ic Incursion: Interstellar 66

[Thevshi]

Paradigm had been concerned when one of the Communion needle fighters had rammed into Galvanic, knocking the Tempestian off course.  But the young Naram knew she had to remain focused on the task at hand and trust Galvanic to be able to take care of herself for the moment. 

Continuing on toward the nearest large Communion ship, Paradigm prepared to throw Rock at the vessel.  As large and heavy as Rock was, Paradigm was more than able to lift his bulk, a task made even easier in the weightlessness of zero gravity.  As she flew towards the Communion warship, the paragon swung Rock forward, releasing him at the end of the motion, sending him hurtling toward the vessel. 

Between Paradigm's strength and Rock's size and durability, the hull of the Communion warship gave way, and Rock burst into the interior, ready to do some damage.  Paradigm turned her attention to the next closest warship, ready to focus on it herself before looking to pick Rock up once more and continue the process.

[Gizmo]

Rock streaked through the empty void with his hefty fists outstretched in front of him, the glowing embers of his eyes narrowed as he focused on the huge, wedge-shaped Communion craft Paradigm had hurled him toward. The stoney goliath was not a being who worried overly about the precise mathematics behind his work but his practical grasp of the results when combining mass and momentum was very nearly unmatched. The nanite deployer's silvery, seamless hull crumpled where he struck it, rippling silently in the vacuum and tearing itself apart with shockwaves moments before his trajectory took him straight through its core. At the speed he was going Rock didn't have much time to take in the sights but he reflexively flung his arms apart like a swimmer doing a breaststroke, rending sensitive innards apart.

The ship erupted in a violent explosion of twisted fragments and brightly annihilating exotic matter and Rock shot out the other side, having barely slowed down. He bellowed something in triumph but with no medium to carry his shout the specific words were anyone's guess.

[Tiffany Korta]

Right now Sitara wasn’t paying much attention to the battle going on around her or Miss Americana’s and Dragonfly’s successful attempts to stop the nanites, thought she did glance up now and again at the displays and gave encouraging sounds.

Right now she had some of the bridges panel’s off and was poking around in the systems of the craft, after promising she’d put them all back better than before. With no actual link to Gorgon’s sytems, and she doubted she’d let them do that in the best of circumstances, all she could do was try to transmit a suitably tuned wake up signal to whatever defences Gorgon carried. It sounded much easier than it actually was.

[Electra]

Miss Americana sat down in the nearest empty seat on the bridge, face and body immediately going slack while losing none of their nearly eerie perfection. At the same moment, Cyberknife raced through the systems of the Horizon, nothing but a blur of data as she gathered up speed and nerve before grabbing a phantom breath and launching herself into the void. 

Far, far, far, such a very long way, longer than she'd ever tried to go before. She'd known the theoretical limits of her own power already, from pinging satellites and spacecraft when her abilities had been new and endlessly fascinating, but this was another step entirely. It seemed to take forever, nanoseconds dragging like hours as she streamed through the vast emptiness of two hundred thousand miles of vacuum. She began to wonder if she was going to make it, if she could make it back, when suddenly she was in another system, an alien, hostile system, but at least something that was solid enough to hold onto. Cyberknife thought she could probably break into their system if she tried, but maybe it would be easier to brute force a solution. Grabbing the programming of the nearest nanite, she cracked it open in intangible hands and studied it, then deliberately altered it. No longer did it want to devour the Gorgon, instead its horrible hunger was for its brethren. She patched it back together and lifted it in cupped "hands" "Fly, be free," she told it, "and tell all your friends what you've learned. They'll love it." 

[Fox]

Dragonfly wasn't far behind Cyberknife, but she at least had the advantage of seeing someone else go first - or the disadvantage, as her partner in crime was long-gone by the time she had to make the jump. So she calibrated, gave a silent, standing command to one of her drones, and slumped where she sat as her mind went elsewhere.

She arrived, at least, in time to see what was being done - and mmmhed in approval, turning her abstract, glowing, visored cyber-self toward similar programming. No, no, she told it, though she didn't open her mouth to speak. Anti-corruption checks? You don't need those, the technopath explained in the tone you'd use to admonish a child, reaching into the object and gently pulling something out to be discarded. Better off with out it, really. So expensive! Bet your friends would be so happy to be optimized for their new tasks....

[Thevshi]

While Rock tore through the cruiser that he had smashed into, Paradigm had quickly closed with another cruiser herself.  While not as larger as Rock, the young Naram was easily as heavy, and was generating her own momentum as she slammed into the side of the craft, tearing through the side with similar ease.   

Once through, the Praetorian did not stop, propelling herself forward as she smashed through inner hulls and all manner of sensitive components and systems.  The wake of destruction was considerable, and only a few moments later Paradigm smashed her way through the opposite side of the Communion cruiser.  The shockwaves caused by her passing were still rupturing the interior of the cruiser for a few moments after she emerged, then the massive vessel began to break apart as several power systems overloaded and began to explode. 

By the time Paradigm had turned her attention back to locating Rock to ensure he was okay, the Communion cruiser was little more than debris. 

[Ecalsneerg]

Galvanic spun through space, trailing chunks of herself through the aether. Reeling, she spun around, those fragments coalescing back around herself until she returned to corporeal form, coat somehow billowing in the airless vacuum of space. 

She brought both hands up in front of her, lightning sparing up her arms to flare up around her hands as she flew towards the ship that had hit her. Streaks of light flew from her, making her resemble a small blue comet as she hit the ship at high velocity, bringing a screech of metal as her strength and momentum powered into it, sparks flying from the point of impact.

[Avenger Assembled]

The vessel exploded in a shower of burning nanites, an electrical storm playing amid the clouds of spreading particles that burned a brilliant silver-blue against the darkness of interplanetary space. Destroying these Communion ships was looking to be easy enough - if anything, they seemed to be considerably more fragile than the ships of the line the heroes were used to. The hard part was going to be destroying them all - this was a big fleet! On the plus side, they were attracting the attention of much of that vast fleet, keeping the enemy from launching further attacks against the Gorgon. But that was a victory that threatened its own problems. A star-shaped vessel swooped past Rock and fired a spray of fast-moving projectiles that embedded themselves in the stony champion's skin like darts in a wooden wall. 

Meanwhile, the cyberkinetics were doing their work - and doing it well! The sheaf of crawling nanites on the Gorgon's face was beginning to splinter apart into huge, self-devouring fragments as large as cities - but the sheaf itself was still continent-sized, bigger than anything Earth had ever seen and and crawling its way towards the Gorgon's eye. Their work was succeeding, but was it succeeding fast enough? The sheer bulk of electronic minds, primitive as fleas though they were, was vast and crushing like a mountain of wriggling, writhing ants pressing down on the all-too-human experts pulling it apart. There was no risk of them being assimilated - just blotted out by the sheer pressure of the collective thing they were pushing their minds against. 

[Electra]

~Keep going,~ Cyberknife encouraged Dragonfly, even as her own cybernetic presence showed the strain of the vast weight of nanites. There were just so many, their coding so dense and intensely focused, even their mere presence was almost enough to shove her back in the direction of her somnolent body on the ship. ~I think we're close to something.~ She could feel the other technopath at her "back" as she studied the massive knot of commands and directives, looking for the string to pull. There was something there, something really well hidden, an achilles heel that had been noticed and protected, but not...well...enough.. With a sudden lunge, she dove into the code with both hands, manipulating the data until she found that one weak underlying code and rewrote it into a self-destruct that would self-perpetuate, ripping its way through the billions of nanites like a plague. She pushed the last bit of new data into place, watched as it began to spread, then looked to Dragonfly. ~That's it! Let's get out of here.~

[Fox]

Right behind you. While Cyberknife had continued to dig around in code, Dragonfly had been playing defense - she'd thrown up and had been maintaining a shifting, bubble-like manifestation that was probably what a more mundane firewall would want to be when it was all grown up.

She waited only long enough to make sure Cyberknife was gone before dropping it and vanishing, cutting off her link to the swarm and leaving them to digest themselves. The snap-back to such a hasty exit, unfortunately, was literal - her head rocked as far back in her armor as it could, and behind her helmet's faceplate she squinched her face up in pain. "Mmmmhhhhhgh. Headache. Forgot how much it hurts to overextend like that. Worth it, though," shea countered, getting to her feet and powering her suit back down into stand-by. "You come out okay?"

Edited June 18, 2015 by Fox

[Thevshi]

Paradigm saw Rock smash back out of the Communion cruiser she had thrown him out, which quickly exploded behind him after his exit.  Even as he reappeared, other Communion ships flew by the large alien, attacking him as they passed. 

Paradigm flew back over next to Rock, to ensure he was alright and prepare to take him to another cruiser.  The young Naram easily crossed the distance between them, weaving through wreckage and energy blasts from other Communion ships. 

As she came to a halt near Rock, the Praetorian turned back towards the nearest Communion cruiser, her yellow eyes flashing red as a beam of energy shot out towards the Communion ship.  But her aim was not as good as it could have been, and the beam of energy glanced off the hull of the Communion vessel.

[Avenger Assembled]

Say what you will for the Communion, it wasn't ones to waste resources. It might send wave after wave of assimilated cyborgs into battle, blotting out pitiful biological defenders with the sheer mass of the metal it could command, But when a plan was failing, it didn't make the mistake a human commander would make of throwing good resources after bad. The sunk cost fallacy had no place in its computations. What this meant was that the fleet attacking the Gorgon abruptly began to disengage, turning and flashing away at near-light speed before jumping into the weird neutrino-space that they seemed to use for hyperlight travel. It was gratifying to any sentient mind to see so many ships turning and fleeing from them; a whole planet's worth of mass fleeing into the Communion's wormhole network and away from the heroes. 

But of course there was also the problem of the Gorgon. Freed from the nanite mass that had sought to devour its intelligence, the great planet-sized world shaper drifted in space, its own mass partially obscured by the vast bulk of the gas giant it had disordered from within. Finally, three eyes glowing, it rotated in space, drifting through the spreading nanite mass like a vast ship parting a light fog before it. Vast, cool, and unsympathetic, the back of its head was actually showing on-screen before it spoke a series of syllables that turned out to be interstellar coordinates. 

SGR-1806-20

And then, from his position at the control panel in the Voidrunner, Dr. Zober called, "Gravitic turbulence forming! She's activating her long range drive!" Sure enough, alarms were jangling in the two starships as space began to warp around the retreating form of the Ultimate Preserver - if they didn't gather up their stray colleagues soon, they might soon find themselves on the other side of the Galaxy! 

 

 

[Tiffany Korta]

With a final prayer to gods long forgotten, she was practical at heart but it never hurt to ask for supernatural help every now and again, she sprung into action as soon as it appeared that the Terran plan had succeeded.

 

“Okay let’s go pick up our allies. Communion don’t strike me as the kind to seek revenge but best not to take any chances.” she spoke to the other ship “How do you want to split thing up? Who should we go pick up?”

This was the pretty run of the mill part of the mission now that the dangerous part was hopefully all done.