as written by barney_fife and Lobos
"Planck Packs are onli--." The Lieutenant was cut short as the AI began to register several tears in the fabric of space time. The
Rapid Conversion was hardly prepared for what came next.
A rift tore itself open about a hundred or so Kilometers from it's starboard side.
"Take evasive action! Full military thrust!" The Commander shouted as the rift grew in size, threatening to Swallow the Flagship as it tried to pull itself away.
"What in Hades is going on!?" Torres yelped, as the Reverence shuddered from the shockwaves of energy.
"Spatial anomalies throughout the star system, we're sustaining casualties, and the energy surge has disabled our shields, Generators are spooling." The AI warned, but not before one of the rifts opened up, swallowing half of a nearby Cruiser, leaving the other half drifting directly towards the Reverence.
"Disabled Gemenon class cruiser, CBDR, brace for impact." The AI Warned again, and the gutted cruiser impacted the Reverence II's Bow, carving a deep gouge in it's sleek hull, and venting crew and debris alike. The Reverence II shuddered from the impact, sending the CIC crew flying against consoles, Torres herself was thrown against the Tactical map, an audible crunch signified a broken arm.
"Hull breach, Section two, decks seven through eighteen."
Wincing in pain, the Commander held her arm, biting back the searing pain from the broken bones. "Damage control to section two. Gods damnit shut those planck packs down!" She howled amidst the shower of sparks.
"Planck Packs coming offline, shields are coming back online. I have summoned medical personal to ascertain the nature of your injuries."
The cacophony of voices, sparks, and flickering lights presented a scenario that was unfolding across the Imperial Fleet, having been left disoriented in the sudden tearing of reality. One would only hope Celion's fleet suffered a similar fate.
____
Massed fire in return was expected, impulses flickering between the vessels of Excelion's armada, coordination on a scale that organics could not comprehend. The counter-fire slammed into the Wave Force armors of the massed Obelisks, Blades, and Seeds, vented energies filling the space around them towards the opposing fleet, the armada's advance as yet to be halted or checked.
And then space went mad, the chains of communications becoming a hurricane of impulse connections as the feeds became cluttered with debris and obstacles. Entire swathes of the armada were engulfed in spatial rifts, a dozen of the pondering Obelisks either gone, drawn through space and time to elsewhere, or cleaved asunder by releases of energy, the klein bottles that were the outermost layer of armor overloaded and surpassed, the speed of the destruction tearing rents through the vessels before the collapse of the bottle itself, unleashing titanic eruptions against the backdrop of space. A score of Blades, and several thousand Seeds suffered similar fates as the rents continued with reckless rage for a time, before the settling occurred in the wake of the stabilizers going offline.
The smooth precision of Excelion's ships as they regrouped was appalling in its swiftness and silence, no communion necessary in order to know their places in formation. In unsettling union, two thirds of the remaining Blades and nearly all of the surviving seeds advanced ahead of the main force at increased paces.
The resumption of firing commenced, the discharge of grasers in the thousands, no lessening to precede the firing of the particle drivers this time. A sustained bombardment supplemented by rapid cannon fire, kinetic slugs and proximity fused nuclear shells spiraling through space as the advance elements proceeded past the point of mere close range and began to encroach at knife-range within space, spaced across a front hundreds of thousands of kilometers across and directing all fire with uncanny precision.
____
As the fleet belonging to excelion returned fire, much of the aschen fleet was still in a fair amount of disarray following the sudden and violent tearing of the fabrics of space and time. As the incoming gamma rays and particle cannons cleared fourth, they took a handful of patrol frigates with them, irradiating the crew as their passive environmental shields had come offline due to the energies involved in the spatial tearing.
Aboard the
Rapid Conversion, which had managed to regain shields in the scant moments between the collision and the incoming volley from excelion's fleet. Commander Torres was holding her arm while the shipboard AI unit coordinated damage control and recovery efforts. Nuclear fire and kinetic slugs alike made their marks, engulfing a few unlucky vessels in brilliant nuclear fire, or breaking their backs and perforating their hulls. Those that were more fortunate, specifically the larger and more powerful vessels fared a great deal better. Celions attacks flared angrily upon their shields, but otherwise left these ships spared.
"Commander, the Twilight Compunction is reporting that their singularity driver will be ready to fire in one half millicenton." The Rapid Conversion's AI reported.
The commander nodded before she turned to her executive officer.
"Colonel Emerson, you have the conn. I'll be in the infirmary." She stated, while the colonel nodded. "
Understood."
Even as the battle was slowly beginning to turn against the Aschen in sol, it was clear they did not intend to go quietly.
In fact, the white flickers of new incoming Ftl signatures were quite indicating of new, fresh arrivals, and like the interdiction performed by Celion ground side, the aschen were going to perform their own flashy interdiction.
The Strictest Doctrine came in first, winking in a scant 50,000 kilometers from the leading group of enemy capital ships. Immediately following its jump, it opened up with all eight high powered kinetic batteries, hurling a brutal salvo of 3,000 ton ferric-tungsten slugs at roughly 12,000km a second towards the nearest 6km pronged ship, aiming to get a center mass volley that climbed upwards to roughly 50 gigatons of force multiplied by twenty four, the number of individual slugs that discharged from the
Iconoclast class battleship's mammoth main magnetic accelerator batteries.
As the Calvary filtered in, a pair of the new Punisher class battleships followed suit, jumping in behind the front of machine ships, aligning their chaos cannons at the second pronged vessel, they unleashed their fury, each individual chaos shell utilized an antimatter warhead, and acceleration up to 5,000 km/s to deliver a whopping 150 gigatons of force per individual shell. Punisher class ships were specifically designed with capital ship killing in mind, and it was with frightening efficiency that it unleashed her fury.
As additional aschen reinforcements filtered in, their number had now doubled, but this fleet was comprised largely of newer and more powerful ships, perhaps now they could turn the tide against a ruthless and efficient enemy.
As the second fleet finished their jump, they unleashed a punishing weapons salvo upon the enemy fleet, hopefully buying the Fleet of Glorious Interdiction moments to regroup and lick their wounds.
____
The lashing of fleets continued, those of the armada possessing the knowledge of how the gambit for the Aschen technologies on the world below seemed unlikely to succeed. The engagement had become one of punishment, over victory.
And so the orbital aspects of the armada elected to cease the idle toying as the second fleet appeared, the rear elements of the Obelisks and accompanying vessels wheeling to face the new threat, weathering the storm behind Wave Force armors that shattered the kinetic slugs, twisting and returning the energies captured within their monstrous Klein bottles into weapons hurled back into the face of the Aschen fleets. Portions of hulls peeled back from over internal bays, the bores of massive cannons along the larger vessels exposing themselves for the first time.
Permission of Graviton clearance is granted. Engage at will.
The simultaneous firing of those fell weapons scythed across the vessels of the Aschen fleets like an eruption, beams that lensed white light into outlines around them being the only indicator of their presence. And yet, they carried no lethal energies, no flood of particles to batter and break, no apocalyptic heat to burn and vaporize. Indeed, they seemed to interact with nothing, easily passing through armor like phantoms slipping through a wall. Yet it was contact with matter that saw the rays activated, creating potent gravitronic fluxing that was still within tolerable specifications. What followed the seemingly harmless rays, however, should they strike true, was far more sinister.
The contact with matter generated a spontaneous creation, a formation of significant amounts of dark matter within the baryonic structures of the unfortunate vessel struck. Sufficient to generate a gravity well equivalent to the core of a neutron star, and with it, the titanic pressures involved with being in such a location, capable of crushing virtually any matter into a short lived singularity before the artificially crafted dark matter decayed. It was a weapon to ignite raw fear, and it's creation was the penultimate achievement of Excelion, the reverse engineering of technologies discovered on his sojourns among the stars. The Graviton Cannon, the Wave Force armor, and the still enigmatic Mirror Ring System.
The first firing was immediately followed by a hurricane of Macro-Flayer fire to strafe the Aschen lines, a continued bombardment of the jade spewing batteries as capacitors of the Graviton arrays recharged, preparing for a second volley.
____
Inviere was suprised, astonished even that the mammoth firepower that was unloaded had been stopped, fear crept into her mind as the Lieutenant replied.
"Our weapons fire is... ineffective."
"Nothing.. their shields have stopped everything we fired at them."
Once Celion's fleet returned fire with the Graviton beams, the unfortunate vessels caught within them were destroyed, crushed into singularities without so much as a wimper, a fight. Macro Flayers impacted their targets, and the damage reports rang across the Tactical feed and ultimately the datalink.
"We've sustained heavy losses in that last attack, Chairman we're not going to last much longer if this keeps up."
The Chairman nodded. "Agreed... open a channel to the
Aurora."
The Lieutenant nodded, and a channel was opened up.
"Aurora, this is the Strictest Doctrine, Admiral McGregor you're to report to Sol Immediately. Use whatever means necessary to destroy Celion's fleet."
There was silence on the other end, and Raphael McGregor appeared on the video feed.
"Excelion at Sol? I thought that was supposed to be a nice n easy smash and grab." He replied.
"Give me a moment..." He said, disconnecting the comm link.
The Penultimate achievement of Excelion Carnage, was about to be put to the test against one of the greatest, and most well kept assets in the Empire.
A
single ship flickered in 150,000 Kilometers off the starboard side of Carnage's lines, strangely enough though, the fabric of reality lensed around this alien vessel, and this alien vessel would likely not match any profiles of known Aschen ships in Excelion's databanks. This was one of the well kept secrets of the Aschen Empire.
The strange alien vessel lacked the size and intimidation of the larger Imperial vessels, sitting at a scant 3.5 Kilometers in length, it appeared to be little more than a cruiser at best.
Raphael closed his eyes and focused his thoughts, if he helped here he would once again become the hero of the people for the Aschen, and he saw it as his duty to assist.
Mind and Starship were perfectly in sync as Raphael leaned back in the control chair, while genetically enhanced crewman worked their stations.
With a few mental commands, an Obelisk was garnered as a target. The Aurora analyzed it quickly, the Alteran AI providing Raphael with tactical data, composition, weapons, and current positioning.
A bead of sweat rolled down the Admiral's brow as he channeled his mind, mental images of atoms gave way to quarks, protons, until he envisioned the very fabric of space.
Reality itself lensed, and like the snap of a high-tension string, the fabric was torn, resulting in a massive warp chasm opening up dead center within the Obelisk. Where it lead too was a mystery, but the chasm was not unlike the spatial tearing from the activation of the Planck Packs.
The mind focused more, like a child struggling to tear a piece of fabric apart, the Warp Chasm was forced to grow until it would inevitably consume the Obelisk, and everything around it.
His teeth clenched as his mind's eye envisioned the rending of space. There was another snap, and a warp fissure was torn in an instant, spanning several hundred thousand kilometers in length, along the frontal boundary of Excelion's formation. Raphael gasped and labored his breath as he released his mental hold on reality, his mind amplified by the ship's interface.
He had hoped, prayed this would work.
____
Spatial breach detected.
Location: Internal structures of Tar-6 Obelisk.
Jump now. 200,000km directly forward.
Communicated within a nanosecond, and processed in three fifths of another. Alas, a thousand more Seeds consumed in the midst of jump translation as the fleet moved with uncanny precision, appearing
behind the wounded first fleet of the Aschen. Not without its own wounds, nearly 2,000 vessels between Obelisks and Blades remained, as well as roughly 9,000 Seeds. The stern facing weapons of the larger vessels ignited, another brutal unleashing of massed Graviton Cannons targeting the largest of the vessels in their recovering formations, Macro Flayer and mass driver batteries spitting fire as the horde of Seeds reversed course faster than their heavier brethren could, rapidly accelerating to thousands of kilometers an hour, racing to slip inside of the fleet's very boundaries, fouling the ability to unleash such wanton destruction for risk of massive friendly fire. As the Blade and Obelisks wheeled, they too pushed for the boundaries of the damaged fleet, close mind to anomalous readings to preempt another such triggering.
Their rate of advance, combined with the sudden leap, left the space between Excelion's Armada and the Aschen fleet scarcely over 10,000 kilometers distant. Knife range was breached and violated, and the grim satisfaction of electronic minds felt pleasure as they poured furious fire into their enemies.
____
Raphael made a face as the fleet closed in on the Fleet of Glorious Interdiction. He made even more of a face when the AI from the Tria Submitted tactical data prior to it losing power.
"So he's going to try and jump ships past our defenses...."
The Aurora's engines kicked into full burn. He couldn't save them all, but the close proximity afforded Raphael with a distinct opportunity. As the Aurora gained on the battle, the McGregor let his mind wander, acquring several targets. It was at this point the Aurora unleashed it's complement of drones. Millions of yellow little spheres belched fourth from the Aurora, swarming around the Aschen fleet, dodging and avoiding friendlies.
Like massive tendrils of light, they branched out and acquired hundreds of ships simultaniously, bypassing the wave force armor in a similar manner as Orlin's drones did groundside, targeting vital power sources and everything else they could burrow through.
Hundreds of thousands of drones attacked each individual ship, hundreds of ships simultaniously attempting to cut Celion's fleet to shreds.
While this occurred, Raphael allowed the Drones to work on their own, and Raphael acquired a single obelisk in his mind, before he opened a warp chasm directly in the center of the ship, a miniature black hole that would serve to swallow the Obelisk into a singularity before decaying.
While this was underway, Raphael focused his defense, a Spatial stabilization field, while manually stabilizing reality to prevent the random rifts from opening up on his ship.
With each of Celion's ships destroyed, the drones would move on to the next, and the odds were evening out, for every loss the Aschen took, Alteran drones managed to make up for by destroying one of Celion's ships.
---
As the Armada was within knife range of the Aschen fleet, Aschen losses began to mount staggeringly high. The casualty count was skyrocketing as the Imperial vessels desperately tried to return fire.
Torres was going over the tactical data, and listening to the cacophony of chaos that transpired around them.
Celion's fleet was essentially knife fighting with Jameson's, and so the Commander made a last second decision.
"Time your planck Packs, sync them to activate in one Centon, calibrate your FTL Drives to jump onto the other side of the planet." She called out.
"Torres, McGregor! Withdraw your ship immediately, I have a plan!"
Across the remaining several hundred Aschen ships, and among the debris of their destroyed brethren, Matter stream transporters, and emergency jettisons activated in unison, sending out a cloud of debris from each ship.
A split second later they all jumped, flickering out of the battle.
A few seconds after that, all the jettisoned Planck packs activated, with thousands of individual Planck packs activating simultaniously, there would no doubt be immense stress on the space-time, and with no escape for Celion's fleet, they would be caught in the eddies that would inevitably follow.
____
Drone swarms inbound.
We'll not suffer this again.
We are agreed.
The final approach to integrate with the Aschen fleet halted, a rapid, near static flurry of communion engaging the larger vessels. Coordination. Sudden discharges, staggered to form a single, precisely timed volley that would arrive at it's target simultaneously, forgone by only one Obelisk, calmly reporting anomalous activity before crushing into ruin.
But the target was not Aschen. Indeed, it wasn't even aimed forward. The near solid sphere of slugs drove inwards on a single Obelisk of the formation, and the armada swiftly made their own jump, exiting nearly a dozen million kilometers distant. All in the sake of being fully clear.
The targeted Obelisk's task was a simple one, the activation of the Mirror Ring System at precisely the opportune moment, the fraction of a moment before impact. The Klein bottle of the Wave Force captured the kinetic force of the hurricane salvo, shredded the slugs and drew more power from the particle wash, before it altered fundamentally, becoming a visible pair of edge-intersecting rings that met at the midpoint of the vessel. The energy mitigated was in the teratons, thousands of mass driven slugs at significant .c velocities halted, their impacts drained. But unlike Wave Force, the Mirror Ring was not a stable defense. Sword and Shield, the energy entered a feedback loop, multiplying in magnitude. Dozens of teratons became low exatons of power within the two brief seconds of the Mirror Ring system's primary activation phase.
And then it fractured, erupting into an omnidirectional blast-wave of absolutely monstrous proportions, 3 exatons of raw, destructive energy that within a second, blossomed into a sphere 5000 kilometers across and continued to expand at lightspeed. At the center of the near cyclonic storm, the Obelisk's superstructure groaned and strained, plates tearing and fracturing along the surface from the titanic strain the firing phase put on the vessel.
____
Timing couldn't have been more perfect, as Torres attempted to execute her plan, she had inadvertently cleared the Aschen fleet from certain doom. The fleet's new location on the other side of the planet afforded them the perfect defense.
Raphael on the other hand foresaw the result as his Drones moved in, and the Aurora came to a sudden stop, winking out of space as the Shockwave started to race outwards.
Appearing among the Aschen fleet on the other side of the Planet, the Aurora's AI informed Raphael that the last strike had depleted the Aurora's drone stores by roughly 40%.
The Admiral cursed to himself as he went over the datalogs.
"I'll have to go back to Proclarush Taonas and rearm." He said to himself, watching the enemy fleet as it sat in the distance.
"We're at 60% weapons capacity.. not exactly ideal, especially if they levy another attack like that and destroy the rest of my drones... I could probably recall the drones from the Tria..."
At that moment the AI informed Raphael that the Drone tubes were loaded for another attack.
"No.. we wait... see what Celion is going to do next."
"Commander Torres, what gave you the foresight to clear that blast?" McGregor asked, while Torres responded. "We were going to try and set a trap." She explained, gesturing to the Planar storm that had no doubt consumed their battlefield.
"I need to tend to my crew, and have Admiral Grayson briefed on everything up here.. Torres out."
Raphael then turned his attention to the Displays. "Gods damnit..."
---
Fortunately the Combined Fleet of Righteous Purpose was far enough away from the blast point that the blast had lost a significant amount of energy, and the fleet had time to react. With shields raised, the larger newer ships shrugged off the blast, while the remainder of the fleet was buffeted, some of the smaller ships sustained damage, but had largely survived.
Inviere was planning her next move, as reports continued to pile in.
"I'm going to recommend we go to Exterminatus." She said, nodding to her XO. "You have the Conn. I need to contact the Emperor." She said before she turned to leave the Bridge of the
Strictest Doctrine.
____
Shuddering from strain, the lone Obelisk that had fired the Mirror Ring system paused, going over the extensive debris field with passive sensors, emissions virtually nonexistent giving the lower power status. What it deduced from wreckage hinted that a gamble had been played, and inadvertently foiled when the drone launch prompted the usage of such extreme measures. However, the end result was extensive debris and gutted vessels abounded in its immediate location, with signals of the nearest fleet outside the range of the Mirror Ring detonation.
Consensus was quickly reached between the internal AI controllers, one withdrawing from its matrix in the form of a back-up burst non-space transmission, to announce on its arrival the presence of salvage to be captured, providing extensive details from the sensor data on location and rate of drift.
Within a minute, muted flashes within the debris field occurred, drone vessels jumping in, locating and attaching to themselves larger portions of wrecks or pieces of debris that appeared to be somewhat salvageable, snaring them and jumping once more with their prizes. For as long as the Aschen response allowed the pillaging, Excelion's support elements, held away for such a purpose, would collect a bounty.
The bulk of the surviving armada regrouped and reassessed, shifting formations to split the cohesion into three dozen smaller units, shifting their coordination to focus on the smaller group tactics with overall communication between the splinter fleets readily possible. Making brief jumps to various midpoints within the system itself, the splinters organized in their holding positions, lurking like jackals ready to pounce unwary or wounded prey.
____
As the wreckage drifted about, the carcasses of ships that were devoid of any valuable data lie dormant. The Drones would find scrap value and some metallurgical data, but there was nothing amidst the field of wreckage that Excelion could benefit from. Data had been purged and the memory storage devices that held it had been physically destroyed by failsafes, to the point where data was salvageable.
Despite that though, scrap metal had some value, and the presence of the Drones gave the Empire pause for a moment, as the Second Combined Fleet of Righteous Purpose regrouped, and the remnants of the Fleet of Glorious Interdiction licked their wounds on the other side of the planet.
Aboard
The Strictest Doctrine Chairman Inviere was in a conference with Emperor McGregor, who was reviewing her proposal to launch an Exterminatus against Valore.
Mollem pondered the data slightly, before he frowned. "Resistance was too viable.. Celion appearing was unforeseen, of course the fleet got slaughtered." Mollem said, tossing the Dataslate aside.
"Terran Resistance was also unusually Viable, their resistance to our invasion has caused us to sustain casualties in the Hundreds, we had to deploy War Adepts to push the native Terrans back." Inviere explained. "I wanted to secure our artifacts and exterminatus the Planet, to prevent any retaliatory strike against the Empire."
Mollem scowled. "I don't like how Admiral Grayson went about it, shooting people indiscriminately. The Doctrine of fear does not seem to apply to these Savages, it galvanizes them, and causes their resistance to be even more viable." Mollem paused.
"I had hoped Admiral Grayson would use a bit more Discretion. I want him severely punished for his incompetence." Mollem added, while Inviere nodded.
"I'll see too it." She replied as Mollem continued.
"I'll review the request for Exterminatus, and grant it if the Circumstances require it. Keep me appraised of the situation on Valore." Mollem said, terminating the link.
Inviere heaved a sigh, before the intercom phone chimed.
"Inviere..." She said, picking it up.
"Chairman, the
Tria was shot down over Westeria City, it appears to be intact. We need to secure it with all haste." The XO reported.
"Understood... Secure the Priority one packages, and then withdraw all forces from Westeria City Proper, we'll redeploy outside the city and establish a Siege, once we've subdued local resistance, deploy the Rapid Conversion to recover the Tria. I understand Commander Torres is a very capable individual."
"At once, Chairman." Colonel Emerson replied.