RP: YSS Ryūjō Mission 2.1 - Breadcrumbs

Security Team Five charged toward the armour bay, as fast as they could. Though there was no need to hurry when they began, Fyodor had almost arrived--the team's Nekovalkyrja were already there--when the shooting started.

Though it cost them a bit of combat time, Shrii still felt it necessary to pass on the briefing she'd received to the rest of the team before opening the door, and it gave Fyodor more time to cover the last several meters. "They got inside as soon as we opened the bay. It's shut again, and the others are playing dead. We've got to stop the cloaked saboteur without friendly fire." She twisted her spray bottle to the 'unsafe' position, and entered a code to unlock the blast door. Fyodor hardly needed to slow down.

Outside the ship, Aurelié, when she saw her foes flanking her, turned away from the battle and attempted to hide in the Ryujo's terrain, in a flurry of countermeasures. She found almost nowhere to hide, unless she flew into a damaged hangar or engine, though, and now that she was so close to the ship it was hard to navigate and took all her attention just to avoid a collision.

More than a dozen shots landed behind her, as her foes seemed too slow to track her through such aggressive maneuvers, but when she flew past the ship's central anti-starship turret, hoping to give it a chance to strike several enemies, they focused their fire and delivered it to sparking ruin after it fired one shot, which went wide, and before Aurelié cleared it again. The smaller turrets defending it had already been cleared!

Aurelié put on another burst of speed to dive around the nose of the ship, and came close enough to being caught in the fire from the main guns of the enemy carrier for her field to start fizzling. One shot from behind clipped her wing on the underside, bringing up an alert that her second wing mount couldn't detect what she'd loaded there.

Nocnimura had trained her guns on the fighters who'd turned their backs on her at the beginning, but had ceased her fire when they followed Aurelié into zero-range with the Ryujo. She seemed confused by her wingmate's actions, and barely began a maneuver to bring herself around to the Ryujo's underside after Aurelié was already almost there.

The commander's Kawarime tumbled unresponsively, but she was less reluctant to speak up on the comms. "I don't have a clear shot, I need you to keep them near m--" She dropped off, as Aurelié's ship left her line-of-sight entirely. A second message, directed to Nocnimura but still heard by Aurelié, soon followed. "Don't go down there, be ready to soften them up when they come back this way for me."

YSS Ryujo Exterior

Argenta narrowed her eyes at the failing engine, pulling herself along the ship's hull as a group of fightercraft flashed past in a blur, their pilots dueling each other at speeds so fast they seemed to teleport whenever she blinked. One of the smaller turrets stood in her way, its many energy-vomiting barrels glowing brightly as the cruiser's defensive systems worked heavily to clear away the hostile fighters. The technician tossed herself downwards, her comparatively tiny body arcing below the overworked weapon as she picked up speed, arriving at the base of the engine's massive exhaust nozzle. She sighed, crouching on the metallic and utilitarian hull before she called in,

"MEGAMI, send me an analysis report of the engines and link my communicator with any technicians inside. We need to get this engine up and running before the others get disabled out here..."

Space

Aurélie quickly doubled her ship back by breaking to the left and back towards the commander's line of sight. Instead of taking a direct route, the pilot maneuvered the craft around the ship itself before finally angling towards the commander's disabled Kawarime. She quickly regretted her past attempt to cover herself within the terrain of the Ryūjō itself. The turrets on the destroyer had been quickly and efficiently annihilated by the hostile fighters, ruling out that course of action.

"Rerouting towards your position.", she stated calmly as she approached the commander's position. Releasing a flurry of flares, Aurélie's Kawarime flew in and out of the commander's firing arc, presumably with the enemy fighter craft on her tail. Once she was past, the pilot doubled her craft back through a hard angled turn, seeking to align the nose of her craft with a hostile fighter and most importantly, to protect the commander's position.

Systems and Safety Monitoring Station

The little Noa's attention was momentarily diverted from her meddling in the starfighter battle still raging just outside the hull of the Urufu-class cruiser to the matter of the engine repair. There still was something definitely wrong about the sequence of the plasma flow after the conduit worked on by Aya showed as repaired, and fluctuations in the barely-functioning CFS system showed the leakages must be still be present every time the engine began a new startup cycle.

"You might be onto something, Foxy. Looks like we got an external breach somewhere down the line from that conduit you shored up," replied the minineko to the Shukaren technician holed up in the maintenance tunnels. "Stand-by, think I got some eyes out there on a not-so-leisurely walk..."

When the call also came in from Argenta, things clicked into place.

"Argenta-hei, I read you! I'm patching you through to Surcouf-hei, she's knee deep in the conduit near that bum engine. Sparks are probably flying out there right now -- and I don't mean the romantic kind, eh," joked the little technician over wireless to lighten the mood. "Seriously, though... need your eyes on those discharges I'm picking up to find where our hull breach is, and guide our fluffy-tailed redshirt to patch it properly and get full power flowing. I'm directing a spare projection drone to fly over and give you another perspective, too."

Meanwhile, alerts were popping up on her orange-tinted visor of the firefight erupting near Team Five's location. Noa tapped her little chin as she tried to see if the ship's sensors could get a bead on the supposed cloaked attacker... and a mental finger on the ship's extensive internal counter measures just in case things broke containment.

Security Team Five

Really need to work on my running more, Fyodor thought as he panted his way to the entrance of the armor bay. "Yes, ma'am. No friendly fire," he said aloud, pulling a flour grenade off his vest as he barreled through the doorway. "Just make sure to get 'em when I draw their fire, ma'am," he added, as he made a beeline to a rack of armor for cover. Would pull the pin on this thing, but I'd rather not get covered in flour if I get shot from a distance.

Aurélie's planned course became more complicated than she intended as three of the enemies on her tail hunted her, with cover from others. She looped to the underside and back to the top again, barely escaping the incoming bolts each time. The enemy seemed to be getting used to the flares, and their warding effect was diminished. The commander's Kawarime was falling further behind, and Nocnimura faded back near to the engines, where Argenta was situated, still having no clear shot on the fighters so close to the Ryujo's hull. The enemy carrier still loomed off to starboard. Whatever ambush it had prepared in its forward bay, it was aimed just behind the Ryujo now, but they still seemed hesitant to launch.

Argenta was connected to Noa and Aya, now. The enemy's weapons left a murky picture, as they caused no physical damage and disabled the ship's diagnostics as well as it's power circuits, but what had been made clear out of that, after Aya's investigation, was that the breach had resulted from an internal malfunction. Aya had replaced the necessary components, but enough redundancy had been lost that there was no way left to reroute the power flow until the ship's defenses were powered down. A hull patch could give Aya a bit more time, or Argenta could repair the short-circuit her own way.

When Fyodor went charging into the Ryujo's armour bay, bright flashes lit up the room, and it echoed with cries from the other team. But when he looked up from cover, he found it eerily quiet, and gloomy, with only a few emergency lights still working. Ten armours were occupied, but all without power, standing stock still in lines on each side of the room. Only two members of Team Six were still fighting fit; one prone, armed only with an NSP, the other holed up in the corner with a full auto rifle.

The enemy was, as had become a terrible habit of theirs, nowhere in sight, and almost entirely undetected. Enough sensors were in the room to give some idea that something was there, hidden, but estimates of its location were approximate, with a margin of error as great as the width of the armour bay. Attempts to scan for it only revealed a dot bouncing around at random, with no direction to its movement.

The rest of his team followed behind Fyodor in pairs, with Shrii to bring up the rear. A luminous web appeared in the doorway as she somersaulted through behind the others, and then it slammed shut, sealing the bay on that end.

YSS Ryujo
Exterior

Argenta wasted no time as soon as she figured out what was going on. "The engine's shorting out! We could reset it by powering half the ship down but that's not an option right now." She was looking into the malfunctioning engine as she spoke, and paused for a response before continuing.

Security Team Five - Armor Bay

Oh, fun, Fyodor thought as the exit closed behind them. Guess that means that it wants us in here and/or it just left. Hopefully it hasn't done that last one, cause who knows how we're supposed to open that web thing.

"Any ideas of where the bugger's at?" the Kodian asked, looking at the remaining members of Team Six as he pulled the pin on one of the improvised flour grenades. "Going to see if I can mark him at all."

After being given vague directions, with all the uncertainty that came with trying to track an invisible foe, Fyodor shrugged and tossed the primed grenade into the middle of the bay, hoping that it'd at least show if the boarder was indeed bouncing around or not.

Space

Aurélie course only became more intricate and mathematical, as she maneuvered to turn the fight in her favor. By now, she was far from the terrain of the Ryujo, and well within open space with plenty of room to maneuver. She was out of flares and her attempts to lure the hostile fighters into the path of Nocnimura's weapons had failed, so the only course of action left to her was to maneuver until they either shot her down or disabled her craft. Of course, maneuvering was not necessarily a last resort option, space was three-dimensional after all, which offered plenty of possibilities for her to leverage angles against the hostile fighters. All she needed to do was to line the nose of her craft up with one of them.

Aurélie's Kawarime banked downward, before making a quick hairpin turn to the left. The maneuvers were followed by a vertical climb, relative to the starting position of her craft, and then a sharp curve to the left, which would put her directly behind the three craft that were pursuing her.

Lining her nose up with each craft and aiming slightly ahead of their flying arcs, Aurélie fired three bursts of aether at each craft respectively, from three of the four turbo aether cannons mounted on her Kawarime.