Post by dokkywokky on Aug 3, 2023 18:33:53 GMT
---NOTE: THIS POST IS BEING ACTIVELY CORRECTED. EXPECT GRAMMAR, TENSE, PACING, AND READING ORDER ISSUES.---
There was a star that the galaxy at-large called ‘SBN-ACE-1079-6760-M’.
SBN-ACE-1079-6760-M was a red dwarf star with seven planets surrounding it, ranging from two rocky midgets and a superhot dwarf planet to a a pair of minor gas giants in the middle of the system. Endearingly, it was called ‘Seven Aces,’ but not just for that reason. The system was once a smuggling route. Still was, if you asked the right people. Just off the map, low luminance, plenty of planets to hide around, and most importantly far away from efficient routes and communication areas. Pirates, lowlifes, highlifes; used to be anyone who wanted to lay low often swung by here for a few solar minutes, then hightailed it to the next system in the route - no sightseeing, no fuss, just in and out. The nickname at some point was a double entendre back when it was used more often, where there were seven aces for every person who came here: seven ways to get off the radar. Of course, everybody has their prime, and while it still saw the odd use here and there the Seven Aces were relatively unbothered for the past however many years. At least, from an outsider's view. For a long, long while, most of the galaxy had had no idea that Seven Aces was inhabited by a race of any conceivable intelligence beyond the animalistic.
From light-years away, it appeared peaceful and quiet - and even probes sent here hard largely turned up blank slates.This had all changed when a Kel’thulian scout was passing through Seven Aces for a dark run, and had picked up the exotic traces of an Alcubierre trail by sheer coincidence. And from there, the scout had briefly taken a detour on its mission to try and discover the source. They found ships out in the depths of space. Ships that looked not like solid objects, but like chrome bubbles and spires. And they followed them; and they found an eighth planet, hidden from the eyes of the outside galaxy because of its unfortunate positioning between the two gas giants ‘ACE 3’ and ‘ACE 4’. It was a water world, warmed by geothermal vents and made turbulent and sporadic by the pull of its twin neighbors - the king and queen of the system. In light of these discoveries, the Kel’thuls had been given a coincidental name for the planet by the outside galaxy.
Officially, it was the new ‘ACE 4’. But casually, people called it ‘Jesta’. And Jesta was inhabited by the same chrome bubble ships the Kel’thul scout had discovered. It was a new species that didn’t just seem to use soft tech, but liquid tech - and they inhabited a region of the galaxy so utterly unproductive in traditional radiowaves and FTL transmissions that it had been named barren or otherwise type-zero by the greater galaxy. The people who lived on Jesta knew this very well, and they had been aware of the greater galaxy for far, far longer than it had been aware of them. And they had a different name for the planet, and different plans than presumably anyone who came across it - be it with guns or gifts. These people called their watery planet ‘Arashi-no-Yoru’. These people lived lives on Arashi-no-Yoru, and had cultures on Arashi-no-Yoru, and - most shocking of all for an interstellar civilization - these people had wars on Arashi-no-Yoru. All the greater galaxy saw was a stormy, wet little ball called Jesta, and covered in a loose lattice of unknown, spherical chrome ships. Soon, they would be getting a much closer look.
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The bridge of the leading vessel, a Weaver-class factory dreadnought named the "KNS Prophet of Valor", was quiet and calm. Silent beeping and tapping as people got to work. At the helm was Fleetmaster Al'Ah'Ni, who took a deep breath and looked over his bridge while also watching the two gas giants in their slow orbit, knowing of Jesta lying between. Up to him walked one of his intel officers, who bowed. "Fleetmaster, we have arrived in the system."
"Good, and the Sachi'vais?" "They are on approach. We are making preparations to engage in Operation Sugarsea upon their arrival."
"Give me a status report on all systems and units."
"Ha'ac.”
The Intel officer nodded and pulled up a datapad, linking relevant data to the Fleetmaster's Sim-goggles as he spoke. The first set showed a diagram of the plan, datalinks pulling up the projected trajectory of the pods and the current location of Jesta from preliminary system-wide scans and orbit predictions. A set of three arrows arced around the giant and 'collided' with the planet. "As we understand it, Jesta is lying directly between the orbits of those two gas giants, and small stealth probes are already en-route to mark the paths for our drop pods. We will use the gravity of the gas giant we are currently in orbit of to sling the pods around it and into Jesta's Atmosphere."
Next, the officer pulled up a display showing a simulated group of ships sailing across the waves.
"Loaded in pods are three primary groups of the naval fleet. Support Group Alpha is a carrier group consisting of three carriers, an escorting cruiser, and a pair of destroyers. Alpha will serve as the command fleet for the assault on our end, and provide support to all other fleet elements. On top of this, they are supported by a dedicated communications frigate with extremely strong radio and FTL communications beacons, to try and keep us in contact, as well as a Strategic-Class Neprops colossi, to try and provide overall strategic warfare and keep the battlefield in our favour."
After the previous display moved aside, a new one popped up, showing a group of vessels emerging from the depths. "Strike Group Delta will serve as the primary offensive group of the fleet, consisting of a Battleship-class Neprops colossi, three supporting cruiser vessels, two destroyers, and four frigates. They will be the arms and armour of the operation, and conduct a majority of the mainline combat." Finally, a display appeared to the side, showing an undersea view of a final group of vessels.
"The final group will be named Extraction Group Epsilon. They are the ones who will be conducting the operation itself. Consisting of Five Hunter-Killer Strategic Submarines, as well as three freighters, they will remain submerged, escorted by a trio of frigates. When they locate any natives that they can... kidnap, for lack of better words, they will use personal-sub units to take them and load them onto empty pods along the freighter. Once enough have been extracted, they will need a way off-planet. This has been solved by loading them onto Atmospheric Exit Vehicles loaded on the submarines, where they once held an ICBM. Each submarine can load two vehicles, with a total of ten across the fleet. Should the enemy care about their own, they will hold fire on these vehicles."
The Fleetmaster nods, and responds. "Very well, when the Zetyans arrive, attach a comm link."
"Aye, Sir."
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Jesta was a reclusive sort. Hid between the gas giants like a shy dog, took the silent hiding spot for granted. But when the Kel's discovered the shrinking violet, they found far more than they originally bargained for, led from the collar by gleaming bulbs of chrome and muscle and fluid. A whole culture, tucked away like a hand-me-down trinket. Filled with sights unseen, ready to be taken in and enjoyed by all.
Or plundered.
Well, the apple never fell far from the tree, anyhow. That's why they were here, after all. Nearby the Kel'thul formation, a warp in space turned into a tear as a 20-strong Zetyan battlegroup came in, gleaming chrome intermixed with weathered shit brown as several upgraded Diaspora ships intermingled with the best Gen-M had yet to offer. Before recent events, the admiralty would have been terse as to the deployment of anything magitech, but given their heightened performance and impressive initial reports compared to the rest of the fleet they had soon found themselves tagging along with their more normal compatriots. The only exception to the mishmash of colors was a ship lathered with vantablack. A stealth clipper, and the mission control for this little occasion. It broke off almost immediately, slinking away to an asteroid a few klicks out as a cool blue thrust cone was all that gave indication that it existed, before it too faded as the thing blent into the background of space.
A communique was sent to the Kels as the fleet began to orient. The plan, some numbers, and a path they wished to take. Group A--Aleph--was the fighting half. A battlecruiser, artillery cruiser, and 3 heavy and assault cruisers each. They were the meat, and the ones who would be making the fleetmaster have an aneurysm back home. Heaviest weapons, biggest targets. Easy and simple. Group S--Samekh--was the supporting half. A support cruiser, 2 support frigates--mingling with Group A for the moment--one big carrier, and the stealth sloop which had peeled off earlier and acted as their command. It was the command and control; the supporting leverage for the other groups. The carrier could launch support fighters for when landfall happened, the support ships would act as both shieldboats and EW platforms, and the stealth sloop could be their eyes in the sky, a space AWACS craft that found new life after some stints that helped NAVCOM find it's niche for it.
Group L--Lamedh--was the landfall group. One raid cruiser, two cargo freighters, and two sloops. Their job was to send things planetside: troops, vehicles, whatever. Their entrance method would be loud; four bundles of giant spires leered off the sides of the raid cruiser. At the moment they were being jam-packed with an army of soldiers, runts, and et-cetera personnel, reminiscent of the old-timey definition for fag before it was appropriated by the religious folk who needed excuses to deny their predilection for penis. Command had decided that the best method of sending off troops was in giant metal spikes that could enter atmosphere and not destroy the planet--nor get turned to slag--and the corvettes and sloops were there to cover for the troops planetside when they were slung around the gas giant into Jestan skies, plus whatever the carriers decided to kindly donate. Of course, they weren't the leaders here. The fish were here to bite the bait, it was the job of the rats to plunder the carcass. The duo of tens sat in the void, waiting for the Kels to give word.
A response to the Zetyans was quickly mustered as the fleet began to prepare itself for the slinging motion around the gas giant. "Zetyan fleet, please note that the orblike structures we discovered in orbit have begun to move towards the fleet, and are arriving with firing range. We know not of their capabilities nor function, so we advise firing solutions immediately. You may launch troops when ready, and begin fleet movement to intercept the orbs."
The orbs sat above the planet were initially situated in a ring around its equator; each hovering just about a kilometer away from one another. In the hours leading up to this conflict, however, this had changed. Now, some twenty-odd objects were floating in space in the direction of the oncoming fleet. LiDAR showed that they had nothing on their surfaces, save collections of spherical joints holding drive-cones and shapes like inverted radar dishes or dinner plates holding these in-place on their backs. As the Kel'Thuls and Zetyans came closer, the ships activated their drive-cones in bursts of nuclear wrath and swirled into a strange formation. It was strange, if only because this was a culture that had seemingly never interacted nor even heard of the outside galaxy before. So, why were they breaking off into honeycomb spreads instead of the 2D-naval formations one might expect of an inexperienced void-navy? Who or what had shown them to form basic intercept groups, or even angle themselves to break into what looked like the rough idea of a Fingertrap-type 3D pincer maneuver? None of these questions were answered as the Zetyans and the Kel'Thuls came within firing distance. No surface weapons resolved on their radars, no radio emissions came forth, no tightbeams; nothing. There was only a strange buzz waking up the fleet's eyes and ears, as the systems tried to puzzle out whether or not the enemy had particle emitters running. Instead of singular particles, however, whole elemental signatures formed from alpha, beta, and gamma frequencies were coming down the pipeline. Uranium. Tantalum. Nihonium. Oganesson. Flashes of elemental signatures - sometimes in impossible configurations - were coming from the 50-meter chrome orbs. What did that mean? And more importantly, what did they expect it to do?
As the Kel’thulian communique played over the bridge, the captain eyed the approaching orbs with scrutinous curiosity through the collective lens of many ultra-high magnification cameras. His name was K'aht O'vola, and until this point he had little idea of what they were facing. Sure, he knew the fishes mentioned something about fluid ships, wacky chrome things, all that. But as they approached in an intercept formation, giving off readings that had everyone in sensors scratching their heads, he couldn't help but get the feeling something was a bit wrong. Shouldn't they have fired by now? Obviously they didn't want to be discovered, so if they were intent on removing the problem wouldn't the best solution be to fire right away? Any rightful questions about how new they were to the galaxy had no place, if only because he didn't really care about that part in particular--they had the tech for it, so as far as he was concerned, the first order of business was testing their mettle; not their sociopolitical IQ. He spoke to his officers, then they spoke to their lieutenants, who spoke to their subordinates, and the telephone soon relayed his commands to the rest of the fleet, as their thrusters began to shunt the light of stars from their rears, and the fleet began to move with the cerulean purples of the Kel' ships.
The communication line went silent again as the Kelthulian vessels began a multitude of preparations, the weapons systems going hot as the signature glowing rings of plasma-encased railguns popped up, then the silent shrieks of rounds flying down the rails, dragging a portion of the plasma along with it. Full-plasma railguns also widened their aperture to provide more area of effect for their burning plasma, then firing towards the orbs indiscriminately. Meanwhile, the Prophet of Valor turned its nose up, the drop-pod launchers changing their firing vectors to match that of the planned trajectories, then shunted all six pods, each carrying half the fleet assets in small protected packages inside the sturdy pods.
The pods were massive, each a couple kilometers inside to hold the large fleets of oceanwater vessels in their transit, their backs firing vast swathes of the stored plasma until they reached their desired burn-trajectory speed. The frontal dampeners and reverse-vector thrusters stayed silent. Small gravitational RCS thrusters made their micro adjustments as the Kel’thulian pods began their wide sling around the gas giant. Accompanying them were swathes of interceptor-craft, launched from the bays of the Prophet and its single supporting supercarrier. Their immense speed allowed them to catch up quickly to the pods, bringing themselves into tight formations with various missiles prepared to launch at a moments notice should any slower projectiles be fired at the pods or the craft surrounding them. The Fleet pushed its thrusters on, widening out slightly, and continuing their, albeit very lazy, assault on the orbs, only a small fraction of weapons firing, the rest holding off incase the orbs turn out to not be a threat to begin with. Hopefully, this should all go well.
As the great Zetyan hulks of chrome and lumps of brown silently began to acquire their targets, crystalline mounts and obtuse turrets aimed towards the silver orbs in lockstep. The first to act was Group L, as the raid cruiser made an aching turn and the sloops dashed off at an immense speed. The bundles of spires, now finished with their stuffing process, now began to rotate, like a washing machine, before each barrel of four began to launch the spires towards their destination. Magnetic launch zones and ionic engines, coupled with the silent bloom of rockets marked their swift departure, as the two sloops now flew beside the leader as escorts to the distant gas giant.
As he watched the spires exit from the berths of the raid cruiser, O'vola now noted the great carrier moving next to act, massive swarms of craft exiting from the great hulk and turning the giant whale into a swarming chorus of reflections, metal and thruster burns. Some of the swarm departed, their place filled by yet more flies as the expatriate stargroup now flew towards the collection of orbs. The rest simply converged around the carrier, a beehive waiting to be disturbed by only itself. Next came the support cruiser, as a moment's scrambling of the Zetyan formation on the command sloop's sensors indicated the activation of its ECM platforms. It remained undirected, a ball of sensor ghosts and false readings mixed with interference and noise. The support frigates followed suit in their own manner, as they now projected a great particulate shield over parts of Groups A and S. Ultimately, they were outstaged by the support cruiser, who decreed they would not be usurped so easily by projecting their own, a bubble going over the entirety of the Zetyan formation not en route to Jesta. Lastly, the assault cruisers from Aleph began to lazily fire at the orbs as the rest of A began to ready their weapons, a few striking lines of magic light dashing their way in geometric constraint towards the orbs every few seconds. Only a few turrets fired for now, the rest simply boring holes into where the computers and wires said the enemy was as they awaited a response from their mysterious foe.
The only thing to do now was wait, as the sensors relayed all that had, would, and will happen to the crew on the bridge. The captain only hoped their payload wouldn't be disturbed, or alternatively that they would be successful-Group A had a paycheck that would give any financier a stroke, but it was Group L's performance that would really get him in hot water if it all went tits up. Well, no point dwelling on what could be. His gaze focused now on the orbs once again, as he watched how they acted next...
The signatures halted when the gunfire started. There was little to no real way of explaining it, except perhaps as a manner of communication. But then, what had they been trying to say? Tempests of black stuff erupted from the surfaces of the strange objects, swirling into sparkling storms around them. The Kel'thul railgun munitions blew holes in the clouds as they were forming, but their plasma splashed and dispersed like vapor in a fan when they hit the surfaces of the enemies' 'clouds'. Some of their shells veered entirely off-course, sent flying off in slanted directions behind the orbs as they tried and failed to make contact. Others were instead brought to strange slants, their long sides making harsh impacts with the chrome things' hulls. But they didn't break. Parts of their surfaces held fast against the shockwaves while others rippled; entire ships distorting and then swelling back into shape. Were they made completely out of liquid? The few Kel'thul rounds which did penetrate the alien vessels' hulls let off sprays of their strange materiel, but they didn't make it all the way through the stuff. The things donutted and deformed into shapes resembling toroids or blood-cells under their impacts, but they sprang up from these as well; their black clouds swirling over their bodies as they did so. The Zetyan magic made collisions and arcs across the dark clouds over the enemy vessels' hulls, signifying some kind of tangible matter in-place. From the way the railguns had behaved, these had to be a manner of deployed ferrofluid shield over the enemy's surfaces. But, it was incredibly unorthodox. Where were their energy projectors? Or, more strangely, did they even have energy projectors to begin with? This became less of a concern, however, when the enemy's drive cones flared to life. Searing comets'-tails of fusion engine fire propelled the hex-groups away from one another and toward the enemies in an outward-bowing shape, trying to limit how many guns they could bring to bear on any given cluster of vessels. Their surfaces were still utterly flat, though. What did they expect to- Impact.
>>PLAYING: "The Red Comet of Loum"
One moment, there had been nothing. Then, absolutely gargantuan guns had sprung up from underneath the fluid armor layers of the enemy. There were cannons with spiralled barrels and brutal spikes and raygun-gothic fins. There were glowing condensers of strange liquids, and there were eerie, needle-esque shapes that looked like particle focusing lances. Dozens of solid and liquid rounds erupted from every hex in a one-inch-punch of searing wrath coated in unassuming austerity. Many of the shots were aimed to to blow concentrated holes through the Zetyan shield and rip into their ECM-Cruiser. Others, however, were sent riproaring in clusters. A honeycomb of five of the orbs aimed just about thirty-five different shots at the supercarrier by-eye, trying to shear through its hull and cause random damage until they could reboot their targeting systems. The lesser carriers faced their own lances of unbridled wrath, with the ploddingly-slow spheres taking potshots at them like there was no tomorrow. These weren't battleship-class cannons submerging into the things' armor once more. No, these should have been mounted spinally on a ship. The unique kinetic properties of these abominations let them field them in handfuls across their own vessels, however - but it left questions as to what the rest of their space was used for. Dozens of real battleship-grade artillery cannons sprung up from the enemy ships along specific arcs of their hulls, as if in response. For one thing, this suggested that they could choose where to let them loose - but for another thing, they were now exploding with magazine-style rapid-fire barrages of ordinances. Sandblaster-type coilguns, smaller railguns, and even plasma-combustion cannons all let hell run rampant in vicious barrages pointed toward two varieties of targets. The fortunate carriers who had evaded the first volley of 'spinal' fire, and the cruisers which had began to fire on their opponents. One thing had just become very, very clear: This was not a race unfamiliar with the art of war.
"Return fire incoming!" came the yells of various bridge crew on the Weaver-Class, various sensors detecting the fire incoming towards the fleet's supercarrier and smaller vessels of the fleet, as shielding units plopped up defensive barriers of plasma and pushing waves of gravity, shunting fire away from themselves. Unfortunately, not all the fire was deflected, as the supercarrier took a massive hit to one of its hundreds of hangar bays, destroying the various craft inside and rendering it useless. Some of the guns onboard were too destroyed by the weaponry of the strange orbs. Smaller carriers were overall more fortunate, only a pair of them being hit by munitions, one seeing another loss of a hanger bay, another seeing multiple guns destroyed and rendered inoperable without significant repair. But they weren't finished. The Kel'thulian fleet began to ramp up it's counterfire, all of their guns unloading bated shots, plasma spearing out in searing bursts, railguns that had been waiting sending out sharp shells of steel and streams of ionized plasmatic death towards their opponents. Strike craft ever more continued to pour from the carriers and supercarrier, various strike-groups sent out to conduct raids against the orbs with missiles and bolts of hot plasma alike, while a squadron of strategic bombercraft loaded with fusion-based cruise missiles began their trek towards the orbs that were assaulting the Zetyans. Meanwhile, the forces loaded in drop pods swing themselves around the massive gas giant, their intended target now within visual range as they ever-approached the surface of the planet, small, cheap RCS thrusters making any final adjustments as the crews of the vessels that were locked inside the pods sat anxiously awaiting their drop to the surface. If only they knew the watery hell that awaited them down below.
The volley made headlines all across the fleet as it roared into their midst, onyx shells and beams of particulate dashing into the ranks of the aggressors like a ballet duet. A number of shells soon found themselves being shredded like cheese, the various rounds and occasional unlucky lance having to push against the network of shields like they were mesh, and others were hit by agile PD missiles, or engulfed by great globs of plasma emitting from the hulls of the ships, a flash of white with an edge of green and red that consumed like wanton beasts. But for every two projectiles stopped, one slipped through in their place. Where once was a gleaming chrome now was a charred black, as the support cruiser endured a volley of firepower that by all means would have crippled or outright annihilated a smaller ship, spinal-grade shells punching holes into their front and back, and a particle lance skimming off the top of their rear. The shield weakened, flickering as the load of bearing began to shift over to the support frigates. The carrier of the Zetyans, too, suffered from the assault, as a shell or two impacted into it's bulk and sent a few dozen runways out of commission, while some sandblaster shots carved bit by bit into the horde it had disgorged around its being, and into the one sent to fight the fluid weapons suitcases. But compared to their peers, it could almost be considered fortunate, or perhaps just lucky. And the cruisers and battlecruiser each took some hits of their own, a damage spread equally amongst themselves in various places. One took a frontal load, a few others had it in the sides, the works. No doubt a crippling blow for some, but a horse that could walk was a horse that could race, and this was a race of a lifetime. Where once the fleet seemed barely able to lift a finger, it now roared to life, a full burn coupled with every gun in the fleet letting loose, a horde of geometric lines zig-zagging their way towards the enemy in volley format. Group A's artillery cruiser was the first to fire spinals, a center-mounted gimbal turret sending a ménage-a-quatre towards one of the twenty orbs while the rest took aim at any orb that wasn't already taken. The support cruiser's ECM, while hampered by the blows it had taken, now began to focus, a tight cone centering around the bow formation of the odd enemy afore them. And the carrier's strike package now began to near the orbs, firing solutions set up and running as a host of bombers and strike craft moved to make striking moves on the wayward foe. The cargo corvette now departed from the formation, a pep in it's step as it began to fly in the direction that Group L had sent it's angry mail. A host from the carrier's mothball moved to give cover to the escape plan in turn, almost forming a barrier as they exited mid-range PD from the rest of the fleet. The package it was moving to retrieve now swung around the gas giant like a pendulum, visuals on the fourth ace of hearts on all sensors, and a host of metal spires now joined a group of tin cans for a reentry op no one would be able to forget.
Shells flew. Beams lanced. Missiles whizzed, and fighters soared. The void-battle was, for lack of a better word, pyrrhic. The falling planetside forces could ‘see’ the fleets’ movements and changes as they beat each other bloody in a war of the heavens, with the fire from the remaining orbs concentrating on those ships which were scorching them into shriveled husks. Those watching were treated to the sight of one slashed-up orb getting slammed by the spinal cannon of the Zetyan artillery cruiser and promptly exploding out from the wounds in a shower of metal fluid. Although they lost most precise contact after that, they could still imagine the silent allegro of the ensuing firefight. They weren’t able to imagine what laid on Jesta’s strange and liquid surface, however. As the landing forces came closer and closer, signatures that should have resolved into landing points and data packets stubbornly remained a wash of electrical noise and confusion. The stormy and lightning-woven seas of the planet formed a kind of natural electronic warfare, cloaking its blue-grey surface against anything looking down upon them. Visual observation was barely more effective than their complex sensors. Camera-based scans revealed a ball of swirling hurricanes and clouded eddies, drenched in the shadows and pulled by the tides of the Aces’ ‘Royals’ surrounding it. Ionized, red lightning flashed and wailed into the depths of space along its edges and ridges, giving it a violent and hateful visage. Its dark beauty was completed by the wine-purple rim of its atmosphere, so thoroughly tinted by the bolts raging across it that its very colour was distorted. Re-entry was a thing of nightmares. Any orbital drop-trooper could tell you as much. They could tell you about turbulence, and they could try to explain being engulfed in the flames of a vengeant atmosphere. They could tell you about the cacophony of the sensors and the din of lights as every system in a drop-vehicle peaked and warped, struggling to hold together against the duress of an entire world. None of those words entirely communicated how hectic it truly was: and especially not on a world like Jesta. The great orbital spikes of the Zetyans and the rounded pods of the Kel’thuls gathered lightning around them like moths to a flame as they descended past the exosphere and into the crucible of the greater atmosphere. Walls shuddered and devices cried out in an incomprehensible cacophony, battering the ears and eyes of those present like relentless and frantic demons as their machines shuddered and groaned against the vicious air. Flames roared for a span of only minutes, and then the noise of a rainfall like nothing short of mounted gunfire battered them on all sides. It partly masked when the actual gunfire began. Re-entry was simultaneously a much shorter and longer process than one might have ever anticipated. While getting there was a process which took hours if not days, actually doing the business of ploughing through the armour of a world took less than half an hour. As a result, orbital drops were an ugly business that made those dropping sitting ducks and gave those being dropped-upon ample time to prepare. A Zetyan orbital-spike’s side was shredded by the impact of a shell as it crashed up from the sea, glancing off the armour. One Kel’thul pod found itself wracked by the explosion of a missle, and another was blasted by an onslaught of battleship-shells.
The scene was something straight out of a death metal cover. Great spikes crashed through layers of clouds and bending them around them, gathering lightning on their surfaces in cloaks of electric death. The rounded pods punched through the cloud layers in a much less graceful fashion, throwing sprays of vapour around them in flurries and blasts. Up from the broiling water’s mountain-sized waves lanced trails of steam and gouts of water, trailing into the blooms and blurs of explosions and glittering shells. They hadn’t even plunged into the sea itself yet. And as far as they could tell, there wasn’t a single landmass in sight.
Jesta - Entering Atmosphere The drop, swift yet painful, was something any soldiers that might survive this conflict will remember for all their lives. Shaking, tumbling, rumbling of storm clouds and rain, bullet and missile, shell and shot. Explosions rocked pods off course and sheared off metal plate. Interceptors; breaching the atmosphere now to continue providing support; got caught in the fire of hell from Jesta's watery surface. Planes shot down, Durable pods taking heavy damage and fire from below. Would they ever reach the surface? With a crash of water, and the snapping open of the pods, the question was answered. In the aftermath, various vessels found themselves damaged, and a few; such as a pair of frigates and other vessels in one of the hit pods, had suffered internal damage and become inoperable, beginning to sink. The crews immediately scuttled the vessel and abandoned ship into the stormy waters, swimming for larger vessels. Despite the famed swimming of kel'thulians, some found themselves lost at sea, forced to hide at the seabed. Overall, losses are high, but manageable Of the interceptors, many still remained in the skies, taking the first chance they could to land upon the decks of the freshly landed carrier-vessels, while others proudly flew in the stormy skies, staying low to avoid fire. Group alpha, the Carriers and Strategic command, began to set up their presence in the watery region, quickly sending out fightercraft and interceptors to scour the water's surface for contacts, as well as personal combat submarines to search below. Group Delta stuck close to the former. Bobbing up and down amongst the water, searchlights of white and light blue scoured around, while the glowing blues of cameras stood amongst the cloudy, stormy darkness on the planet. Guns turned and shifted, itching and yearning for targets to shoot as bolts of superheated plasma jumping from the sky hit extended lightning rods jutting out from the tops of the vessels amongst the fleet. Epsilon was far different. The moment they hit the water and assessed damages, the submarines, frigates, and freighters battened the hatches, closed the doors, and hit the lights. They let out a blaring foghorn noise towards the rest of the fleet, then plunged into the dark depths, disappearing from sight above the surface. They will be doing the dirty work, stealing innocents for the sake of sick and twisted research hidden under the guise of these things not truly being alive- of which is a blatant lie. Many sailors and captains knew not if they would make it home after these long days of battle ahead of them. But one thing was obvious: Here, in the stormy seas. the Kel'thulians found themselves at home.
There was a saying for orbital drops. Well, there was multiple sayings, and most of them were fairly well-known by the daredevils or suicidal ideators who signed up to get thrown into planets in huge metal spikes, but one in particular stood out. "The ride out's worse than the ride in!" Nobody knew who first said it, and to tell the truth, nobody cared. All that mattered was the message, and how it was portrayed. The phrase had become something of a prayer for those who said it; if not for wanting easy entry, then hoping the 'ride out' would indicate they got their job done. Harder resistance equals something having gone wrong, right? The common consensus, though, was that whoever came up with that one was a fucking retard. The plethora of spikes were trailing smoke from their ends as they came down, but there wasn't any damage or propulsion to it. Any fuel they had was spent getting here in the first place, or evading any oncoming fire with RCS and luck. Their escorts bobbed and weaved like locusts in a swarm, fighters and bombers and all sorts of interatmospheric craft zipped to and fro, to and fro. Of those who reached the surface, some lived, some died; the spikes themselves may have been build hard, but no amount of hard could stop a shell the size of a house from shearing off everything from the neck down, or a laser from cutting them in twine, or a missile from grazing their side, ejecting their cargo into the wrathful sea of storms. Even the least religious of their cargo could not help but pray. At any rate, it was a response almost primal; something that drove the mind to call to higher powers and spirits when the body might yet collapse, fall down and weep. Who wouldn't, after all, when their world was nothing but thunder, fire and noise? Once they reached a certain point-give or take about a half-Everest above sea level-the spikes opened up, discarded themselves. Heat dispersers that had served their purpose, inertial stabilizers, and everything connected to their outer shells was cast off like silk, leaving large pods with spikes for heads that engaged on full burn, two per spike as they pierced the sea like spears from heaven. They went down, down down. Their thrusters didn't stop burning until they either hit the seabed or ran out of fuel, a yellowish-orange contrasted to the deep blue sea. Once settled, their contents opened, slowly at first, but then with haste as assortments of bubbles and masses of metal erupted from their insides, like a cell self-destructing after a virus entered it's body. There were three kinds of things that exited from the pods, though some were in far greater number than others. The first were submarines, a plethora of turbinid drones mixed with long, almost reptilian attackers that dwarfed most there, the meat that would stall the inevitable for as long as they could-and already were, as they began acquiring fire solutions and firing autolocking torpedoes that yearned for a target. The second were troop transports, little buslike things built to take their men from point A to point B, moving as a swarm while their bearings were acquired, and their targets sighted. And the third were automated craft, split between carrier drones holding large boxes of nondescription, and smaller drone craft that were retrofitted for oceangoing duties. The murky deep was likely to be less kind than the surface. Only the lord knew what awaited them in the sea, as the lights of fire began to flash in the far distance, and munitions began to soar at them from the fathoms.
The surface of the sea was hot and ready. Now, this wasn't to say that it wouldn't have been even without the things approaching from the distance. The storms crackled between sky and sea like blinding pillars upholding the flying rapids of the immense clouds high overhead, and the waves rivaled mountains in their height and wrath. These throes of madness were so cacophonic and mad on all sides that they almost served as cover for the incoming enemy. Almost. The immediate and first indication that something had gone wrong was the way the RADAR started giving off very frantic warnings. Notices of supersonic overpressure and the almost-shrill whines of the infared sensors' own complaints pointed toward wings of rapidly-accelerating shapes surging through the rain and rapidly approaching the surface forces. Then they dropped torpedoes. Then they fired their electrothermal-chemically propelled autocannons. The cross-sections of the shapes were almost painfully obscured by the cones of heat and screaming noise that their supersonic acrobatics left riproaring behind them; but they became clearer when the things flared their massive wings out to either side and dove toward the waves. Half of them maintained their eerie and teardrop-like shapes, sizzling as they plunged and then stubbornly flickered on the SONAR equipment as little more than ghosts. The other half arose from the waves again, with the thrust-vectoring segments of their fuselages swung under them like legs. It looked like the things were accordioning into themselves as more of their bodies shifted in a liquid mess, revealing multicolored bubbles of hydraulic muscle and chrome material in the darkness. In an incredibly baffling affront to most traditional concepts of modern warfare, the natives of Jesta were using first-strike mechs as their forward assaulting force. Who does that? And more importantly, how does someone do it that well? . . . The SONAR ghosts were not merely a problem above-water. Jesta's sea floor was littered with the ghosts of butchered forests. Wherever one looked, the boneyard stretched through the darkness; great and eerie wisps and tangles of warped bio-stone reaching desperately up from the hidden ground below. Their edges were moth-eaten and ragged, suggesting both their prior height and the terrible acts wrought against them by their occupants - cheerily confirmed by chemical samples of the sea around the groups. While more samples elicited signs of industrial residue off to the north-east, they didn't speak of anything coming down the flow of the water. Group Epsilon and their motley crew washed above the white and labyrinthine peaks and shadows of the Ghost Forest below and around them. Mountains of silt and rock loomed to their sides at slopes impossible above the waves, honed to flowing faces and ribbons by the ruthless currents surrounding them. Though the light of their target had yet to reach them, its scent was distinct: and they knew they were on the right path. A submarine near the rear of the formation sensed something approaching it at a speed which should have only been possible in an atmosphere; much less a void. Then the shockwave of the supercavitating round cracked the poor thing's hull: followed by the muffled thunk of its warhead and the terrible byoom of its chemical-explosive warhead. The wreckage expanded out from itself in a cloud of shrapnel, wavered unsteadily, and then collapsed with a terrible force - compressing the whole shredded mess into an almost amusingly-small ball of tightly-wrapped panels, fuels, shells, and presumably, corpses.
Every other submarine registered the presence of a SONAR ghost somewhere behind them - something that rivaled or even matched the size of the eerie spaceships the enemy had produced - and then just as quick as that, it vanished. In the blink of an eye, something fifty meters in diameter just vanished from their sensors: leaving a gaping hole where it should have been. Though they could no longer sense the looming phantom behind them, the forest of ghosts was occupied by another kind of spectre. Things - things which absorbed most of their signals and slinked through the trees like the water itself - were hunting them. Someone, somewhere, was probably playing Fortunate Son at full-blast at the bottom of a pool.
Crash-Crash-Crash! Torpedoes ripped through the hull of a frigate, autocannons battering the hull of a cruiser. Armour shredded and bullets deflected, the pale blue lights shining in the rainy dark like a solemn bioluminescence. Crews fought with radars and other sailors, chaos aboard all the ships taking on sailors abandoning vessels and dealing with injured, it was pure anarchy. From the outside, though, it looked calm, and strategic.
The cruisers swung their guns around gracefully, taking calculated aims the best they could at the streaking 'vessels' of which they found themselves in combat with. The air screamed and shrieked as metal rubbed metal, a super- no, hypersonic- boom resounding as batteries of railguns unleashed shells towards their enemies, followed up with shots from coilguns, accented by the glowing-blue light of plasma bolts and beams, vaporizing droplets of rain and blending in with the angry lightning as they hunted their marks. Smaller vessels followed suit as destroyers unleashed volleys of fusion missiles, and torpedoes flew from bays towards targets. Fighters soared through the skies, bombarding the strange sensor ghosts with plasmafire, and the occasional missiles, the storms and clouds and seemingly jamming making finding targets hard and painful for them. Fighters continued to be launched launched from the decks of carriers that found themselves under fire, the railgun sitting on each carrier's side deck sending out bolts of screaming metal towards the mechs flying above the water's surface. Chaos, Chaos, made all pretty; Who'd've thought it'd been this shitty? Group Epsilon found itself under fire too, the death of a submarine apparent as they began to unleash intense sonar scanning, and cameras darted around, searching like hundreds of little eyes, itching to find their target. Bays opened on the submarines, holding guided torpedoes and micro-torps alike, like missiles in the water. Fingers sat above triggers, and waited for a lock.
Kaboom. Group L's entry into the deep blue was as bad as the ride in, as one of their fast attack submarines was turned into an inside-out by a flash of light, and their brothers making mad dashes to find the enemy. From the outside, it seemed orderly, much like the Kel' assault; from their busoms came a horde of torpedoes, locked onto SONAR pings both real and fake, as the submarine drones rushed forward in a swarm wall to serve as a motile cover. Other drones broke away from the group, some riding high and letting off what looked like countermeasures but read as outright screams on sensors as they became their own targets, and others popping buoys and sensors to scout out the surroundings, find a path to the nearest city. And amongst all the mess was the swarm of troop transports and dronecraft, following the scent of prey and covered by their larger cohorts as they let loose volley after volley of torpedoes and missiles. On the inside? Well, seeing as every man, woman and child-quite literally, as half the manned crews for the subs were often runts-was practically screaming orders and confirmations at the top of their lungs, praying to higher powers, or otherwise scurrying like ants as they scrambled to keep the fight going, it was going better than ever expected. Damage reports were minimal, across the fleet, but not because their enemy was negligent; rather the opposite. To be hit down here was a death sentence, the only difference being whether it was instant or prolonged, and their enemy was wily as a few more drone subs were caved in or blown apart by munitions found wanting. As much as the Zetyan navy was a neglected child, their products at least had quality to them, quality that served them best they could as their sensors and maps updated, gave them paths, target data, sensor ghosts that filled the forests around them. But one thing was forcefully assured, even in the chaos that surrounded them-they would find their quarry, come rain or sunshine. Because if they didn't? The cargo corvette on it's merry way wouldn't just be picking up body bags, and the enemy would have a whole lot more than dead men and scrap to study. ... On the surface, the swarm of escorting fightercraft finally had a reason to use their weapons, as they flew to support any Kel' forces still above the water. While they were more keyed for ground attack than sea ops in about half the flight, it didn't stop fighters both manned and automated from letting loose on the bubbly mechs that broke the surface, fighters ripping out bursts of autocannon fire and small missiles, and attack craft tossing MLAGS or smart torpedoes at their orboid foes. A pyrrhic move, but one they learned from the fishes, as they worked in tandem with the Kel' battlegroups still above the surface as they waged their little war.
Even outnumbered three-to-one, the machines on the surface fought like demons. More than one fighter-plane found itself with a perfect lock on one of the opponent's aircraft, only to fire and find their trajectory completely flipped or bent. The things moved in ways that shouldn't have been possible: flexing their bodies in artful curves at velocities and Gs that would have compressed any solid organism into a stain on their cockpit interior. When missiles loosed themselves, they were met by clouds of heated chaff floating in the air: and when the things fired back, they did it with vicious accuracy. The most effective method of downing them ended up being plasma. When they approached the hot zones the clouds created, the fightercraft generally tended to try and swerve or divebomb into the water: corraling them into certain paths. Once or twice, they even managed to catch one's hypersonic shockwave in one of the clouds - causing the thing to boil and erupt in a crackling blast of liquid-metal fuel and munitions. The mechs were another problem entirely. While they carried less intelligent armaments than their pure-fighter brethren, that didn't mean they were any less effective. There was more than one occasion where one closed into range and snapped to-arms with murderous intent. At this point, several ships were sinking due to the countless holes their automatic sabot-shotgun-things had chewed into their sides - and several more had peeled open from the hull outward from a pint-sized shaped nuclear charge. The mechs were taken down more by CIWS than anything else. While being fast, they weren't nearly as speedy when they were folded into their spindly humanoid forms - and that opened them up to rotary cannons and lasers once they got in too close. One in particular was floating to the bottom of the sea; having been taught its lesson by a burst of automated gunfire when it tried to close into melee range. The only saving grace was that, in spite of their gleeful use of beehive-munitions and tactical warheads and contrails crackling with radiological death, the Jestans were reluctant to shoot those who chose to scuttle or abandon ship. It was some small comfort among the miles-high waves and the bullets of the falling rains.
The submarines hunted like jackals. They attacked sporadically and viciously, hobbling and executing small numbers of the enemy from seemingly-random directions. When they fired, they did so in bursts - taking advantage of their ghostly nature to blindside the enemy as many times as possible before vanishing into the shadows of the dead coral forest. At this point, they knew that their SONAR wasn't being directly interfered-with. Though the radiation concentration was steadily rising, interfering with radio and tightband communications across the board, they weren't receiving any targeted bursts of interference. They could perfectly see one another—but it was almost miraculous whenever a shot scored one of the vicious little opportunists. It had to be some quirk of their architecture; which was confirmed when a pressure-based warhead went off right next to one. In the aftermath, the computers finally identified its shape. It looked almost like a fish without fins, but it behaved like a gel. The thing's hull didn't shatter so much as it wobbled when the shockwave finally hit it; convincing the thing to suck its clusters of bubbled turrets back into its skin like a polyp hiding from predators. There was another flare of SONAR activity as it rebounded, and then it was gone; having scurried back into the darkness.
September 30, 2022
Through the flurry of bubbles, the Zetyan conglomerate continued to follow a chemical trail, eruptions of bubbles and light coupling themselves with a rush of current as they charged onwards. The way ahead seemed dark in both figurativity and literality, illuminated only with the pings of sonar and through the monochromatic hues of FLIR and night vision cameras. That the flickering on their displays wasn't a targeted effect was a small yet precious solace, even as their sensors chugged to figure out the geometry of their surroundings that twisted like cancerous bone. But a valley caved in nearby, a seedbed for SONAR feedback that they proceeded to in haste, that they might see their foes clearer. A communique was sent to the Kel's that were in the murky black with them, a request to assist in mapping the quickest route to a trafficking zone as sensor inflows were dispersed amongst the shoal, and to join them in the dash to the valley of death. The drone subs began to split off, or merely some of them, as they twisted and turned amongst the debris. The migrant's purpose was twofold; map the surroundings, and try to play at their opponent's game as they slipped in and out of sensors like silverfish. More torpedoes came from the tubes that exuded themselves from their hulls, both the turbinid forms of the drones and the reptilian submarines volley launching as if their life depended on it. One sub was punctured in the aft side, another in their fore. The drone losses were beginning to mount at haste, and while the plethora of troop transports and small drones that accompanied them hadn't reported much if any losses, that would be soon to change if the attrition rate kept it's steady pace, or the fishes that harried them so dutifully were not dealt with. ... On the surface, they repeated the course of boom and zoom. While now, in the face of progress, they opted for nails just as much as spears, it didn't make the task any less difficult for all but the nascent aces among them. If anything, it made it almost worse-simply because you were in gun range didn't mean you could make your platform turn fast enough to make the gun hit the silver blurs that were dashing through the clouds and thunder. Coordination with the Kel' airforce was tight, and for that the lesser experienced could find solace-where they might fail, there would be two to help them back it up. A communique from space was relayed down below, into the murky storm. The cargo corvette was t-minus 20, and the pressure was on.
Sending a positive response to the Zetyans, the Kel's had already noticed the valley, and pushed their propellors and jets of water to move half of their submarines towards the ever-important dip in the terrain, hoping to get clearer SONAR readings. Torpedoes ejected themselves from tubes as they frantically tried to find targets in the dark, while the sonar ever pinged. A submarine found itself with holes across itself, propellors failing and jets of water used to propell it sputtering and stopping as it began to vent its atmosphere and take on gallons upon gallons upon gallons of water, guzzling it in like a thirsty man fresh out of a desert. While the kel'thulians inside did not drown, they instead found themselves dying from the sheer pressure of the water hitting them, breaking ribs and enacting concussions, before inevitably crushing their bones from the sheer depth of the water they found themselves in, like trash in a compactor. Surface Guns continued to fire off, railguns shrieking through the storm with violent supersonic shockwaves, letting off bright flashes of light. Plasma bolts burned and screamed in the downpour of rain, sending off water-vapour misting through the air just to condense in the cold and rain right back down into the murky death below. Missiles flew from vessels trying to track their gunning-and-running opponents, often to no avail. "Target in sight, 22-34-02. Bank right hard, fire missiles!" The radio screamed in his earholes, but it mattered not, nothing mattered, nothing but the targets he chased. Having already gotten just enough a glimpse to lock on, the pilot loosed a pair of fusion missiles before pulling up hard and turning his craft around. His interceptor creaked as the high-G maneuver- of which wouldve knocked out any inexperienced pilot- threatened to stall the plane mid-air. The Battle of Jesta has already proven itself bloody, and the pressure mounted more with the Cargo corvette en-route, so very close. May they only hope the submarines can find their targets, and extract them as the mission plan instated.
At some point, one had to start wondering why the enemy was acting the way they were. To the average soldier, this was a non-concern; their matter was one of life, death, and brutality. To the tacticians and the higher-echelon commanders, however, there was something decidedly off. The Jestans weren't trying to destroy the Kel'thuls and the Zetyans. If they'd truly wanted to, it seems likely that they would have sent intercontinental ordinances or at the very least re-enforcements by now. The fact that they were simply shredding the advance force with their own initial scramble was curious: and their organization was equally bizarre. Rather than trying to route or separate the invaders, the enemy had been focusing on corralling the attack groups into a smaller and smaller space; striking them from outside and above rather than from within and beneath. These were delaying tactics. The Jestans were forcing their enemies into a corner and bunching them up from all sides while a larger, more organized force were either en-route or preparing themselves at other defensive positions. They'd already proven themselves to be freakishly adept at avoiding sensors and disturbingly mobile: so there remained the unsettling question of whether or not more were already here—but the guillotine never dropped. One by one, the mecha and their fighter escorts were falling: and though the submarine group had been diverted, they were maintaining insubstantial losses. . . . Speaking of the submarine group, their efforts had finally paid off. Nestled in a valley of grotesque graves and rotten forests, they at last discerned a clear image of their opponent. Having forced the enemy submarine group to follow them, they were finally in a no-guard situation: everyone could see everyone in the echoing barriers of the great fissure. What they saw was absolutely terrifying. Swimming above them was a sphere, fifty meters in diameter. Only, no; its cross-section warped and changed. It was a sphere at first, and then it became a teardrop as it moved forward - and then again, it squashed like gel: the alien machine warping itself into a shape like a blood cell. Finally exposed, it drew its swarm of little escorts into its body - the things merging eerily with its surface and vanishing. There was a gargantuan and terrible heartbeat where the liquid monster hovered there, doing nothing at all. Then its bottom face became a wall of long, thin protrusions - and its firing solutions finished. All at once, hell broke loose. From its three incredibly long 'lances,' the Coral Phantom unleashed three corkscrewed supercavitating projectiles which formed vortexes in their wake and unleashed storms of needled shrapnel into the swirling water. From its dozens of slightly shorter cannons, smaller and less vicious ordinances of supercavitating penetrators and hydrothermobaric detonators let loose. Flurries of incredibly thin projectiles like cut wires went whizzing in a great storm from its countless smaller barrels, and last, a few score torpedoes snaked around the freakish disc to snare those who tried to flee down the valley. This was a desperate Hail Mary: a sniper torn down from its tower, now firing at everything it could in an attempt to destroy as much as was possible before its coming demise.
The cahort of metal swam through the rain like scattered sardines, drone subs shredded by flechettes the size of men and the attack subs perforated by flechettes two grades higher. Three subs were obliterated near-instantly by a flurry of implosions and fire. Not even the wily transports and small drones could escape the storm, now that it had engulfed the battlefield in a final crescendo of bubbles and currents, and many disappeared into the path of a thermobaric explosion and never came back out. The losses were stacking once more, and in a way almost untenable-over 8 subs lost, three score in transportation, six in drones. One couldn't blame them as they began to flee into the valley, torpedoes launched hurriedly in their wake as the crew attempted to escape the underwater storm. Only, the drones did not follow suit as before, like dogs on leashes. Rather, they surged towards the sphere, letting off flurries of torpedoes as they seemingly charged mindlessly at the sphere itself, metal upon metal upon metal forming into all but a desperation manuever that churned the waters like a mixer. Whatever fear effect the Jestans might have intended to accomplish, the motile wall of meat that was closing the distance was inarguable evidence it had succeeded. As the craven hordes fled into the depths, their sensors were tuned, water samples prepared to be taken and expunged by automated equipment. A speed-search for chemicals, expulse, waste, anything to cobble a trail to discern travel lanes, where these beasts of liquid matter went to and fro. It was almost orderly, the way their procession moved-if not for the jerking every craft had to do, trying and not-too-occasionally failing not to add to the tally of those raked by monowire, punctured by flechettes or punked by a torpedo. ... The battle was progressing, yet paradoxically there wasn't much in progress. Though the Jestans were falling, they weren't falling fast enough, and the attrition they had succeeded in maintaining threatened to prolong into a stalemate. Still, the swarm continued their duties, as best as one could trying to fight beings of liquid that absorbed your shots like oobleck, and one by one both bubble and silverfish were beginning to sink into the deep, given freckles on every surface that yet oozed with lifeblood. Though, the Jestan tactics were not lost on some-or atleast, those not taken by the throes of battle. As the two sides fought on, a contingent of the mothball departed into the mare nostrum above, drones and aircraft tuned for long-distance ops given a new purpose. In groups of five, they spread out into five prongs, hiding in the storm as they began to roar away from the nascent battlefield in a 2D cone that stretched into the beyond. Their purpose was simple; scout ahead, see where the stockades were waiting for their prisoners, or if they were there at all.
Submarines took hits left and right, metal torn through by shots as bubbles of air shot up and water flooded into caverns. Shards of metal drifted in the water like pretty mirrors reflecting the light of drowned explosions, the kel'thulian submarines setting their sensors into overdrive to hunt for any clues, while pumping out torpedoes, and small bays opening up. From these bays, swarms of little drone-craft shot out, dodging and weaving through the water like fighters through air, propellers and water-jets pushing them smoothly through the thick, dense, pressurized water. Behind this swarm of drones, the larger submarines began to pull back, but still covering the retreat of their Vais' allies. The fight wasnt over yet. --- The battle went stale like bread, every inch gained by either side lost almost immediatley, a battle of eye-for-an-eye at it's finest. Fighters and mecha clashed at immense speeds in the air, while subs and boats on the liquid water 'ground' were pelted by munitions, still ever-driving their own into the dark and stormy sky. INCOMING TRANSMISSION "Z- [static] -command, come i- -delaying tacti- -regrou- -keep plane- -n the sky-, i repeat, regr-" TRANSMISSION FAILED The storm seemed to be interfering with their communications far worse than expected. With this garbled information, the Kel'thulian forces began to consolidate their losses, pulling into a tighter defensive formation, while the fighters, ever invigored as new were launched and old landed for resupply, continued to lash out at the mechas, trying to keep them off the backs of the subs below.
The Leviathan died in bloodshed. The thing withstood just about every ordinance they threw at it, but when it came to the slicing claws and razors of the drones, it bled like a cell peeled open by a tiny scalpel. They cut through twenty-five straight meters of membrane and liquid as it did everything to stall them: firing munitions into itself, blowing its own munitions stores, and even venting the searing fluid of its fission reactor into its encroaching opponents. It wasn’t designed for close-combat engagements, however: and its hasty scramble had left it with a fraction of its intended munitions stores. As the drones made it to the center of the thing, they tripped a single, unassuming membrane: distinguished by just one thing. It was pink. When that pink membrane split, the Leviathan died in its tracks. It sat there, lifeless, as the last of its attackers reveled in the glory of the moment with their mechanical augments and fleshy, lobotomized brains. Then, something was sent screaming out of the thing’s center: fired off like one of its shells and sent zipping toward the sea’s surface. The radiation levels spiked. The Leviathan boiled. The resulting ball of plasmatic fire shattered the bone forest for dozens of klicks, saturating the local sea with fissile material for dozens more. The plume of radioactive steam, smog, and vaporized metals came rising from the sea like an evil spirit. It drenched the stormy horizon in Death’s pale shadow, forming a mushroom and boiling the clouds it touched even as it was cooled back into submission. The sound overloaded SONAR systems for hundreds of kilometers around it, driving the Sodalyte aircraft into mad spirals for but a moment. At the sight of the mushroom cloud, however, they stopped weaving away from the enemy. More projectiles went flying from the mechs and the planes as they went on full-burn, screaming straight toward the bunched-up mass of Zetyan ships. While it didn’t seem to be their initial plan, something about the cloud had convinced the Jestans to perform a last-ditch effort against the invasion: Kamikaze attacks. . . . As the shockwave passed through the underwater contingent, they found a tangible trail. It was strange, admittedly: it was a cloud of metallic isotopes and fission byproducts upon the ocean floor, too heavy to be blown away by even the tides of Jesta’s raging seas. It led deep into the labyrinth of coral: sinking below even the underwater valley into a variable trench. Was this where the Jestans lived? It was a strange comedy: the Zetyans and Kel’Thuls’ road to El Dorado was paved not in gold, but in decaying forms of Plutonium, Uranium, and superstable superheavy elements such as Oganesson and Nihonium. . . . The fanned contingent found Prospero’s Island in the tempest, by some miracle. In spite of the planet’s wonky magnetic field, the noise of its storms, the force of its winds, and the sheer impact of its rain and hail, they breached the clouds and discovered something remarkable at the end of the rainbow. A trio of orbs. They resembled the Leviathan below the sea, and the Pearls dying in space. Their surfaces were different shades of reflective chrome, their diameters were subtly different, and their propulsions varied greatly. One stood upon the water using a series of flowing skirt-segments, boiling the sea beneath it. One floated on a complex set of crossed pontoons, with ends like open fish mouths and tornadoes of blades. The last was half-submerged in the sea, surrounded in an inner-tube of floating material ringed by long legs hovering just over the waves. They were maneuvering into position on the horizon, miles upon miles away from one another. They each bore the mountain-sized waves with grace, and they each trudged through the maelstrom in their own way before coming to rest upon the edge of the visible world.
There, they simply waited: but for what? And were there others where the Kel’Thuls and Zetyans couldn’t see them, or were these truly their only opponents? Perhaps the most eerie thing about them was the signature emanating from them. It wasn’t radio, or light, or sound, or even microwave-band comms. They were emitting alpha, beta, and gamma particles in a kind of fluid dance. The same dance they’d been seeing ever since they arrived on Jesta. ...118-200. 129-287. 107-322… Those were signals. The same signals the voidships had cast toward the approaching fleets. The same signals the planes and mechs had been emitting to one another. The same eerie signatures they were receiving in faint blips and sparks from beyond the horizon. This entire time, they had been talking to one another: and they’d tried to talk to the Zets and Kel’Thuls when they made contact with Jesta’s orbital defenses, too.
The water swirled, boiled. The churning fathoms precluded the shockwave from the detonation, a soft cushion for the impact of a brick that put the SONAR of the Zetyan craft into brief haywire, and rattled the hulls akin to how one would shake a birdcage. It led to no losses, or perhaps just not immediate ones-ARS be damned-but as the chaos was winding down the ratio of alive to dead was nearing the line from concerning to unfavourable. They would have to find their quarry, fast and in bulk, lest the operation graduate to something akin to phyrric-or worse, failed. Data was found, subsequently relayed. The chemical trail was highlighted, a sinking breadcrumb trail of oxidized waste and decayed material, winding down into a challenger deep that light did not tread, and the scouters who laid eyes upon the great trio now lit them up like lights, sensors acutely focused as some encircled, and others spread outward. The communication methods were lost on the rodents, or perhaps just ignored-if they had come to speak in tongues, perhaps they would have brought ministers instead of munitions. Unwilling to repeat the battle from before, the zetyans began the headlong charge to their mythical, hypothetical city, and to the Kel's still upon the surface, in their submersible ships they received only one request-go down with us. ... For the Zetyan craft still on the surface, the fight had not yet ended, even basking in a sickeningly familar sight. There were no Zetyan ships-perhaps a few submarines had surfaced here and there before, ballast damage and punctured holes forcing a surfacing, but they would have been lost or evacuated, left to rot or turned into scrap by the walking artillery batallions the others fought against. But there were plenty of Zetyan planes, a swarm that was starting to wane from the extensive combat. Many were manueverable fightercraft, or atleast had the span and control to dodge or graze a headlong suicide dash from a meters-long spear of violence gelatin barring the unlucky pilot here and there. But many were also gunships, bombers, the slow and ponderous-and it was they who were made to bargain, as the steel and composite of theirs was punctured and impacted by the membraneous figures, or dashed upon by cannons and missiles. A transmission from above, again. The cargo corvette was nearing, and it was within range to begin requesting voidcraft reinforcements from the swarm. T-15, and seemingly with no room for delay.
In the wake of the detonation and the shockwave, the Kel'thulian ships had scrambled to push themselves towards the chemical trails. They had to hurry, no time to spare. None of them were destroyed, but there was some damage on a couple ships- sensors that would need to be replaced, or a leak that led to a room being sealed off. Nothing fatal. Hearing the zetyan's calls to above, the Kel'thulian submarines copied the messages and relayed them louder to the fleets on the surface, further cementing the chances for them to come down into the depths and provide support. --- The membranes of the odd gel-mechs sliced through the Kel'thulian ships like butter. Having noticed that all the zetyan vessels were already turned to seascrap and drifting metal, the jestans had decided to switch targets. Ship after ship was cut through by the Jestan's kamikaze attacks, which forced the miniscule amount of remaining vessels into retreat, the menacing form of one of the Neprops- the hulking lobster-esque mass of a battleship- dropped under the water's surface alongside many of the other ships, pushing themselves deep below the water, as the zetyans below called for more help. The kel'thulain ships went to join their submarines in the hunt of Jesta's depths. This left the fightercraft alone, fighting alongside their Sachi-vais bretheren in an unfamiliar, stormy sky. Nothing they hadn't trained for, before. The fightercraft swirled around, some being cut down by munitions mid-turn, while others launched off more salvoes of glowing bright plasma missiles, burning through water and membrane alike. Even the slower craft of the Kel'thulians seemed to slice through the rain- not perfectly, but with the ease of something designed for harsh conditions akin to these on a lesser scale.
The battlefield above the surface grew almost deathly-quiet against the mad, frothing cacophony of Jesta's storms. With the Sodalyte mechs and jets silenced, there was nothing assaulting the landing force - though the triangle of orbs around them refused to budge. They simply sat there like three mismatched monoliths, stoically bearing the force of the constant typhoons ripping across the mile-high waves and nightmare-disco of crackling lightning. The froth bathed their reflective, metallic hulls, and they waited. They were struck by lightning here and there, and they waited - the charges arcing brief distances along the swirling greyscales of their surfaces and then falling dead and silent. Either they weren't sure of what to do, or it simply wasn't worth it to fire them on an opponent that might run - either financially, or tactically. War, someone once said (to the effect of), ...is a series of long periods of mind-numbing boredom and paranoia, periodically broken by flashes of violence and insanity. They were in one of the lulls, even as the madness seemed to fill the air around them. . . . The Jestan El Dorado looked almost nothing like a city. Jokingly, some of the men had started calling it 'El Isotopo': because the roads seemed to be paved in reactor waste as opposed to gold and riches. For one thing, no sane species would ever design a city that looked so intentionally oppressive and nightmarish. Up on high, its towers loomed into the darkness like great strands of grey seaweed. Where there would normally be a single or possibly even double-layer of city streets, the thing was mangled and knotted in on itself like a cross between a coral reef, an Escher design, and a brutalist's idea of a good time. Some levels looked so densely-packed that they could have been mistaken for solid objects, while others were so obscenely vacant that they resembled something closer to a titan's trench than a city street. There were lights, but they were small and harsh - casting searing, angled beams through the darkness and polluted silt onto the ground below. There were streets and walkways, but they were so broad as to be mind-numbing for anyone on the ground. There were alleys, but they were so tight that one would have to enter them single-file. The power lines throbbed like veins. Advertisements glowed on every surface not occupied by a faceless door or important system of some kind, and some weren't even restrained by such ideas as architecture. A few submarines even triggered ads as they passed-by, their visual-spectrum sensors abruptly stunned by bursts of light and corporate, stale imagination. They saw more random bullshit about the Jestan goods than they ever could have wanted to in a lifetime, and they saw the Jestans, too. They were some kind of amoeba-people, with some depicted as short, heavy-bottomed humanoids, and others depicted as fluid organisms bound by tanks, or testing out fresh pairs of arms and legs, or doing all manner of high-society stuff that bordered on the obscene and lavish. Carefully-calculated waves of pressure delivered muffled jingles through their hulls, albeit, distorted by the material they used: and glowing points of light guided them away from the maddening circuit-board's remaining undeveloped spires of carved coral and seabed-stuff. It was something out of a nightmare, laced with tubes and arteries and transport-tunnels and spaces without reason. It was a prison with no walls, and a casino that never slept. It was decrepit. It was gleeful. It was horrifying. It was delightful. It was monotonous. It was evil and duplicitous at once. What kind of pathological psychopaths built their cities like this?
"El Isotopo"s schizophrenic design did nothing to deter the home invasion, though the deathly quiet and rumbling distortions also did nothing for the crew's spirits. Escher's timecube was as vast as it was travelable, as the various tinier shuttlecraft and automata began to flock into the city streets like a wave of vermin, red-dotted visors and harsh sensors scanning for any signs of life while the attack drones and submarines drifted above like zeppelins, backlit by the artificial light of capitalism. It was a strange sight, one you might expect more in war propaganda-all it would need was a stylized palette and a caption screaming to defend the homeland. The lull burnished on the crew's minds like alcohol, and the antsy nature of the Zetyans was pushing them onto a tension edge. They had reached the target, and yet there were seemingly no visible signs of life. Or, perhaps, they lay in wait for an ambush once again, waiting for some transport to open it's guts and spill out their captors before springing the trap like a flytrap. Perhaps they weren't even here, and the cold reality was that they had fled the moment the submarines went on intercept course. Who knew? At any rate, all they could figure was that the walls of nonsensical advertisements and the triage floating far, far above were the only company they would get. A few of the troop transports were more daring than their brethren, their pilots parking near where they saw faceless doors and their rears opening to reveal a squad of soldiery. The shadows with red eyes moved to breach and clear, as automata built to contain and suppress floated alongside them in wait. ... There was little else for the mothball to do, now that the others had slipped beneath the surface. The cargo corvette was nearing by the minute, and most with interatmo capabilities took opportunities when they saw them, beginning to roar back to the heavens they came from. The rest who stayed were ordered to move, to begin shadowing the distant triad just like the recon craft were doing. It was a concept a good chunk were averse to-but options tended to limit themselves when there was nothing to do.
From the bowels of the Kel'thulian submarines, smaller mini-subs and personal transport units began to drop out of once-hidden moonpools. Bubble-jets of water shot out from wingtips as propellers helped the jets push the mini-subs forwards, along the radioactive-brick-road of "El Isotopo." Alongside the zetyans, the Kel'thulians hunted for the inhabitants of the nightmarish city. The beaming advertizements and oppressive nature of the city struck some level of uncertainty into the hearts of the Kel'thulian hunters, but nevertheless, they pushed on and on and on. Squads of minisubs began disembarking their pilots into the inky water, where they drew water-capable harpoonesque weapons, or brandished their hand-claws like gauntlets, the bony protrusions glinting in the dim light. These varied squads would bust into homes where they could, or hunt through buildings that had any semblance of an entrance.
The witch-hunt was as tense at it was fruitful. Many of the breached doors led to spaces less logical than the city itself. Rooms built in three dimensions with no concept of up or down assaulted the senses and sensibilities of the Zetyans and Kel'Thuls, many of which were plastered or marked by bizarre, multicolored shapes and sequences. Their translations AIs kept fruitlessly trying to insist this was some form of language: but each time they worked at decrypting it, they ran into errors, or overloaded, or simply shut down. Floating screens and honeycombed walls of desolate, hexagonal cubicles filled many of the spaces - while others were layered in on themselves like golgi apparati, stocked to the brim with all manner of items. Some, they could recognize: they burst into thrift stores, and food shops, and offices. There were forms resembling hobby stores, and warehouses; and more. One team even managed to barge their way into something resembling a cross between an oversized pneumatic ferry and a subway. Another was less lucky - traversing what felt like a mile of winding hallways down, and down, and down, only to enter a room filled to the brim with eyes staring at them. That team went radio silent not long after. The distribution of the Jestans seemed almost random as they ransacked their working and living spaces - sometimes even dystopian mixes of the two. Most zones were simply empty, with various items just left floating in the middle of the water like they had been suspended by phantoms. Some had only smatterings of Jestans in various states of violence and panic. The jackpot, however, came when a combined squad burst into something that had looked a bit like a planetarium, jammed in the centre of several different buildings and fed by a sprawling forest of pipes and cables. This one was filled with an entire dozen Jestans, though they were dressed oddly: their thick-bottomed bodies swathed in thick, padded layers of mirror-finish bubbles and white straps. Their heads were covered by spheres of the stuff, with mirror-finish dots spattered across them like compound eyes. These ones were managing a space filled to the fucking brim with Gamma radiation. As the re-enforced door to the radiation room blew open, most of them scattered: jamming their oversized paw-gloves into their helmets and extracting wicked-looking spikes with four points apiece. They hid in side-doors and behind thin cubicle walls, disappearing among the brilliant, mirror-finish surfaces of the space. Two remained at the centre of the room, however: bathed in the overwhelming, blue glow of the space's radiation and suspended in midair by umbilical bundles of wires that trailed into the backs of their heads and torsos. These two twitched as if they were having seizures, their fingers flicking in and out as if a vicious child were yanking them around.
Those who thought the tail end would be less stressful than the other parts of the operation were proven wrong in almost humorous concession, as the task of actually plying through the nightmare city soon enveloped all involved. Sure, there was no grand ambush, no enemy in wait, but the design of the city was in and of itself a psychological blunt force, not mentioning what they had to do to get there in the first place. Having already grown rather world-weary, most teams settled for the first Jestans they found, even if they only came around with just one or two. For some of the more demoralized, they were fine with coming back empty-handed, or with simply letting their companion droids do all the work-for better or worse. The same was true of those who broke into the antechamber, arguably even more so. Faced with a Lynchian scene more suited for a horror flick than any sane or reasonable technology, the unlucky squad that came upon them were as rushed as they were in getting there as they stuck to the edges and tried to capture at least a few of those monochromic shades, before they broke some kind of Roche limit for radiation dosage and given something even the doctors couldn't cure. The rest made do, plying through the Escherian depths as best they could before the timer sounded off, and the return window was open. ... Up above, the air began to rumble and turn a shade of scarlet as a massive craft propelled by dual engines screamed into the atmosphere. 3.5 by 4.5 kilometers of solid Polyrite, a beast of tremendous burden that began to angle it's bulbous engines like an Osprey to stabilize it's descent. Massive flotation devices, nominally meant for emergencies, ballooned out from it's bottom, and spotlights shone from the skies to the seas, spires of light highlighting the landing zone as merely nearing the surface caused it almost to part as if it were Moses. The mothballs that once encircled in the air now began to flock towards where it was to land, evidenced by the ocean churning as if being boiled while stirred in a shaker and the sky looking as if the rapture had commenced, the cargo corvette eking out of the clouds as the lights from it's mere arrival illuminated the entire area for miles. The time to leave was almost nigh.
The kel'thulians found themselves utterly frustrated at the awful design of the city-structures. Winding pathways to nowhere, no certain up or down- it ruined their sense of direction, even though many of them had spent large portions of their lives in underwater cities. Some resorted to cutting through the walls with their claws, ripping open new doorways, while others simply gave up and turned to different buildings. But their naturaly affinity to movement in water meant less of them felt the need to simply turn back- its not like getting back on the ship just to later go to the surface and get killed would be any worse than swimming around and grabbing globs of feisty colour. The ones in the irradiated chamber felt very different about that topic. One tried to turn back but was pulled in by their officer, while all the rest tried to grab as many of the Jestans as they could- and stab at the ones who fought with their sharp, serrated claws, aiming to rip them open at what the fish would consider a 'nonvital' region- limbs, hands, shoulders- to incapacitate and make the grabbing easier. Eventually, though, when the Zetyans began to get antsy, the kel's too became weary of sticking around in the irradiated chamber.
In total, the city teams returned with about twenty individual Jestans. Most were in good shape - though those retrieved by drones were in decidedly poor states of repair, and one particularly unfortunate Jestan had been retrieved in pieces: with her neck and arms limp in the pinch of one manipulator, and her lower body spasming in the grip of the other. The fact that she still seemed vaguely alive in spite of this was perhaps more disturbing than her dismemberment - though it was at the very least somewhat handy for research. The spheres on the horizon merely sat there, glaring from kilometers away as the extraction craft made its landing. In a sense, they had a silent truce: Don't do anything shifty, and we'll leave you be. . . . The combined team in the Gamma Room were decidedly less lucky. At least two Jestans were instantly impaled: diving into melee combat with the brawling Kel'Thuls. They had managed to stick their freakish four-pronged weapons into their assailants, however: and their companions could only watch as slurries of radiation-boiled mush and gore were viciously pried from their bodies and mashed into incoherent paste. Those Jestans who had hung back were shot - most of them in the hands, feet, or both. Many of these began panicking: desperately trying to push patches of tan goo over their holes as the water pressure squeezed their bodies in vice-grips. One died clawing at her own fingers as her body was turned cleanly inside-out from the water pressure by a hole in her palm. The rest were relatively easy captures: either disarmed from their thick, clunky suits, or simply ripped from their spasming umbilical cords and forced into restraints. The fourth and final Jestan to die made the fatal mistake of a valiant charge - springing from a nook in the ceiling and ripping out a Zetyan's brains with her proboscis-weapon before she was turned into irradiated ribbons by gunfire. Most of the men, women, and ungendered persons in this room would die mere hours after entering it; their skin sloughing from their bones as radiation broke down the foundations of their cells with indiscriminate malice. Some had the misfortune of surviving for days, or even weeks - though perhaps the most fortunate in the rear were granted the providence of early and terminal thyroid cancer some years down the line.
Twenty was the reported tally. It didn't change as they reentered their submarines and transports, as they began to breach the surface near the cargo corvette, as they had to deal with some of their men melting in the cargo bay from ARS turning them into genetic erasure. Some called it terrible, almost buffoonish and lacking for a city raid. Others, lukewarm. But after the ordeal most simply agreed it was the best they could do. It was funny-the Zettish folk weren't really known for their compromises, yet here they were, tired from the long voyage and aching for home. Whether they had won or lost far up above mattered not. Whether the debris and dead left behind would be used against them mattered not. The bounty was claimed, the peoples taken, the tolls high and spirits low-with the implicit truce accepted, the cargo corvette could launch FTL just after it breached atmosphere.. All that was left to do was wait for the Kel'thulians to return from the Labyrinth of Escher to deposit their claim, and then leave the lands of eternal storm.
The kel'thulians had found themselves to be notably more successful than the zetyans; with a tally of thirty-two jestans recovered by the time the teams had all left the Jestan city, with many never returning for one reason or another- presumed K.I.A. Two jestans died as the submarines began to surface- some sort of leak they couldnt fix while being restrained, their memories and eventually lives slipping from them in an irradiated liquidy sludge. More than that in kel'thulians died from radiation sickness. Normally, a kel'thulian endowed with cancer would simply have the genetic code of that region rewritten to better fight the cancer, but the returning soldiers did not have such a luxury. All but one died shortly after the breach to the surface, with the last one scarred and missing a now-amputated limb, the medbay only able to work so fast on fighting the cancers in spite of the tools at their disposal. It was likely he'd die in a week, anyways, from some other complication with the DNA in his crainium being ruined by radiation. They had gotten what they'd came here for, in the end- despite harsh losses. Hopefully it would be enough for their scientists to do their sick work that so many lives had been lost for. With little complication the fleet returned to the stormy skies and loaded in with the zetyans upon their cargo corvette, ships damaged beyond repair being abandoned as crews jumped into the water and climbed into other vessels. And thus the storm-song finally fell on empty skies, no more ears to hear it's wailing-- the operation was concluded.
El Isotopo vanished into waves, then storms, then swirling, macabre flashes of maroon lightning in their wake. The orbs simply sat there like immense sentinels, watching as they sailed up, and up, and up, until at last even the faintest of their signatures could no longer be seen. The King and Queen of SBN-ACE-1079-6760-M watched over the ship like looming eyes as it approached its fleet in orbit, overshadowing both the sun and stars in two immense and shadowed masses. The fighting had long since ended, with only wrecks and the tense triggers of surface-to-orbit weapons painting their phantom gazes across the fleet's hulls and scars. RADAR and LiDAR washed upon them like the hot breath of restrained and eager bloodhounds wafting over their desired quarry. As the surviving equipment--well over half--fell back into formation, something resembling a coherent transmission finally splashed clumsily across their hulls. Later, translation data gathered from the captive Jestans would allow them to translate it: "FINE," it had said, "FOR DAMAGE OF GOVERNMENT PROPERTIES OF MULTIPLE NATIONS." And for a hundred-and-fifty-odd pages' worth of data, it went on, and on, and on: detailing data expenses, infrastructural damage, lost productivity; the whole, great mess. At this stage, it seemed horribly par for the course.
There was a star that the galaxy at-large called ‘SBN-ACE-1079-6760-M’.
SBN-ACE-1079-6760-M was a red dwarf star with seven planets surrounding it, ranging from two rocky midgets and a superhot dwarf planet to a a pair of minor gas giants in the middle of the system. Endearingly, it was called ‘Seven Aces,’ but not just for that reason. The system was once a smuggling route. Still was, if you asked the right people. Just off the map, low luminance, plenty of planets to hide around, and most importantly far away from efficient routes and communication areas. Pirates, lowlifes, highlifes; used to be anyone who wanted to lay low often swung by here for a few solar minutes, then hightailed it to the next system in the route - no sightseeing, no fuss, just in and out. The nickname at some point was a double entendre back when it was used more often, where there were seven aces for every person who came here: seven ways to get off the radar. Of course, everybody has their prime, and while it still saw the odd use here and there the Seven Aces were relatively unbothered for the past however many years. At least, from an outsider's view. For a long, long while, most of the galaxy had had no idea that Seven Aces was inhabited by a race of any conceivable intelligence beyond the animalistic.
From light-years away, it appeared peaceful and quiet - and even probes sent here hard largely turned up blank slates.This had all changed when a Kel’thulian scout was passing through Seven Aces for a dark run, and had picked up the exotic traces of an Alcubierre trail by sheer coincidence. And from there, the scout had briefly taken a detour on its mission to try and discover the source. They found ships out in the depths of space. Ships that looked not like solid objects, but like chrome bubbles and spires. And they followed them; and they found an eighth planet, hidden from the eyes of the outside galaxy because of its unfortunate positioning between the two gas giants ‘ACE 3’ and ‘ACE 4’. It was a water world, warmed by geothermal vents and made turbulent and sporadic by the pull of its twin neighbors - the king and queen of the system. In light of these discoveries, the Kel’thuls had been given a coincidental name for the planet by the outside galaxy.
Officially, it was the new ‘ACE 4’. But casually, people called it ‘Jesta’. And Jesta was inhabited by the same chrome bubble ships the Kel’thul scout had discovered. It was a new species that didn’t just seem to use soft tech, but liquid tech - and they inhabited a region of the galaxy so utterly unproductive in traditional radiowaves and FTL transmissions that it had been named barren or otherwise type-zero by the greater galaxy. The people who lived on Jesta knew this very well, and they had been aware of the greater galaxy for far, far longer than it had been aware of them. And they had a different name for the planet, and different plans than presumably anyone who came across it - be it with guns or gifts. These people called their watery planet ‘Arashi-no-Yoru’. These people lived lives on Arashi-no-Yoru, and had cultures on Arashi-no-Yoru, and - most shocking of all for an interstellar civilization - these people had wars on Arashi-no-Yoru. All the greater galaxy saw was a stormy, wet little ball called Jesta, and covered in a loose lattice of unknown, spherical chrome ships. Soon, they would be getting a much closer look.
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The bridge of the leading vessel, a Weaver-class factory dreadnought named the "KNS Prophet of Valor", was quiet and calm. Silent beeping and tapping as people got to work. At the helm was Fleetmaster Al'Ah'Ni, who took a deep breath and looked over his bridge while also watching the two gas giants in their slow orbit, knowing of Jesta lying between. Up to him walked one of his intel officers, who bowed. "Fleetmaster, we have arrived in the system."
"Good, and the Sachi'vais?" "They are on approach. We are making preparations to engage in Operation Sugarsea upon their arrival."
"Give me a status report on all systems and units."
"Ha'ac.”
The Intel officer nodded and pulled up a datapad, linking relevant data to the Fleetmaster's Sim-goggles as he spoke. The first set showed a diagram of the plan, datalinks pulling up the projected trajectory of the pods and the current location of Jesta from preliminary system-wide scans and orbit predictions. A set of three arrows arced around the giant and 'collided' with the planet. "As we understand it, Jesta is lying directly between the orbits of those two gas giants, and small stealth probes are already en-route to mark the paths for our drop pods. We will use the gravity of the gas giant we are currently in orbit of to sling the pods around it and into Jesta's Atmosphere."
Next, the officer pulled up a display showing a simulated group of ships sailing across the waves.
"Loaded in pods are three primary groups of the naval fleet. Support Group Alpha is a carrier group consisting of three carriers, an escorting cruiser, and a pair of destroyers. Alpha will serve as the command fleet for the assault on our end, and provide support to all other fleet elements. On top of this, they are supported by a dedicated communications frigate with extremely strong radio and FTL communications beacons, to try and keep us in contact, as well as a Strategic-Class Neprops colossi, to try and provide overall strategic warfare and keep the battlefield in our favour."
After the previous display moved aside, a new one popped up, showing a group of vessels emerging from the depths. "Strike Group Delta will serve as the primary offensive group of the fleet, consisting of a Battleship-class Neprops colossi, three supporting cruiser vessels, two destroyers, and four frigates. They will be the arms and armour of the operation, and conduct a majority of the mainline combat." Finally, a display appeared to the side, showing an undersea view of a final group of vessels.
"The final group will be named Extraction Group Epsilon. They are the ones who will be conducting the operation itself. Consisting of Five Hunter-Killer Strategic Submarines, as well as three freighters, they will remain submerged, escorted by a trio of frigates. When they locate any natives that they can... kidnap, for lack of better words, they will use personal-sub units to take them and load them onto empty pods along the freighter. Once enough have been extracted, they will need a way off-planet. This has been solved by loading them onto Atmospheric Exit Vehicles loaded on the submarines, where they once held an ICBM. Each submarine can load two vehicles, with a total of ten across the fleet. Should the enemy care about their own, they will hold fire on these vehicles."
The Fleetmaster nods, and responds. "Very well, when the Zetyans arrive, attach a comm link."
"Aye, Sir."
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Jesta was a reclusive sort. Hid between the gas giants like a shy dog, took the silent hiding spot for granted. But when the Kel's discovered the shrinking violet, they found far more than they originally bargained for, led from the collar by gleaming bulbs of chrome and muscle and fluid. A whole culture, tucked away like a hand-me-down trinket. Filled with sights unseen, ready to be taken in and enjoyed by all.
Or plundered.
Well, the apple never fell far from the tree, anyhow. That's why they were here, after all. Nearby the Kel'thul formation, a warp in space turned into a tear as a 20-strong Zetyan battlegroup came in, gleaming chrome intermixed with weathered shit brown as several upgraded Diaspora ships intermingled with the best Gen-M had yet to offer. Before recent events, the admiralty would have been terse as to the deployment of anything magitech, but given their heightened performance and impressive initial reports compared to the rest of the fleet they had soon found themselves tagging along with their more normal compatriots. The only exception to the mishmash of colors was a ship lathered with vantablack. A stealth clipper, and the mission control for this little occasion. It broke off almost immediately, slinking away to an asteroid a few klicks out as a cool blue thrust cone was all that gave indication that it existed, before it too faded as the thing blent into the background of space.
A communique was sent to the Kels as the fleet began to orient. The plan, some numbers, and a path they wished to take. Group A--Aleph--was the fighting half. A battlecruiser, artillery cruiser, and 3 heavy and assault cruisers each. They were the meat, and the ones who would be making the fleetmaster have an aneurysm back home. Heaviest weapons, biggest targets. Easy and simple. Group S--Samekh--was the supporting half. A support cruiser, 2 support frigates--mingling with Group A for the moment--one big carrier, and the stealth sloop which had peeled off earlier and acted as their command. It was the command and control; the supporting leverage for the other groups. The carrier could launch support fighters for when landfall happened, the support ships would act as both shieldboats and EW platforms, and the stealth sloop could be their eyes in the sky, a space AWACS craft that found new life after some stints that helped NAVCOM find it's niche for it.
Group L--Lamedh--was the landfall group. One raid cruiser, two cargo freighters, and two sloops. Their job was to send things planetside: troops, vehicles, whatever. Their entrance method would be loud; four bundles of giant spires leered off the sides of the raid cruiser. At the moment they were being jam-packed with an army of soldiers, runts, and et-cetera personnel, reminiscent of the old-timey definition for fag before it was appropriated by the religious folk who needed excuses to deny their predilection for penis. Command had decided that the best method of sending off troops was in giant metal spikes that could enter atmosphere and not destroy the planet--nor get turned to slag--and the corvettes and sloops were there to cover for the troops planetside when they were slung around the gas giant into Jestan skies, plus whatever the carriers decided to kindly donate. Of course, they weren't the leaders here. The fish were here to bite the bait, it was the job of the rats to plunder the carcass. The duo of tens sat in the void, waiting for the Kels to give word.
A response to the Zetyans was quickly mustered as the fleet began to prepare itself for the slinging motion around the gas giant. "Zetyan fleet, please note that the orblike structures we discovered in orbit have begun to move towards the fleet, and are arriving with firing range. We know not of their capabilities nor function, so we advise firing solutions immediately. You may launch troops when ready, and begin fleet movement to intercept the orbs."
The orbs sat above the planet were initially situated in a ring around its equator; each hovering just about a kilometer away from one another. In the hours leading up to this conflict, however, this had changed. Now, some twenty-odd objects were floating in space in the direction of the oncoming fleet. LiDAR showed that they had nothing on their surfaces, save collections of spherical joints holding drive-cones and shapes like inverted radar dishes or dinner plates holding these in-place on their backs. As the Kel'Thuls and Zetyans came closer, the ships activated their drive-cones in bursts of nuclear wrath and swirled into a strange formation. It was strange, if only because this was a culture that had seemingly never interacted nor even heard of the outside galaxy before. So, why were they breaking off into honeycomb spreads instead of the 2D-naval formations one might expect of an inexperienced void-navy? Who or what had shown them to form basic intercept groups, or even angle themselves to break into what looked like the rough idea of a Fingertrap-type 3D pincer maneuver? None of these questions were answered as the Zetyans and the Kel'Thuls came within firing distance. No surface weapons resolved on their radars, no radio emissions came forth, no tightbeams; nothing. There was only a strange buzz waking up the fleet's eyes and ears, as the systems tried to puzzle out whether or not the enemy had particle emitters running. Instead of singular particles, however, whole elemental signatures formed from alpha, beta, and gamma frequencies were coming down the pipeline. Uranium. Tantalum. Nihonium. Oganesson. Flashes of elemental signatures - sometimes in impossible configurations - were coming from the 50-meter chrome orbs. What did that mean? And more importantly, what did they expect it to do?
As the Kel’thulian communique played over the bridge, the captain eyed the approaching orbs with scrutinous curiosity through the collective lens of many ultra-high magnification cameras. His name was K'aht O'vola, and until this point he had little idea of what they were facing. Sure, he knew the fishes mentioned something about fluid ships, wacky chrome things, all that. But as they approached in an intercept formation, giving off readings that had everyone in sensors scratching their heads, he couldn't help but get the feeling something was a bit wrong. Shouldn't they have fired by now? Obviously they didn't want to be discovered, so if they were intent on removing the problem wouldn't the best solution be to fire right away? Any rightful questions about how new they were to the galaxy had no place, if only because he didn't really care about that part in particular--they had the tech for it, so as far as he was concerned, the first order of business was testing their mettle; not their sociopolitical IQ. He spoke to his officers, then they spoke to their lieutenants, who spoke to their subordinates, and the telephone soon relayed his commands to the rest of the fleet, as their thrusters began to shunt the light of stars from their rears, and the fleet began to move with the cerulean purples of the Kel' ships.
The communication line went silent again as the Kelthulian vessels began a multitude of preparations, the weapons systems going hot as the signature glowing rings of plasma-encased railguns popped up, then the silent shrieks of rounds flying down the rails, dragging a portion of the plasma along with it. Full-plasma railguns also widened their aperture to provide more area of effect for their burning plasma, then firing towards the orbs indiscriminately. Meanwhile, the Prophet of Valor turned its nose up, the drop-pod launchers changing their firing vectors to match that of the planned trajectories, then shunted all six pods, each carrying half the fleet assets in small protected packages inside the sturdy pods.
The pods were massive, each a couple kilometers inside to hold the large fleets of oceanwater vessels in their transit, their backs firing vast swathes of the stored plasma until they reached their desired burn-trajectory speed. The frontal dampeners and reverse-vector thrusters stayed silent. Small gravitational RCS thrusters made their micro adjustments as the Kel’thulian pods began their wide sling around the gas giant. Accompanying them were swathes of interceptor-craft, launched from the bays of the Prophet and its single supporting supercarrier. Their immense speed allowed them to catch up quickly to the pods, bringing themselves into tight formations with various missiles prepared to launch at a moments notice should any slower projectiles be fired at the pods or the craft surrounding them. The Fleet pushed its thrusters on, widening out slightly, and continuing their, albeit very lazy, assault on the orbs, only a small fraction of weapons firing, the rest holding off incase the orbs turn out to not be a threat to begin with. Hopefully, this should all go well.
As the great Zetyan hulks of chrome and lumps of brown silently began to acquire their targets, crystalline mounts and obtuse turrets aimed towards the silver orbs in lockstep. The first to act was Group L, as the raid cruiser made an aching turn and the sloops dashed off at an immense speed. The bundles of spires, now finished with their stuffing process, now began to rotate, like a washing machine, before each barrel of four began to launch the spires towards their destination. Magnetic launch zones and ionic engines, coupled with the silent bloom of rockets marked their swift departure, as the two sloops now flew beside the leader as escorts to the distant gas giant.
As he watched the spires exit from the berths of the raid cruiser, O'vola now noted the great carrier moving next to act, massive swarms of craft exiting from the great hulk and turning the giant whale into a swarming chorus of reflections, metal and thruster burns. Some of the swarm departed, their place filled by yet more flies as the expatriate stargroup now flew towards the collection of orbs. The rest simply converged around the carrier, a beehive waiting to be disturbed by only itself. Next came the support cruiser, as a moment's scrambling of the Zetyan formation on the command sloop's sensors indicated the activation of its ECM platforms. It remained undirected, a ball of sensor ghosts and false readings mixed with interference and noise. The support frigates followed suit in their own manner, as they now projected a great particulate shield over parts of Groups A and S. Ultimately, they were outstaged by the support cruiser, who decreed they would not be usurped so easily by projecting their own, a bubble going over the entirety of the Zetyan formation not en route to Jesta. Lastly, the assault cruisers from Aleph began to lazily fire at the orbs as the rest of A began to ready their weapons, a few striking lines of magic light dashing their way in geometric constraint towards the orbs every few seconds. Only a few turrets fired for now, the rest simply boring holes into where the computers and wires said the enemy was as they awaited a response from their mysterious foe.
The only thing to do now was wait, as the sensors relayed all that had, would, and will happen to the crew on the bridge. The captain only hoped their payload wouldn't be disturbed, or alternatively that they would be successful-Group A had a paycheck that would give any financier a stroke, but it was Group L's performance that would really get him in hot water if it all went tits up. Well, no point dwelling on what could be. His gaze focused now on the orbs once again, as he watched how they acted next...
The signatures halted when the gunfire started. There was little to no real way of explaining it, except perhaps as a manner of communication. But then, what had they been trying to say? Tempests of black stuff erupted from the surfaces of the strange objects, swirling into sparkling storms around them. The Kel'thul railgun munitions blew holes in the clouds as they were forming, but their plasma splashed and dispersed like vapor in a fan when they hit the surfaces of the enemies' 'clouds'. Some of their shells veered entirely off-course, sent flying off in slanted directions behind the orbs as they tried and failed to make contact. Others were instead brought to strange slants, their long sides making harsh impacts with the chrome things' hulls. But they didn't break. Parts of their surfaces held fast against the shockwaves while others rippled; entire ships distorting and then swelling back into shape. Were they made completely out of liquid? The few Kel'thul rounds which did penetrate the alien vessels' hulls let off sprays of their strange materiel, but they didn't make it all the way through the stuff. The things donutted and deformed into shapes resembling toroids or blood-cells under their impacts, but they sprang up from these as well; their black clouds swirling over their bodies as they did so. The Zetyan magic made collisions and arcs across the dark clouds over the enemy vessels' hulls, signifying some kind of tangible matter in-place. From the way the railguns had behaved, these had to be a manner of deployed ferrofluid shield over the enemy's surfaces. But, it was incredibly unorthodox. Where were their energy projectors? Or, more strangely, did they even have energy projectors to begin with? This became less of a concern, however, when the enemy's drive cones flared to life. Searing comets'-tails of fusion engine fire propelled the hex-groups away from one another and toward the enemies in an outward-bowing shape, trying to limit how many guns they could bring to bear on any given cluster of vessels. Their surfaces were still utterly flat, though. What did they expect to- Impact.
>>PLAYING: "The Red Comet of Loum"
One moment, there had been nothing. Then, absolutely gargantuan guns had sprung up from underneath the fluid armor layers of the enemy. There were cannons with spiralled barrels and brutal spikes and raygun-gothic fins. There were glowing condensers of strange liquids, and there were eerie, needle-esque shapes that looked like particle focusing lances. Dozens of solid and liquid rounds erupted from every hex in a one-inch-punch of searing wrath coated in unassuming austerity. Many of the shots were aimed to to blow concentrated holes through the Zetyan shield and rip into their ECM-Cruiser. Others, however, were sent riproaring in clusters. A honeycomb of five of the orbs aimed just about thirty-five different shots at the supercarrier by-eye, trying to shear through its hull and cause random damage until they could reboot their targeting systems. The lesser carriers faced their own lances of unbridled wrath, with the ploddingly-slow spheres taking potshots at them like there was no tomorrow. These weren't battleship-class cannons submerging into the things' armor once more. No, these should have been mounted spinally on a ship. The unique kinetic properties of these abominations let them field them in handfuls across their own vessels, however - but it left questions as to what the rest of their space was used for. Dozens of real battleship-grade artillery cannons sprung up from the enemy ships along specific arcs of their hulls, as if in response. For one thing, this suggested that they could choose where to let them loose - but for another thing, they were now exploding with magazine-style rapid-fire barrages of ordinances. Sandblaster-type coilguns, smaller railguns, and even plasma-combustion cannons all let hell run rampant in vicious barrages pointed toward two varieties of targets. The fortunate carriers who had evaded the first volley of 'spinal' fire, and the cruisers which had began to fire on their opponents. One thing had just become very, very clear: This was not a race unfamiliar with the art of war.
"Return fire incoming!" came the yells of various bridge crew on the Weaver-Class, various sensors detecting the fire incoming towards the fleet's supercarrier and smaller vessels of the fleet, as shielding units plopped up defensive barriers of plasma and pushing waves of gravity, shunting fire away from themselves. Unfortunately, not all the fire was deflected, as the supercarrier took a massive hit to one of its hundreds of hangar bays, destroying the various craft inside and rendering it useless. Some of the guns onboard were too destroyed by the weaponry of the strange orbs. Smaller carriers were overall more fortunate, only a pair of them being hit by munitions, one seeing another loss of a hanger bay, another seeing multiple guns destroyed and rendered inoperable without significant repair. But they weren't finished. The Kel'thulian fleet began to ramp up it's counterfire, all of their guns unloading bated shots, plasma spearing out in searing bursts, railguns that had been waiting sending out sharp shells of steel and streams of ionized plasmatic death towards their opponents. Strike craft ever more continued to pour from the carriers and supercarrier, various strike-groups sent out to conduct raids against the orbs with missiles and bolts of hot plasma alike, while a squadron of strategic bombercraft loaded with fusion-based cruise missiles began their trek towards the orbs that were assaulting the Zetyans. Meanwhile, the forces loaded in drop pods swing themselves around the massive gas giant, their intended target now within visual range as they ever-approached the surface of the planet, small, cheap RCS thrusters making any final adjustments as the crews of the vessels that were locked inside the pods sat anxiously awaiting their drop to the surface. If only they knew the watery hell that awaited them down below.
The volley made headlines all across the fleet as it roared into their midst, onyx shells and beams of particulate dashing into the ranks of the aggressors like a ballet duet. A number of shells soon found themselves being shredded like cheese, the various rounds and occasional unlucky lance having to push against the network of shields like they were mesh, and others were hit by agile PD missiles, or engulfed by great globs of plasma emitting from the hulls of the ships, a flash of white with an edge of green and red that consumed like wanton beasts. But for every two projectiles stopped, one slipped through in their place. Where once was a gleaming chrome now was a charred black, as the support cruiser endured a volley of firepower that by all means would have crippled or outright annihilated a smaller ship, spinal-grade shells punching holes into their front and back, and a particle lance skimming off the top of their rear. The shield weakened, flickering as the load of bearing began to shift over to the support frigates. The carrier of the Zetyans, too, suffered from the assault, as a shell or two impacted into it's bulk and sent a few dozen runways out of commission, while some sandblaster shots carved bit by bit into the horde it had disgorged around its being, and into the one sent to fight the fluid weapons suitcases. But compared to their peers, it could almost be considered fortunate, or perhaps just lucky. And the cruisers and battlecruiser each took some hits of their own, a damage spread equally amongst themselves in various places. One took a frontal load, a few others had it in the sides, the works. No doubt a crippling blow for some, but a horse that could walk was a horse that could race, and this was a race of a lifetime. Where once the fleet seemed barely able to lift a finger, it now roared to life, a full burn coupled with every gun in the fleet letting loose, a horde of geometric lines zig-zagging their way towards the enemy in volley format. Group A's artillery cruiser was the first to fire spinals, a center-mounted gimbal turret sending a ménage-a-quatre towards one of the twenty orbs while the rest took aim at any orb that wasn't already taken. The support cruiser's ECM, while hampered by the blows it had taken, now began to focus, a tight cone centering around the bow formation of the odd enemy afore them. And the carrier's strike package now began to near the orbs, firing solutions set up and running as a host of bombers and strike craft moved to make striking moves on the wayward foe. The cargo corvette now departed from the formation, a pep in it's step as it began to fly in the direction that Group L had sent it's angry mail. A host from the carrier's mothball moved to give cover to the escape plan in turn, almost forming a barrier as they exited mid-range PD from the rest of the fleet. The package it was moving to retrieve now swung around the gas giant like a pendulum, visuals on the fourth ace of hearts on all sensors, and a host of metal spires now joined a group of tin cans for a reentry op no one would be able to forget.
Shells flew. Beams lanced. Missiles whizzed, and fighters soared. The void-battle was, for lack of a better word, pyrrhic. The falling planetside forces could ‘see’ the fleets’ movements and changes as they beat each other bloody in a war of the heavens, with the fire from the remaining orbs concentrating on those ships which were scorching them into shriveled husks. Those watching were treated to the sight of one slashed-up orb getting slammed by the spinal cannon of the Zetyan artillery cruiser and promptly exploding out from the wounds in a shower of metal fluid. Although they lost most precise contact after that, they could still imagine the silent allegro of the ensuing firefight. They weren’t able to imagine what laid on Jesta’s strange and liquid surface, however. As the landing forces came closer and closer, signatures that should have resolved into landing points and data packets stubbornly remained a wash of electrical noise and confusion. The stormy and lightning-woven seas of the planet formed a kind of natural electronic warfare, cloaking its blue-grey surface against anything looking down upon them. Visual observation was barely more effective than their complex sensors. Camera-based scans revealed a ball of swirling hurricanes and clouded eddies, drenched in the shadows and pulled by the tides of the Aces’ ‘Royals’ surrounding it. Ionized, red lightning flashed and wailed into the depths of space along its edges and ridges, giving it a violent and hateful visage. Its dark beauty was completed by the wine-purple rim of its atmosphere, so thoroughly tinted by the bolts raging across it that its very colour was distorted. Re-entry was a thing of nightmares. Any orbital drop-trooper could tell you as much. They could tell you about turbulence, and they could try to explain being engulfed in the flames of a vengeant atmosphere. They could tell you about the cacophony of the sensors and the din of lights as every system in a drop-vehicle peaked and warped, struggling to hold together against the duress of an entire world. None of those words entirely communicated how hectic it truly was: and especially not on a world like Jesta. The great orbital spikes of the Zetyans and the rounded pods of the Kel’thuls gathered lightning around them like moths to a flame as they descended past the exosphere and into the crucible of the greater atmosphere. Walls shuddered and devices cried out in an incomprehensible cacophony, battering the ears and eyes of those present like relentless and frantic demons as their machines shuddered and groaned against the vicious air. Flames roared for a span of only minutes, and then the noise of a rainfall like nothing short of mounted gunfire battered them on all sides. It partly masked when the actual gunfire began. Re-entry was simultaneously a much shorter and longer process than one might have ever anticipated. While getting there was a process which took hours if not days, actually doing the business of ploughing through the armour of a world took less than half an hour. As a result, orbital drops were an ugly business that made those dropping sitting ducks and gave those being dropped-upon ample time to prepare. A Zetyan orbital-spike’s side was shredded by the impact of a shell as it crashed up from the sea, glancing off the armour. One Kel’thul pod found itself wracked by the explosion of a missle, and another was blasted by an onslaught of battleship-shells.
The scene was something straight out of a death metal cover. Great spikes crashed through layers of clouds and bending them around them, gathering lightning on their surfaces in cloaks of electric death. The rounded pods punched through the cloud layers in a much less graceful fashion, throwing sprays of vapour around them in flurries and blasts. Up from the broiling water’s mountain-sized waves lanced trails of steam and gouts of water, trailing into the blooms and blurs of explosions and glittering shells. They hadn’t even plunged into the sea itself yet. And as far as they could tell, there wasn’t a single landmass in sight.
Jesta - Entering Atmosphere The drop, swift yet painful, was something any soldiers that might survive this conflict will remember for all their lives. Shaking, tumbling, rumbling of storm clouds and rain, bullet and missile, shell and shot. Explosions rocked pods off course and sheared off metal plate. Interceptors; breaching the atmosphere now to continue providing support; got caught in the fire of hell from Jesta's watery surface. Planes shot down, Durable pods taking heavy damage and fire from below. Would they ever reach the surface? With a crash of water, and the snapping open of the pods, the question was answered. In the aftermath, various vessels found themselves damaged, and a few; such as a pair of frigates and other vessels in one of the hit pods, had suffered internal damage and become inoperable, beginning to sink. The crews immediately scuttled the vessel and abandoned ship into the stormy waters, swimming for larger vessels. Despite the famed swimming of kel'thulians, some found themselves lost at sea, forced to hide at the seabed. Overall, losses are high, but manageable Of the interceptors, many still remained in the skies, taking the first chance they could to land upon the decks of the freshly landed carrier-vessels, while others proudly flew in the stormy skies, staying low to avoid fire. Group alpha, the Carriers and Strategic command, began to set up their presence in the watery region, quickly sending out fightercraft and interceptors to scour the water's surface for contacts, as well as personal combat submarines to search below. Group Delta stuck close to the former. Bobbing up and down amongst the water, searchlights of white and light blue scoured around, while the glowing blues of cameras stood amongst the cloudy, stormy darkness on the planet. Guns turned and shifted, itching and yearning for targets to shoot as bolts of superheated plasma jumping from the sky hit extended lightning rods jutting out from the tops of the vessels amongst the fleet. Epsilon was far different. The moment they hit the water and assessed damages, the submarines, frigates, and freighters battened the hatches, closed the doors, and hit the lights. They let out a blaring foghorn noise towards the rest of the fleet, then plunged into the dark depths, disappearing from sight above the surface. They will be doing the dirty work, stealing innocents for the sake of sick and twisted research hidden under the guise of these things not truly being alive- of which is a blatant lie. Many sailors and captains knew not if they would make it home after these long days of battle ahead of them. But one thing was obvious: Here, in the stormy seas. the Kel'thulians found themselves at home.
There was a saying for orbital drops. Well, there was multiple sayings, and most of them were fairly well-known by the daredevils or suicidal ideators who signed up to get thrown into planets in huge metal spikes, but one in particular stood out. "The ride out's worse than the ride in!" Nobody knew who first said it, and to tell the truth, nobody cared. All that mattered was the message, and how it was portrayed. The phrase had become something of a prayer for those who said it; if not for wanting easy entry, then hoping the 'ride out' would indicate they got their job done. Harder resistance equals something having gone wrong, right? The common consensus, though, was that whoever came up with that one was a fucking retard. The plethora of spikes were trailing smoke from their ends as they came down, but there wasn't any damage or propulsion to it. Any fuel they had was spent getting here in the first place, or evading any oncoming fire with RCS and luck. Their escorts bobbed and weaved like locusts in a swarm, fighters and bombers and all sorts of interatmospheric craft zipped to and fro, to and fro. Of those who reached the surface, some lived, some died; the spikes themselves may have been build hard, but no amount of hard could stop a shell the size of a house from shearing off everything from the neck down, or a laser from cutting them in twine, or a missile from grazing their side, ejecting their cargo into the wrathful sea of storms. Even the least religious of their cargo could not help but pray. At any rate, it was a response almost primal; something that drove the mind to call to higher powers and spirits when the body might yet collapse, fall down and weep. Who wouldn't, after all, when their world was nothing but thunder, fire and noise? Once they reached a certain point-give or take about a half-Everest above sea level-the spikes opened up, discarded themselves. Heat dispersers that had served their purpose, inertial stabilizers, and everything connected to their outer shells was cast off like silk, leaving large pods with spikes for heads that engaged on full burn, two per spike as they pierced the sea like spears from heaven. They went down, down down. Their thrusters didn't stop burning until they either hit the seabed or ran out of fuel, a yellowish-orange contrasted to the deep blue sea. Once settled, their contents opened, slowly at first, but then with haste as assortments of bubbles and masses of metal erupted from their insides, like a cell self-destructing after a virus entered it's body. There were three kinds of things that exited from the pods, though some were in far greater number than others. The first were submarines, a plethora of turbinid drones mixed with long, almost reptilian attackers that dwarfed most there, the meat that would stall the inevitable for as long as they could-and already were, as they began acquiring fire solutions and firing autolocking torpedoes that yearned for a target. The second were troop transports, little buslike things built to take their men from point A to point B, moving as a swarm while their bearings were acquired, and their targets sighted. And the third were automated craft, split between carrier drones holding large boxes of nondescription, and smaller drone craft that were retrofitted for oceangoing duties. The murky deep was likely to be less kind than the surface. Only the lord knew what awaited them in the sea, as the lights of fire began to flash in the far distance, and munitions began to soar at them from the fathoms.
The surface of the sea was hot and ready. Now, this wasn't to say that it wouldn't have been even without the things approaching from the distance. The storms crackled between sky and sea like blinding pillars upholding the flying rapids of the immense clouds high overhead, and the waves rivaled mountains in their height and wrath. These throes of madness were so cacophonic and mad on all sides that they almost served as cover for the incoming enemy. Almost. The immediate and first indication that something had gone wrong was the way the RADAR started giving off very frantic warnings. Notices of supersonic overpressure and the almost-shrill whines of the infared sensors' own complaints pointed toward wings of rapidly-accelerating shapes surging through the rain and rapidly approaching the surface forces. Then they dropped torpedoes. Then they fired their electrothermal-chemically propelled autocannons. The cross-sections of the shapes were almost painfully obscured by the cones of heat and screaming noise that their supersonic acrobatics left riproaring behind them; but they became clearer when the things flared their massive wings out to either side and dove toward the waves. Half of them maintained their eerie and teardrop-like shapes, sizzling as they plunged and then stubbornly flickered on the SONAR equipment as little more than ghosts. The other half arose from the waves again, with the thrust-vectoring segments of their fuselages swung under them like legs. It looked like the things were accordioning into themselves as more of their bodies shifted in a liquid mess, revealing multicolored bubbles of hydraulic muscle and chrome material in the darkness. In an incredibly baffling affront to most traditional concepts of modern warfare, the natives of Jesta were using first-strike mechs as their forward assaulting force. Who does that? And more importantly, how does someone do it that well? . . . The SONAR ghosts were not merely a problem above-water. Jesta's sea floor was littered with the ghosts of butchered forests. Wherever one looked, the boneyard stretched through the darkness; great and eerie wisps and tangles of warped bio-stone reaching desperately up from the hidden ground below. Their edges were moth-eaten and ragged, suggesting both their prior height and the terrible acts wrought against them by their occupants - cheerily confirmed by chemical samples of the sea around the groups. While more samples elicited signs of industrial residue off to the north-east, they didn't speak of anything coming down the flow of the water. Group Epsilon and their motley crew washed above the white and labyrinthine peaks and shadows of the Ghost Forest below and around them. Mountains of silt and rock loomed to their sides at slopes impossible above the waves, honed to flowing faces and ribbons by the ruthless currents surrounding them. Though the light of their target had yet to reach them, its scent was distinct: and they knew they were on the right path. A submarine near the rear of the formation sensed something approaching it at a speed which should have only been possible in an atmosphere; much less a void. Then the shockwave of the supercavitating round cracked the poor thing's hull: followed by the muffled thunk of its warhead and the terrible byoom of its chemical-explosive warhead. The wreckage expanded out from itself in a cloud of shrapnel, wavered unsteadily, and then collapsed with a terrible force - compressing the whole shredded mess into an almost amusingly-small ball of tightly-wrapped panels, fuels, shells, and presumably, corpses.
Every other submarine registered the presence of a SONAR ghost somewhere behind them - something that rivaled or even matched the size of the eerie spaceships the enemy had produced - and then just as quick as that, it vanished. In the blink of an eye, something fifty meters in diameter just vanished from their sensors: leaving a gaping hole where it should have been. Though they could no longer sense the looming phantom behind them, the forest of ghosts was occupied by another kind of spectre. Things - things which absorbed most of their signals and slinked through the trees like the water itself - were hunting them. Someone, somewhere, was probably playing Fortunate Son at full-blast at the bottom of a pool.
Crash-Crash-Crash! Torpedoes ripped through the hull of a frigate, autocannons battering the hull of a cruiser. Armour shredded and bullets deflected, the pale blue lights shining in the rainy dark like a solemn bioluminescence. Crews fought with radars and other sailors, chaos aboard all the ships taking on sailors abandoning vessels and dealing with injured, it was pure anarchy. From the outside, though, it looked calm, and strategic.
The cruisers swung their guns around gracefully, taking calculated aims the best they could at the streaking 'vessels' of which they found themselves in combat with. The air screamed and shrieked as metal rubbed metal, a super- no, hypersonic- boom resounding as batteries of railguns unleashed shells towards their enemies, followed up with shots from coilguns, accented by the glowing-blue light of plasma bolts and beams, vaporizing droplets of rain and blending in with the angry lightning as they hunted their marks. Smaller vessels followed suit as destroyers unleashed volleys of fusion missiles, and torpedoes flew from bays towards targets. Fighters soared through the skies, bombarding the strange sensor ghosts with plasmafire, and the occasional missiles, the storms and clouds and seemingly jamming making finding targets hard and painful for them. Fighters continued to be launched launched from the decks of carriers that found themselves under fire, the railgun sitting on each carrier's side deck sending out bolts of screaming metal towards the mechs flying above the water's surface. Chaos, Chaos, made all pretty; Who'd've thought it'd been this shitty? Group Epsilon found itself under fire too, the death of a submarine apparent as they began to unleash intense sonar scanning, and cameras darted around, searching like hundreds of little eyes, itching to find their target. Bays opened on the submarines, holding guided torpedoes and micro-torps alike, like missiles in the water. Fingers sat above triggers, and waited for a lock.
Kaboom. Group L's entry into the deep blue was as bad as the ride in, as one of their fast attack submarines was turned into an inside-out by a flash of light, and their brothers making mad dashes to find the enemy. From the outside, it seemed orderly, much like the Kel' assault; from their busoms came a horde of torpedoes, locked onto SONAR pings both real and fake, as the submarine drones rushed forward in a swarm wall to serve as a motile cover. Other drones broke away from the group, some riding high and letting off what looked like countermeasures but read as outright screams on sensors as they became their own targets, and others popping buoys and sensors to scout out the surroundings, find a path to the nearest city. And amongst all the mess was the swarm of troop transports and dronecraft, following the scent of prey and covered by their larger cohorts as they let loose volley after volley of torpedoes and missiles. On the inside? Well, seeing as every man, woman and child-quite literally, as half the manned crews for the subs were often runts-was practically screaming orders and confirmations at the top of their lungs, praying to higher powers, or otherwise scurrying like ants as they scrambled to keep the fight going, it was going better than ever expected. Damage reports were minimal, across the fleet, but not because their enemy was negligent; rather the opposite. To be hit down here was a death sentence, the only difference being whether it was instant or prolonged, and their enemy was wily as a few more drone subs were caved in or blown apart by munitions found wanting. As much as the Zetyan navy was a neglected child, their products at least had quality to them, quality that served them best they could as their sensors and maps updated, gave them paths, target data, sensor ghosts that filled the forests around them. But one thing was forcefully assured, even in the chaos that surrounded them-they would find their quarry, come rain or sunshine. Because if they didn't? The cargo corvette on it's merry way wouldn't just be picking up body bags, and the enemy would have a whole lot more than dead men and scrap to study. ... On the surface, the swarm of escorting fightercraft finally had a reason to use their weapons, as they flew to support any Kel' forces still above the water. While they were more keyed for ground attack than sea ops in about half the flight, it didn't stop fighters both manned and automated from letting loose on the bubbly mechs that broke the surface, fighters ripping out bursts of autocannon fire and small missiles, and attack craft tossing MLAGS or smart torpedoes at their orboid foes. A pyrrhic move, but one they learned from the fishes, as they worked in tandem with the Kel' battlegroups still above the surface as they waged their little war.
Even outnumbered three-to-one, the machines on the surface fought like demons. More than one fighter-plane found itself with a perfect lock on one of the opponent's aircraft, only to fire and find their trajectory completely flipped or bent. The things moved in ways that shouldn't have been possible: flexing their bodies in artful curves at velocities and Gs that would have compressed any solid organism into a stain on their cockpit interior. When missiles loosed themselves, they were met by clouds of heated chaff floating in the air: and when the things fired back, they did it with vicious accuracy. The most effective method of downing them ended up being plasma. When they approached the hot zones the clouds created, the fightercraft generally tended to try and swerve or divebomb into the water: corraling them into certain paths. Once or twice, they even managed to catch one's hypersonic shockwave in one of the clouds - causing the thing to boil and erupt in a crackling blast of liquid-metal fuel and munitions. The mechs were another problem entirely. While they carried less intelligent armaments than their pure-fighter brethren, that didn't mean they were any less effective. There was more than one occasion where one closed into range and snapped to-arms with murderous intent. At this point, several ships were sinking due to the countless holes their automatic sabot-shotgun-things had chewed into their sides - and several more had peeled open from the hull outward from a pint-sized shaped nuclear charge. The mechs were taken down more by CIWS than anything else. While being fast, they weren't nearly as speedy when they were folded into their spindly humanoid forms - and that opened them up to rotary cannons and lasers once they got in too close. One in particular was floating to the bottom of the sea; having been taught its lesson by a burst of automated gunfire when it tried to close into melee range. The only saving grace was that, in spite of their gleeful use of beehive-munitions and tactical warheads and contrails crackling with radiological death, the Jestans were reluctant to shoot those who chose to scuttle or abandon ship. It was some small comfort among the miles-high waves and the bullets of the falling rains.
The submarines hunted like jackals. They attacked sporadically and viciously, hobbling and executing small numbers of the enemy from seemingly-random directions. When they fired, they did so in bursts - taking advantage of their ghostly nature to blindside the enemy as many times as possible before vanishing into the shadows of the dead coral forest. At this point, they knew that their SONAR wasn't being directly interfered-with. Though the radiation concentration was steadily rising, interfering with radio and tightband communications across the board, they weren't receiving any targeted bursts of interference. They could perfectly see one another—but it was almost miraculous whenever a shot scored one of the vicious little opportunists. It had to be some quirk of their architecture; which was confirmed when a pressure-based warhead went off right next to one. In the aftermath, the computers finally identified its shape. It looked almost like a fish without fins, but it behaved like a gel. The thing's hull didn't shatter so much as it wobbled when the shockwave finally hit it; convincing the thing to suck its clusters of bubbled turrets back into its skin like a polyp hiding from predators. There was another flare of SONAR activity as it rebounded, and then it was gone; having scurried back into the darkness.
September 30, 2022
Through the flurry of bubbles, the Zetyan conglomerate continued to follow a chemical trail, eruptions of bubbles and light coupling themselves with a rush of current as they charged onwards. The way ahead seemed dark in both figurativity and literality, illuminated only with the pings of sonar and through the monochromatic hues of FLIR and night vision cameras. That the flickering on their displays wasn't a targeted effect was a small yet precious solace, even as their sensors chugged to figure out the geometry of their surroundings that twisted like cancerous bone. But a valley caved in nearby, a seedbed for SONAR feedback that they proceeded to in haste, that they might see their foes clearer. A communique was sent to the Kel's that were in the murky black with them, a request to assist in mapping the quickest route to a trafficking zone as sensor inflows were dispersed amongst the shoal, and to join them in the dash to the valley of death. The drone subs began to split off, or merely some of them, as they twisted and turned amongst the debris. The migrant's purpose was twofold; map the surroundings, and try to play at their opponent's game as they slipped in and out of sensors like silverfish. More torpedoes came from the tubes that exuded themselves from their hulls, both the turbinid forms of the drones and the reptilian submarines volley launching as if their life depended on it. One sub was punctured in the aft side, another in their fore. The drone losses were beginning to mount at haste, and while the plethora of troop transports and small drones that accompanied them hadn't reported much if any losses, that would be soon to change if the attrition rate kept it's steady pace, or the fishes that harried them so dutifully were not dealt with. ... On the surface, they repeated the course of boom and zoom. While now, in the face of progress, they opted for nails just as much as spears, it didn't make the task any less difficult for all but the nascent aces among them. If anything, it made it almost worse-simply because you were in gun range didn't mean you could make your platform turn fast enough to make the gun hit the silver blurs that were dashing through the clouds and thunder. Coordination with the Kel' airforce was tight, and for that the lesser experienced could find solace-where they might fail, there would be two to help them back it up. A communique from space was relayed down below, into the murky storm. The cargo corvette was t-minus 20, and the pressure was on.
Sending a positive response to the Zetyans, the Kel's had already noticed the valley, and pushed their propellors and jets of water to move half of their submarines towards the ever-important dip in the terrain, hoping to get clearer SONAR readings. Torpedoes ejected themselves from tubes as they frantically tried to find targets in the dark, while the sonar ever pinged. A submarine found itself with holes across itself, propellors failing and jets of water used to propell it sputtering and stopping as it began to vent its atmosphere and take on gallons upon gallons upon gallons of water, guzzling it in like a thirsty man fresh out of a desert. While the kel'thulians inside did not drown, they instead found themselves dying from the sheer pressure of the water hitting them, breaking ribs and enacting concussions, before inevitably crushing their bones from the sheer depth of the water they found themselves in, like trash in a compactor. Surface Guns continued to fire off, railguns shrieking through the storm with violent supersonic shockwaves, letting off bright flashes of light. Plasma bolts burned and screamed in the downpour of rain, sending off water-vapour misting through the air just to condense in the cold and rain right back down into the murky death below. Missiles flew from vessels trying to track their gunning-and-running opponents, often to no avail. "Target in sight, 22-34-02. Bank right hard, fire missiles!" The radio screamed in his earholes, but it mattered not, nothing mattered, nothing but the targets he chased. Having already gotten just enough a glimpse to lock on, the pilot loosed a pair of fusion missiles before pulling up hard and turning his craft around. His interceptor creaked as the high-G maneuver- of which wouldve knocked out any inexperienced pilot- threatened to stall the plane mid-air. The Battle of Jesta has already proven itself bloody, and the pressure mounted more with the Cargo corvette en-route, so very close. May they only hope the submarines can find their targets, and extract them as the mission plan instated.
At some point, one had to start wondering why the enemy was acting the way they were. To the average soldier, this was a non-concern; their matter was one of life, death, and brutality. To the tacticians and the higher-echelon commanders, however, there was something decidedly off. The Jestans weren't trying to destroy the Kel'thuls and the Zetyans. If they'd truly wanted to, it seems likely that they would have sent intercontinental ordinances or at the very least re-enforcements by now. The fact that they were simply shredding the advance force with their own initial scramble was curious: and their organization was equally bizarre. Rather than trying to route or separate the invaders, the enemy had been focusing on corralling the attack groups into a smaller and smaller space; striking them from outside and above rather than from within and beneath. These were delaying tactics. The Jestans were forcing their enemies into a corner and bunching them up from all sides while a larger, more organized force were either en-route or preparing themselves at other defensive positions. They'd already proven themselves to be freakishly adept at avoiding sensors and disturbingly mobile: so there remained the unsettling question of whether or not more were already here—but the guillotine never dropped. One by one, the mecha and their fighter escorts were falling: and though the submarine group had been diverted, they were maintaining insubstantial losses. . . . Speaking of the submarine group, their efforts had finally paid off. Nestled in a valley of grotesque graves and rotten forests, they at last discerned a clear image of their opponent. Having forced the enemy submarine group to follow them, they were finally in a no-guard situation: everyone could see everyone in the echoing barriers of the great fissure. What they saw was absolutely terrifying. Swimming above them was a sphere, fifty meters in diameter. Only, no; its cross-section warped and changed. It was a sphere at first, and then it became a teardrop as it moved forward - and then again, it squashed like gel: the alien machine warping itself into a shape like a blood cell. Finally exposed, it drew its swarm of little escorts into its body - the things merging eerily with its surface and vanishing. There was a gargantuan and terrible heartbeat where the liquid monster hovered there, doing nothing at all. Then its bottom face became a wall of long, thin protrusions - and its firing solutions finished. All at once, hell broke loose. From its three incredibly long 'lances,' the Coral Phantom unleashed three corkscrewed supercavitating projectiles which formed vortexes in their wake and unleashed storms of needled shrapnel into the swirling water. From its dozens of slightly shorter cannons, smaller and less vicious ordinances of supercavitating penetrators and hydrothermobaric detonators let loose. Flurries of incredibly thin projectiles like cut wires went whizzing in a great storm from its countless smaller barrels, and last, a few score torpedoes snaked around the freakish disc to snare those who tried to flee down the valley. This was a desperate Hail Mary: a sniper torn down from its tower, now firing at everything it could in an attempt to destroy as much as was possible before its coming demise.
The cahort of metal swam through the rain like scattered sardines, drone subs shredded by flechettes the size of men and the attack subs perforated by flechettes two grades higher. Three subs were obliterated near-instantly by a flurry of implosions and fire. Not even the wily transports and small drones could escape the storm, now that it had engulfed the battlefield in a final crescendo of bubbles and currents, and many disappeared into the path of a thermobaric explosion and never came back out. The losses were stacking once more, and in a way almost untenable-over 8 subs lost, three score in transportation, six in drones. One couldn't blame them as they began to flee into the valley, torpedoes launched hurriedly in their wake as the crew attempted to escape the underwater storm. Only, the drones did not follow suit as before, like dogs on leashes. Rather, they surged towards the sphere, letting off flurries of torpedoes as they seemingly charged mindlessly at the sphere itself, metal upon metal upon metal forming into all but a desperation manuever that churned the waters like a mixer. Whatever fear effect the Jestans might have intended to accomplish, the motile wall of meat that was closing the distance was inarguable evidence it had succeeded. As the craven hordes fled into the depths, their sensors were tuned, water samples prepared to be taken and expunged by automated equipment. A speed-search for chemicals, expulse, waste, anything to cobble a trail to discern travel lanes, where these beasts of liquid matter went to and fro. It was almost orderly, the way their procession moved-if not for the jerking every craft had to do, trying and not-too-occasionally failing not to add to the tally of those raked by monowire, punctured by flechettes or punked by a torpedo. ... The battle was progressing, yet paradoxically there wasn't much in progress. Though the Jestans were falling, they weren't falling fast enough, and the attrition they had succeeded in maintaining threatened to prolong into a stalemate. Still, the swarm continued their duties, as best as one could trying to fight beings of liquid that absorbed your shots like oobleck, and one by one both bubble and silverfish were beginning to sink into the deep, given freckles on every surface that yet oozed with lifeblood. Though, the Jestan tactics were not lost on some-or atleast, those not taken by the throes of battle. As the two sides fought on, a contingent of the mothball departed into the mare nostrum above, drones and aircraft tuned for long-distance ops given a new purpose. In groups of five, they spread out into five prongs, hiding in the storm as they began to roar away from the nascent battlefield in a 2D cone that stretched into the beyond. Their purpose was simple; scout ahead, see where the stockades were waiting for their prisoners, or if they were there at all.
Submarines took hits left and right, metal torn through by shots as bubbles of air shot up and water flooded into caverns. Shards of metal drifted in the water like pretty mirrors reflecting the light of drowned explosions, the kel'thulian submarines setting their sensors into overdrive to hunt for any clues, while pumping out torpedoes, and small bays opening up. From these bays, swarms of little drone-craft shot out, dodging and weaving through the water like fighters through air, propellers and water-jets pushing them smoothly through the thick, dense, pressurized water. Behind this swarm of drones, the larger submarines began to pull back, but still covering the retreat of their Vais' allies. The fight wasnt over yet. --- The battle went stale like bread, every inch gained by either side lost almost immediatley, a battle of eye-for-an-eye at it's finest. Fighters and mecha clashed at immense speeds in the air, while subs and boats on the liquid water 'ground' were pelted by munitions, still ever-driving their own into the dark and stormy sky. INCOMING TRANSMISSION "Z- [static] -command, come i- -delaying tacti- -regrou- -keep plane- -n the sky-, i repeat, regr-" TRANSMISSION FAILED The storm seemed to be interfering with their communications far worse than expected. With this garbled information, the Kel'thulian forces began to consolidate their losses, pulling into a tighter defensive formation, while the fighters, ever invigored as new were launched and old landed for resupply, continued to lash out at the mechas, trying to keep them off the backs of the subs below.
The Leviathan died in bloodshed. The thing withstood just about every ordinance they threw at it, but when it came to the slicing claws and razors of the drones, it bled like a cell peeled open by a tiny scalpel. They cut through twenty-five straight meters of membrane and liquid as it did everything to stall them: firing munitions into itself, blowing its own munitions stores, and even venting the searing fluid of its fission reactor into its encroaching opponents. It wasn’t designed for close-combat engagements, however: and its hasty scramble had left it with a fraction of its intended munitions stores. As the drones made it to the center of the thing, they tripped a single, unassuming membrane: distinguished by just one thing. It was pink. When that pink membrane split, the Leviathan died in its tracks. It sat there, lifeless, as the last of its attackers reveled in the glory of the moment with their mechanical augments and fleshy, lobotomized brains. Then, something was sent screaming out of the thing’s center: fired off like one of its shells and sent zipping toward the sea’s surface. The radiation levels spiked. The Leviathan boiled. The resulting ball of plasmatic fire shattered the bone forest for dozens of klicks, saturating the local sea with fissile material for dozens more. The plume of radioactive steam, smog, and vaporized metals came rising from the sea like an evil spirit. It drenched the stormy horizon in Death’s pale shadow, forming a mushroom and boiling the clouds it touched even as it was cooled back into submission. The sound overloaded SONAR systems for hundreds of kilometers around it, driving the Sodalyte aircraft into mad spirals for but a moment. At the sight of the mushroom cloud, however, they stopped weaving away from the enemy. More projectiles went flying from the mechs and the planes as they went on full-burn, screaming straight toward the bunched-up mass of Zetyan ships. While it didn’t seem to be their initial plan, something about the cloud had convinced the Jestans to perform a last-ditch effort against the invasion: Kamikaze attacks. . . . As the shockwave passed through the underwater contingent, they found a tangible trail. It was strange, admittedly: it was a cloud of metallic isotopes and fission byproducts upon the ocean floor, too heavy to be blown away by even the tides of Jesta’s raging seas. It led deep into the labyrinth of coral: sinking below even the underwater valley into a variable trench. Was this where the Jestans lived? It was a strange comedy: the Zetyans and Kel’Thuls’ road to El Dorado was paved not in gold, but in decaying forms of Plutonium, Uranium, and superstable superheavy elements such as Oganesson and Nihonium. . . . The fanned contingent found Prospero’s Island in the tempest, by some miracle. In spite of the planet’s wonky magnetic field, the noise of its storms, the force of its winds, and the sheer impact of its rain and hail, they breached the clouds and discovered something remarkable at the end of the rainbow. A trio of orbs. They resembled the Leviathan below the sea, and the Pearls dying in space. Their surfaces were different shades of reflective chrome, their diameters were subtly different, and their propulsions varied greatly. One stood upon the water using a series of flowing skirt-segments, boiling the sea beneath it. One floated on a complex set of crossed pontoons, with ends like open fish mouths and tornadoes of blades. The last was half-submerged in the sea, surrounded in an inner-tube of floating material ringed by long legs hovering just over the waves. They were maneuvering into position on the horizon, miles upon miles away from one another. They each bore the mountain-sized waves with grace, and they each trudged through the maelstrom in their own way before coming to rest upon the edge of the visible world.
There, they simply waited: but for what? And were there others where the Kel’Thuls and Zetyans couldn’t see them, or were these truly their only opponents? Perhaps the most eerie thing about them was the signature emanating from them. It wasn’t radio, or light, or sound, or even microwave-band comms. They were emitting alpha, beta, and gamma particles in a kind of fluid dance. The same dance they’d been seeing ever since they arrived on Jesta. ...118-200. 129-287. 107-322… Those were signals. The same signals the voidships had cast toward the approaching fleets. The same signals the planes and mechs had been emitting to one another. The same eerie signatures they were receiving in faint blips and sparks from beyond the horizon. This entire time, they had been talking to one another: and they’d tried to talk to the Zets and Kel’Thuls when they made contact with Jesta’s orbital defenses, too.
The water swirled, boiled. The churning fathoms precluded the shockwave from the detonation, a soft cushion for the impact of a brick that put the SONAR of the Zetyan craft into brief haywire, and rattled the hulls akin to how one would shake a birdcage. It led to no losses, or perhaps just not immediate ones-ARS be damned-but as the chaos was winding down the ratio of alive to dead was nearing the line from concerning to unfavourable. They would have to find their quarry, fast and in bulk, lest the operation graduate to something akin to phyrric-or worse, failed. Data was found, subsequently relayed. The chemical trail was highlighted, a sinking breadcrumb trail of oxidized waste and decayed material, winding down into a challenger deep that light did not tread, and the scouters who laid eyes upon the great trio now lit them up like lights, sensors acutely focused as some encircled, and others spread outward. The communication methods were lost on the rodents, or perhaps just ignored-if they had come to speak in tongues, perhaps they would have brought ministers instead of munitions. Unwilling to repeat the battle from before, the zetyans began the headlong charge to their mythical, hypothetical city, and to the Kel's still upon the surface, in their submersible ships they received only one request-go down with us. ... For the Zetyan craft still on the surface, the fight had not yet ended, even basking in a sickeningly familar sight. There were no Zetyan ships-perhaps a few submarines had surfaced here and there before, ballast damage and punctured holes forcing a surfacing, but they would have been lost or evacuated, left to rot or turned into scrap by the walking artillery batallions the others fought against. But there were plenty of Zetyan planes, a swarm that was starting to wane from the extensive combat. Many were manueverable fightercraft, or atleast had the span and control to dodge or graze a headlong suicide dash from a meters-long spear of violence gelatin barring the unlucky pilot here and there. But many were also gunships, bombers, the slow and ponderous-and it was they who were made to bargain, as the steel and composite of theirs was punctured and impacted by the membraneous figures, or dashed upon by cannons and missiles. A transmission from above, again. The cargo corvette was nearing, and it was within range to begin requesting voidcraft reinforcements from the swarm. T-15, and seemingly with no room for delay.
In the wake of the detonation and the shockwave, the Kel'thulian ships had scrambled to push themselves towards the chemical trails. They had to hurry, no time to spare. None of them were destroyed, but there was some damage on a couple ships- sensors that would need to be replaced, or a leak that led to a room being sealed off. Nothing fatal. Hearing the zetyan's calls to above, the Kel'thulian submarines copied the messages and relayed them louder to the fleets on the surface, further cementing the chances for them to come down into the depths and provide support. --- The membranes of the odd gel-mechs sliced through the Kel'thulian ships like butter. Having noticed that all the zetyan vessels were already turned to seascrap and drifting metal, the jestans had decided to switch targets. Ship after ship was cut through by the Jestan's kamikaze attacks, which forced the miniscule amount of remaining vessels into retreat, the menacing form of one of the Neprops- the hulking lobster-esque mass of a battleship- dropped under the water's surface alongside many of the other ships, pushing themselves deep below the water, as the zetyans below called for more help. The kel'thulain ships went to join their submarines in the hunt of Jesta's depths. This left the fightercraft alone, fighting alongside their Sachi-vais bretheren in an unfamiliar, stormy sky. Nothing they hadn't trained for, before. The fightercraft swirled around, some being cut down by munitions mid-turn, while others launched off more salvoes of glowing bright plasma missiles, burning through water and membrane alike. Even the slower craft of the Kel'thulians seemed to slice through the rain- not perfectly, but with the ease of something designed for harsh conditions akin to these on a lesser scale.
The battlefield above the surface grew almost deathly-quiet against the mad, frothing cacophony of Jesta's storms. With the Sodalyte mechs and jets silenced, there was nothing assaulting the landing force - though the triangle of orbs around them refused to budge. They simply sat there like three mismatched monoliths, stoically bearing the force of the constant typhoons ripping across the mile-high waves and nightmare-disco of crackling lightning. The froth bathed their reflective, metallic hulls, and they waited. They were struck by lightning here and there, and they waited - the charges arcing brief distances along the swirling greyscales of their surfaces and then falling dead and silent. Either they weren't sure of what to do, or it simply wasn't worth it to fire them on an opponent that might run - either financially, or tactically. War, someone once said (to the effect of), ...is a series of long periods of mind-numbing boredom and paranoia, periodically broken by flashes of violence and insanity. They were in one of the lulls, even as the madness seemed to fill the air around them. . . . The Jestan El Dorado looked almost nothing like a city. Jokingly, some of the men had started calling it 'El Isotopo': because the roads seemed to be paved in reactor waste as opposed to gold and riches. For one thing, no sane species would ever design a city that looked so intentionally oppressive and nightmarish. Up on high, its towers loomed into the darkness like great strands of grey seaweed. Where there would normally be a single or possibly even double-layer of city streets, the thing was mangled and knotted in on itself like a cross between a coral reef, an Escher design, and a brutalist's idea of a good time. Some levels looked so densely-packed that they could have been mistaken for solid objects, while others were so obscenely vacant that they resembled something closer to a titan's trench than a city street. There were lights, but they were small and harsh - casting searing, angled beams through the darkness and polluted silt onto the ground below. There were streets and walkways, but they were so broad as to be mind-numbing for anyone on the ground. There were alleys, but they were so tight that one would have to enter them single-file. The power lines throbbed like veins. Advertisements glowed on every surface not occupied by a faceless door or important system of some kind, and some weren't even restrained by such ideas as architecture. A few submarines even triggered ads as they passed-by, their visual-spectrum sensors abruptly stunned by bursts of light and corporate, stale imagination. They saw more random bullshit about the Jestan goods than they ever could have wanted to in a lifetime, and they saw the Jestans, too. They were some kind of amoeba-people, with some depicted as short, heavy-bottomed humanoids, and others depicted as fluid organisms bound by tanks, or testing out fresh pairs of arms and legs, or doing all manner of high-society stuff that bordered on the obscene and lavish. Carefully-calculated waves of pressure delivered muffled jingles through their hulls, albeit, distorted by the material they used: and glowing points of light guided them away from the maddening circuit-board's remaining undeveloped spires of carved coral and seabed-stuff. It was something out of a nightmare, laced with tubes and arteries and transport-tunnels and spaces without reason. It was a prison with no walls, and a casino that never slept. It was decrepit. It was gleeful. It was horrifying. It was delightful. It was monotonous. It was evil and duplicitous at once. What kind of pathological psychopaths built their cities like this?
"El Isotopo"s schizophrenic design did nothing to deter the home invasion, though the deathly quiet and rumbling distortions also did nothing for the crew's spirits. Escher's timecube was as vast as it was travelable, as the various tinier shuttlecraft and automata began to flock into the city streets like a wave of vermin, red-dotted visors and harsh sensors scanning for any signs of life while the attack drones and submarines drifted above like zeppelins, backlit by the artificial light of capitalism. It was a strange sight, one you might expect more in war propaganda-all it would need was a stylized palette and a caption screaming to defend the homeland. The lull burnished on the crew's minds like alcohol, and the antsy nature of the Zetyans was pushing them onto a tension edge. They had reached the target, and yet there were seemingly no visible signs of life. Or, perhaps, they lay in wait for an ambush once again, waiting for some transport to open it's guts and spill out their captors before springing the trap like a flytrap. Perhaps they weren't even here, and the cold reality was that they had fled the moment the submarines went on intercept course. Who knew? At any rate, all they could figure was that the walls of nonsensical advertisements and the triage floating far, far above were the only company they would get. A few of the troop transports were more daring than their brethren, their pilots parking near where they saw faceless doors and their rears opening to reveal a squad of soldiery. The shadows with red eyes moved to breach and clear, as automata built to contain and suppress floated alongside them in wait. ... There was little else for the mothball to do, now that the others had slipped beneath the surface. The cargo corvette was nearing by the minute, and most with interatmo capabilities took opportunities when they saw them, beginning to roar back to the heavens they came from. The rest who stayed were ordered to move, to begin shadowing the distant triad just like the recon craft were doing. It was a concept a good chunk were averse to-but options tended to limit themselves when there was nothing to do.
From the bowels of the Kel'thulian submarines, smaller mini-subs and personal transport units began to drop out of once-hidden moonpools. Bubble-jets of water shot out from wingtips as propellers helped the jets push the mini-subs forwards, along the radioactive-brick-road of "El Isotopo." Alongside the zetyans, the Kel'thulians hunted for the inhabitants of the nightmarish city. The beaming advertizements and oppressive nature of the city struck some level of uncertainty into the hearts of the Kel'thulian hunters, but nevertheless, they pushed on and on and on. Squads of minisubs began disembarking their pilots into the inky water, where they drew water-capable harpoonesque weapons, or brandished their hand-claws like gauntlets, the bony protrusions glinting in the dim light. These varied squads would bust into homes where they could, or hunt through buildings that had any semblance of an entrance.
The witch-hunt was as tense at it was fruitful. Many of the breached doors led to spaces less logical than the city itself. Rooms built in three dimensions with no concept of up or down assaulted the senses and sensibilities of the Zetyans and Kel'Thuls, many of which were plastered or marked by bizarre, multicolored shapes and sequences. Their translations AIs kept fruitlessly trying to insist this was some form of language: but each time they worked at decrypting it, they ran into errors, or overloaded, or simply shut down. Floating screens and honeycombed walls of desolate, hexagonal cubicles filled many of the spaces - while others were layered in on themselves like golgi apparati, stocked to the brim with all manner of items. Some, they could recognize: they burst into thrift stores, and food shops, and offices. There were forms resembling hobby stores, and warehouses; and more. One team even managed to barge their way into something resembling a cross between an oversized pneumatic ferry and a subway. Another was less lucky - traversing what felt like a mile of winding hallways down, and down, and down, only to enter a room filled to the brim with eyes staring at them. That team went radio silent not long after. The distribution of the Jestans seemed almost random as they ransacked their working and living spaces - sometimes even dystopian mixes of the two. Most zones were simply empty, with various items just left floating in the middle of the water like they had been suspended by phantoms. Some had only smatterings of Jestans in various states of violence and panic. The jackpot, however, came when a combined squad burst into something that had looked a bit like a planetarium, jammed in the centre of several different buildings and fed by a sprawling forest of pipes and cables. This one was filled with an entire dozen Jestans, though they were dressed oddly: their thick-bottomed bodies swathed in thick, padded layers of mirror-finish bubbles and white straps. Their heads were covered by spheres of the stuff, with mirror-finish dots spattered across them like compound eyes. These ones were managing a space filled to the fucking brim with Gamma radiation. As the re-enforced door to the radiation room blew open, most of them scattered: jamming their oversized paw-gloves into their helmets and extracting wicked-looking spikes with four points apiece. They hid in side-doors and behind thin cubicle walls, disappearing among the brilliant, mirror-finish surfaces of the space. Two remained at the centre of the room, however: bathed in the overwhelming, blue glow of the space's radiation and suspended in midair by umbilical bundles of wires that trailed into the backs of their heads and torsos. These two twitched as if they were having seizures, their fingers flicking in and out as if a vicious child were yanking them around.
Those who thought the tail end would be less stressful than the other parts of the operation were proven wrong in almost humorous concession, as the task of actually plying through the nightmare city soon enveloped all involved. Sure, there was no grand ambush, no enemy in wait, but the design of the city was in and of itself a psychological blunt force, not mentioning what they had to do to get there in the first place. Having already grown rather world-weary, most teams settled for the first Jestans they found, even if they only came around with just one or two. For some of the more demoralized, they were fine with coming back empty-handed, or with simply letting their companion droids do all the work-for better or worse. The same was true of those who broke into the antechamber, arguably even more so. Faced with a Lynchian scene more suited for a horror flick than any sane or reasonable technology, the unlucky squad that came upon them were as rushed as they were in getting there as they stuck to the edges and tried to capture at least a few of those monochromic shades, before they broke some kind of Roche limit for radiation dosage and given something even the doctors couldn't cure. The rest made do, plying through the Escherian depths as best they could before the timer sounded off, and the return window was open. ... Up above, the air began to rumble and turn a shade of scarlet as a massive craft propelled by dual engines screamed into the atmosphere. 3.5 by 4.5 kilometers of solid Polyrite, a beast of tremendous burden that began to angle it's bulbous engines like an Osprey to stabilize it's descent. Massive flotation devices, nominally meant for emergencies, ballooned out from it's bottom, and spotlights shone from the skies to the seas, spires of light highlighting the landing zone as merely nearing the surface caused it almost to part as if it were Moses. The mothballs that once encircled in the air now began to flock towards where it was to land, evidenced by the ocean churning as if being boiled while stirred in a shaker and the sky looking as if the rapture had commenced, the cargo corvette eking out of the clouds as the lights from it's mere arrival illuminated the entire area for miles. The time to leave was almost nigh.
The kel'thulians found themselves utterly frustrated at the awful design of the city-structures. Winding pathways to nowhere, no certain up or down- it ruined their sense of direction, even though many of them had spent large portions of their lives in underwater cities. Some resorted to cutting through the walls with their claws, ripping open new doorways, while others simply gave up and turned to different buildings. But their naturaly affinity to movement in water meant less of them felt the need to simply turn back- its not like getting back on the ship just to later go to the surface and get killed would be any worse than swimming around and grabbing globs of feisty colour. The ones in the irradiated chamber felt very different about that topic. One tried to turn back but was pulled in by their officer, while all the rest tried to grab as many of the Jestans as they could- and stab at the ones who fought with their sharp, serrated claws, aiming to rip them open at what the fish would consider a 'nonvital' region- limbs, hands, shoulders- to incapacitate and make the grabbing easier. Eventually, though, when the Zetyans began to get antsy, the kel's too became weary of sticking around in the irradiated chamber.
In total, the city teams returned with about twenty individual Jestans. Most were in good shape - though those retrieved by drones were in decidedly poor states of repair, and one particularly unfortunate Jestan had been retrieved in pieces: with her neck and arms limp in the pinch of one manipulator, and her lower body spasming in the grip of the other. The fact that she still seemed vaguely alive in spite of this was perhaps more disturbing than her dismemberment - though it was at the very least somewhat handy for research. The spheres on the horizon merely sat there, glaring from kilometers away as the extraction craft made its landing. In a sense, they had a silent truce: Don't do anything shifty, and we'll leave you be. . . . The combined team in the Gamma Room were decidedly less lucky. At least two Jestans were instantly impaled: diving into melee combat with the brawling Kel'Thuls. They had managed to stick their freakish four-pronged weapons into their assailants, however: and their companions could only watch as slurries of radiation-boiled mush and gore were viciously pried from their bodies and mashed into incoherent paste. Those Jestans who had hung back were shot - most of them in the hands, feet, or both. Many of these began panicking: desperately trying to push patches of tan goo over their holes as the water pressure squeezed their bodies in vice-grips. One died clawing at her own fingers as her body was turned cleanly inside-out from the water pressure by a hole in her palm. The rest were relatively easy captures: either disarmed from their thick, clunky suits, or simply ripped from their spasming umbilical cords and forced into restraints. The fourth and final Jestan to die made the fatal mistake of a valiant charge - springing from a nook in the ceiling and ripping out a Zetyan's brains with her proboscis-weapon before she was turned into irradiated ribbons by gunfire. Most of the men, women, and ungendered persons in this room would die mere hours after entering it; their skin sloughing from their bones as radiation broke down the foundations of their cells with indiscriminate malice. Some had the misfortune of surviving for days, or even weeks - though perhaps the most fortunate in the rear were granted the providence of early and terminal thyroid cancer some years down the line.
Twenty was the reported tally. It didn't change as they reentered their submarines and transports, as they began to breach the surface near the cargo corvette, as they had to deal with some of their men melting in the cargo bay from ARS turning them into genetic erasure. Some called it terrible, almost buffoonish and lacking for a city raid. Others, lukewarm. But after the ordeal most simply agreed it was the best they could do. It was funny-the Zettish folk weren't really known for their compromises, yet here they were, tired from the long voyage and aching for home. Whether they had won or lost far up above mattered not. Whether the debris and dead left behind would be used against them mattered not. The bounty was claimed, the peoples taken, the tolls high and spirits low-with the implicit truce accepted, the cargo corvette could launch FTL just after it breached atmosphere.. All that was left to do was wait for the Kel'thulians to return from the Labyrinth of Escher to deposit their claim, and then leave the lands of eternal storm.
The kel'thulians had found themselves to be notably more successful than the zetyans; with a tally of thirty-two jestans recovered by the time the teams had all left the Jestan city, with many never returning for one reason or another- presumed K.I.A. Two jestans died as the submarines began to surface- some sort of leak they couldnt fix while being restrained, their memories and eventually lives slipping from them in an irradiated liquidy sludge. More than that in kel'thulians died from radiation sickness. Normally, a kel'thulian endowed with cancer would simply have the genetic code of that region rewritten to better fight the cancer, but the returning soldiers did not have such a luxury. All but one died shortly after the breach to the surface, with the last one scarred and missing a now-amputated limb, the medbay only able to work so fast on fighting the cancers in spite of the tools at their disposal. It was likely he'd die in a week, anyways, from some other complication with the DNA in his crainium being ruined by radiation. They had gotten what they'd came here for, in the end- despite harsh losses. Hopefully it would be enough for their scientists to do their sick work that so many lives had been lost for. With little complication the fleet returned to the stormy skies and loaded in with the zetyans upon their cargo corvette, ships damaged beyond repair being abandoned as crews jumped into the water and climbed into other vessels. And thus the storm-song finally fell on empty skies, no more ears to hear it's wailing-- the operation was concluded.
El Isotopo vanished into waves, then storms, then swirling, macabre flashes of maroon lightning in their wake. The orbs simply sat there like immense sentinels, watching as they sailed up, and up, and up, until at last even the faintest of their signatures could no longer be seen. The King and Queen of SBN-ACE-1079-6760-M watched over the ship like looming eyes as it approached its fleet in orbit, overshadowing both the sun and stars in two immense and shadowed masses. The fighting had long since ended, with only wrecks and the tense triggers of surface-to-orbit weapons painting their phantom gazes across the fleet's hulls and scars. RADAR and LiDAR washed upon them like the hot breath of restrained and eager bloodhounds wafting over their desired quarry. As the surviving equipment--well over half--fell back into formation, something resembling a coherent transmission finally splashed clumsily across their hulls. Later, translation data gathered from the captive Jestans would allow them to translate it: "FINE," it had said, "FOR DAMAGE OF GOVERNMENT PROPERTIES OF MULTIPLE NATIONS." And for a hundred-and-fifty-odd pages' worth of data, it went on, and on, and on: detailing data expenses, infrastructural damage, lost productivity; the whole, great mess. At this stage, it seemed horribly par for the course.