SDNW4 Story Thread 2

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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Force Lord »

The Central Times

Central State denies rumors that it has sent "stealth craft" for operations within MEH territory

Centrum has again denied allegations by certain foreign states that it has deployed stealth vessels to attack MEH ships. Several foreign intelligence agencies have stated that they have found "irregularities" in internal MEH trade, noting that it has reached a level not usually dismissed as accidents. A few also say that the "irregularities" started to happen a day after energy surges were detected almost simultaneously within Centrality and MEH territory that was linked to warp gate activity. The Center of Foreign Affairs has sent a public message stating that the Central State "is not responsible for incidents so far away from home and that it does not have designs on the MEH as certain nations are declaring recently".
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

THE FREE REPORTER-OBSERVER DAILY
Middle March Edition

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THE PREFECTURE, TESTINGSTAN - In response to the comments made by several members of the Imperial Belkan Armed Forces, Smarm-Star General Montgommery Strak of the Ford Regional Overall Defense Force has issued the following statement:

"I would thank the mercenaries and soldiers of negotiable allegiance of Belka not to make presumptions about the capabilities of the FROD Force, its servicebeings or its machines. Certain Belkan officers are entitled to make whatever statements they wish from their well-indented armchairs, but I believe several misconceptions have to be corrected. Firstly, while the militaries of other nations' preference for tried and true weapons systems with forms and functions very much like proven designs from the 20th-21st centuries is all well and good, turns out technological advancements over the last one thousand four hundred years has allowed for the development of radically different designs that more than match the aforementioned systems in effectiveness - shortsighted dithering detractors bickering like a bunch of fatty nerds on a netsite notwithstanding. Who knew?

"The FROD Force now makes full use of many of these radical designs - not exclusively, as we have conventional systems for dedicated roles as well, thank you very much - and these designs are fitted into various roles where they are best suited, giving the FROD Force an extremely flexible combat capability. As we are neither a large scale nation like our nearest neighbors the Shinrans and Haruhiists, nor are we a so-called "empire" of multiple-systems with a dodgy reputation of renting regiments out to the highest bidder, the roles the FROD Force's post-conventional doctrines encompass unfortunately do not include large scale galactic warfare, but our roles do include support elements, like maritime space patrol, rapid response, reconnaissance, peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, occupation, civil defense and special operations. These are right important parts of any military operation, best not neglected, and where any additional help would be welcomed, am I right? Our mechas are tailored for these missions, where their multi-role capability to function as spacecraft, aircaft and terrestrial vehicles are invaluable. The notion of the FROD Force being exclusively composed of mecha is probably a misconception they got from an overabundance of whimsical animated media, or from wearing their flight helmets and g-suits too tightly.

"We are very well aware of the realities of warfare, thank you. But if these Belkan officers' demonstrated awareness, or lack of thereof, of the FROD Force and its nuances is anything like their own awareness of the realities of warfare, then as much as I also hope that such a grim event will never come to pass, they may sadly be the ones who might have a one-sided massacre as a wakeup call.

"The FROD Force's offer for assistance encompasses mostly (nonetheless important) supportive roles in coalition operations. Judging by the eagerness of Belkan mercenaries to 'kill the fatties', and other such chest-beating nationalistic statements, and seeing as how in this period of shock at the alleged atrocities of the MEH some Belkan officers spared no time to cherrypick the military minutiae of a nation that offered its services to the coalition well ahead of them, if they really want it so badly then the FROD Force is more than glad to share duties it may be assigned - both front-line and rear echelon - with its newfound allies, so that together we can help bring an end to tyranny, esper oppression and the illegal experimentation of sentient beings. Am I right?"

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Smarm-Star General Montgommery Strak.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Shinn Langley Soryu »

Belkan Backlash
Colonel Dietrich Kellerman's office, Kellerman Institute, Greater Belka
Mid-March 3401


"Do you know what the problem is with young officers like yourself, Colonel Fleisher?" Colonel Dietrich Kellerman, legendary leader of the Imperial Belkan Aerospace Force 126th Tactical Fighter Squadron "Silber" and founder of the military academy that bore his name, asked a visibly pale and sullen Detlef Fleisher. "You may have the intelligence needed to be a good officer, yes, and I certainly will not doubt that, but what you truly lack is wisdom. You can regurgitate facts and figures all you like, but do you actually understand what those facts and figures really mean?

"You know, I used to be like you once, Detlef. Like you, I graduated at the top of my class at the academy and flight school. Like you, I had a reasonably successful early career as a pilot. Unlike you, however, I learned about the taste of defeat early on. I was shot down, I lost wingmen, I sometimes failed to achieve my objectives, and I was passed up for promotions. They were certainly bitter experiences, yes, and you can be sure that my ego took a hit or two. But I recovered. I learned from my mistakes, and I became a better pilot and officer because of them. Fast forward a few decades, and here I am, passing on my knowledge to future generations.

"You, on the other hand, apparently do not know what the word 'defeat' means. Your record is one of the most flawless in the entire service. You've never been shot down, you've never lost a wingman, you always complete all of your objectives, and you've never been passed up for a promotion. However, your success comes at a high price. As I said before, you do not know what defeat is. You have become far too proud of yourself, and that pride shall prove to be your downfall. Your pride gives rise to recklessness, and recklessness leads to minor mistakes becoming major ones. Otherwise insignificant gaffes like your blatant misrepresentation of the the FROD Force snowball into three-ring multimedia circuses, with you as the main attraction. You're just fortunate this wasn't a combat situation. If it had been, then you wouldn't be here right now. Do you get me, Colonel Fleisher?"

Detlef remained silent.

"I said, do you get me, Colonel Fleisher?"

"Yes, Sir, sorry, Sir," Detlef mumbled.

"What's that?! I couldn't hear you! Sound off like ya got a pair, Colonel!"

"Yes, Sir! Sorry, Sir! I will make sure to control myself in the future, Sir!" Detlef barked as the color returned to his face.

"Good, good. I am glad that we've come to an understanding, Colonel Fleisher," Dietrich said. "Hopefully, you've learned something today. You have every right to be confident, but don't be too confident. It might just save your life one day."

"Thank you, Sir," Detlef said as he saluted the senior officer.

Dietrich returned the salute. "Carry on, Colonel."

Detlef left the room and closed the door behind him. With the impertinent officer gone, Dietrich rifled through the papers on his desk for a bit before picking up his hard copy of the Middle-March Edition of The Free Reporter-Observer Daily. He sat down in his chair and read the editorial by FROD Force Smarm-Star General Montgommery Strak.

As he was walking in the hallway, Detlef swore he could hear the sound of fucking laughter emanating from Dietrich's office.

Cranagan, Mid-Childa
Mid-March 3401


"No, seriously, just what were you thinking, Vita?" Signum asked. "There is clearly nothing wrong with attending these rallies; some of them are mandatory, after all. It's when you bring signs with profanity written on them and openly tell the reporters that you want to kill some fat people that your...enthusiasm for the cause...becomes...worrisome."

"Look, I don't need you repeating to me what exactly it is I did wrong," Vita retorted. "I know that my conduct at the rally was unprofessional and unbecoming of an officer. It's just... It's just... The MEH, man! They're openly kidnapping people of our talents and abilities and subjecting them to unimaginable suffering as part of some warped 'research project'! What scientific worth is there in vivisecting and lobotomizing ESPers?! Answer me, Signum!"

"We understand that you feel strongly on this issue," Signum said. "We all hate the MEH just as much as you do. I can't speak for everyone else, but at least I know that there are appropriate times and places to make our true sentiments known. Going out to a mandated public rally in full dress uniform chanting 'Kill the fatties!' while waving a picket sign scrawled with profanities is certainly not how you should express your displeasure with the MEH. Our day of vengeance will come. Just be patient, old friend. Just be patient, and save your wrath for the MEH's soldiers. You can do that, can you?"

Vita was visibly hyperventilating. "I'll...try, Signum," she said, panting in between words. "I'll...try."

RESULTS:

Detlef Fleisher and Vita both have generous helpings of crow pie served to them in the aftermath of the Belkanische Allgemeine Zeitung fiasco.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Mayabird »

War Shipyards, Prime Refuge (Sector CC-23)
Buildup to the MEH War/Goddamn Unreal Time


The escort ships that went with the diplomatic yachts had been noted to be squarish, boxy, ugly things. The warships seen in their various roles in the newly claimed Refuge territories and elsewhere in the former Outlander Commissions were noted to be of greatly varying shapes, sizes, and configurations. Some of it was due to different ship classes and types, of course, but foreign analysts had already guessed at the other major reason: modular ship parts.

The ships sent out to be seen clearly by the other nations were the basic hulls, carrying only the basic weapons suites, lacking additional weapons modules or other pieces which would reveal far too much about Refuge technology at once. Of course they looked small for their engine output: they were supposed to be bigger.

The War Shipyards was a busy system at all times but it was an even more hectic place now, even with new construction on hold. The repainting/engine remodulating deception still needed to be maintained. The ones nearest completion were being rushed out to their crash shakedown/service cruises. And those being readied for the great upcoming war were having modules added.

Intelligence came in from multiple sources on the dispositions of forces within the Multiversal Empire of Happiness. Navies based on few super-capital ships were quite different to deal with than ragtag pirate fleets (which were themselves quite different from, say, angry molecular clouds), so the ships needed to be adapted accordingly. It was a very logical thought process for the Refuge; they had an entire species that worked by those principles, after all. No matter the threat, they could optimize themselves for it, and switch back if needed. New designs could be added and obsolete ones could be removed without extensive refitting.

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Artist's conception of the idea. It actually looks nothing like this, but to be fair, the artist was a child.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the factory ships retooled and readied themselves for the long voyage.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Siege »

Mount Thunder Staging Grounds
Formalhaut, Sovereignty


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The Marine Corps was mobilizing, and all of Formalhaut knew it. There were always troops and troopships mounting, redistributing, refueling, regrouping or exercising at Mount Thunder -- that's how the facility got its name. Back before the invention of the suspensorlift the skies for many hundreds of miles around the facility had been permanently alive with the sound of hundreds of reaction engines. Those days were long gone, but today the clouds overhead still roiled as flocks of Hurricane strategic lifters rumbled down from space toward the endless fibcrete expanse below.

Yes, there were always ships coming and going at Mount Thunder, but today was unlike most because of the sheer scale of the mobilization. Down on the wastes of artificial gray, tens of thousands of marines marched in parade-ground formations to their assigned transports. Lines of hovertanks raced past waiting Terminator heavies and Shillelagh mobile autolaser batteries. Loaded dropships lit their engines and ascended back into the skies, past the flocks of Peregrine and White Shark fighters that soared overhead, to join the flotilla that was rapidly growing at the polar anchorage in high orbit.

The fleet of Warstars and Strikestars, Dreadstars and Independent Offensive Units was ostensibly assembled here, at the largest USMC fleet base before Wild Space, in order to counteract the Bragulan mobilization ongoing on the other side of no-man's space. "Making sure the Brags don't try anything funny" was the public word. Amongst the ranks of briefed officers circulated another version of that story: "make sure that if Byzon changes his mind about the designated 'mysterious enemy from the anti-spinward', he'll rue it for centuries to come".

Only a handful of CIs and trusted admirals knew the real goal of the mobilization. The Star Force, usually quite frank and open about its operations, had gone to some length to keep the great enemy from guessing the fleet's real purpose. Not that it mattered in the long run: the Brags would find out soon enough... When their own fleet was halfway around the galaxy.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Celeste, USS

In one of the tiny ramshackle asteroid-stations littering the systems bordering Wild Space, a shortwave hypertransmission was sent. The message, read with the voice of a woman, was composed entirely of numbers. Spoken in a cipher, understood only to those on the other side with the requisite code books.

The message read:

Code: Select all

Large scale mobilization detected. USMC. USSF. Formalhaut.
These reports would be received by listening stations in Wild Space, before passed on to the BSE proper, where they would be sifted and filtered to Bragbyanka - the nerve center of the Imperial Bureau of Galactic Vigilance.

It was concluded that the movements were a natural precautionary reaction to Bragule's operations in the anti-spinward. Understandable. Expected, even, from the eternal enemy - who so feared the forces of mighty Bragule, as to tremble and quiver with the passing of the Imperator's Space Fleets, even when the bear paid man no heed.

Yet it was a fact that considerable Bragforces were now far away from Bragspace. Occupied in the anti-spinward frontier, and the Outlands periphery. If there was a moment for human treachery to exploit, it would be now.

There were still Kosmoflotts stationed at the Western worlds of the BSE and pointed at the Sovereignty as Bragule's own precautionary measure. So it was decided to raise the alertness levels of the remaining Bragforces, just in case.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Previously on SDNW4 wrote: Once we were all thoroughly prepared and re-Byzonized, the exercise commenced in short order. This time Bragotyomkin held the defensive position against the approaching feline fleets. They came from all sides, and as the mock battle began, with all its simulated glory and computated horror, the exercise gradually descended into a protracted hours-long campaign as the Chamarrans, seemingly more cautious this time round, opted to stand from afar and lay siege to us in space.

In that position, outnumbered by a slightly superior force of cats, I would have never expected the eventual outcome of that second exercise.

NAVY NYAH!

By: Darkevilme, Simon_Jester and Shroom Man 777

Sector E-24
Off Chamarran Space
Unreal Time / Late 3400 / End of the Year

A MOST BYZONISTIC FLEET REVIEW OF THE PROLETARIAN PERFORMANCE OF KOSMOFLOT BRAGOTYOMKIN IN THE SECTOR E-24 WARGAMES WITH CHAMARRAN HIERARCHY FORCES

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Seal of the Imperial People's Military Maritime Space Fleet
Round 2

This time, the Chamarrans had a 3:2 advantage on us. They arrived in the system using a multi-vectorial approach, coming from different directions in an attempt to englobulate us. However, we stood fast and maintained our positions, careful not commit the very same mistake we made before - we would not divide our forces unless absolutely necessary. Instead, we consolidated all of Bragotyomkin into a single unbreakable phalanx to weather the inevitable storm the felines would unleash upon us with their overwhelming numbers. ‘Circling the wagons’, as the Solarianoid phrase went, was an apt description for the stratagem we used. By banding together, our ships would be able to mutually defend each other from the felines’ long-ranged strikes - using a combination of overlapping fields of fire, circulating gunskimmer sweeps, and smaller subcrafts to intercept incoming attacks.

As soon as they got in range, the Chamarrans began launching their missile salvos. Their primary long range missile combatants were the Dominions and the Predators, and the larger carriers hurled a truly staggering amount of warheads - each Dominion being equal in throw weight to no less than two Friend of Bragules in missile cruiser configuration (of which, Bragotyomkin only had two). The smaller cruisers individually mustered smaller barrages, but they more than made up for it in numbers.

Bragotyomkin held its ground in steadfast and resolute defiance and swiftly counterstruck with long-ranged missile salvos of its own. Unlike the Chamarrans, who only had two varieties of missile-capable ships, all our warships were missile-capable and when their salvos were combined, the whole bragfleet itself would become one enormous missile combatant. But the sheer extent of our armamentations was tempered by the need to conserve our warheads, lest we deplete them prematurely. Knowing full well that we had a long battle ahead of us, we administered a carefully measured dose of simulated thermosubnucleoatomics to the felines, reciprocating with roughly equivalent salvos as we traded blows with them. We reserved the bulk of our strategic missile force for later, when we would unleash it at an opportune moment.

In the meanwhile, we endured. As the gunskimmers, fighters and gunboat-missileers swept the space around us, the venerable paleocruisers were also dispatched to screen us from the cats’ claws. As I expected, it seemed as though the Chamarrans had changed stratagems, adopting a more cautionary pose. Whereas in the first exercise Sesh had hurled the bulk of her forces in a direct attack, heedless of the wanton casualties she might (and did) sustain, in the second exercise they were more content with bombarding us from afar rather than risking themselves as Sesh did in a direct engagement.

Perhaps the other two Battlemistresses, Eshe and Liana, balked at the prospects of losing ships and crews in combat, or maybe they thought taking their time and striking from long-distances was a more efficient strategy. Either way, their three battle groups had Bragotyomkin completely surrounded, and it gradually became a space siege - a grinding war of attrition. In that situation, both sides could have held on indefinitely* while battering each other from afar, dealing and sustaining only a fraction of the damage a more up close and personal engagement might inflict, but eventually, someone had to make a move.

It was not just a battle of long-range missiles, but also a battle of patience. I waited for the situation to change, and prepared Bragotyomkin to spring into action when the time was right.

*[In real war, a protracted campaign would favor the defenders more than it would the attackers, as delaying the attackers from accomplishing their objectives (be it the destruction of their opponents, or the seizing of an objective) is in the interest of the defender, whereas the attacker is better served with a quicker resolution to the conflict. Aside from bogging down the attackers, a prolonged resistance may also allow for the eventual arrival of reinforcements to support the defenders - as seen in the recent actions in space sector H-12, the so-called Battle of Zebes - while simultaneously preventing or at least delaying the enemy campaign from advancing forward strategically. Battles must not be only analyzed in their own individual contexts, but also in the greater strategic scheme of things in relation to the overall campaign.]


HSF Nightshadow, Rampant-class battleship, Second Battlegroup

Sesh was not at ease fighting from range. Oh, how she’d prefer to get to beam range with Nightshadow and the other Rampants- a quick lunge and pounce to tear their opponent’s throat out. Unfortunately she’d found last exercise that Bragulan throats were covered in teeth and those teeth were made out of bullets. So here she was, cautiously watching her Predators and Dominions engage in a missile duel with the Bragulan fleet. Even the drones couldn’t close range and were forced to hang as diffuse cloud of supplementary point defence between the two forces. The Bragulans hadn’t sortied their fighters offensively and attempting a drone strike would only lead to a dogfight and both sides depleting their supply of strike craft to little gain.

Battlemistress Sesh wasn’t going to be content to sit and spectate for this battle though. Even if her precious Rampants were devoid of missile launchers, she’d made some plans just in case they played the cautious kitty.

“All beamcannon armed ships, prepare for coordinated slash beam salvo.” she said and then waited to get a nod from her fire control operator.

“All ships keyed in, battlemistress. Target?”

“Saturation fire on paleocruiser 3.”

“By your will.”
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In unison over a dozen beamcannons lashed out into the space Sesh’s battlegroup had localized one of the Bragulan ships into. They then whipped across that volume in parallel sweeps, attempting to put fire into all conceivable positions where jamming and dodging might place the target vessel. The first sweeps did nothing, but narrowed down the possibilities for the second. The third went somewhat better. All that the beams touched glowed brightly as the exotic energy weapons interacted with the walls of coagulated atomic radiation that surrounded the Bragulan warships, in reality the beams were dialed down to their absolute minimum yields though they simulated combat-grade intensities.


BSS Most Erudite and Byzonic Decree of Most Merciful Magnanimously Munificent Moon Smashing, Patriotic Glory-class paleocruiser

The exterior tele-video sensors suddenly flashed far more brilliantly than before and the computer started to click and whirr with the ponderous sounds of venerable vacuum tubulated computations.

“Have we been hit?” Zaggadavik barked at the crew clustered around the computer, who were desperately and futilely trying to resolve a paper jam in the computer’s output system before the commissar could inflict stickbeatings.

“Coming now sir, vessel hit with extreme range beamcannon fire. External missile batteries starboard 3 through to starboard 41 destroyed, k-bolter batteries 2, 4 and 6 50% or more inoperable.” A computationalist summarized from the printout over the sound of his comrades becoming percussively more patriotic.

“Nothing but exterior damage?” Zaggadavik asked, wanting confirmation that the beam had not been able to dwell on them long enough to do more than disable some of their Byzonic arsenal.

“Da.”

“Send trucks to the missile magazines under the affected batteries! Move the missiles from there to the undamaged launchers!” Zaggadavik barked. Keeping the missiles in their original place, by the broken batteries that could no longer launch them, would be an exercise in futility. At least the undamaged launchers would be able to use them still.
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Half-tracks roared through the corridors, carrying enormous quantities of missiles. The Moon Smasher was lucky in that a century ago it had been charged with carrying an entire division of the Imperial Legions of Liberation within its massive cargo holds. Their destination was some distant warzone in Wild Space, but the brave troopers never made it as the cargo holds malfunctioned and they were all asphyxiated to a bear. They were given heroes’ burials and promptly spaced, and the Moon Smasher got to keep all the military vehicles they had brought with them. Including the trucks that were now ferrying ammunitions. It was certainly more convenient than relying on press-gangs to haul the missiles across the ship by hand.

“Trucks are on their way, Commissar.”

“Very well. Continue fire with remaining launchers.” Zaggadavik ordered and settled as the Computationalists tried not to whimper loud enough to attract further stickbeatings. The half-tracks were rolling, the missiles were being transferred, and they were mitigating some of the damages done unto them by the felines. The beam fire was inconvenient, but they were Bragulans, they could ignore the inconvenient.


HSF Nightshadow

“Several Predators now report minor focusing node degradation, battlemistress.” Sesh had known this was inevitable, but the urge to at least DO something, to strike out with beams as a Chamarran fleet should, had been overwhelming. A few dozen salvos later, the Bragulans did seem to have lost some of their missile throw weight, but her ships ran the risk of burning their beamcannons out before they inflicted any meaningful damage at this rate. The Predators, with less room for redundant focusing nodes, were simply showing signs of damage first.

The phrase that popped into her head was Chewing Vacuum.

“Very well, cease coordinated fire plan and go to plan B. All Rampant ships to go over to auxiliary jamming mode, all Rampants prepare damage control teams at jammers to conduct quick replacement when ordered.” They couldn’t contribute to the fleet’s offense anymore, but she could contribute to the defence with the preparations she’d made. The Rampant had quite a powerful jamming suite, like all Chamarran vessels. The trouble previously was that her jammers had been trying to engage in a close range shouting match with the Bragulan sensor systems. What the Bragulans lacked in electronic sophistication they made up for with power output- to the extent that Sesh was now pretty sure if she looked up “finesse” in a Bragulan dictionary, it would describe it as “a state achieved through the application of superior wattage”.

At this range, though, she could at the very least take the heat off her Dominions with regards to the radiation seeking missiles the Bragulans kept on mixing into their salvos. By making sure the damage control teams and replacement jamming parts were right adjacent to the jammers, she could do it without the inevitable burnouts from prolonged high power operation impairing her ability to jam should she get into another close in shouting and shooting match with the bears.

To the Bragulan missiles, the number of Dominion grade jamming signals suddenly more than doubled as the Rampants diverted their Tap output more fully into their jamming suite. Missiles designed to kill sources of jamming suddenly found themselves spoiled for choice. Being too dumb and too inundated with noise to coordinate, they split their atomic attentions between the freshly multiplied targets.


BSS Fist of Consummated Retribution, Imperator’s Fist-class battleship
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The mood in Consummated Retribution’s bridge was that of controlled chaos as battle controllers and adjutants beared their stations. Operators relayed orders, barking at corded handsets while stabbing plugs into bulkhead-spanning switchboards. Cosmocartographers with elongated beating-sticks pushed floating miniature ships across null-grav holograms of the battlespace. Orderlies ran to and fro, relaying papers from the printers to the commanders, and shoving their signed orders into the pneumatic tubes, or discarding outdated reports in incinerator bins. Commands were roared by officers, alarms were blared by macrophones, adjutants droned and chanted status updates in a mantra of megatons.

In the middle of this Byzonic battle-bustle sat Front Admiral Nykanor Zyvan Nikhamov, seated on his command chair. The roll cage was disengaged as he leaned forward and steepled his claws under his chin, deep in thought. His eyes darted from one telescreen to another, while at the same time he listened to the many reports of his subordinates and the vessel’s very own captain, in charge of combat operations in the Retribution.

“Multiple paleocruisers report having sustained superficial damage from the beamstrikes, Admiral. Their external systems have been damaged, and their collective missile throw weight has been reduced to 85%,” announced their communications officer.

“Instruct those affected to exchange places with fresh paleoships before the felines fire again. The phalanx must be maintained.” Nykanor replied. On one paw, the beam cannons that had previously been so devastating to his battleships had inflicted only slight, bearable damage on the paleocruisers after so many salvos, showing that distance and jamming was adversely affecting their aim. On the other paw, the damage sustained by Moon Smasher and her grandsister ships combined with the Chamarran’s own EW meant that the paleocruisers’ striking power was nonetheless diminished, and no matter how slight this damage was it would still accumulate as the battle went on. Eventually this would affect the whole fleet as well, as they were few and the Chamarrans were so many, sheer numbers would gradually grind them down.

“Chamarran Second Battlegroup has ceased their beamfire but substantially increased their jamming,” a sensor officer reported. “Spud salvo effectiveness has been attenuated.”

Nykanor turned his attention to the telescreens displaying the course of the paleocruiser missile salvos, which were losing coordination and veering towards too many sources of jamming. This was not surprising, as the older missiles were prone to this whenever confronted by more sophisticated EW systems like those of the Solarianoids, and right now the Chamarrans. Had they used more intelligent missiles, the problem would have been alleviated, but now was not the time for them - not when the enemy was at full strength and in position to intercept anything he threw at them. Fully familiar with Koprulu Zone Rules, he knew better than to squander his hand this early in the game, before the Battlemistresses made their move, or he made his.

For the moment, they would wait. As if to accentuate that point, Nykanor glanced at his pocket watch to note the time since the beginning of their mock battle.

He didn’t expect the battle to be resolved through long distance fire alone. In a missile engagement against disproportionally few foes, perhaps. But between whole fleets whose offensive missilery were just as effective as their defenses? A battle that would be decided by long-range salvos, by who had the most warheads and/or point defenses, or who ran out of them first, would be a time consuming affair that could last for hours.

“The Chamarrans are firing another salvo of missiles. Incoming!” announced an adjutant.
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“Da,” Nykanor acknowledged, but otherwise gave no other command. As a Front Admiral, he had delegated the duties of defensive counter-action to his subordinates, namely the captain of the Retribution and the commander of all other vessels. They had served under him in many campaigns and skirmishes throughout Wild Space, there was no need for any further instruction, they knew what to do.

In the radar screens, the Chamarran missile mass was displayed as massive blobs rushing out from their launcher ships. There were thousands of individual delivery vehicles there, each of them yielding less than the standard Bragulan vegemite-nuke, but compensating for it with their sophisticated sensor systems, decoys, EW suites, and the like - so while each Chamarran missile had less destructive power than a Bragulan equivalent, it was nonetheless more accurate and more difficult to shoot down.

It was a challenge the targeteers of Bragotyomkin were eager to meet. Active aggressive-aggressive arrays were mechanically steered to face these incoming threats, bathing them with intense radiations from all over the nuclear spectrums. Sensors illuminated them, lighting them up brighter and brighter as they came nearer and nearer, even harmonizing with the radiological electro-warfare suites and jammers to the point of disturbing some missiles’ more sensitive systems. What the Bragtech sensoriums lacked in technical sophistication, they more than made up with sheer power, to the point where warships tested their aggressive-arrays by using them to irradiate hapless Wild Space colonies from orbit.

Their point-defenses also followed the same inelegant and brutish solution. The telescreens displayed the distance between the missiles and their intended targets, and the numbers counted down as the seconds passed. In the instant they reached the engagement envelopes of the Bragulan close-in weapons systems, space lit up as flak guns spewed out relativistic buckshots, salvo cannons lobbed out multi-megaton mortars, K-bolters filled space with acid bullets and nuclear-tipped missiles threw themselves against the waves of Chamarran warheads. The wave of missiles was met by a wave of bullets and explosions promptly ensued.

Inevitably, some of the wily cat missiles, controlled by a rudimentary version of their drone AI, managed to slip through the fury of the fusillade. Defense guns continued to fire at them while proximity mines were detonated in an attempt to bathe them in shrapnel. More missiles fell to these, ripped to pieces in the indiscriminate fire. At close range, Bragulan radiological jamming threatened to outright burn out the most sensitive seekers of the remaining missiles. Decoy buoys projected the nuclear silhouettes of bragships in an attempt to confuse them and make them detonate prematurely. Some were tricked into doing so, but the sheer volume of warheads launched meant that there were still few left, and these survivors evaded made their terminal approach.

They weaved and maneuvered gracefully on their contra-grav thrusters, evading the point-blank buckshots of Bragulan space shotguns and finding their marks with cat-like dexterity. Compared to Bragnuke detonations, the Chamarran warheads were positively puny. But precision was something they had over the bragnukes, in spades.
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Amongst those hit was a Chernovyi-class battlecruiser. According to the graphs printed out by the computators, its hull would have glowed as ray shields deflected the thermonuclear energies of the detonating missiles. Some bleed through would have caused ablative bragcrete armor to vaporize, taking the heat and dissipating it to spare the rest of the ship from damage. Overall, the mighty Moonbreaker, which had also partaken in the first exercises with the Chamarrans, had gotten off lightly compared to the last time it danced with the cats. The simulated damage was bearable and it continued to fight with minimal impediment.

Other ships were not quite as lucky. The larger bragships were able to withstand the bombardment with the strength of their shields and armors, and the gunskimmers were nimble enough to dodge the missiles, but the paleocruisers were showing their age in this battle. Those hit by the earlier Rampant/Predator beamstrikes were further attrited, a few were already down to estimated 75% combat effectiveness, and while the rest were better off still their collective throw weight had been diminished. They could still continue on with their Byzonic duties, as the light Chamarran warheads lacked penetrating power, but the battle was still far from over and at the rate the fossil ships were sustaining damage, the younger and sprier Chamarran ships would surely outlast them and gradually wear them down. Superficial damage would accumulate until the paleocruisers lost their hides. The babushka warships’ myopic sensors, rusting turrets and arthritic armor were costing them dearly, they were running out of stamina and gasping for breath. They simply couldn’t stay in the fight for too long.

Nykanor knew this, of course. He had no illusions as to the state of the fleet’s paleocruisers, and as lauded as the fossil ships were, strategic doctrine called for their mass numbers to be used in dispensable wave attacks against the enemy. This was so even during the Apexai War, when the Patriotic Glories were still in their middle-years as opposed to being outright Pre-Cambrian, and their conditions had only worsened as the centuries went by. Still, their utility as screening ships and missile buses was undeniable. He knew he couldn’t let the enemy destroy his dispensable wave attack ships before he could get the chance to launch them in a dispensable wave to attack the enemy. The paleocruisers formed the bulk of all bragfleets, second only to gunskimmers in numerosity, and their combined firepower was formidable. Losing them would be tantamount to amputating a limb off his bragfleet, albeit a gnarled and wrinkled up limb, but one that could be used as a club.

“Instruct the paleocruisers to close back to the main body of the fleet, tighten up our formation and ensure intersecting fields of fire. Tell the fighters and gunships to intensify their defensive coverage on the paleocruisers especially,” Nykanor barked as he listened to the damage readouts, it was not bad, but not quite good either. This was a most unusual situation to be in, a bragfleet being the one recipient of a long-range missile barrage. Their principle enemies in the Koprulu Zone favored energy beam-heavy combatants for they - the Imperial Bragulan Navy - were the ones who did the massive multi-megaton missile massacres, not the other way around!

He would be damned if he let the kitties school him in the art of missile combat, not when all his ships were missile combatants. Nyet. They would be the ones in for an de-education.

Two can play at this game, Nykanor thought, recalling how Sesh was able to scratch his paleocruisers from afar by concentrating her warships’ beamcannon fire. He had a cunning plan.

“Inform the fleet to concentrate all active aggressive-aggressive arrays on the largest targets in the Chamarran Second Battlegroup’s formation. Target super-carrier one. Missiles are to be configured in semi-active modes. Missile-warcruisers Bragslava Bragski and Nyadya Kyraloviya are to lead in target designation, authorize them to use tier-3 missiles.” Nykanor rose up from his command chair and barked these orders with a predatory glint in his beady bear eyes. “Let’s show these cats how a dozen of their tiny scratches compares to one mighty bear clout.”

“Aye, admiral. Bragski and Nyadya acknowledge,” the weapons officer affirmed. This particular Bragulan was bearing one of the most modern defense network computers ever, as evidenced by the thick cables that snaked from its console and into his snout, going into his nostrils to interface with his brain. Cybragnetic computronic command and control. Many buttons glowed and there was beeping as he received his answer. “Illuminating... now.”

His statement was followed, on cue, by half a dozen HR Geiger counters clicking and clacking in harmony as the combined radionucleonic emissions of the Bragulan fleet more than doubled. Just as the Chamarrans did by focusing their beamcannons in a gridfire to localize targets, such as the vulnerable paleocruisers of Bragotyomkin, the Bragulan active aggressive-aggressive arrays returned the favor and bombarded the Chamarran fleet with their own emissions as well. Irradiated tachyons made the very vacuum of space sizzle, mechanically-scanned dishes and apertures swept in grids, so many ships focusing and combining their radiations to simply burn through jamming and ECM to locate their target.

It was as though the Bragulans were once more in a shouting match with the Chamarran ships, but this time they had cupped their mouths to shout even louder.
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At the center of this effort were the Bragslava Bragski and Nadiya Kyraloviya, dedicated Friend of Bragule-class warcruisers in specialist missile configuration. They were optimized for this, even more so than the huger Fist and Chernovyi-classes, and their networked gamma pulse systems could coordinate not just their own massive missile massacre motherloads but also that of entire fleets’. The centerpiece of this was their Aggressively Enhanced Subnuclear Arrays, the most advanced missile guidance packages in the Bragulan fleet, integrated into their BRAEGIS system. If puny human active electronic scanned arrays sent hundreds of thousands of pencil-thin beams of energy to illuminate their targets, this aggressively enhanced subnuclear array sent thousands of millions of beating stick-thick beams of hyper-atomic energy to light the target up like a little Bragsday Tree. They made it glow in the dark so they could be shot in the dark.

By all the Bragulan warships, launching their missiles as one.

Thirsting for the sweet nectar-honeys of revenge, the paleocruisers launched first, sending wave after wave of antiquated Spuds towards the Chamarrans. In an act of filial piety, the younger warships - large and small alike - followed suit and unloaded at the cats. Nimble gunskimmers fired quick salvos of cruise missiles, battlecruisers regurgitated torpedoes, and the Imperator’s Fist battleships launched cruise torpedoes. Strangely, the Bragslava Bragski and Nadiya Kyraloviya launched last - but as their primary armamentation was disproportionately composed of missilery, their final salvo was the largest of all ships.

The missiles were configurated to semi-active homing. Which meant that rather than use their own built-in targeting sensors, they would instead be directed by the sensors of their launching warships, which acted like flashlights or laser designators to paint the specific target. With so many ships concentrating so many aggressive arrays on a specific target, even the most potent jamming and countermeasures would be hard pressed to repulse the oncoming storm.

So it was up to the Chamarran point-defense specialist ships. Their Wayward-class escorts with the Meercat 2 area defence system. They had proven themselves in the previous exercise with the Bragulans, their defense missiles proved decisive in the battle between the Predator-class cruisers and the Patriotic Glory paleoships, shooting down the fossil warships’ missiles and allowing the Predators to last longer, in effect serving as a very potent force multiplicator. In the preceding minutes of this second engagement they had also proved effective in defending the other larger ships from the saturation missile bombardment.

Now, they would be put to the ultimate test. This was not a saturation bombardment equally distributed to target all ships, but a highly concentrated spear of missiles targeted at one ship. The placement of the Waywards was to defend all ships equally from the former, meaning that they were dispersed, their formation spread out equally amongst many ships. Against the latter, they were not in a proper position. Only a few of the Waywards would be located ideally to intercept the spear of missiles. But that did not stop the other outlying escorts from aiding their sister ships despite their suboptimal placements. As the Bragulan missiles approached them, they all pitched in and unleashed a worthy barrage of counter-missiles and point-defenses that fell the initial wave of antiquated paleocruiser-launched Spuds and even the gunskimmer-fired cruise missiles.
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But the following waves were not as easily repulsed. The Braguda Moskill torpedoes that came after engaged their countermeasures, as they were guided by the emissions of the Bragfleets’ sensors so they turned their own unused arrays into jammers and began flying in mad weaving courses whilst dispensing vegemite chaff to throw off enemy targeting. Even more troublesome were the advanced 007-P Bragranits launched from the Bragslava Bragski and Nyadya Kyraloviya. They flew in tight formations, their jamming pods filling their area with intense radiations to turn them into a big indistinguishable blob of radioactivity in the eyes of enemy sensors, and in each group of missiles only one would stick its metaphorical head out of this field of ECM to scan with its own passive sensors - to see the targets designated by the AESA of the bragships - while using gamma ray pulses to relay information to their fellow missiles through their own intense jamming. Should the spotter missile get shot down, another would simply take its place, until they came within range and then they would...


HSF Fey Runaway, Wayward-class escort, Second Battlegroup
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“...Nyah!” sensorcat Chica mewed as she watched events unfold in her holotank. She touched the holos with her interfacing nail extensions, which totally weren’t there just for cosmetic purposes, and zoomed in on the image. Now she could see them more clearly, the two waves of those insufferable Bragulan missiles. They came in two kinds, the first kind was weaving and dodging and chaffing and going so fast, the second kind that came later were even trickier and covered themselves in jam. It wasn’t as if they weren’t already having difficulty with the first wave of paleocruiser paleo-missiles, that took a lot of Meercat missiles to stop, and then the gunskimmer cruise missiles. And now this!

To make things worse, the Brag missiles were MIRVing! For every one they had targeted, ten more took its place! The missiles launched by the Bragulan warships were now splitting open and launching their own missiles!

It was like the Bragulans were so into missiles that their missiles had missiles inside them so they could missile while they missiled!

Nyah!

“Tell all the Waywards to intensify forward batteries!” her shipmistress cried. “Even the escorts out of immediate range, everyone just shoot those missiles down. Throw everything we have at them!”

“But we’ll run out of missiles faster!” someone protested.

“Better that than having the Brags’ run out of targets first!” another countered.

“Just shaddup and shoot the damn missiles!” the shipmistress snapped. “Did those stinkin’ bears make off with a Haruhiist picnic basket full of malletspace massacre missiles or something? What?! Keep on firing!”

The Wayward shuddered as it launched more and more Meercat missiles, but the waves of Bragulan nukes just wouldn’t stop. Some broke through and found their target. A Dominion-class carrier. The Severance.

Chica watched the holotank’s high resolution depiction of the incoming Bragnukes. The carrier’s last-ditch CIWS opened fire on them, trying to cut them down before they could make contact. But to no avail. The first nukes shot down had failsafes and detonated prematurely, but in a forward-focused fashion that sent enough ionizing radiation to degrade the Serverance’s point-defense sensors. They continued on shooting even though they were disoriented by the proximity nuking. Then the next missiles came, again and again and again, until they finally got through. The sub-kiloton training rounds exploded on the carrier’s shields, and though they were ‘dialed down’ Bragnukes, their blasts were still something to behold.

Smoke machines on the Sev’s hull started billowing, simulating hull penetration. Fleets-wide statistical tallies listed down the damage incurred by the carrier and its name suddenly moved to the top of the list, above those of the damaged paleocruisers they had previously been striking with impunity. The Chamarran carrier was now number one in the score board of hitpoints lost, a thoroughly disheartening sight to all the sailor cats of Second Battlegroup.

“Eh, don’t worry sisters!” came a voice from the comms. It was from the Sev, she was still in the fight. “We’re still in the fight! Took quite a bang from those bears, but we’re still game. We shouldn’t get angry, ne? We should get even!”

Cheers erupted from the other lines. The Sev’s encouragements lifted up all their spirits.

But suddenly -

“Bragulan ships are powering up their radars again!” another sensor cat shouted.

Chica gulped. She looked at her ammunition counter. This was not good.

“They’re illuminating... Fourth Battlegroup!” she announced again. “They’re launching. Oh noes, that’s a lot of missiles. Thank the mysteries it isn’t towards us!”

You got that right, sis, Chica thought as she breathed a sigh of relief. Let that rookie Battlemistress Liana handle that. Let’s see just what those Amaries can do.
Image "DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source)
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Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people :D - PeZook
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Force Lord
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Force Lord »

Unknown Location

Pitch black. Black black black. It was like being in a black hole. The sensation of swirling towards your doom...and not seeing it. But then there was light, a small, weak light, but light nontheless. Soon the light became more and more intense, until it was all white.

In reality, Kierger had opened his eyes.

"Uhhhgh...where... am I?"

Taking a look into his surroundings, he saw that he was in an nondescript white room, seemingly lacking in doors and windows. He felt confused as to why he was here. Suddenly, he remembered.

"BIIIIIITCH!!!"
Shits shits shits shits shits shits...

Kierger tried to move, but found his hands and feet were restrained. Before he could think of a plan, a viewscreen lowered from the ceiling!

"Hi Kiergy! Comfortable?"

Kierger wanted to choke her dead. "Fuck you, WHORES! What is this?! BDSM?!"

"Uh, no. Too early for that. More like agressive poking."

"Agressive poking? The hell?"

"It has to do with pointy, sharp objects."

"Wait, are you gonna inject me with shits?!"

"No, silly! They're gonna suck."

"Oh, so you're vampires, huh? Very funny! Did it come across your head that you just kidnapped a foreign head of state!?"

"Well...yes."

"...Okay, okay, you're officially insane! How do your thought processes work?!"

"Actually, it's simple. You're the most powerful ESPer that came here, so why miss the opportunity? Besides, I need my fill, or I get a serious case of enervation."

"Your fill? The hell do you mean by that?"

"The reason why you see me like I am, Kiergy, is that I suck the essence of my subjects."

"...So, you're a real vampire? Only that you don't drink blood?"

"There is a reason why my subjects are so fat and dumb, Kiergy."

"And now, you can't depend on them anymore. Which is why you wanted those ESPers all along! Including me!"

"Yes. My plan is to clone them and you, so I can have a reliable supply of energy I can suck upon. And maybe have some fun with them."

Kierger didn't what to think what SASHA thought as fun.

"Ooookaayyyy..."

"As for you, I'll make sure you don't remember what happened these last few hours."

"I guess that blurb about conquering the galaxy was entirely serious, too?"

"Tee hee hee! I like to have everyone under my wing. I want them to know how much I like them."

"You're cwaaaaaazy."

"Oh, I got to go, Kiergy. Sorry that I won't be able to attend your...diagnosis. Toodles!"

And with that, the viewscreen shut down and returned to inside the ceiling.

Fucks. I gotta get the hell out of here, warn the Triumvirate...

He looked at his restraints. They looked tough, but he doubted they were designed with an ESPer in mind, especially one like Kierger. Applying concentration, he found it easy to free his left hand.

But before he could go on, he heard a door slide open.

Machines. With needles.

"PREPARE FOR BLOOD EXJECTION."

Ah, crap. I always hated needles.

"Sorry, but the doc told me I'm fine. You, on the other hand..."

Suddenly, Kierger extended his left hand, and electricity came out of it! The machines went haywire and collapsed.

"...The repairman needs to check on you."

A bit of concentration, and Kierger was free of his restraints.

Now to flee!
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Mayabird »

The Bragulan Economic Exposition Extravaganza of Friendship (BEEEF)
Vlyadibragstok, Southeastern Severnaya Sector / just beyond Northwestern Lena Sector
Unreal Time / December 3400


Image

The Shroomanist Prophet stood before the holographic display of the galaxy, his cape waving behind him dramatically, though the only breeze in the chamber was faint, from the small fans for circulation. A person observing him might believe that he was studying the display, looking at hyperspace routes and locations of worlds, but he already knew what path to take. No, it was simply a convenient and suitably impressive-looking place to stand while he considered other matters.

Behind him, the Prophet heard the echoing footsteps of an approaching acolyte. (In any other place, the great holo-chamber with its echoes would be a way to overawe the underlings, make them feel small and weak, but here, it was to make the place as cool as possible. Nobody likes ugly cramped rooms.) When the sounds stopped, the Prophet whipped around so as to make his cape spin around. He beheld the attendant kneeling before him: Zach, a very promising young man who had already performed several excellent feats for the cause of Awesome.

“Rise,” he spoke, and Zach stood tall before him. “Apprise me of our preparations for departure.”

“My liege, the NUERSes are finishing treatment with the last patients and will be able to discharge them by tomorrow. A few disciples are out completing some unfinished business but should be done tonight. Our new defensive systems still need significant work-”

“We will have plenty of time to work on them during our journeys. The labor will keep us from growing bored on the longer stretches, so no need to worry now. Please, Zach, continue.”

“Other than that, we are ready to go. We have refueled and restocked, and our engines and systems have been double-checked.”

“Then as soon as our people are ready, we will set forth.”

“If I may ask, where are we going?”

“Of course you may ask! We go first to the Sovereignty, to Kimanjano and our factory there. We will make a brief stopover to observe the magnificent ecologies and meet with more of our brother and sister ships. Once we are all gathered, we will continue on. The great source of Lameness still resides to the antispinward, and we must lend our support to the forces who seek to eliminate it.”

“The battle will be most rad!” Zach intoned.

“Radical. Come! Have you eaten? It is burrito night!” And that was a good night indeed, for their chefs were of course phenomenal and made some of the best damn burritos in the galaxy.


Late the next day, the Shroomanist medical frigate Badass left the surface of Vlyadibragstok and continued on its never-ending quest for Awesome.

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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Fingolfin_Noldor »

Replenishment
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The fleet emerged into an unclaimed star system largely uninhabited. They had travelled outside the main star lanes to avoid prying eyes. The fleet however, was here for other purposes, other than hiding. Above the dead worlds in the system, a fleet of Adeptus Mechanicus manufactorium ships descended upon the worlds like a swarm of locusts, looking to feast upon a carcass.The Adeptus Mechanicus was incredibly adept at strip mining worlds. This operation was no different from any other. They came and simply drew up swathes of earth, sorting through the soil for rare elements that might be potentially useful. These elements would be extracted and processed./ The remaining soil was not wasted however; the rest was atomised and converted molecularly to other elements. This process was energy consuming however. But energy was not a concern. Another fleet of ships descended on the star, sucking up swathes of hydrogen and processing them into fuel for antimatter reactors and fusion reactors.
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By the end of the week, the worlds have been thoroughly stripped mined, and the scars they left behind were deep. Deep gorges have been cut into the world, as if a blow torch had been used to carve it. The manufactorium ships had done a thorough job of mining the world till the mantle had been reached. The lava was even extracted, for they were rich in minerals that would be useful. The worlds have been, quite simply, raped quite dry and the Adeptus Mechanicus had sucked out lifeblood of the worlds till they were nothing more than dessicated husks.
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All that raw material was then processed and used to make weapons of war, armor plating, or anything that an army might need, even food. Nutrient packs were synthesized to feed the army, while tonnes of ammunition was produced to feed the guns. The navy received a good stock of matter-antimatter fuel and fuel for their fusion plants. While rift generators were the primary power source, antimatter and fusion reactors act as secondary power sources, supplying the necessary to regulate the rift generator and other secondary needs.

When all was done, and the fleet had their fill, they made their way to their next rendezvous point in deep space. Behind them stood the dead worlds, who by now were quite simply devoid of even an atmosphere, or anything of worth. They were quite simply, dead.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Dark Hellion »

March 7th 3401
Unreal time


To: The Coalition
From: The First, Supreme Ambassador of the Emissaries

Your ultimatum to the MEH has given us some concern. You will understand our worries about having an entire Coalition of primarily humanoid races so close to our space. It also interferes with our own plans to rid the galaxy of the MEHs destabilizing influence. However, we are flexible and will be willing to cooperate but there will be a price. Sectors A26, A27, and B27 will be ours to patrol and occupy as we see fit. These boarders will be inviolate. Any trespasser will be warned and escorted away. Any hostile actions will be met with deadly force. These are not negotiations or suggestions. You, like the MEH, are intruding on areas of space we have controlled for thousands of years. You respect our space and you will have the greatest help you can imagine in cleansing the universe of the filth that is the MEH. Draw our ire and you will see how dreadful our wrath can be.

I have spoken. You have heard. You will honor this demand... or you will perish in flames.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by RogueIce »

March 8th, 3401

The Shinra Republic and her coalition partners had received the message from the Emissaries and digested it. As Sector A26 was within the Chamarran's half of the MEH, the coalition itself was not threatened by the Xylyx.

However, the question then arose of whether to alert the Chamarrans to this new development. In the end, the answer was yes. The division of responsibility had been created to avert a further escalation of the war amongst all parties; and it was decided that the Chamarrans being aware of this new danger in advance would help in that aim. While the Shinra Republic could promise no aid against the machine forces, the Chamarrans and their allies would at least know what to expect, and could plan accordingly.
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"How can I wait unknowing?
This is the price of war,
We rise with noble intentions,
And we risk all that is pure..." - Angela & Jeff van Dyck, Forever (Rome: Total War)

"On and on, through the years,
The war continues on..." - Angela & Jeff van Dyck, We Are All One (Medieval 2: Total War)
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Beowulf »

Fujioka(Royal Yacht)
Tianguo Space
Semi-unreal time


"So, the cats out of the bag now, eh?"

"Yup. Everyone knows we've joined the public coalition against MEH. The Chamarran coalition against the MEH is a bit shadowier than ours. We're trying to figure out who's joining, and what they're bringing to the party, but it's difficult. Our spies in Chamarra can't get a high enough rank to know anything, since no one knows them. The disadvantage of a clannish society."

"So what are we bringing to the party?"

"In addition to the 36 ships we've already sent, we've decided on two more squadrons each of battleships, cruisers, and carriers. This formation will be escorting additional fleet replenishment ships to Shinra, where they will maintain station until necessary."

"Isn't that over half the battleships in the fleet?"

"It is, but the true strength of the Taikongjun is not the battleships, it is the cruisers and carriers. We will retain sufficient forces at home to deal with almost any contigency."
"preemptive killing of cops might not be such a bad idea from a personal saftey[sic] standpoint..." --Keevan Colton
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Dark Hellion »

BEEEF
Unreal time
Inhumanist League Meeting


The invitation to this meeting had been delivered most surreptitiously. A little blip in the data of the small Emissary dropship. Whoever had placed it had done a very good job; the Ambassador could not track it back to its source, even with his not too inconsiderable skills. But that hadn't really mattered, it represented a chance to establish greater diplomatic ties with similarly minded species. Plus it would probably not involve giant apes.

There was an empty chair on one side of the Karlack representative. On the other side sat the Ambassador. Perhaps we was trying to say something, sitting so close to the creature that repulsed the others, letting the Karlack spores sizzle against his fields. Or perhaps it was simply the most convenient chair. Whatever message he was trying to send was rendered more confusing by the pair of Chamarran strippers sleeping across his shoulders. These catgirls raised a lot of questions like "why were they here?" "Why did the Ambassador allow them to lounge across his armoured pauldrons?" and most importantly "How could any creature sleep so peacefully atop a naval grade particle cannon?" But the answer to these was far less important than the business to be carried out.

Many others had spoken their piece and finally things came around to the Ambassador. He positioned a hand a manner that 94% of species regarded as thoughtful (the other 6% thought of it as annoyingly smug) and began to speak.

Code: Select all

We have already made our intentions clear to other factions within this room.  We intend on the utter dissolution of the MEH as a power within this galaxy.  They represent a dangerous destabilizing element and an affront to all civilized beings.  Others have convinced us that our usual, shall we say pyrotechnic, methods are not the best course of action.  Thus we have begun assembling a fleet in sectors A27, A28, B27, B28 under the guise of anti-piracy patrols in order to mount our strike.  Already we have sizable forces (OOC: nearly $30,000) which can act at any time.  We simply await some call to action.
There was whispering behind his shoulders. "Nyah nee-chan. What is robo-san talking about?"

"Quiet nyaa. They talking about blowing up fat people."

"Really nee? But they didn't mention food at all."

"NYAAAH! You are such a dummy. Everyone knows fat is very flammable. You just need a spark to blow up fatties."

A Bragulan officer cleared his throat. "Ambassador, would you mind keeping the ladies you brought with quiet for this meeting?"

In unison the girls responded, "Sorry Kuma-Ojii-Sama!"

The Bragulan gave a confused look. The Ambassador provided explanation.

Code: Select all

They called you honorable bear geezer.
The officer gave a hearty laugh. "Ho, seems 'bout right. Pretty sharp for girl wearing wrong days underpants."

Code: Select all

I know.  I myself don't get the purpose of using a calender to cover ones hindquarters, but I digress.  Back to the business at hand.  We have complete control of space south of MEH territory.  We will allow all members of this league free access through this space.  We will provide defense for any logistical stations that need to be set up to utilize this area, although we will not be able to provide such logistical support ourselves.  We don't generally have need of ships to carry such things as food or air.  We think these arrangments will help considerably in any offensive against the MEH.
With his speech concluded the Ambassador sat down. There was a light "ting" as a spastic paw swatted at some kind of dream insect. As dozens of minds tried to piece through the information they heard and incongruities they'd seen the Ambassador allowed himself an inner smile. You play the fool, because in the deceptive world of politics only the fool can speak the truth.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Zor »

Commonwealth Diet: Mareiopolis, Mareiopolis

Their had been some discussion going back and forth on this matter as hundreds spoke their case. Various parties had been split by this. Various points were brought up, including relations with the Chammarans and other friendly states, the loss of face that might come from inaction, the potentional for opening up new markets, the deviation from the typical Commonwealth policies, the Risk to the commonwealth, the recent incident in the former outlander comissions and the involvement of states with longstanding grudges. Protesters for and against it had gathered at rallies against and in favor of action, but eventually the vote was cast it. It was not unanimous, but it was passed and signed by the Chancellor.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Force Lord »

MEH Earth
Unreal Time/Early-Mid February


"Fighters inbound!"

"Lose em'!"

Lord Redav could barely concentrate due to the pilots' attempts to evade enemy fire, and this made him angry.

"Blast it! Can't this piece of garbage go any faster?!"

"Sorry sir! This shuttle's a bitch to maneuver!"

Just then, the rear gunner shouted, "Ha! Got one!"

"Great kid! Don't get cocky!", shouted one of the bodyguards.

As the shuttle twisted and turned as best as it could between the great spires of the planet, avoiding the fire of the MEH fighters, one missle battery was busy targeting.

"Acquiring targets," said a machine.

"Fire."

A full salvo of missles was launched.

"Damn it! Missles incoming!"

"Take us down!", shouted Redav.

The shuttle dived, but it could not go fast enough to avoid all the missles. Eventually, one hit home.

"We're gonna crash!"

"Pilot, out of your seat, now!"

"Sir, what-"

Lord Redav threw the hapless pilot off his seat and took control.

"Only I can make this a crash landing!"

Thanks to his mask, Redav could not smell the smoke that was filling the shuttle, but he could feel the survivors' distress. He decided he could not afford any more losses. Using his powers, he tried to guide the shuttle into an controlled crash.

He succeded, though the wings were lost due to the impact, and the shuttle slided for a few seconds before finally stopping.

"Out of the ship, now!"

"Move, move, move!"

The surviving men busted themselves out of the crashed shuttle, and made for the nearest piece of cover they could find.

"Where are we, sir?"

Lord Redav looked up. He realized he just crashed the ship inside some building.

"I...am not sure."

Meanwhile, at Centrum...

Viso Fredon had, in the last few hours, walked back and forth like a madman.

He knew the MEH's so-called LEADER was over her head, but to kidnap a head of state?! Madness!

He feared for Kieger's safety, knowing that his dissapearance could not be spun for too long. But the fear turned into fury at the MEH. That childish nation had proven itself to be a menace, and logic dictated that menaces had to be destroyed.

With this in mind, he made a call to the Center of War.

He shouted to his comlink, "This is Fredon. I want you to prepare to send the largest possible force against the MEH by June at the latest..."
Last edited by Force Lord on 2011-06-17 02:44pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: THEY SAVED GUYNALD'S BEARD!

Post by Simon_Jester »

Byzantinian Holdings
Cananaan, Sector L-23
GODDAMN SURREAL TIME


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The late King Guynald de Chatilusignon of Byzantine Cananaan

On Canaan, all good Orthodox Christians wept with sorrow at the loss of their king. No amount of ritual burning of xenos and heretics could wipe away the fact that their beloved and mighty monarch was no more. No more would he lead them against the accursed Saracen warriors of the wasteland, matching his wits and brawn with the mighty al-Humungus. No more would he rout out pockets of heretical Cananaanites with their bizarre and unholy faiths such as Getoffmyplanetism. No more would his piety and grey-bearded wisdom provide comfort to nobles and peasants alike.

There was no body to lie in state, but the Byzantines were not heathens, and knew that his soul was now one with the God-Emperor. Some had misgivings about the God-Emperor's pronouncements that souls unified with his holy might were "good with ketchup" or the like, but the designs and sacred mysteries of such a glorious Being were not theirs to comprehend. And so it was that richly dressed priests and nobles came to the cathedrals of Byzantine Cananaan to mourn their ruler.

Image

And so it was that processions of not so richly dressed monks mourned their fallen lord-secular, chanting traditional arco-flagellating requiem masses as were commonly used among adherents of the Byzantine faith.



Meanwhile two enginseers, members of the Adeptus Mechanicus detachment overseeing the Byzantine Cananaanites' manufactoriums, classmates from the same schola, surveyed the proceedings.

"I think it's silly."

"You never take ritual seriously- can't even work up a good bolt-tightening chant without giggling, really Felicia, it's holding you back."

"It's still silly, Diktys. No one else does it."

"And that, Felicia, is why the techpriests never consider you for promotion."

Enginseer Second Class, Electrical Engineering Specialization, Spiros sniffed. Enginseer Third Class (and expected to remain so) Tayber, Biomedical Specialization, rolled her eyes. "The hardware still works. And some of the stuff they cook up for us to do, I mean incense, really, no one would've used that around a computer in the Tau war. I worry sometimes, what we might turn into left to our own devices for a few thousand years..."

"It'll be fine. As long as the STC's hold out, what can go wrong?"

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway. This really is suspicious. How did a Tau assassin massacre his way into Guynald's bedroom anyway? The locals aren't Skitarii, but they're not that clumsy. And what happened to the body? Did they find anything? Something's fishy..."

"Mmph. Granted... but so what? One of his dukes will replace him, and everything will be fine, business as usual, worlds without end, amen."

"...I bet we could get to the scene."

"No."

"You know we could."

"What would we find? We're not crime scene investigators; there aren't any on this rockball."

"I don't know. I wanna find out. Let's do it!"

Guynald's Bedchamber
Some Hours Later


"There's hair all over the place. Some of it's kind of burnt. What the frak is going on here?"

"Mind your language Felicia, we're supposed to be setting an example for these people."

While the enginseers had their suspicions, they knew nothing of the blasphemous nanites used by the Solarian assassin to transmogrify and then ignite King Guynald had discarded certain unnecessary bits of the Byzantine. Tau, after all, did not have facial hair, and it was much harder for the nanites to reel hair back inside the body for use as raw materials than to simply let it fall out of its own accord as the follicles lost cohesion.

"Hmmm. I wonder... hang on, let me get a bag and pull it together."

Laboratories of the Adeptus Mechanicus
Later That Day


Felicia leaned back on her spinal mechadendrite and glanced familiarly around the biotech lab. "So, it is his hair?"

Techpriest Second Class Elias's augmetics beeped agreement, and his voice rattled out in a deep, mechanical-sounding baritone. "Facial hair, to be precise."

"Thought so, boss. So, we gonna try out the cloning tank templates in the fabber?"

"I will speak with the magos. This is too important for me to decide on my own, young one. And you should not speak so familiarly of sacred technologies. I lay upon you a penance: ten recitations of the Chant of Test Tube Cleaning, and three hours' contemplation of the works of the great Kritikos. I expect a full report on his views on the omphaloidean controversy by tomorrow's evening vespers."

The younger enginseer pouted slightly, which passed unnoticed by Elias (whose grasp of meatbag facial expressions hadn't been particularly impressive even when he'd had more flesh and less augmetics on him to begin with). Her slight dip of the head as a gesture of obedience was not missed, and Elias dismissed her.

Byzantinian Holdings, Cananaan
GODDAMN SURREAL TIME


And so it was that the technosorcerous mages of the sacred Adeptus Mechanicus, graced a thousand times over by the blessings of the Omnissiah, did petition the machine-spirits to allow pious King Guynald to live once more! And lo did the machine-spirits answer, offering to restore him from that most important part of any true medieval man's body: his BEARD!

Of course, there were many obstacles in the way to be dealt with first. The DNA samples were incomplete, and had to be spliced in places with that of close relatives, or with that of the blessed egg-donor-mother Anna of Apulitanizania (later beatified). The cloning tank had to be adjusted in many ways. And, of course, the urgencies of the great crusade left no time for such lengthy, boring processes as raising an infant clone through long childhood to mature warrior-beardiness. Nay, King Guynald II was put through accelerated flash-growth processes, and the spaces in his brain that would otherwise be filled with lengthy experience were instead filled with many thousands of hours of sped-up hypnotapes. Guynald II did thus complete by instruction in the holy canon and hymns of the Imperium, the which would take an ordinary man decades to master, and also his learning of the great works of the Byzantine Imperium's generals, such as the Tactica, Strategica, Logistica, and Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer.

To be sure, Guynald II of Byzantine Cananaan would not be the original Guynald I. No one could replace that which the vile xenos and heretics had reft away, not so truly and fully, save by the intervention of God-Emperor himself rather than his mere mortal intermediaries of the Mechanicus. But one would be hard pressed to distinguish between the men, without having known both closely.

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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by White Haven »

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HMS Canis Arctis
Sirius-class fleet carrier
Royal Navy First Fleet


With a hiss of equalizing pressure, the freshly-landed gunship's opaque canopy unsealed, rising upwards several inches before siding backwards to reveal an equally-sealed pilot. The figure's hands were busy reaching up and unsealing its helmet -- his, as was revealed when it lifted away with its own hissing noise. With his full range of vision returned, he turned to wave down at the uniformed officer waiting on the deck nearby, hiding a smirk at the frown riding his welcoming committee's face.

Oh look, more toes to step on. Good thing I borrowed an admiral's boots.

Several more minutes passed as he completed the full, by-the-numbers shutdown sequence straight out of the manual, a period in which storm clouds began to move in across the waiting officer's face. Finally, with the capacitors discharged and the reactor cold, he lifted himself up out of the cockpit and scrambled down the recessed handholds to come to a halt on the deck, nodding to the crew chief standing off to one side and staring at the craft with undisguised interest. With a step forward he came to attention and snapped off a salute, barking out, "Wing Commander Francis Jackman, reporting for duty, sir."

"That," the frowning captain stabbed a figure towards the audibly-cooling gunship, then swept it across the ranks of parked craft of a visibly different type, "Is not a Thor."

Jackman nodded curtly, a smile tugging at his lips at the same time, "The captain is very observant. This is the new Hermes-class Heim-drive gunship, fresh out of the factory. The rest of the wing will be landing shortly; we're to serve as an evaluation unit and start working up a proper doctrine for their use."

His face visibly reddening, the officer chopped a hand in midair, gesturing towards the launch bays, "Well I'm Captain Warlow, and I'm the CAG, and I say what gets to fly off my decks and I want my tenth wing of Thors back! Heim drive? What's next, nuclear saltwater rockets? Oars? Don't bother requisitioning quarters, I'll have you and your wing packed off to foist off onto some shithole patrol route carrier before it's time for--What are you grinning about, Wing Commander!"

"Sorry sir, but that's not likely. My orders come straight from Admiral DuValle back at Central. I'll be needing quarters for myself and the rest of my wing, and as soon as possible I'll need to begin setting up some shakedown tests and practice drills. Nothing too demanding on your time, I assure you."

"...Admiral DuValle. That son of a...Jackman, you didn't hear that. Alright, fine." Warlow had to make a visible effort to avoid gritting his teeth, "You'll get your shakedowns and your skirmishes, if it's the only way I can get my Thors back. Canis Arctis is a modern ship, you'll have your quarters assignments by the time you clear the bay."

"Thank you, sir." Should I tell him? Yeaaah, too much fun, I've got to. "DuValle expects that we'll be able to start moving Hermes into full production within six months. I understand the plan is to split fleet carrier deckloads between Thors and Hermes. Don't worry, captain, they're not getting rid of the Thor, you'll still have some."

"..." "That will be all, Wing Commander. You're dismissed."

As Jackman saluted and turned away from the CAG, he caught sight of the crew chief again, the jumpsuit-clad figure having been loitering close enough to overhear the exchange. Francis let his face split into a wide, shit-eating grin once out of Warlow's view and nodded over towards the chief, who ducked behind the brand-new gunship while biting his hand to avoid laughing.

Yeah, this is gonna be fun.

(One 40-craft wing of experimental Hermes-class Heim-drive gunships attached to First Fleet in place of same number and point value of standard Thors.)
Last edited by White Haven on 2011-06-20 03:52pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Simon_Jester »

[meant for commentary, delete please]
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by White Haven »

Planet Nova Luna, Nova Luna system, Nova Luna sector
Medical office


"Sometimes, we just try to distance the memories, wrap them in time until they lose their immediacy. That works better for events that were...broadly traumatic, but impersonal. That helps in more or less any case, but in cases like yours it's often not enough." The tall, dusky-skinned woman seated behind the slightly-cluttered desk straightened up and leaned forwards, reaching out to straighten the nameplate that simply read 'Dr. Regina Carter, Licensed Clinical Psychopath.' She inclined her head slightly to the woman on the opposite side of the desk in an equally-comfortable padded recliner, her visitor's casual streetclothes contrasting sharply with Carter's own conservative suit. "Now, I could also try to suppress the memories entirely, but I understand you contract for the Navy, Miss Henderley?"

"Y...yes. I'm a shielding specialist. Well, actually, I specialize in inductor coil calibration, when I'm not too busy...I'm meandering again. Yes, I contract for the navy." The blonde's reply is shaky at first, firming up only when she's able to take refuge in her professional environment. As she cuts herself off, she grimaces, then sighs in a quiet pause before asking, "Why do you ask?"

"Memory suppression is tricky, the mind always tries to fight back even after the fact. You'd be happier forgetting, of course, but since my patients can't remember that, they often react poorly to hidden memories. I could still do it, you understand, but we would likely be seeing each other again in the future. I asked about your work because the Navy would almost certainly revoke your clearances due to potential instability. The choice is always yours, but I don't recommend it." After another short pause a rueful, lopsided smile tugs at Carter's lips, "And on a personal level, it's somewhat distressing when someone I've gotten to know that intimately comes back screaming that they never wanted to remember."

"Oh...you mentioned other options though, right?"

"Well, the last option is much broader, and will require a great deal more trust on your part. It also, in my experience, has by far the best success rate in cases like yours, but you will have no secrets from me, none at all. I won't know everything you know, a mind is a very large place and mine isn't any larger, but I could know anything you know or feel or think. Before you ask, yes, I have up to Top Secret clearance, and I am forbidden from engaging in any investment opportunities either personally, or by proxy. Anything I learn, anything, goes no farther than me. Confidentiality is total. LCPs like me are watched very closely, Miss Henderley, because of just the possibility for abuse that this procedure entails."

Her already-light skin paling visibly, the slender figure of Carter's visitor rocked back in her chair with a frown of consternation. A long silence dragged out between the two as she turned the dilemma over in her mind before nodding once, sharply, almost convulsively, "I'll do it."

A wry smile spread across her features as the doctor replied, "'It?' I haven't even explained what I'm referring to?"

"I did my research...I don't know what-all you do, but everyone I spoke with told me you were one of the best."

"I'm glad others spoke well of me, but I still need to be perfectly clear on what I might do with you. This is always quite difficult enough even without the element of surprise involved; I don't even want to think about how hard it would be if you didn't have some concept what was coming." After receiving a quiet nod from her prospective patient, Carter continued, "In essence, I would be running you through the events again. Quite probably many times. I know, I know, that sounds like the last thing you want. Hear me out. In each, something would be different, causing a more favorable outcome. In one, you might decide to leave work five minutes later and not walk past that particular alley at that particular time on the way home. In another, there might be a police officer just around the corner who hears you cry out. Even something as simple as a split-second's warning, a scuff of a foot, the sound of your attacker kicking a discarded can, something to give you a moment to prepare. I've read your file, I expect that's all it would have taken."

"You will experience all of these, and I won't lie to you, not all of them will end well. I can't control your mind, all I can do is direct it. The end result when all's said and done will be that you will still have your original memories of the incident, but you will also have as many as a few dozen others, others in which you fought back, in which it never happened, in which you were rescued, so on and so forth. More to the point, you will have lived these memories. You will have experienced them yourself. You'll still know which really happened, but at the same time you will have been helped, you will have helped yourself, you will have gotten lucky. And most importantly, there will be no artificial barriers walling off or setting aside the real memories, nothing for you to pick at in ignorance, nothing that can give way and leave you back where you started."

"...I'll do it."

"That's good, this is the best way I have to help you. Now, one more word of warning, and rest assured that I will hate this every bit as much as you do. I have to experience your memories as they happened, once, before I can work with them. Do you still want to go through with it?"

After an even longer pause, the woman's head nods jerkily, a forced smile plastered across her face, "Yes. And please... call me Rachael, if we're going to be this close to each other."

"You have no idea..." Carter grinned back, her own expression far more natural, "I met my husband this way, you know. And in that case, it's Gina. Now, I've got a few forms for you to sign before we begin..."

A few minutes later, Rachael Hendersley reclined backwards in her padded chair, Regina Carter leaned forwards and braced her elbows on the desk, and the world fell away.

Rachael stepped out of her aircar, the door closing smoothly shut behind her as it settled onto the wide public landing pad. She pulled her overcoat around her body snugly, the light drizzle working its way down her neck as she hurried down the sidewalk in intermittently-light night. As she passed an alleyway, an arm lashed out...
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Xylyx Emissary Emissary wrote:

Code: Select all

We have already made our intentions clear to other factions within this room.  We intend on the utter dissolution of the MEH as a power within this galaxy.  They represent a dangerous destabilizing element and an affront to all civilized beings.  Others have convinced us that our usual, shall we say pyrotechnic, methods are not the best course of action.  Thus we have begun assembling a fleet in sectors A27, A28, B27, B28 under the guise of anti-piracy patrols in order to mount our strike.  Already we have sizable forces (OOC: nearly $30,000) which can act at any time.  We simply await some call to action.

Code: Select all

I know.  I myself don't get the purpose of using a calender to cover ones hindquarters, but I digress.  Back to the business at hand.  We have complete control of space south of MEH territory.  We will allow all members of this league free access through this space.  We will provide defense for any logistical stations that need to be set up to utilize this area, although we will not be able to provide such logistical support ourselves.  We don't generally have need of ships to carry such things as food or air.  We think these arrangments will help considerably in any offensive against the MEH.
BEEEF
Unreal time
Inhumanist League Meeting


Image

"A very wise choice, Emissary." Putyn acknowledged. "Our operations in the anti-spinward will be focused most particularly on sectors A-26 and B-26, the MEH's largest bastion of naval might, and we will be bringing a very sizable force to meet them, engage them, and bury them. The Xylyx' support in this noble and most-patriotic endeavor is most appreciated - and we look forward in cooperating with your nation in bringing freedom to the no-longer-puny humans in the MEH."

Putyn chuckled disingenuously at the last bit. Foolish humans so loved their notion 'freedom'. Soon, they would get a true taste of it.

He also noted that the Refugees were quite pleased with this development. More powers joining in on the elimination of what they deemed to be a theological threat would no doubt be a boon to them. The Chamarrans too seemed relax a little, now that they weren't the only ones taking the brunt of the war effort.

Yet, inevitably, the entry of more factions and players into the operation was nonetheless an additional complication. Putyn would have to relay the Xylyx' entry into the OMINOUS to the IBGV, to see how it played into things. They knew that there were rumblings of war against the MEH not only in the Inhumanist camp but also with several human powers as well. Decius told him as much, and HUMINT had confirmed with its monitoring of various human trafficking cartels an increase of 'special shipments' to the anti-spinward. That the human nations were appalled at the MEH's open request for specimens for their experiments was already well known, not that anyone in Bragule cared for their moralistic hypocritical outrage. All these were like the black clouds that heralded an oncoming storm. They would put out the fire with gasoline, and one didn't need a bear's nose to smell the burning.

"Now, before I forget, let me explain the meaning of OMINOUS, for which we have the Eoghans to thank. It stands for the Operation for MEH Invasion Nation Overthrow Usurpation and Subjugation, and I would like to thank all of you for taking part of this most momentous occasion. May the Imperator Byzon smile and bare his fangs upon us. May death come swiftly to our enemies."
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Dark Hellion »

Excuse me a moment for a strange interlude...

MEH Space
Slotham City
1:33 AM


Crash! The display case shattered into a million shards, each sparkling like the diamonds contained inside. The masked men scooped the stones into bags and went to make their escape. But there was no escape. Not in Slotham City. Not under the watch of its dreadful protector.

Swoosh! A shadow fell upon the criminals. Huge and menacing. And the criminals were menaced by this shadow. And the figure that produced it.

"It's him! Run!" But you could not outrun the night. The figure ruled the night. Ruled it with fists and with fright. He pounced from the shadows, rolling to gain momentum.

Bamf! Pow! And two creeps were down. And for a while the city was safe. Safe for honest citizens. Safe from the tyrannous fist of crime. For now. But evil never slept. And neither would the cities hidden protector.

************

A signal! More crime. Always more crime. Crime never stopped, until he stopped it. This time it was at 1st Slotham Bank. Only one madman was crazy enough to rob a bank like that. HIS BANK! IN HIS TOWN! Only one man would invite his dark wrath: the Coker!

He arrived late. The police had thought they could handle it. They had THOUGHT wrong! They COULD not handle it! No one ELSE could handle it! No one but HIM! HE COULD HANDLE IT! AND he would! He WOULD handle IT!

But the police: incompetent and CORRUPT! They had lost the trail. LOST it! But he would not lose it! There was NOTHING else for him to lose. CRIME! Crime had taken all from him. And HE would take it BACK from crime. TAKE it back from criminals. And make the PAY! PAY for their SINS! Pay for their GREED! Pay FOR it in blood!

He found the trail. Found it from some WHORES! WHORES! With BREASTS! Criminal WHORES! He wanted to make them BLEED. But he COULDN'T. Not now. A MADMAN needed to be stopped. Stopped from his MADNESS! HE would stop the madness. HE would make him bleed! Like the WHORES. And their BREASTS!

HE found the building. HE looked inside. HE saw him. White face. Crazed eyes. The Coker! He crashed through the skylight! He disable the guards. Punching them. In the FACE. With his FISTS! A MAN'S FISTS! He confronted the Coker. His voice was horse and raspy!

"What are you planning Coker!"

The MADMAN turned to him. Turned to him and spoke. Spoke his words which he heard! "DUH! Winning!"

But he WOULDN'T win. HE wouldn't allow him to win. He leapt! He came down heavily upon the Coker. He hit him. The Coker hit back. With FISTS! And FIRE! FLAMING FISTS! On fire! But that wouldn't stop HIM. Nothing STOPPED him. His face was beaten. He was bleeding. Bleeding his BLOOD. From his face! Which was BLEEDING. So he hit back. Hit the Coker in the FACE! Pushed him back. To the edge. Pushed him over. They fell!

He grabbed the Coker. He stopped their fall. He punched the Coker again. Punched his FACE! And the Coker slumped. The villain taunted him. They always TAUNTED him.

"You can't beat me! I have tigersblood and you are only a man!"

He pulled him up. To his FACE! His BLOODY face! He TOLD him.

"I am not a man. I am the goddamn Fatman!"
A teenage girl is just a teenage boy who can get laid.
-GTO

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KlavoHunter
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by KlavoHunter »

Wolf 359 System
EHW Onslaught
December 7, 3400

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EHW Onslaught
The Battle of Wolf 359 was off to an awful start for the Multiuniversal Empire of Happiness, with the cataclysmic detonation of DA BOMB and the backbreaking implications thereof this had for the Victorious-class battleship Invincible Megadeath XVI... and now there was a VERY unhappy number of Orks incoming from the hyper limit.

"At least they're small," Flag Lieutenant Lionel Johnson tried to bravely quip as they all stared at the incoming horde.

"That one isn't," Grand Admiral Oliver Beose remarked sourly, pointing out the mountainous armored bulk that brashly boasted itself to be da Deff Starr on all frequencies. He worried. He began to panic. He quelled it down with his next order. "Maximum Priority message to The Leader. Under heavy Orkish attack, request immediate reinforcements." Beose smiled self-satisfiedly to himself. "There, now they'll be here any moment through the Warp Gate."

The Flag Lieutenant's heart sank as he realized that he had to be the bearer of unhappy news, as the holodisplay hovering before him yielded factoids about the Orks' course, plotting it out as an angry red arrow. "Sir... they'll never make it in time. The other fleets would have to travel from their current positions in the other systems to their Warp Gates, and by then, the Orks...."




... the Orks brutally wanted nothing more than to get into battle as fast as possible, and kunningly, had kontrived to slingshot themselves around the outer-system 'comet catcher' gas giant that the MEH had left in place during the massive interstellar engineering to move additional rocky planets into Wolf 359's water belt and terraform them. With a rousing chorus of 'ERE WE GO! as their hulls creaked from the strain, the WAAAAAGH! transmitted their countless points of view of the first of the planets they would hit today, as it grew closer and closer. No Warboss had ever conquered five worlds in one day before, at least as far as Shroombad could remember.... He'd be da first! Dis wuz gonna be great!


Very unhappy feelings gripped Grand Admiral Beose as he thought about what was to come. The Multiversal Empire of Happiness Navy had fought many engagements before, even some outnumbered, and they'd won before. Trust in The Leader and her Turtle Doctrine defense. And trust in his predecessors who had devised a way to assist an admiral crippled by shock. Beose pressed the warning-labeled red holobutton that was before him.

Datalinks aboard the Onslaught's bridge connected to what had lain mostly isolated. The MEH liked their AIs nice and hobbled, smart enough to creatively solve problems that would take up human happy-time, but not so free as to disobey their Human overlords' commands. For something as fantastically complex as commanding a space battle, though, they could not shackle an AI in many ways. A portal in the ceiling of the bridge slid open, and snaking down along an articulated column came the physical avatar of...
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"Singulr Intellect online," the synthesized voice intoned, both officers sighing in relief, neither noticing the subtle effects of the Nova Atlantean Grammar Worms that had lightly infested their robo-savior, originating from the Klavostani junk-dealers. The meaning was clear in context, after all. Then the AI agonizingly waited countless cycles for its far slower, dim-witted human masters to ask the questions it had already found the depressing answers to.

"Thank The Leader! The Orks are coming. What should we do?" Beose asked, visibly stressed in all the human baseline ways the AI knew to look for, though the supertech fabric of his uniform refused to darken and stain in an unsightly manner from his sweat.

"In order to fufill our primary objective, the defrans of all Multiversal Empire of Happyness worlds; the most reliable point at which to battle the Orks would be within the field of fire of the orbital defenses of the planet Elephant." The image projected before them shifted to a representation of the MEH Fleet in a defensive formation around that world, and then a demonstration of all guns firing. Singulr Intellect could get into more depressing of detail, but felt it appropriate to omit these things from the organics before him.

"Excellent! Order it done! ... And order me a snack, this looks like it's gonna be a long one." Grand Admiral Beose beamed, before noisily slurping the remnants of the contents of his cup, disposing of this one as he had several by now, as Flag Lieutenant Lionel Johnson jiggled about to and fro, relaying orders across the bridge and through the MEH fleet...


Da Deff Starr

"'ERE WE GOOOOO, KROSS DA KOSSSSSS-MOOOSSSS!"

"'ERE WE GO!"

"'ERE WE GO!"

"DUNNO WHERE WE GOIN'-"

"KWOOOIIIIIIIIIII-ETTTTTTT!"
Warboss Shroombad Mad Uruk Dakka roared over the collective singing of the rest of the Orks, "I kan't even hear meself fink!" He ground his teef togevver in frustration, and looked around for a target for his wrath, and then the Warboss' boot lashed out in a stompy kick, crushing a grot that was too close to his chair into a green and red paste. He chuckled at its misfortune, and then rubbed his favorite scar on his face with a finger thoughtfully as he stared at da big skreen. Dere dey were, lots 'n lotsa dem fatty pizza-ships, gettin' in between him and da planet below. Dat wuz fine, he'd do to them what he did with anything that got in his way - to hit them as hard as he could wiff da biggest fing at hand.

"ROKKZ TO DA FORE!" Shroombad bellowed with a toofy grin. With so many spare bitz and so much extra dakka at hand, it'd been easy to convert more than a dozen of the better-sized asteroids laying around into attempts at matching the magnificence of his Deff Starr, all naturally falling far short, but still dreadfully destructive in their own right; and perfect to soak up all dat fatty firepower! The bloaters did seem to know how to make pretty big dakka, but his wuz bigga. He'd show dem dat!

Hurtling forward at fantastic velocities only possible by the long acceleration and slingshot maneuver, the fourteen enormous Rokkz pushed their way to the fore of the mob of oncoming Orkz, everyork else getting out of da way - and even da Rokkz made sure da Deff Starr had a clear line of fire - everyork wanted a good view of da big zappa in action, but no Ork wanted to be TOO close to such stupendous firepower!*


EHW Onslaught

Staring fearfully at the oncoming Orkish onslaught, the tension was palpable on the bridge. Grand Admiral Beose slurped at his snack and nervously undid his belt for comfort, and a MEH Marine discreetly fingered the injection button on some of his combat drugs.

"INCOMING!" someone shouted excitably, as the mother of all energy beams lit up the bridge displays with an obscenity that would make any high-energy physicist vomit in horror. All stared as da Deff Starr's opening shot roared across space... and continued streaking off into space forever, as the Orkz completely missed anything worth shooting at. Still, this boastful act was enough to fray upon the morale of the MEH fleet even further.

"RETURN FIRE!" Beose screamed, and across the dozens of compact, heavily-gunned MEHN warships, they snarled out with well-drilled long-range gunnery, hurling hundreds of powerful Turbolaser bolts downrange. And for their credit, they achieved high hit percentages, though the Rokkz were hardly difficult enemies to hit. Shields boiled away, metal vaporized, rock crumbled and slagged, Orkz WAAAAAAAGHed and died at their weapons stations. But these enemies were built to take punishment, and began to volley back in kind, hurling dakka, missiles, and packets of hatred-laced energy. Little struck true, merely lighting up the MEH shields, but the Battle of Wolf 359 was on to the knife now.


Da Deff Starr

"ATTACK! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! ATTACK!"
Shoombad then fucking laughed and had the pleasure of watching as his Boyz had at it in the ways that seemed most natural to them. Rather than clustering close and tasting the exhaust of da Rokkz as they had just used them for cover, every Orkish ship now rammed their throttle to full and bore in upon their MEHnemies from every angle in the X, Y, and Z planes, and even the mysterious W plane. The Orkz were indeed a marvel of nature, adapted quite perfectly for warfare, as Klavostani anthropologists had deduced, if not engineered to be so by some past race that had inhabited this galaxy or another. None other species was prepared from birth to be the ultimate shock trooper, with such remarkably aggressive fight-or-flight response, and such eager joy at battle.

Loose blobs of Kill Kroozas belched out random fireworks displays of outgoing fire, while shoals of runtier privateers zoomed outwards, streaking in closer to the flanks of their wallowing, mighty enemies. The puniest of those that were unfortunate enough to intersect a MEH Turbolaser bolt would explode spectacularly, as the MEH got the better of the beginning of the engagement. As if anyone expected otherwise, Orks on the whole were hardly known for their accuracy. These, however, were more than acceptable losses.

As the slag-scarred Rokkz ploughed in closer to their tormenters, they proved their worth in their sheer mass - Not only surviving the truly tremendous bombardment on approach, but as the MEH Fighter Wings closed in on them for strike missions to break them up with more precision, the Rokkz showed their other purpose. Their great volume also allowed for great, cavernous fighta bayz, sufficient to fit every wannabe Speed Kultist who'd beat, badgered and/or bribed a Mekboy into makin' dem a Fighta, and flowers of smoggy radioactive exhaust blossomed outwards as they all launched, racing each other into battle.

Barely having had time to return from their harrowing blanket BARCAP missions earlier, the majority of the MEH pilots had been only able to listen helplessly as some of their friends died to the Ork Aces. Why, they'd only barely had time for a snack and reloads before they were launched again to meet the massive threat of a full Orkish WAAAAGH!, not mere raiders like they'd thought earlier in the day! Pumped to the gills with stimms and frightened, the dense genetically engineered pilots owed much to their predecessors who had designed the high-energy guns and the droids slaved to the copilot controls, for it was those that did the reaping into the horde of oncoming Orkz. Explosions flared into being as kountless Ork kraft were destroyed, kamera feedz kutting owt in a krescendo, pleasing the audience who liked dey 'sploshunz!

Then, the Ork fightaz entered their own effective range, and dove in at full speed from every angle, gunz blazing. Where the MEH TOE Fightaz and Big TOE Bombaz kept their formations, their sheer firepower ploughed the road ahead of them quite effectively. From the flanks, however, the Orks had more success, where their wildly-misaimed dakka had more clear shots at the enemy than into their unfortunate fellow flyboyz - The MEH's vaunted carrier-projected ECM did little to cut down on the effective Ork fire, though that was truly not a flaw in their hardware. Coordinated fighter formation maneuvers broke down in the sheer chaos of the battle, and an enormous dogfight ensued, pitting the 1500-some superfighters of the MEH against a countless swarm of Orkz. Perhaps in isolation, the MEH fighter force would narrowly beat out the Orkz, but now the capital ships began to engage at close range...



Kaptain Grungax da Spiky-Helmed, of da now unfortunately aptly-named Slagball ignored the explosions that sent dramatic showers of sparkz and debris careening across the bridge of his mighty Rokk. The fatties were giving him a lickin', but even though most of her weapons emplacements had been blown away, da Slagball was still a'tickin'. Shoving the dead helmsork out of his chair, Grungax spat out a broken toof, and licked the blood on his lip, staring meanly at the closest MEH ship he could see. Warboss Shroombad had seen the fatties' fancy formation, like they wuz a bunch of Klavos, and was determined to break it up, hurling da Rokkz like... well, a human would say bowling balls, through it. He wuz gonna do just dat. Taking da kontrolz, Grungax took a deep breath of the more-smoke-than-oxygen-filled air, and shoved the throttle down til it broke. "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"

"Evasive maneuvers! Get outta the way!" Captain Butterthigh yelled in alarm from the bridge of her Fort-class cruiser Eben-Emeal as the hideously shattered rock hurtled closer, looming bigger in the displays. Turbolaser fire streamed out of every gun, but it wasn't enough. The smaller MEH ship was utterly crushed as the huge Ork Rokk somehow outmassed it, hull snapping into wreckage, until the MEH's hypertech reactor was catastrophically violated, producing an impressive explosion that buffeted all nearby with expanding energy and rock shrapnel!


EHW Onslaught

"Eben-Emeal destroyed! Enemy penetrating our formation!" someone shouted, as the angry red of Ork forces began to flow into the MEHN formation, interlocking fields of fire be damned, as there were simply too many of them. In response, Grand Admiral Beose merely groaned, and undid several of the lower buttons of his uniform shirt. "Enemy ship approaching! Judging by the ship type, it appears to be an enemy battleship!"

"Intensify forward firepower! I don't want anything getting through!" Lionel Johnson ordered. While the Onslaught was primarily a carrier, an Interstellar Slaughter Device was also well-equipped with turbolasers, and she blasted away with all of them. The Ork heavy ship was already leaking atmosphere and energy from more places than usual, force fields weak and wavering. With such a concentration of angry high energy spearing into its nose, armor was atomized, eating in until something sufficiently volatile in the unstable Orky konstruktion was touched off, exploding violently. The Onslaught's bridge erupted in cheers for a moment, but then through the expanding cloud of gas and wreckage ploughed another heavy Ork ship!

"Another battleship!"

"Keep firing!"


Norkmandy

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! Fire erryfing! Full speed ahead! Prepare ter' ram 'n board 'em!" Kaptain Gatzgrub bellowed, crushing an empty can of UMERTHIRST against his very green and improbably muscled forehead. The Norkmandy showed her new teeth, thundering away with beam cannons, railguns, and dirty nukes, pounding away on the stout shields of the Onslaught, while her own soaked up the delightfully Orky green of the MEHnemy turbolaser bolts without too much complaint, for the moment.

The ship's shouty-tubes easily carried da Kaptain's orders everywhere with painful loudness, even in the already-deafeningly loud bowels of the Norkmandy's engine room. Warky da Mek heard dat, and peered at one of da skreens showing da kamera feed from outside. Bein' a Mek, Warky konsidered 'imself smarter den de average Ork, and one look at his Kaptain's intended prey told 'im dat dis wuz not such a good idea. Seeing the helmsork's intended kourse, Warky shoved one of 'is toolboxes atop a piece of machinery as the extra step he needed to get back into da right spot, and he adjusted a great valve, letting off a hissing plume of steam...

There was a tremendous crash, but instead of the expected impact that would smack everyork's face into whatever was in front of dem, the hull began to groan with a horrific shriek as the Norkmandy and Onslaught traded paint, hulls scraping along one another at a tone would make it painful to have teeth in one's head, until they were past one another. Warky wiped da sweat off 'is brow. Whew, dat wuz a klose wun!


Da Deff Starr

Satisfied dat his boyz were attacking akkording to plan, Shroombad took some time out of commanding to have a little more personal of fun. It'd taken a tremendous beating to konvince Orkenhamma to install a set of kontrols for da Main Gun onto the bridge for his boss, but he'd done it. "Enuff muckin' about," he growled under his breath, putting his fists on da kontrolz and putting an eye up to the sights. "You squigshit-fer'-brains couldn't hit the broad side of a moon..."
Image
It was easier for Orkenhamma to install a bit of foreign equipment...
Choosing his target, he hovered the reticle over one that he liked the look of, and held the kontrols steady on it. Many Ork weapons were guided only by the error-prone Mark One Eyeball, but some more ambitious Mekz eventually, grudgingly added various forms of targeting sensors to ensure that their greater creations of firepower might actually hit their targets at the ranges most everyone else fought space battles at. Then, he tried to destroy the red firing button with his thumb. While the red plastic stubbornly remained intact, the Acclamation-class frigate on the receiving end was completely engulfed by the girth of the beam, shields blazing out of existence after a single moment of defiance, and then all the thick armor and creamy nougat center were blowtorched out of existence from the sheer power of da Deff Starr's Supa-Zappa.

Again, Warboss Shroombad fucking laughed. Firin' dis fing himself felt like he wuz pointin' da very finger of Gork at his enemies to snuff dem out! His own personal paintbrush uv destrukshun across da battlefield! Loik meltin' apart one of dem stinky cakes in de bottom uv de yurry-null wif 'is stream! "Ha! Dis'll show dem fatties!" Shroombad boasted, as de lights indy-kayted de Main Gun wuz ready fer annuver go...


EHW Onslaught

Despite the ferocious pounding they were trading with the Orks, despite their losses so far, the MEH Fleet was still mostly giving as good as it got. Off to port, the Indestructible Master of War delivered a fantastic volume of fire, each heavy turbolaser bolt from the Victorious II class battleship wreaking enormous destruction on the Orks on the receiving end. Right now, the majority of her firepower was punishing any Ork that dared close in on the flagship. The ECCM targeting packages sold by the Klavostanis were working exactly as advertised - since even thrice-generations'-obsolete targeting gear was well-programmed in dealing with traditional Orkish ECM methods. More klever Mekz had realized de uvver guyz had to be CHEATIN' somehow to hit 'em as much as they did, and set to doin' sumfing about dat. Identifying the ECM randomization seed of one Ork Kill Krooza as being an old tape-deck with a centuries-popular Ork Rokk song, their would-be sneaky flanking maneuver did not save them from the fierce, tight salvo that blasted them apart all at once.

"Hah! Our upgraded ships are working perf-" Flag Lieutenant Lionel Johnson began to boast, and then the terrible, baleful eye of da Deff Starr turned on the Indestructible Master of War, blindingly illuminating space around it... and then the Klavostani-built thrice-generations-obsolete, refurbished capacitors mated to the polycyclic shield generators the MEH had been convinced to buy and install, against the 'grave threat' of a Cadence Lance attack - failed with an utterly spectacular cascading reaction, blowing out the ship's conventional shields as well all at once. And armor alone wasn't going to save it from da Deff Starr, nothing would. The impossibly bright bloom of the firing beam then blazed bigger like a small sun, as the Indestructible Master of War exploded. Lionel Johnson tasted the deck as the Onslaught was shaken like a toy, its inertial dampners overloaded from the suddenness of it.

Lionel Johnson groaned, blinking in the darkness as lights slowly began to come back on on the bridge. He looked around, where was the Grand Admiral? Not in his chair.... down on the ground, there. not moving. Lionel hauled himself over and felt at Beose, around his torn uniform, between his flabs of fat. He felt wetness on his hands, and began to feel a new chill of alarmed fear. He got up on his knees and pulled his hands away, looking down at them. Brown.

"Medibot to the bridge. Grand Admiral Beose has shit his pants," he dazedly reported across the wide channel.


Da Deff Starr

"'E WOT? BWAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!" This disabled the Orkish leader effectively for the next few minutes in the battle, as Shroombad could not stop laffing, laffing so 'ard 'e cried! Of course, his boyz were completely swarming over the MEH's last lines of defense, so he could afford to be indisposed. What little coordination the MEHN had left at this point was falling apart, as by now a second wave uv Rokkz were hurtling past the fleet, and into the field of fire of the various orbital defenses of the planet Elephant. Deez Rokkz were a different kind, not meant for space superiority, but to deliver dey big bad load uv boyz to de enemy's planets. Some of these began to fry under turbolaser bombardment, but it was clearly insufficient...

The first Gargants were beginning to march and destroy everything in sight on Elephant, as the battered corpse of the Onslaught burned up on re-entry...


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Not entirely true, as this fails to take into account the rare, tiny Suicide Kultz of Big Dakka, Orkz who so derengedly worship superior firepower and wish nothing more than to die by the biggest dakka of them all. Pilgrimages of these Kultz to the crossroads of the Malacca Strait provide adequate test-firings for Al-Vaban Fortress's main gun. Here, however, they are given some of the best Kameras and sent out to take their most spectacular last shots in the face of a great last shot...
"The 4th Earl of Hereford led the fight on the bridge, but he and his men were caught in the arrow fire. Then one of de Harclay's pikemen, concealed beneath the bridge, thrust upwards between the planks and skewered the Earl of Hereford through the anus, twisting the head of the iron pike into his intestines. His dying screams turned the advance into a panic."'

SDNW4: The Sultanate of Klavostan
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Mayabird
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Mayabird »

Cucumberland, Kimanjano, the United Solarian Sovereignty
January 3401



Kimanjano! Visited by hundreds of millions of tourists a year, home to strange, exotic, and beautiful wildlife and incredible scenery. It is a pilgrimage stop-of-sorts for many budding ecologists of the Sovereignty and beyond.
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Picture may not have been taken on Kimanjano.
But not all places were equally blessed with loveliness. Some regions of the world, which on other worlds would be considered glorious gardens, simply could not compare to the greater glories elsewhere, and so they languished. People still lived there in the out-of-the-way places, making their livings as they could, and since it was the Sovereignty they were just fine, but they knew they were in a backwater.

One of these places was the small region of Cucumberland, which was known for...well, they had a canal that was alright. That was about it. It was therefore a perfect place for a group of Shroomanists to settle, to make their little cult compound and practice their eccentric but mostly harmless religion, protecting prostitutes (though they were under absolutely no threat of harm in the U.S.S) and providing NUERSing services to those in need, even though in the Sovereignty the vast majority of the time no one was really in need.

Those were the days of Old Shroomanism. Then came the Prophet. The Cucumberland Shroomanists quickly converted to ways of Awesome. No longer did they practice their crazy faith impotently, but lived to make the universe a bit more rad. They became active, performing strange works of community service, like the construction of the giant housetree to enliven the area.
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It looks a lot better in real life. Also bigger.
They paid for their works by starting their own business. The Shroomanists built a factory. Compared to the megacorps of the U.S.S., it was barely more than a cottage industry, a small home handicrafts shop. Still, in its little way, it was pretty cool.
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They also have an excellent safety record and are a member of the local Bestest Business Bureau.
The Shroomanists became a moderately celebrated local group. And yet, even so... and even though they didn't hurt anyone...and even though they were barely a blip in the of visitors statistics...it was a bit unnerving to some having a couple hundred thousand of them (and their ships) converge upon Cucumberland.

The private investigator was hired by a few of those people. Call her Aisling Ni - at the moment she was going by that name.

Aisling stood outside Terrace Park, though it had unofficially been renamed Housetree Park. Being a well traveled woman and having seen a lot of weird things from her work, she was not one of the people looking up gaped-jawed or at least with slightly open mouths at the scene. The scene, of course, was not the housetree but the Shroomanist antics going on all around it.

She wrote a mental note. Apparently this is not unusual. This locals call this “every four or five days, ya know?” However this seems a bit larger than normal.

There were physical stunts and feats, displays of light and sound (and some smells too, but it was hard to distinguish the incense from the food after a while – especially with the chocolate incense about), games of every horrible overstimulating type the Sovereignty could think of in its most decadent moments, a C. J. Motonow film screening, and on and on...pretty much everything a small country festival needed, really. The investigator listened in on conversations all around, ignoring the usual inane chatter (gossip, questions about the blockiness of the leaves, and so on) and searching for something relevant or useful.

“It's all a big going away party.” “So it's not a fundraiser?” “Nah, they're just doing it for fun like always.”
“But do they still have that breast stigmata thing?”
“They declared war on the MEH. Can a cult even do that?”
“Good tippers. Some kinda religious obligation. 'Stiffing is lame,' they said.”
“Where did that Prophet guy come from?”
“They call it a 'massive source of the Lame' and I can't blame them. Just want to punch them in their fat stupid faces so hard they puke lipids. I don't even know why but I hate the Happys that much.

I can't find anything suspicious. Normally, I find that suspicious, but maybe, for once, something isn't hiding something. Is that possible? Are they really just stopping by to pick up people and supplies before moving on?

A Zigonian was debating, or at least chatting with, a couple Shroomanists. Aisling focused on that.

“Not at all! The gods look kindly upon the Space Pope and his flock.”

The Zigonian responded, in a usual laid back fashion, “But if ya not missionaries, and this in't to draw converts, then what ya doing?”

“Just being awesome!”

“Really, mon?”

“Yes! By no means do we demand that you or anyone else join our ranks. The path of Awesome is a grueling one, filled with unending extreme exploits, a life not for the faint-hearted. The ideal Shroomanist would lead a life as over-the-top as one of the heroes from Thompson's Lives of the Badasses.”
Image
The cover of legendary long-lost first edition of Lives of the Badasses. The version the Shroomanists and other readers of the classic work go by the thirty forth and final edition, first published in 2614 and actually compiled by a different author. Incidentally, the book is required reading for all children of the Way Outback of Nova Australia.
“But those of us who can follow the true path of the Awesome, we are drawn to our faith, and we make it our duty to always strive for the most radness impossible.”

“Ya mean possible?”

“No, impossible.”

“I dig, and the Awesome is good.”

“Groovy is good too!”

Aisling found a secluded place to stand around so she could continue to watch and listen (with her enhanced senses) at a safe distance. She saw the Zigonian made a small bow. “Thank your kindness. But, did ya not just say that Awesome is the True Path?'

One of the Shroomanists waved her hands. “Oh no, you misunderstand. We mean the path of Awesome, the straight path, and not the curved path that goes back around to Lameness. It is as this symbol...”
Image
It's actually a graph. The gods also like graphs, for some reason.
The Shroomanist continued. “The Prophet said, 'There is no true path to living, and not all things fall on the continuum of Awesome and Lame, but it is with those things only that we concern ourselves.' The 'we' here means Shroomanists dedicated to the Awesome, not to all people. It is our labor of love, and not a job for the faint of heart.”

“Ya, I heard, Awesome to oppose Lameness, which'll destroy the universe?”

“That is...oversimplified. The gods, we believe, are insane. They created this universe for their amusement. There are many gods, with their own motivations and characteristics, and they come and go with no pattern. Some of them don't seem to be very smart, and a few are even lame themselves (and I hope none of them are listening now, lest I be retconned out of existence like the Regency of the Engine...)”

“...the what?”

“(Exactly.) But even the worst of the gods can recognize Awesome and are amused by it, and great Lameness repulses them. If they are not amused, they will do something to amuse themselves, and some of them are bad at making their own fun. Maybe they will become bored and simply snuff us out instantly. More likely, they will do things like start wars, or summon abominations from beyond spacetime, something to watch us bugs react for their entertainment. Quick or slow and painful, either way we would all be destroyed.”

Then one Shroomanist, who hadn't said anything up to now, jumped forward. “AND THAT'S WHY WE AWESOMEIZE TO THE EXTREME! WE ARE RAD SO EVERYONE MAY LIVE AND CONTINUE TO BE RAD! NEVER COMPROMISE TO THE LAME! GO ABOVE THE IMPOSSIBLE AND PUNCH THE FACE OF ETERNITY! HAAAAAAAAH!” And then he shot into the air with his jetpack and disappeared behind the housetree.

“Brad gets excited,” one of them said as explanation. “Amyway, that is why we follow our Prophet, for he is the wisest and most experienced in the ways of Awesome. In fact, there he goes now!”
Image
No comment is necessary.
“I guess he's going somewhere. Meeting?”

“Another ship just landed, the Peanut Butter Chuffington from Anglia, I think. Maybe he's gone to greet them?”

They chatted a bit on random topics, like their next rendezvous with other Shroomanists while heading antispinward until the Zigonian needed to depart.

“I must be gone. Space Pope bless you, good mons!”

“Live well and be awesome!”

Aisling made it look like she was wandering off. I'm still getting paid to look for something suspicious, so I'll keep searching, even if I have my doubts. These people are just too silly to be that devious.


Result: Theology!
No, wait, I mean, the Shroomanists will eventually contribute a whopping 65 whole points to the MEH war effort. Yes, 15 of them are the disco ball. They'll mostly be support. Mostly.
DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!

SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.
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Re: SDNW4 Story Thread 2

Post by Shinn Langley Soryu »

No Substitute for Victory
Ushijima class assault ship HSS Midori Kanda, Sector N-19
Between Shinra and Haruhiist space
UNREAL TIME / March 3401

Douglas MacArthur wrote:I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes. ... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.
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Field Marshal Homura Akemi dispassionately studied the image currently being projected by the holotank on the HSS Midori Kanda's bridge. It was a schematic of perhaps the nastiest anti-planetary weapon in the SOS Imperial Navy's arsenal: The liquid rubiconium warhead. While it certainly possessed plenty of raw destructive power, the weapon was designed with a far more insidious goal in mind. When detonated within a planetary atmosphere or on a planetary surface, any rubiconium not directly consumed during the detonation would be propagated well beyond the blast radius, contaminating the environment with rubiconium; considering the compound's highly toxic and radioactive properties, any areas affected by a liquid rubiconium warhead would be rendered permanently uninhabitable for carbon-based lifeforms. Detonating the warhead over an existing rubiconium deposit would have even worse consequences, as it would start a chain reaction that would produce enough destructive power to wipe out entire regions if the deposit was large enough.

That was exactly what Field Marshal Akemi sought to do. While these weapons were meant to be used against Bragulan-controlled rubiconium deposits, she felt that they would also make excellent area denial weapons against the MEH. Her plan was to deploy the liquid rubiconium warheads against the MEH agriworlds of the Wolf 359 system, denying their use to the enemy by contaminating them with the pervasive green crystals. Once the rubiconium was given some time to spread, a second wave of warheads would be launched against those new deposits, detonating them, spreading even more rubiconium, and hopefully eliminating any remaining resistance on the ground. The same would also be done against the worlds of Alpha Centauri, with their own agricultural and industrial centers singled out for destruction by liquid rubiconium warheads. As a bonus, the Haruhiists and the other coalition members could harvest the rubiconium on those worlds once hostilities ended.

It was an especially cruel and ruthless plan, but Field Marshal Akemi was especially cruel and ruthless herself. Five centuries of service with the SOS Imperial Marine Corps had largely left her a cold, unfeeling husk of a woman, though she still knew all too well the suffering that a protracted war caused. She wanted to bring a relatively quick end to the war with the MEH, and all of her planning had that single goal in mind. Even though Wolf 359 had already been devastated by the Orks, it was still a strategically important location, and she would not take any chances if the MEH was to somehow restore its primary food source. If starving out the fatties would help destroy their will to fight, she would go through with it, even if her methods would almost certainly be condemned by her allies.

Field Marshal Akemi deactivated the holotank and turned to walk back to her quarters when she bumped into her comrade Field Marshal Madoka Kaname. "Homura-chan!" Madoka exclaimed. "What are you still doing up here on the bridge?"

"I couldn't sleep," Homura replied offhandedly. She sighed. "Now, could you please get out of my way, Madoka? I want to go back to my quarters."

"Look, something's clearly bothering you, Homura," Madoka said. "Let's sit down somewhere and talk about it, okay? Does the mess hall sound good to you?"

"Yeah, sure, why not," Homura droned as she followed Madoka over to the Kanda's commissary. The two of them sat across from each other at one of the many tables.

"So, you mind telling me what's wrong, Homura?" Madoka asked her colleague.

"If you can find a better way to help accelerate the end of this war, I'd like you to tell me, Madoka," Homura replied. "Once we go in there, we're not leaving until the last remnants of the MEH are crushed into dust and scattered to the nine vectors. The quicker we can do that, the better things would be for all of us, right?"

"Right."

"We know war as few other beings now living know it. I know that you are just as repulsed by it as I am, if not even more. However, we are being forced to go to war once more, and you know as well as I do that once we are at war, we must do everything we can in order to bring it to a swift end. You get what I'm saying, Madoka?"

"I get it, I get it."

"I know for a fact that there are people on our own side who'll call me a monster for what I'm planning to do. However, short of just declaring exterminatus and glassing them, it's the only way to take them out without having to throw too many of our ground forces into the grinder."

"You're not talking about...using the Liquid-R warheads, are you, Homura?"

"Of course that's what I'm talking about, Madoka. Like I asked you before, if you can find a better way to bring the war to a quick end, I'm all ears."

"But what about the civilians?"

"You know as well as I do that there are no innocent civilians, Madoka. You are not just fighting an armed force, you are fighting a government and the people who support it. It really shouldn't bother you as much as it does to be killing these so-called 'innocent bystanders.' If we can end this war nearly as soon as it starts, then it shouldn't matter just how many civilians get slaughtered, as long as our own men and women are spared. I'll leave you here to think it over. I'm going back to my quarters."

Homura got up from her seat and left the mess hall, leaving Madoka to contemplate what they had just discussed. Five centuries of continuous service had indeed left Madoka and Homura with a rather unique perspective on the horrors of war, but even with that amount of time, there were still some things that Madoka was having trouble reconciling.
I ship Eino Ilmari Juutilainen x Lydia V. Litvyak.

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Phantasee: Don't be a dick.
Stofsk: What are you, his mother?
The Yosemite Bear: Obviously, which means that he's grounded, and that she needs to go back to sucking Mr. Coffee's cock.

"d-did... did this thread just turn into Thanas/PeZook slash fiction?" - Ilya Muromets[/size]
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