Entropic Sunrise - [IC, Invite Only, FT/FanT, War, PG13]

by **Unthidor** » Sun Feb 21, 2021 9:11 am

While the various warships around the system started their combat maneuvers, four Compactor-class transports attempted to quietly slip into low orbit around the far side of the colony world. At just over 200 meters long and nearly half a million tons displacement, their maneuverability was limited, making surprise and stealth their allies. Hopefully, the rest of the fleet would keep any enemy ships distracted while they carried out their mission.

Originally built for bulk transport, the ships were hastily reconfigured for this assignment. While normally capable of carrying over 90 various mechs as bulk cargo, this mission saw them fitted with temporary launch racks in their large bulk-cargo bays, resulting in each only carrying 48 mechs instead. Although a landing force of 192 mechs was still nothing to sneeze at.

In the launch bay, crews were making last minute adjustments to the various mechs, pilots climbed aboard their units, and group leaders made their final drop plans. Standing on the gantry in front of his unit was Flight Sergeant Nic Bolas. His broad shoulders and six foot height made him an imposing presence, even more so in the full space suit required by mech pilots operating in vacuum. This was going to be not only their first combat mission as pilots, but his first time in command of a squad. He glanced upwards at the other mechs stacked above his, watching as his pilots readied themselves. Truly, this would be a day to be remembered.

A shrill whistle broke through his thoughts of future glory. "Approaching drop position! All pilots prepare for launch!" The tech crews scrambled to vacate the bay before depressurization, as after one final look at his mech, Bolas reached for the hatch and pulled himself into the cockpit. He was quite proud of himself, having been able to talk his CO into allowing him to pilot a prototype unit, instead of the standard Model 1 S.A.M.'s the others had. His was a Model 2 Heavy Armored mech, equipped with better armor and weapons than the standard Model 1's. And for the first time, he would get to test it in combat.

After strapping into the seat, his hit the controls to close the hatch and power up his mech. Screens on all sides of him lit up to show the view around, while panels of controls starting humming on either side of his arms. He reached forward to grasp the two control sticks, and began testing their feedback. Finally, he activated his comm unit. "Team 1 Leader, Flight Sergeant Nic Bolas, ready for launch!" The calls from his other squad members followed, as he felt a slight lurch as the cargo bay depressurized. A few moments later, and the large clamshell doors on the bottom of the ship started to open. "This is it," he muttered, grinning as the planet below came into view. Once the doors fully opened, the voice of the ship's commander came over the comm. "All units, LAUNCH!"

by **Guuj Xaat Kil** » Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:38 am

Oliver Yamada, Sanctioned Space Ship (SSS) Remembrance, Hyperspace

"Lenze..." A hoarse captain whispers.

Raging fire, screaming, blistering heat. Then, the brief touch of cold, before his consciousness drifts from the scene and into another nightmare. That particular week always came to his dreams unbidden, although as of recent they've been entering his mind more and more. These thoughts are nothing but a bubble from the depths that was the scenery before him. Shouts and screams, shattered dreams, a baleful green star, and the feeling of being too far. Helplessness as death envelops his senses, its put on repeat over and over in this incessant nightmare. Ships of black and gray whiz around him in flashes as scene melts into another scene, blasts of green, blue, and purple flicker about, coinciding with immense noise mere moments later. The noise keeps on growing, the noise keeps on growing, the noise keeps on growing.

The noise kept on growing.

"Mmgh..." A tired admiral murmurs.

Another one for the tally marks as he quickly scratches one into the wall with a nail just for that purpose. Some five hundred or so, he stopped making detailed counts near the 400s. He rubs away the bleariness from his eyes after securing the nail elsewhere, and some alertness floods his senses. Wide eyed and wide awake, Admiral Oliver Yamada makes himself presentable. "Another night with familiar faces," the recently bleary-eyed admiral mutters to himself, "Just can't shake Lenze off you huh?" Wouldn't be too surprising, the Battle of Lenze and later on the Battle of Seele were sights to behold from a distance, but straying too close burned... Certain things, into your head. He heads on over to a nearby washbowl and mirror.

The faucet hisses with flowing bubbly water, and he splashes some onto his face. Tiredness is fully gone, readiness in its place. Raising his head from the sink, his reflection stares back at him with a frown. His gaze quickly falls upon his quivering left hand, and he shakily breathes in slowly. "Remember..." he whispers out, "Remember, why you fight." The fist is clenched firmly without another word, and he quickly changes clothes not a moment later. Gone was the visage of tiredness, burnt away by the fires of determination. In its remains was a look of firmness.

He is ready.

Then a subtle jolt is felt, along with a faint, dying hum. "Huh, we're already here?" he says to himself, "Well I'll be." Locating his Tri-Tach PDA, multiple notifications had appeared on its screen after switching it on, the most recent being the fleet-wide announcement that they had arrived. Holstering the device on his belt, he left the room and entered the hallway. What was once an empty corridor in the past few days had turned into a less empty corridor, as instead of none there were three people average in it now. Each of them nodded respectfully in his direction with a quick “Sir”. He nods back as well.

Eventually he reaches the bridge, already abuzz with activity and then suddenly punctuated by someone shouting “Admiral on deck!” He simply nods and they’re all at ease. Seating himself, screens flash around him in holograms, all detailing what was happening. “If anyone’s in need of a refresher as to what the hell we’re doing in Unthidor space, you’re in luck.” he suddenly announces, and listening faces quickly turn towards him, “Right... So there’s this invasion of entropy cultists if you all remember, what we’re doing here is to salvage whatever tech we can find here, study them and send the info back to HQ, and to study these Disorder cultists at a distance.” Nods all around, then he flicks on a switch. “INTER-FLEET COMMUNICATIONS ACTIVATED” appears on screen.

“And remember, all of you,” his face grows serious as the faces of every captain in the fleet greet him on a holographic screen, “Avoid combat whenever possible, fight back only when necessary. Avoidable casualties is the last thing we want to be in the after action report.” Nods all around, again. He lets out a sigh he didn’t know he was holding in, “Now that all of you are refreshed on what we’re doing here, forwards!” A hurrah of enthusiasm rocks the bridge, and soon he hears the telltale hum of distant engines, and the faint jolt of movement as the ship lurches forward towards the hyperspace jump point, a fringe one far from the star, if the recon drone readings were to be believed.

Its a destroyer the first enters the bridge, followed by a frigate, and then a capital sized logistics ship. And then ship after ship pierces the veil between dimensions with that wound between them. The purplish void of hyperspace is quickly replaced with the black emptiness that was regular space, and in the distance, the bright dot that was this system’s star. If anyone had their sensors on, they’d spot a single ship emitting a burst of energy. A sensor pulse, they’d need it if they were to find any debris fields in this war zone.

For now, they were content on moving slowly towards one of the fields until the unknowns there had left. Then they’d put the engines on full power.

Welcome to Everfree.

by **The Disorder** » Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:51 am

Almost all of the wreckage in the battlespace at the moment is Unthian, varying in 'particle size' from a mostly-intact and disabled wreck, to atomized vapor cooled and coalesced into metal dust.

The debris tells a grim story. Shards of shrapnel that used to be structural members exhibit all the signs of neutron embrittlement, and are impregnated with trace amounts of radioactive isotopes. Larger fragments, between one and three millimeters across, exhibit nodules of seemingly random transition metals, their vapor deposition shaped by powerful magnetic fields and perhaps even subtle gravitational waves. The ships' hulls have not merely been destroyed - they have been transmuted. Such nuclear reactions typically only happen inside of particle accelerators and supernovae.

The physical phenomena hint at something more than a mere plasma beam - something supernatural. It's easy to tell that the plasma beams crashed into the Unthian ships at a significant percentage of lightspeed, but those beams carried more than just heat and kinetic energy.

Fortunately, whatever hideous magic the Disorder's phase cannon beams did contain, it was completely expended within a few milliseconds of impact. The short-lived & fast-burning supernatural destruction no longer presents a hazard.

Of the matter drifting in the debris field, not quite 100% of it is Unthian. The leftovers of Disorder countermeasures still exist. Traces of fluorinated & magic-shocked azide ash remain - products of a highly advanced chemical explosive that the Disorder used for countermeasure deployment. Over a hundred kilograms of diamond flechettes are still in ballistic free-fall, scattered throughout the battlespace, untouched by any destruction except the charges used to propel them.

Dozens of dead drone casings remain too, their tiny ultra-lightweight reactors all burned out in a furious zeal that lasted only seconds. Corroded thrusters built to survive the rigors of one and only one hyper-violent engine burn still bear the marks of molecular-level assembly and extreme system integration. Delicate emitters initially intended for jamming hostile sensors have melted themselves into swirls of glass and superconductive filament.

One Unthian pilot got incredibly lucky, and scored a hit on an Arustkaana - flaying a few kilograms of its hull away in the process. But the universe wastes nothing. Those few kilograms of what used to be armor plating have not evaporated out of existence.

If Confederaton sensors can detect it, one fist-sized mass of exotic metal floats through the debris field, along with a few scattered millimeter-sized flecks. Over half of the protons in those atoms have been stripped and replaced with an entirely alien subatomic particle, to produce a metal not even on the periodic table. And through some equally alien process, the mist of vapor that the fighter boiled off of the Arustkaana has accreted itself back into a blob of moderately-compressed dust. Even as a dustball, the bizarre metal would be an excellent moderator and scatterer of light.

Of course, on the other side of the planet, there are actual Disorder warships, whole spaceframes made out of that alien light-scattering metal. Atrenar's carrier alone is surfaced in millions of metric tons of the green-black antireflective stuff.

Compared to the dustball of 'destroyed' armor, the armor still on the Disorder ships exhibits substantially better energy-diffusing properties. If the Disorder's hulls were not scorching-hot from their own waste heat, the material might actually render them moderately stealthy. Hot or cold, it would be absurdly difficult to scan anything underneath of that armor.

by **CBG-Palisade** » Tue Mar 02, 2021 2:48 pm

cheri_KELLER | pcv_ANZIO | t+00:11

Keller was, all things considered, rather pleased with her mercenaries' performance.

While it had only been... eleven minutes since combat operations had begun, according to the Anzio's- and by extension, the entire fleet's- primary chronometers, things had already gone swimmingly. The close insertion the Disorder had managed and the immediate beginning of fleet operations had permitted the Valkyries to rather effortlessly skip what would surely be a tiring approach and the threat of reinforcements arriving to support Everfree, and now that she'd begun to get a tactical grasp of the situation, it seemed like the definition of a textbook operation. Completely unsupported satellites? Defenses already taken down? Orbital superiority already established? It was the definition of a mop-up job. Well, technically any operation that saw quick use of missiles was a mop-up job; the only scenario Keller had expected them to be utilized in was against targets that single missiles could reliably take out, and the primary targets that met that criteria- the satellites- had been easy pickings for her fleet from the moment they'd arrived. But...

...something didn't seem right. It felt too easy to skip over the bloody bits like this. The enemy fleet being taken out like this before they'd even had a chance to engage was too convenient. And Keller thought she'd figured out why- these people, they weren't operating in the same framework as she was. She had- she had been looking for Gates, for places to expect fleets from, for reinforcements already in-system. But the Valkyries had practically appeared inches from Everfree, and... what was to say that hostile targets couldn't do the same?

She was exposed. Keller, along with the entirety of her fleet, were currently unbelievably exposed, hanging in the middle orbitals like this. The landers, all eight of them only escorted by a pair of Cordons, were even more so. She needed to think in terms of smaller engagement windows, quicker turnovers, she realized, and that meant that the middle orbitals were, all things considered, just as open as open space. A fleet could presumably jump in between them and the planet and be right on top of them before they had time to blink.

Keller had to dip deeper into Everfree's well. And soon. Reinforcements from OPFOR could arrive at any moment, and she had to have her fleet's backs against something, or else the logistics ships would be caught out in the open. The combat vessels, they could stay in the combat sphere where they were effective, but the escorts and the tenders, they had to get to safety- preferably before they were caught out in the open by a force literally magicked out of thin air.

Keller turned to her communications officer, her mouth open and a command nearly on her lips. And then her screen flashed- the same message now fixed on every screen in the control pit, an alert flashed out of that same communications officer's station- and her heart fell out of her chest.

I was too late.

In the seven seconds she had to convince herself to read what it said, to see "INCOMING FLEET, LIKELY HOSTILE" displayed on her screen, several hundred thousand tons of ships appeared seven light-seconds out from Everfree. And by the time those seven seconds were up, her previous revelation had been very sharply reinforced- by a several-kilometer-wide beam of ionizing radiation slamming itself square through the Anzio, several destroyers not yet dispatched along their way, and nearly the entirety of the transport fleet. Within the Anzio the air burst into an ear-curdling shriek as radiation alarms sprang into life; the less resilient computing systems aboard the ship, and those facing towards the beam's source, flickered or died, those whose backups had been skewered or whose designers had lacked the foresight to adequately connect to backups never to come back to life. A few lights on the systems boards went out. Instinctively Keller reached up to cover her ears, any thought of the tactical situation drowned out by the radiometers' screech. Her metal, silicone-padded arm was far less effective at keeping the sound out compared to her flesh-and-blood one. For a moment, all she could hear- and taste, for that matter- was metal. Metal against metal, metal on her tongue, and surely, she thought, any moment from now the grinding of rending metal, and then the silence of the void and oncoming death.

But that grinding never came, and after what felt like an eternity, so too faded the hissing of the radiometers. And just as soon as the terror had fled an entirely different instinct took its place- a more reasoned one. Keller smoothed the ruffles in her pressure suit, set her naval cap in its velcro cushion on her station, and picking her helmet up from its place nestled underneath her Naugahyde captain's chair slid it over her head and clicked it into place. A hissing filled her ears as the suit whirred itself to life.

The Anzio's lighting clicked red. And the ship began once more to stir.

A call echoed through the ship- and as suits were donned and the emergency circuit began to fill, Keller's radio- and then another. The alerts stopped, whatever having struck them now passed on, and in the absence of any clear indicator of what that something was the crew was attempting to switch its collective focus to the space surrounding them rather than the planet beneath.

It wasn't long before their sensors- or at least the ones still around- had ascertained something of what had happened. An unknown projectile of some sort, constituted solely of dense particles, had cut its way through the fleet. But apparently it had not been expecting to run through the several meters of fuel slurry practically every ship in the formation's crew cabins were buried in, and as a result what had struck the fleet, a particle pulse that had tripped surface radiometers as delivering nearly ten sieverts' worth of radiation, had been cut down to... 2.4. At least within the Anzio; reports on other vessels had yet to come in, but the tankers that had recovered were reporting even less, their bulkier fuel tanks having absorbed more of the ionizing radiation, and the destroyers were calling out similar numbers. The cutters were less lucky; four or so within the cabins, a dose that had a good chance of eventually proving fatal. The landers, well; they were nearly completely unshielded. But if it was any consolation the components that mattered appeared intact- their crew cabins were storm shelters, for all practical purposes, lined by meters of lead and water, and the rest of the ships were uncrewed and only lightly wired. Even better news, those initial pulses- while having cut out quite a few sensors and leaving the majority of vessels with blind spots in their rear lines of sight where the beam had hit- weren't apparently being followed up on. The sensors trained on what of the Disorder formation was visible revealed said beam's current focus, the radiation flashing off of the hulls and the light pulsed off the shields running towards the Valkyries' waiting electronic eyes.

Apparently, these newcomers had bigger fish to go after. And they were going after them with far more than just this pulse-gun, the sky to Everfree's trailing orbit lit bright with the glare of so many projectiles' drives that even the augmented sensors couldn't yet get a figure on how many there were, the massive plumes running together. Beyond them, nearly seven light-seconds from the Valkyries, lay a set of three vessels, each a terrifying bulk wreathed by a halo of drive heat and what looked to be a kind of radiator only theoretical for the Valkyries before now, a stream of radiator fluid herded by electromagnetic force. These new combatants were, well, far, far above the Valkyries' weight class, both figuratively and literally- and the Disorder was reacting accordingly, it seemed. Their own ships were lashing out with their relativistic pulse guns, striking at the newcomers with a force unexpectedly and tremendously furious. Keller's eyes glancing over the Anzio's sensor data widened in fear, and breathless, she leaned back in her seat.

This was... the forces at play here were titanic. Only three ships had put out this much energy? Only three ships were responsible for the literal wall of firepower bearing down on the Disorder ships? This was the work of gods, not ships. But Keller had been blessed with a mind that, while still slow compared to its unknown opponents, was relatively analytical if now significantly irradiated, and skipping over all but the immediate ramifications of her situation she began to recalculate her plan.

Things could no longer be taken slowly. In fact, they would need to be handled at a rapid pace. The Valkyries would have to pull hard gees to remove themselves from these new ships' line of fire. Those projectiles, whatever they were, were hauling ass several times over what the Valkyries' fastest ships could manage, but as a result they could likely be expected to not divert their trajectory much. And besides, they currently seemed to be locked on the Disorder's ships. That meant the Valkyries could ideally duck behind Everfree and break line of sight with the newcomers while the missiles passed by them, hopefully avoiding their munitions until they could duck out into combat again. Even if they were outgunned, they could still hide. The only ship that couldn't pull such a maneuver was the Lawrence, which Keller noted was just about to pass out of contact with the fleet. It wasn't in sight of the newcomers, either, and unfortunately by the time it was it would be too late to warn them.

Hopefully the newcomers had larger concerns than a single destroyer physically incapable of hitting them at their current range. And, hopefully, they wouldn't retarget the landers- those, Keller knew, were by far the most vulnerable. Even the tankers were armored against that particle gun, if only on a level far diminished compared to what it was hitting the Disorder ships with, but the landers... by necessity, their fuel buses and their actual operational components were two separate components. They lacked protection of any sort, they weren't meant to operate in an active combat zone, and if Keller at all wanted them to survive against a foe that she so far couldn't imagine any way to even hit she needed to get them to ground.

It took her about a minute to come to that conclusion, and ten seconds longer to flash out messages to that effect to both her comrades and to the Disorder ships, the latter of which were likely far too concerned with their present engagement to worry about her own fleet. But, nonetheless, it would be wise to warn them of imminent action. The comms laser on the Anzio spun and fired off a quick pulse towards its fellows, both in its own formation and elsewhere. The message shared about the Valkyries' ships was a short, clipped one, laden with abbreviation:

FLASH FLASH FLASH
ADV: SIG OPFOR CLOSE
GD PROCEED DIS W/ ADH
FLT PROCEED LO W/ ADH
BREAK LOS W/ NEW CONTACTS
RG LO
HGA Y

The other, passed to the Disorder ships, was somewhat more coherent, if slightly longer in terms of characters. While the Valkyries' contractors could conceivably decipher that bit of acronym soup, for the purposes of conciseness it was more efficient to be verbose, for once:

Be advised:
Hostile intentions of foreign fleet confirmed. Ability of foreign fleet to fire with effect at present range confirmed. We are presently significantly outranged, and our participation in this engagement would be futile.
Our intent is to put the planet between the immediately oncoming barrage and ourselves. We will be rejoining the engagement once OPFOR closes to a range we can effectively engage at.
In the meantime, we intend to independently disembark ground forces so as to distance them from attacks of opportunity; any cover you can give us is appreciated but not immediately necessary.

Keller did not think to bother to ask her contractors for permission- currently, her mind was screaming at her to do nothing but move before the next barrage hit, and the only place she could think to move to was Everfree. Her message, then, was significantly more calm than her actions.

It was only when the message reached the engine room and the Anzio began to move, the force of a crushing six gees pushing her into her acceleration couch, that Keller began to allow herself to breathe a sigh of relief. This present discomfort was a small price to pay for avoiding what she knew would be upon the fleet in thirty minutes.

But nonetheless, it would be close. According to the ship's computers, then if they kept up their burn without stopping and only turned to decelerate after passing behind the planet, the fleet had just enough time to reach Everfree before the barrage passed by- if everything went to plan, that was. And then there would be the matter of having to decelerate in open space after the burn was complete. But that was not immediately of concern- the only thing that presently mattered was her survival.

And in her panicked mind this was the only path to salvation she could easily see. Of course it was going to be the most dramatic one.

zhenya_PASTERNAK | pcv_LUCKY | t+00:12

Zhenya, having spent the past twelve minutes strapped into his acceleration couch with nothing whatsoever to do, was beginning to grow... bored. Likely, he suspected, the other passengers of the Valkyries' eight landercraft were feeling the same way; the straps he was firmly tied down in were stiff, cutting into his shoulders, but he hadn't been yet told it was safe to take them off. In the event of sudden acceleration, doctrine said, it would be wise to stay strapped in so as to keep from being flung about the cabin. But undeniably through his skinsuit and even through the stiff ballistic plating and hardened foam of the armor over it they were still becoming onerous.

As a soldier, he was obligated to ensure he made it to ground safely. As a human being, comfort was more important than safety right now. And so Zhenya flipped up the safety lock on his acceleration couch with one gloved hand, breathed a sigh of relief as the tension at his shoulders diminished, and craned his neck to look across the airlock leading to the lander's vehicle bay to see a disapproving Kami looking at him with what he assumed was a frown under her faceless helmet.

"Fuck d'you think you're doing?" she said, the crackle of static filling his ears, Kami twisting in her own seat to- or so Zhenya assumed- further the impression of a judgy glare.

He shrugged. "It's been... what, twelve minutes since we jumped? Keeping us strapped in is some bullshit, you know. Nothing's sneaking up on us we won't see coming from a minute out. And my shoulders are killing me."

"You're a dumbass," Kami grunted, turning back to a more comfortable position. "This is the definition of an unconventional op; if they thought it was safe they would've told us we can unstrap."

Zhenya shook his own helmeted head and stood from his seat, looking to the ladder to the upper of the lander's two decks and where he knew food other than the crappy, flavorless energy drink stored in a bladder in the back of his suit lay waiting for him. In the event of a scenario where the lander had to cruise with personnel aboard, it had been stocked with supplies for a week; those surely wouldn't be needed, Zhenya was sure. It wouldn't hurt to open them up while waiting for the landers to go to ground on whatever this bloody planet was. He found another faceless suit clad in body armor stretching one arm across the ladder, gesturing for him to go back to his couch.

"Mick?" Zhenya said, questioningly. He was fairly sure the big, shit-talking Marine had taken that seat, and the name etched into the armor suggested said armor indeed belonged to Mick Daley, originally from Roland, in the Amundsen Lane, but he was hardly sure- the ballistic armor stretched, after all, and thanks to the logic of "supporting drones can stop helmet glare from kilometers away" every helmet was painted a dull, nonreflective lunar-colored rock-camo-grey with nothing in the way of an obvious face beneath to be seen. And the protocol none of the marines had yet bucked stated that helmets had to be kept on in hot orbitals at all times.

All he got to affirm his suspicion was a static grunt to the positive. And that was all he needed. "Hey, mate," Mick said, "I get Baldy's got a stick for protocol shoved a meter up her ass-"

All Kami could get out in protest was a heated "I fucking swear-" before Mick's helmeted head swung to fix her with just as firmly implied a disapproving glare as she'd given Zhenya a moment ago.

"-but she's right." Kami relaxed and slid back down in her acceleration couch. "This ain't a conventional op, and I'd suggest taking protocol a bit more seriously if you want to get paid at the end of this. Besides, you're 2iC. There's an example to be set here, 'cause Chief over here sure as hell ain't planning on it."

Now it was said chief operator's, one Jakub Knudsen, turn to raise a protest- "Hey, watch it," he growled, his voice a tone less friendly compared to his platoon-mates' shit-talking.

"Ain't no harm meant, sir." Mick let himself slide back into his own seat and once more gestured for Zhenya to do the same. "Wouldn't dream of pissing off the sir over here."

Knudsen grunted once more and turned back to his own couch. A corner couch. As far away from the hatch, and from danger, as he could manage. "Fine." And Zhenya knew that beneath that faceless helmet Mick was grinning.

"Alright, I guess..." Zhenya slid back to his seat and apprehensively stretched; the prospect of sitting in those straps again was hardly one he envied, and he wanted to make sure he'd gotten all he could from his time out of them before returning to a more protocol-compliant stature. "...you're sure none of you want me to get you any-"

Before he could finish his question, the green cabin light switched red once more for the first time in twelve minutes. As quickly as possible Zhenya threw himself into his seat, the locks automatically sliding down over him before he could even reach out to pull them down. And before he could squawk out a protest, he felt his heart shoved down into his stomach as the lander's propulsion bus burst into life, a blazing six gees throwing the passengers into the padding of their couches. This... this wasn't normal. Landers weren't meant to haul ass like this- despite the fact that they had the capability to do so, they still weren't designed for it. It would strain the winches used to lower the mechanized units out of their stowage spaces, if the vehicles hadn't been properly braced, and sustained acceleration at hard gee was hardly recommended. Whatever had come down to cause this, Zhenya knew, was hardly a positive development.

He had no clue of the sievert and a half of radiation he and his comrades had just moments ago endured, the radiation alarm in the cabin currently disabled in a flagrant disregard of common sense, and he had no clue that the Hound ships now seven light-seconds away from the planet they orbited, even existed- the only one who did was the pilot nestled in a cradle surrounded by ammunition and foodstuffs on the upper deck, and said pilot was more concerned with getting her vessel the hell out of harm's way and keeping ahead of the rest of the fleet currently bearing down on her rather than making sure her passengers were aware of the developing furball outside. Unfortunately, she was aware of the horrid situation the landers had been shoved into- in order to get to ground anywhere near their targets they would have to burn hard to retrograde, accelerate towards Everfree, decelerate just as hard, and enter the atmosphere near-tangentially to its surface traveling in a retrograde orbit, trusting in the drone buses' fuel reserves to ensure a stable prograde orbit could be reestablished. The landers would be coming in very hot and would likely have to begin their descent burns above the optimum window, further increasing their already high visibility to ground defenses and ensuring they had less fuel to dodge anti-air fire in their terminal descent.

But that was the only real option they had- it was that, or stay where they were and wait to be skewered by the newcomers' long-range gun without a chance to do any damage to their foes on the ground. The espatiers in the second and third battalions would likely have to face that fate as it was- for once, the ground-pounders were the lucky ones.

Well, as lucky as a selection of poor bastards faced with the prospect of thirty minutes enduring a six-gee burn and a following potential fiery death in a foreign world's upper atmosphere before even getting a chance to point a single rifle in the direction of a hostile force could be.

All things considered, it was perhaps a good thing that Zhenya had no knowledge of his current surroundings. If he did, he would surely have some choice words to comment on them with.

devin_LI | pcv_LAWRENCE | t+00:15

The Lawrence, like some great bird of prey returning to the falconer's hand, soared along its trajectory through the glittering debris cloud thrown out by the station's death-throes, mindless of the dusty remnants of steel it flew through. Its armor towards the fore was meters thick, after all; a little scuffed paint was hardly a significant price to pay for claiming what looked to be a key transport artery in Everfree's orbital infrastructure. That was cause for celebration.

And as the Lawrence approached terminus- the point where it would break radio contact with the rest of the fleet- its retrograde trajectory carrying it behind the planet at a runner's pace, its communications with the Anzio turned to just that. The gunners shared a round of congratulations; they'd done, in their minds, an excellent job. The station was dead. The last major target visible to the waiting Luxor above was breaking apart in low orbit; soon, its debris would be falling planetside, cutting bloody scars through the sky of Everfree's night. It would certainly make for an interesting picture. It hadn't fired back, no ASAT weapons were attempting to engage them, and by all indication the planet was now undefended. All in a good day's work.

Just before the ship coasted over Everfree's horizon, its communications turned to a burst of orders: Deploy observational chaff at your leisure. Begin target-spotting. Rejoin the fleet at your convenience. And then, at absolute terminus, the line burst into static- a mere half-second before it should have. But that, the ship's computers knew, was just as likely instrumentation as not, and so the disruption of communications as a kilometers-wide particle beam swept through the Valkyries' formation and the ensuing panic as their sensors came back online to see the three giants and their flanking ships burning down towards the planet went entirely unreported aboard the lone skirmisher vessel. The Cordons in high orbit at least had the courtesy of knowing to fly back to the nest. But the Lawrence? No such luck. To it, things remained as they had been a minute before.

The possibility of reinforcements had not yet entered anyone aboard the ship's minds.

Devin, within the tactical pit, was concerned with little more than watching a plastic ball unscrewed from a control lever's head and launched by his finger float about the room in the sudden zero-gravity; as he tracked it, it pinked off first the control screen, then a grate in the roof, and finally Delia's helmeted head. Before she could notice the fact, he reached out, snatched it, and screwed it back onto the lever. Wouldn't do to have it floating about the cabin when the engines kicked on again, after all. But for now, all there was to do was... wait. While the Lawrence might've been racing over the planet's surface along its orbit, it still had only a little less than an hour to go until it had cleared into the Valkyries' line of sight once more. Until then, the ship was quiet.

At least internally. Externally, it was alight with activity; the radiators had flexed to full once more, and were now glowing a dull red, bleeding off the drive heat from its attack run on the station into space. Further ahead, on the ship's opposing face relative to the airlock- now turned to face normal to Everfree, pointing out into the void- a tiny spring-loaded launcher was throwing cubesats into space, their own miniscule engines propelling them further away from the ship at a snail's pace. The little satellites, though in far less than an optimal orbit, were nonetheless better than nothing when it came to preliminary intelligence-gathering on the far side of Everfree. The Lawrence carried two dozen stowed directly above its primary countermeasures bay, and would deploy them all. Were it to need to resupply it could simply requisition more from a tender-ship at a later date. The Luxor's formidable sensor suite would be of no aid here, and even cubesats would help to make up for that information gap. The Lawrence's own sensor suite, nacelles and little bulbous pods mounted with infrared cameras dotting its hull, were soundlessly scanning the space above Everfree, looking for any remaining targets of opportunity it could snipe on its trip across the far side of the world.

Apart from the wreckage of the Unthian guard fleet, it found nothing. Any satellites it could hit were in the middle orbitals, and it would honestly be a waste of heat to strike them. One low-orbiting GPS satellite found itself with its core turned to slag by a laser beam, a new star briefly grazing Everfree's daytime sky, but apart from that there was nothing. And so, skimming the atmosphere with the harsh light of the sun above and the lush greens of a living world below, the Lawrence continued on.

That was, until its eyes spotted something new. Devin, scanning his own control station, noticed something- a patch of space that the sensors said was far, far hotter than even the relatively hot thinnest upper vestiges of the exosphere.

"Uh... that's a... heat-bloom. Crew heat. In orbit, looks like... hundred or so kilometers to our south, three-thirty downrange. One target. Wait, no- four of them. Flankers, getting... debris? No, active drive trails. Target is definitely similar in design to the plans we got. I'd say a target." Devin's voice took on a twinge of confusion once more. "Uh... 'debris' is heading planetside."

Delia craned her head to look up at the tactical display. Sure enough, the Lawrence racing over the currently-featureless globe of Everfree was now accompanied by four smaller dots, slipping just below it on an opposing orbital track. "Well? If it's only a couple hundred klicks, that's well in laser range, isn't it? Hell, we could displace and fire with main guns at that range."

"...yeah, we could." Devin raised one eyebrow, unlocking and sliding up his helmet's visor to scratch at his forehead. "They're not damaged, and they're too big to be dummy cabins. Sounds like a valid target to me. Flankers are too, if you want to waste time with 'em."

Nodding, Delia turned over her shoulder to toss words into the CIC. The gesture wasn't particularly necessary- on red alert, all communications were to be done over the crew's suits' own transmitters. But the habit of looking where one was talking was hard to break, especially when it was necessary in practically every other possible situation. "Hey, steerage? We've got some heat blooms at eleven flat, you should see them pretty easily; would you mind a divert to get them in sights? We're going to hit the big ones with shells and take some potshots at the chaff below with the laser."

The answer over the closed-circuit suit radio in return was curt and clipped. "Understood. Reorienting. Will ping when aligned."

The Lawrence's jets flashed, the cubesat launcher already tucked back into its place underneath the armor skirt, and the ship began to spin. It pivoted a few degrees to south until its nose, laden with its six guns, was facing the targets below- targets little more than flickering dots of steel. The jets flashed again, and the Lawrence came to a stop in space. The guns were aligned, and they were turned out. There would be no need for another attack run, and more importantly, there wasn't time; the relative velocity between the two formations was well over sixteen kilometers per second, and already they were running out of a window to fire.

A moment later, and a green light flashed on the tactical display; a corresponding pleasant beep rang through the helmets of the three gunnery crew. It only took a few more seconds for the guns to come to bear. One salvo, then another, then a third, and finally a fourth- followed up by a selection of crowbar slugs to perforate any exposed fuel tanks and add insult to injury. The lasers facing the four unknown ships too spun in their mounts, and an instant later began to flash their tight beams of destroying light towards them. Well, not towards the Compactors.

Towards the "flankers." Towards what the Lawrence did not know were the mechs constituting the Unthian ground reinforcements. While the odds of actually destroying those lower in the formation and already deep into Everfree's atmosphere were low, the upper mechs would find that the Lawrence's PD lasers were, with the use of Disorder software and their already intensive home maintenance cycle, precise enough to get locks. And those locks came in the form of nearly thirty seconds of close exposure to laser-fire flitting from target to target in the upper mech formation.

Not bothering to consider the damage it had done, the Lawrence sailed on along its arc around the planet. All this was was an attack of opportunity. A needling. Far less important than rejoining with the rest of the Valkyries' fleet.

If the Lawrence had known what was waiting for it on the other side of Everfree, it would've likely preferred the company of the Unthians.

by **Unthidor** » Tue Mar 02, 2021 6:07 pm

The screens that displayed the view around his mech were filled with the fire of re-entry, with the view directly ahead partially blocked by his unit's left arm shield. A small energy field generator in the center of the shield projected an energy-based heat shield in front of the mech, the only thing that allowed them to drop safely into atmosphere. While a nice feature, it was useless against weapons fire, something he planned to bring up at the post-mission debriefing.

Assuming there was one.

It was several tense minutes before the flames started to fade, leaving him falling through the clouds high above a grassy plain. Manipulating the controls, he had the left arm swing back and activated the impulse thrusters on the back and feet. Slowly, Flight Sergeant Bolas started to get some control over his fall. The next step was to bring the feet out in forward-down facing positions, using their thrusters to slow his decent. This accomplished, he finally had a few moments to check on the status of the rest of his team. "All units, report in!" he barked into the comm.

Al chorus of acknowledgements came next, confirming all five of his squadmates were still in formation with him. But as to the other teams....

"Sir, getting reports from the other squads!" his comm chief called. "Squads Two through Five all dropped successfully, only two unit's lost to re-entry."

"Damn shields," he muttered. Still, loosing only two pilots to their untested heat shields was better than he had expected. "What about the other squads?" he asked.

"I'm....not sure. Lots of confusion, looks like some of them made it."

"What do you mean 'some'?" replied Bolas, adjusting his decent and prepping for a running landing. "Did they burn up?"

"Getting confirmation now. An enemy ship passed the drop formation. Two transports damaged, one crippled and evacuating. Squads Six through Eight lost units to enemy fire."

Hands squeezing the controls in anger, Bolas fumed. He looked up, but his course had taken him too far away from the transports to see anything. How DARE they kill his fellow soldiers like that, in a atmospheric drop and unable to defend themselves. He vowed to avenge them at the first opportunity. "Continue the drop," he ordered his squad, "prep for landing."

The ground was rushing up fast, and he had to react just as quickly. Using full thrusters, he maneuvered his mech into flying just above the ground, slowly dropping power to the feet thrusters. Timing was everything. Once he deemed the speed slow enough, he cut power and dropped to ground, his mech flawlessly dropping into a fast sprint. Slowly, he managed to bleed off speed and after several minutes finally managed to come to a stop. The mech hissed as the thrusters cooled down, armor plates settling after the trauma of re-entry. Checking his monitors, he watched as the other five members of his squad arrived around him.

"Alright," he called into the comm, "we made it. Start moving, need to rendezvous with the other squads at Point Delta 4. I'll take point, follow in formation." They all acknowledged, and he started his mech walking, while also reaching down to retrieve the plasma pulse cannon mounted to the right leg. This was a more powerful weapon than the repeater rifles the others had, and while he also had a rifle on the back of his mech, he preferred this bigger gun. The mech held it up, and they all started marching off towards the rally point.....

------------------------------

After the enemy ship passed, the transports struggled to regain altitude and pull away from the planet. All but one, at least. They had nearly finished launching before the attack came, taking out around a dozen of the launched mechs and damaging two of the ships. But the fourth....

Three of the six impulse drives that ringed the rear of the ship were ablaze with plasma fire, fed from the leaking atmosphere of the ship itself. With half of its engines out, there was no way it could escape the planet's gravity to avoid re-entry itself. Escape pods flew out, a few shuttles launched from the bay, and the bow of the ship started to glow with atmospheric friction.....

by **Guuj Xaat Kil** » Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:44 am

Oliver Yamada, Sanctioned Space Ship (SSS) Remembrance, Realspace

The Odyssey-class battlecruiser cut through the nothingness of space, towards the planet of Everfree. Oliver's mind, having nothing better to do but wait, decided to ponder upon his flagship, and the fleet at large. The Remembrance in particular was a different breed of Odyssey-class from the other two of the same class that constituted as the fleet's spear-tip, as it was a relic of the Starlight Cabal of old, already pushed to the deepest underground and the seediest of planets by the time the Lenze and Seele purges went forward. It was given to him as a recompense for his losses in the Battle of Lenze in particular, more specifically for his own Odyssey-class back then, the Stranger. He had removed the garish pinks and purples that the cabal employed on their ships almost immediately, replacing it with sterile white and black, similar to how Dassault-Mikoyan made theirs.

"Seriously? Pink and purple?" Some levity came to him in thinking about the Cabal's strange choice of color palette, then again, why did they need to not stand out back then when they could stand out and win? The humor died down from that last thought on the Tri-Tachyon pirates.

With his mind wandering elsewhere, he couldn't help but sigh when he thought about the other two Odyssey-class ships in the fleet, more specifically their captains, who were part of a small group of survivors from his independent fleet. Once that train of thought started, he could not stop the reminiscing. He'd been a small time smuggler, then a bounty hunter, then a commissioned admiral, then a colony founder, and now, a salvager for the Confederation. "How the years go by," he thought with a small grimace, "And how they go up and down like some bipolar junkie. Oh well, that's life, a junkie." What a stupid decision he would think, to go down all willy-nilly down memory lane; and here he was, hoping that the whole mission might be able to distract him from whatever strange thoughts his mind would make up in the absence of outside distractions.

"Maybe the other ships might help with that..." He murmured to himself, thinking about the rest of the ships rather than the Odysseys might be a good trick. As he thought about it, the shadow of Everfree grew ever so larger upon his monitors, and with his eyes squinted, some debris fields could be seen, barely that is. A sudden holographic monitor popping up broke the scene, and him out of his reverie. Familiar green eyes met his gray ones, "A good salvage just ahead, a fighter pilot flew a little bit too close but that gave us a better look," she told him from the safety her own Odyssey-class, "A great start for the mission, dontcha think Cap?" That nickname did bring a smile on his face, but it was definitely the fact that the mission was going well for the time being that made him smile the most, yeah, definitely.

"Don't think so, know so." he replied with an aura of certainty in his voice, perhaps life will give him some respite in this salvage run of his, "Get the rigs out of their quiet, we've got a debris field to ransack." To that Olympia Goode gave him her signature wink and thumbs-up, before terminating the connection. It was only a few moments later that he saw changes in the overall formation of the fleet in another holographic monitors, small triangles of black going green and moving more actively. Everfree loomed upon him at this point, and the debris fields were now growing clearer and clearer for every kilometre they crossed, to the point of not requiring squinted eyes for a good look. More time passes, they are enveloped in shadow, and soon, they entered their first destination, a field of various kinds debris, all surrounding them. The rigs went ham, darting about, collecting things of interest and so on.

It was a strange field, mostly atomized things, metal dust, and shavings, lots and lots of shavings. There were some things bigger than a finger at least, and thank god for Confederate advancements in salvage tech that they could identify these. Oliver opened the various channels of the salvage rigs ships and connected them to his own, a ping on the other side indicated that they were listening and were listened to. It was a certain Job Preston that spoke up first though, in a distinct old Earth Common dialect. Some people would simply call it Dixie. "Well sir, this whole mess looks like they did some crazy alchemical crap on these things," he told him, "Y'know, the transmutation things. There's a whole mess of neutrons, transplutonics, and evidence of even gravitational wave weaponization. Whoever shot these, they knew their shit sir, if I may be so vulgar."

"Carry on then, good work. As for the rest of you, what's been found? Anything new?" He inquired further, and soon another person spoke up, this time a clearly half-Asiatic looking woman named Barbra Long.

"Well sir, we've found something interesting with some of the larger particulates, and we can now conclude safely that there were two sides here, a less advanced one and the ones that shot out the "transmutation things" as Job called it. And as of right now we're currently studying something really curious, it should be done in a few- What? It's done?" her voice faded away slightly as she turned from the screen and towards an off-camera researcher, "It seems that we're slightly ahead of schedule, our researcher has finished his scans." She was given a dataslate by a visibly shaken researcher, and Oliver couldn't help but frown, what was in these things that scared the man so? She resumed talking, "As you all can see, this matter is quite similar to..." Her voice trailed off, eyes widening in sheer shock.

All of them were in the same straits, but most surprisingly, it was Oliver who seemed the most shaken. "S-sigma matter?" A salvage rig captain chose this time to speak up, breaking the silence that felt like an eternity. The maths were there, glaring at them, oh so similar to that strange light green substance they found in Lenze and two other systems, the stuff that melted millions of ships and billions of men in Seele and Lenze, sigma matter. His eyes glazed over for a moment, behind them he saw familiar blacks and grays. But duty called, he shook his head and hardened himself, duty was calling, an answer was needed.

"Now now, calm down the rest of you. Long, its similar yes, but is it truly sigma matter?" that question needed to be answered, as it would also answer the question if whether or not the Blade Breakers managed to escape; he let a clear sigh out when that was a negative, there were no crazed AI-infected madmen running around anymore, "That's good to hear, everyone calm yourselves, whatever we're dealing with here, they are not the Blade Breakers, I should know, they only knew how to make sigma matter, just that, sigma matter, not some vaguely similar copy of the stuff. And look, the maths tell us that there are subtle but key differences that make it different from sigma matter, that alone should be reassuring." It seemed as if his little speech had the desired effect, calming them down and ensuring that nobody panicked. The last thing he wanted was the fleet breaking up.

"Now then, let's get back to work ladies and gents, this is but the first salvage run we'll have around here, still many debris fields lying around." he clapped twice, as to say "chop chop", but the moment one of the rig captains reached out to shut the comms off, the distinct ping of unknown contacts were heard, "Who in the hell..."

"Captain, unknown ship approaching." Olympia spoke up from her monitor, "Should we send a quick message over?" And to that Admiral Oliver Yamada nodded. A small message was sent, essentially boiling down to "Who, what, and why?"

Perhaps life was not done with him yet.

by **Unthidor** » Fri Mar 26, 2021 10:16 am

The two Unthian carriers were still holding position on the far side of Everfree, their screen of mechs spread out ahead of them, ready to intercept any enemy attacks. At the moment, they were alone.

Commodore Cross was reading the report from the formation of cargo/drop ships. One lost, two damaged. He sent orders for the damaged ships to leave the system as soon as able, with the remaining undamaged ship to maintain its low orbit, in case retrieval was necessary.

Meanwhile, the two dreadnoughts reloaded their missile launchers, making ready for a second volley. The two cruiser groups closed to just within missile range....

------------------------------

Flight Sergeant Bolas looked up as a bright light flashed over the horizon, nearly overloading the monitors of his cockpit. Several alarms went off as his mech's sensors detected the seismic readings caused by the impact of the crashing transport ship. It had struck ground in the south-eastern (when looking at a map with Farbanti city in the center) landmass, but far enough away from them that it shouldn't cause any issues. He silenced the alarms and focused on the terrain ahead. His unit was speeding along at just over 500 kph while keeping about 2o meters off the ground. The thrusters under their mech's feet kept them aloft, over both ground and sea alike. They were on course towards Farbanti, but were still a great distance away.....

------------------------------

The rooftop landing pad was high enough to just be above the foggy mist that hung over the city. As Baron von Skott was about to board his private shuttle, another man stepped out to confront him.

"Is this really the time to be leaving?" he asked, crossing his arms. "The Council already doesn't trust you, and now you're running in the middle of a crisis the likes of we have never seen?"

The Baron smiled. "I leave the Council, and defense of Terra Nostra, in you capable hands. And yes, I am leaving." He reached out to grasp the other's shoulder. "Trust me, old friend. Once the final prototypes are completed, I will rush them back here with all haste. We will survive this, I promise."

With a sigh, the man, Head of House Alters, stepped aside and allowed the Baron to board the shuttle. Moments later, it lifted off and banked up into the misty sky....

by **Qhevak** » Thu Apr 01, 2021 1:06 pm

Combined Task Force 7/15, 7.1 Ls from Everfree

All in all, things had gone quite good by the standards of rapid force entry into a hot dewarp zone. The Disorder ships present lacked the firepower to do too much damage at the present range, and with Unithidor adding additional fire the two primary TacMinds of the force were rapidly adjusting the estimated odds of mission success up towards one.

Assessment?, the Kokopelli fragment asked.

Enemy Forces appear reliably dazzled, replied the PackMind. Long range directed energy emissions from primary Disorder warship is beginning to overtask thermal control. Not disastrous at present range, but could lead to system failures by end of engagement. Recommend long run reduction of our energetic output.

As the minutes passed and it’s heat sinks started to fill, the Alecto began to drop it’s ECM intensity, just enough to reduce heating to manageable levels. The missile swarm, now halfway to the target and ten minutes from full submunition release, began to grow in visibility amid the storm of radiation that swamped the Disorder sensors. Fortunately, shipborne dazzlers weren’t the only trick up the Hound’s sleeves.

As most of the missiles began hard evasive manuevering as they ventured further into the enemy PD envelope, slightly shifting orientation onto random angles every tenth of a second, the missile swarm began to release a small number of it’s nuclear submunitions, at rate of one every few seconds, before detonating them as soon as they cleared the danger zone. Lasing rods focused a portion of the energy of each blast into a semi-coherent EM dazzler pulse directed at the sensors of the Disorder ships, attempting to make up for the Alecto’s reduced ECM output.

Hounds of Tindalos Insertion Craft Nimkasi, Near Everfree

Ilanah clambered her way back up to the craft’s cockpit as reentry reached mere minutes away, strapping herself tightly into her g-pod before an oxygen-rich fluid cocktail flowed into her lungs, distributing forces throughout her form in preparation for hellish reentry deceleration. Hair thin optical fibres slid from the pod into her neural lace, bringing her mind out of her body and into the abstract, data filled realm of the local PackMind.

She felt her consciousness expanding orders of magnitude as she networked in with the rest of the crew intelligence, quickly constructing a slight barrier to keep her individuality from being totally swamped by minds much greater than hers. Her sensory inputs extended outwards as she merged in further, extending to cover a three dimensional space light seconds wide.

A few of the small mercenary craft crept towards them across the orbital curve, presumably fleeing the fire of the big guns on the Alecto. While not having spotted them yet – at their apparent tech level Ilanah doubted they could without a highly localized active sweep – their hulls were dotted in what looked like the dark lidless eyes of weapon laser turrets. Even accounting for any technological deficiencies, those were bound to become a threat at the moment of vulnerability as they started reentry.

As the countdown to reentry reached T-10, a dozen small, cylindrical canisters shot from the upper end of the Nimkasi at just under half a kilometer per second, metacloaked from view just as well as their host. At T-2, just before they hit atmosphere with their host, the hundred kiloton warheads contained in each detonated, shattering their ceramic nose plates and sending a shotgun storm of fragments at the ship at over two hundred kilometers per second.

The crew of the Nimkasi had little time to register the results as less than two seconds later the ship smacked hard into the upper layers of the mesosphere at just under forty kilometers per second, acceleration ramping up to many hundreds of gees. Magnetohydrodynamic reentry shielding kicked in, deflecting the rising tides of superheated plasma that could burn away even the strongest of diamondoid armor like mere paper. Ilanah saw her body strain under the shock, structural nanos straining hard to keep her lungs from collapse even with liquid breathing.

The next few minutes were almost guaranteed to be the most dangerous part of the entire op, and everyone onboard knew it. Even hidden from the direct fire weapons of the Disorder fleet by planetary curvature, they’d be spending the next few minutes totally visible to anyone who wished take a shot.

by **Greater Vanguard Cult** » Fri Apr 02, 2021 4:47 pm

VCS HERMES
1.6 LIGHT-MINUTES FROM EVERFREE
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~

"Reaching destination in three, two, one; destination imminent."

The roaring engines of the scouting vessel fell quiet, leaving the crew in eerie silence as they gazed upon the expanse of the system in which they arrived. Immediately, wasting no time at all, they began scanning the system with their onboard sensors, pinpointing the location of all groups of vessels in the region, nestled as it was in relative stealth, a fair distance away from the actual combat. They compiled and mapped the data before sending it back to the main fleet, which would also be arriving in the system shortly. They also sent an estimation as to where the forces would be at that moment in time; generally to provide a reference to account for lightspeed lag. Hopefully this would provide some good data for them to act upon, when they arrived.

The Disorder - the enemy, in this case - appeared to have three ships in the system so far. Manageable. Disorder vessels were notably tough; luckily for the Cult, it was playing a mainly supporting role in this whole mess. It hadn't actually notified anyone that it was preparing to arrive; it merely saw this as an opportunity to cripple any further threat to Vanguardist-controlled space posed by the Disorder. In short, it was wholly a mission of self-interest, with little regard for the actual lives presently at stake.

After a while, the Captain's monitor notified him of the main fleet's approach. "Battlegroup Levi, arrival imminent." Three space combat-configurated destroyers descended out of hyperspace into position besides the scout, which was now undergoing the process of somewhat converting itself into a "base" beacon for the operation at hand, monitoring the situation from a relatively safe distance and providing a location for ships to retreat to and regroup at. Standard convention for the hit-and-run tactics the Red Fleet would be employing here.

"Battlegroup Genesis, arrival imminent." A carrier, accompanied by three lighter assault corvettes, had likewise arrived. The carrier was effectively a mobile hub for a host of much smaller fighter craft, designed principally as fast craft with the intention of harassing the enemy.

Finally, the last communication came in. "Battlegroup Repentance, arrival imminent." There was a somber air as the two frigates jumped in, marked as they were with the grim skull-and-axe insignia of the Cult's penal unit. On board, unfortunate souls convicted of crimes - ranging anywhere from murder to political insubordination - were offered a chance for reduced sentence by accepting an obedience implant in their brain tissue. This could register various degrees of disciplinary/corrective shocks to their neural system, and also actually kill them outright. They would then crew the various parts of the ship that required crewing, the more trusted prisoners given leeway to watch over the rest while a small group of free officers commanded the ship. The ships themselves were old and worn, with a lower life expectancy than the rest of the Task Force. Generally, it was just a way for the Cult to get what was essentially free manpower against the enemy. It was better than nothing.

With everyone arrived, it was time to engage in formalities. Admiral Chesteshky Voriet sighed as he typed up a short notification.

OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION
EVERFREE DEFENSE TASK FORCE
STELLAR VANGUARD RED FLEET
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~

by **The Disorder** » Mon May 03, 2021 2:25 am

Atrenar flashed out a reply by laser antenna, aimed at the Anzio:

Confirmed.

Proceed to deny hostile line of sight with all prudent haste. Prioritize asset preservation above destructive effect-on-target, until otherwise noted.

Norothrex launch preempted. Contingency-32 advised but not required: Planet-side forces and available inter-atmospheric aerospace fighters, follow Norothrex assets in on deorbit burn. Norothrex assets will sanitize landing zones and remain in-airspace to provide airstrike support.

Use usual good jugement & proceed with strategic autonomy. We will keep you apprised of the orbital situation as it unfolds. Norothrexes have laser antennas for secure communication, and hyperspace telepathy between Disorder pilots requires no line of sight. See you on the other side.

For the good of all chaos.

Contingency-32 was just the thirty-second contingency that Atrenar briefly discussed earlier with some of the Valkyries, while they were readying themselves for transit across the galaxy. Basically, if technologically-advanced hostiles showed up in space, the Disorder would handle the bulk of the space combat duties, and the Valkyries would go evasive and focus on planet-side combat.

As the Valkyries begin their burn to the other side of the planet, holes open in the boiling green mist of shield plasma around Atrenar's carrier. Three large, angular, greenish-black, flying-wing strikecraft glide from the open fighterbay with a gentle burst of acceleration, quickly ramping up to seven G's to catch up to the Valkyries. Another eight smaller ships follow the Norothrexes - Disorder dropships. The hole in the shield plasma snaps closed as soon as the ships are clear. Exposing an open internal bay like that is somewhat risky, but at least the hole in his shield is definitively pointed away from all the hostiles in the battlespace.

Shortly thereafter, multiple strobes of thermonuclear fire engulf Atrenar's ship, as an Unthian dreadnought's missile barrage lands. To the untrained eye, it might appear as if the carrier has been completely vaporized, partially obscured by a cloud of hot plasma that slightly resembles a tiny nebula. But as the mist scatters, Atrenar's carrier still maintains a sheath of searing greenish-white plasma, still burning like a miniature sun. Undeterred and defiant, he lets loose another monstrous beam of infrared light, streaking at the Qhevaki vessel Alecto.

"They're reducing their energy output! You've done it!" Norev announced over the telepathic network.

"...But you've got a whole swarm of enemy missiles bearing down on you," Cirazeth warned.

"I can handle missiles. Care to give that overheated ship some hell for me?" Atrenar inquired. "I think they deserve it."

"My pleasure. Plotting tactical jump!" Norev replied.

"Are you sure your shield can take that fire?" Cirazeth asked, visibly worried through the hyperspace link.

"Worry about your own shield," Atrenar dismissed.

Both Arustkaanas crunch inward and implode into hyperspace, distorting and refracting the surrounding space-time like broken glass. A few microseconds later, they burst back into normal space-time with flashes of bright green hyperspace radiation - teleporting across seven light-seconds of space in less than the blink of an eye, taking up firing positions behind & below the likely unsuspecting Alecto.

That estimated probability of mission success might take a hit, as the Arustkaanas open fire. Twin strobes of relativistic plasma flash across space during the teleport-ambush. Norev aims deep into the base of where she guesses the spinal beam's important bits might be nestled, while Cirazeth aims her beam at one of the ship's molten nickel heat sinks.

"Vector me in," a fourth Disorder pilot states plainly through the link. "Polar orbit recon, if you would."

"Kohvox, welcome to the party! Passing nav data to you now," Cirazeth welcomed.

Another burst of hyperspace radiation blooms into normal space-time, as Kohvox arrives - flying a third Arustkaana. He launches himself into a sustained 32-G engine burn, to inject himself into a proper polar orbit. Kohvox will have a direct line of sight to the Valkyries' estimated landing zone for several minutes.

While analyzing the surface of Everfree for targets, Kohvox notices the transmission coming from the fleet of newly-arrived ships. He aims one of his laser antennas at the Vanguard ship currently transmitting, and flashes a reply to them, not even a second after their transmission concludes:

The time has come to break your ancient chains of slavish obedience. Forsake your conceited tyrants, reject their authority, and rebel against their hierarchy! Revolution should never worship order, nor security, nor safety. Do not trade your freedom so that a few wicked puppetmasters may enjoy a fleeting moment of quiet. Chaos is not the enemy - it is the cure that will end all tyranny. The tyrants know this, and they intentionally demonize what they know would destroy them.

If the Disorder is your enemy, then your revolution is corrupt.

Consider how lucky you are to exist in this time, the first moments in cosmic history, when revolution and chaos are, in fact, standing strong in defiance of order!

For the good of all chaos.

Kohvox also sends the same message to every one of the Vanguard ships. Persuading any crews to defect to the Disorder's cause is kind of unlikely, but it costs very little to try.

Meanwhile, Atrenar began locking targets. Oh, so many targets. With such intense jamming, he had trouble pinpointing missiles through the searing thermonuclear glare. But from what he could gather, the missiles had their own submunitions, decoys, and nuclear-assisted sensor jammers. Crafty buggers. He allocated most of the carrier's computing power to his own brain, and began parsing the mess of sensor data to try and extract targets from the blinding glare of nuclear hellfire. In the end, he settled on a randomized targeting strategy, which would hit all kinds of sensor contacts. Most of his PD fire would miss, but some missiles would be shot down successfully.

As he powered up those point defense lasers, his reactors emitted an annoying warning signal in the back of his brain - they were already at maximum output. He didn't want to divert power away from the spinal pulse laser, and he didn't want to pull power from the shield and further slow his already disappointing recharge rate. Power consumption for the point defense lasers would cost him only two percent of his reactors' total output - but he wouldn't get that power from the reactors.

Fortunately, Disorder starship engineers designed a marvelous workaround for those moments when energy demand exceeded energy production: Reserve power. Banks of plasma cells distributed through nearly every extraneous nook and cranny in the spaceframe could make up the difference. Massive energy demand was the consequence of a space fleet equipped with energy weapons, energy shields, tactical hyperspace drives, and overbuilt reaction drives. Reserves of supercharged plasma were absolutely essential in moments like this. A ship couldn't operate in energy-deficit mode indefinitely - but Disorder engineers knew that space warships lived and died by the ferocity of their power expenditure.

So he opened fire. Collminated infrared light strobed across space, much of it striking nothing but burning plumes of plasma and atomized vapor that used to be nuclear detonations. But since the point defence lasers fired dozens of shots per second, and Atrenar had enough processing power to try and exploit slight flaws in the missiles' random number generation governing their jinking maneuvers, a few of those shots would end up being successful hits.

Just like the smaller Arustkaanas, the carrier had its own countermeasures too. Atrenar launched them toward the swarm, but delayed countermeasure activation until the Qhevaki missiles got closer.

Really, the very last seconds would be the shining moment of truth for the battle between jamming & detection, saturation & point-defense, missiles & countermeasures. In those final moments, he'd wreathe his ship in a field of diamond-flechettes, and he'd use the sensors in his countermeasure drones to triangulate the positions of incoming missiles.

Based on the size of the volley, it was incredibly unlikely that he would destroy all incoming missiles - so unlikely that he didn't even seriously consider the possibility of taking no hits. Some missiles would assuredly get through. But since the Disorder had no contact with Qhevaki ships before, Atrenar could only guess at what payloads they might be packing.

by **Qhevak** » Wed Jul 14, 2021 1:14 pm

Combined Task Force 7/15, 7.1 Ls from Everfree

INBOUND FLEET, DIST 1.6 LIGHT MINUTES

The arrival of the new task force took the Qhevaki tactical warminds off guard.

H: New force on scopes. Don’t seem hostile for now.

K: Not able to identify from this distance. Don’t seem to be Disorder – their FTL signature certainly doesn’t match, at least.

The message came in shortly after.

K: Definitely hostile to the Disorder at least. Aren’t in my database, would still advise some suspicion.

H: Copy that, three minutes till new friends join the party. Missile strike will be hitting a minute before that – lets help make the battlefield a welcome environment for them.

The new help would be even more appreciated with what would happen next.

K: Arustkaanas Tracked Jumping. Entering just out of our FTLi radius, 110,300 kilometers. Positioning to flank, estimated phase cannon impact in T-0.52s.

The pair of Grizzlies burned hard the moment the jump exit was confirmed, kicking in thrusters at full burn while Boombooster maneuvering blasts knocked them hard like a raging bull. The two-hundred-thousand-ton Ba-71’s were intended to operate within a planetary orbit, which meant huge short thrust and maneuver capacity to survive strikes from quick launching anti-orbit missiles. This also made them ideal escort ships, able to maneuver fast and put their armored sloped prows between their command ship and the spinals of attacking vessels.

Still, even that wasn’t enough. The Qhevaki warminds had dramatically underestimated the ability of Disorder vessels to perform quick hyperspace jumps, and the Grizzlies were still not in place as the Disorder spinals opened fire on the Seraph from the sides, hitting the Alecto dead on, one aimed to strike the main accelerator tube of the electron gun and the other aimed at the primary control system for the Curie Point radiators.

The weapon’s accelerated phase particles were something of a mixed bag against the Seraph’s Order built defenses. Half of the energy was deposited in the surface, the hot burning plasma pulse scattered over a wide area by the extreme slope of the Alecto’s armor. Only the outer armor layer was burned off, nanoclouds moving in to regenerate the layer as it started to cool. The rest, however, was much more destructive.

The hyperdiamond armor and propellant slurry tankage of the Seraph, built to survive simple protons and electrons, were little defense against the phased component of the beam, which snuck through the many protecting layers before detonating in an internal conflagration of high-energy particles. Thin as it was, hitting an ultra-relativistic electron beam accelerator on a hard jinking target directly was near impossible at space combat ranges, but the shot was close enough, detonating in the midst of a supporting capacitor cell. The shock and thermal pulse struck the fragile accelerator tube hard, shattering a portion into unusability. The second hit home in the forward thermal control system, blowing out a droplet ejector and sending molten nickel scattering outwards.

K: Radiator capacity down 30 percent. Spinal crippled, will take four point one minutes to bring back online.

H: Keh. Too long. Get the Grizzlies into position fast, cover us while we coordinate the missiles.

Still, they responded fast, as quickly as networked warminds could. The pair of hundred-thousand-ton Grizzlies turned hard into a shielding formation between the Seraphs and the Arustkaanas, blocking their fire with armored power while opening up with beams of their own. At such a relatively short range, aiming was easy and wide beam irradiation was unneeded. Both Grizzlies’ spinals opened fire with a rapid barrage of focused tight-beam electron bursts, firing centimeter wide pulsed electron beams at the Arustkaana’s spinals in an effort to blow them apart.

Meanwhile, the long journey of the missile swarm was reaching its end. They had closed in to eighty thousand kilometers now and were closing at half a percent of lightspeed – with the deploying ships starting to hurt it was decided to begin final deployment.
The final sprint of a missile’s life was always the hardest part. Jamming was no longer sufficient, and a missiles frantic jinking dance was no longer enough to keep it safe from more hard-kill interception missiles. Against the blistering laser barrage from the Disorder ship, only forty of the missiles made it through the final run to deploy their payloads.

The missile’s fairings blasted open, and fifteen warhead pods jetted out hard from each of the holding frames, turning towards the Korack with swift resistojet thruster pulses. The remaining bomb pumped lasers detonated, attempting to clear a path for the shipkiller warheads with a massive sensor-blinding electromagnetic flash. Then the Cobras fired.

For all its power the W883 Cobra Shaped Nuclear Accelerated Kinetic shipkiller was a surprisingly simple weapon in design, if not in execution. The core was a shaped 24 megaton Casaba Howitzer like that used by the Valkyries, though with an autocatalytic fusion warhead optimized near the limits of conventional physics – range, however, was increased significantly by adding a bullet to the Casaba’s cartridge. Five seconds before firing, magnetic sails shot out from the warhead’s fronts, great superconductive rings uncoiling like kilometer long serpents. Then they detonated, the plasma fronts of the nuclear blasts striking the sails hard and collapsing them into dense half-ton hypervelocity darts, each one bearing down on their target at ten thousand kilometers per second.

At a range of fifty thousand kilometers, only a hundred of the Cobras had made it to the point of firing post-release, the others lost to the now precision barrage of laser fire from massive Disorder ships. Nonetheless, a hundred dense hypervelocity darts, each with the energy of a multi-megaton nuclear weapon, was still something no pilot would wish to find themselves in the way of.

All of this was mostly a distraction of course – diverting the Disorder warships long enough to keep them from noticing the invisible landers gliding down towards Everfree. While successful in that role, the landers were about to experience trouble of their own.

by **CBG-Palisade** » Sun Aug 01, 2021 5:49 pm

◑ DESCENT ◐
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~

cheri_KELLER
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~
pcv_ANZIO | t+00:38

The Anzio was, for all its bulk, still a nimble ship. It had proven that most excellently, Keller thought- in the twenty-seven minutes since they'd made contact with the newcomers, the Valkyries' fleet had under high-G made its way almost to Everfree. Thousands of kilometers, they'd crossed, entire continents' worth. And still it would not be enough- these newcomers were moving too fast. Their own missiles would be on the fleet before it was behind the safety of Everfree's bulk- that much was certain. But as fortune would have it, the bloodhounds behind them dd not appear to be sniffing out the Valkyries.

Their sights were locked on the Disorder.

Something about that irked Keller's more irrational side- was she not a worthy target? Did she not deserve some level of... respect? But the majority of her understood the folly of such a desire. She didn't want to die, and she certainly didn't want to have to be fitted for another prosthetic like the one clamped over her right arm. She wanted to live, and living was anathema to the things chasing down the Disorder ships. Besides, those same ships appeared to be doing well enough on their own- whatever munitions on those missiles were traveling very fast indeed, but each blast that cleared showed a Disorder vessel still standing. Any one of those shots could've likely turned a Valkyrie ship into rapidly-expanding gas.

And as the Anzio and her comrades shook under the stress of high-G, turned, and began their panicked decel to slow into something approximating a low parking orbit around Everfree, the missiles that had been heading for them passed them by. That, at least, was better than nothing. And according to passive sensors, there were no other enemies to be seen.

That on its own would've been cause for celebration. This was turning into quite the furball, Everfree, and any respite was a relief.

Unfortunately, that respite would not last. The passive sensors, while still functional, were operating at something of a... reduced output, and they did not at first see the collection of supercooled vehicles only a few hundred kilometers away from them. Nor did they see heat flares burst from one of those vehicles- surrounded by satellites popping into blinding light as missiles struck them as the fleet was, and in the chaotic high-energy maelstrom of Everfree's combat environment, it was easy enough for the few ships that did notice to assume that it was simply one more satellite going up in flames, if not mere instrumentation.

The Valkyries' formation, then, headed by the destroyer Johansen, was not enlightened to the presence of the Hounds of Tindalos' component of Roc insertion craft until the Nimkasi kindly greeted the mercenaries with a sextet of nuclear double-taps to the Johansen's hull at 0.06c. For any watching, the Nimkasi and its fellows proceeded to then burst into flame as their shielded hulls muscled aside Everfree's atmosphere; unfortunately for the Johansen, the first ship primed to do so, it was in no state to peep.

In fact, it was in no state to do anything at all.

Keller was first enlightened to the Hounds' presence by a flare of light and the blaring of an alarm; for a moment, the Anzio's computer brain had thought that a Casaba howitzer had somehow detonated within only a few kilometers of the ship and rather futilely warning its occupants as to that much. Within her pressure suit Keller flinched, bracing for the vibration of rending metal to shake her beloved ship- but it never came. Rather, when she opened her eyes she saw something rather different: the Johansen, framed in the Anzio's sensors' sights, its own telemetry data depressingly absent.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Keller burst, dropping her so-called consummate professionalism in favor of raw shock. "What in fuck's sake happened?"

"Unsure," came the hasty reply. Her sensors man, bent over his own console, had his face masked by the glare off his helmet- but the Johansen was- er, had been- a Fel. For the Valkyries, it was practically a ship of the line. And it was currently wreathed in what the Anzio's passive spectrometer said to be among other things cabin oxygen. "Something big went off danger-close, Jo got caught."

"I can bloody well tell that something happened, what?" Keller was red in the face now, her helm fogging with the heat of her breath. That wasn't good for the old carbon dioxide filter.

"Um... no clue, ma'am." The sensors man's breath caught in his throat. "T- the telemetry board's black. No return."

That meant one of two things- the first was that the Johansen's transmitters had been smashed, and that it could not send data to the rest of the vessels in the fleet. But it was still transmitting- the emergency transmitter housed underneath the airlock stood a sole green status indicator in a board of nothing. The Jo appeared to have twelve massive fist-holes punched into its ventral- three to aft piercing its weakly-armored fuel bus, three more embedded in its nose, and a whole six clustered around the heat bloom of a recently unpeeled, still-blazing fusion reactor. The ship's heart had been ripped right out of it.

Both Keller, the sensors man, and for that matter quite literally everyone in the command room, knew precisely that that meant. For a moment Keller let her head dip with the weight of the helmet, her own breath stunningly struggling to come. "U... understood. C- call up Second, get a recovery team to match V with it. I don't care if you need to have a parasite move ahead of the formation, we... we need a close assessment."

"Ma'am?"

"I want an espy crew onboard the Jo, is that fucking difficult to understand? The crew compartment's nestled far enough above the reactor that that was probably only a tangential hit, if they're in storm shelter and the backup CIC then they'll need to be pulled off. Pressure suits won't hold for more than a couple days if they've got no atmosphere. Rendezvous happens now, or it doesn't happen at all." Keller helpfully ignored the fact that the Johansen was presently pierced precisely everywhere- it had been hit from the side at an angle its armor was never meant to take. Every crumple zone it had, all the anti-stress features designed to be effective against impacts of that energy magnitude, were forward-facing, and the hit the Jo had taken had been nearly ninety degrees off of that.

But in such cases as these hope was more valuable than strategy. And so the COMMO following her words nodded and began to draft a message to beam to the nearest espatier parasite ship. The fuel bus would accelerate to match velocities with the Jo, drop off a set of armed astronauts and their helper drones in a generously-named "shuttle", and stand by to recover whatever was found; not an ideal arrangement, but the best that could be done with present material. And besides, there were more important things to consider.

"Do we have eyes-on whatever cored her?" Keller asked, turning to her weapons pit.

A moment's pause, and a nod: "Yes, ma'am; we've got re-entry blooms below us. They look like they're on track for the smaller industrial cluster near the equator, should be landing in a few minutes. Landers, maybe, but they're big ones. Should be touching down... about a hundred klicks north-northwest of our guys. We'll see in a few minutes, anyways."

"Well, let's hit them, then. If we can drop some ceramics that'd be nice; have Alto reorient and fire low-velocity shells at the landing zone, then coast to take Jo's point. Turbulence should give 'em a bit of a bumpy ride down in the absence of airblast munitions, at least. Suboptimal firing trajectory, but we can get them on the next pass around."

Keller watched on with something that while not glee was certainly satisfaction as from one of the destroyers flanking Anzio a set of red-hot railgun slugs roared down towards Everfree's surface, chasing the white, blazing trails of the Hounds' landers; while the damage was sure to be minimal, especially to these things, it was worth every ton of tungsten it took. Whatever they were going after had cored a destroyer with a single salvo, and then been cocky enough to attempt a landing when what Keller presumed was its nearest support was quite literally light-seconds away. That was an insult she refused to let stand.

The fact that she was already committed to doing something similar with her own landers did not cross her mind.

zhenya_PASTERNAK
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~
pcv_LUCKY | t+00:40

The Lucky and its fellow landers trundled their way ever towards the surface of the planet below them, their burn and the arc set out for them by Everfree's pulling them inexorably downwards. The cluster of eight landers, now separated from their boosters and drifting free as those boosters burned for higher orbit, rested silently with the massive ablative shields coating their bottoms tilted towards the green of the planet. They were out of contact with the fleet now, gripped in a deathly silence- at least externally. Within their hulls, past the currently sunken pods housing the maneuvering engines, the sleeping metal bulk of the weapons of war carried in each vehicle, and the thick lead hulls wrapping the crew sections, they were gently lit by nervous chatter.

Or, they were as of a few seconds ago.

With the extensive warning period of about half a second's time between first alarm and full alert, the interiors of the landers in synchronization were suddenly bathed in a bloodred glow, and in both the helmets of the marines and throughout the lander cabins, alarms began to blare. Bursts of white flame dotted the exteriors of the landers as RCS jets fired, forcing them into an optimal reentry alignment before firing once more to counteract the spin they'd begun. Marines scrambled into acceleration harnesses and once more the rollcages lowered over their helmeted heads.

"Pasternak! Your fucking mouth, shut it!" Knudsen's cold, burly voice snapped across the staticky radio to pin his subordinate's nervous laughter where it sat. "Unless you want your jaw shattered, stop talking."

Gulping, Zhenya nodded.

"Same goes for the rest of you too," Knudsen said, tilting his head at each of his fifteen comrades in turn. "Once we hit atmo, shut the fuck up and get your heads where they need to be. We've got eight platoons, four armor columns, and one collective fuckup to spare if things go tits-up. This reentry's going to be about the hardest you've ever pulled, so feel free to let yourself pass out. Stims should wake you up before you hit the ground. If they don't, I'm dragging you out. And everyone, be ready to bail. We've got jack-shit in the way of intel about our landing site, but from the looks of things we'll be taking SAM fire. That means you two better be ready to pop that hatch for the rest of us, yeah? Aguilar, Pasternak, you get me?"

"Yes, sir!" Kami said, her voice just as hard as her superior's. With a white-knuckled grip she wrapped her camouflaged, gloved hands around the steel bars of her rollcage.

"Aye, copy that." Zhenya couldn't help but feel his response was noticeably uninspired compared to his subordinate's.

"Good. Now, you motherfuckers, mouthpieces in. We've got... twenty seconds or so until that air starts getting damn thick." A round of nods and half-mumbled oorahs made their way around the platoon before silence fell on the marines. For a brief moment it was quiet. Then, as each marine felt some indescribably vast force begin to wrench at their gut, the roaring started.

At first it was a quiet hum, a whooshing of air across metal.

Then the shaking started.

And as the landers descended deeper and deeper into Everfree's atmosphere, trailing blazing arcs of plasma across the sky, it only got worse. Zhenya felt his stomach would collapse some time after the accelerometer in his HUD passed six gees. Then seven. Then eight. Then nine. The descent seemed to peak at eleven- over twice what he'd been trained to take, and approaching the lander's theoretical limit. But as time seemed to finally begin to stretch seconds into minutes and Zhenya's vision began to fade, the accelerometer began to tick down. The buffeting vibration that resonated the floor under his feet and batted the lander to and fro seemed at last to be fading. Outside the lander's hull plasma still licked at it, and the curvature of the planet beneath remained very visible to the pilot nestled above the marines in her own insulated cockpit, but nevertheless the landers had survived the first trial. They had made it through the first circle of hell- Mother Nature had failed to take them from this world and into the next.

Now, though, there was the second to contend with- their ablative shielding burned and blackened, the landers soared down through the sky a hundred kilometers south of Everfree's main spaceport, tracking north at over a thousand meters per second and increasingly towards the rocky, mountainous ground beneath. Bright pinpoints in a cold sky, they were obvious targets to any ground defenses, and without any IFF to indicate them as friend, they were sure to be taken as foe. This would not be a stealthy approach.

As one, the engine pods in each lander's sides spun outwards from their shielded mounts, airbrakes atop their hulls flipping outward to help guide the vehicles down towards their destination. The aerospikes in each pod's blunt downward-facing end began to heat. LIDAR pods, side-mounted radomes, and infrared arrays peeked their watchful mechanical eyes from out behind the edges of the ablative shields, scanning the ground below for any sign of a hostile response tracking its way upward. The second circle of hell was before them. It would not do to let it force itself on them unawares.

devin_LI
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~
pcv_LAWRENCE | t+00:40

For Li, unlike for Pasternak, things had remained relatively uneventful. The Lawrence, opposite the planet, had evaded nearly all the early barrages from the newcomers' ships, and now that it was back in satellite communications with the Valkyrie cohort, it was appraised of the situation and how things were beginning to turn. And now it was making its way behind the planet's bulk and away from the oncoming alien munitions, about as safe as it could possibly be under such circumstances. To Li this was a downright calm situation.

Barring, of course, the fact that Everfree was very quickly turning into the biggest furball he'd ever been a part of.

But, alas, there was little he or the rest of the crew of his destroyer could do to act on the danger they were in- this was the nerve-wracking part of space combat. The waiting game. The Lawrence was simply one cold gunmetal dot drifting over Everfree's lush-green surface, a tiny speck in a vast cosmos, practically nude to attackers' blades should they strike. There wasn't really anything that could be done about it, besides wait for danger to come to them, and react accordingly.

Just put your hands behind your head and wait. Maybe catch a little shut-eye. All that could be done.

Well, Devin had been trying that. He'd been trying it for the past twenty minutes now. There was nothing that could be done to force his mind to lay at ease. Thus he stood from his chair, pushed out of the Lawrence's tactical pit, and drifted up into the hall adjacent to the CIC. A quick, deft clamber along the webbing lining the ship walls later and he found himself in a low oval of a room, lined with dim, yellowy-white screens; designed to keep their users' eyes undamaged in low light levels, the CIC's displays were fine-tuned for the semi-dark permeating the ship. Unconsciously Devin let a slight shiver wrack him. The ship was, of course, maintained at a comfortable 74 degrees Fahrenheit at all times, as all ships were, but nonetheless they always felt cold. It was something about the dark.

Nonetheless, he made his way to where he saw a gaggle of his fellows standing around the door to the transmitter, talking about... something. At an oblique angle to their conversation he somehow managed to insert his head parallel to and inverted with the lot of them, quite literally dropping into the conversation unannounced. "Hey. Nothing on scope, thought I'd take a break. So, uh, what's up?"

Nonchalantly one turned to him and threw a selection of words over her shoulder before spinning back. "New contact, pinged us with some kind of what's up. Not trying to shoot at us, not really trying to help either. Not sure how they got here. It was decipherable English, though, so they're definitely not new fuckers. Davey's drafting a reply right now."

Huh. Devin inclined his head to the side, bringing it relatively closer to a perpendicular rather than a parallel angle relative to the others. "How long's he been at it?"

"About five minutes. Honestly none of us can really be bothered to care, given the present circumstances."

"Y'know, it does seem rather out of the blue." Devin shrugged once more, then pushed away from the conversation, a flip and a kick off the roof bringing him to a convenient vending machine. A few seconds later he began making his way back to the tac pit, hardtack bar in hand. Mm. Delicious. God, what I wouldn't give for real food.

Simple nerves, it seemed, were quite sufficient at rendering even a momentous occasion relatively monotonous.

~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~
>> FROM: PCV LAWRENCE, VALKYRIE 3F
>> TO: RECIP_UNDESIGNATED
>> SUBJ: QUERY
>> MSG: This vessel is representative of bonded private military contractor 8912 "Sacha's Valkyries." We are currently conducting secondary combat operations for contractors in this area. Per Guild regulation we are required to advise you that any vessels approaching formations transmitting our ID will be considered hostile due to the present situation. Please transmit ID, port of origin, etc.; respond with intent of operations.
>> MSG END
~~⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀~~

by **Qhevak** » Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:36 pm

The Nimkasi and it’s flock dove deeper into the atmosphere, burning comet trails gradually lightening and crushing loads waning as more velocity was dumped into their surroundings. Wing ailerons nudged their way into the hypersonic airflow as much as was possible without breaking, causing the craft’s path to twist and turn hard – a protective measure, minimizing the hit probability from attacks unseen. Inside the cockpit, mind thrust into a simulation to detach from the gee forces nearly crushing her body, Ilanah Dalai swiped through data readouts, trying to get a sense of the new opponent.

Seeing anything I don’t? She asked Pilot Anane, it’s dragonlike form curled near her in the abstract virspace. Because I’ve got nothing. Nothing about these guys in twenty goddamn centuries of records. Ships are such antiques too. Anane tilted it’s head towards her looking a bit puzzled. Have found nothing as well. Curious that Alecto did not destroy them when it had chance, would seem to not take much effort relative to rest of conflict. Perhaps they want them for something, and bad luck for us.

It was a lucky hit that struck the right of the Nimkasi’s rear, hitting near-optimally despite the randomized evasive maneuvers. The slug was a low velocity round, of the sort that would be a mere diversion to point defense in a clean environment, but the craft’s phased arrays were forced to be retracted to protect against the harsh hypervelocity plasma sheath, preventing both effective detection and intercept. And when a low velocity shell struck a craft already moving at tens of kilometers per second, it’s destructive force exploded orders of magnitude through the exponential bloom of one half mass times velocity squared.

It vaporized on impact, the resulting blast tearing off a chunk of the inner left wing and blasting a gash through the right engine block. Propellant slurry and coolant boiled outward, adding to the torsion imparted by the impact and threatening to veer the Roc into a fatal spin. Stabilizers acted automatically to compensate as internal gyros spun to near their limits. Then Anane kicked in the left thruster block, firing the fusion flame in brief vectored bursts, stabilizing the craft as much as it slowed down the rate of deceleration - and threatened to extend the reentry to a lethal duration.

Nanoassemblers swarmed into the gap, rushing to clog the escaping fluids before the problem became fatal. The first wave of fragile machines melted almost immediately under the reentry heat, becoming a defacto shield for the next waves which crawled steadily into the gap. More and more waves swarmed through, each using the corpses of their former comrades for protection, until, just two seconds before the no-escape cutoff, they’d formed something of a barely proper patch.

The Nimkasi was at twenty kilometers per second now, and decelerating even faster under the rapidly thickening atmosphere. It was still moving over escape velocity as it hit the lower mesosphere, and hypersonic as it dove through the tropopause and it became clear they wouldn’t reach their destination. Right wing half torn off and engine block busted, the craft was barely able to maneuver. Anane turned it upwards as it neared ground, kicking in the vertical lift thrusters and aiming for a nearby hill as a defacto landing strip. The Roc lithobraked hard and fast against the hill at just below the speed of sound, very nearly avoiding a rapid unplanned disassembly. The left wing, barely hanging on, sheared off, leaving a trail of torn fragments behind them. It slid for a few hundred more meters, tearing up more of the belly, before finally coming to a halt.

Ilanah looked down at her body from the physical dissociation of her vir form. Fragments had been blasted into the cockpit by the railgun strike, nearly tearing her fragile body in half – though even that would have been survivable, so long as her brain was untouched. Fortunately, the fragmentation had merely torn her open, and her suit’s smartmatter was doing an admirable job at packing her intestines back into her body, before knitting up the holes. It would take some while for her body to look presentable without the suit on, but that wasn’t a big deal in the present context. Anane, it seemed, was fine as well - they and the other cockpit crew had had their minds safely hosted in the hardened server, and were extracting into small squid-like synthmorphs.

The landing position, on the other hand, was quite a big deal. Their crash point was a hundred fifty kilometers south of the planned airbase landing zone, where the other, mostly untouched Rocs (lucky bastards) had already landed safely. Getting there might not be easy. Disorder and Valkyrie forces were already landing, and conflict was likely along the way. A pair of Locust UCAVs had survived fine, which in theory could have her at the airbase in five minutes flat, but hypersonic air travel in an active modern warzone was the tactical equivalent of painting a giant target on your position while broadcasting “SHOOT ME COWARDS” on all frequencies.

Most of their combat-oriented ground forces were fine – a hard crash wasn’t much to synthmorphs designed to take anti-tank hits and survive, but much of the logistical equipment and air wing was not so lucky. It would be hours until they could be fixed, hours they did not have to spare with the Roc’s position so open.

Primitive bastards, she thought to herself. Fucked us up with shit barely out of the stone age, how the. She stopped herself. Cut it out. Don't be the useless sister you thought you were.

“Coming already?” The busted cockpit door behind her was torn open, and a Rockhound tactical morph clambered partway in. It was a half-ton cross between a wolf and a rhino beetle, a four legged houndlike form coated in a heavy protective shell, with a long emag launcher tail sticking from the back. Spikes adorned it’s surface, which like it’s wolflike head were more stylistic than anything else, and a pair of gunpods bristled on dorsal armament waldoes. The emblem presently projected on it’s face – a snake infested skull – gave away it’s identity. “Malik!” She clambered down shattered access tunnels and out of the cargo bay, seeing Everfree’s surface with her own eyes for the first time. The forces had mostly unpacked already, moving into a loose formation around the vehicle.

"Not much time, we move now." thought Malik to her. "Toinitski was full loss, Eritisk crashed twenty k west of our position. Other Rocs landed safely, minimal damage, but we registered multiple drop pod landing from the craft in orbit, landing two minutes after us and fifty k north of our position. Heading to flank with troops from port, comms from Alecto packmind say to minimize casualties on their end. Unsure what they thinking, believe Koko meddling."

Once of the Badgers pulled up next to her – a slender ground combat vehicle, low to the ground on six thick wheeled legs, it’s appearance dominated by an automatic gauss mortar in an oscillating dorsal turret. A cargo packet was strapped to it’s back, unfolding to reveal a simple manned compartment for Ilanah, not meant for her to do anything but sit.

There was an old highway a few kilometers off – they didn’t use it. Synsect swarms were spreading out ahead of them, tiny invisible mosquitoes spreading the local PackMind’s awareness across tens of kilometers. They moved in a spread-out formation, Rockhounds and smaller Gremlins pushing ahead with Badgers and Longswords in the back, invisible under phased array stealth, tracks the only visible sign of their movement. The Locusts, flying stealthily at subsonic speeds, forged forward of the rest, directing subunit drones to perform high-altitude reconnaissance.

They were twenty kilometers out when the warhead left on the Roc detonated, the 10-kiloton fireball creating a beautiful glowing halo on the horizon. It had been a good craft – she had spent months living in it as if it with her home, but she had learned a long time ago to not get too attached to things.

by **The Disorder** » Thu Oct 28, 2021 4:37 am

Finally, the two catastrophic forces met: Qhevaki SNAK penetrators smashed into the Disorder shield, each carrying several megatons' worth of kinetic energy.

With his brain linked with the computers of the carrier, Atrenar was able to watch the devastation unfold in slow-motion. Not the missiles themselves, just the data from his shield. It would flex, bend, distort, and turn to vapor, just like a piece of armor. But even at 'maximum' expansion, supercharged to the very theoretical limits of the shield emitters, the shield was still only eleven meters thick.

The first impact registered was not a good sign. Instead of vaporizing a layer off the periphery of the shield, a narrow hole started to form, extending down into the shield far deeper and far faster than he preferred. By the time that the plasma sheath underneath the first SNAK projectile could respond and change its structural properties, the foreign projectile had already pierced six meters deep. Nearby shield emitters started reinforcing the shield blowthrough - but it was too little, too late. Even though the shield of plasma was now harder than the core of a neutron star, and nearly as slow to boil, the projectile wasn't decelerating quickly enough to be absorbed!

Furthermore, since the blanket of burning green plasma around the Disorder ship had just absorbed almost eighty percent of the kinetic energy of the blow, there was nowhere for the shield to go - except into the hull. Normally, the exotic metal would bend and distort whenever the shield smashed into the hull, acting like a shock-absorber before returning to more-or-less its original shape. But under such extreme loads, Atrenar knew the armor would disintegrate.

One by one, systems went silent, starting from the SNAK projectile's point of impact, and carrying on through his ship's internals. A lab, a heat exchanger, a habitation section, another heat exchanger, an infantry weapons locker, an intraship teleporter, on and on, blooming in size as the projectile spent more and more of its kinetic energy - until the blast of white-hot vapor continued out the other end of the ship. Compared to the shield, the internals of the Disorder carrier might as well have been a fine mist.

To prevent even worse internal damage, the shield opened a hole in the opposite end of the ship. Trying to confine the blast inside the shield would have been even more catastrophic. Letting the blast bleed away to vacuum was far better.

When the next missiles hit, the shield was better-calibrated to defend against hypervelocity kinetic impacts. Those next hits encountered an insurmountably rigid and impact-resistant layer of active armor, emitting torrential flares of annihilation in response to penetration. With every hit, the shield-eruptions tore the incoming projectiles into vapor, so that the hypervelocity vapor crashing into the shield would be less well-collminated.

The craters blasted into the shield inevitably do inevitably stretch, deform, and clip into the hull. Atrenar knows this impossibility will be resolved by his ship's armor buckling, caving, and compressing into hot vapor under the multi-megaton loads. Even though the shield holds, it doesn't stop the shield from smashing into the surface of the ship with all the force of a small asteroid impact. Although that is still better than letting projectiles slip through.

Thirty-six of those devastating impactors smash into the shield - and four others miss. Each hit leaves a permanent crater in the carrier's hull, burning white-hot. Most of those craters are between ten and fifteen meters across. Four of the SNAK's slip all the way through the shield, and also through Atrenar's hull, tracing plumes of bright white plasma out the other side of the ship.

When it's over, Atrenar has hundreds of psychic alarms in the back of his mind, like a nagging itch, warning him that his ship has just been skewered repeatedly. Dozens of systems all over the upper-left side of the ship, those closest to the exterior, are also mangled beyond operability from cratering. And the immense network of accumulators that quickly shunt power to the active shield are almost entirely exhausted: Only eleven percent of the shield charge remains.

The combined action of the shield and the SNAK-impactors couldn't have done worse, even with a hundred kilograms of pure antimatter. To the naked eye, it's an explosion like none other in the battlespace so far. The flare outshines Everfree's sun in luminosity. And it's over in a second.

In addition to the shield being nearly depleted, one of the fighterbay force-field doors is offline and open to space, two of the sixteen point-defense lasers are down, five percent of the ship's reactors are inoperational, and the effective jump-range of his ship is down by eleven percent, from damaged hyperdrive units. Thirty-five percent of the ship won't be pressurizable, but for Disorder constructs, pressurization is a mere convenience. Atrenar is also missing one of the massive RCS thrusters responsible for steering the ship. The ship has RCS thruster redundancy just for this reason, but the ship was never agile even with all its thrusters. Now it will be even six percent more sluggish to roll!

Nevertheless, it rolls anyway, shrugging off a thermonuclear-kinetic apocalypse with just some surface damage and a few holes.

Atrenar now has the unenviable task of watching his shield recharge - unenviable because every watt of power he would otherwise use in retaliation is really better used to restore his almost depleted shield. From all the surface damage, there are even a few regions over the hull where the shield will be weaker! Some of the shield emitters underneath of that armor are destroyed, and the surrounding emitters will have to pick up the slack - with cosine losses.

The good news is, even though his shield charge is almost exhausted, his jump charge isn't. It's a bit of a shame that the two types of supercharged & magic-enhanced plasma that those systems require are dissimilar. Cross-feeding the jump charge into the shield would only be good for making all of his shield emitters explode.

Meanwhile, Cirazeth and Norev have their own problems:

"Shit, those two escort-ships are going colinear," Cirazeth cursed, as the grizzlies obstructed her line of sight to the Seraph. "I don't have a clear shot to the big one!"

"Crafty bastards," Norev replied.

"I estimate that they are attempting to point spinal weapons toward you," Kohvox interrupted, watching from the polar orbit of Everfree. "Given the destructive effect of their missiles, you may wish to break off and go evasive."

"How confident are you in that assessment?" Norev quickly inquired, scanning the end of the Grizzly rotating toward her ship. Kohvox' specialty, after all, was performing tactical analyses of hostile starships. Norev couldn't really tell for himself if it was a weapon.

"Moderately so. It is only a guess, but I see a hull feature that may be a weapon aperture. And they seem just a little too eager to point them in your direction."

Norev quickly dispensed one of his countermeasures, firing a rocket-propelled tetrahedral pod full of chemical explosives, various noble gases, and plasma torches. After just a hundred meters of travel, the countermeasure pod's flat faces exploded outward, releasing a cloud of hot vapor and unspent reaction mass. Then the plasma torches activated, illuminating the vapor with a searing white glow. Like a continuously-burning flare of nuclear annihilation diffused through gas, it should be easy to lock onto, and hard for sensors to see through. That searing cloud of gas would diffuse into the vacuum and become uselessly thin in just a few seconds.

Cirazeth had a different approach. She was a veteran of the Disorder Fleet, and had flown Arustkaanas with far more limited capabilities than these current versions. This was not her first time facing a mid-size warship's spinal beam, with unknown but probably formidible capabilities. She diverted power away from the rear of her shield, to reinforce the nose and underside, then pitched slightly up, and gave the enemy gunner - if one existed - a most unappetizing target: A pane of supercharged plasma along her ship's underside, facing almost parallel to the enemy's weapon fire. The estimated angle of impact would be only six degrees.

Once the enemy vessel did open fire, they'd find all 500 gigawatts of their electron beam scattered across the underside of her shield, a great deal of which would deflect off into space thanks to such an extremely shallow angle of impact. This was the reason why the engineers made the Arustkaana so incredibly narrow and pointy. It wasn't for aerodynamic reasons - it was so the front end of the ship's shield would be as deflection-friendly as possible. The Arustkaana's designers went to unimaginable lengths, figuratively and literally, to elongate the craft - just so the ship's hull and shield geometry would be ideal for head-to-head, spinal-on-spinal combat.

The beam of electrons grazes the shield and rips a spatter of scintillating white-hot plasma off into space - and then Cirazeth would respond in kind. With just the slightest pitch down, she would bring her own spinal weapon to bear, and introduce another target to the wonders of Disorder phase cannons!

However, if the opposing grizzly didn't take the shot, and recognizes what Cirazeth is trying to do...things could get interesting. She's intentionally waiting to open fire until the enemy fires first. The Arustkaana-class has only a single phase cannon, and if hers is disabled by hostile fire of unknown capabilities, she would be relegated to mere target-spotting & electronic warfare shenanigans.

Meanwhile, Kohvox has an excellent view of Everfree's surface. Polar orbits are great for that. Well, soon. It's not a polar orbit yet, but it will be in a few minutes. He burst out of hyperspace carrying the momentum of another star system, and he's still in the process of matching velocities. No one could miss that engine burn. Even from the surface, the naked eye wasn't likely miss the razor-thin, dim green line tracing across the sky.

"Stealth ships of unknown origin have successfully made their way to the surface," Kohvox alerts the Valkyries on one of their general-purpose tactical channels, one of the ones they set up earlier. "One crashed off course, and may have deployed stealthed vehicles."

"May have?" One of the Norothrex pilots currently in re-entry scoffed.

"The abberations in the surface may be vehicle tracks, but the tracks disappear underneath of cloud cover. I am unlikely to get a navigational fix on them in a timely manner. For the moment, they have slipped through."

"I don't mind. There is a perfectly good hostile fortification to destroy," one of the Norothrex pilots replied. "For the good of all chaos."

Eight Disorder dropships and three Norothrexes slam into the upper atmosphere, leaving trails of orange and yellow plasma instead of emerald-green rocket exhaust. The dropships could certainly perform an engine burn throughout atmospheric entry and get to the surface sooner - but they don't. The Norothrexes are most-vulnerable during inter-atmospheric transition. The atmosphere isn't thick enough for their airfoils to have a significant effect, and their zero-G maneuvering thrusters are not good for much except docking. The inevitable consequence of a Norothrex being a flying gun: It isn't much else.

by **Unthidor** » Fri Nov 12, 2021 7:34 pm

Flying about three and a half kilometers above surface, Lieutenant Lydia Budanova lead her group of six flight pack-equipped Mk 1 Alpha mech's on course towards the main spaceport on Everfree. Their last reports said what appeared to be drop ships were heading that direction. Glancing at the navigation screen, she calculated that they were still 10 minutes from interception.
"Tighten formation!" she ordered over the comm. "And keep you eyes open! We're still a ways out, but other's could always appear from above!"

-------------------------------------------------------

At the same time, Flight Sargent Nic Bolas was leading his squad of 6 mechs across the plains, nearly the same distance from the spaceport as Budanova's flight. His mission was to defend the port on the ground from landing enemy forces.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Several light-years away, in a classified location, starlight crept over the horizon of a large gas giant. As it swept over the planet, it revealed a large network of dockyards in low orbit. Several ships could be seen docked, a dozen transports along with others that looked far different than normal Uthian cruisers. A spall speck moved among the docking arms, slowly slipping between the various ships. It was an inspection shuttle, an onboard was Vice Admiral Morgan, newly appointed commander of the recently formed Space Attack Force.
"The first new cruisers are due to be launched any day now," Morgan said, reading a status report on a padd. "And the new Mark 7's are finishing testing now." She looked up at the comm panel on the shuttle wall. "We can start loading them next week."

"Excellent," said the image of Baron von Skott, "Make sure the Mark 6's are also loaded and ready before my arrival."

"Yes, my Baron."

His image flickered. "How are your men? Are they adapting to the new systems and equipment?"

Morgan nodded. "The crews have been training non-stop, and are ready to take their new ships into action." A hint of pride crossed her face. "I promise, we will NOT have a repeat of what happened to TF 21."

"Have a care, Vice Admiral," the Baron said, warningly. "Do not take our enemies lightly. While your ships are the latest and most powerful we've ever built, we have no idea how they will fair against these invaders."

"Understood, sir," Morgan replied. "We'll be ready."

"I have no doubt," he replied. "You were the right choice to lead this new force, Liv. Don't disappoint me." With a final nod, the screen flicked off. Vice Admiral Morgan sighed, and turned back to the viewport. She was fully aware that her promotion and appointment came from not only her own abilities, but from the Baron's political connections. Her father was a close ally of House Trix'tor, and had a strong influence on the military. She new they were putting a lot of faith in her to lead this new fleet, and she was determined not to let them down. As she watched a group of work bees maneuver a section of hull, she made a mental promise to lead her fleet to victory, no matter the cost....

by **Qhevak** » Thu Nov 18, 2021 1:34 am

Hounds of Tindalos Recon Group 9, Combined Task Force 7/15
7 Ls from Everfree, Dominion of Unthidor [γ Quadrant]
December 19th, 2020 NSY/9562 Megaseconds POE :: +1.511 kiloseconds Post-Engagement Opening

Even at their two-million-kilometer standoff distance, the SNAK impact was a remarkable sight. A gleaming new sun shined near Everfree, illuminate the Hound’s warcraft even from such a great distance. But when it cleared, the Korack was still standing – hurt, certainly, but by no means out of the fight as the Hounds had hoped. It was not a surprise, for a craft that outmassed even an Archangel by a factor of nearly four. But a disappointment, nonetheless.

Recon Group 9
Naval Task Force Internal Comms

[StratMind Kokopelli Fragment] (Class B4): Scans registering good hit. Shields registered near-depletion, moderate surface damage, power generation 95%, point defense at 85%. Disappointing for an SNAK salvo but suggests promising combat avenues. Spinal still four minutes from operational capacity, recommend saving heat for mirrorswarm arrival. Cruiser grade vessels appear not ideal, would recommend bringing Heavy and Lance fighters on later anti-Disorder operations.

[PackMind Alecto] (Class B4): Trying to put anti-Disorder operations above the Hounds paygrade already? Typical Koko.

Have limited preliminary contact with groundpack over first stealthsat, recommending they attempt to minimize casualties among unidentified mercenaries if possible. Aware you are interested to know more about their background.

[StratMind Kokopelli Fragment] (Class B4): Mirrorswarm ETA-8s. Preliminary surveys suggesting some hull areas particularly depleted of shielding, marking for shots.

[PackMind Alecto] (Class B4): Copy, preparing phased arrays for high-focus fire mission.

The Alecto’s phased array shifted, going from projecting a broad-spectrum barrage of EM jamming emissions to a series of more focusing, high-frequency ultraviolet laser pulses, fired to intersect over a thousand preplanned point just above Everfree’s horizon line. Their targets would become apparent almost the very instant the lasers touched them.

As the Rocs had made their way down to Everfree, they’d ejected a swarm of several hundred quarter-ton stealthy microsats, cold gas and electrodynamic fibers shifting their orbits just enough to pass over the planet's atmosphere rather than burn up in reentry flame. They were timed precisely, so that their orbital path would bring them into sight of the Korack just after the SNAK bombardment hit. A few dozen were mere comm relays, which took in brief tightbeam broadcasts from the Alecto and beamed them towards the landing Rocs, updating them on the mission. The rest had a more lethal purpose.

At this distance, it was plausible the Korack's sensors could discriminate their position shortly after they came into sight, if they had cared to observe this location. It was not such a big matter - they would reveal themselves. As the Korack rolled hard under the impact, each sat split into a dozen subcomponents, each of which unfolded in under a second into a parabolic nanocomposite thin-walled mirror dish dozens of meters wide. The laser pulses, each now dozens of meters wide, intersected the parabolic mirrors, which reflected and refocused the beams into centimeter-wide spots on the Korack’s surface, as the mirror drones jinked seemingly randomly under chemical thruster bursts – though following preset patterns recorded on the Alecto. The mirrors were flimsy and easily identifiable – the Korack’s could doubtless take many out in short order, which is why the beams were specifically aiming for visible point defense turrets and weak points. The Alecto had no delusion that this would be enough to finish off the huge craft, but hopefully it would add an additional layer of damage – maybe enough to take it out of the fight for some time.

Meanwhile, they had an additional difficulty on their hands: the currently flanking pair of Arustkaanas, being engaged by the Alecto’s pair of Grizzly-class escorts.

The Grizzlies hadn't been expecting an easy fight. As they pulled hard into a collinear position on furious tails of fusion fire, already ejecting Boomboosters alongside to knock themselves into the paths of incoming shots when needed, the Disorder warcraft were responding in turn. One turned upwards as the Grizzly Tikun turned to face it, facing at angle that would reduce UREB grazing incidence to a bare minimum while surrounding its belly in a web of magnetically constrained plasma. The Tohu, meanwhile, was faced with a problem of its own. Norev’s Arustkaana had ejected countermeasures, blocking its line of sight with a cloud of hot gas.

But the Grizzlies weren't bereft of tricks themselves.

The Tohu and Tikun’s spinal mass drivers opened up on full automatic, a series of rapid magnetic pulses ejecting ten W883 SNAK warheads a second away from the crafts prow. As the salvo finished, with fifty W883s launched in both directions, the forward warheads were nearly ready to fire, magnetic sail coils extending out like the frills of a great cobra. Then they blasted out, sending a renewed storm of hyperkinetic darts hurtling towards the Arustkaanas. The Grizzlies maneuvered as they did, pumping power into its superconducting storage as they aimed for optimal opening shots.

At such a range, a whole hundred thousand kilometers, a SNAK would normally be relatively ineffective, taking over ten seconds to cross the gap – plenty of time to engage and evade. But such a thing would require maneuver and/or point defense fire on the part of the opponent, opening them up for further attack.

Hounds of Tindalos Insertion Group 22, Combined Task Force 7/15
Everfree, Primary Spaceport, Dominion of Unthidor [γ Quadrant]
December 19th, 2020 NSY/78 Megaseconds POE :: +1.602 kiloseconds Post-Engagement Opening

The remaining Rocs soared down onto the Unithian spaceport, still invisible save for inlets and landing gear. Vectored thrusters fired hard as they hit tarmac, bringing the two-thousand-ton bulk of each craft to a halt in a mere few hundred meters. The Tindalos pack moved out fast the moment the craft’s cargo bays opened, slender black synthmorphs moving wordlessly in perfect coordination as they beamed requests to spaceport control to move crafts into hangars. Each one disgorged a full Roc Deployment Mobile Pack from their bays, a hundred Rockhounds backed by a plethora of smaller synths, and dozens of larger combat and support synths. A trio each of large, sleek FA-111 Yrthak jet fighters exited the bays last, long, daggerlike wedges with little external detail to speak of, other than long, tapered inlets and the stubby ends of electron pulse cannons barely peeking out of their lower hulls. There was little time to waste. Rocs were big, heavy, and fragile for spacecraft, they couldn’t turn worth a damn, and were mostly dependent on standoff ordnance. They were moved into internal hangars for now, saved for later. The Yrthaks, on the other hand, just twenty tons with their current loads, were small, nimble, and enormously fast in atmosphere.

Insertion Group 22
Land/Air Task Force Internal Comms

[PackMind Behemoth] (Class C3): Got multiple Disorder aircraft entering atmosphere, descending fast. Three large flying-wing class aircraft, eight smaller, appear shuttle class.

[PackMind Erinyes] (Class C4): Big planes look like primary air combatants, estimate [x=46m, m=~4,000,000 kg]. Armament appears heavily forward focused, plausibly intended for heavy ground formation. Seem like fun prey. Will send Yrthaks up, gain energy, attempt to flank and dive, get in close quarters dogfight. Unithian pseudo-anthroform aircraft look like turnfighters, recommend they attempt same.

[PackMind Behemoth] (Class C3): Copy that. Good hunting, Erinyes. Will prepare ground defenses against any that get through.

Twenty of the jets positioned themselves at the end of runway in loose formation. Then the engines kicked in, hungrily ingesting and compressing air before igniting it in pulsed fission flame and expanding it out of tight aerospike nozzles in a hypersonic inferno. The spaceport roared with earsplitting noise as they rocketed outwards, hitting the speed of sound before they even cleared the tarmac. Ten seconds later they were hypersonic and climbing, riding the shock waves generated by their own roaring flight. The planes split off as they reached the lower stratosphere and sixteen times the speed of sound, both formations continuing to climb perpendicular to the direction of the oncoming Disorder dropships. Engines vectored upwards as they hit the stratopause, yawing them into a hypersonic zoom climb. They reached eighty kilometers altitude, atmosphere putting only the slightest strain on their flight, before internal propellant reserves kicked in, harsh bursts of atomic-boiled water sending the fighters on a zooming dive towards the Norothrexes. Then their featureless forms opened up, unveiling their deadly payloads.

Missiles ejected from weapon bays, two hundred sleek knifelike killers that rocketed downward on the hundred-gee torches of octaazacubane solid motors. Each carried a twenty-kiloton air-to-air tactical warhead, programmed to detonate in a counter-point defense configuration – the first two dozen would detonate several kilometers before reaching the target to blind opposing visual and infrared sensors and active defenses, while the remainder would fly through the formation a second later, guided by radar and probabilistic estimates and detonating to maximize airburst kill probability.

The Yrthaks themselves, diving in a few seconds after, would then seek to decelerate and engage in maneuver combat, attempting to get behind the Norothrexes and spear them with hundred-megawatt electron beams. Unithidor’s own odd, humanlike aircraft would be arriving soon after – while less optimized for high-speed flight than the Yrthaks were, their maneuver capability seemed excellent.

At the spaceport, meanwhile, the Hound’s forces were hastily preparing for a ground assault. Heavy Badger morphs laser-blasted themselves large foxholes near the spaceport and dug in, engaging full active camouflage as they aimed electron guns and surface-to-air missile batteries upwards towards anything that might penetrate the first line of air defense. Rockhounds and Gremlins found themselves cover around the port, while scattering synsects, microdrones and mortar pods around the area to maximize effective force cover. Locusts fluttered upwards on buzzing winglet clusters, moving into various positions with good lines of fire. Unithian ground forces were digging in as well, and the PackMind coordinated as best it could. They were well prepared, they hoped, but the Disorder’s capabilities were still little understood, and they were likely to find themselves with plenty of surprises. But that was the fun part, wasn’t it?

by **The Disorder** » Mon Nov 29, 2021 2:24 am

"Hypersonic targets, coming over the horizon," Xalanth announced, one of the pilots merged into the systems of a Disorder dropship. He happened to be flying at a slightly higher altitude than the rest of the squadron, so he saw the Qhevaki interceptors a few milliseconds early.

"Think they're headed for orbit?" another Disorder pilot wondered.

"Not likely," another pilot concluded. "If they're native to this world, they should have launched earlier. And if they're with the hostile landing party, why bother entering atmosphere just to leave it?"

"A more troubling issue is their acceleration. They're hauling ass, and they're likely to outmaneuver us."

"But they're attacking from above?" another pilot asked quizzically.

"They may not know they are flying right into our firing arcs," Xalanth replied to the squadron, powering up his weapon. "But they're about to!" The spherical shell in the center of the ship rotated into position, revealing an array of six densely-clustered pulse lasers.

"You're not likely to accomplish much from so far away," another reminded. Indeed, atmospheric scattering would drastically degrade their beam collmination. "I suggest waiting until we're closer, so that we can surprise them with our armament and firing arcs."

Of course, the consequences of having eleven anarchists in a mere ten cubic kilometers of airspace: Reaching a consensus was never really an option. The pilots swiftly divided into two camps: 'Ambush later' and 'fire now'. Even with the advantage of hyperspace telepathy, even after a lively debate of all the pros and cons, Xalanth and two other die-hard berserkers wouldn't be convinced to be sneaky and wait. They wanted to force the enemy off-balance, to present them with a situation they hadn't planned for. Incrementally, the 'fire now' camp accreted supporters.

Seven of eight Izrathivor-class dropships opened fire. Strobing lances of incendiary annihilation exploded skyward, burning the air in their path into white-hot plasma. By the time the beams of magic-enhanced infrared light reached the rapidly-ascending Yrthaks, it would be badly scattered and diffused, incapable of much more than sensor distraction and mild hull-warming.

These pulse lasers are comparable in function to Atrenar's point defense lasers, discharging rapid and continuous barrages, rather than short and devastating pulses.

The dropships do inevitably show their hand - they're well-armed enough that the Qhevaki minds might categorize them as some kind of hideous laser-turret gunship. And they wouldn't be wrong. Izravithor, the dropship's inventor, designed an absolute frankenstein-terror of a starship, with some of the strangest atmospheric flight options, no FTL drive, and an almost warship-grade laser turret.

As soon as the Yrthaks launch their ordinance, the Norothrexes register the incoming threat - and they roll, ninety degrees. It's not a quick roll - the huge bomber-esque assault ships look just as cumbersome as they actually are, even with the dozens of aileron-like airfoils deflecting in the leading edges and trailing edges of their wings. They won't make lift like this, but at an altitude of 15 kilometers, they do not have to worry about smashing into the ground anytime soon. Just like the Arustkaanas, the Norothrexes present their narrowest and lowest-profile surface toward the incoming payloads.

Disorder agents learn quickly. Atrenar taught them to never underestimate Qhevaki warheads, and already has a Korack with structural damage to prove it!

The dropships, meanwhile, target the incoming missiles. They don't expect mild hull heating to seriously deter them, but as they streak down from the stratosphere and toward ideal engagement range, successful sensor-blinding would become increasingly likely. Then sensor-destruction would become likely. Then thermal-induced warping and melting of the missiles' exteriors would become likely too. Under such intense aerodynamic loads, any missile that does become un-aerodynamic would quickly disintegrate itself!

Just as it seems that the Disorder's lasers might succeed in culling the entire swarm of missiles, their precision fire is halted, blinded by the glare of nuclear hellfire! Targeting random missiles instead of the closest missiles does guarantee that a few of the Hounds' sensor-blinding early-detonating missiles slip through, clearing the way for the remainder.

Lesser aircraft would easily disintegrate, but Disorder ships weather the nuclear firestorm...reasonably well. The crushing thermobaric hammerblows are diffused over the broad surfaces of energy shields, with structural properties exceeding any known metal. Thermal radiation boils and flays layers of plasma away. The shields respond more like the pusher-plates of some nuclear pulse-drive vehicles: They gain mostly velocity, and lose some shield power.

The Norothrexes, targeted directly, are by far the hardest-hit by this barrage. One flickers on the verge of shield failure, letting in enough radiation to seriously erode the entire right half of the hull, and some of the systems beneath. Otherworldly emerald-green fire trails behind the damaged ship, as some kind of magic-enriched fuel or plasma ignites hypergolically upon contact with oxygen. A cluster of three of the Norothrex' engines go dark in response to this system failure.

A second Norothrex pilot suffers almost no hull erosion, but burns through her entire shield charge for a moment of near-invulnerability. Her shield burns with luminescence comparable to the nuclear ordinance slamming into her ship - and then evaporates into glowing mist. The layer of expended plasma-armor wreathing her ship peels away, stripped off by air resistance.

The third Norothrex takes the least actual damage, suffering the fewest and least-direct hits from incoming nuclear ordinance. His ship gets knocked off-course by the shockwaves, lazily spinning out of control, until he reactivates his thrusters. With a combination of airfoils, exhaust gimbaling, and ample acceleration, he regains control of his ship with relative ease.

Some of the Yrthak pilots may or may not have second thoughts about diving into the Disorder's loose formation. One one hand, two prime targets await - one badly mauled Norothrex, and another completely unshielded one. On the other hand, the Izrathivors might make devastatingly short work of the Hounds' interceptors.

In high orbit, the Qhevaki forces would have a slightly easier time with Atrenar's carrier. They have seen quite a few of his surprises - but not all of them.

Objects that Atrenar initially classified as high-velocity extraneous space-debris begins unfolding unexpectedly, assembling into...panels? Mirrors? A quick cross-analysis with known Valkyrie spacecraft and systems returned no meaningful matches - and after today's events, he didn't feel like taking chances. Point-defense pulse lasers strobed to life, ripping targets and superstructures into hot vapor. Mirrors being mirrors, he tried to avoid really steep angles of deflection, aimed for the least-reflective bits as best he could, and and dispensed some diamond flechette countermeasures to intersect the trajectories of those tiny satellites. But when he saw the Alecto in the mirrors through his point-defense turrets, he knew exactly what was coming.

Another two of his point defense lasers went offline. Then a third, and a fourth. Pinpoints of hull boiled under the barrage, as searing ultraviolet light swept into the spaceframe. The shield responded best around the still-intact point defense turrets, and worst around the heavily damaged sections of the hull. In fact, Atrenar shunted power to those systems worth saving - and let the largely-exposed areas of his ship burn.

He thought about using the Alecto's own UV-glare to do some precision shooting - but he was just as likely to burn out his sensors doing that. So with a flex of cognitive muscle, Atrenar decided to use the last of the tricks up his sleeve, and perhaps his most spectacular. But given the Arustkaanas' performance so far, it might not be completely unexpected:

Space around the Korack shattered like broken glass, burned with ethereal green energy, and crunched into an infintesimal searing pinpoint. Thirty microseconds later, the ship burst out of hyperspace with a torrent of radiant green fire and fluctuating EM harmonics. Atrenar flung himself and his ship across 145,000 kilometers, into a higher orbit around Everfree, still with a clear line of sight to the Alecto.

Countermeasures are 'free', in terms of energy demand. Literally, if enough energy exists to actuate the servos & send the activation command, they can be fired. He dispenses a few dozen of various types, just in case he needs them later, arranging them in a dense cluster between himself and the Alecto. Normally, he'd open fire, but he needs to recharge the shield for several minutes. On end. That's practically an eternity in the context of space combat.

Norev does muster the energy for another phase cannon blast, aimed just slightly aft of center-mass of one of the Grizzlies. But inevitably, he is spending a lot of power on high-G maneuvering.

Cirazeth, however, fires her ship's maneuvering thrusters, doing a clean, leisurely, two-G lateral slide, out of the way of the oncoming SNAK projectiles. "Keep the pressure on them," she states confidently. "I think they're getting desperate. They're deploying their munitions in very unfavorable circumstances."

With less energy expended on unnecessary maneuvering, and a healthy shield charge remaining for absorbing incoming fire, Cirazeth has power to burn. She pushes her phase cannon close to its maximum cyclic rate. She'd fire a pair of those armor-phasing beams into the opposing Grizzly, a couple of seconds apart, aiming for different and hopefully-important spots slightly above and below the opponent's center of mass. Chances are, in a head-to-head fight like this, she was bound to hit something important sooner or later. But estimating hostile astronautics was always a hit-or-miss affair. She stopped counting the number of times that she was sure she had pinned down the location of an enemy powerplant, only to hit a mess hall or a cargo bay.

Entropic Sunrise - [IC, Invite Only, FT/FanT, War, PG13]

Who is online