RP: YSS Miharu Prologue, Day 4

Miyoko's apology went right over Kotori's head as the nekovalkyrja commander considered the impact of her science officer's words. "If it's a directed fold, is there a way we could use WARMS to predict what will be folded and where and when it would end up?"

The less familiar WARMS interface slowed Miyoko down considerably as she struggled to coax results from the unfamiliar system. Soon enough, though, she began producing data. "It's firing in about... right, approximately 48 seconds. I can't quite interpret the targets, though. It's either moving part of the sun to the Taiie no Iori memorial or vice-versa. Probably the former, since the latter wouldn't make much sense."

Mizuho gave a curt nod to Kotori's instructions, and settled herself quietly, alertly, at the place she was directed. Though she looked rather dazed in her appearance, she was quite alert, taking in everything about her. The comments about the giant Mishhu battleship, the massive fold cannon, the... 'coming right towards Taiie' bit. She pondered a moment, then decided it best not to speak just yet. There was something difficult about this situation, something she profoundly disliked.

Probably the massive convenience of being attacked with a piece of a fucking STAR at a base that, for fuck's sake, housed an entire bloody fleet. Ah, this would certainly be fun. Mizuho could almost smell the death coming towards her!

"...if we have forty-eight seconds to work with, is it possible to debilitate a fold cannon?" Mizuho's unfamiliarity with such weapons was rather clear, though a valid question it was. "With FTL interdiction, perhaps..?"

Frowning slightly, Masako turned to Mara and nodded. "Right that would be for the best," the young neko replied with a straight face. Only, she was even more embarassed than she had been before. She hadn't thought about environmental suits at all. "I'll get three environmental suits from damage control," she replied as she dashed to the nearest Damage Control room. Once in, she opened up a locker and pulled out three suits. Throwing her yukata off her body, she quickly climbed into the first suit and locked it up before carrying both her helmet and the other two suits out to Leutre and Mara.

"Veressis-Hei, Mara-san, put these on," she said as she handed them each an environmental suit.

"Arigato!" Mara grabbed the AMES suit Masako offered and began slipping it on.

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"Forty seconds now," Miharu, back in the bridge, corrected.

Kotori had to fight the urge not to panic: if a piece of star appeared in such close proximity to Taiie, if would probably cause the planet's atmosphere to burn off. The settlers wouldn't have the time to escape or reach shelter: they would all die from the exposure. Luckily, Mizuho quickly supplied her with the most potent option seemingly at their disposal.

The Miharu was the only ship that was aware of the threat; it was fortunate coincidence that Kotori had been vigilant enough to notice it. She couldn't count on the 5th XF to respond to the threat even if she warned them about it: she had no assurances they would trust her and swiftly respond to any plea she made to use the station's Temporal-Spatial Distortion System - most especially while the Koganagi Initiative was still considered in progress. Even the Miharu's MEGAMI could probably not override the KAMI's control in this instance.

"Yuka, I don't care how you do it, but get us within one-hundred kilometers of Taiie no Iori with gravimetric propulsion only! Use the combined field uniquely to deploy an interdiction field at maximum capacity."

The Miharu's CFS could probably manage a 1 AU-wide interdiction field; covering the sun would stop it from being used as a weapon, but wouldn't assure Taiie's safety... protecting the planet itself seemed the better idea. Luckily, even with the faulty port capacitor, the Miharu's systems were already warmed up and functional. Hopefully, the 5th XF wouldn't react too badly to an unregistered ship suddenly disabling their FTL capabilities.

Smiling inwardly at Kotori's response, Mizuho then fell to silence, utter calm over her features. Placid as a lake sheltered fully from wind. There was no fear, no uncertainty, only a black or white scenario. Either that method she suggested would work (as Kotori at least seemed to think it might), and they would survive, or it would not, and they - along with many, many people - would die. Mizuho did hold hope that, for the sake of those people on Taiie... her idea proved fruitful.

She made a mental note to, if she survived this shitstorm she had woken up to, familiarize herself further with the massive advances in weaponry which the Star Army had seen since she had worked as a commander. Her ideas, clearly, remained sharp enough... but ideas would quickly prove futile if she didn't learn what these ideas needed to be applied to...

Involuntarily, her muscles tensed as the time slowly ticked away, each second feeling as hours...

"Hai, Taii-san." With all docking procedures complete, the Miharu somewhat-roughly glided backward for a painfully slow eight seconds, then turned and let the gravimetric engines fire fully to life. Yukari winced as she imagined the marks she left on the docking equipment.

The chatter coming from Akina no Iori was irritating, so she squelched it and took off. They were about 800,000 kilometers away, which meant she had to be a little quicker with the throttle than she preferred. Getting used to the Miharu's wing engines was difficult, but the ship still handled more gracefully than the Sakura did. She swung the ship below a passing group of Sojourner transports.

500,000 kilometers and closing. 17 seconds left. "Deploying interdiction field," she said calmly. The field came to life, though Yukari winced as she watched the battery life of the capacitors dip considerably. "Interdiction field's projected maximum range, 0.981 AU."

Suddenly, communications from all over the fleet rang out. Ships wanted to know the meaning of an interdiction field by a vessel they neither recognized nor could confirm as one of their own. "Miharu, squelch all channels and restore on my command."

200,000 kilometers. 10 seconds left. She narrowly dodged a now-stuck Yui 5 scout as she rounded over the planet's "top" toward Taiie no Iori, which maintained a parallel orbit with She increased speed just a tick.

The ship was pulled into a tight stopping curve, as if they were going to try the "drive-by shooting" attack pattern, before resting in front of Taiie no Iori. They were 50 kilometers directly before the floating graveyard.

"In position, Taii-san." Four seconds left. The interdiction field had nearly come fully online, its range having reached 0.9 AU.

The Yui 5, as well as several other 5th XF ships, were switching to whatever back-up engines they had and were angling themselves into position to fire at the Miharu. The Iori's mass protected them some, but a Arashi, labeled on Yukari's monitors as NE-X5-04 under the Command group, would have a firing solution soon.

"Environmental suits? I have the favor of Lady Luck herself. Skill, safety equipment, it's all insignificant when you have luck on your side!" Leutre took the suit from Masako and began slipping it over his uniform. "But the Lady can be fickle on occasion so I suppose it's a fair precaution."

Placing the helmet on top of the console, he turned back to the console as he spoke. "Now let's get down to brass tacks. We have to nail down that capacitor issue before it comes back to haunt us when the shooting begins." He turned back to Mara and Masako with a jolly smile on his face. "I'll give both of you ten minutes to find the source of the problem. If we don't have the problem nailed down by then, I'm confiscating both of your helmets. If we fail the Miharu it's only fair that we join her when she plunges into the abyss. Now both of you get to work."

Mara made a grimace - she wasn't even sure in ten minutes there would still be a ship to fix; Leutre's time estimate didn't match the situation, she felt. "Veressis-Hei, please shut down power on the port capacitors so we can work on them without having anything blowing up in our faces."

It was probably best, if they were going to plug and unplug connections. Aether-based power systems were anything but plug-and-play.

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Kotori cringed as the count went to zero.

Nothing.

Three seconds later, the Miharu still seemed whole. It hadn't been destroyed. However, Miyoko's instrumentation breeped in alarm. On one of the bigger holographic displays, they could see the emissions provoked by the 'giant battleship' wane in indication of it having expended the charge of its massive transposition cannon. However, something had still happened to Taiie's sun.

The Taii couldn't hold her silence anymore. "Report!"

Masako could only blink at Leutre as he began what seemed to be an attempt to act cool before smiling and shaking her head. "Veressis-Hei...nows not the time to make silly jokes," she replied as she placed her gunbelt, which she had taken off before hand, around her waist. "I'll go check on the starboard capacitor, hopefully there won't be any problems," she said as she picked up her helmet with a single hand and dashed off towards the starboard side.

Ducking into the Starboard Capacitor System Chamber, the young warrant officer examine the device via the monitoring console. This was all new to her, having capacitors onboard, but she knew enough about the technology to repair minor system malfunctions if necessary. Fortunately enough, the starboard capacitor seemed to have fared better than it's port side brethern. "Starboard capacitor is all green," she called back as she began to double checked all the other systems.

Kotori said:

The Taii couldn't hold her silence anymore. "Report!"

Click to expand...

Recovering from her brief elation at her momentarily averted demise, Miyoko quickly began pulling up new sensor feeds on the sun and weapon. I... this doesn't even make sense. The electromagnetic radiation is dropping off, but the core itself registers as denser than before... there should still be plenty of radiation, unless- unless it's too dense for the radiation to escape. That phrase set off alarm bells in her head- what was happening was clear enough if that were the case. When the sensor feed shortly thereafter reported that the star's volume was slowly- but surely- decreasing, it cinched the problem. They're making Taiie into a black hole... If most of the star becomes a singularity at once- and that's a pretty big 'if,' then things may be safe for the immediate term. If not...

"They're making a black hole. I don't have the time to run simulations to verify it, but chances are that it will have an effect similar to a small hypernova." She hurriedly pulled up a map of the system, finding the distance from Taiie IV to the star. "When it goes up, this part of the system has about fourteen minutes left before the shockwave and radiation hit. It is... not something that anything in the system will survive. By 'small,' I mean that it won't cause mass extinctions through this entire end of the galaxy." She barely avoided panicking- fourteen minutes, after all. Plenty of time for an FTL-capable vessel to escape. Harder, though, was repressing the urge to personally open up a communications channel and broadcast an evacuation order to the other vessels in the system.

And the implications of this... Either way I look at it, they're destroying an entire system as a military maneuver. Her brief research on the Mishhu had left little doubt that they were ruthless and brutal, but to actually see this.

"Right. Let's see. Power down, power down, power-- Ah, here it is." He tapped the appropriate button on the console and smiled as he heard the buzzing of the capacitor banks fade away. He then glanced over at Mara. "I think we can skip the tedious job of checking inter-capacitor cables, seeing as how a fault there would be giving us some power instead of none. It's safe to assume zero power means it's likely trouble the generator to capacitor connection. Where's the main power feed for the entire room?"

"On either end of the chamber," the sprite replied, "I think it gets power primarely from the main generator, but the rear end are tied in to the secondary generators in the wing sections."

Mara quickly made her way into the port chamber and then walked swiftly by the networked rows of large battery cells, resorting to plain eyesight to try and find the problem - she tugged occasionally on them to make sure they were solidly connected - but everything seemed fine there.

At the forward-end of the capacitor chamber, she found the problem. One of the two power connectors linking the second battery cell to the third had been replaced with a sort of monitoring device which was plugged on instead. It gutted the rest of the power feed to the rest of the thirty-or-so cells by half the normal charge, which was just barely enough for the ship's basic functions - leave alone FTL speed and combat capabilities. It was like forcing a human to sprint with only a single lung.

The sandy-haired sprite bent down and looked at the small screen on the device, which displayed the amount of power being fed through from one cell to another. It looked to her like it was a sort of power transformer which was simulating the resilience of a... 'EGS3-1D power transfer conduit'

Someone did comparative studies on yesterday's maintenance work? Mara wondered before yelling back to Leutre: "I think I found the problem! We'd probably need a new EGC3-1A cable..."

The cable type was one designed to feed power to the Aether Shock Array on a Sakura Gunship. She figured one of the workers might have wanted to make a comparison with the Miharu's power cabling seeing the Sakuras had been undergoing some refit work recently. Considering the ship had left on a whim to get its cargo from Akina no Iori instead of the secret Scorpio Base, the person running the scans had probably left it overnight to gather data and hadn't had the chance to replace it back to the standard cabling.

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The report had Kotori go cold, her eyes widening in horror.

She couldn't stop an exploding sun - really, no one could. They couldn't evacuate the settlers on Taiie with only fourteen minutes to spare.

Their enemy had doomed a star system. While the Miharu might have had prevented the death of all life on Taiie due to transposed solar mass, all it had amounted to were fourteen minutes filled with the promise of impending doom.

The MEGAMI's voice jolted her out of her shock. "Warning: NE-X5-04 has acquired a firing solution."

"Tch." Kotori stood up, glaring at the magnified visual the Miharu provided on the main volumetric window, which showed the Arashi-class escort looming 25 000-miles away starboard, defensive screens raised and its massive assortment of weaponry ready to be unleashed.

This was no contest: Miharu's shields were down and most of its weapons weren't even charged due to the problem in the capacitors and the expenditure of energy projecting out the interdiction field. With the ship immobile and reliant on sublight acceleration only, there was no chance, even with WARMS, of avoiding an AS-7 anti-starship aetheric torpedo.

Luckily the Miharu wasn't fired upon. What was happening to Taiie's sun was too obvious for the few KAMI computers in the ships present not to notice what was going on... and added to the confusion were appertures of ships defolding in the system just beyond the range of the Miharu's interdiction field.

The MEGAMI quickly labelled the forming battlegroup as what SAINT suspected was the configuration for the Command Groups in a Mishhuvurthyar Battle Fleet. Totalling 50 ships, there were 16 Destroyers, 14 Gunships, 6 Carriers, 1 Battleship, 12 small units of unknown configuration and one unmistakably larger vessel they were unfortunately getting better acquainted with.

One of Yukari's displays blinked to life: The Mishhuvurthyar 'flagship' was hailing the 5th Expeditionary Fleet.

Yukari froze. All of that life ... lives ...

But there was no time to think. The moment she saw the notice, she guided the communication equipment to monitor it specifically. She punched the communication to Kotori as well. "Taii, an SMX vessel is hailing the YSS Munin. Signal is up for you."

Tensing from ragdoll to tree-root, Mizuho found herself more disturbed at the prospect of the Mishhu vessel hailing than the idea that the sun was going to explode and destroy the entire goddamn system in roughly thirteen minutes. A large part of Mizuho hoped that Kotori would stay and die in the blaze of the hypernova, but she knew this would not be the case.

"...Kotori-san." She spoke mildly. "No matter the conditions or words of the Mishhu, do not let them distract you from the star." She blanched, slightly. Much as she wished for death, the billions on Taiie did not deserve it. "...and... if I may, I would suggest alerting Taiie to the predicament. Let them... let them have their last moments to speak to one another, to live. And perhaps some even can escape... there are vessels which could leave quickly enough..."

Her lips were quivering, she noted with distaste. She was showing through that bleeding heart that had nearly seen her raped by Nepleslians; the inability to accept civilian deaths...

"We can't warn them... but I'm sure they'll learn it from someone in the 5th XF," Kotori met Mizuho's eyes for a moment, looking grim, before turning back to look ahead. "Yukari, put it up the communication on the main screen - viewing only."

Shortly, the picture of a Mishhuvurthyar interpreter came to the large holowindow with a green organic-looking huge chamber in the background. The creature was relatively pretty by yamataian standards. Humanoid and slight like a neko, with smooth pink skin, wine-red eyes and a voluminous mane of wavy, crimson hair. The sheer, wispy robe she wore was not a statement of fashion so much as a concession to modesty.

Kotori scowled in recognition. That was the fleet commander from the fleet that had attacked Lor. The one that called herself Melisson.

"Greetings from the Sfrarabla, Yamataians! We are the Mishhuvurthyar and we come bearing many gifts to the troubled yamataian people." The interpret said with a gleefulness which was probably glaringly out of place to the people on the receiving end of the message.

There was hope for some; every city on Taiie was being visited by a swarm of shuttles and smaller starships from the First Fleet and First Expeditionary Fleet, which had gone on alert status just minutes earlier. Unfortunately, the 1st Expeditionary Fleet's territory was also under invasion; Taisho Yui, however, had given Taiie priority for the duration of the event, leaving behind only a few battleships and part of the Strategic Strike Pool to defend Gemini.

The holographic display in the Miharu split suddenly, showing the hybrid on the commander's right, where as the picture of a Neko wearing a Chujo pin standing in front of a seat.

"This is Matokai Rieko-Chujo, of the Command Group of the 5th Expeditionary Fleet. Unless you have the means with which to reverse the damage you have done to Taiie, I have nothing to say to you."

The Neko's icy-blue eyes were a little haunting against the curtain of straight black hair going behind her.

Nyton's eyes narrowed as he observed the familiar Mishhu interpreter. While Kotori's reaction had been rather strong he simply observed and tried to take notes of all that was around her from the transmission source. The new face of the 5th group's commander had come on to challenge Melisson but he wondered what possible argument she could throw out to stop the destruction.

"Miharu, give me an update from engineering. I want to know if our capacitor problem has been fixed yet and if not to update me on any developments." Nyton said as he tried to better gauge their capacity in this situation. He then began to try and scan the capacity of the SMX battleship and any signs of a battlegroup. If there were any similiarities to any of the ships that had been present at Lor he tried to compare it to those despite Miyoko's earlier report of no familiar comparisons. This must be the new ship. Perhaps the size of the ship is directly proportional to the amount of power needed to create something like this maneuver. he thought. A slight choke struck his throat and he forced himself to breath. This isn't a tactical maneuver. This is genocide.

At the same time he studied fleet movements and noticed the rescue efforts being made as he cut through the chatter and focused on anything that may have been connected to this event. Instinctively he brought up a small star map that showed their current location before he shrank it down to give him a more general overview. Perhaps there was something that could be learned from this event. Could their strike on Taiie have a desired affect elsewhere? There were signs that ships from the first fleet had been shifted to answer this crisis.

"Taii, there is currently a rescue effort going on planetside. Smaller ships from the first group are attempting a rescue effort. They cannot spare much more than this since they are currently dealing with an invasion. I doubt they will be able to evacuate everyone in time. I'm currently trying to analyze the SMX ship but I can only make guesses as to it's capabilities."

Kotori nodded to Nyton's words, though her attention was on the ongoing communication.

"Sorry, I can't reverse it..." Melisson shrugged lightly. "but I can worsen the situation!" The interpreter's wine-red eyes smirked malevolently as she made a sweeping gesture with one hand, signaling one of the crew, most likely.

The Mishhuvurthyar flagship's reverse-engineered and improved on Combined Field System unleashed its own interdiction field which swept through a large part of the Taiie star system, overlapping over the Miharu's field. However, the effects not only prevented the fold-based system to function, but also seriously debilitated the FTL capabilities of the Star Army own CFS systems, limiting them to only sublight speed unless some of the recently refitted models invested a hefty portion of their power output into countering the effect with their own interdiction fields.

Most of the ships in the Fifth Expeditionary Fleet were older models. The majority of the newer ships Taisho Katsuko had requested had been lost in Talori, sent to Kilnar or stationed at Valaad or the Katsuko nebula.

Melisson had caught the 5th XF and their rescuers their pants down and that shockwave was still coming.

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When the interdiction field reached the Miharu's position, Leutre was witness to a seeing his first sparking console. Well, the first that sparked into a small explosion and knocked him down on the gridded floor about two meters away.

Thankfully, that preliminary bursting console saved him from being close to the main CFS unit, which had power surges run over it before some breaker panels blew themselves open one after another, offering even more pyrotechnics.

He didn't need a computer to tell him the Combined Field System had just been fucked by whatever happened out there.

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On the Miharu's bridge, digital panels flickered. The holowindows filled with static. Lighting failed altogether.

Melisson's voice still came from the speakers. "Conveniently, a great many fellow ships came to your succor, only to fall into my web." The interpreter was obviously gloating. "So now, I offer my gift: positrons. In numerous, unhealthy quantities. I've destroyed your world and now I will kill you all."

The communication channel died with disconcerting finality. A moment later, Miharu managed to restore function to the bridge; the consoles and lighting flickered back on.

Kotori quickly turned to look at the status condition display behind her. "Shimatta!" The Miharu's combined field was down for an indefinite amount of time. That meant no shields.

And the Mishhuvurthyar took that as their cue to advance and engage the Star Army ships guarding Taiie.