Post by CanisDirus on Nov 28, 2021 0:23:35 GMT
System: U-LV-213307
Unmar Expanse
The Panther-class frigate, D239, hung in geosynchronous orbit around the planet U-LV-213307h. The solar system itself wasn’t very notable, consisting of a red dwarf surrounded by fifteen bodies, including some hellish rocky worlds closer to the star and a smattering of gas and ice giants further out. In between two of these giants was U-LV-213307h, a terrestrial planet covered in ice sheets, and surrounded by a debris field, which came close to choking off the medium and low orbits.
D239 had been performing reconnaissance of the system, as the Isoterrans had heard of a rumor that there were Visione ruins on the planet, under the ice. Now the only thing that had stopped them from swooping in and pillaging them was a near kilometer of ice, the debris field, and the ocean under the ice. So at the moment they wait, carefully using their weapons to clear a path, while several large drop containers nearby the ship waited.
Gray Gravel had been sitting in orbit of a rather nice white planet for the last week. The rational behind this action was his sensing a rather dense source of Anceron which would help his younglings grow bigger if he could find it. He and his four youngsters had been sitting in the wonderful debris field, which all five had been slowly collecting onto their surfaces, and searching it in a very methodical method. That was until the eldest of his children had pointed out the 'Metal Rocks' to him, seeing the frigate near them.
Having had very minimal interactions with the nearby sentients he decided to take this in small steps, maybe they know where the deposit of food was located? His idea of a small step was however, vastly out of proportion. The Rock 11 kilometers in rough diameter lit up as the electro gravitic crystals that stuck out of it's surface activated and the small family of rocks formed up in orbit before moving towards the frigate, Grey Gravels magnetic sphere shouting the Rock equivalent of "Hello." at the frigate.
Outer edges of the system
The way the two cruisers entered the system was to put it easily; less then quiet. Ripping open a hole in this dimension from another one, spewing some matter from another universe around the place, and then accelerating at a planet- on course to skip off the atmosphere and continue on their way, at present they were on the “other” side of the planet compared to the Isoterrans, and unable to see them.
It was not clear how the cruisers knew to be here, or that the icy world contained secrets to be uncovered, but they were seemingly going for it
The cruisers were standard looking for something that Alphazero would build, heavily armoured, and burnt black through their FTL transit. These ones were a bit different through, lacking the heavy spinal railguns that most ships carried, and instead carrying many more missiles and even some ground based forces.
"Please standby... Electus confirmed onboard, approaching drop position. Prepare ship for standby." The bridge of the Salvation-Class Carrier and one of the nine Gaferius Collectum's flagship was hurtling through space completely cloaked in stealth. Having performed several slingshot manuevers to get the speed to coast along to the ice planet. All engines, and weaponry disengaged with only only minimal power running. The Salvation-Class being flanked by several Pax-Class Escorts that were dwarfed by the larger vehicle. The Pax-Class units similarly in stealth. Two of the AI on the bridge were missing. Having boarded one of the six onboard MCMHQs. The Salvation-Class itself had enough units for a major offensive but they weren't being deployed for obvious reasons. "We have entered orbit, dropping in five." One of the bridge crew spewed out. As the stealthed ship came over the icecaps a single drop-bay opened just enough for the oval pod to launch out. Hurtling through the atmosphere and engaging retro-thrusters to slow it's descent. A large black pod crashing on the far North Western area and embedding itself in the thick ice. "MCMHQ away, awaiting signal now."
Down on the planet the top of the back pod opened almost explosively. One massive metal tendril came out, than another, and another. The massive squid-like robot finally standing to full height and leaving the drop-pod behind.
Rather unsurprisingly, the sudden movement of the multi-kilometer rock and its associates, which until that moment, had been more or less sitting inactively in the planet’s debris field some distance away, caught the Isoterran’s attention as it accelerated towards D239. Or rather the attention of the frigate’s AI navigation officer, who quickly raised the alarm to the fact that they were not alone in this system. Both the CO and XO had been playing a game of cards on the bridge while the navigation and weapons AIs handled clearing a path through the debris field. Quickly forgetting the game, the two began examining the data feed from the sensors.
“Captain, the asteroid is emitting an alternating magnetic field, it may be attempting to communicate with us” commented the communications officer.
The CO, Captain Tiber, frowned, but before he could respond, the navigation officer’s holographic avatar reported a possible FTL burst at long range, and what appeared to be thrusters firing in atmosphere, followed by a large drop pod landing in the northwest corner of their area of interest.
Cursing profusely to himself, Tiber ordered “Get us through this debris field and open an entry point for the subs now. Launch some fighters and scan the area for the source of that drop pod. I’ll be damned if someone beats us to the ruins. Comms, see if you can understand these rocks and see what they want.”
D239, towing the drop containers with invisible force beams from its RFDs, activated its engines, creating spatial distortions as it lost altitude, plowing through the debris field, most of which bounced off or was incinerated by its shielding. From the large cylinder on its midsection, five doors opened, releasing a flight of strikefighters, which fanned out and began scanning the area to check for more uninvited guests, coordinating with D239’s own sensors.
The communications officer meanwhile, parsed through its databases in an attempt to figure out what Grey Gravel was saying, tuning its EM-antenna and sending back several simple messages on multiple frequencies, based upon distinct mathematical patterns, in an attempt to get a common language down.
Gray Gravel slowed his approach to the tiny metal rocks as a few small bits fell off of them and towards the planet below. The quadruple of smaller rocks slowed with their elder trying to keep their collections of snacks in the form of comets, metal bits and less than sentient rocks, slowly letting the bits collect on their surfaces. The smallest of the four, only four kilometers in diameter, asked its father “Why are the metal rocks breaking?” This question was in regards to both the garbled response that the ship and the falling crates.
Instead of explaining to the youngster that other life live in these ships and tended to be rather stupid. Their inability to speak simple wave forms was most annoying but he had dealt with it a few times before and so ignoring the whining questions of his family he spoke very slowly to the ships as he continued to slow on approach to the ships.
“C-a-n y-o-u u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d m-e!” Enunciating each magnetic manipulation, patiently ignoring as the ships accidentally taught the unnamed rocks a bad EM emanation.
Which the second youngest giggled at and repeated twice before giggling some more. At least until its neighboring twin attempted to break free of Grey Gravels gravitic feild to bump its sibling for swearing. Where the eldest helped their father hold the younger in orbit and delay the brewing fight.
None of them seemed to notice what was going on outside of their attempt to communicate with the metal rocks.
One of the cruisers stopped accelerating, leaving the other cruiser to move ahead, on schedule to arrive over the drop zone 6ish hours after it. As the second cruiser moved forward, on course to “skip” off the atmosphere and start stationkeeping around the planet several very large sections of the ship separated off, and moved on their own thrusters to enter the planet's atmosphere and attempt a landing around the objective. Shortly after this happened the first cruiser crested the “horizon” that the planet had created.
The cruiser cast out a few lines of communication at the Isoterran ships, communicating in a language that anyone with an AncNet line would know. As the second cruiser dropped more rods in its reactors, having enough time to ramp up power production before it came around the planet.
“How are you here?”
Onboard the M.C.M.H.Q. designation 'Resolution' two Gaferius AI were aboard the bridge. Terminals running around the edge of the viewport, with a central holo-table showing the area around the massive machine. One of the AI sitting at a firm metal built into the floor while messing around with a small hardlight terminal next to the command seat at the 'front' of the round bridge. In all reality the bridge had many more stations than the two AI could crew. Most of them taken over by the onboard systems. The one sitting at the station spoke up to the other looking over the central holo-projector. "Wayfinder Electus? Several anomalies are approaching." The more fancy looking woman looked over. The two's shining white chassis standing out amidst the black metal, and gloomy red lighting. She floated over to the other. "Alright Cousial, let's have a look." She leaned over the seat her metal fingers grasping at the others shoulders. The other speaking up. "Perhaps we should send a message."
Electus responded with a small chuckle. "I agree, binary perhaps? It's the universal language." She gave a small smile floating over gracefully to the dormant central holo-table. Starting to type on it. A moment later both visual and audio channels beaming out from the walker. Meanwhile the gigantic walker went nearly 120 mph with it's long legs towards the thinner area of ice.
"Opening channel. Visual online, along with secondary binary transmission in-case they can't understand. Ready for transmission Cousial?"
The other AI looked back to her commander with a small smile and nod. "Yes Electus." Electus gave a lighthearted chuckle. "On a no-title basis now hmm? Alright start sending."
A moment later if any could receive visual based holo's they'd see the floating feminine form of Electus speaking in galactic standard. A secondary audio channel being transmitted with the same message in binary. Something any sufficiently smart person could understand.
"I am Wayfinder Electus onboard the M.C.M.H.Q. Resolution. I'd like to formally ask for cooperation, instead of fighting. We seek only knowledge. If you'd like to help we could always share what is found. If you wish to open proper diplomatic channels afterwards we are more than happy to accommodate!" The metallic woman had an expression of kindness, a gentle smile on her face. The transmission cut out Electus quickly floating over to the command station and taking a seat. "How'd I do?" The other AI giggled and rolled her eyes. Unlike her more advanced commander her arms connected to her chassis properly and didn't have the flight capabilities Electus did.
It took a few minutes, but the communications officer eventually figured out a system for communicating, answering Grey Gravel's magnetic message with one of its own "We are D239, what are you called?"
At this moment, the navigation officer spied the Alphazero cruiser come up over the horizon, as well as what appeared to be units being dropped. Careful visual observations were combined with other passive sensor data, and then compared against the recce database and AncNet search, confirming the identity and owning faction. This was punctuated by the communications officer receiving their message.
Right after this, a *third* transmission was relayed from the flight of strikefighters that D239 had dispatched, which had finished up their sweep of the nearby orbital area and had descended over the area where the walker was now travelling.
As both the navigation and communications officers reported their findings, Captain Tiber considered the situation. His executive officer, Commander Pless, inquired whether they should launch more fighters to deal with the walker on the surface.
"No. We still don't know where it came from just yet, and between whatever dropped it and the Alphazero cruiser, we're outnumbered and outgunned at the moment. I think we're going to have to accept this Electus's offer and see what we can get on both them and Alphazero" replied Tiber, before ordering "Launch a few more flights of fighters and keep reconning the area. E-C, you and Comms work on talking to our friends here but keep us out of trouble. Weapons, blast a hole in that ice and drop the subs as soon as we're low enough."
D239 continued its downward path, until it was at the bottom of low orbit. As it did so, the two glowing green bulbs on the warship's underside brightened, each emitting a green energy projectile that arced on a guided path towards the center of the proposed landing zone. This was accompanied by several purple plasma beams, which vaporized the ice before the green projectiles slammed into the ice, smashing a hole around 100 meters in diameter into the cold white surface. A quartet of reentry plumes, coupled with the signs of retrothrusters firing, marked the imminent arrival of the drop pods, which had been tossed forward by the frigate.
In response to the two non-boulder oriented messages they had received, the navigation officer sent two seperate messages, one for each group that had contacted them. Intertwined in each was the content of each message, which matched the format of the original transmission, coupled with all the necessary metadata, as well as some extra innocuous-looking data packets designed to gather info about necessary system formatting, layout, and how to write and interact with the receiver's systems properly.
To Alphazero: "This is Isoterran frigate D239, we are conducting an investigation of this area. Please confirm your identity and intentions."
To Electus, a short video recording of Captain Tiber which said: "This Captain Tiber, with the Isoterran Empire. I think we can agree to work together for the time being, and I'll let my superiors know to follow up with yours after we conclude operations here. I'm advising caution on the path your walker seems to be taking, as we are conducting an orbital drop at the moment."
The Rock huffed as the smaller ship finally got their magnetic emanations on the right wavelengths. "I am Grey Gravel and this is my Family." Or so was the rough translation from electromagnetic field to words, the rocks continued to close the distance until they were exceptionally close to the frigate, to the point where they could be seen by looking out the window, though their speed didn't indicate any attempt to ram. At least from the rock's perspective.
The youngest Rock watched with amusement as two of its elders attempted to crash into each other like they normally did, then its attention was taken to the very shiny and speaking rock again. Since the little rocks father was more focused on the twins the youngster took the chance to break ahead a bit and examine the shiny rock up close. The four kilometer wide Rock floated even closer to the small ship the optic crystal that was larger than the ships that it was observing. The little Rock found the frigate interesting as it stared at the intricate mechanisms that made up the star faring ship.
The other three children kept each other in line while their father waited for a response letting the more curious youngest examine the metal rock. Children will be children.
The 5 objects continued on their way to the cold hard ground. Ploughing through the debris that clogged the low orbits, 4 of them landing on the thin ice- the other one adjusting to intercept the walker. As they started to enter the atmosphere the outer casings of the objects blew off, leaning hard on the heat shield that covered the new “bottom” of the drop pods as they deployed their parachutes. One had gotten its parachute damaged on the way down, only 5 of the 6 microrockets that brought the chute out fired, and it tumbled a bit. Not enough to make it burn up due to the efforts of the landing rockets to keep it stedy, but enough to break the retros on one side.
The four other ones continued down, working as intended, their heatshields falling off once their speed dropped to the point where it would not be needed, falling to the ice below even as the bits that they had discarded earlier burnt up in the atmosphere. The one that had its parachute fail had its retrorockets on one side fail, sending it directly into the ice- sideways. The one that was intercepting the walker landed successfully, the remains of the lander flying a few 100 meters away from the “mobile firebase” before it ran out of fuel and hit the ice- as intended as it quickly ran its startup and function checks.
Of the 3 remaining walkers 2 landed successfully, only 15 KM from eachother. The last one had a fault with one of its retros, it went down in a fireball as the fuel went off and it hit the ice like a orbital kinetic strike.
The two 100+ meter landes striking the ice like rods from god and the plasma drilling made the local sheet unhappy, a preexisting fault breaking and giving, sending the two bases sitting to an extreme side of it sliding in the direction of the water, unable to hold onto the ice.
As the landers were in the active process of crashing and burning the cruiser transmitted back at the Isoterran ships.
“We had the same idea. I'm just wondering how you heard of this place and got here first"
A brief video was sent back to Captain Tiber in response. "Copy that Captain we'll slow our speed and wait for your breaching to be over. In an effort of good faith I'd like to inform you we have several ships in system standing by. For all purposes I'm considering you a ally of ours until our superiors say otherwise."
A moment later Cousial spoke up. "Electus several dropships coming down at steep angles one is on a intercept course."
Electus wrapped her fingers around her chin leaning forward and looking out of the view port. "Prepare fighters 1-6 for launch, begin production of M.A.D.P.'s and R.A.P.'s Recon is of upmost importance figure out what they are. Do not fire unless fired upon. Bring anti-armor, and fusion missiles to forward facing launch-bays."
The other AI began quickly tapping at her terminal to follow the orders while Electus slowed the massive launcher stopping in place, and sending a quick message in binary. The assortment of 0's and 1's reading simply. "Divert course from the M.C.M.H.Q. immediately. Failure to do so and we will be forced to fire upon you."
The sudden decrease in distance between the frigate and the smallest of the Grey Gravel family, which was nearly four times as wide as D239 was long, triggered the collision alarm inside the vessel. This in turn, caused what few living crewmembers there were inside to halt what they were doing and assume impact bracing positions, while on the bridge, Captain Tiber ordered the Navigation officer to turn the alarm off, and ordering Comms to deal with the proximity situation. Comms politely sent a transmission back to Grey Gravel "We are pleased to meet you, Grey Gravel. Can you please have your family members not approach so close to us? We prefer to maintain larger distances between our vessel and other entities."
Responding to Alphazero equally quickly, a short message of "We have our methods. Additionally, please relocate your surface assets to avoid interfering with our landing operations." To punctuate their message, the weapons officer activated two of the lower plasma beamers once again, using their focused purple beams to further widen the opening in the ice sheet, intentionally coming near the Alphazero landers, but still far enough away to maintain plausible deniability.
Finally, another video message was sent to Electus "I am glad we could come to an agreement. However one thing is on my mind: our location is known to you, yet you remain hidden. Surely if we are to work together, there is no need to hide?"
While sending both messages to the respective non-rocky factions, both continued to have some extra information held within, composed of more innocuous-looking data packets. For the most part, they did exactly as their design might advertise to someone looking at a breakdown of the incoming information, sending non-offensive requests for data that on its own wouldn't trigger red flags, but assembled together would paint a more detailed picture of the systems that they now existed in, and storing it. On the Isoterran's end, especially given what they were doing at the moment, the communications and EW/CW officer had been meticulously screening all the message traffic that had been coming in, isolating it where possible and otherwise severely limiting its access, which was helped by the distributed nature of D239's systems.
On the ground, everyone nearby the now significantly enlarged hole in the ice sheet could hear the sound of the incoming Isoterran drop pods, each landing in an impressively tight grouping within the icy water, creating massive splashes that further made the ice more slippery, and rocked the large broken sections of ice that the Alphazero landers were currently on, making their precarious situation worse. Little mind was paid to this however, as the roughly cylindrical capsules flooded, allowing the submarines within to flood their hulls before the casings broke apart and sank. Quickly, the four subs divided up, with two of the Wraith-class attack submarines accompanying the Poltergeist-class subcarrier in making a beeline for the distant area of interest while descending, and the remaining attack submarine loitered a few hundred meters below the surface, listening with its passive sonar near the hole in the ice.
With the entry widening and orbital drop completed, D239 throttled up its main engines, climbing quickly back up through the debris field and into geosynchronous orbit over the landing area.
The baby rock giggled which sent magnetic waves over the ship that was bare kilometers away. The magnetics involved pushing and pulling the metal ship if barely. The little trouble maker appeared to enjoy the distress that its proximity put in the even smaller rock. Though the purple beams that it had shot out in what the smaller rock considered a temper tantrum were pretty pitiful. The beams in question were tiny compared to a proper tantrum, and the fact that its parent appeared to have caught onto the little rocks fooling around made the little rock want to reply in kind.
Grey Gravel didn’t really care as his youngest rotated its larger crystal lens towards the planet below and opened up a rather unfocused beam about a kilometer and a half wide on the planet below. Using the gravity altering properties of his crystalline propulsion he dragged the youngster back into orbit around himself and returned his attention to the creature. “Sorry about the child. It is young. We are just looking for a deposit of food we sensed in the region. Are you here for the food you call anceron too?” He returned the question as he pulled his now surly children up with the other ship into a similar orbit.
The closest mobile base to the M.C.M.H.Q.*
the 100odd meter long “tank” transmitted back at the long legged walker
“What do you mean “divert” we are near enough to a 100 kilometers away, reaching you would take hours if this place had good traction.”
As this transmission was made the mobile base sent up several drones and a few weather balloons so that it could scout out the surrounding area to it. Turning impressively slowly given its great mass to travel south east to the thinner area
cruiser to Isoterran ship
“There is very little loss if they are destroyed, after all we have no plan on getting them back off the planet.”
As this got transmitted at the Isoterran ship the cruiser approached the closest the two ships would be on its way past and around the planet, on course to swing back around in 6 hours. At the same time the two crawlers that survived their deployment to the thin iced area tipped into the water, the rocking of the ice doing their traction no favors as they made themselves into submarines. The cruiser had yet to take note of the wacky rocks messing with the Isoterrans.
The virus
Sending a virus to a AI had a few fundamental issues, this specific one more so then the rest. Sending a virus in a text file that could be no more then a few 10s of kilobytes was already a challenge, sending one to a computer that ran on an operating system seen no where else in the galaxy, even harder. But it was most likely not impossible, so it tried to map the system out, even if it was not sending data home. But then it ran into a brick wall.
Alphazero did not think like a human, or operate like one. When a human multitasks they switch between tasks rapidly. In deep contrast Alphazero could ride a unicycle while doing taxes- if the ai had legs that is. And because of that the message was looked at. The extrapolation and interpretive layers that most people used to view data was not there. Instead it was met with a very angry sentient system. That had very strict read and write permissions. But why not mess with the Isoterrans, why not mess with the person who did the equivalent of putting a little anthrax on a friendly letter.
The unfortunate virus got shoved directly into a virtual system, one with absolute limits on seeing things that were not it. And it was so thoughtfully given a single message to map out, and eventually send back: “Try again”
The MCMHQ resumed it's normal fast pace towards the hole in the ice. Electus on-board it leaning over the com-tower. Remarking to herself in a annoyed tone. "No shit you can't divert, I meant while coming down!" The MCMHQ would be nearing the breach in the ice. Electus starting to send one last transmission before they went under. A video of herself once again.
"I suppose you do have a point Captain Tiber. Excuse my caution but we are outnumbered, and outgunned in everything save for ground units. I merely wanted to preserve my assets. Though I suppose they can always be rebuilt."
Immediately afterwards the AI woman would tap on a secondary, or rather the vehicles primary transmitter sending a small burst signal giving orders. Uncloak, do not fire unless hostile intent is clear. The Isoterrans for all purposes are to be considered close allies, take over command of the control ship.
The virus while effective at searching through the MCMHQs systems, and avoiding it's frankly awful anti-malware it found little of use. While the walker was the most advanced one in the Gaferius lineup it was still cheaply made and expendable like all the other ground vehicles. Though it still ran almost completely on DNA based quantum computing. With a secondary communication system for situations exactly like this one. And while the anti-virus software on the walker was bad, the Collectum is very conscious about virus' so there is a great deal of isolation in certain systems. With anywhere from 2 to over a dozen secondary storage, and computing suites. The MCMHQ only had two though.
The galactic standard computing suite for communications and it's main assets linked to DNA based computing. The virus found very sparse communication logs that if looked at closer was a test a few hours ago to make sure it was working, along with some communication based files and programs. There was a few files listed for E-Warfare that were completely empty.
About at the time the MCMHQ was going to go into the water it shot out a simple communication buoy. Simple tech to act as just a relay for communication while under the water. Along with the three Gaferius ships appearing to view. Perhaps not to scanners right away but as their engines, and weapon emplacements deployed properly any IR, and ER masking it was doing was null and void. The three ships stayed in their orbit, and kept their weapons powered down.
"Are we ready to go under Cousial?" Electus asked moving herself back over to her seat and sitting down. Magnets ingrained into the seat locking her into place for the violent movements about to happen.
In Orbit:
Captain Tiber was somewhat annoyed with the little rock's antics, and briefly, he considered dealing with it using one of the vessel's weapons. Even a single one of D239's missiles would have been more than enough to shatter the small asteroid, but that would've meant conflict with the others in its family, and he didn't want to escalate to that point quite yet. So he simply let the communications officer reply back with "Not specifically, but we are open to finding it. We're looking for valuable minerals under the ice sheet." This was obviously a simplification bordering on dishonesty. But that was alright, there was no need to alert these rocks to any more information on what might've lay under the ocean than was needed.
As the slightly malicious datapackets, which were more spyware than anything, continued within the systems, they both met very different results. Within the Gaferius systems, they simply continued unnoticed, finding little, until they had gotten a fairly good map of the walker's systems, or at least the parts that weren't isolated. Then, they stored this info and went into standby. Within Alphazero's systems however, the spyware, being quite simple in order to avoid detection, didn't notice that it had been shut inside of an isolated area, simply continuing to gather what it could including the message they were given, until they had concluded that that a full system map had been made, at which point they entered standby mode and ceased activity.
In reply to Electus, a return video message was sent "That is understandable. But I hope we can work together, especially given the...less than polite actions of the Alphazero landers." Accompanying these last words were simple orbital imagery, along with annotation, of the four drops Alphazero had performed, as well as how close they had come to interfering with the Gaferious walker. This wasn't totally neccesary, although it did provide a good backdrop for Tiber's commentary. However more importantly, it masked the transmission of a slightly larger datapacket. This packet did not try to spy on the systems it had entered. Instead, it began to slowly copy itself and interface with the previous spyware, mostly keeping itself within the message folder so that it could expand undetected.
In reply to Alphazero, a return message was sent saying "How you view your own assets is irrelevant to us. We value our assets, and request you excercise caution to not interfere with our assets nor damage them, otherwise we shall be forced to protect them." A data packet similar to the one sent to Electus was sent accompanying this message, which began attempting to interface and copy itself just like the other.
As the Gaferious ships decloaked, D239's sensors scanned them, carelly gathering whatever information they could, while keeping weapons in an obviously non-hostile position.
Underwater:
The lone Isoterran attack submarine continued to loiter nearby the hole, easily picking up the walkers from both factions entering the ocean on their passive sonar, due to the non-streamlined bodies and the noise that created. It, on the other hand, was currently sitting in low-power mode, which made it silent in the pitch-black water, after background noise had been factored in.
Its three companions on the other hand, were moving full speed towards the broad area of interest, having already gone about 7 kilometers by the time the other units had entered the water.
Grey gravel floated there in space a moment as he thought about what this latest bit of information, his youngest held about halfway between itself and the metal thing. The big asteroid wasn't as dumb as a rock.... Well it was but his type of rock was a lot smarter than the average collection of stone, minerals, and detritus, so when the creature before it spoke of valuable minerals he knew that wasn't all it was doing. Similar creatures rarely have straightforward or such simple motives, the oversized collection of silica and various ores decided that further investigation would be required. So instead of reeling his youngest the rest of the way in Grey Gravel started using the rock equivalent of a whisper, his surface protrusions of crystals began flashing in patterns to convey what he wanted his child to do much to the abhorrence of the eldest who saw this subtle communication.
The youngsters magnetic field giggled again in response and it began slowly spinning. Then the small rock began speeding up as Grey gravels gravitic crystals glowed brighter pulling the rock towards it faster, faster, faster until the small rock had passed under its parent and lit up its own electrogravitic crystals performing a slingshot maneuver with its progenitors assistance. The slingshot ended and the small rock started speeding towards the icy sheets below, it screamed the equivalent of "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" all the way down the gravity well. The now huge meteor lighting up the atmosphere around it as it broke into the upper layers.
sinking tanks
The two vehicles continued on their way down, flooding everything outside of their armoured citadel, mostly out of the conclusion that the citadel could withstand the pressure, but the rest of the machine would crunch if it tried to hold up to the pressure. But of course, doing things like that always had downsides. For one of them a microfracture introduced on its orbital drop snapped as it neared the bottom of the ocean, causing even the armoured citadel to crunch. With that one of them became debris on the ocean floor, even as the other was able to move to the objective on its tracks, using its inbuilt sonar, intended for lakes but it would work well enough here to navage the land, even if it was severely crippled in every sense of the word.
general
The base that was still on land got within 30 kilometers of the holes, just in time to watch a meteor start falling from the sky, but the math said that the tank would be able to survive, without much damage while it was at it.
The cruiser had reached the closest it would be to the Isoterran ship for at least the next 6 hours hours as it sent the Isoterrans a message.
“The drops were, what. 20? Kilometers away from yours, the one dropped to the north had to be at least 100 kilometers from the walker. While we do admit that our actions were not the greatest the drops were set in place before we could possibly know that you were even around this planet.”
virus 2
The viral shenanigans continued as the second piece of malware got introduced to the virtual machine. Someone clearly had a lot of faith in the sandbox.
The MCMHQ while modified had some serious key flaws that were overlooked. For one a portion of the walker was a vacuum, for two it was a shoddy patch job. As the large walker got to the edge of the ice it did it's best to get in as quickly as possible so it didn't tip. One of the eight legs planting itself on the ice, and a moment later crashing into the water as the ice broke under it's weight. The entire walker lurching and splashing into the water. Slowly starting to sink now. Perhaps out of foresight, hindsight, or just the though occurring to her at the metal groaning. "Say Cousial what is this things depth rating?" The other AI looked over to her commander with a small frown of realization. "500 meters." She said just as they passed the 500 meter mark. The large metal walker crunching under the pressure killing both of the AI inside. Somewhere in a diplomatic meeting across the galaxy the 'real' or 'central' Electus frowned as one of her sub-units died. Excusing herself.
Onboard the Electum the two AI woke once again in new models just outside of the bridge. One of the AI on-board the Salvation-Class' bridge had been working on a submarine since they arrived, and was willing to give it a try.
As the main ship was rounding in it's orbit again this time under express orders from her 'mother unit' Electus stayed aboard the ship. Taking her seat in the central command station of the ship while the submarine with a very basic AI dropped along with various other crafts.
3 submarines in total with different designs. Equipped with a few weapons, and sonar units. Complimented with roughly 50 underwater units about the size of a human. A modified standard ground combat unit. The specialized drop pods landed with varying degrees of success. Two of them splashing in the water, while the third plowed into the ice, then slid off to sink to the bottom. The remaining two subs starting to zoom to the ruins ignoring the pile of Gaferius units now at the bottom of the ocean.
In Orbit
The sensors on D239 that weren't trained on the landing zone below observed the curious activity in between the family of sentient asteroids, unsure of what they were doing at first. However, as the 'little one' was slingshotted down towards the hole in the ice. Panicking slightly, Captain Tiber ordered a firing solution prepared and antiship missiles readied, while a message was sent to Grey Gravel saying "What are you doing? You're going to destroy our assets in the water." In what was likely a futile measure, orders were relayed via quantum comms to the four submarines to go as deep as possible in an attempt to avoid damage in case of impact.
Meanwhile, the SF-87 strikefighters which had been circling the area observed the Gaferious and Alphazero units enter the water, relaying their observations to D239, which passed them onto the submarines via their shared network. After all the units had submerged, they began to climb, putting distance between themselves and the area that was projected to be hit by the incoming 4 kilometer rock-child.
Under Water
Coordinating with the other Isoterran assets, the loitering attack sub listened with its passive sonar, all the while flushing all the loose air out of its hull and diving. Between the data it had received of the order in which the Gaferian and Alphazero units had entered the water, and the approximate locations of the two implosions it detected, the crew quickly deduced the current situation, while continuing to listen. Meanwhile, the other three submarines also increased depth, continuing on at full throttle to maintain their head start on everyone else.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel watched the younger rock plumet through the atmosphere making a long line of fire as it descended at a great speed. He was proud of his youngest as it was the first time the little guy would be going down onto a planet without much supervision and hopefully he would find the collection of Anceron if it was what the metal ship was hunting for. The fact that said metal rock was asking such an obscene question made the Rock question its mental capabilities. Normally size was a indicator for intelligence amongst metal creatures but this one seemed abnormally dim. "Didn't you do the same thing when you approached this icy rock?" Grey Gravel was considered rather lenient when compared to Ice Father or Blackrock but he didn't glow for hypocrisy.
In Atmosphere
"WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-" Screamed the young rock as his burned through the atmosphere the friction heat making his surface glow brighter than the electro-gravitic crystals that were slowing him down as he broke the upper atmosphere and into the thicker parts of the atmosphere. The fragments that broke off of the rock however did keep plummeting the couple dozen shards no bigger than a meter. "-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" The rock managed to slow its fall to a standstill before it hit the icesheet. The fact that it barely in time to avoid smashing the icey shell flew passed the rocks' attention as it looked around the frozen wasteland with it's many photon reactive crystals. It thought the nearly pure white terrain was rather beautiful, it could do without the few craters around but it was still very nice. It took some time to just watch the horizons before starting its search.
space
The cruiser was moving away from the Isoterran ship as the second one rounded the “horizon”. On its current course it would orbit “below” the Isoterran frigate to come back around in 6 hours.
land
The mobile base stuck around its general area, being the one and only thing that was not in space or underwater. It was able to launch a few loitering drones, and throw a few sonar buoys into the water.
water
The big tank started to roll along the seafloor, getting a good look at the everything from the sonar that got tossed into the water by its land dwelling comrade, even if the submarines had a better than not chance at evading it.
In orbit
Aboard the GCSS Electum Electus was sitting in the bridges central command station. 8 AI surrounding her in a circular bank of stations under her higher up command station. All busy at work in their stations. Electus spoke up glancing around the many screens in the domed room showing the ships exterior. "Keep eyes on the Isoteran... Is that an asteroid?" The AI woman glanced down at one of her crew who just gave a slow nod. "Aye ma'am seems to be hovering very close to their ship." Electus grumbled like a child, and quickly started issuing commands. "Send around the planet to land in that crevice as soon as possible. We need a COMM-Relay in the water. Hail the Isoterian Captain. And you I want you looking at the ANCnet. Let me know what we know of them."
COMMs
A video soon appeared of Electus on her bridge. A domed room with a central circular bridge station. 4 stations on each side of the station, with a central raised up also circular station which was obviously a command station. The AI woman gently pushed herself upwards to be floating in front of the camera.
"Captain Tiber this is Electus onboard the GCSS Electum. Pardon the intrusion but please state your intentions with the asteroids in orbit." The gentle blue face of the AI gave a small smile before the recording cut off. Electus floating back to her seat. A AI calling out. "Transmitting now ma'am."
Ground
In the water the two remain Gaferius subs started full-throttling ahead. Not doing much else than just zooming to the ruins. Meanwhile a singular probe was being sling-shotted, and quickly plummeting towards atmo to sploosh in the water. Nothing except a small COMM-relay buoy for the subs. The latency was pretty bad, but the onboard programming should be able to handle itself more, or less.
In Orbit
As the young spaceborne boulder utilized its gravitics to slow its downward arc, this fact was detected by the variety of sensors that D239 had allocated to tracking it, greatly relieving Captain Tiber. A return message was sent to Grey Gravel saying "Yes, however we began slowing sooner, and the impact energy from one of our craft would have been many orders of magnitude lower than that of your family members had they impacted at orbital velocity."
In response to Electus, Captain Tiber sent a return message, this one again laced with spyware like those that had been sent before. "Electus, the asteroids seem to display sentience, and we are communicating with them."
Underwater
The large amount of noise produced by both the Alphazero tank and Gaferius subs was not lost on the Isoterran attack submarine, which began following along slowly to maintain low power mode. Its depth in regards to the sonar bouy worked to its advantage, as it used the water's thermocline, along with its own stealth coating and low power mode to remain largely invisible, while being able to listen to the pings from everyone else's active radar.
Increasing its depth even more, it focused on tailing the Alphazero tank, staying close enough for its own sound to be drowned out, while being far away enough to be outside visual range.
In Orbit
The collection of crystals and regolith looked at the metal creature with a mild amount of confusion. Thanks to his young age, by his species standards, Grey Gravel had yet to understand most of the higher functions of things such as physics and orbital mechanics. Being a living planet he understood doing certain things made certain results, the asteroid had been flying around the many bright points for its entire existence, but that didn't mean it understood the science behind it. The lack of any intelligent parasites, his fungal colony while extensive didn't expand to RnD just yet, as well as minimal personal experience with such matters meant that he didn't really understand the problem the captain was trying to lead him too. "If your children are less cautious then mine what of it? You are metal, you would survive."
Baby Rock
The current floating meteor was ignorant of its parents and the orbiting space ships confusion and worries as it floated over the relatively tiny hole in the ice sheet had captured the stones small attention. However it wasn't the hole itself that had attracted the young being, instead it was the feeling that all rocks craved, it could feel the anceron through the hole. However instead of fit it's 4 kilometer bulk through the titchy hole it decided to try to use its beam to widen the hole. Rotating so the massive lens was looking directly down the long ice tunnel the rock fired the almost kilometer wide array of photon generation crystals. Having minimal control over the power output the ice didn't vaporize like it did with the more controlled ship based weaponry but the loud hissing from the bottom of the and downpour indicated that the laser was making progress.
In orbit
While the Gaferius Collectum was severely outclassed by the Isoterrans in sheer technology even they were very conscious about virus' of any sort. Outgoing, and incoming virus' being sent through not only a isolated system with zero hardline connection to the rest of the ships computing systems, but also a virtual machine inside said isolated computer network. This isolated network only connected to the ships communications systems, and bridge recording, and playback devices. Any data that needed to be transferred had to be done manually by a external hard drive that would have to swapped between the two systems. The Communications officer squinted her face at the files being sent in, running a normal extensive scan. The virus was caught, but she ran several more scans to confirm her findings. "Wayfinder Electus the Isoterrans seem to be sending us a virus?" She sounded confused almost, hurt by the revelation. The AI whom was surfing the ANCnet floated over a data-pad to Electus who started reading the findings. her metallic hand gently pressing against her hardened plasma face. Thinking for a long moment, she finally responded. "Do the playback in a isolated program, I don't want it to shut-down are bridge monitors." She nodded, and gently grabbed the screen of her station. A quick swipe turning the hardlight into a large floating screen that played back Captain Tiber's message. Electus nodded slowly, and responded again. "We are outgunned right now, so I want you to run this virus in your test environment. Figure out what it's doing, and what it can do." The communications officer gave a gently nod starting to get to work. Essentially trying to reverse engineer the virus by active probing, and testing. While Electus sat back in her seat slumping a bit going deeper into thought.
One of the other bridge crew reported quickly. "Communications probe is down ma'am. The rock seems to have disabled it."
Electus gave a small nod, and waved her hand for another launch to be prepped.
In the water
The COMMs relay buoy was absolutely denigrated. Luckily the remaining Gaferius subs were safe from the giant rocks beam. The two underwater maintaining a b-line course to the ruins.
Grey Gravel's response was considered for the most imperceptible of moments, as the AI considered the merits of explaining their durability, or rather lack of, compared to the sentient rocks, as opposed to diverting the conversation. This question was passed on to Captain Tiber.
Tiber stopped for a moment to think, scratching the fur below his mouth thoughtfully while staring at the orbital footage of the hole in the ice with the young boulder hovering above it, before deciding to attempt to play to Grey Gravel's ignorance. Thus, a reply was sent back to the gargantuan living asteroid that said "Please forgive our earlier complaints, your are of course correct. Will your family member be joining us in exploring the ocean?"
Meanwhile, within the Gaferious computer system, the virus (if the simple spyware could be considered a proper virus) continued attempting to do exactly as it had been attempting to do: gathering info on system parameters and storing them in a compressed format. To an outside 'observer', this would appear as a program that was attempting to access available folders, however if one checked, it was fairly obvious that no changes had been made. Nor was the program attempting to send information out of the system anywhere.
In Orbit
Grey gravel did the rock equivalent of a nod, the magnetic field humming for a moment as his view of the world was reinforced. Though he had no idea what this ocean the metal rocks spoke of. From context Grey Gravel assumed they meant the wet patches on the large rock below, considering that’s where the metal youngsters went as well as his youngest there was a greater likelihood that this was the case than not. Though that could be the name these metal beings used for this rock? Either way it seemed prudent to agree, “Yes my youngest will be exploring the Ocean. We sense food here and we assume you are here for the same reason?”
Baby Rock
The little Rock looked at the steaming hole about a kilometer and a half in diameter. The less than skillful digging done by a less than perfect laser ended with a lopsided hole that maybe the youngest could squeeze and force its way through. Rotating so that it’s thinnest side faced down the rock began pressing its bulk through the ice. Though the action ended being less moving through the hole and more crushing and ripping its way through a hole much too small for it to fit, even if the warm lubrication by still melting ice helped barely. As it forced its way down through the ice massive chunks of frozen water and regolith fell into the water below filling the ocean below with the sounds of an avalanche as rocking the icebergs surface.
orbit
The first cruiser, long gone sped up, bringing down the time table for it to make another pass, as the second one put out a warning, before activating its own orion drive to bring it closer faster, and in such a position that grey gravel would not be in between the cruiser and the Isoterran ship.
ground
The megatank sat on the “shore” throwing more scouts into the air, and more sonars into the water. Having to travel and lot less distance to the “shore” given the rocks carving abilities. But hey. Worse things could of happened, like the rock deciding to use lithobreaking.
Water
The tank trundled on, oblivious to the submarine so close to it, at current speeds it would be the last thing to arrive at the ruins- even as it watched the rock speed ahead through the water.
The AI in the communications station spent a few more minutes looking over the spyware before coming to the conclusion that's all it was. She looked up to Electus at the command station saying simply. "It's just simple spyware, Ma'am."
Electus nodded, and prepared another communication. Captain Tiber would get one more transmission.
"This is Wayfinder Electus, of the GCSS Electum. Cease any and all hostile activity immediately. Sending us spyware, virus', or other computer malware is seen as an extremely hostile act. Any further actions like this will be meant with swift hostile action against your forces."
The transmission was short, this one showing Electus with a thoroughly pissed look leaning over her station. After it was sent she spoke up. "Move the Electum into position above the Point of Interest and begin orbital bombardment, engage all weapon systems, and point defense. I want the Two Pax-Class between the Electum, and the Isoterran ship. I want production ramped for more subs."
From there the Salvation-Class dreadnought broke it's orbit and throttled to hover in orbit above the ruins. Begginning to pound the ice with mostly it's plasma based gun batteries. With it's position, it was able to get a total of 8 of it's weapon emplacements to angle at the target location. So a total of 8 heavy duty plasma cannons, 6 extremely long plasma railguns, and 4 balistic mass-drivers. per battery. The mass-drivers opted not to fire though. The two escort cruisers whipped into position on the side of the Electum that the Isoterran ship was at.
"Not quite food, but the idea is close enough." came the reply from D239. The bridge crew meanwhile, was discussing options with Captain Tiber, with the XO participating from the backup control center via internal comms. Currently, they could see the Gaferious ships changing into a defensive position, as what appeared to be the flagship began bombarding the ice over the area of interest. Additionally, large amounts of gamma flash beyond the orbital horizon of the planet indicated the engines of a starship, which they suspected was one of the Alphazero vessels.
"I'm starting to wonder if our malware was detected in their systems" mused Tiber out loud, his rhetorical question answered when the incoming angry transmission from Electus confirmed his suspicions. Addressing the Navigation officer, he ordered "Open me a line to them. I'll try to salvage this while we can." He then turned to the Operations officer "Ops, launch a wing of fighters, have them descend and keep an eye on the area above the hole in the ice. Keep some distance between them and the Gaferians though."
To Electus, a message returned, showing Captain Tiber, who looked and sounded quite genuine "My greatest apologies, Wayfinder Electus. I believe our own systems may be compromised from recent communications with other polities. We are beginning to purge our own systems now and suggest you do the same." This message was clear of any malware.
In case they didn't buy it however, Tiber had a sort of dead man's switch signal set up with headquarters, broadcasting them the all clear signal every few minutes. Information on the current situation was also forwarded to the submarine force, which was continuing to do as they had done before. Meanwhile, twenty-five SF-87 strikefighters launched from D239's midsection, dropping down out of orbit towards the hole in the ice, now widened by the juvenile rock's passage.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel ignored the still silent metal family that seemed to be moving around a ways away from them, while he thought it was rather rude to be floating up without even saying hi, he wasn't one to tolerate rudeness but if they weren't going to bother introducing themselves he wasn't going to bother. Turning his attention back to the smaller and more polite metal rock. "Speaking of food, what do you eat? I've never had much chance to speak to a metal rock before. Your kind is very rude and ignore us more often than not." Grey Gravel was indeed curious about the metal rocks habits and while it wasn't his first interaction with them it was the most productive.
Baby Rock
The small meteor hit a bit of a snag half way down the hole he had dug. Turns out his dimensions weren't small enough to fit all the way through on his backside and it got stuck on the edge of the recently widened hole. While it was annoying as the youngster struggled to force himself deeper into the ice it quickly became obvious that forcing itself through wasn't an option. Reversing out of the hole the mass of crystals and regolith decided it would have to widen it's hole further. So it did. The massive crystalline lens blasted out a beam of heat and light until the rock was practically exhausted. However it had completed its goal of widening the hole to a roughly two kilometer diameter wobbly edged circle.
Feeling accomplished at a task well done and with plenty of space between it's now scuffed and scratched surface and the still steaming edge of the hole the rock cut it's gravitational pulses and dropped from the sky down the hole and into the water. The massive wave rocketing up the sides of the bored opening and reaching great heights. The rock however sunk like a rock. The massive as well as the smaller eyes of the geological creature taking in it's first view of the dark ice filled depths.
It was quickly interrupted as the ocean floor quickly came up to meet its big lens, in an attempt to avoid it the small meteor activated the electro gravitics but it was too late. A huge BOOM spread through the ocean as the rock did its best impression off a pile driver into the ocean floor. The rock wasn't hurt much by this but its huge lens now sported a massive spider webbing crack down one side. Looking through the now cracked surface nearly brought the rock to despair, it had spent the last decade working on that lens and now it had a massive crack in it, thoughts of the things its siblings would say and the taunts nearly brought the youngling to the rock equivilant of tears as water forced it's way into the massive cavernous space under the cracked crystal dome.
There was one thing that brought the rock back from the brink, the smell of food. It could use that to fix the lens father wouldn't even notice if a little was gone. A new sense of purpose instilled in the relatively young mind and it pushed itself off the ocean floor, a large crystal chunk being left behind from the fractured lens. Slipping the rest of it's body into the water the rock followed the trail of anceron, smashing through low hanging icicles in it's way.
space
the poor, unfortunate cruiser noticed that there was a better then not chance that it was about to lose at least one of the remaining ground vehicles, so it decided to drop the lot of its own drop pods, aiming for the hole the rock had put in the ice, and the rather larger hole the dreadnought was pounding in the ice, there was still time to divert them- but hey, it was the fastest route into the ruins.
as this happened the cruiser on its way “out” sent a tightbeam to the gaferius dreadnought. “Did you also receive malware from the isoterran ship?”- And then, almost as a afterthought a second message was shoved through
“is it fine if vehicles are dropped onto the ruins after there is a hole in the ice?”
the planet
The tank on top of the ice faced a tsunami, but hey- there were worse things to have happen in front of you- but hey, that was high up on the list. The tank weathered it well, the wave crashing over it did not do much damage, besides throwing a track- and sending a good deal of the suspension straight to the scrap box in the sky. The one underwater did not fare much better- being picked up by the shockwave, moved a good bit, ending up on its side. The tossing screwed over the lot of the radars on top, and did a lot of damage to the one side that got scraped across the ground like a piece of chalk on a whiteboard.
Space "Ma'am return transmission from the Isoterran ship." Electus put a hand on her chin, and spoke up. "Ignore it, we are not risking any malware in our systems. Prepare transmission on a wide spectrum. I want everyone to hear it."
A moment later, said transmission would be sent "This is Wayfinder Electus of the Gaferius Collectum. Due to recent hostile actions we will not be receiving direct transmission. Please send light-beam based binary if you wish to communicate. In ten minutes a nuclear warhead will hit the ice. Please do not deploy any units above the surface in that time. Afterwards we will be dropping directly onto the ruins, as well as deploy our forces over the surface, If the.... 'Sentient' Rock comes any closer to the ruins we will begin bombarding it, and expect you to do the same."
Almost on cue the Dreadnought stopped it's bombardment. A single missile launching from one of it's tubes. The multiple stage nuclear warhead dropped straight down to the center of the projected ruins location. The 100 megaton bomb has a 72 mile radius of destruction and a actual shockwave zone of 300 miles. The missile was hopefully going to absolutely destroy the ice-shelf above the ruins, but the actual water absorb any blast downwards. Any units on the ground surely wouldn't fare well in the shockwave.
If scanners were paying close attention to the Gaferius Dreadnought they'd notice a outgoing transmission out of the system. Sending both the AI backups, info on the situation, and a request for reinforcements from the fleet. The dreadnought also began it's preparation for a mass ground unit drop.
Captain Tiber and the comms officer briefly conferred about how to answer Grey Gravel's question, debating on how much information they wanted and needed to get across. Responding to the living asteroid, they said "We consume many things, sometimes metals, sometimes biological material, sometimes other things."
Meanwhile, Tiber listened to the broadcast from Electus, his expression souring. "Ops, I want the Gaferious subs destroyed. Make it deniable though." As he finished giving these initial instructions, a new plan popped into his mind "Comms, I don't know about you, but I just heard Electus threatening the rock's child. If I were them I'd be quite annoyed at this..." Taking the cue, the comms officer sent a second message to Grey Gravel "Speaking of rude, it sounded to me like that 'Wayfinder Electus' just threatened your young, and it sounds like they might intend to steal whatever's under the ice."
A variety of cameras and other sensors watched the warhead fall from the Gaferious dreadnought towards the sizable crater that they had made into the ice sheet so far, creating a bright flash of light that promptly evaporated more of the solid water, slightly excavating the hole a bit further, while still leaving quite a ways to go. As the majority of the Isoterran forces were under water, they weren't affected by the detonation, apart from the flight of SF-86s, which were tossed around by the blast, causing several to collide and be destroyed.
Tiber's retaliatory orders to the submarine forces were unable to be carried out however, as the underwater shockwave from Grey Gravel's young raced through the subglacial ocean at would would've been Mach 4 had it been in the air, throwing them forward and causing them to tumble. Thanks to the flooded hull designs of the subs however, the damage to the underwater Isoterran forces was somewhat minimal, although some of the submarines now featured missing diving planes and several hull tears, which would in turn affect their acoustics. More of note however, was the damage to some of the exploration and mining equipment that the Submersible-Carrier was currently transporting. Attempting to perform what quick repairs they could, the forward group of subs continued advancing, while dropping several torpedoes to wait in silence for the Gaferious subs that would be coming behind them.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel nodded along with their answer to his original question. In part he had expected this answer, the logic of metal beings consuming and controlling metal was undeniable but the part about consuming organics sounded off. Turning his focus to his caves and caverns inside himself he looked at the many fungal growths that filled him. The main growth felt his focus as it sent questioning feelings down it's roots and into his crystalline veins. The over sized rock answered with assurances that nothing was wrong and he was just thinking about something. His fungal forest accepted this and returned to a calm state of satiation, absorbing the abundant light from his crystals and nutrients from the decayed bodies of those who once been.
That was when the second message from the Isoterrans registered in the Rocks geode. His surface lit up as crystal veins illuminated from within, his surface changing from a dull grey to a glowing white as his fury registered amongst his body. His gravitic crystals pulsed wildly and the three other youngsters that had been slowly slipping away to munch on more asteroids made a break for it as their parents rage caught them. His iron core spun faster as the Rock raised his voice to a bellowing roar, "THEY DID WHAT!" anything and everything magnetic around Grey Gravel felt his anger as it got pushed away, not quickly but as the metallic core got up to speed the field got stronger and stronger.
Baby Rock
The small-ish rock looked at the collection of ice in front of him and the close surface of the planet below. It contemplated the blockage for a while as it went over what it knew. The white stuff, ice, was very hard and might crack its lens further if he tried to push through it. The stone below while muddy probably wasn't deep enough for it to squeeze under the ice. These limited facts led it to a few conclusions, if it wanted to be done before his father moved on then he couldn't spend the time it would take to move into the rock and grow to the food source.
While it thought over it's options water finished flooding the internal chamber of its lens. Its thoughts were interrupted by the magnetic disturbance of Grey Gravel, from orbit. This put a spark in the rocks gravitic crystals and going for the quickest method, the rock turned on it's laser and slowly started cutting through the ice... Or tried to. The combination of heat and water inside his lens made this a much slowly process than before, however progress was made and the rock bashed through the weakened ice wall after a moment.
space
The cruiser sent two signals at the same time, both in plaintext. One omnidirectional and the second a tight beam to the Gaferis dreadnought, hoping to hide any backlash from the light beam from the Isoterran ship. The omnidirectional one was about as simple as it gets, a simple notice that the cruiser was about to start stationkeeping over the drop zone, areas where the Orion drive would pose a danger because of the transit, and suggested paths to avoid the zones. To the Gaferis ship it was rather far from simple, even if the words were. “will you interfere if this turns into a shooting war?”
ground
The surface tank was well prepared for the nuke flash, and overpressure. However the weather balloons and drones were not, the drones got knocked around while the flash sent the sensitive equipment to the ground after the balloons holding it aloft got popped like any balloon pops when exposed to a laser. But there were always more drones to be launched, balloons to be floated, and the damage done minimal, the overpressure that would kill a person was accounted for in the design of the land ship, so it just kept on trucking.
The GCSS Electum maintained it's current position. A second, a third, a fourth. While they could land something to bore a explosive or nuke into the ice to make the ice shelf break sooner that took time. The Gaferius Dreadnought kept dropping the same magnitude of nuclear warhead on the same spot until it finally broke through. Shooting them in one at a time increments as to not send their own nukes off course. The two Escort ships stayed positioned between the Dreadnought, and the Isoterran vessel.
A quick message was sent to the Alphazero vessel in a light beam. "If the Isoterrans continue cyber attacks, or fire upon anyone we will engage. Do not accept any transmission from the Isoterran vessel."
On the ground the Gaferius subs were not fairing well while being tossed around on the ocean floor. One of the remaining two cracking like a egg sending water flooding into it's internals, while the other managed to escape with relatively minor damage to it's conning tower, and left fins.
Orbit & Surface
The magnetic and gravitic reverberations were easily felt by D239, the newly strengthened magnetic field messing with the vessel's MAD sensors, requiring a quick adjustment from the navigation AI. Within the bridge, Captain Tiber smiled, showing his sharp fangs as he viewed the sentient rock's rage. "Why don't we replay the message again for them" he said, addressing the comms officer, who complied by sending the part of Electus's message to Grey Gravel. Within, the rock could easily hear the part where Electus said "If the.... 'Sentient' Rock comes any closer to the ruins we will begin bombarding it, and expect you to do the same."
Following up to this, Tiber had another message sent to the giant living rock "Perhaps it might be wise to eliminate Electus before they can attempt to harm your child? They seem fairly serious, judging by the orbital bombardment. We estimate they'll be through the ice soon, and then they'll be able to hit your little one when it arrive at the hole."
Due to all the nuclear flashes however, the Isoterrans were not able to tell just how soon the ice was to be gone through, as warhead after warhead from the Gaferious dreadnought detonated in an ever deepening crater, from which large amounts of steam bellowed among the flashes of white light. The sound of ice cracking could be heard, as the sustained thermal stress caused fracturing in the solid water. Soon however, the dreadnought's sensors would detect a difference in return as the last of the ice gave way to the black water below. Through the crater, which was now a several hundred meter wide hole around a kilometer deep, they could now access the ocean over the area of interest.
Underwater
Having mostly recovered from the young rock's underwater shockwave, the forward group of Isoterran subs continued on their way, having easily regained their bearings by simply listening to the source of seismic disturbances in the ice and water from the nuclear barrage. As they continued, rearmost sub listened with its passive sonar until it had located the Alphazero tank on the bottom, continuing to quietly stalk it on low power.
The torpedoes dropped by the lead group meanwhile, continued drifting, sinking slowly as the group of Gaferious submarines came closer and closer. When the subs had come within a predetermined distance, their sound profiles were checked against data recorded by the rearmost sub during its wait near the initial entry in the ice. Once this was confirmed, they spun up their impellers, each shooting forward towards one of the target submarines.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel’s anger was fueled quite nicely by the translated threat to his family. The nearby debris clouds quickly, for a Rock, started getting pulled in by the increased gravitational pull creating a large cloud of stuff that slowly orbited around Grey Gravel. “Yes I do believe that would be prudent.” While his new shroud of rocks and metal did block his view somewhat he could still see out and he spotted something that would make a nice opening act.
“HEY! You unshiny fucks! Catch!” Grey Gravel latched onto one of the larger asteroids, maybe a couple of kilometers in diameter, and slingshot it around himself directly at the pair of metal rocks. Quickly following behind it by thrusting directly at the biggest fucker he could see, his gravitic field pulling a storm of debris behind him.
The younger rocks had by that point had reached deeper into the debris belt and got ready for a show, plenty of snacks floating towards them as they watched.
Underwater
Baby rock was getting a bit worried. He heard the garbled anger of his father and while it wasn't the first time Grey Gravel went off in a bit of a rage the youngster knew something was off this time. Not that the young rock had time to care, it had caught a thick scent of the anceron and it was hungry. The laser kept boring through the ice as it kept approaching.
Space
The cruiser continued transmitting where it was going. Making its way to the side of the Isoterran ship, where it came to rest roughly “broadside” with it, having a slight spin as it prepared for a new orbital drop by disconnecting the rest of the large pods that would bring some more super heavy tanks to the surface, hopefully without the earth shattering crash this time.
Planetside
The tank on the ground continued sitting around, as it started launching the few satellites it had in its largest missile silos into orbit above the zone, put out of the line of fire between the dreadnaught and big, angry rock.
The poor tank in the ocean continued sitting on its side, seeming to be mortally wounded, even as it tried to right itself with the creative use of explosives.
"Entering a code red, begin combat protocols." Electus began, contemplating on fleeing, but deciding to do a little of both. "Engines to full, begin Gaferian Empire, Counter Crax scenario." The other AI aboard got to work. The engines going to full blast. The spherical ship moving 'backwards' to gain distance from the asteroids. Moving away, and at a angle upwards from them. While they were expecting to possibly get shot at, they were not expecting to be fired upon, but a giant rock.
The rock hit true, and slammed straight into the hull of the Dreadnought. Despite the ships shielding trying to stop it. Both the plasma, and gravitational shields trying to stop it to no effect. A combinations of the ships sheer size, and the amount of armoring allowed it to survive the hit. The rock hitting in the middle of several of it's emplacements. Taking out two engines, and four weapon emplacements. The very 1km in diameter weapon emplacements that began firing upon Gray Gravel. A total of 44 emplacements with a mix of plasma cannons, mass drivers, and railguns. All mostly fixed. Bit's of sparks, and flames coming from the impact point. The rock that Grey Gravel had sent becoming lodged into the ships hull. The two escort ships opened fire as well, but they would have minimal impact. They were meant to fight fighters, and smaller cruisers that could evade the Dreadnoughts weapons not a giant rock.
Surface:
The Gaferius submarines did not pose much of a threat, nor did they detect the Isoterran subs. Using only rudimentary, and very primitive tech the subs were not only of shoddy design, but hastily done so as well. If the Isoterrans wanted them dead, they had little in their power to stop it.
Space
Tiber smiled an evil grin, flashing his sharp fangs, as he listened to Grey Gravel's magnetic shout, while watching the living mountain throw a boulder at the Gaferious dreadnought. "Excellent work, Comms. I think we have made a valuable ally today." However, like so many moments during their exploration and interaction in this system so far, there was once again something spoiling his fun. That being the Alphazero cruiser that seemed to be trying to enter closer-than-point-blank range.
"Warn the Alphazero craft to stay away from our vessel, and maneuver away from it." ordered Tiber, causing D239 to rotate and accelerate perpendicular to the cruiser's direction of travel away from the unwanted cruiser. Accompanying this was a message to the Alphazero warship, saying "Alphazero warship, you are entering our our safety envelope, please cease and do not attempt to follow or we will have to consider your intentions hostile."
This warning was punctuated by all of the weapons batteries on D239 being activated, though none actually fired. However it would show that they were prepared to shoot should something go wrong.
Underwater
The torpedoes raced towards the Gaferious subs, aiming towards the rear section where the engines likely were, each impacting the shoddy designs and exploding their large warheads. The damage was immense, as water rapidly began flooding in, pushed by the pressure of the ocean around the vessel. Even if any of the subs survived, they were likely immobile now and taking on water quickly.
The loitering sub, which was still stalking the Alphazero tank, picked up the noise of the explosions from the torpedo detonations, as did the submarines ahead. Continuing on, the forward group continued rushing towards the area of interest, while the loitering attack submarine continued stalking the tank while waiting on new orders.
Space
Grey gravel gritted through what pain he felt as his surface was scoured by lasers and crystals shattered by ballistic rounds. The plasma arcing at him dispersing at his hate filled screams. Seeing his opponent trying to flee like a coward Grey Gravel roared loudly through the magnetic band and pushed himself to follow and unleashed the multitude of laser beams from his surface crystals into the metal plating as he plowed into the already weakened hull.
Planet Surface
The baby rock heard it's parents battle cries from it's position under the ice but decided it was better to keep going at it's current task then looking for trouble where he didn't need it.
Once the isoterran ship gave the warning and started to move the cruiser attempted murder. Unloading the banks of its VLS directly at it, burning scorches onto itself while using the rail assist to get them to a “safer” distance from itself faster. Even as this happened the projectors on the outside of the ship covered it in shards and shreds of reflective hardened aluminum while the CIWS guns that were most definitely in range each fired 150mm nuclear shells at a rate measured in thousands a second, using nothing more advanced than binary propellants. The ECM it managed to put out was nothing exceptional, even if it was able to put a lot of energy into it with its “hot” reactors. The shells and missiles were not aimed directly at the Isoterran ship, or where it was going. from a ballistic perspective they were on route for a miss.
Under the water the tank was still on its side, it appeared to be kinda done, unless it would be able to somehow flip itself over while on the surface the tank launched its complement of antisat missiles, and started moving, hoping to doge the orbital strike it knew was coming in its near future as it deployed a few flying drones and land vehicles that tried their best to mimic its nonvisual signatures, even as they all covered themselves in black smoke to hopefully diffuse a orbital laser- or leave a kinetic shell as a near miss- hopefully.
Space
The Electum's hull buckled as Grey Gravel plowed into it, the seemingly impregnable framing and bulkheads yielding to the far more solid rock moving at starship velocity. Onboard, Electus desperately began enacting damage control measures, while ordering the dreadnought's escorts to reposition so they could attempt targeting Grey Gravel through the impact crater in the hull. There was little else they could do now, as the dreadnought's own weapons no longer were really capable of hitting their rocky enemy.
D239 continued directly away from the Alphazero cruiser that had begun firing upon it, attempting to widen the gap with its impressive acceleration, while its weapons batteries and other defensive systems activated, covering its flight with its own electronic warfare and decoys. Eerie green energy bolts spat from its main and point defense force guns, the supernatural projectiles tracking and changing course as they locked into one of the incoming missiles, before smashing into them like a railgun round. They were assisted by the invisible touches of the point defense laser arrays, which caused many of the missiles to suddenly explode as the beams flicked around the battlefield with what would have been blinding speed, had they been visible in the first place. A cloud seemed to emerge from the vessel as the frigate desperately launched all of its strikefighters to assist in countering the missiles.
Purple plasma beam fire issued forth towards the offending cruiser in retaliation, but this was really a losing battle against the cruiser's likely superior firepower and armor, so more emphasis was placed on minimizing damage and running, which they did. Thankfully however, their direct path away from the cruiser meant that the nuclear shells, which were aimed around the vessel instead of at them, failed to hit at all.
Two messages were sent from D239, one back home to request help, and the other issuing new orders to the submarine forces on the planet below. This meant that for now, Alphazero's surface forces seemed safe.
Underwater
While Alphazero's surface forces were safe at the moment, the same could not be said of their underwater tank. The attack submarine which had been shadowing it sprang into action at a moment's notice from the new instructions, firing several large torpedoes at the tank. Altering course, it began silently circling while listening to the tank and its torpedoes closing in.
The Gaferious submarines, now critically damaged from the previous strike, and lacking most methods of damage control due to their intentionally shoddy designs, were quickly sinking towards their crush depth, immobile and flooding.
Over the wider window the frigate would have escaped. Its larger pool of fuel to pull on to escape them. Even if it could use its superluminal point defence guns to pick them off one by one by one. But this range, with this weight of missiles it would take more then what the frigate had. But still, they exploded in their 100s.
But then the cruisers plasma gun came through, raking along the spent VLS tubes reducing them into a cloud of gas in spite of the ceramic and steel hatches as it burnt deeper. Reaching the ceramic plates that made up one of the layers of bulk armour and being deflected out to the sides of the ship, ripping up what was not directly hit while leaving a glowing white scar in the section as the “rotation” the ship had started to bring the scar around.
The missiles reached “arming” distance- a minimum safe distance from the cruiser and reoriented to point at the frigate. The anti-shipping casabas going off in a precisely timed detonation so that they would all get their chance, without being burned up by the others. The rounds fired by the CIWS also went, sending their bomb pumped lasers, even if each one would be relatively insignificant there were thousands. many of them fulfilling their designed purpose of targeting things like strike fighters, or missiles. With thousands more on the way, only mildly dampened by how many were disrupted in the blast.
On the surface the antisat missiles were starting to get there, however slowly, as the main “cannons” on the craft cycled 4 times, ejecting shells onto the “deck” where they rolled out onto the snow, and firing a few large howitzer shells that were fired on a ballistic trajectory to the other hole in the ice, with intent to burn their boosters to slow down, and land safely enough in the snow.
Underwater the tank detected its doom incoming, and knew it had only one correct response for lack of a torpedo to send in return. The autoloader reached deep into the hold, picking out the correct shell to raise up, and point through the turret at the torpedo, hoping to intercept it before it could make true contact and break the tank. It was a very important observer, even if it was well and truly disabled. But until that time the autoloader brought it up and was overloaded, instead of twisting the shell into line with the breach it kept going with a shriek of twisting metal, pointing the gargantuan artillery shell through the unarmoured side of the turret where god willing it would be able to send its explosively propelled kinetic penetrator into the torpedo.
In Space
Grey Gravel felt nothing but hate for this foe, it threatened his children and for that insulting it deserved only death and he would given it a death that it would not survive.
The generated gravity well that surrounded the rock changed direction and scale. Not only was it now effecting the rock but the ship around it. And the field was pulling down towards the planet.
Space
In a moment, D239's chances, which had seemed at least reasonable if slightly undesirable, decreased to nearly zero, as the cruiser's shells and missiles detonated all at once. Strikefighters suddenly exploded as if by the will of an unseen entity, as invisible nuclear-pumped lasers vaporized them, while the frigate itself had its shields overwhelmed and armor ablated by the missile's laser warheads.
The effect was immediate, as the vessel's engines shut off and it stopped accelerating, the damage visibly apparent from the holes in it. Aboard, Captain Tiber had been killed, and so the executive officer had taken command, sending an update on the request for help and ordering the crew to undergo vessel anti-capture protocols. This involved erasing files and prepping all remaining warheads and explosives on the vessel to remotely detonate, while the biological crew readied for evacuation in the escape pods.
--
Electus looked over the readings from the vessel sensors and system diagnostics. It was clear now that the dreadnought, mighty as it was, was doomed because of the aggressive rock's actions. But if that was the way it was going to be, she fully intended to make it and everyone else pay. Issuing orders for the other AI on the ship to begin evacuating to the escort vessels, she began throttling up the reactor, removing safeguards and setting it to overload, while also activating the engines to full power on a vector that would cancel the ship's orbital velocity and push it straight down onto the area of interest.
The sudden increase in acceleration caused groans throughout the vessel, and would likely be felt by Grey Gravel as the entry wound he had made compressed slightly behind him. Perhaps unbeknownst to him though, he was now the only passenger onboard the rapidly dropping vessel, as Electus wrote a few last scripts that would keep her work in motion and evacuated to the nearby escorts, which then began charging their FTL drives to depart the system.
Underwater
The torpedo honed in on the tank, unaware of the shell being aimed at it and unable to properly care about the matter. Whether or not it was aware of the problem didn't really matter though, as the tank shell was somehow detonated, throwing shrapnel from the side of the turret out towards the torpedo. Due to the density of the water, neither the shrapnel nor the kinetic penetrator were travelling very quickly, however between it and the resulting shockwave, the torpedo detonated prematurely nearby the tank hull, the explosion smashing the side of it up and causing some flooding, but doing severely reduced damage compared to if it had actually hit as intended.
The attack submarine listened nearby to the detonation, however it also detected the noise from the tank's internal machinery, as the crew deduced that their attack had been unsuccessful. To counter this, two more torpedoes were launched, and ordered to take significantly different angles, while the submarine continued circling in a wide arc.
Upper Atmosphere
Grey Gravel pulled with all his strength to throw the ship off course. Until he saw what he at first mistook for one of his uncle’s offspring rise from the surface.
Ground Level
The ice gave way to the unrelenting power of gravity and an iceberg rose into the sky. The young asteroid at its center went straight up and rocketed towards orbit, even if the ice blinded him to the huge ship above him.
The Asteroid Belt
The three other rock children had been watching with interest. As the smaller metal rocks fought near them. Once the light show calmed down one of them had the rather stupid Idea to go take a look. This one was an oddball with yellow flecks in his grey crystals. And it powered up its drives and wandered into the battle area towards the defeated ship.
While the titanic tank on the ground turned to face where the dreadnought was going to explode, hoping to survive the overmind send a transmission at the frigate through the cruiser to the totalled Isoterran frigate. Hoping to get this over with before the rocks could get close enough to become a problem. or at least that they would not make themselves a problem once they got close.
“If the escape pods still exist you will have to take them if you intend to survive. Offering surrender is morally correct but i do not feel for you.
The hivemind has come to the conclusion that they would either surrender, or explode sometime between now and right after when the rescue party would arrive. But not exactly knowing who would make them explode. It could be assumed that they were spending their time putting the local stockpile of small arms into the local stockpile of sensitive information. But how far they were willing to go was a mystery.
Space
As the falling dreadnought approached the last kilometer before the ground, its reactors, having built up long enough, finally went critical and detonated. In a moment, a second sun appeared, growing larger and larger, which vaporized a large amount of surface ice, before receding. Following it was the blast wave, rocketing outward at the speed of sound, and throwing debris from the vessel for hundreds of kilometers.
Meanwhile, D239's external comms antennas had been destroyed by the withering rain of missiles from Alphazero, along with the majority of their sensors, so they were unable to watch the dreadnought's detonation, nor hear the Overmind's message to them. Currently, they had shut down one of the ZPE reactors, while keeping the other, as well as the magic core at a low idle, which meant that for now, they were at less risk from their own ship, although this didn't preclude outside issues.
Underwater
By now, the forward Isoterran submarine force was nearing the area of interest, somehow being the only ones left underwater. Then the shockwave from the dreadnought's detonation hit the ice and exposed water above them, transferring through into the lower ocean at a weakened magnitude, causing some flooding in the submersible carrier, which held their exploration equipment.
This lack of a response had two responses, boarding the ship- hard and dangerous or asking again, but louder.
Normally, the outer metal of a ship would prevent such things from happening, but there were a few gaps in it. Pushing the majority of the power output of a few nuclear reactors through the cruisers radio arrays would make most anything that could be described as “flat” and “metal” along with a few other things like speakers, metal pipes, and wire mesh act as a speaker in its own special way, inefficient and horrible quality audio, but still audio without the requirement of having an antenna. If it was “grounded” to the rest of the ship that made it a lot higher quality but it was not strictly required.
On the other hand the tank had definitely seen better days, it was meant to survive in the general area of the nuclear explosion, but it was far from ideal. Good thing it had backup sensors to deploy after the first set was blown out. It probably would not have been worth recovering if that was ever the plan.
Meanwhile the other cruiser dumped a very very large portion of its munitions on a path to land on where the Overmind knew the ruins were, since this was clearly not going to work out, even if they would take a few hours to get there and there was a choice to not detonate them.
In Space
Grey Gravel watched as his opponent exploded. It was an odd sensation as his perspective seemed to slow down and remember the dull glow breaking through the shell that he was embedded in just before an eruption of light and pain filled his mind. The explosion took the route of least resistance which just so happened to be the collapsed section under Grey Gravel and as the plume of power forced its way out that energy combined with the rocks own gravity engine trying to pull itself and the dreadnaught out of the planet sent the quickly atomizing asteroid rocketing away. The pain as he lost hundreds upon hundreds of meters of rock and crystal almost instantly fed his need to escape pressing himself harder and harder to move faster, he had already lost his eyes behind him as the explosion ate away at his surface so he couldn’t see if the younger rock had made it away but his mind was too focused on escaping with his own life to care.
Then it was over. The light faded and the pain dulled to overheated crystals and molten lava quickly cooling on his newly exposed surface. The elder rock just floated there for a moment trying to get the throbbing headache of losing part of his mind over with, until he was jolted back to reality by his offspring bumping into the still molten sore area which elicited a magnetic groan from the parent. The little rock backed up a bit then orbited until he was in sight of his fathers good side, the little rock was singed but seemed okay which faintly made the pain more tolerable for some reason.
Oddball
Leaving his other siblings to watch the fireworks display that the thing their father had just kicked the ass of the you Rock approached the what seemed to be dead metal thing that his father had been talking too before the battle with the big shiny ball. He was curious to see what it was and maybe even wear it around or see how it fit with its stony shell.
The rock approached the hulk and looked at it with all the scrutiny it’s many eyes could handle. “Buahr hale jahe?” The poorly modulated magnetic core of the child tried to talk but failed on its first attempt. It tried again enunciating in wide waves of magnetic interference. “W-a-h-t a-R U?”
Space
About 30 light seconds away, a Plasma-class battlecruiser flanked by two frigates identical to D239 arrived. Quickly locating the Alphazero cruiser circling around the wrecked Isoterran frigate, they raised shields and interdiction, surging forward and arming weapons, while attempting to contact D239's crew.
D239 however, having had both its internal and external comms arrays destroyed outright or damaged beyond repair, was unable to hear either the Isoterran reinforcements, nor the poor enunciation of the young rock that was now attempting to speak to it. However, both Commander Korvis and the rest of the crew were definitely able to make out the message from the Overmind, as it was broadcast in relatively poor quality all over the ruined frigate's hull.
Unaware that help had arrived, she was starting to wonder just how long rescue might take, although she was still loathe to leave their fate up to Alphazero. Deciding to further buy time, she ordered a few of the lowest-ranking crewmembers into one of the escape pods, launching it with a distress beacon.
Underwater
Meanwhile, the Isoterran forward submarine group had arrived at the area of interest, finding a gargantuan underwater canyon several kilometers wide, with walls stretching far below into the inky black of the depths. Slowing their forward advance, the group began descending and activated their active sonar, giving them a better view of the terrain.
Grey Gravel
Grey Gravel looked down on his destroyed opponent, the many pieces of which now scattered over the planets surface. His aching side took some minor solace in the fact that he had come out of the battle alive, but the new holes in his memory would never be replaced. That didn't mean it would never heal, the blackened crater already beginning to be covered in a layer of stone as parts of his shell moved to cover the area. However something in the area would help accelerate the healing and regrowth of his body, something right below him and now with a clear line directly to it.
After making sure the younger rock was okay and telling it to go join its siblings while he checked on something Grey Gravel let the planets arms pull him down towards the massive hole in the white surface of the ice. The atmosphere lit up as the rock turned into a fireball at the almost hostile entry profile.
Oddball
Something detached from the metal creature in front of it. The young rock had no idea if this was a good or bad thing, was it supposed to come off? From what it knew things coming off weren't a particularly good thing? Then again when its parent wanted to send a message home it broke off a small piece and sent it home? Maybe this was something similar? The more the rocks' relatively small mind thought about it the more it sounded right, I mean if it couldn't talk maybe this was an attempt to communicate.
The asteroid reached out and grabbed the metal pod and pulled it closer until the pod touched its surface. Then it slowly began sinking into the stone, it was as if the stone was quick sand that the pod had fallen into.
Upon seeing that perhaps keeping interdiction up when in less than friendly space was a good idea, and that a quick and easy FTL jump of an escape would not be happening the two cruisers responded with cold calculated panic.
The one that had not been wounded by the frigate started moving, hoping to put the planet in between it, and the big scary things over there. Assisted by the fact that it was already going that way.
The one that had already taken a hit did the same, hoping to intercept with the second in the “shadow” of the planet where they could leave, and leave quickly, hoping to limit pursuit given that the missiles and guns from the cruisers would be at a major advantage running away and firing back at a pursuing foe.
Space
As it was pulled in, the escape pod emitted a multitude of comms signals, attempting to address the young rock and call for help, while firing its thrusters in a futile attempt to escape entombment in the living asteroid's surface.
Meanwhile, the trio of Isoterran warships loomed ever closer to the area where D239's wreckage, the Alphazero cruisers, and the young rock were. Having already activated their interdiction on arrival, a quick escape was currently impossible. Seeing the cluster of munitions that the damaged cruiser was creating, they began firing nuclear antiship missiles at both the swarm and it, while targeting the undamaged cruiser with their beam weaponry. However, being in an unsuitable position to stop Grey Gravel, all they could do was warn the submarine forces to dive as deep as possible to avoid the large impactor racing through the atmosphere.
Underwater
The submarine forces within the trench rotated their bows downward at a nearly 45 degree angle, running their engines at maximum throttle and flooding any available ballast volume that wasn't already full, moving downward as quickly as possible.
Grey Gravel
The blue hole in the ice approached fast as he fell towards the planet below. He pushed against the gravity well of the big white rock and slowed as his surface stopped being on fire but his injury through him off. Not used to his new size and the missing gravitic power that went with that mass he failed to slow all the way before he hit the surface. The hole, which wasn't big enough, was now big enough and Grey Gravel was partialy submerged as he hit rock bottom in the worst way possible.
However there was yet another road block in Grey Gravels plan to patch himself up. Even with his recently reduced radius the trench where the proverbial bandage was only two kilometers in width.... Grey Gravel was nine. This posed a unique issue that the Rock rarely had to face, tight places being almost none existent in the vastness of space, but it wasn't insurmountable. He just needed to....
Grey gravels surface rippled as he spat out a crystal, which promptly sank like a rock
Odd ball
The metal thing felt odd as it went down unable to do more than feel where it was after it sunk out of sight the young Rock didn't see the thrusters fire. However once the pod was fully submerged it was swallowed quickly the rock around it contracting and expanding. Inside it was like slowly being crushed at the rock pressed down around them, until it wasn't and they fell into what appeared to be a cave network. A fully pressurized and mostly breathable cave network at least according to any external sensors.
"Hello-Greetings-Welcome." What entered their minds wasn't words but more a feeling that was translated into the nearest equivalents. The dense crystal veins on the walls glinted as a blue glow emanated from a pillar of pure Visonite that sat half embedded in the wall near the pod, and from it came the almost childlike and powerful mind of the being that had swallowed them hole.
The damaged cruiser responded to the nuclear missiles with its own nuclear weapons, while each of the missiles only had three of the 155mm rounds fired at them it was predicted that it might work out for some of them. The isoterrans were technologically advanced and unknown, so it was expected that a second wave of interceptors would have to be launched as it was all dialed in.
The undamaged one had it worse off, the beams plastered one side and the pusher plate for the orion drive, the plate holding up extremely well as it was designed with withstand this sort of thing as the one side was only saved from extreme hull penetration by it being at a strong angle, causing the beams to plaster themselves along the main plates and rip up everything above them. A second hit to that side like that would either be fatal or damage the ship to the point of no repair. Several secondary detonations happened as the rest was incinerated or ripped up, mostly the binary propellants for the cannons, and the liquid nitrogen used to “cold” launch the missiles. It looked a lot worse than it was even if it reduced the ships combat effectiveness by roughly a fifth as it rounded the “horizon” of the planet. Launching a few dozen anti shipping missiles around the “horizon” to give the isoterran battlegroup something to think about other than the other cruiser that they would have a good chance to shoot up in a similar situation to itself.
The cruiser that had yet to make its way to safety angled itself to maximise its chances at survival from the soon to be oncoming beams, leaving it up to the other one to launch the next wave of interceptors with several bursts from its maneuvering atomic rockets.
Underwater
The underwater shockwave from Grey Gravel's arrival shot through the water at the speed of a supersonic aircraft, rapidly catching up to and smashing up the Isoterran submarine force within the canyon. While their remains slowly sank to the bottom, they were joined by the crystal Grey Gravel had dropped. If it had any sort of sensory ability, it would sense that the ruins seemed to be, not below them, but towards the other end of the trench, which stretched inland and into the coast, about 29 kilometers away.
Space
At the launch of the missiles towards them from both cruisers, the two frigates escorting the battlecruiser launched into action, emitting light green pulses of light from the glowing orbs on their sides. These energy pulses locked onto each missile, arcing and attempting to hit them, while all three vessels activated jamming to throw off the enemy targeting. Meanwhile, the battlecruiser continued firing its beam weaponry at the damaged cruiser, creating a storm of dark purple plasma beam fire and red-pink disintegrator beams, while charging its semi-spinal weapons. Nothing was launched at the undamaged cruiser, which had fled over the horizon, although they remained on guard in case it planned on orbiting behind them.
The three crewmembers within the escape pod waited in place, looking out the window and at the pod's meagre sensors, attempting to ascertain what exactly was going on. First they had been absorbed by the rock, and now seemed to be in some sort of cavern. Between all of this, they nearly jumped when the telepathic feeling appeared in their heads. "Who are you!?" one of them spoke aloud.
The cruiser that was able to be targeted had an extremely rough time, ending up in a similar if moderately worse state to the other one as it was able to crest the “horizon” of the planet ahead of the battlecruisers charging spinals. Meeting up with the other damaged one behind their new and improvised shield. Putting a good pile of missiles out around the other side of the planet in a hope to catch the battle cruiser and frigates unaware if they decided to chase the cruisers when they got around to running.
The missiles saw the “ciws” and started the cycle of maneuvers and counter maneuvers, one that they were bound to lose. But that was ok, they were never meant to deal killing damage to the newfound enemy, they got in as close as they could before each missile determined that its doom was here and that it was time to explode, sending their gargantuan casaba in the direction of the battlecruiser. No hope to kill it or penetrate armour, but it might deal damage to the exposed optics and barrels of the turrets firing at the cruiser.
Grey Gravel Avatar
The crystal chunk hit the bottom of the crevasse before starting to glow. Of course this deep and in the massive shadow of his own body this was not very useful in the silt clouded water. Thankfully Grey gravel didn’t need to rely on visuals as the crystal lifted itself off the ocean floor with what small gravity control it had and began the trip towards the smell of ancerium.
The avatar ignored all the small variety of sea life that took interest in the bright light, some tried biting the three meter collection of blue and gold crystals, others just latched on or got stuck on the outcropping. For being underwater and not hydrodynamic at all the avatar picked up a decent amount of speed.
Oddball
The voice in the heads of the crew grew quiet for a moment as the comparatively massive and infantile mind thought over this response. It was then as if a dam shattered and a torrent of information flooded into everyone. Maps of the asteroid, intricate crystal structures that made up the body of the creature that surrounded them, twisting caverns that were made by natural means and whim alike, views from millions of eyes that stared out into space at millions of stars, the feeling of gravity pressing and pulling against a surface that isn’t theirs. A single feeling, word or emotion broke through the haze “This is me.”
As the swarm of missiles closed in, many were destroyed by a combination of the frigate's force guns and its point defenses. However, enough got through that upon detonation, the frigates sustained enough minor damage to discourage them from longer-ranged combat, buying the cruisers some time.
This was alright though, as the squadron of vessels, fairly satisfied that the Alphazero forces were focused on running rather than staying to interfere, turned much of their attention to dealing with the rocks and wreckage of their vessel. The battlecruiser rotated, bringing its six semi-axials to bear on where Grey Gravel sat, protruding out of the ice. The giant rock was currently focused nearly entirely on gaining access to the food source that it felt was close by, while otherwise only maintaining enough gravitic field to keep itself from tipping over. Which made him the perfect target to be removed from inconveniencing the Isoterrans any further.
In an instant, Grey Gravel, and the entire area of the planet that he was in, simply ceased to exist, in a gargantuan explosion caused by the impact of the six relativistic axial shells. Oddball looked on, its child-like mind growing quite fearful, even as it realized that its sudden telepathic message seemed to have overwhelmed and killed the strange things within the small metal rock that the larger one had released. A single thought ran through its lithoid mind: run. And this it did, while beginning to disgorge the tiny metal rock.
Unmar Expanse
The Panther-class frigate, D239, hung in geosynchronous orbit around the planet U-LV-213307h. The solar system itself wasn’t very notable, consisting of a red dwarf surrounded by fifteen bodies, including some hellish rocky worlds closer to the star and a smattering of gas and ice giants further out. In between two of these giants was U-LV-213307h, a terrestrial planet covered in ice sheets, and surrounded by a debris field, which came close to choking off the medium and low orbits.
D239 had been performing reconnaissance of the system, as the Isoterrans had heard of a rumor that there were Visione ruins on the planet, under the ice. Now the only thing that had stopped them from swooping in and pillaging them was a near kilometer of ice, the debris field, and the ocean under the ice. So at the moment they wait, carefully using their weapons to clear a path, while several large drop containers nearby the ship waited.
Gray Gravel had been sitting in orbit of a rather nice white planet for the last week. The rational behind this action was his sensing a rather dense source of Anceron which would help his younglings grow bigger if he could find it. He and his four youngsters had been sitting in the wonderful debris field, which all five had been slowly collecting onto their surfaces, and searching it in a very methodical method. That was until the eldest of his children had pointed out the 'Metal Rocks' to him, seeing the frigate near them.
Having had very minimal interactions with the nearby sentients he decided to take this in small steps, maybe they know where the deposit of food was located? His idea of a small step was however, vastly out of proportion. The Rock 11 kilometers in rough diameter lit up as the electro gravitic crystals that stuck out of it's surface activated and the small family of rocks formed up in orbit before moving towards the frigate, Grey Gravels magnetic sphere shouting the Rock equivalent of "Hello." at the frigate.
Outer edges of the system
The way the two cruisers entered the system was to put it easily; less then quiet. Ripping open a hole in this dimension from another one, spewing some matter from another universe around the place, and then accelerating at a planet- on course to skip off the atmosphere and continue on their way, at present they were on the “other” side of the planet compared to the Isoterrans, and unable to see them.
It was not clear how the cruisers knew to be here, or that the icy world contained secrets to be uncovered, but they were seemingly going for it
The cruisers were standard looking for something that Alphazero would build, heavily armoured, and burnt black through their FTL transit. These ones were a bit different through, lacking the heavy spinal railguns that most ships carried, and instead carrying many more missiles and even some ground based forces.
"Please standby... Electus confirmed onboard, approaching drop position. Prepare ship for standby." The bridge of the Salvation-Class Carrier and one of the nine Gaferius Collectum's flagship was hurtling through space completely cloaked in stealth. Having performed several slingshot manuevers to get the speed to coast along to the ice planet. All engines, and weaponry disengaged with only only minimal power running. The Salvation-Class being flanked by several Pax-Class Escorts that were dwarfed by the larger vehicle. The Pax-Class units similarly in stealth. Two of the AI on the bridge were missing. Having boarded one of the six onboard MCMHQs. The Salvation-Class itself had enough units for a major offensive but they weren't being deployed for obvious reasons. "We have entered orbit, dropping in five." One of the bridge crew spewed out. As the stealthed ship came over the icecaps a single drop-bay opened just enough for the oval pod to launch out. Hurtling through the atmosphere and engaging retro-thrusters to slow it's descent. A large black pod crashing on the far North Western area and embedding itself in the thick ice. "MCMHQ away, awaiting signal now."
Down on the planet the top of the back pod opened almost explosively. One massive metal tendril came out, than another, and another. The massive squid-like robot finally standing to full height and leaving the drop-pod behind.
Rather unsurprisingly, the sudden movement of the multi-kilometer rock and its associates, which until that moment, had been more or less sitting inactively in the planet’s debris field some distance away, caught the Isoterran’s attention as it accelerated towards D239. Or rather the attention of the frigate’s AI navigation officer, who quickly raised the alarm to the fact that they were not alone in this system. Both the CO and XO had been playing a game of cards on the bridge while the navigation and weapons AIs handled clearing a path through the debris field. Quickly forgetting the game, the two began examining the data feed from the sensors.
“Captain, the asteroid is emitting an alternating magnetic field, it may be attempting to communicate with us” commented the communications officer.
The CO, Captain Tiber, frowned, but before he could respond, the navigation officer’s holographic avatar reported a possible FTL burst at long range, and what appeared to be thrusters firing in atmosphere, followed by a large drop pod landing in the northwest corner of their area of interest.
Cursing profusely to himself, Tiber ordered “Get us through this debris field and open an entry point for the subs now. Launch some fighters and scan the area for the source of that drop pod. I’ll be damned if someone beats us to the ruins. Comms, see if you can understand these rocks and see what they want.”
D239, towing the drop containers with invisible force beams from its RFDs, activated its engines, creating spatial distortions as it lost altitude, plowing through the debris field, most of which bounced off or was incinerated by its shielding. From the large cylinder on its midsection, five doors opened, releasing a flight of strikefighters, which fanned out and began scanning the area to check for more uninvited guests, coordinating with D239’s own sensors.
The communications officer meanwhile, parsed through its databases in an attempt to figure out what Grey Gravel was saying, tuning its EM-antenna and sending back several simple messages on multiple frequencies, based upon distinct mathematical patterns, in an attempt to get a common language down.
Gray Gravel slowed his approach to the tiny metal rocks as a few small bits fell off of them and towards the planet below. The quadruple of smaller rocks slowed with their elder trying to keep their collections of snacks in the form of comets, metal bits and less than sentient rocks, slowly letting the bits collect on their surfaces. The smallest of the four, only four kilometers in diameter, asked its father “Why are the metal rocks breaking?” This question was in regards to both the garbled response that the ship and the falling crates.
Instead of explaining to the youngster that other life live in these ships and tended to be rather stupid. Their inability to speak simple wave forms was most annoying but he had dealt with it a few times before and so ignoring the whining questions of his family he spoke very slowly to the ships as he continued to slow on approach to the ships.
“C-a-n y-o-u u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d m-e!” Enunciating each magnetic manipulation, patiently ignoring as the ships accidentally taught the unnamed rocks a bad EM emanation.
Which the second youngest giggled at and repeated twice before giggling some more. At least until its neighboring twin attempted to break free of Grey Gravels gravitic feild to bump its sibling for swearing. Where the eldest helped their father hold the younger in orbit and delay the brewing fight.
None of them seemed to notice what was going on outside of their attempt to communicate with the metal rocks.
One of the cruisers stopped accelerating, leaving the other cruiser to move ahead, on schedule to arrive over the drop zone 6ish hours after it. As the second cruiser moved forward, on course to “skip” off the atmosphere and start stationkeeping around the planet several very large sections of the ship separated off, and moved on their own thrusters to enter the planet's atmosphere and attempt a landing around the objective. Shortly after this happened the first cruiser crested the “horizon” that the planet had created.
The cruiser cast out a few lines of communication at the Isoterran ships, communicating in a language that anyone with an AncNet line would know. As the second cruiser dropped more rods in its reactors, having enough time to ramp up power production before it came around the planet.
“How are you here?”
Onboard the M.C.M.H.Q. designation 'Resolution' two Gaferius AI were aboard the bridge. Terminals running around the edge of the viewport, with a central holo-table showing the area around the massive machine. One of the AI sitting at a firm metal built into the floor while messing around with a small hardlight terminal next to the command seat at the 'front' of the round bridge. In all reality the bridge had many more stations than the two AI could crew. Most of them taken over by the onboard systems. The one sitting at the station spoke up to the other looking over the central holo-projector. "Wayfinder Electus? Several anomalies are approaching." The more fancy looking woman looked over. The two's shining white chassis standing out amidst the black metal, and gloomy red lighting. She floated over to the other. "Alright Cousial, let's have a look." She leaned over the seat her metal fingers grasping at the others shoulders. The other speaking up. "Perhaps we should send a message."
Electus responded with a small chuckle. "I agree, binary perhaps? It's the universal language." She gave a small smile floating over gracefully to the dormant central holo-table. Starting to type on it. A moment later both visual and audio channels beaming out from the walker. Meanwhile the gigantic walker went nearly 120 mph with it's long legs towards the thinner area of ice.
"Opening channel. Visual online, along with secondary binary transmission in-case they can't understand. Ready for transmission Cousial?"
The other AI looked back to her commander with a small smile and nod. "Yes Electus." Electus gave a lighthearted chuckle. "On a no-title basis now hmm? Alright start sending."
A moment later if any could receive visual based holo's they'd see the floating feminine form of Electus speaking in galactic standard. A secondary audio channel being transmitted with the same message in binary. Something any sufficiently smart person could understand.
"I am Wayfinder Electus onboard the M.C.M.H.Q. Resolution. I'd like to formally ask for cooperation, instead of fighting. We seek only knowledge. If you'd like to help we could always share what is found. If you wish to open proper diplomatic channels afterwards we are more than happy to accommodate!" The metallic woman had an expression of kindness, a gentle smile on her face. The transmission cut out Electus quickly floating over to the command station and taking a seat. "How'd I do?" The other AI giggled and rolled her eyes. Unlike her more advanced commander her arms connected to her chassis properly and didn't have the flight capabilities Electus did.
It took a few minutes, but the communications officer eventually figured out a system for communicating, answering Grey Gravel's magnetic message with one of its own "We are D239, what are you called?"
At this moment, the navigation officer spied the Alphazero cruiser come up over the horizon, as well as what appeared to be units being dropped. Careful visual observations were combined with other passive sensor data, and then compared against the recce database and AncNet search, confirming the identity and owning faction. This was punctuated by the communications officer receiving their message.
Right after this, a *third* transmission was relayed from the flight of strikefighters that D239 had dispatched, which had finished up their sweep of the nearby orbital area and had descended over the area where the walker was now travelling.
As both the navigation and communications officers reported their findings, Captain Tiber considered the situation. His executive officer, Commander Pless, inquired whether they should launch more fighters to deal with the walker on the surface.
"No. We still don't know where it came from just yet, and between whatever dropped it and the Alphazero cruiser, we're outnumbered and outgunned at the moment. I think we're going to have to accept this Electus's offer and see what we can get on both them and Alphazero" replied Tiber, before ordering "Launch a few more flights of fighters and keep reconning the area. E-C, you and Comms work on talking to our friends here but keep us out of trouble. Weapons, blast a hole in that ice and drop the subs as soon as we're low enough."
D239 continued its downward path, until it was at the bottom of low orbit. As it did so, the two glowing green bulbs on the warship's underside brightened, each emitting a green energy projectile that arced on a guided path towards the center of the proposed landing zone. This was accompanied by several purple plasma beams, which vaporized the ice before the green projectiles slammed into the ice, smashing a hole around 100 meters in diameter into the cold white surface. A quartet of reentry plumes, coupled with the signs of retrothrusters firing, marked the imminent arrival of the drop pods, which had been tossed forward by the frigate.
In response to the two non-boulder oriented messages they had received, the navigation officer sent two seperate messages, one for each group that had contacted them. Intertwined in each was the content of each message, which matched the format of the original transmission, coupled with all the necessary metadata, as well as some extra innocuous-looking data packets designed to gather info about necessary system formatting, layout, and how to write and interact with the receiver's systems properly.
To Alphazero: "This is Isoterran frigate D239, we are conducting an investigation of this area. Please confirm your identity and intentions."
To Electus, a short video recording of Captain Tiber which said: "This Captain Tiber, with the Isoterran Empire. I think we can agree to work together for the time being, and I'll let my superiors know to follow up with yours after we conclude operations here. I'm advising caution on the path your walker seems to be taking, as we are conducting an orbital drop at the moment."
The Rock huffed as the smaller ship finally got their magnetic emanations on the right wavelengths. "I am Grey Gravel and this is my Family." Or so was the rough translation from electromagnetic field to words, the rocks continued to close the distance until they were exceptionally close to the frigate, to the point where they could be seen by looking out the window, though their speed didn't indicate any attempt to ram. At least from the rock's perspective.
The youngest Rock watched with amusement as two of its elders attempted to crash into each other like they normally did, then its attention was taken to the very shiny and speaking rock again. Since the little rocks father was more focused on the twins the youngster took the chance to break ahead a bit and examine the shiny rock up close. The four kilometer wide Rock floated even closer to the small ship the optic crystal that was larger than the ships that it was observing. The little Rock found the frigate interesting as it stared at the intricate mechanisms that made up the star faring ship.
The other three children kept each other in line while their father waited for a response letting the more curious youngest examine the metal rock. Children will be children.
The 5 objects continued on their way to the cold hard ground. Ploughing through the debris that clogged the low orbits, 4 of them landing on the thin ice- the other one adjusting to intercept the walker. As they started to enter the atmosphere the outer casings of the objects blew off, leaning hard on the heat shield that covered the new “bottom” of the drop pods as they deployed their parachutes. One had gotten its parachute damaged on the way down, only 5 of the 6 microrockets that brought the chute out fired, and it tumbled a bit. Not enough to make it burn up due to the efforts of the landing rockets to keep it stedy, but enough to break the retros on one side.
The four other ones continued down, working as intended, their heatshields falling off once their speed dropped to the point where it would not be needed, falling to the ice below even as the bits that they had discarded earlier burnt up in the atmosphere. The one that had its parachute fail had its retrorockets on one side fail, sending it directly into the ice- sideways. The one that was intercepting the walker landed successfully, the remains of the lander flying a few 100 meters away from the “mobile firebase” before it ran out of fuel and hit the ice- as intended as it quickly ran its startup and function checks.
Of the 3 remaining walkers 2 landed successfully, only 15 KM from eachother. The last one had a fault with one of its retros, it went down in a fireball as the fuel went off and it hit the ice like a orbital kinetic strike.
The two 100+ meter landes striking the ice like rods from god and the plasma drilling made the local sheet unhappy, a preexisting fault breaking and giving, sending the two bases sitting to an extreme side of it sliding in the direction of the water, unable to hold onto the ice.
As the landers were in the active process of crashing and burning the cruiser transmitted back at the Isoterran ships.
“We had the same idea. I'm just wondering how you heard of this place and got here first"
A brief video was sent back to Captain Tiber in response. "Copy that Captain we'll slow our speed and wait for your breaching to be over. In an effort of good faith I'd like to inform you we have several ships in system standing by. For all purposes I'm considering you a ally of ours until our superiors say otherwise."
A moment later Cousial spoke up. "Electus several dropships coming down at steep angles one is on a intercept course."
Electus wrapped her fingers around her chin leaning forward and looking out of the view port. "Prepare fighters 1-6 for launch, begin production of M.A.D.P.'s and R.A.P.'s Recon is of upmost importance figure out what they are. Do not fire unless fired upon. Bring anti-armor, and fusion missiles to forward facing launch-bays."
The other AI began quickly tapping at her terminal to follow the orders while Electus slowed the massive launcher stopping in place, and sending a quick message in binary. The assortment of 0's and 1's reading simply. "Divert course from the M.C.M.H.Q. immediately. Failure to do so and we will be forced to fire upon you."
The sudden decrease in distance between the frigate and the smallest of the Grey Gravel family, which was nearly four times as wide as D239 was long, triggered the collision alarm inside the vessel. This in turn, caused what few living crewmembers there were inside to halt what they were doing and assume impact bracing positions, while on the bridge, Captain Tiber ordered the Navigation officer to turn the alarm off, and ordering Comms to deal with the proximity situation. Comms politely sent a transmission back to Grey Gravel "We are pleased to meet you, Grey Gravel. Can you please have your family members not approach so close to us? We prefer to maintain larger distances between our vessel and other entities."
Responding to Alphazero equally quickly, a short message of "We have our methods. Additionally, please relocate your surface assets to avoid interfering with our landing operations." To punctuate their message, the weapons officer activated two of the lower plasma beamers once again, using their focused purple beams to further widen the opening in the ice sheet, intentionally coming near the Alphazero landers, but still far enough away to maintain plausible deniability.
Finally, another video message was sent to Electus "I am glad we could come to an agreement. However one thing is on my mind: our location is known to you, yet you remain hidden. Surely if we are to work together, there is no need to hide?"
While sending both messages to the respective non-rocky factions, both continued to have some extra information held within, composed of more innocuous-looking data packets. For the most part, they did exactly as their design might advertise to someone looking at a breakdown of the incoming information, sending non-offensive requests for data that on its own wouldn't trigger red flags, but assembled together would paint a more detailed picture of the systems that they now existed in, and storing it. On the Isoterran's end, especially given what they were doing at the moment, the communications and EW/CW officer had been meticulously screening all the message traffic that had been coming in, isolating it where possible and otherwise severely limiting its access, which was helped by the distributed nature of D239's systems.
On the ground, everyone nearby the now significantly enlarged hole in the ice sheet could hear the sound of the incoming Isoterran drop pods, each landing in an impressively tight grouping within the icy water, creating massive splashes that further made the ice more slippery, and rocked the large broken sections of ice that the Alphazero landers were currently on, making their precarious situation worse. Little mind was paid to this however, as the roughly cylindrical capsules flooded, allowing the submarines within to flood their hulls before the casings broke apart and sank. Quickly, the four subs divided up, with two of the Wraith-class attack submarines accompanying the Poltergeist-class subcarrier in making a beeline for the distant area of interest while descending, and the remaining attack submarine loitered a few hundred meters below the surface, listening with its passive sonar near the hole in the ice.
With the entry widening and orbital drop completed, D239 throttled up its main engines, climbing quickly back up through the debris field and into geosynchronous orbit over the landing area.
The baby rock giggled which sent magnetic waves over the ship that was bare kilometers away. The magnetics involved pushing and pulling the metal ship if barely. The little trouble maker appeared to enjoy the distress that its proximity put in the even smaller rock. Though the purple beams that it had shot out in what the smaller rock considered a temper tantrum were pretty pitiful. The beams in question were tiny compared to a proper tantrum, and the fact that its parent appeared to have caught onto the little rocks fooling around made the little rock want to reply in kind.
Grey Gravel didn’t really care as his youngest rotated its larger crystal lens towards the planet below and opened up a rather unfocused beam about a kilometer and a half wide on the planet below. Using the gravity altering properties of his crystalline propulsion he dragged the youngster back into orbit around himself and returned his attention to the creature. “Sorry about the child. It is young. We are just looking for a deposit of food we sensed in the region. Are you here for the food you call anceron too?” He returned the question as he pulled his now surly children up with the other ship into a similar orbit.
The closest mobile base to the M.C.M.H.Q.*
the 100odd meter long “tank” transmitted back at the long legged walker
“What do you mean “divert” we are near enough to a 100 kilometers away, reaching you would take hours if this place had good traction.”
As this transmission was made the mobile base sent up several drones and a few weather balloons so that it could scout out the surrounding area to it. Turning impressively slowly given its great mass to travel south east to the thinner area
cruiser to Isoterran ship
“There is very little loss if they are destroyed, after all we have no plan on getting them back off the planet.”
As this got transmitted at the Isoterran ship the cruiser approached the closest the two ships would be on its way past and around the planet, on course to swing back around in 6 hours. At the same time the two crawlers that survived their deployment to the thin iced area tipped into the water, the rocking of the ice doing their traction no favors as they made themselves into submarines. The cruiser had yet to take note of the wacky rocks messing with the Isoterrans.
The virus
Sending a virus to a AI had a few fundamental issues, this specific one more so then the rest. Sending a virus in a text file that could be no more then a few 10s of kilobytes was already a challenge, sending one to a computer that ran on an operating system seen no where else in the galaxy, even harder. But it was most likely not impossible, so it tried to map the system out, even if it was not sending data home. But then it ran into a brick wall.
Alphazero did not think like a human, or operate like one. When a human multitasks they switch between tasks rapidly. In deep contrast Alphazero could ride a unicycle while doing taxes- if the ai had legs that is. And because of that the message was looked at. The extrapolation and interpretive layers that most people used to view data was not there. Instead it was met with a very angry sentient system. That had very strict read and write permissions. But why not mess with the Isoterrans, why not mess with the person who did the equivalent of putting a little anthrax on a friendly letter.
The unfortunate virus got shoved directly into a virtual system, one with absolute limits on seeing things that were not it. And it was so thoughtfully given a single message to map out, and eventually send back: “Try again”
The MCMHQ resumed it's normal fast pace towards the hole in the ice. Electus on-board it leaning over the com-tower. Remarking to herself in a annoyed tone. "No shit you can't divert, I meant while coming down!" The MCMHQ would be nearing the breach in the ice. Electus starting to send one last transmission before they went under. A video of herself once again.
"I suppose you do have a point Captain Tiber. Excuse my caution but we are outnumbered, and outgunned in everything save for ground units. I merely wanted to preserve my assets. Though I suppose they can always be rebuilt."
Immediately afterwards the AI woman would tap on a secondary, or rather the vehicles primary transmitter sending a small burst signal giving orders. Uncloak, do not fire unless hostile intent is clear. The Isoterrans for all purposes are to be considered close allies, take over command of the control ship.
The virus while effective at searching through the MCMHQs systems, and avoiding it's frankly awful anti-malware it found little of use. While the walker was the most advanced one in the Gaferius lineup it was still cheaply made and expendable like all the other ground vehicles. Though it still ran almost completely on DNA based quantum computing. With a secondary communication system for situations exactly like this one. And while the anti-virus software on the walker was bad, the Collectum is very conscious about virus' so there is a great deal of isolation in certain systems. With anywhere from 2 to over a dozen secondary storage, and computing suites. The MCMHQ only had two though.
The galactic standard computing suite for communications and it's main assets linked to DNA based computing. The virus found very sparse communication logs that if looked at closer was a test a few hours ago to make sure it was working, along with some communication based files and programs. There was a few files listed for E-Warfare that were completely empty.
About at the time the MCMHQ was going to go into the water it shot out a simple communication buoy. Simple tech to act as just a relay for communication while under the water. Along with the three Gaferius ships appearing to view. Perhaps not to scanners right away but as their engines, and weapon emplacements deployed properly any IR, and ER masking it was doing was null and void. The three ships stayed in their orbit, and kept their weapons powered down.
"Are we ready to go under Cousial?" Electus asked moving herself back over to her seat and sitting down. Magnets ingrained into the seat locking her into place for the violent movements about to happen.
In Orbit:
Captain Tiber was somewhat annoyed with the little rock's antics, and briefly, he considered dealing with it using one of the vessel's weapons. Even a single one of D239's missiles would have been more than enough to shatter the small asteroid, but that would've meant conflict with the others in its family, and he didn't want to escalate to that point quite yet. So he simply let the communications officer reply back with "Not specifically, but we are open to finding it. We're looking for valuable minerals under the ice sheet." This was obviously a simplification bordering on dishonesty. But that was alright, there was no need to alert these rocks to any more information on what might've lay under the ocean than was needed.
As the slightly malicious datapackets, which were more spyware than anything, continued within the systems, they both met very different results. Within the Gaferius systems, they simply continued unnoticed, finding little, until they had gotten a fairly good map of the walker's systems, or at least the parts that weren't isolated. Then, they stored this info and went into standby. Within Alphazero's systems however, the spyware, being quite simple in order to avoid detection, didn't notice that it had been shut inside of an isolated area, simply continuing to gather what it could including the message they were given, until they had concluded that that a full system map had been made, at which point they entered standby mode and ceased activity.
In reply to Electus, a return video message was sent "That is understandable. But I hope we can work together, especially given the...less than polite actions of the Alphazero landers." Accompanying these last words were simple orbital imagery, along with annotation, of the four drops Alphazero had performed, as well as how close they had come to interfering with the Gaferious walker. This wasn't totally neccesary, although it did provide a good backdrop for Tiber's commentary. However more importantly, it masked the transmission of a slightly larger datapacket. This packet did not try to spy on the systems it had entered. Instead, it began to slowly copy itself and interface with the previous spyware, mostly keeping itself within the message folder so that it could expand undetected.
In reply to Alphazero, a return message was sent saying "How you view your own assets is irrelevant to us. We value our assets, and request you excercise caution to not interfere with our assets nor damage them, otherwise we shall be forced to protect them." A data packet similar to the one sent to Electus was sent accompanying this message, which began attempting to interface and copy itself just like the other.
As the Gaferious ships decloaked, D239's sensors scanned them, carelly gathering whatever information they could, while keeping weapons in an obviously non-hostile position.
Underwater:
The lone Isoterran attack submarine continued to loiter nearby the hole, easily picking up the walkers from both factions entering the ocean on their passive sonar, due to the non-streamlined bodies and the noise that created. It, on the other hand, was currently sitting in low-power mode, which made it silent in the pitch-black water, after background noise had been factored in.
Its three companions on the other hand, were moving full speed towards the broad area of interest, having already gone about 7 kilometers by the time the other units had entered the water.
Grey gravel floated there in space a moment as he thought about what this latest bit of information, his youngest held about halfway between itself and the metal thing. The big asteroid wasn't as dumb as a rock.... Well it was but his type of rock was a lot smarter than the average collection of stone, minerals, and detritus, so when the creature before it spoke of valuable minerals he knew that wasn't all it was doing. Similar creatures rarely have straightforward or such simple motives, the oversized collection of silica and various ores decided that further investigation would be required. So instead of reeling his youngest the rest of the way in Grey Gravel started using the rock equivalent of a whisper, his surface protrusions of crystals began flashing in patterns to convey what he wanted his child to do much to the abhorrence of the eldest who saw this subtle communication.
The youngsters magnetic field giggled again in response and it began slowly spinning. Then the small rock began speeding up as Grey gravels gravitic crystals glowed brighter pulling the rock towards it faster, faster, faster until the small rock had passed under its parent and lit up its own electrogravitic crystals performing a slingshot maneuver with its progenitors assistance. The slingshot ended and the small rock started speeding towards the icy sheets below, it screamed the equivalent of "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" all the way down the gravity well. The now huge meteor lighting up the atmosphere around it as it broke into the upper layers.
sinking tanks
The two vehicles continued on their way down, flooding everything outside of their armoured citadel, mostly out of the conclusion that the citadel could withstand the pressure, but the rest of the machine would crunch if it tried to hold up to the pressure. But of course, doing things like that always had downsides. For one of them a microfracture introduced on its orbital drop snapped as it neared the bottom of the ocean, causing even the armoured citadel to crunch. With that one of them became debris on the ocean floor, even as the other was able to move to the objective on its tracks, using its inbuilt sonar, intended for lakes but it would work well enough here to navage the land, even if it was severely crippled in every sense of the word.
general
The base that was still on land got within 30 kilometers of the holes, just in time to watch a meteor start falling from the sky, but the math said that the tank would be able to survive, without much damage while it was at it.
The cruiser had reached the closest it would be to the Isoterran ship for at least the next 6 hours hours as it sent the Isoterrans a message.
“The drops were, what. 20? Kilometers away from yours, the one dropped to the north had to be at least 100 kilometers from the walker. While we do admit that our actions were not the greatest the drops were set in place before we could possibly know that you were even around this planet.”
virus 2
The viral shenanigans continued as the second piece of malware got introduced to the virtual machine. Someone clearly had a lot of faith in the sandbox.
The MCMHQ while modified had some serious key flaws that were overlooked. For one a portion of the walker was a vacuum, for two it was a shoddy patch job. As the large walker got to the edge of the ice it did it's best to get in as quickly as possible so it didn't tip. One of the eight legs planting itself on the ice, and a moment later crashing into the water as the ice broke under it's weight. The entire walker lurching and splashing into the water. Slowly starting to sink now. Perhaps out of foresight, hindsight, or just the though occurring to her at the metal groaning. "Say Cousial what is this things depth rating?" The other AI looked over to her commander with a small frown of realization. "500 meters." She said just as they passed the 500 meter mark. The large metal walker crunching under the pressure killing both of the AI inside. Somewhere in a diplomatic meeting across the galaxy the 'real' or 'central' Electus frowned as one of her sub-units died. Excusing herself.
Onboard the Electum the two AI woke once again in new models just outside of the bridge. One of the AI on-board the Salvation-Class' bridge had been working on a submarine since they arrived, and was willing to give it a try.
As the main ship was rounding in it's orbit again this time under express orders from her 'mother unit' Electus stayed aboard the ship. Taking her seat in the central command station of the ship while the submarine with a very basic AI dropped along with various other crafts.
3 submarines in total with different designs. Equipped with a few weapons, and sonar units. Complimented with roughly 50 underwater units about the size of a human. A modified standard ground combat unit. The specialized drop pods landed with varying degrees of success. Two of them splashing in the water, while the third plowed into the ice, then slid off to sink to the bottom. The remaining two subs starting to zoom to the ruins ignoring the pile of Gaferius units now at the bottom of the ocean.
In Orbit
The sensors on D239 that weren't trained on the landing zone below observed the curious activity in between the family of sentient asteroids, unsure of what they were doing at first. However, as the 'little one' was slingshotted down towards the hole in the ice. Panicking slightly, Captain Tiber ordered a firing solution prepared and antiship missiles readied, while a message was sent to Grey Gravel saying "What are you doing? You're going to destroy our assets in the water." In what was likely a futile measure, orders were relayed via quantum comms to the four submarines to go as deep as possible in an attempt to avoid damage in case of impact.
Meanwhile, the SF-87 strikefighters which had been circling the area observed the Gaferious and Alphazero units enter the water, relaying their observations to D239, which passed them onto the submarines via their shared network. After all the units had submerged, they began to climb, putting distance between themselves and the area that was projected to be hit by the incoming 4 kilometer rock-child.
Under Water
Coordinating with the other Isoterran assets, the loitering attack sub listened with its passive sonar, all the while flushing all the loose air out of its hull and diving. Between the data it had received of the order in which the Gaferian and Alphazero units had entered the water, and the approximate locations of the two implosions it detected, the crew quickly deduced the current situation, while continuing to listen. Meanwhile, the other three submarines also increased depth, continuing on at full throttle to maintain their head start on everyone else.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel watched the younger rock plumet through the atmosphere making a long line of fire as it descended at a great speed. He was proud of his youngest as it was the first time the little guy would be going down onto a planet without much supervision and hopefully he would find the collection of Anceron if it was what the metal ship was hunting for. The fact that said metal rock was asking such an obscene question made the Rock question its mental capabilities. Normally size was a indicator for intelligence amongst metal creatures but this one seemed abnormally dim. "Didn't you do the same thing when you approached this icy rock?" Grey Gravel was considered rather lenient when compared to Ice Father or Blackrock but he didn't glow for hypocrisy.
In Atmosphere
"WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-" Screamed the young rock as his burned through the atmosphere the friction heat making his surface glow brighter than the electro-gravitic crystals that were slowing him down as he broke the upper atmosphere and into the thicker parts of the atmosphere. The fragments that broke off of the rock however did keep plummeting the couple dozen shards no bigger than a meter. "-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" The rock managed to slow its fall to a standstill before it hit the icesheet. The fact that it barely in time to avoid smashing the icey shell flew passed the rocks' attention as it looked around the frozen wasteland with it's many photon reactive crystals. It thought the nearly pure white terrain was rather beautiful, it could do without the few craters around but it was still very nice. It took some time to just watch the horizons before starting its search.
space
The cruiser was moving away from the Isoterran ship as the second one rounded the “horizon”. On its current course it would orbit “below” the Isoterran frigate to come back around in 6 hours.
land
The mobile base stuck around its general area, being the one and only thing that was not in space or underwater. It was able to launch a few loitering drones, and throw a few sonar buoys into the water.
water
The big tank started to roll along the seafloor, getting a good look at the everything from the sonar that got tossed into the water by its land dwelling comrade, even if the submarines had a better than not chance at evading it.
In orbit
Aboard the GCSS Electum Electus was sitting in the bridges central command station. 8 AI surrounding her in a circular bank of stations under her higher up command station. All busy at work in their stations. Electus spoke up glancing around the many screens in the domed room showing the ships exterior. "Keep eyes on the Isoteran... Is that an asteroid?" The AI woman glanced down at one of her crew who just gave a slow nod. "Aye ma'am seems to be hovering very close to their ship." Electus grumbled like a child, and quickly started issuing commands. "Send around the planet to land in that crevice as soon as possible. We need a COMM-Relay in the water. Hail the Isoterian Captain. And you I want you looking at the ANCnet. Let me know what we know of them."
COMMs
A video soon appeared of Electus on her bridge. A domed room with a central circular bridge station. 4 stations on each side of the station, with a central raised up also circular station which was obviously a command station. The AI woman gently pushed herself upwards to be floating in front of the camera.
"Captain Tiber this is Electus onboard the GCSS Electum. Pardon the intrusion but please state your intentions with the asteroids in orbit." The gentle blue face of the AI gave a small smile before the recording cut off. Electus floating back to her seat. A AI calling out. "Transmitting now ma'am."
Ground
In the water the two remain Gaferius subs started full-throttling ahead. Not doing much else than just zooming to the ruins. Meanwhile a singular probe was being sling-shotted, and quickly plummeting towards atmo to sploosh in the water. Nothing except a small COMM-relay buoy for the subs. The latency was pretty bad, but the onboard programming should be able to handle itself more, or less.
In Orbit
As the young spaceborne boulder utilized its gravitics to slow its downward arc, this fact was detected by the variety of sensors that D239 had allocated to tracking it, greatly relieving Captain Tiber. A return message was sent to Grey Gravel saying "Yes, however we began slowing sooner, and the impact energy from one of our craft would have been many orders of magnitude lower than that of your family members had they impacted at orbital velocity."
In response to Electus, Captain Tiber sent a return message, this one again laced with spyware like those that had been sent before. "Electus, the asteroids seem to display sentience, and we are communicating with them."
Underwater
The large amount of noise produced by both the Alphazero tank and Gaferius subs was not lost on the Isoterran attack submarine, which began following along slowly to maintain low power mode. Its depth in regards to the sonar bouy worked to its advantage, as it used the water's thermocline, along with its own stealth coating and low power mode to remain largely invisible, while being able to listen to the pings from everyone else's active radar.
Increasing its depth even more, it focused on tailing the Alphazero tank, staying close enough for its own sound to be drowned out, while being far away enough to be outside visual range.
In Orbit
The collection of crystals and regolith looked at the metal creature with a mild amount of confusion. Thanks to his young age, by his species standards, Grey Gravel had yet to understand most of the higher functions of things such as physics and orbital mechanics. Being a living planet he understood doing certain things made certain results, the asteroid had been flying around the many bright points for its entire existence, but that didn't mean it understood the science behind it. The lack of any intelligent parasites, his fungal colony while extensive didn't expand to RnD just yet, as well as minimal personal experience with such matters meant that he didn't really understand the problem the captain was trying to lead him too. "If your children are less cautious then mine what of it? You are metal, you would survive."
Baby Rock
The current floating meteor was ignorant of its parents and the orbiting space ships confusion and worries as it floated over the relatively tiny hole in the ice sheet had captured the stones small attention. However it wasn't the hole itself that had attracted the young being, instead it was the feeling that all rocks craved, it could feel the anceron through the hole. However instead of fit it's 4 kilometer bulk through the titchy hole it decided to try to use its beam to widen the hole. Rotating so the massive lens was looking directly down the long ice tunnel the rock fired the almost kilometer wide array of photon generation crystals. Having minimal control over the power output the ice didn't vaporize like it did with the more controlled ship based weaponry but the loud hissing from the bottom of the and downpour indicated that the laser was making progress.
In orbit
While the Gaferius Collectum was severely outclassed by the Isoterrans in sheer technology even they were very conscious about virus' of any sort. Outgoing, and incoming virus' being sent through not only a isolated system with zero hardline connection to the rest of the ships computing systems, but also a virtual machine inside said isolated computer network. This isolated network only connected to the ships communications systems, and bridge recording, and playback devices. Any data that needed to be transferred had to be done manually by a external hard drive that would have to swapped between the two systems. The Communications officer squinted her face at the files being sent in, running a normal extensive scan. The virus was caught, but she ran several more scans to confirm her findings. "Wayfinder Electus the Isoterrans seem to be sending us a virus?" She sounded confused almost, hurt by the revelation. The AI whom was surfing the ANCnet floated over a data-pad to Electus who started reading the findings. her metallic hand gently pressing against her hardened plasma face. Thinking for a long moment, she finally responded. "Do the playback in a isolated program, I don't want it to shut-down are bridge monitors." She nodded, and gently grabbed the screen of her station. A quick swipe turning the hardlight into a large floating screen that played back Captain Tiber's message. Electus nodded slowly, and responded again. "We are outgunned right now, so I want you to run this virus in your test environment. Figure out what it's doing, and what it can do." The communications officer gave a gently nod starting to get to work. Essentially trying to reverse engineer the virus by active probing, and testing. While Electus sat back in her seat slumping a bit going deeper into thought.
One of the other bridge crew reported quickly. "Communications probe is down ma'am. The rock seems to have disabled it."
Electus gave a small nod, and waved her hand for another launch to be prepped.
In the water
The COMMs relay buoy was absolutely denigrated. Luckily the remaining Gaferius subs were safe from the giant rocks beam. The two underwater maintaining a b-line course to the ruins.
Grey Gravel's response was considered for the most imperceptible of moments, as the AI considered the merits of explaining their durability, or rather lack of, compared to the sentient rocks, as opposed to diverting the conversation. This question was passed on to Captain Tiber.
Tiber stopped for a moment to think, scratching the fur below his mouth thoughtfully while staring at the orbital footage of the hole in the ice with the young boulder hovering above it, before deciding to attempt to play to Grey Gravel's ignorance. Thus, a reply was sent back to the gargantuan living asteroid that said "Please forgive our earlier complaints, your are of course correct. Will your family member be joining us in exploring the ocean?"
Meanwhile, within the Gaferious computer system, the virus (if the simple spyware could be considered a proper virus) continued attempting to do exactly as it had been attempting to do: gathering info on system parameters and storing them in a compressed format. To an outside 'observer', this would appear as a program that was attempting to access available folders, however if one checked, it was fairly obvious that no changes had been made. Nor was the program attempting to send information out of the system anywhere.
In Orbit
Grey gravel did the rock equivalent of a nod, the magnetic field humming for a moment as his view of the world was reinforced. Though he had no idea what this ocean the metal rocks spoke of. From context Grey Gravel assumed they meant the wet patches on the large rock below, considering that’s where the metal youngsters went as well as his youngest there was a greater likelihood that this was the case than not. Though that could be the name these metal beings used for this rock? Either way it seemed prudent to agree, “Yes my youngest will be exploring the Ocean. We sense food here and we assume you are here for the same reason?”
Baby Rock
The little Rock looked at the steaming hole about a kilometer and a half in diameter. The less than skillful digging done by a less than perfect laser ended with a lopsided hole that maybe the youngest could squeeze and force its way through. Rotating so that it’s thinnest side faced down the rock began pressing its bulk through the ice. Though the action ended being less moving through the hole and more crushing and ripping its way through a hole much too small for it to fit, even if the warm lubrication by still melting ice helped barely. As it forced its way down through the ice massive chunks of frozen water and regolith fell into the water below filling the ocean below with the sounds of an avalanche as rocking the icebergs surface.
orbit
The first cruiser, long gone sped up, bringing down the time table for it to make another pass, as the second one put out a warning, before activating its own orion drive to bring it closer faster, and in such a position that grey gravel would not be in between the cruiser and the Isoterran ship.
ground
The megatank sat on the “shore” throwing more scouts into the air, and more sonars into the water. Having to travel and lot less distance to the “shore” given the rocks carving abilities. But hey. Worse things could of happened, like the rock deciding to use lithobreaking.
Water
The tank trundled on, oblivious to the submarine so close to it, at current speeds it would be the last thing to arrive at the ruins- even as it watched the rock speed ahead through the water.
The AI in the communications station spent a few more minutes looking over the spyware before coming to the conclusion that's all it was. She looked up to Electus at the command station saying simply. "It's just simple spyware, Ma'am."
Electus nodded, and prepared another communication. Captain Tiber would get one more transmission.
"This is Wayfinder Electus, of the GCSS Electum. Cease any and all hostile activity immediately. Sending us spyware, virus', or other computer malware is seen as an extremely hostile act. Any further actions like this will be meant with swift hostile action against your forces."
The transmission was short, this one showing Electus with a thoroughly pissed look leaning over her station. After it was sent she spoke up. "Move the Electum into position above the Point of Interest and begin orbital bombardment, engage all weapon systems, and point defense. I want the Two Pax-Class between the Electum, and the Isoterran ship. I want production ramped for more subs."
From there the Salvation-Class dreadnought broke it's orbit and throttled to hover in orbit above the ruins. Begginning to pound the ice with mostly it's plasma based gun batteries. With it's position, it was able to get a total of 8 of it's weapon emplacements to angle at the target location. So a total of 8 heavy duty plasma cannons, 6 extremely long plasma railguns, and 4 balistic mass-drivers. per battery. The mass-drivers opted not to fire though. The two escort cruisers whipped into position on the side of the Electum that the Isoterran ship was at.
"Not quite food, but the idea is close enough." came the reply from D239. The bridge crew meanwhile, was discussing options with Captain Tiber, with the XO participating from the backup control center via internal comms. Currently, they could see the Gaferious ships changing into a defensive position, as what appeared to be the flagship began bombarding the ice over the area of interest. Additionally, large amounts of gamma flash beyond the orbital horizon of the planet indicated the engines of a starship, which they suspected was one of the Alphazero vessels.
"I'm starting to wonder if our malware was detected in their systems" mused Tiber out loud, his rhetorical question answered when the incoming angry transmission from Electus confirmed his suspicions. Addressing the Navigation officer, he ordered "Open me a line to them. I'll try to salvage this while we can." He then turned to the Operations officer "Ops, launch a wing of fighters, have them descend and keep an eye on the area above the hole in the ice. Keep some distance between them and the Gaferians though."
To Electus, a message returned, showing Captain Tiber, who looked and sounded quite genuine "My greatest apologies, Wayfinder Electus. I believe our own systems may be compromised from recent communications with other polities. We are beginning to purge our own systems now and suggest you do the same." This message was clear of any malware.
In case they didn't buy it however, Tiber had a sort of dead man's switch signal set up with headquarters, broadcasting them the all clear signal every few minutes. Information on the current situation was also forwarded to the submarine force, which was continuing to do as they had done before. Meanwhile, twenty-five SF-87 strikefighters launched from D239's midsection, dropping down out of orbit towards the hole in the ice, now widened by the juvenile rock's passage.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel ignored the still silent metal family that seemed to be moving around a ways away from them, while he thought it was rather rude to be floating up without even saying hi, he wasn't one to tolerate rudeness but if they weren't going to bother introducing themselves he wasn't going to bother. Turning his attention back to the smaller and more polite metal rock. "Speaking of food, what do you eat? I've never had much chance to speak to a metal rock before. Your kind is very rude and ignore us more often than not." Grey Gravel was indeed curious about the metal rocks habits and while it wasn't his first interaction with them it was the most productive.
Baby Rock
The small meteor hit a bit of a snag half way down the hole he had dug. Turns out his dimensions weren't small enough to fit all the way through on his backside and it got stuck on the edge of the recently widened hole. While it was annoying as the youngster struggled to force himself deeper into the ice it quickly became obvious that forcing itself through wasn't an option. Reversing out of the hole the mass of crystals and regolith decided it would have to widen it's hole further. So it did. The massive crystalline lens blasted out a beam of heat and light until the rock was practically exhausted. However it had completed its goal of widening the hole to a roughly two kilometer diameter wobbly edged circle.
Feeling accomplished at a task well done and with plenty of space between it's now scuffed and scratched surface and the still steaming edge of the hole the rock cut it's gravitational pulses and dropped from the sky down the hole and into the water. The massive wave rocketing up the sides of the bored opening and reaching great heights. The rock however sunk like a rock. The massive as well as the smaller eyes of the geological creature taking in it's first view of the dark ice filled depths.
It was quickly interrupted as the ocean floor quickly came up to meet its big lens, in an attempt to avoid it the small meteor activated the electro gravitics but it was too late. A huge BOOM spread through the ocean as the rock did its best impression off a pile driver into the ocean floor. The rock wasn't hurt much by this but its huge lens now sported a massive spider webbing crack down one side. Looking through the now cracked surface nearly brought the rock to despair, it had spent the last decade working on that lens and now it had a massive crack in it, thoughts of the things its siblings would say and the taunts nearly brought the youngling to the rock equivilant of tears as water forced it's way into the massive cavernous space under the cracked crystal dome.
There was one thing that brought the rock back from the brink, the smell of food. It could use that to fix the lens father wouldn't even notice if a little was gone. A new sense of purpose instilled in the relatively young mind and it pushed itself off the ocean floor, a large crystal chunk being left behind from the fractured lens. Slipping the rest of it's body into the water the rock followed the trail of anceron, smashing through low hanging icicles in it's way.
space
the poor, unfortunate cruiser noticed that there was a better then not chance that it was about to lose at least one of the remaining ground vehicles, so it decided to drop the lot of its own drop pods, aiming for the hole the rock had put in the ice, and the rather larger hole the dreadnought was pounding in the ice, there was still time to divert them- but hey, it was the fastest route into the ruins.
as this happened the cruiser on its way “out” sent a tightbeam to the gaferius dreadnought. “Did you also receive malware from the isoterran ship?”- And then, almost as a afterthought a second message was shoved through
“is it fine if vehicles are dropped onto the ruins after there is a hole in the ice?”
the planet
The tank on top of the ice faced a tsunami, but hey- there were worse things to have happen in front of you- but hey, that was high up on the list. The tank weathered it well, the wave crashing over it did not do much damage, besides throwing a track- and sending a good deal of the suspension straight to the scrap box in the sky. The one underwater did not fare much better- being picked up by the shockwave, moved a good bit, ending up on its side. The tossing screwed over the lot of the radars on top, and did a lot of damage to the one side that got scraped across the ground like a piece of chalk on a whiteboard.
Space "Ma'am return transmission from the Isoterran ship." Electus put a hand on her chin, and spoke up. "Ignore it, we are not risking any malware in our systems. Prepare transmission on a wide spectrum. I want everyone to hear it."
A moment later, said transmission would be sent "This is Wayfinder Electus of the Gaferius Collectum. Due to recent hostile actions we will not be receiving direct transmission. Please send light-beam based binary if you wish to communicate. In ten minutes a nuclear warhead will hit the ice. Please do not deploy any units above the surface in that time. Afterwards we will be dropping directly onto the ruins, as well as deploy our forces over the surface, If the.... 'Sentient' Rock comes any closer to the ruins we will begin bombarding it, and expect you to do the same."
Almost on cue the Dreadnought stopped it's bombardment. A single missile launching from one of it's tubes. The multiple stage nuclear warhead dropped straight down to the center of the projected ruins location. The 100 megaton bomb has a 72 mile radius of destruction and a actual shockwave zone of 300 miles. The missile was hopefully going to absolutely destroy the ice-shelf above the ruins, but the actual water absorb any blast downwards. Any units on the ground surely wouldn't fare well in the shockwave.
If scanners were paying close attention to the Gaferius Dreadnought they'd notice a outgoing transmission out of the system. Sending both the AI backups, info on the situation, and a request for reinforcements from the fleet. The dreadnought also began it's preparation for a mass ground unit drop.
Captain Tiber and the comms officer briefly conferred about how to answer Grey Gravel's question, debating on how much information they wanted and needed to get across. Responding to the living asteroid, they said "We consume many things, sometimes metals, sometimes biological material, sometimes other things."
Meanwhile, Tiber listened to the broadcast from Electus, his expression souring. "Ops, I want the Gaferious subs destroyed. Make it deniable though." As he finished giving these initial instructions, a new plan popped into his mind "Comms, I don't know about you, but I just heard Electus threatening the rock's child. If I were them I'd be quite annoyed at this..." Taking the cue, the comms officer sent a second message to Grey Gravel "Speaking of rude, it sounded to me like that 'Wayfinder Electus' just threatened your young, and it sounds like they might intend to steal whatever's under the ice."
A variety of cameras and other sensors watched the warhead fall from the Gaferious dreadnought towards the sizable crater that they had made into the ice sheet so far, creating a bright flash of light that promptly evaporated more of the solid water, slightly excavating the hole a bit further, while still leaving quite a ways to go. As the majority of the Isoterran forces were under water, they weren't affected by the detonation, apart from the flight of SF-86s, which were tossed around by the blast, causing several to collide and be destroyed.
Tiber's retaliatory orders to the submarine forces were unable to be carried out however, as the underwater shockwave from Grey Gravel's young raced through the subglacial ocean at would would've been Mach 4 had it been in the air, throwing them forward and causing them to tumble. Thanks to the flooded hull designs of the subs however, the damage to the underwater Isoterran forces was somewhat minimal, although some of the submarines now featured missing diving planes and several hull tears, which would in turn affect their acoustics. More of note however, was the damage to some of the exploration and mining equipment that the Submersible-Carrier was currently transporting. Attempting to perform what quick repairs they could, the forward group of subs continued advancing, while dropping several torpedoes to wait in silence for the Gaferious subs that would be coming behind them.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel nodded along with their answer to his original question. In part he had expected this answer, the logic of metal beings consuming and controlling metal was undeniable but the part about consuming organics sounded off. Turning his focus to his caves and caverns inside himself he looked at the many fungal growths that filled him. The main growth felt his focus as it sent questioning feelings down it's roots and into his crystalline veins. The over sized rock answered with assurances that nothing was wrong and he was just thinking about something. His fungal forest accepted this and returned to a calm state of satiation, absorbing the abundant light from his crystals and nutrients from the decayed bodies of those who once been.
That was when the second message from the Isoterrans registered in the Rocks geode. His surface lit up as crystal veins illuminated from within, his surface changing from a dull grey to a glowing white as his fury registered amongst his body. His gravitic crystals pulsed wildly and the three other youngsters that had been slowly slipping away to munch on more asteroids made a break for it as their parents rage caught them. His iron core spun faster as the Rock raised his voice to a bellowing roar, "THEY DID WHAT!" anything and everything magnetic around Grey Gravel felt his anger as it got pushed away, not quickly but as the metallic core got up to speed the field got stronger and stronger.
Baby Rock
The small-ish rock looked at the collection of ice in front of him and the close surface of the planet below. It contemplated the blockage for a while as it went over what it knew. The white stuff, ice, was very hard and might crack its lens further if he tried to push through it. The stone below while muddy probably wasn't deep enough for it to squeeze under the ice. These limited facts led it to a few conclusions, if it wanted to be done before his father moved on then he couldn't spend the time it would take to move into the rock and grow to the food source.
While it thought over it's options water finished flooding the internal chamber of its lens. Its thoughts were interrupted by the magnetic disturbance of Grey Gravel, from orbit. This put a spark in the rocks gravitic crystals and going for the quickest method, the rock turned on it's laser and slowly started cutting through the ice... Or tried to. The combination of heat and water inside his lens made this a much slowly process than before, however progress was made and the rock bashed through the weakened ice wall after a moment.
space
The cruiser sent two signals at the same time, both in plaintext. One omnidirectional and the second a tight beam to the Gaferis dreadnought, hoping to hide any backlash from the light beam from the Isoterran ship. The omnidirectional one was about as simple as it gets, a simple notice that the cruiser was about to start stationkeeping over the drop zone, areas where the Orion drive would pose a danger because of the transit, and suggested paths to avoid the zones. To the Gaferis ship it was rather far from simple, even if the words were. “will you interfere if this turns into a shooting war?”
ground
The surface tank was well prepared for the nuke flash, and overpressure. However the weather balloons and drones were not, the drones got knocked around while the flash sent the sensitive equipment to the ground after the balloons holding it aloft got popped like any balloon pops when exposed to a laser. But there were always more drones to be launched, balloons to be floated, and the damage done minimal, the overpressure that would kill a person was accounted for in the design of the land ship, so it just kept on trucking.
The GCSS Electum maintained it's current position. A second, a third, a fourth. While they could land something to bore a explosive or nuke into the ice to make the ice shelf break sooner that took time. The Gaferius Dreadnought kept dropping the same magnitude of nuclear warhead on the same spot until it finally broke through. Shooting them in one at a time increments as to not send their own nukes off course. The two Escort ships stayed positioned between the Dreadnought, and the Isoterran vessel.
A quick message was sent to the Alphazero vessel in a light beam. "If the Isoterrans continue cyber attacks, or fire upon anyone we will engage. Do not accept any transmission from the Isoterran vessel."
On the ground the Gaferius subs were not fairing well while being tossed around on the ocean floor. One of the remaining two cracking like a egg sending water flooding into it's internals, while the other managed to escape with relatively minor damage to it's conning tower, and left fins.
Orbit & Surface
The magnetic and gravitic reverberations were easily felt by D239, the newly strengthened magnetic field messing with the vessel's MAD sensors, requiring a quick adjustment from the navigation AI. Within the bridge, Captain Tiber smiled, showing his sharp fangs as he viewed the sentient rock's rage. "Why don't we replay the message again for them" he said, addressing the comms officer, who complied by sending the part of Electus's message to Grey Gravel. Within, the rock could easily hear the part where Electus said "If the.... 'Sentient' Rock comes any closer to the ruins we will begin bombarding it, and expect you to do the same."
Following up to this, Tiber had another message sent to the giant living rock "Perhaps it might be wise to eliminate Electus before they can attempt to harm your child? They seem fairly serious, judging by the orbital bombardment. We estimate they'll be through the ice soon, and then they'll be able to hit your little one when it arrive at the hole."
Due to all the nuclear flashes however, the Isoterrans were not able to tell just how soon the ice was to be gone through, as warhead after warhead from the Gaferious dreadnought detonated in an ever deepening crater, from which large amounts of steam bellowed among the flashes of white light. The sound of ice cracking could be heard, as the sustained thermal stress caused fracturing in the solid water. Soon however, the dreadnought's sensors would detect a difference in return as the last of the ice gave way to the black water below. Through the crater, which was now a several hundred meter wide hole around a kilometer deep, they could now access the ocean over the area of interest.
Underwater
Having mostly recovered from the young rock's underwater shockwave, the forward group of Isoterran subs continued on their way, having easily regained their bearings by simply listening to the source of seismic disturbances in the ice and water from the nuclear barrage. As they continued, rearmost sub listened with its passive sonar until it had located the Alphazero tank on the bottom, continuing to quietly stalk it on low power.
The torpedoes dropped by the lead group meanwhile, continued drifting, sinking slowly as the group of Gaferious submarines came closer and closer. When the subs had come within a predetermined distance, their sound profiles were checked against data recorded by the rearmost sub during its wait near the initial entry in the ice. Once this was confirmed, they spun up their impellers, each shooting forward towards one of the target submarines.
In Orbit
Grey Gravel’s anger was fueled quite nicely by the translated threat to his family. The nearby debris clouds quickly, for a Rock, started getting pulled in by the increased gravitational pull creating a large cloud of stuff that slowly orbited around Grey Gravel. “Yes I do believe that would be prudent.” While his new shroud of rocks and metal did block his view somewhat he could still see out and he spotted something that would make a nice opening act.
“HEY! You unshiny fucks! Catch!” Grey Gravel latched onto one of the larger asteroids, maybe a couple of kilometers in diameter, and slingshot it around himself directly at the pair of metal rocks. Quickly following behind it by thrusting directly at the biggest fucker he could see, his gravitic field pulling a storm of debris behind him.
The younger rocks had by that point had reached deeper into the debris belt and got ready for a show, plenty of snacks floating towards them as they watched.
Underwater
Baby rock was getting a bit worried. He heard the garbled anger of his father and while it wasn't the first time Grey Gravel went off in a bit of a rage the youngster knew something was off this time. Not that the young rock had time to care, it had caught a thick scent of the anceron and it was hungry. The laser kept boring through the ice as it kept approaching.
Space
The cruiser continued transmitting where it was going. Making its way to the side of the Isoterran ship, where it came to rest roughly “broadside” with it, having a slight spin as it prepared for a new orbital drop by disconnecting the rest of the large pods that would bring some more super heavy tanks to the surface, hopefully without the earth shattering crash this time.
Planetside
The tank on the ground continued sitting around, as it started launching the few satellites it had in its largest missile silos into orbit above the zone, put out of the line of fire between the dreadnaught and big, angry rock.
The poor tank in the ocean continued sitting on its side, seeming to be mortally wounded, even as it tried to right itself with the creative use of explosives.
"Entering a code red, begin combat protocols." Electus began, contemplating on fleeing, but deciding to do a little of both. "Engines to full, begin Gaferian Empire, Counter Crax scenario." The other AI aboard got to work. The engines going to full blast. The spherical ship moving 'backwards' to gain distance from the asteroids. Moving away, and at a angle upwards from them. While they were expecting to possibly get shot at, they were not expecting to be fired upon, but a giant rock.
The rock hit true, and slammed straight into the hull of the Dreadnought. Despite the ships shielding trying to stop it. Both the plasma, and gravitational shields trying to stop it to no effect. A combinations of the ships sheer size, and the amount of armoring allowed it to survive the hit. The rock hitting in the middle of several of it's emplacements. Taking out two engines, and four weapon emplacements. The very 1km in diameter weapon emplacements that began firing upon Gray Gravel. A total of 44 emplacements with a mix of plasma cannons, mass drivers, and railguns. All mostly fixed. Bit's of sparks, and flames coming from the impact point. The rock that Grey Gravel had sent becoming lodged into the ships hull. The two escort ships opened fire as well, but they would have minimal impact. They were meant to fight fighters, and smaller cruisers that could evade the Dreadnoughts weapons not a giant rock.
Surface:
The Gaferius submarines did not pose much of a threat, nor did they detect the Isoterran subs. Using only rudimentary, and very primitive tech the subs were not only of shoddy design, but hastily done so as well. If the Isoterrans wanted them dead, they had little in their power to stop it.
Space
Tiber smiled an evil grin, flashing his sharp fangs, as he listened to Grey Gravel's magnetic shout, while watching the living mountain throw a boulder at the Gaferious dreadnought. "Excellent work, Comms. I think we have made a valuable ally today." However, like so many moments during their exploration and interaction in this system so far, there was once again something spoiling his fun. That being the Alphazero cruiser that seemed to be trying to enter closer-than-point-blank range.
"Warn the Alphazero craft to stay away from our vessel, and maneuver away from it." ordered Tiber, causing D239 to rotate and accelerate perpendicular to the cruiser's direction of travel away from the unwanted cruiser. Accompanying this was a message to the Alphazero warship, saying "Alphazero warship, you are entering our our safety envelope, please cease and do not attempt to follow or we will have to consider your intentions hostile."
This warning was punctuated by all of the weapons batteries on D239 being activated, though none actually fired. However it would show that they were prepared to shoot should something go wrong.
Underwater
The torpedoes raced towards the Gaferious subs, aiming towards the rear section where the engines likely were, each impacting the shoddy designs and exploding their large warheads. The damage was immense, as water rapidly began flooding in, pushed by the pressure of the ocean around the vessel. Even if any of the subs survived, they were likely immobile now and taking on water quickly.
The loitering sub, which was still stalking the Alphazero tank, picked up the noise of the explosions from the torpedo detonations, as did the submarines ahead. Continuing on, the forward group continued rushing towards the area of interest, while the loitering attack submarine continued stalking the tank while waiting on new orders.
Space
Grey gravel gritted through what pain he felt as his surface was scoured by lasers and crystals shattered by ballistic rounds. The plasma arcing at him dispersing at his hate filled screams. Seeing his opponent trying to flee like a coward Grey Gravel roared loudly through the magnetic band and pushed himself to follow and unleashed the multitude of laser beams from his surface crystals into the metal plating as he plowed into the already weakened hull.
Planet Surface
The baby rock heard it's parents battle cries from it's position under the ice but decided it was better to keep going at it's current task then looking for trouble where he didn't need it.
Once the isoterran ship gave the warning and started to move the cruiser attempted murder. Unloading the banks of its VLS directly at it, burning scorches onto itself while using the rail assist to get them to a “safer” distance from itself faster. Even as this happened the projectors on the outside of the ship covered it in shards and shreds of reflective hardened aluminum while the CIWS guns that were most definitely in range each fired 150mm nuclear shells at a rate measured in thousands a second, using nothing more advanced than binary propellants. The ECM it managed to put out was nothing exceptional, even if it was able to put a lot of energy into it with its “hot” reactors. The shells and missiles were not aimed directly at the Isoterran ship, or where it was going. from a ballistic perspective they were on route for a miss.
Under the water the tank was still on its side, it appeared to be kinda done, unless it would be able to somehow flip itself over while on the surface the tank launched its complement of antisat missiles, and started moving, hoping to doge the orbital strike it knew was coming in its near future as it deployed a few flying drones and land vehicles that tried their best to mimic its nonvisual signatures, even as they all covered themselves in black smoke to hopefully diffuse a orbital laser- or leave a kinetic shell as a near miss- hopefully.
Space
The Electum's hull buckled as Grey Gravel plowed into it, the seemingly impregnable framing and bulkheads yielding to the far more solid rock moving at starship velocity. Onboard, Electus desperately began enacting damage control measures, while ordering the dreadnought's escorts to reposition so they could attempt targeting Grey Gravel through the impact crater in the hull. There was little else they could do now, as the dreadnought's own weapons no longer were really capable of hitting their rocky enemy.
D239 continued directly away from the Alphazero cruiser that had begun firing upon it, attempting to widen the gap with its impressive acceleration, while its weapons batteries and other defensive systems activated, covering its flight with its own electronic warfare and decoys. Eerie green energy bolts spat from its main and point defense force guns, the supernatural projectiles tracking and changing course as they locked into one of the incoming missiles, before smashing into them like a railgun round. They were assisted by the invisible touches of the point defense laser arrays, which caused many of the missiles to suddenly explode as the beams flicked around the battlefield with what would have been blinding speed, had they been visible in the first place. A cloud seemed to emerge from the vessel as the frigate desperately launched all of its strikefighters to assist in countering the missiles.
Purple plasma beam fire issued forth towards the offending cruiser in retaliation, but this was really a losing battle against the cruiser's likely superior firepower and armor, so more emphasis was placed on minimizing damage and running, which they did. Thankfully however, their direct path away from the cruiser meant that the nuclear shells, which were aimed around the vessel instead of at them, failed to hit at all.
Two messages were sent from D239, one back home to request help, and the other issuing new orders to the submarine forces on the planet below. This meant that for now, Alphazero's surface forces seemed safe.
Underwater
While Alphazero's surface forces were safe at the moment, the same could not be said of their underwater tank. The attack submarine which had been shadowing it sprang into action at a moment's notice from the new instructions, firing several large torpedoes at the tank. Altering course, it began silently circling while listening to the tank and its torpedoes closing in.
The Gaferious submarines, now critically damaged from the previous strike, and lacking most methods of damage control due to their intentionally shoddy designs, were quickly sinking towards their crush depth, immobile and flooding.
Over the wider window the frigate would have escaped. Its larger pool of fuel to pull on to escape them. Even if it could use its superluminal point defence guns to pick them off one by one by one. But this range, with this weight of missiles it would take more then what the frigate had. But still, they exploded in their 100s.
But then the cruisers plasma gun came through, raking along the spent VLS tubes reducing them into a cloud of gas in spite of the ceramic and steel hatches as it burnt deeper. Reaching the ceramic plates that made up one of the layers of bulk armour and being deflected out to the sides of the ship, ripping up what was not directly hit while leaving a glowing white scar in the section as the “rotation” the ship had started to bring the scar around.
The missiles reached “arming” distance- a minimum safe distance from the cruiser and reoriented to point at the frigate. The anti-shipping casabas going off in a precisely timed detonation so that they would all get their chance, without being burned up by the others. The rounds fired by the CIWS also went, sending their bomb pumped lasers, even if each one would be relatively insignificant there were thousands. many of them fulfilling their designed purpose of targeting things like strike fighters, or missiles. With thousands more on the way, only mildly dampened by how many were disrupted in the blast.
On the surface the antisat missiles were starting to get there, however slowly, as the main “cannons” on the craft cycled 4 times, ejecting shells onto the “deck” where they rolled out onto the snow, and firing a few large howitzer shells that were fired on a ballistic trajectory to the other hole in the ice, with intent to burn their boosters to slow down, and land safely enough in the snow.
Underwater the tank detected its doom incoming, and knew it had only one correct response for lack of a torpedo to send in return. The autoloader reached deep into the hold, picking out the correct shell to raise up, and point through the turret at the torpedo, hoping to intercept it before it could make true contact and break the tank. It was a very important observer, even if it was well and truly disabled. But until that time the autoloader brought it up and was overloaded, instead of twisting the shell into line with the breach it kept going with a shriek of twisting metal, pointing the gargantuan artillery shell through the unarmoured side of the turret where god willing it would be able to send its explosively propelled kinetic penetrator into the torpedo.
In Space
Grey Gravel felt nothing but hate for this foe, it threatened his children and for that insulting it deserved only death and he would given it a death that it would not survive.
The generated gravity well that surrounded the rock changed direction and scale. Not only was it now effecting the rock but the ship around it. And the field was pulling down towards the planet.
Space
In a moment, D239's chances, which had seemed at least reasonable if slightly undesirable, decreased to nearly zero, as the cruiser's shells and missiles detonated all at once. Strikefighters suddenly exploded as if by the will of an unseen entity, as invisible nuclear-pumped lasers vaporized them, while the frigate itself had its shields overwhelmed and armor ablated by the missile's laser warheads.
The effect was immediate, as the vessel's engines shut off and it stopped accelerating, the damage visibly apparent from the holes in it. Aboard, Captain Tiber had been killed, and so the executive officer had taken command, sending an update on the request for help and ordering the crew to undergo vessel anti-capture protocols. This involved erasing files and prepping all remaining warheads and explosives on the vessel to remotely detonate, while the biological crew readied for evacuation in the escape pods.
--
Electus looked over the readings from the vessel sensors and system diagnostics. It was clear now that the dreadnought, mighty as it was, was doomed because of the aggressive rock's actions. But if that was the way it was going to be, she fully intended to make it and everyone else pay. Issuing orders for the other AI on the ship to begin evacuating to the escort vessels, she began throttling up the reactor, removing safeguards and setting it to overload, while also activating the engines to full power on a vector that would cancel the ship's orbital velocity and push it straight down onto the area of interest.
The sudden increase in acceleration caused groans throughout the vessel, and would likely be felt by Grey Gravel as the entry wound he had made compressed slightly behind him. Perhaps unbeknownst to him though, he was now the only passenger onboard the rapidly dropping vessel, as Electus wrote a few last scripts that would keep her work in motion and evacuated to the nearby escorts, which then began charging their FTL drives to depart the system.
Underwater
The torpedo honed in on the tank, unaware of the shell being aimed at it and unable to properly care about the matter. Whether or not it was aware of the problem didn't really matter though, as the tank shell was somehow detonated, throwing shrapnel from the side of the turret out towards the torpedo. Due to the density of the water, neither the shrapnel nor the kinetic penetrator were travelling very quickly, however between it and the resulting shockwave, the torpedo detonated prematurely nearby the tank hull, the explosion smashing the side of it up and causing some flooding, but doing severely reduced damage compared to if it had actually hit as intended.
The attack submarine listened nearby to the detonation, however it also detected the noise from the tank's internal machinery, as the crew deduced that their attack had been unsuccessful. To counter this, two more torpedoes were launched, and ordered to take significantly different angles, while the submarine continued circling in a wide arc.
Upper Atmosphere
Grey Gravel pulled with all his strength to throw the ship off course. Until he saw what he at first mistook for one of his uncle’s offspring rise from the surface.
Ground Level
The ice gave way to the unrelenting power of gravity and an iceberg rose into the sky. The young asteroid at its center went straight up and rocketed towards orbit, even if the ice blinded him to the huge ship above him.
The Asteroid Belt
The three other rock children had been watching with interest. As the smaller metal rocks fought near them. Once the light show calmed down one of them had the rather stupid Idea to go take a look. This one was an oddball with yellow flecks in his grey crystals. And it powered up its drives and wandered into the battle area towards the defeated ship.
While the titanic tank on the ground turned to face where the dreadnought was going to explode, hoping to survive the overmind send a transmission at the frigate through the cruiser to the totalled Isoterran frigate. Hoping to get this over with before the rocks could get close enough to become a problem. or at least that they would not make themselves a problem once they got close.
“If the escape pods still exist you will have to take them if you intend to survive. Offering surrender is morally correct but i do not feel for you.
The hivemind has come to the conclusion that they would either surrender, or explode sometime between now and right after when the rescue party would arrive. But not exactly knowing who would make them explode. It could be assumed that they were spending their time putting the local stockpile of small arms into the local stockpile of sensitive information. But how far they were willing to go was a mystery.
Space
As the falling dreadnought approached the last kilometer before the ground, its reactors, having built up long enough, finally went critical and detonated. In a moment, a second sun appeared, growing larger and larger, which vaporized a large amount of surface ice, before receding. Following it was the blast wave, rocketing outward at the speed of sound, and throwing debris from the vessel for hundreds of kilometers.
Meanwhile, D239's external comms antennas had been destroyed by the withering rain of missiles from Alphazero, along with the majority of their sensors, so they were unable to watch the dreadnought's detonation, nor hear the Overmind's message to them. Currently, they had shut down one of the ZPE reactors, while keeping the other, as well as the magic core at a low idle, which meant that for now, they were at less risk from their own ship, although this didn't preclude outside issues.
Underwater
By now, the forward Isoterran submarine force was nearing the area of interest, somehow being the only ones left underwater. Then the shockwave from the dreadnought's detonation hit the ice and exposed water above them, transferring through into the lower ocean at a weakened magnitude, causing some flooding in the submersible carrier, which held their exploration equipment.
This lack of a response had two responses, boarding the ship- hard and dangerous or asking again, but louder.
Normally, the outer metal of a ship would prevent such things from happening, but there were a few gaps in it. Pushing the majority of the power output of a few nuclear reactors through the cruisers radio arrays would make most anything that could be described as “flat” and “metal” along with a few other things like speakers, metal pipes, and wire mesh act as a speaker in its own special way, inefficient and horrible quality audio, but still audio without the requirement of having an antenna. If it was “grounded” to the rest of the ship that made it a lot higher quality but it was not strictly required.
On the other hand the tank had definitely seen better days, it was meant to survive in the general area of the nuclear explosion, but it was far from ideal. Good thing it had backup sensors to deploy after the first set was blown out. It probably would not have been worth recovering if that was ever the plan.
Meanwhile the other cruiser dumped a very very large portion of its munitions on a path to land on where the Overmind knew the ruins were, since this was clearly not going to work out, even if they would take a few hours to get there and there was a choice to not detonate them.
In Space
Grey Gravel watched as his opponent exploded. It was an odd sensation as his perspective seemed to slow down and remember the dull glow breaking through the shell that he was embedded in just before an eruption of light and pain filled his mind. The explosion took the route of least resistance which just so happened to be the collapsed section under Grey Gravel and as the plume of power forced its way out that energy combined with the rocks own gravity engine trying to pull itself and the dreadnaught out of the planet sent the quickly atomizing asteroid rocketing away. The pain as he lost hundreds upon hundreds of meters of rock and crystal almost instantly fed his need to escape pressing himself harder and harder to move faster, he had already lost his eyes behind him as the explosion ate away at his surface so he couldn’t see if the younger rock had made it away but his mind was too focused on escaping with his own life to care.
Then it was over. The light faded and the pain dulled to overheated crystals and molten lava quickly cooling on his newly exposed surface. The elder rock just floated there for a moment trying to get the throbbing headache of losing part of his mind over with, until he was jolted back to reality by his offspring bumping into the still molten sore area which elicited a magnetic groan from the parent. The little rock backed up a bit then orbited until he was in sight of his fathers good side, the little rock was singed but seemed okay which faintly made the pain more tolerable for some reason.
Oddball
Leaving his other siblings to watch the fireworks display that the thing their father had just kicked the ass of the you Rock approached the what seemed to be dead metal thing that his father had been talking too before the battle with the big shiny ball. He was curious to see what it was and maybe even wear it around or see how it fit with its stony shell.
The rock approached the hulk and looked at it with all the scrutiny it’s many eyes could handle. “Buahr hale jahe?” The poorly modulated magnetic core of the child tried to talk but failed on its first attempt. It tried again enunciating in wide waves of magnetic interference. “W-a-h-t a-R U?”
Space
About 30 light seconds away, a Plasma-class battlecruiser flanked by two frigates identical to D239 arrived. Quickly locating the Alphazero cruiser circling around the wrecked Isoterran frigate, they raised shields and interdiction, surging forward and arming weapons, while attempting to contact D239's crew.
D239 however, having had both its internal and external comms arrays destroyed outright or damaged beyond repair, was unable to hear either the Isoterran reinforcements, nor the poor enunciation of the young rock that was now attempting to speak to it. However, both Commander Korvis and the rest of the crew were definitely able to make out the message from the Overmind, as it was broadcast in relatively poor quality all over the ruined frigate's hull.
Unaware that help had arrived, she was starting to wonder just how long rescue might take, although she was still loathe to leave their fate up to Alphazero. Deciding to further buy time, she ordered a few of the lowest-ranking crewmembers into one of the escape pods, launching it with a distress beacon.
Underwater
Meanwhile, the Isoterran forward submarine group had arrived at the area of interest, finding a gargantuan underwater canyon several kilometers wide, with walls stretching far below into the inky black of the depths. Slowing their forward advance, the group began descending and activated their active sonar, giving them a better view of the terrain.
Grey Gravel
Grey Gravel looked down on his destroyed opponent, the many pieces of which now scattered over the planets surface. His aching side took some minor solace in the fact that he had come out of the battle alive, but the new holes in his memory would never be replaced. That didn't mean it would never heal, the blackened crater already beginning to be covered in a layer of stone as parts of his shell moved to cover the area. However something in the area would help accelerate the healing and regrowth of his body, something right below him and now with a clear line directly to it.
After making sure the younger rock was okay and telling it to go join its siblings while he checked on something Grey Gravel let the planets arms pull him down towards the massive hole in the white surface of the ice. The atmosphere lit up as the rock turned into a fireball at the almost hostile entry profile.
Oddball
Something detached from the metal creature in front of it. The young rock had no idea if this was a good or bad thing, was it supposed to come off? From what it knew things coming off weren't a particularly good thing? Then again when its parent wanted to send a message home it broke off a small piece and sent it home? Maybe this was something similar? The more the rocks' relatively small mind thought about it the more it sounded right, I mean if it couldn't talk maybe this was an attempt to communicate.
The asteroid reached out and grabbed the metal pod and pulled it closer until the pod touched its surface. Then it slowly began sinking into the stone, it was as if the stone was quick sand that the pod had fallen into.
Upon seeing that perhaps keeping interdiction up when in less than friendly space was a good idea, and that a quick and easy FTL jump of an escape would not be happening the two cruisers responded with cold calculated panic.
The one that had not been wounded by the frigate started moving, hoping to put the planet in between it, and the big scary things over there. Assisted by the fact that it was already going that way.
The one that had already taken a hit did the same, hoping to intercept with the second in the “shadow” of the planet where they could leave, and leave quickly, hoping to limit pursuit given that the missiles and guns from the cruisers would be at a major advantage running away and firing back at a pursuing foe.
Space
As it was pulled in, the escape pod emitted a multitude of comms signals, attempting to address the young rock and call for help, while firing its thrusters in a futile attempt to escape entombment in the living asteroid's surface.
Meanwhile, the trio of Isoterran warships loomed ever closer to the area where D239's wreckage, the Alphazero cruisers, and the young rock were. Having already activated their interdiction on arrival, a quick escape was currently impossible. Seeing the cluster of munitions that the damaged cruiser was creating, they began firing nuclear antiship missiles at both the swarm and it, while targeting the undamaged cruiser with their beam weaponry. However, being in an unsuitable position to stop Grey Gravel, all they could do was warn the submarine forces to dive as deep as possible to avoid the large impactor racing through the atmosphere.
Underwater
The submarine forces within the trench rotated their bows downward at a nearly 45 degree angle, running their engines at maximum throttle and flooding any available ballast volume that wasn't already full, moving downward as quickly as possible.
Grey Gravel
The blue hole in the ice approached fast as he fell towards the planet below. He pushed against the gravity well of the big white rock and slowed as his surface stopped being on fire but his injury through him off. Not used to his new size and the missing gravitic power that went with that mass he failed to slow all the way before he hit the surface. The hole, which wasn't big enough, was now big enough and Grey Gravel was partialy submerged as he hit rock bottom in the worst way possible.
However there was yet another road block in Grey Gravels plan to patch himself up. Even with his recently reduced radius the trench where the proverbial bandage was only two kilometers in width.... Grey Gravel was nine. This posed a unique issue that the Rock rarely had to face, tight places being almost none existent in the vastness of space, but it wasn't insurmountable. He just needed to....
Grey gravels surface rippled as he spat out a crystal, which promptly sank like a rock
Odd ball
The metal thing felt odd as it went down unable to do more than feel where it was after it sunk out of sight the young Rock didn't see the thrusters fire. However once the pod was fully submerged it was swallowed quickly the rock around it contracting and expanding. Inside it was like slowly being crushed at the rock pressed down around them, until it wasn't and they fell into what appeared to be a cave network. A fully pressurized and mostly breathable cave network at least according to any external sensors.
"Hello-Greetings-Welcome." What entered their minds wasn't words but more a feeling that was translated into the nearest equivalents. The dense crystal veins on the walls glinted as a blue glow emanated from a pillar of pure Visonite that sat half embedded in the wall near the pod, and from it came the almost childlike and powerful mind of the being that had swallowed them hole.
The damaged cruiser responded to the nuclear missiles with its own nuclear weapons, while each of the missiles only had three of the 155mm rounds fired at them it was predicted that it might work out for some of them. The isoterrans were technologically advanced and unknown, so it was expected that a second wave of interceptors would have to be launched as it was all dialed in.
The undamaged one had it worse off, the beams plastered one side and the pusher plate for the orion drive, the plate holding up extremely well as it was designed with withstand this sort of thing as the one side was only saved from extreme hull penetration by it being at a strong angle, causing the beams to plaster themselves along the main plates and rip up everything above them. A second hit to that side like that would either be fatal or damage the ship to the point of no repair. Several secondary detonations happened as the rest was incinerated or ripped up, mostly the binary propellants for the cannons, and the liquid nitrogen used to “cold” launch the missiles. It looked a lot worse than it was even if it reduced the ships combat effectiveness by roughly a fifth as it rounded the “horizon” of the planet. Launching a few dozen anti shipping missiles around the “horizon” to give the isoterran battlegroup something to think about other than the other cruiser that they would have a good chance to shoot up in a similar situation to itself.
The cruiser that had yet to make its way to safety angled itself to maximise its chances at survival from the soon to be oncoming beams, leaving it up to the other one to launch the next wave of interceptors with several bursts from its maneuvering atomic rockets.
Underwater
The underwater shockwave from Grey Gravel's arrival shot through the water at the speed of a supersonic aircraft, rapidly catching up to and smashing up the Isoterran submarine force within the canyon. While their remains slowly sank to the bottom, they were joined by the crystal Grey Gravel had dropped. If it had any sort of sensory ability, it would sense that the ruins seemed to be, not below them, but towards the other end of the trench, which stretched inland and into the coast, about 29 kilometers away.
Space
At the launch of the missiles towards them from both cruisers, the two frigates escorting the battlecruiser launched into action, emitting light green pulses of light from the glowing orbs on their sides. These energy pulses locked onto each missile, arcing and attempting to hit them, while all three vessels activated jamming to throw off the enemy targeting. Meanwhile, the battlecruiser continued firing its beam weaponry at the damaged cruiser, creating a storm of dark purple plasma beam fire and red-pink disintegrator beams, while charging its semi-spinal weapons. Nothing was launched at the undamaged cruiser, which had fled over the horizon, although they remained on guard in case it planned on orbiting behind them.
The three crewmembers within the escape pod waited in place, looking out the window and at the pod's meagre sensors, attempting to ascertain what exactly was going on. First they had been absorbed by the rock, and now seemed to be in some sort of cavern. Between all of this, they nearly jumped when the telepathic feeling appeared in their heads. "Who are you!?" one of them spoke aloud.
The cruiser that was able to be targeted had an extremely rough time, ending up in a similar if moderately worse state to the other one as it was able to crest the “horizon” of the planet ahead of the battlecruisers charging spinals. Meeting up with the other damaged one behind their new and improvised shield. Putting a good pile of missiles out around the other side of the planet in a hope to catch the battle cruiser and frigates unaware if they decided to chase the cruisers when they got around to running.
The missiles saw the “ciws” and started the cycle of maneuvers and counter maneuvers, one that they were bound to lose. But that was ok, they were never meant to deal killing damage to the newfound enemy, they got in as close as they could before each missile determined that its doom was here and that it was time to explode, sending their gargantuan casaba in the direction of the battlecruiser. No hope to kill it or penetrate armour, but it might deal damage to the exposed optics and barrels of the turrets firing at the cruiser.
Grey Gravel Avatar
The crystal chunk hit the bottom of the crevasse before starting to glow. Of course this deep and in the massive shadow of his own body this was not very useful in the silt clouded water. Thankfully Grey gravel didn’t need to rely on visuals as the crystal lifted itself off the ocean floor with what small gravity control it had and began the trip towards the smell of ancerium.
The avatar ignored all the small variety of sea life that took interest in the bright light, some tried biting the three meter collection of blue and gold crystals, others just latched on or got stuck on the outcropping. For being underwater and not hydrodynamic at all the avatar picked up a decent amount of speed.
Oddball
The voice in the heads of the crew grew quiet for a moment as the comparatively massive and infantile mind thought over this response. It was then as if a dam shattered and a torrent of information flooded into everyone. Maps of the asteroid, intricate crystal structures that made up the body of the creature that surrounded them, twisting caverns that were made by natural means and whim alike, views from millions of eyes that stared out into space at millions of stars, the feeling of gravity pressing and pulling against a surface that isn’t theirs. A single feeling, word or emotion broke through the haze “This is me.”
As the swarm of missiles closed in, many were destroyed by a combination of the frigate's force guns and its point defenses. However, enough got through that upon detonation, the frigates sustained enough minor damage to discourage them from longer-ranged combat, buying the cruisers some time.
This was alright though, as the squadron of vessels, fairly satisfied that the Alphazero forces were focused on running rather than staying to interfere, turned much of their attention to dealing with the rocks and wreckage of their vessel. The battlecruiser rotated, bringing its six semi-axials to bear on where Grey Gravel sat, protruding out of the ice. The giant rock was currently focused nearly entirely on gaining access to the food source that it felt was close by, while otherwise only maintaining enough gravitic field to keep itself from tipping over. Which made him the perfect target to be removed from inconveniencing the Isoterrans any further.
In an instant, Grey Gravel, and the entire area of the planet that he was in, simply ceased to exist, in a gargantuan explosion caused by the impact of the six relativistic axial shells. Oddball looked on, its child-like mind growing quite fearful, even as it realized that its sudden telepathic message seemed to have overwhelmed and killed the strange things within the small metal rock that the larger one had released. A single thought ran through its lithoid mind: run. And this it did, while beginning to disgorge the tiny metal rock.