Tau Leonis

[ACH0225]

Aygyrn's scout ship flashed a brilliant crimson as it exited it's Yttrium-fueled FTL jump. The scout ship was long, about 35 meters long. It, however, was narrow, only 8 meters wide, and 15 meters high. The ship cruised towards the starport, until it entered optical view range. The ship was already coated in ablative stealth paint, but it was a test for new Strigiforme tech. The cloaking device could cloak the ship for a full standard hour, a full 15 minutes batter than most high end cloaks. As the ship entered optical range, it activated it's cloak, and disappeared to go find a place to hide and fulfill its primary mission: To spy and scout the system for possible invasion

[Prototype]

Midas control room:

Theta look at the display in front of him, they had been able to retreive the star map of the local sector, and what they found was quite displeasing.

"Sir, if you look here you'll see a very strange energy signature emanating from this planet, now we don't know what is causing this, but the distribution suggests that either the source is crystalline in nature, or the signal is being passed through a crystalline structure", a scans officer reported

"What are you saying?"

"This strange energy signature could be what is interfering with the ansible"

"So all we have to do is get rid of the source?"

"Not so simple, a few years ago, an Extinctor class passed close to this area, it never came back, but the black box recordings indicated it had been attacked"

This was not good, Extinctor classes were very powerful warships, and had been known to take out much larger vessels single handedly, the readings that came back from this one showed that it didn't get a chance to fight back.

"What sort of tech could do that?" The officer asked.

"I only know of a few things capable of doing that" Theta replied, "the NDC Planet buster, but they would not possess that technology, a Frestorian final blaster, or a very big fleet". "We should not stay too long"

[Chairman_Tiel]

Arcipel twirled the stylus in the appendages that composed the 'hand' portion of his wing as he lay sprawled on his bed. It was a quarter to 0600 last time he checked; though translating the military time standard to foreign worlds like this was bound to produce errors, it gave the Tien peace to know that it would not be an hour before base operations resumed.

He chuckled. Of course, there would be some sorry souls still patrolling the perimeters of the base at this hour, though the actual installation didn't come to life until what could be called 'dawn' on the moon, when the sun rose over the rocky horizon and attempt to fry anyone whom wasn't within the solar shields. That in itself served to deter most illegal prospectors, but the orbital stations had to really haul ass to reach the dark side of the planetoid if they hoped to escape the scathing rays. Not too much of an issue, all government contracted scientists were already housed in the planetside base along with the small marine detachment assigned to guarding them.

With a groan, Arcipel lifted himself off of the mattress and strode to the ivory aperture that serviced his quarters, clenching his head as he did so. The three bottles of alcohol he'd requisitioned from the quartermaster the night before did not let him off as easily as he'd hoped. But, that wouldn't serve as much of an excuse to not begin the workday, and so he walked out the door and into the main corridor of the barracks.

"Good morning!" a voice to his right called out, causing him to jump and reach for his vacant firearm.

But, as he looked at the source, thankfully it wasn't an assault-rifle toting intruder but one of his junior officers, a young white-feathered tien named Alys. As usual, the ensign wore a cheerful expression he swore never left her face.

"Ensign, what are you doing here?" He asked carefully, trying not to let the annoyance of the intrusion seep into his voice.

Evidently it did despite his efforts, for she stiffened and looked at him quizzically. "You instructed me to wake you up, remember?"

Arcipel did remember, though he didn't let the recognition show on his face. He hadn't expected her to actually follow up on the request.

"How long were you waiting here?"

The younger tien paused for a moment and then responded, "Around five minutes, your datapad wasn't responding so I figured you'd already gotten up. I was just about to use the lock override code you gave me, actually."

Fair enough. "I see. Good job." He said, seeing the ensign beam at the praise before turning to walk down the hallway, heading to the cafeteria to hopefully pick up some pain meds before performing the morning inspection. But as he walked along, he distinctly heard a second set of feet following him and spun around to see Alys following him.

"Don't you have better things to do than follow me around?" Arcipel snapped.

"Oh no, I took the night shift. I'm technically off-duty right now."

A response started in his throat, a command actually, but the headache prevented him from uttering it. Tired and annoyed, he doubted the usefulness of working up the energy to try it again and instead resumed walking to his destination.

[Error]

Error listened to the chatter from Tau I control. He sighed, nudged his RCS system, and fired up the main engines, decelerating the massive freighter into a stable orbit.

"DSS-F Polaris, maintain your current vector, zero-nine-zero relative, and prepare for de-orbit burn at two-six-three-three local."
"Polaris copies, control. Standing by reentry and landing vectors."
"Stand by."

Error suddenly looked up and glared at his radar screen. He felt there was something there, though the sensors showed nothing. He shook his head and returned to calculating landing trajectories.

[Professor Fenway]

>// Initialize Reactivation Sequence...

Energy Nominal
Shield Integrity Stable
AI Normal

Restarting...

Kayne began receiving input again. Slowly, but surely. No problems. No graphical glitches. Nothing. He accepted more inputs until he was connected to nearly every device in the system. His thought process was disrupted by debugging process, which made sure everything was running normally. It detected no problems and shortly shut off. He received a message from the head commander.

"Greetings Kayne," he said. "We've got you back online. I'm sure you would like the root cause of these problems?"

"Indeed," Kayne replied. The commander held up a small chip. "We found this installed on one of your core regulators. It was feeding false inputs and null errors into your AI." Kayne did a visual analysis of the chip, but it did not come up in any databases. "It also corrupted several data centers. We restored those from backups." At this, Kayne started.

"What was lost?"

"Recent information on the status of most of the Dark Matter Crystals. Don't worry, nothing happened there." Kayne did a quick scan of the sectors and his own personal memory. He was right.

"Affirmative Commander. Anything else?"

"One of our database facilities unexpectedly crashed into Tau IV. We still don't know the cause. It contained all pending and sent messages that you completed. We lost maybe 120 of your last messages. You will have to resend these."

Kayne clicked. "Such a waste. Good day, commander." He signed off.


Meanwhile, a freighter docked with a station. Part of the radar fritzed out for a second, and when it returned, the map was minus one facility.

[Professor Fenway]

OOC: NO! We cannot let this die!

[Iv121]

OOC: Well I need more stuff to work with before I can do anything with my char and I hoped you will give me more details about the universe - for example who the hell do those refugees running from and why the hell to Tau Leonis.

[Professor Fenway]

Did you even read the story?

Alright, the Refugees are from neighboring backwater systems, who left those systems for Tau Leonis because it has a habitable planet and sufficient resources for survival, due to the upcoming warp storm. (This was during the events of Lambda Leonis). Tau Leonis had a habitable planet AND plenty of resources, and was nearby. And already developed.

[Iv121]

I read quite carefully, but I'm not that aware of lambda leonis stuff. And it actually doesn't sit well with what you wrote before...

[Prototype]

Theta stood on the hangar observation deck, several pilots were about to conduct a stealth flyby of the near military station, to determine how much of a threat it was. Theta was confident that the cloaking systems should hold for the duration of the flight, but if the pilots were detected, they would be defenceless.

Three BR-45 bombers were to make the run, they had had their destructive payload removed, and replaced with an array of scanners, sensors, and stealth devices, the converted bombers would be able to make the pass with ease, and if the worst happened, they would be able to hold up long enough for the Midas to provide support, at that point all cover would be blown anyway.

Theta had briefed the pilots earlier, three MK-VIIb pilot rigs, and gave them one final reminder of what would happen if they screwed up, even though Theta knew this was unlikely, these particular pilots were the three best on board.
The pilots, going under the code names CLIMAX, PHALANX and GODEYE began to spin up the engines on their craft, CLIMAX and PHALANX preparing to deploy from the starboard side, GODEYE from the port side.

The deck rang with the awesome roars of the ion engines that powered the three bombers.

"CLIMAX, launch successful"
"PHALANX launch successful"
"GODEYE launch successful"

No problem there.

Ten minutes passed, then CLIMAX opened up a comm channel to flight control.

"Control, this is CLIMAX do you read me over"
"Yes CLIMAX we read you over"

"Enemy station sighted, though I have lost contact with PHALANX and GODEYE, can you make contact with them over"

The control officer checked the Telemetry and comm channels of PHALANX and GODEYE, both pilots responded soundly, and both craft seemed fine

"Control to CLIMAX, we have contacted PHALANX and GODEYE, they are functioning normally over"

"CLIMAX to control, I believe my equipment is failing, I am aborting the mission and returning to-"

"..."

"Sir, contact with CLIMAX has been lost"

Second later, GODEYE radioed in

"GODEYE to control, I can confirm CLIMAX's craft has exploded, I do not have a visual on the escape pod, nor can my sensors pick it up over"

"Control to GODEYE and PHALANX, abort mission, return to base immediately over"

"GODEYE returning to base over"
"PHALANX returning to base over"

"uh-oh" Theta thought to himself

[cats]

OOC: Sorry for not posting, been busy/tired lately.

[Professor Fenway]

Kayne received a detection alert from one of the drones stationed in the asteroid belt. Everyone knew where the no-fly zones were, so they were avoided.

He switched views and locked on to the drone. It was an electronic warfare drone, designed to scramble the electronics of passing craft, so they could be detained later. They were all cloaked, so nothing was wrong there. He connected to it and read the feeds.

At 0731, a small signature was detected by the drone. It closed in, and the signature was identified as a small fighter. It would have been picked up much earlier, but it was cloaked. This cloak was faulty, but on an electronic level- it couldn't be detected by camera or human. The drone began scrambling communications as it approached, and the scrambled the entire system. The ship crashed into an asteroid.

Kayne read this and activated the video feed of the drone. It managed to capture the explosion as it crashed. The feed stopped shortly after. Kayne then directly contacted the nearest station. It pinged for a moment until the base admiral picked up. Before could speak, Kayne began.

"One of our drones just picked up and crashed a cloaked fighter about 2 clicks from your position," he stated.

"We haven't detected anything," the admiral stated. "Are you sure?"

"The chance that this was a glitch are lower than 1%."

"Roger, continue."

"From the video feeds, I have determined that it was unarmed. It was likely out for reconnaissance."

"But who? We're the only military presence in the system."

"It appears we may not be. We must find out who. Take a destroyer and a salvage frigate and recover the remains."

"Right away." The admiral signed off. And then he contacted the control tower. It pinged for a second. "Base control, come in."

"Roger Admiral, this is Base Control," the communicator squawked.

"Launch the Harmony salvage ship, to coordinates 22, 216, 187. We have a small salvage operation here. One of our drones crashed."

"Roger sir."

"I want the remains salvaged and the cause known within 1 cycles." And, as an afterthought, added, "Fighter team Isis will accompany the salvage team."

"Roger, launch underway." The admiral signed off.


Meanwhile, Kayne was observing civilian freighter traffic. He hardly noticed when his system map blanked out for a second, then returned.

[Error]

Error sat back in his shuttle, watching as the cargo handles unloaded his ship. His plan, though simple, should work, he thought.
It was, in fact, incredibly simple: find whoever was ghosting around in the system and tell system control where they are.+

He hit the switch and heard the launch clamps thunk clear, Firing thrusters, he maneuvered away from the docked freighter and off towards the asteroid belt.

[Professor Fenway]

The captain of the Harmony looked out the viewscreen, into the dense asteroid field up ahead. A fighter streaked by and destroyed a particularly large rock barreling nearby. The captain sighed and opened a communication line to the fighter.

"Isis 3, hold your fire. We are perfectly able to defend ourselves, and we don't want to blow up the salvage!"

The pilot sighed. "Got it captain. It's just, it's so boring out here."

It was the captain's turn to sigh. Shaking his head, he closed the communicator and observed a complex interaction between several asteroids. Before long, a sensor station began beeping. A lieutenant checked the console.

"Sir, we have an unidentified contact closing on our position, fast. We can't get a lock on it."

"Perfect. Another ship to throw into the mix. ETA?"

"It will be here within a minute." At this moment, a small shower of asteroids began pelting the shield. The AI, not being state-of-the-art, interpreted this as kinetic weapons fire. The shield console began squawking. "Sir, we just took kinetic weapon's fire!"

The captain snatched the communicator. "Isis 3, we have a hostile contact heading our way, attack vector 2-8-0. Engage the ship!"

"Roger sir!" The fighters banked just as the ship entered the asteroid belt. It looked unarmed. The fighters began their attack. Soon, an urgent message came in from the ship. The captain answered and Error came onto the screen.

"Hold your fire! This is a civilian vessel!" The captain sighed and contacted the fighters.

"Hold your fire! This vessel is civilian!" The fighters stopped. The captain then turned back to the freighter. "You alright?"

"No, I am not okay. My engines are shot to hell. You can expect a report for this." The captain shook his head.

"State your business then. This is a military no-fly zone." Before he could answer, something large and heavy bumped against the ship. "Hold that thought." He turned to the sensors.

"Sir, that's the..."

"Yes yes. It's the wreckage we came for." He activated a console, and steadily snatched the wreck and brought it into the cargo hold.

[Error]

Error sighed explosively and mashed his comms button. "It would be kind of you to say so before causing several thousand credits worth of damage, sir. And I'm here because someone's ghosting around your system with a cloaked ship. I was hired to try and find them."
during this message, Error put on his most persuasive voice and...other abilities.