A World Half In Love With Death

Posted on Fri Feb 12th, 2021 @ 2:19am by The Narrator

Mission: S2:3: Snow Drift
Location: Tripwire
Timeline: MD2: 6.00

From a distance, you might mistake Tripwire for a ho-hum world that just couldn't make the big leagues. Too small to get a thick enough atmosphere to get a proper carbon cycle going, to big to be just another stellar wind-blasted cinder. It was just ugly enough to have a shroud of gases that a humanoid could breathe, and only then because lichen and moss are hardy fuckers.

It didn't even have a moon. Even Earth had a moon, and it was the utopian hellscape everyone in Starfleet tried to escape by boldly going in another direction.

The Necromancer had dropped out of warp, carefully channelling the energetic pulse of its warp out into a specific direction away from the inner system. No forewarning for these assholes. It had then drifted in a zig zag pattern across the system, using the shadows of the ice giants and other stellar objects to mask its signature. For a ship designed to bury most problems in photon torpedoes, the Steamrunner class was not a bad little stealth ship.

And then it had reached the closet approach to Tripwire and spat out the SFMC Javalin drop ship like a sour pip. The vessel's sleek aerodynamic hull was rough and textured in the special ablative foam coating the engineers referred to as 'discreet putty'. As opposed to 'serious putty' which was safely packed into the arms lockers on the dropship, with cheerful cartoon illustrations in five languages about what happens when D-17 mouldable explosives go off.

Safety briefings would be the least of your worries.

The larger starships sensor suites had begun to piece together some of the facts of the matter, sucking in data passively from the target world. Life signs were abundant, clustered into large settlements on both hemisphere. These were themselves then clustered around large mechanical and engineering works. Long-range scans saw miles deep craters carved into the mantle, the thermal bloom of machines ceaseless gnawing on the corpse of a planet.

And above the planet, like vultures, were the ships. Not a few. Not a couple. Hundreds. Thousands. Some were the size of the Javelin, flitting from one place to the other. Other's put Starbases to shame. All of them were shockingly, and embarrassingly crude. Fusion rockets instead of impulse drives, with some of the larger vessels employing brute force nuclear pulse detonation engines. Ice clad armour on the hull instead of shields. Rail guns instead of phasers.

These were the terrors of Messier 4? The destroyer and consumer of worlds? A daycare holoNanny was more combat capable than most of the fleet in orbit. But the old adage about 'many a small bird can bring down a hawk' still applied. The Pakled, for instance, were a joke to most. And yet they still got around by hijacking ships.

Jokes were only fun when they didn't hold bloody knives.

The Javelin slid into a quiet polar orbit, the better to map the planet quickly in three rotations. A proto-ocean was on the far side, shrouded by night. A sickly wane light etched the coastline where the tides were slowly receding, foot by foot, as massive pump works out in the ocean swells consumed the water like the well of the tides. We will take all that is you, we assume the Concordance says, all your sky and all your tides.

And you. We'll take you too.

On the night side, the fires are easier to see. Vast encampments, like postcards from the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, can be picked out by the campfires alone. Unlike the worksites on the dayside, these life signs are blandly similar. Native population? Transplants? Maybe the Concordance really go in for camping on a societal level?

God knows they love sermonising. The airwaves are thick with EM chatter, ship to ship, interstellar broadcast, subspace pulse tones. The few that the computer can lock on to show crowded gathers, watching as a single figure talks at length about a lot of things. Righteous this, righteous that, a lot of fire imagery that speaks to the little pyro in us all.

And now the Javelin hangs in orbit, slowly swinging around under the noises of the enemy. Its computer systems adjust its course slightly, keeping them from smacking into a Concordance dreadnaught or other super massive starship. It is content to drive the bus, whilst the meat that gets the adventures debates what to do...