Drakador_Chaos KrankysFirebrand48
HALLWAY WITH THE WAR-MACHINE
A sound like a War-horn sounded out loudly down the hall as the machine’s shoulder shifted, a canister opening and firing a trio of thumps, smoke grenades with a purple trail behind them firing into the corridor. There was a high whine as the Fifthers’ thermal goggles clicked to life, green interlacing with their purple-white forms like six spider-eyes. The War-machine let out a mechanical shriek as it’s shield arm was rendered useless by a well-placed particle lance, rendering the electronics in that limb’s shoulder useless and dysfunctional. The thing’s eye glowed brightly as mechanics behind the camera’s light whirled in circles. If a Dawner could get a good shot in…
At the same time, some of the Fifther soldiers had been cut down, particle beams to the face or chest rendering them near-instantly dead as their hearts stopped, brains melted, and radiation caused vast internal bleeding, as well as externally from the large holes cut through them.
DAWNER-SEEKER EXPEDITION
“Looks like they’ve got a cannon down there, anyone here got any heavy ordinance!?” called out the de-facto leader of the seeker squad, after their original commander was turned into sludge in the initial barrage, his half melted corpse laying against the wall around the corner. A couple marines produced plasma grenades, but beyond that there wasnt much. The new captain turned to the Dawners, and nodded.
"You have anything in the way of explosives?” he asked, hefting one of the plasma grenades and looking over towards the bend in the corridor. He winced as a trio of rounds fired off from a seeker marine’s micropellet railcannon, their form pulling back as a wave of plasma slapped the wall where they had been peeking out. “Anything to at least force the Fifthers into a retreat.”
BASTONIAN EXPEDITION
More prepared and cautious, and the Fifther’s element of surprise gone, the Bastonians filed into a wider, brightly lit courtyard with benches, climbing rock walls, fences, and exercising equipment as cover. At the other end they quickly spotted one of their drones laying in pieces across the floor, smoldering, and Fifthers who popped out from behind some equipment. As the wolf-like robot lumbered in, its weapon laying down covering fire, an autocannon popped down from the ceiling, firing back with comparatively weak munitions- rubber bullets designed as a non-lethal way to put down riots.
One of the Fifther soldiers in ragged gear tried to run off, clearly scared- but was stopped as a commander in full body armour roughly grabbed the back of his armour, shoving him back with a crack into the cement rock-wall that was drowned out by the gunfire. The soldier that had tried to run didn’t show as human on any recording the Bastonians had taken of the incident. Were they fighting with armed slaves?
THE AIRLOCK
The inner airlock creaked open with the pain of being ages untouched. Eventually it gave way and opened up into a room with EVA suits, a high ceiling, and equipment for external repair. Some of the suits were missing, while one was impaled with a long screwdriver, torn open, but empty- no corpse inside of it. There was the symbol of the dominion etched into the opposite door, and-
Was it… snowing?
Flecks of purple-white crystals gently shimmered down to the floor, floating as if there was half a G’s worth of gravity, despite there being none on the ship itself. A welding tool floated in front of Lalina, purple crystals forming on it like ice on the surface of a lake, jagged and frozen. A soft purple glow emanated through the room. As the seconds ticked on, the glow became more powerful, ice began to form softly on their suits and the walls around them, tiny purple flecks of energy zapping between each crystal, arcing harmlessly.
Three purple dots peered down from the ceiling, and there was a gentle shimmer as a black figure revealed it’s form, still unseen by the marines as it hung from the top of the room. A silent, unhearable crackle as purple plasma and lightning formed in it’s palm and flowed across the blade of a sword they had unsheathed, forming around the blade like a second sheath of crackly plasma.
Under the helmet, the Fifther Psion grinned, ready to take her prey. She pushed from the ceiling with her feet, and lunged at one of the marines, wrangling her arms tightly around the marine as she tried to keep them from turning around and fighting. The plasma blade came close enough to the neck of the suit’s armour to begin scorching the metal, and ice began to spontaneously erupt across the marine’s suit, trying to poke through and pierce it at it’s soft points, in an attempt to expose the squishy body inside to the cold, dangerous vacuum.
“SURRENDER, BASTONIANS!” she cried out hysterically, the helmet not giving off the wide, manaical smile underneath it. “OR ALL OF YOU WILL BECOME ONE WITH THE VOID!”
She chuckled as she tightened her grip and pulled the blade closer to the marine’s throat, backing up to use their body as a meat-shield. She let her psionic energy surge as she tried to pour fake agony into the head of the marine, like alternating hot needles and cold blades across every inch of their skin.
SPACE
Everything devolved in less than a split second. The moment the Dawners opened up with swarms of missiles, particle lances, and fusion cannons- the allied forces struck back. Seeker weaponsfire wiped out a swathe of fighters and the fifty-meter corvettes out, as did the fire of the Bastonians. A seeker vessel was rendered damaged by the particle lance of the Fifthers, ripping off one of it’s star-point wings. Less than a moment later, the entire engine-block of the Fifther’s capital ship was torn into oblivion by the Dawner’s probe, cast out at hyperspace, into the depths of the maw as new debris to strike down unsuspecting explorers.
But the ship continued moving. Despite its mission-death, its weapons continued firing as it spun around in a circle, on a path to directly strike the IDS Harbinger. They needed to stop it's movement, while wiping out it's weapons.
The seekers reached out, offering touse their vessels' magnetic fields to try to slow the imperial corpse of a vessel, provided someone escort them and provide fire to annihilate the fifther's weapons before they killed the seekers. Even fighter coverage would be helpful, they concluded. It was made clear that other suggestions or plans of action were welcome, but they needed to be fast.
It seems the dawner's plan worked, but the consequences could leave the answers to the oddity they studied unfound, and their boys on the ground dead, if they did not act now.
