova Varangia when we first conquered it.”

“I’m not buying it. You want to send a message to civilians, you mess with the civilians. You want to send a message to a nation, you mess with the government and military. Disappearing ships is a highly effective way to do that, doesn’t even give them anything to work off of for forensic ops like this one.”

“Right. Since you seem to have a good grasp on what’s happening then, what’s your thoughts on how we should proceed?”

“Real simple. Just wait for the next one, blink over there, and pour over the scraps. Nobody’s releasing their data on it, and EOS has had difficulties obtaining it, so we’ll just get our own by force.” Great. More waiting. At least the man’s methodology was solid. Resigned to his increasingly dull fate, Eirenikos dismissed Sagasawa and his SOG before departing for his CIC. If the eggheads from the OAD didn’t have anything they could do with current data, he’d just have to figure it out for himself. Planetgazing would just waste even more time at this point.

OOC: Sorry for the super long response time, I’ve been having some difficulty writing anything lately. Should be less of an issue in the future now that I’ve got a better handle on characters and such again.

[Kasa Tkoth Sphere]

Obek Palsag

A day was more than enough time to knock out an Imperial spaceport's defenses and take control of the docks; it was not, however, enough to root through a city-sized complex for every resisting soldier or stranded civilian. True Palsagi Response troops down in the maze of hallways were doing what they could to secure essential areas and set up corridors for supply, leaving their commanders alone in an observation tower. Whatever chaos unfolded in the spaceport's underbelly couldn't be heard up here, only the soft whining of computers and discussion of plans in motion.

A mechanical body, modeled after some ferocious insect held up with six creaking legs, trundled up to someone in the middle of the room, loading a disc into a holograph display that painted the air with a starmap laced with smudges of red and blue. "Commander? The most recent transit map. Just the probe-confirmed events that match FTL entries and exits this time. It's... more patterned than usual."

"Right." The other one here — an ambiguous humanoid in a yellow spacesuit — didn't need much time to process what he saw. He pointed at the closest dot marked as occupied by the Empire of Blades proper, surrounded by a swarm of blue specks for all of the times it'd looked as if a warship had coasted into realspace and formed up with its peers. "No, this should just confirm our suspicions. Count them up — this makes over a hundred in that staging system so far. That's the response fleet, if you ask me." When the automaton let out a confused chirp, he elaborated. "They weren't exactly being subtle about whether they were going to send one; they let it go all over the goddamn news."

"Locked down 'where', then. Just waiting on 'when'?"

The commander's posture weakened just a touch. "I think we need to assume it'll be very, very soon. If those terrorists don't do their thing, we'll have to switch out for the evacuation plan." The humanoid traced his finger over the map to the dot marked Obek Palsag, flanked by a pair of dots, one blue and one red — one entry and one exit. "Do we have any intel on... this one?"

"Unmarked freighter. Dropped in about half an AU from here a few hours ago, and then, as far as we can tell, dumped radiator droplets before darting out. Not noteworthy."

"Keep me updated anyway."

A moment later, another suited humanoid's voice grabbed the commander's attention. "A small medical vessel just transited in. They're requesting docking permission. I'm thinking we ought to lift the perimeter—"

His response was instant and sharp. "No. Unsafe, untrustworthy — we all agreed to bar interference until the situation was resolved."

"I don't know... you might still want to take a look at the transmission."

The commander begrudgingly flicked the text from her personal screen to his, steeling himself for whatever it read. Was... was that how they chose to phrase it...? How very...

"Alright. Open dock one, let them make their approach."

An alarm sounded. The windows of the observation tower lit up with cycling red text — well over a hundred cruiser-scale signatures from the Empire of Blades had pounced from their perch a subsector away, streaking towards somewhere in the Obek Palsag system with predictable enough speed for the alerts to show a timer counting down from just under four hours.

"Aaaand... halve the timetables, everyone, we've got company."

[Mamasa]

Master Lifeworker Alba of the Lifeworkers Guild, Teg Exploration Tribe

Alba felt the heat of the sun blare onto her, or what one would perceive as her, skin. The smell of cooked meat from the nearby fire filled the small, slightly sunken nostrils while she stood in the near field of rocky terrain, gazing at the sky above her. A large gas giant loomed over her, supported by sparkling stars, striking pearlescent blends of green, purple, and red, along with the few moons that orbited it. She could spot the emblem of her tribe etched into the giant planetoid, a key clue in figuring out that she wasn’t on any planet in any reality. Alba adjusted the leather baldric over her grey tunic, settling her bone sword dangling by her hip as she stood up and took a bite of the small skewered animal on the fire before here. Even in the neural web of the Tribe Ark, things were kept oddly traditional; an unlimited amount of settings, and they always chose their races home planet, orbiting the gas giant of Ma.

“Alba, come! The Elders are gathering!” Someone called, the clicking of the native language cutting through the neural webs’ chosen ambiance. “You’re needed, Alba!” The young Massa continued, galloping over the rocky terrain and tugging at her arm. Alba followed the Massa back to the tribe area, cutting through most crowd before landing herself before the communal fire pit. Several of the Elders stood by, clad in the dyed robes and ceremonial jewellery of bone, painted wood and animal horn. One of the Elders took a step towards the fire, briefly picking up a small amount of dirt and ash that laid before it.

“My Tribe, praise!” He called, lifting his stave in the air. A call responded back, the large group that had gathered before him raising a hand and crying ‘praise’. The Elder peered around and threw the dirt and ash into the fire, a large surge of flames growing taller than himself. He waved his stave into the air, pointing and directing everyone to look above. “My Tribe, look! Our journey is partially complete.” He called. The fire dimmed drastically, the sky turning black and beginning to moult of its’ pearlescent sheen. The sky twinkled and glimmered, the gas giant and her moons disappearing and revealing a new sight. The new galaxy laid before them, in all of its undiscovered glory. “After ten years, our voyage through the galactic void ends. We have arrived in this new galaxy, teeming with life and knowledge.”

The Elder walked around the fire, staring at the group before them, filled with the vast array of groups that were present on the ship; the Lifeworkers Guild, who were responsible for the understanding of advanced science; the Builders Guild, who were taught how build and maintain the ships; the Guardians Guild, those who were in charge of security, law and order, and military matters on the ship; the Elders Guild, home to the Elders and their juniors who lead the tribe. “However, there are few of us that will be no longer following us on our journey.” The Elder announced, drawing a necklace from their pocket. It was a Lifeworkers necklace, similar to one Alba was wearing, but filled with more elaborate totems. “Some of you may have already received this news, but our Master Lifeworker, Almek, failed to wake from their hibernation over the journey. After careful investigations of the Builders and Guardians Guilds, we believe the fault lies with their hibernation pod, rather than any outside parties.” The Elder continued. “Almek was a paragon of a Lifeworker; inquisitive, dedicated to their craft, welcoming to new ideas, but most of all, hopeful. They were hopeful that we were going find new life, they were hopeful that we were going to continue of journey of self discovery and self advancement.”

Alba had worked under Almek, had closely followed Almeks’ work on neural physics, the concept that the universe itself is a living entity, and had hoped to work on Almeks next project of creating more refined instantaneous space travel over galactic distances. Alba was going to miss him, even if everybody was going to ignore their slight obsession of the neural physics concept. Almek had tried desperately to get other Lifeworker Guilds to help them develop and study the project, even going so far as to ignore some of their other responsibilities in the Lifeworker Guild, but to no avail. “Even though Almek may be gone, their spirit will always follow us, guiding our spirits to our betterment. Now, however, it seems our position of Master Lifeworker has been left unattended and unfulfilled.” The statement had chirped a few ears, a gained much attention, especially amongst the Lifeworkers Guild. A Guild Masters position was coveted, especially for a Lifeworker. Access to such a wealth of knowledge, information and technologies hidden away from casual use, along with access to a singular shared neural system between other Guild Masters was hugely beneficial to someone, especially one who sought to further their own projects.

The Elder stopped amongst the other Elders, conversing quietly, while examining the necklace. Alba saw some of the Elders gaze over in her general direction, but she knew she wasn’t to be picked as the new Guild Master. She was far too young, far too inexperienced leading a group, and felt far to opportunistic to push her own desires over what was best for her tribe. “Lifeworker Alba.” The Elder called out. ”Approach the fire.” Alba looked around at the tribe, now intensely focused on her. A quick push from behind jolted her forward, landing her face to face with the Elder. She placed her hands over her face, and lowered them into a flat open palm before the Elder.

“My Elder, I am yours – I live to serve the tribe.” She pronounced.

“Some of the other Elders, along with the Guild Masters believe it is... too radical to allow someone so young and without wisdom to lead our Lifeworkers, however the ultimate decision falls to me.” The Elder began. The Elder held the necklace over Albas’ hands. “Almek, like many of the Elders and Guild Masters, had specified who they wished to replace them when the time arrived; you were his choice. He declared you as insightful, luminous, and one of the few people who wanted to study the universe in its entirety. Do you see yourself as that?”

Alba closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She looked at the tribe; most of them looked pleased, happy that she had managed to secure such a position for herself, however she didn’t. “I see myself as ready for the challenges ahead. I will do my best to help our tribe, even if don’t feel entirely sure of myself.” She replied. The Elder gave her a soft smile and gently placed the necklace in her hands.

“If you believe that you are ready, then step to the fire; your genesong will be grafted, and you will be who you are capable of being.” The Elder addressed, striking the ground with their stave and dusting the fire with some ash. The fire rose, forking in the middle to guide as an entrance. Alba ran her fingers over the necklace, wrapped it around her hand and plunged forward.

---

“Guild Master, welcome to the galaxy.” The hibernation technician called through Albas’ headpiece, while standing by a console near the end of the hibernation bay. Alba disconnected the feeding tubes that led to the chest plate of her life armour, pushed through the connective tissues that was sealing her into the pod, and released the canopy to the hibernation pod through some small inputs down by her hands. She pushed past the partially opened door of the pod, the connective tissues sealing the pod together tearing apart and dangling helplessly as the canopy lifted up and revealed the hibernation bay.

Albas’ head felt like it was going to explode; her vision had yet to adjust, and her life armour adjusted the brightness of her visor canopy in response. She even felt different; her nerve endings were still burning from her genetic editing, with her new genesong still attempting to be registered by her armour. “How long since we arrived?” She asked.

“Just under a day in the galaxy, we should be arriving in our first system shortly.” The technician replied, still attending to their console. “Your body is still adjusting to your new genesong, let alone ten years of neural webbing use; your brain activity has increased significantly since it was grafted into your structure, but I suggest having a Lifeworker do a full update graft update once we arrive in system, or maybe go to a Builder and have your life armour adjusted to desensitise your neural sensory inputs. ” Alba nodded in acknowledgement to the suggestions, checking over her life armour. It looked different to what she had been wearing when she began her hibernation. The subtle etchings that denoted her position, guild, and tribe had become increasingly ornate, while her left pauldron had grown larger, along with her helmet. Even the balance between her chest plate and breathing pack had changed, with her new pack more flush with her armour.

“I’ll be at the nearest information core.” Alba announced, making sure the last of her armour was fitted properly. The journey to the nearest core only took her a few minutes, weaving through the amassing workers that were waking up from their ten year hibernation, the ever winding corridors that spanned the four kilometre tribe ark. Alba arrived at the information core, a large computer core covered in various pipes for cooling and transporting liquid memory, wires of both mechanical and organic nature, along with seven consoles spiralled around the core itself. The core glowed with a white haze, low frequency humming filling the room. "What's the preliminary scanning report?" Alba inquired to the bustling workforce.

A Lifeworker, stationed at the central control console, adjusted their gaze towards Alba. "Preliminary scans show one red giant, two high density asteroid belts, along with three planetoids in system." They replied, gesturing to Alba to use the console. Alba stepped forwards, taking a step towards the central console. She rested her hands onto the two neural reviewers, spherical objects moulded to fit their hands and fitted to interact with their life armour, both either side of a small keyboard with a touch screen attached to it. Above, she saw one large verticle screen, angled towards her left side, and two smaller screens stacked on top each other angles towards her right. She clutched the recievers, the screens flickering to display the scanning report.

"That is interesting..." She spoke to herself. From the scans of the asteroid fields, along with the stars rate of nucleosynthesis, the red giant had only started expanding with the past hundred years or so. "It's ever so rare one gets to observe the expansion so early in the stars phase." She continued. Her head jolted slightly - that sounded like something Almek would say. Genesongs that were passed down, like the one Alba recently acquired, often had small side effects that resulted in a genetic sympathy of sorts; muscle memory, dialect changes, even allergies could change from acquiring a genesong from someone else.

Alba could feel Almeks' voice poking at her through the back of her head, pressing her to set up a small expidition into the red giants expansion zone. Usually a probe would normally be used, but she had an itch to go there personally. "Have a utility flier readied; fitted for as many sensory sweeps as they can fit into it, and adjust the hull and homeostasis systems for long term habitation in extreme heat and solar radiation." She instructed, more authoritive than she meant to. The Lifeworker nodded, waving over her left arm piece and revealing a series of holographic interfaces, and proceeding away from the information core. The system probably wasn't going to be suitable for colonising, as Massa had very specific living requirements, but mining endeavours may be more successful. They may even meet new races outside of the overbearing eyes that currently burdened themselves with the protection of their home system; what could possibly go wrong?

[Kasa Tkoth Sphere]

Red Giant System

It looked as if the undeveloped, underexploited system of ThoAmeksun 44-72 had not seen much activity for some time. The only trace of civilization here was a remote, deprecated space station in the system's inner belt, thrumming with just enough heat and electronic activity to suggest it was inhabited but not large enough to hold a fleet or claim much more authority over the space than a flag. Along that line of reasoning, even at a great distance, it was feasible to pick up on its identification broadcasts: ThoAmeksun 44-72 Preliminary Outpost "Less All Cares But One", Rigel Union, if the data was to be believed.

Two parsecs away, an ordinary brown dwarf was, for just a moment, for those whose cameras were suitable for the job, accompanied by a flash of red light outshining it by an order of magnitude. Then the light faded out, and only a faint crackle of superluminal radiation made it to computers and sensors at this distance, flipping the occasional stray non-hardened bit or trit. The little station's docking lights and external displays flickered in a few places, but it otherwise weathered the electronic front without incident. Predictably, the asteroids and planetoids of the scorched system did not deviate so much as a micron.

If Alba's flier or the mothership she'd launched from had missed either of these signatures of cosmic scope but minimal intensity, her next warning that something was amiss was much closer: more or less half a light-hour from the hydrogen-exhausted star's wispy surface, a moment after the blast had died down, a wormhole tunnel snaked open, energy leakage contrasting the natural lighting with a unique blue glow, the gravitational field behind the mouth twisted into a helix.

Out the end of the ghostly tube — fading away even as it disgorged its contents — came a pair of crippled objects a kilometer long, tethered together by a cord of tenuous energy that disconnected them as soon as they were through. It wouldn't have been a stretch to say these were spacecraft, judging from their EM emissions, metal hulls, and plasma leaking out behind them. Under normal circumstances, the two would have each been hemispherical, with what were supposed to be their flat sides facing one another; each one, however, was missing so much mass and had so much of the remainder rendered into superheated sludge — chiefly in vast jagged columns straight through — that it wasn't fair to assign them any notional geometric shape.

If even this had not been enough to draw her attention, the distress codes they promptly began blaring in all directions certainly ought to have. Of particular note was their use of the term "Milky Way Intruders"; translators, if any were being deployed here, might have picked up a datatag on the end of this phrase indicating that it was very much an uncertain designation.

Shepherd Group Combat Coupling "Ad Hoc & Post Hoc", Rigel Union

Emergency! Contacting all local spacecraft and facilities!

Both subunits of this combat coupling have received critical damage sustained in combat against the Milky Way Intruders {?}, and are in dire need of repair and medical assistance. Respond as soon as feasible.

The minuscule station lit up with activity as it prepared to unload its small complement of emergency shuttles, but it was all too apparent that the Rigel Union's presence here was vastly insufficient to care for its own assets.

[Qhevak]

Hounds of Tindalos Insertion Craft Ogbanje, 2 weeks, 5 days prior to the Obek Palsag spaceport assault

Sally Belknap Long woke bleary eyed from a much desired, if not strictly needed, sleep, briefly blinded by the summer light coming in through the window of her Venetian villa. She climbed slowly out of the double wide bed and walked to the mirror, mentally flicking through outfits in the mirror until deciding on a light blue sundress, and went down to the kitchen, and summoned a small plate of blueberry pancakes for a less strictly needed breakfast. That done, she walked out to the front plaza for her morning stroll, making it a few blocks before she encountered the two meter tall dire wolf standing by the Grand Canal, and the full extent of her situation returned to her.

“Couldn’t choose a more fitting form, could you?” she muttered under her breath.

“Liaison Officer Long”, the wolf thought into her head without a hint of movement. “I apologize for contacting you this soon after the West Pacific operation, but we received a communique of critical significance.”

“How significant?” she thought back.

“Entangled Order.”

SHIT, she thought privately.

The wolf's lips peeled back in a disconcerting smile. “They’ve been tracking the comms and movements of the galaxy’s more aggressive imperial powers ever since Gamma started getting gentrified. Mostly there hasn’t been much important with regards to us – seems like we’re too isolated and too heavily armed for most powers to care about. But in the last few weeks, we’ve been getting something more concerning.”

The peaceful ambience of Sally’s carefully crafted simulation was further shattered as the sky filled with viewscreen panels, each showing what appeared to be the aftermaths of space battles of some sort - tiny, shattered chunks of a huge plethora of warships, deep scorch marks betraying the violence of their demise. Of the ones she recognized, Sally could tell they belonged to the sorts of powers she wouldn’t mind being brought down a peg.

“Are these from a war I somehow haven’t heard about?”

“More a slaughter, to be precise. So far all we know is that they’re blowing up right after going STL – ECM in the wake of these events has been to strong to get anything more. Some data seems to suggest warships, but there’s nothing certain now.”

“Ah. We thinking anti-imperialists, given the ships being destroyed?”

“Betting markets in Moria are 81% on that right now, so quite possible. The Order’s more suspect of their possible altruism, given there’s been a few strikes on merely heavily Involved powers.”

“I’m feeling a bit suspect too. Is the Order thinking this could be a lead up to some kind of larger attack?”

“That’s one of their main theories, yes.”

“Thought so”, Sally replied. “So why are they contacting us? Too high minded to get their hands dirty?”

“Mostly – you know their brains aren’t the best equipped to deal with the nitty gritty of mere mortal affairs. What they want us to do right now is hire ourselves out.”

“Lemme guess, to the sort of groups that imperialists tend to go after? Use us as bait to draw in the assailants? Typical.”

“You’re about right. They want us to divert out to space near Obek Palsag, to join up with True Palsagi Response revolutionaries on a planned starport assault in nineteen realtime days. Prediction markets have the odds of an intervention by the unknown assailants at 79%. You’ll be the liaison between our ground team and baselines.”

“We’d better be getting serious compensation for this op.”

“Oh, more than you could imagine.”

Obek Palsag Spaceport, Lower Levels

Liaison Officer Long crouched down by the spaceport bathroom door, preparing to breach yet another room in the endless labyrinth that was the lower halls of the Obek Palsag spaceport. She nodded to Longknife and Moro, the massive bulk of their half ton Rockhound synthmorphs hidden under metacloak, and a barrage of low frequency soundwaves made their way through the cracks, mapping out the interior. Fifteen civilians huddled in the faux safety of the stalls, while a security guard crouched by the door holding a gyroc carbine, perhaps thinking he’d be able to get the drop on an intruder. Laser traffic between her and the wolves raised to a peak as they briefly mindmerged to map out an entry plan, before she executed it a hundredth of a second later, blasting open the lock with a breacher round from her carbine’s underbarrel shotgun before kicking the door open hard, barely straining her Fury biomorph’s augmented muscles.

The door swung open almost agonizingly slowly from the perspective of her combat reflexes, steadily revealing the spotless interior. The guard started to leave his crouch, and Moro responded in turn, firing a flashbang from his tail launcher which ignited into a miniature thunderclap in the center. He half-collapsed, and Long swung around the door, drilling a neat hole through the gyroc’s firing mechanism with a brief laser pulse before grabbing the guard’s head and slamming him to the tiled floor.

“Tell me anything you know”, she shouted, pressing the mirrored sheen of her smartsuit’s helmet less than an inch from his face. “I don’t know sh-“, he began to say, before Moro dropped cloak and he lost any composure he had left. “Don’t get paid enough for this, fuck it. Rest of my security team went to help some others guard the main transport terminals while I stayed behind to keep civilians safe.”

Sally checked in with TPR command, and then nodded to Moro, who knocked him out cold with an electrolaser pulse. She didn’t have the heart to tell him the rest of his team was dead. “Alright, I think we’re done here. Let’s get the civvies and Mr. Rent-A-Cop here and bring them to the other captives.”

Her relief at another successful clear was short lived, as a flashing green PRIORITY MESSAGE from Hounds Of Tindalos FleetCom blasted into her head.

100+ CRUISER SCALE EMPIRE OF BLADES FLEET ASSETS HAVE LEFT STAGING POINT TO ENTER OBEK PALSAG SYSTEM WITH ETA 4 HOURS. HOUNDS OF TINDALOS FLEET ASSESTS WILL WARP TO INTERCEPT FROM (2 LIGHT WEEK) STAGING POINT 5 MINUTES AFTER EOB FLEET DEWARP - ENTANGLED ORDER FLEET ASSESTS WILL REMAIN AT STAGING POINT.

As she stood to clear her head, Sally felt a glimmer of something ancient, primal and almost hopeful through her mindlink with the two wolves. This situation was swiftly moving from her niche to theirs.

[Kasa Tkoth Sphere]

Obek Palsag Spaceport

"Triple Torus! Clear the way, clear the way!"

From the tiny medical frigate in the spaceport's main docking bay came a veritable deluge of blue-clad workers, decorated with the trefoil-knot insignia of one of the galaxy's countless minor humanitarian groups. Sophonts running the gamut from humanoid to polyhedral rushed to clear any floor space they could find, dragging hoses and wires aside to make room for surgery booths and sterilization chambers. In their midst, Jisi and Xac-Ton, clearly dressed differently from the rest and carrying backpacks full of equipment of their own, slipped through the bustle to find their way farther into the spaceport's interior blocked by a tenuous line of nervous-looking TPR soldiers.

One of them — perhaps a rookie — was brave enough to ask a question to the others. "We're... not supposed to let them through, right?"

"Command said they'd stop people from docking," a humanoid soldier standing nearby explained, her grip on her rifle wavering nonetheless. A tide of yelling and protests erupted from the somehow still crowded group of Triple Torus workers. Amidst the commotion, Xac-Ton turned to his human-passable partner and hissed a quiet question.

"Do you think you can get these guys out of the way?"

Jisi sighed. "...Sure, sure, might as well."

She strode forward to meet the soldier who'd spoken for their commander, cleared her throat, and, with a piercing stare of utter bewilderment, started talking, not much more loudly than anyone else but somehow so pointedly that many in the vicinity simply stopped in their tracks. A barely-perceptible but ear-ringing whine accompanied her voice, and every word came out accented — in a way, sharpened, as if transformed into a weapon aimed at her heart. "What are you on about? Sure looks like people docked anyway, huh? Do you have anything better to do than stand around? Go help your friends clear the rest of the locals out and get the wounded over here instead. Might make you actually useful."

Without so much as a word, most of the TPR line dispersed. Relieved, the blue-suited sophonts continued swarming about the docking bay, moving more medical supplies into the newly freed area.

The two K-Sphere operatives passed through the doors out of the bay to find themselves maybe two meters from a huge soldier with a rifle pointed straight at Jisi's forehead. "Hold it right the fuck there, verbalist."

Once more, Jisi launched into attack mode, cutting the air with her words. "You're going to let us through, because there's genuinely nothing useful you can do with us otherwise. We're doing something more important than you care to know."

Nothing high-tech seemed to permeate the response — neither of the two felt particularly persuaded — but the only minor hesitation gave away that he'd soaked up the metatech assault with little damage. "No, I'm going to turn you in. Tricking tower control to let your ship board? Yeah, that's all real clever, you think. I don't even think you're with the Triple Torus, and by god, I'll have command figure out on whose authority you're trying to brainwash our men."

"And then what?" She drew her weapon, a lightweight handgun whose firing chamber held a writhing loop of tenuous plasma, and aimed at him in return purely as a formality. "The Empire shows up in four hours and blasts us both into particles? Quite the productive thing to waste your effort on."

"Listen to your tone, girl. You're hoping they get themselves blown up, aren't you?" Xac-Ton's acute reptilian gaze caught the soldier's eyes, frantic unlike the rest of him, deadlocked against Jisi's maniacal stare in a desperate attempt to defend himself. He remembered what his partner had told him about her fights — often, she could get someone to hyperfocus even if she couldn't quite make them give up. In a swift motion, he yanked a large cylinder out of Jisi's backpack and, once she gave him a faint hand signal, sidled out of their mutual line of sight deeper into the maze.

He went over the checklist in his head as he placed each tool: datatap in the server room, flux monitor tied to the cables leading in from the station's sensors, spectrum assembly mounted on a wall near the main reactor... all easy enough, given the commotion. The cylinder was last — it needed to go right in the middle of the spaceport, within the central bulkheads, where much of the fighting was still going on.

The sight of a reptilian wielding what was quite apparently a scientific instrument the size of his arm, scurrying around the cleared-out hallways in search of a place to set it down, would have been an unusual one amidst the small-scale firefights and room-by-room evacuations making the surroundings awfully busy. But not many were in the mood to stop a very deliberate-looking sophont unless they particularly cared about something besides taking over or defending the station.

He could have sworn he'd seen a glimpse of some giant biomechanical creature breaking cloak in a noisy room in the distance, at that. Was that one of the — no, no, he reassured himself, surely they wouldn't have showed up here, of all places.

---

Obek Palsag
Oort Cloud

The gig was up: with the metaphorical wires tripped as reports of the Empire's incoming fleet flooded into the systems of FI The Worst Night Drowns The Day, Holder of Dreams deduced within very little time that there was no point in concealing the K-Sphere's intentions for much longer. With a quick set of orders relayed to the cluster of probes surrounding the small spacecraft, the FI had them digitally connect to one another, fire up their thrusters, and begin accelerating apart. Four hours was enough to widen the interferometer to half an AU or so while keeping the probes' cyclefusers at a relatively "quiet" twenty percent; sometimes, stealth had to be traded just a small amount in exchange for utility.

Four hours later, no attack came. The Empire of Blades' cruisers dropped in, took out the spaceport's recovering shields in one coherent volley, and boarded it by the thousands, killing everyone on board.

Holder of Dreams rewound, adjusted a few parameters, and rerolled the dice.

It was playing a delicate balancing game, absolutely, but that wasn't to say it couldn't get some practice. A handful of Freed minds who'd been asked politely had given up their spare environmental data (there was no need to waste core computing resources on something as simple as this), and many of them were now spectating as it fiddled with faux-timelines, making wild guesses as to the behavior of its targets, the sort of assets others in the area might be ready to field, and too many other factors to go into detail on. Brute-forcing the options was only one leg of its solution triangle, though: coupled in were an ASI's innate ability to recognize patterns in the data it created and fill in the missing pieces, and having enough help from the Freed, making comments here and there, to get a good sense of how extreme the possible results could be.

Some interval passed — it was hard to say exactly how long, since the Freed saw time dilated eight orders of magnitude and Holder of Dreams didn't really clock its own thoughts in any meaningful sense — and then the rough work was done.

Five percent power it was. The safety tolerances on discouraging the mystery attackers from making their move had to be decently wide. In the Obek Palsag system's Oort cloud, this time in genuine realspace, the probes linked up and spread out, leaving trails of iron plasma in their wake, hurrying to their staging points as fast as the low-power thrust would allow. The clocks ticked down.

[Qhevak]

Obek Palsag Spaceport, T-3h 50min before fleet arrival
Sally, escorted the captives into the crowded docking bay, gesturing to the two mech hounds to stay behind under cloak in the hallway as she saw the goings on inside. Confirming the message she’d received earlier, a small Triple Torus medical frigate filled a good bit of the docking bay, surrounded by unpacked medical equipment and frantic blue clad workers. Sally frowned, looking more closely at the assorted workers. While Triple Torus seemed legitimate, there was wide suspicion among many of them being at least in part a front – for who, they didn’t know.

As she looked around the crowded deck, her suit’s defense software picked something up in what looked like an argument occurring at one of the other hangar exits, between a tall woman dressed visibly differently from the other workers and a heavily armed soldier. It was hard to tell at such a distance, but it was picking up a tinge of low level social memetic deployment, transmitted through sound and body language – not too useful against someone who knew what it was, but giving a great deal of subtle control over someone with less experience.

She handed the captives over to a group of soldiers elsewhere, before walking to the exit, folding up the mask of her smartsuit and smiling at the newcomer. “Hi there”, she said, adding in a tinge of low level verbalism from her suit's database as a small signal of her identity. “Might want to give an explanation before barging through our cordon unannounced.” “How about we go somewhere more quiet” – she gestured at the Ogbanje, it’s small, sleek form huddled near the frigate at the open end of the bay – “to talk this out?”

Obek Palsag Oort Cloud

TacMind Gereon of the Entangled Order was an older swarm entity, first formed nearly hundred years ago back when Qhevak was first taking shape to solve the Helium Conflagration. Composed of thousands of crystalline minds, most so loyal to their swarm that they rarely ever demerged, Gereon had gained a reputation both for it’s interest in spreading the Order’s ideology outward and for it’s distate for lethal force as an initial resort, aspects which had lead to it taking a leading role in the few Knights Aethra operations to take place.

As of now, it and the rather smaller, wilder, less unified mind of the Hounds of Tindalos fleet were floating in the deep Oort cloud, reading the incoming transmission from the stealthed array put into place around. While the Entangled Order had their own tachyon inferometer set up at the staging point, the Ogbanje had dumped nearly a hundred tons of sensor equipment into high orbit while on spaceport approach, stealthily deployed via photon recycling and cold gas thruster and hiding heat in bulky sinks. Multiple infared and optical distributed arrays arranged themselves into position, closely tracking EM emission from predicted exit regions, while others scanned the general surroundings, searching for any hint of another battlefleet under approach. More exotic sensors hunted in deeper fields of physics, scanning for shifts in surrounding neutrino density and gravitational field strength.

As of present, there was no sign of any sort of intruder. Stealth in space was nigh impossible to achieve, but even with total thermal masking there’d usually be something that could be picked up – emissions from neutrino chillers, occasional occlusion of distant stars, even very slight gravitational shifts. The array was picking up neither of these, which, assuming the fleet was going to be intercepted, suggested one of two conclusions – stealth invisible to some of the best sensors they could bring to bear, or highly precise, undetectable and unrestricted tactical FTL. The second possibility was even more terrifying than the first.

Having not picked up anything important to anything other than citizen science programs, the Oortian controllers kept the satellites in standby and waited. No matter what, there were sure to be interesting observations soon.

[Kasa Tkoth Sphere]

Obek Palsag Spaceport

"I... I'm still going to have to stop you. I can't let your kind any... further inside —"

"Look at you. You're trembling. How about you just put down your gun first, and we forget this mess ever happened? We've both got other things to be doing. How much time have we wasted already, anyway? Come on."

Sally would have found herself looking at an awkward armed standoff accompanied by a chiefly one-way verbal battle upon arriving. Her first words, accompanied by their marker, pushed the poor man just a little too far past the point where he could mount a defense. His conditioning swapped targets, and one glance from Jisi, now open to strike, was enough to make him drop his rifle in a panic and stagger away until he could muster the strength to turn and run.

"Well, I think I have to say thanks for that." Jisi turned to meet the person who'd come up from beside her with a faint grin, the slight creak to some of her joints giving away that her body was a fresh one. She kept a lighter mood than usual in her tone, but started shifting her weight as if she was ready to move. "Your cordon, now? You don't exactly look like you're a local, either. Unless something's really going wrong, your mission here shouldn't concern me."

She began to turn away, showing off her backpack full of electronics and scanning equipment. "Here's my offer — you're not here for me, and I don't even know you. If you need to talk for some other reason, we'll meet here after the clock runs out in... three hours, forty-eight minutes... whether something explodes or not." Whether Sally had planned to reply vocally or with a gesture, Jisi was already heading out.

---

Obek Palsag Oort Cloud

Surveying the space around the contested station from a distance this great was made difficult by the presence of a sparse debris field surrounding the entire facility; of course, it was only natural that one would be there after the space battle that had occurred not too long before. Optical analysis would show the cloud to be dominated in mass by large fragments of broken-down engines and bulkheads, but also full of countless microscopic bits of shrapnel of the size that would be expected to vaporize against a shield or spall harmlessly against armor. Tachyonic sensors trained on the swarm of metal shards picked up the occasional stray quantum-tunneling particle ping headed into or out of it, often reflected against several bodies in series, but in numerical quantity barely higher than background levels.

From its vantage point of FI The Worst Night Drowns The Day, the ever-patient Holder of Dreams watched no less intently than it always had, shrugging off minor fluctuations in readings hundreds of AUs away. If anyone was really out there, and they were already this hard to spot from within the system, then there was little reason to worry about them being noticed by an interstellar visitor.

Whether minutes or hours would pass before the next event, or whether the void would remain quiet until the moment of truth, it was ready.

[Menschlicher Sternenstaat]

― c o m p l i m e n t a r y m u s i c :: 2049 / sea wall ―

“Surveillance is diligence; diligence is triumphance.”

Urvater Martin Hertzog, second dictator of the Veran Star Confederation

---

Obek Palsag Heliopause, Outer Heliosphere, Obek Palsag System
Autonome Überwachungsdrohne B8B77, Empire of Blades [Contested Space]
LOAD ERROR :: Unknown / Variant Local Time

---

Stars, incandescent in their brilliant shines, glowed without any end as fixtures in the yawning void of space. If one were to gaze at the spectacle with the mere naked eye, there were simply no anomalies to see other than the sheer presence of space consuming all of one's field of vision ― it was as if floating in an unending, idyll ocean of darkness.

However, within the realm of the quantum, the particle flow of space gained turbulence as interstellar winds hit the Obek Palsag system's own. Baths of gamma and cosmic rays began to ripple through space without anything to block their advance, subsuming all possible objects in their breadth with their fatal embraces. Of course, there was nothing to truly embrace or encounter - the heliopause was always a desolate wasteland, as little matter sought to coalesce and orbit the ever-so-distant suns in such an unforgiving place.

Beneath the black veil of the abyss, space itself shuddered.

Countless millions of miles away from any known planemo, and thousands of astronomical units away from the center of the Obek Palsag system center, space itself began to stretch and distort. It was being violated to its existential core by an unknown assailant, being forced to shape itself into a circular contortion whose mouth yawned open in unfathomable gravitational influence. The ripples across the foam of reality tore themselves as a perfect hole opened at the center, disgorging the innards of what had come from a bubble of space-time.

Once more, to the naked eye, there would have been nothing to see afterwards but the distortion of starlight collapsing into normalcy and the shudder of space-time back into a still, quantum ocean. The ultimate deception had now lied in the new, silent, still "waters" of space ― the faintest trail of particles pushed away from the advance of a mass and the slightest temperature difference upon a surface were the only things in existence that could indicate the presence of something more.

The entity which had emerged from the instantaneous perforation of space-time floated silently through the void, maintaining a constant velocity until it neared the true edge of the system's heliopause and border with the heliosheath. After some time, it engaged deceleration through the timed firing of supercooled propellant, with the black wisps of dyed particles made by such becoming grabbed and thrown into the greater interstellar medium by the galactic wind.

With deceleration complete, the newcomer laid in total silence.

Soon after it approached the finite barrier between the heliopause and the heliosheath, the front of the object opened ever-so-slightly to allow photons and other particles ― such as the nascent tachyon ― to come in unfettered from the center of the star system that it wished to peer into. The camouflage that it wore across its ovular was apparent, as the petal-like opening of the entity's anterior surface distorted the stars that it had been simulating over its hull. The emergence of a monstrous sensor system seemed to be like a parasitic growth emerging from the nothingness of space as it was disgorged; a miscellany of lenses, cameras, sensors, and antennae unfurling into the void. They were all trained to the same direction that the camouflaged craft pointed towards, which was a location within the star system in question.

---

Sensor deployment complete. All systems operating at optimal capacities. Preparing target tracking procedure.

The mass of sensors twitched and turned ever so slightly, as they panned through thousands of astronomical units in order to find the target destination.

Declared target has been detected within observational range. Preparing initial observation procedures.

The lenses and cameras focused their optics and components to attain stunning clarity of the target in question. The artificial intelligence which was handling the coordination and conduct of the vessel's instruments sorted through all phenomena that showed up at an unprecedented rate, analyzing the volume and identity of matter present.

Chemically consistent metal and plastic fragmentation matter detected in target view; presumptive analysis posits a previous spatial battle occurred in the area. Searching for target object.

Within a fraction of a second, the mechanisms of the sensors froze in place as the AI ran through the data it had collected. Parsing it in full, it cogitated the current situation seamlessly.

Target installation, codified "Obek Palsag Spaceport", remains intact. Corroboration with new input data rationalizes that previous spatial battle was not of sudden strategic interest, but of anomalous intervention. Corroboration with new input data suggests similar situation to occur with inbound contingent of naval forces from the local star power. Surveillance conditions have been met successfully. Preparing surveillance procedures.

As the vessel floated in ancient oblivion, two smaller entities detached themselves from its hull at astonishing speed, rocketing in opposite directions from the leftward and rightward surfaces of the vessel. The artificial intelligence now began to parse sensor information from three separate sources, with the two entities that it had spat out being autonomous surveillance pods.

It maintained the fixtures of its thousands of glass eyes upon the station and its periphery, and came to bask in the cosmic rays that poured in from the greater galaxy.

---

SWM Kólga, Spezialaktivitäten Geschwader Hornisse, Interstellar Space
Kapitän zur Weltraum Christopher Spanner, Empire of Blades [Contested Space]
LOAD ERROR :: Unknown / Variant Local Time

---

“We have established a firm connection with the B8B77, sir.”

The combat information center of the mighty warship was bathed in an inky blackness; much like that of the very space it stood still within. The only source of light, beyond the faint outlines of red that encircled the exit doors and ports of the room, was a large holographic projection that dominated the CIC's central cavity. It incarnated for all who had assembled in the CIC a real-time feed that rolled in from the Schemen-II drone. They were tens of light years away from such a drone, but the feed was nevertheless smooth in rendering and play due to the tight-beam tachyon connection that the data had as it streamed up from the surveillance craft.

“Make sure the footage is condensed for transfer to the Monolith. We can't expose our position until the time is right,” said KzW. Christopher Spanner; the captain of the Kólga and the current commander of the special detachment of Weltraummarine vessels known as the Spezialaktivitäten Geschwader Hornisse, he stood at a towering height over the rest of his command and administrative staff who were seated in a plethora of individual coordination and communication suites. His specific attention was being brought to his most senior of communication staff, who worked on managing the ship AI's encryption and packaging of the live feed.

“Yes, sir. Transmission will only be issued at your call.”

As he watched the feed, the orange-hued information suite in front of Spanner flooded with a plethora of statuses and notifications detailing the current state of his squadron ― most of which being optimal conditions. In the empty midst of interstellar space, their signatures were practically undetectable, but he was to take no chances and let anything slip by to risk the confidentiality of his mission and personnel.

“Now it's time to enjoy the fireworks; if the intel's right, that is...”

[Kasa Tkoth Sphere]

Obek Palsag Spaceport Exterior

The Empire of Blades was to come in style. If all had gone according to their plan, their array of vertically-oriented, sharp-tipped cruisers, dyed in marvelous rose and black, would slip out of warp — exactly as sensors detected their direction of motion to be aimed — a planet-diameter in the spaceport's approximate "up" direction, an only slightly cluttered zone relatively unprotected by gun turrets and excellent for bombardment. This was not to be.

Around the fleet's position, just before it arrived, for the barest fraction of a second, the space faintly shined with a metallic gleam, the work of a trillion microscopic pieces hidden in the low-density debris field all swiveling at once, their loose, concentric shells all aimed in like the rings of a lamprey's teeth. Past that point, no semblance of detail was possible to pull from any readings, for sensors and counter-countermeasures alike buckled under the strain of a chorus of electronic screams. The vacuum itself was set alight with a network of intricate quantum fields, gravitons and tachyons alike sent skittering off a zone stretching a few thousand kilometers around the entire group; whatever jamming systems were in play here, they were broadcasting so much noise that sensors found their pings lost into the mist, if their computers could even keep up with the outpouring of scrambling radiation well enough to try to send something in.

It was not as if any observer would even have had time to process the data without the jamming, however. At the same instant as the zone of static kicked on and the shards reached their final alignment, an explosion blanketed everything within in a foam of red-tinged substrate only reasonably described as something akin to ball lightning. Wavy tendrils of plasmatic energy snaked out of the fleet-enveloping central mass at superluminal speed, hopping between clusters of metal shards one layer outwards at a time until they ran out of jumps to make and dissipated. Into the chaos landed the hapless Imperial cruisers, swallowed whole before their systems could recalibrate from the jump to allow their escape.

A handful of milliseconds was enough to end the flash and start a new one before it could fade completely, and with their pattern established the unknown assailants flooded the zone above the spaceport with a continuous barrage of pulses, melting away more and more of the shells of "debris" and confining the paths taken by the next blasts in the sequence, until after around a second and a half all the little objects had been blown away into white-hot specks escaping the system at a small fraction of c. As the last pulse winked out and the ECM pulse went silent, cameras could finally focus on the molten collection of spacecraft parts slowly expanding in the wake of the destruction, with no full-sized vehicles to be seen. Gravitational sensors, tuned just right, may have finally picked up traces of large masses leaving the area, around a dozen megaton-range signatures shooting off in all directions somewhere into the galactic halo.

Globs of metal collided with the spaceport's shields, scattering against them like paintballs. Comm signatures blared from everything in the vicinity, TPR squadrons and local civilians alike checking up to see who had any readings on the event and what their enemy had just lost. Within the graveyard, two devices remained, clearly no more advanced than modified relay-sats with just a transmitter and an antenna, shooting off messages of their own.

/selfcode-l5\ Ha Jip Te Run \selfcode/

When we say "space is an ocean",
we really mean that the local invertebrates drift on the current
and get eaten by whatever happens to bury itself in the right spot.

/selfcode-l3\ Blind Idiot \selfcode/

Ouch.
Had it coming.

Microjump flares marked FI The Worst Night Drowns The Day's repeated entry and exit from phase space, as the little observer bounced from vantage point to vantage point collecting as much data as possible from the residual radiation of various forms. Whatever anyone else was doing in the wake of the event, the Kasa Tkoth Sphere seemed more intent on learning what had happened than on any of their usual goals. The spacecraft's presence was far from masked at this point.

---

Obek Palsag Spaceport

From the scrolling feeds on her data ring, Jisi could tell the sensors she and Xac-Ton had spent the past few hours planting around the station had worked in the sense that they were spitting out data on neutrino flux, quantum clock distortion, and all the other oddities one might expect to accompany a highly energetic event, but the numbers were so scrambled and random that there wasn't much use a regular sophont could pull from them. More worrying, though, was the data pulled from the spaceport's radar.

"It's not..."

Xac-Ton on the other end of their comms responded. "What's the issue?"

"...The ship's not parking in upload range. It's microjumping all over with its sensors at full power, sure, but wasn't the plan for them to send something near the station?"

"I guess the Sphere doesn't care enough. I've already had our data beamed over. I think that's all it actually agreed to send us here for."

Jisi looked down at her data ring in disappointment. The two of them had arranged an opportunity for a one-time hack into the spaceport's PA system — the natural way of telling everyone 'if you are afraid for your lives, proceed to this rendezvous point for immediate mind upload' — but now there was no reason to fire it off.

"Feel free to get yourself to safety, if that's the case. There's someone who asked to talk to me a few hours ago, and I'm not going to flake on them just yet."