Well, I couldn't help but love reading the last thing I saw...
So I thought I'd give it a try myself. Hope you don't hate me if it doesn't all line up, but I'm only in Gemini.
Therefore, I don't yet have 100% of the storyline.
Some of this might overlap with other things.
I tried to make this as generally clever as I could, but if you just look at the size of this thing, then I think you can understand why revision isn't quite on my to-do list. XD
Set aside a good ten minutes, and have a party! Hope you folks like it! xD
...it'll probably suck. xD I'll let you decide though.
The mood was a panicked one, as men in grey uniforms, half of them admirals from the looks of it, scrambled left and right as their attention turned from monitor to monitor in the flagships control area. The thud of their combat boots upon the metallic tiling could be heard for fifty meters down any of the nearby corridors, and occasionally, one of the admirals could be seen to stare at the approaching mantis fleet with a gobsmacked expression upon his otherwise stern and hardened face.
"Just how the F-*TcHHHH* are we supposed to beat that?" The thing about these admirals... they swore like they'd never known better before the wars... but perhaps they'd just endured too much pain and sorrow to care about appearances of character anymore.
Some ways off to the side, away from the panels and the immense transparent Draconis-grade window of the command deck, an engineer could be heard talking about how the static emitter for the comm channel might have been a bad idea.
"I mean, they can't keep it toned down, so all we ever hear is static on the channel anyway!"
"I'll drink to that."
"There ain't gonna be no drinking before this assault is over, and that ain't a good thing for our pilots!"
"Like we're really going to make it anyway."
The first engineer seemed very taken aback by that statement.
"Do you ever listen to yourself talk, or do you just let whatever muck you think up flow from your throat?"
The other man simply laughed before responding, "the second one." And suddenly, they were both laughing...
But it wasn't a happy laugh, and Admiral Hornblower could tell the difference. These men were trying to have hope when there almost wasn't enough to stop him from drinking the fridge dry.
One man barked an order to another, who promptly barked an order back. This often turned into a barking fest between admirals, and static filled the line once again, overpowering the Engineers' loud groans of disapproval in it's volume.
Prosperous had fallen so fast... The mantis had never even dropped a bomb... and everything was destroyed... his reputation lay in ruin before him for that terrible, terrible miscalculation...
He hadn't factored in that the mantis had a new toy to play with... a terrible, tiny little devil of a toy.
Mechanical devils... armed robotic units that could fight in a more than incredible fashion, outperforming even the admiral's best tactics...
How... His flagship... His beautiful flagship, The Guardian Star... The radiation shield...
How had it all gone so wrong...
Let's start from the Top then, Shall we? And thus, better know how this horror came to happen to our good friend, and admiral... the man who was forced to become more clever than people thought he was, and expected him to be.
*Two weeks earlier*
A heated battle rages, the Gemini Defense Force was fighting with all it had, and were barely holding their ground. It was just something about those ships, and the fact that right now, they weren't being manufactured on the fly...
The Gemini Components Fusion Storms, the real ones, had armor rivaling that of a standard Sol ship...
But as time went on, he could see the cutbacks happening. The armor was getting weaker, and the resistant super-coatings that had once existed as a glorious polished sheen upon the ships was a rare sight now.
Hornblower sighed deeply, remembering the way that the mantis antimatter weaponry had simply bounced off of his own during an ambush on the testing location, and smiled... remembering the good old days...
He stood now upon that polished floor, but a different polished floor. This one was devoid of the dust and grime, a byproduct of having a large amount of seasoned admirals in close quarters, and there wasn't a single man on his ship that wasn't stone cold sober 100% of the time. Beyond his terminal, upon which there lay a precariously balanced mug of black coffee (a VERY rare commodity since the initial invasion of earth), one could see outside of the ship, and get a feel for it's absolutely ridiculous proportions.
The ship stood fast at almost a mile long... and this was viewable through a tri-layered multi-surfaced window, a gift from the Princess of the Sol system herself. Were it ever damaged, the transparent nanotech marvel could close up the area that had taken the hit, thus protecting he and his crew from the dark, but intensely hot Gemini Space-stream.
That being said... not even a sonic blaster had ever put a dent in his marvelous flagship. Nothing had ever even scratched the paint, save for his own failures when it came to parking the enormous metal maverick.
He took a gentle sip of his coffee, before setting it once more upon the control terminal, albeit in a somewhat less precarious place than the last time, before the Comm Channel crackled to life.
"mmn. About time."
And with that passing thought he brought the comm up on the holoscreen... another rare commodity, though you wouldn't think it'd be in this incredible era.
"Ahh! Just the man I wanted to see. General Jalqan, it's an honor."
"Well, he-he! It better be, I'm not around often enough for it to be anything but rare!"
Hornblower couldn't help but hide a grin. Jalqan hadn't changed a bit... he still spoke as if he had some sort of ego problem, whilst his gruff yet wispy, aged sergeant voice just barely exposed his jest to those who would listen.
"Well Jalqan, we'll just have to hope it doesn't get any rarer in the near future now shant we?"
And with that, the two of them burst out laughing. Jalqan was the forbidden third squadmate who'd been with Hornblower when the Mantis Death Squads had attacked all those years ago. So many thought he was dead, but what they didn't know was that had it not been for Jalqan, things may have ended very differently that day.
He'd thrown back all of his unit's energy into creating a single titanic Aggrobomb explosion that tossed their ships clean out of orbit! Hornblower still remembered gaping after he woke up, and seeing stars... the backdrop of outer space!
For three years after that, he'd believed him to be dead... but following a tip from a Mizar jailbug, Hornblower had tracked him down.
They say he pulled Jalqan out of that bar on commerce Central by the scruff, and set him straight after all of the mushy "I thought you were dead!" stuff had finished spilling out. Though some of his crew had been there, it wasn't something the often talked about.
Jalqan now led an army of super STAM-R Storms from the Sol System. They were the new prototype ship fresh off the rack these days, and were known to be far more reliable than the latest prototype, dubbed "Parsec" by the engineers, after the distance that the closest retrieved piece was recovered from after an incredible malfuntion.
See, the parsec had too many problems at present to even be considered flyable at all, despite the efforts of the best engineers in the cosmos. Engine explosions, ion reversals in the ionicatalytic capacitation chambers (really unpleasant way to die by the way), the works... it had exploded so violently, in fact, that they never did manage to find all of the parts!
"So Scruffy," That was Hornblower's nickname... something only Jalqan could call him, because of the way he once wore his facial hair. "I'm curious, did you ever get about to fixing that old Mizar ship of mine?"
"HAHaha, same old Jalqan... tell ya what, if you can find me the parts-"
"HELL naw. HAHAHA- hm? ...yes, what is it?"
Hornblower raised an eyebrow, his curiosity hooked.
And that's when everything got more serious. Jalqan's face contorted, exposing a small level of shock.
The admiral's brow furrowed. Jalqan was cool enough to gladly make a gas joke before getting killed. But when his face contorted... it usually meant-
"Hey Hornblower, get this. Quick. We've been *TCchhhhhhh*-ing around for too long here."
"My, my... who's it in trouble this time?"
"Well, what planet are we orbiting?"
"Prosperous. Why?"
"Then we're the ones in trouble admiral."
Hornblower was immediately at his post again. "ALL HANDS, Get to your stations! 20 Seconds!"
A quick marching and a "shtchh" sound 5 seconds later revealed that already his crew had somehow managed to reach their locations, and for a moment he sat stunned, wondering how exactly they had managed to get there so fast.
"Well... jeez, that was fast. New record I believe, under five seconds computer?"
A robotic feminoid voice blared over the comm channel. "That is incorrect commander. Five point oh-oh-oh-oh-two-six-eight-seven-fi-"
"Thank you Cehidra."
"Hornblower," It was Jalqan, getting impatient.
"Right. Scans boys and girls! Make it happen-"
"But it's already up... we've been keeping an eye on it this whole ti-"
Jalqan interrupted. "Scan again, because they're SCREWING with the-! INCOMING, PREPARE FOR-"
There was a massive thud that shook the entire ship, and the power went out.
The coffee flew halfway across the room, landing with a pitiful *crash* as the admiral stumbled to his feet.
His beverage was now the last thing on his mind.
"Engineer team, what's going on."
The engineer, who sat at a high terminal to the far upper right of the massive cockpit was shaking his head. "Sir! It's our energy! Those-...they somehow leeched our-!"
He was interrupted by the sound of the Stam-R storms as they surged past the bridge in a titanic battle formation.
There were thousands of them! How had the Sol branch managed to find that much Cryonite!?
The sheer magnatude... so much-
"was that a Terrorizor class ship?! NICE!"
You didn't have to look back to hear the heads turn to stare at the source of the voice, who quickly grew very silent. "just trying to help the mood... jeez."
"By Mars... what have you been doing in the underworld Jalqan... oh, my...god..."
"Admiral Hornblower, we await your instructions."
"hm..."
There was a quiet chatter beginning to spread across the room... that meant his men weren't sure what to make of the EMP either... heck, if the engineers were stumped...
Well, maybe a cyber-eye gigacomputer interface wouldn't be toned away by human error.
As such, he did what he always did. He had the cybernetic Eye interface with the ship, and as the data flared into view, he quickly had his answer.
"It's some sort of dispersed Stun-Charge... but it's not a stun dome..."
The Antimatter weaponry that flew left and right beyond the bridge was casting an eerie light into the now darkened room, lit by only a few screens that had somehow escaped the power outage.
"Why... it's almost as if..."
The cyber eye brought the power online, and the first thing that Hornblower did, was have it bring up a cam feed without having to utter a word... but what he saw was the exact opposite of what he'd expected, so much so that the entire crew gasped as he did a double-take.
Some kind of robotic mantis unit was boring into the ship, and emitting a perpetual stun-wave after securing itself in the armor! The impenetrable armor!
There were thousands of them... but that meant...
"JALQAN! CAN YOU HEAR THIS, they're using some kind of droid! It's-"
There was significantly less mantis laser fire, but there was also something that seemed to be drifting away from the battlefield...
And just where they had flown so fiercly but a moment before... now a powerless STAM-R storm, the most powerful ship there was as far as damage were concerned in the cosmos, blew past the cockpit with it's nose down, it's lights off, as it traveled in an arc on it's side...
He could see the horrified face of it's pilot. It wasn't Jalqan though... but what did it matter!?
Prosperous's own gravitational field was pulling it in! The mantis objective was never to destroy the shield directly! They couldn't! Why hadn't he realized it before?
There was a panicked mumble that turned into a shout as the once proud Sol ship fell upon the radiation shield... but that was nothing...
The true moment of horror, was as it crashed through one of the great glass lenses, and began to burn up as it plummeted down... down... down...
And as it dropped... Admiral Hornblower could see the green part of the planet that had been once protected... he could see it burn away, as a grey cloud slowly emanated from the hole in the shield...
for it was only dust that remained... as the rest were burned away by the blaze.
"EVERYONE, I want the sniper blasters active, and I want most of the power going there! The targets are the droids on those Stammers! Turret division, get the upper deck! I don't care how many shot's it takes but get those leeches off of my ship!"
He quietly gave the command to the prosperian E-cannon operators on the ground to fire up some additional energy. Orbs were a thing of the past... this was raw energy, fired straight upon the recieving ship... and it was as powerful and potent as energy ever got, with a rate of 3000 energy per half second, to go towards the Guardian Star's immense Cap of 239,350,250 energy.
But the technology was developed on this planet, and only existed on this planet so far.
<All the more reason to hold our ground...> Thought he.
"AYE!" The Engineers.
"MOVE IT, MOVE IT MOVE IT! OUTTA MY WAY!" The Stun Cannon operators.
"LET'S ROLL PEOPLE, YOU WANNA KEEP WHAT YEH'VE GOT? THEN GET TO YER STATION!"
The heavy gunners were always a little gruesome with their wording, but they made him chuckle with how brash they could be... and they made him smile with their bravery.
"Get in touch, get it warmed, get em gone, simple enough!" The sniper cannon operators.
And within moments, only Hornblower and a couple of his most elite men remained in that room, terminals blazing with commands, information grinding across the screen, as bits and pieces of an unknown droid joined the falling Stam-R storms... and lasers flew out across the noses of these ships in a desperate attempt to remove as many of those terrifying maniacal Mantis Droids as possible.
And the admiral?
He made one final call before returning the the battlestation, and launching his Mizar and mixed Sol Squadrons into the creepy battle zone with an unknown kind of threat.
"This is Admiral Hornblower to all star systems, all pilots, and anyone that wants to keep their life. If you be civilian, then get off of Prosperous as fast as you can, run for your life, and don't try to be a hero right now. If ye be with the GDF, then if you trust that your ship is one of the chosen few that was well produced, we demand your presence in the prosperous orbit immediately. If ye be in another system, and if ye be a warrior, this is an urgent call, because one flagship, no matter how massive, is not enough to hold the planet anymore. They have come."
***
Location: Somewhere on Teresa, in a minors resort hotel.
"Ay..." There was a kick. That one was annoying, but he'd keep feigning sleep.
"Ay... you, get up, maggot." So someone was after his life again. How pleasant.
"Dakl, screw it, let's just gut him with th-"
He responded now. "What the heck do you want."
"Hehehe, oh, so now he talks. Fraid for your life? W-"
"No. not really."
The man trying to wake him up were what his kind called pirates.
Probably in with that last big criminal circle.
He spoke, yawning as he did.
"yaou... ah, aahwoke meah ahp... ah.. you woke me up just to threaten my life...?"
He said it for a reason. He was just playing dumb.
He was listening, trying to figure out how many henchmen this pest had brought with him.
His comment served it's effect, and "Ooooh's" and "aaaaaaahhhhh-haha-hehehehehs" filled the relatively large room.
He sat up, and the mirror revealed a face, with sharp, accentuated features hidden behind a matted parlay of dark brown hair that fell upon his head such as a pale faced whisper reaches it's intended ear...
This man was not a strong man as far as his physique was concerned. his arms fell short of being average in build, though by a slight margin... and the blue jean's (even eon's later, gasp, they're STILL in style? Who would've thought?) fell relatively slim, but not nearly enough so to be considered form fitting by any stretch of the imagination. The last piece of attire he wore, as he rose from what remained of his sheets, was revealed to be a T-shirt, with brilliant fluorescent and X made of two segments of some uknown fabric-like gem-style material.
And he'd been sleeping like that. No pajama's... another thing, that remained, like his jeans, rather common eons later. As he rose, he looked like someone fresh from the Teresian slums, and being that they were not very big, it is a considerable insult to anyone to be identified with such, for unlike the folks of old, these were the people who had become so lost in the paradise-like parts of the planet, that they never did anything else.
"Jeez... you'd think I could finally, someday, catch a good nights sleep without being threatened at..."
The man, in his early 20's, peered upon his watch... it was set to earth time.
"What's 1:30 am earth time translate to here?"
The men looked at him as if he'd just tried to kill them.
"You think we're playing with you, huh? Is that it there?"
"Yeah. It's like that. Am I mistaken?"
The man drew a blade, made of deluvian steel. These blades were lightweight, but it was said that they were tougher than any weapon in existence... for deluvian steel, was not steel at all... it was stronger.
"Well then, let's make good on our claim!"
As the men advanced, the man who sat up in bed heard his earpiece buzz as it caught a frequency. "Localie: Gemini System. Forwarding now:"
"If ye....thhhhhhhxHHHHHHHHHHHX... in the prosperous orbit immediately. If ye be in another system, and if ye... TChhhhhhhhHH..."
"Ay, cut the static." The man suddenly caught himself, he hadn't meant to say that out loud.
"Hey, he's got a comm!"
The comm continued to play to his ear, and his alone.
"...is an urgent call, because one flagship, no matter how massive, is not enough to hold the planet anymore. They have-"
It is not quite known what happened next in room 3694.8x. What is known, is that an Anln Heavy Transport outfitted with absolutely nothing as per eyewitness reports, erupted quite abruptly from the room, straight through the wall, and hyperwarped to the Anteres stargate from a proximity that was dangerously close to the hotel. The entire structure was severely compromised.
The time of the first sightings of this ship were at approximately 1:10 PM, Teresian Time...
or rather, 1:31 AM, Earth time...
So I thought I'd give it a try myself. Hope you don't hate me if it doesn't all line up, but I'm only in Gemini.
Therefore, I don't yet have 100% of the storyline.
Some of this might overlap with other things.I tried to make this as generally clever as I could, but if you just look at the size of this thing, then I think you can understand why revision isn't quite on my to-do list. XD
Set aside a good ten minutes, and have a party! Hope you folks like it! xD
...it'll probably suck. xD I'll let you decide though.
The mood was a panicked one, as men in grey uniforms, half of them admirals from the looks of it, scrambled left and right as their attention turned from monitor to monitor in the flagships control area. The thud of their combat boots upon the metallic tiling could be heard for fifty meters down any of the nearby corridors, and occasionally, one of the admirals could be seen to stare at the approaching mantis fleet with a gobsmacked expression upon his otherwise stern and hardened face.
"Just how the F-*TcHHHH* are we supposed to beat that?" The thing about these admirals... they swore like they'd never known better before the wars... but perhaps they'd just endured too much pain and sorrow to care about appearances of character anymore.
Some ways off to the side, away from the panels and the immense transparent Draconis-grade window of the command deck, an engineer could be heard talking about how the static emitter for the comm channel might have been a bad idea.
"I mean, they can't keep it toned down, so all we ever hear is static on the channel anyway!"
"I'll drink to that."
"There ain't gonna be no drinking before this assault is over, and that ain't a good thing for our pilots!"
"Like we're really going to make it anyway."
The first engineer seemed very taken aback by that statement.
"Do you ever listen to yourself talk, or do you just let whatever muck you think up flow from your throat?"
The other man simply laughed before responding, "the second one." And suddenly, they were both laughing...
But it wasn't a happy laugh, and Admiral Hornblower could tell the difference. These men were trying to have hope when there almost wasn't enough to stop him from drinking the fridge dry.
One man barked an order to another, who promptly barked an order back. This often turned into a barking fest between admirals, and static filled the line once again, overpowering the Engineers' loud groans of disapproval in it's volume.
Prosperous had fallen so fast... The mantis had never even dropped a bomb... and everything was destroyed... his reputation lay in ruin before him for that terrible, terrible miscalculation...
He hadn't factored in that the mantis had a new toy to play with... a terrible, tiny little devil of a toy.
Mechanical devils... armed robotic units that could fight in a more than incredible fashion, outperforming even the admiral's best tactics...
How... His flagship... His beautiful flagship, The Guardian Star... The radiation shield...
How had it all gone so wrong...
Let's start from the Top then, Shall we? And thus, better know how this horror came to happen to our good friend, and admiral... the man who was forced to become more clever than people thought he was, and expected him to be.
*Two weeks earlier*
A heated battle rages, the Gemini Defense Force was fighting with all it had, and were barely holding their ground. It was just something about those ships, and the fact that right now, they weren't being manufactured on the fly...
The Gemini Components Fusion Storms, the real ones, had armor rivaling that of a standard Sol ship...
But as time went on, he could see the cutbacks happening. The armor was getting weaker, and the resistant super-coatings that had once existed as a glorious polished sheen upon the ships was a rare sight now.
Hornblower sighed deeply, remembering the way that the mantis antimatter weaponry had simply bounced off of his own during an ambush on the testing location, and smiled... remembering the good old days...
He stood now upon that polished floor, but a different polished floor. This one was devoid of the dust and grime, a byproduct of having a large amount of seasoned admirals in close quarters, and there wasn't a single man on his ship that wasn't stone cold sober 100% of the time. Beyond his terminal, upon which there lay a precariously balanced mug of black coffee (a VERY rare commodity since the initial invasion of earth), one could see outside of the ship, and get a feel for it's absolutely ridiculous proportions.
The ship stood fast at almost a mile long... and this was viewable through a tri-layered multi-surfaced window, a gift from the Princess of the Sol system herself. Were it ever damaged, the transparent nanotech marvel could close up the area that had taken the hit, thus protecting he and his crew from the dark, but intensely hot Gemini Space-stream.
That being said... not even a sonic blaster had ever put a dent in his marvelous flagship. Nothing had ever even scratched the paint, save for his own failures when it came to parking the enormous metal maverick.
He took a gentle sip of his coffee, before setting it once more upon the control terminal, albeit in a somewhat less precarious place than the last time, before the Comm Channel crackled to life.
"mmn. About time."
And with that passing thought he brought the comm up on the holoscreen... another rare commodity, though you wouldn't think it'd be in this incredible era.
"Ahh! Just the man I wanted to see. General Jalqan, it's an honor."
"Well, he-he! It better be, I'm not around often enough for it to be anything but rare!"
Hornblower couldn't help but hide a grin. Jalqan hadn't changed a bit... he still spoke as if he had some sort of ego problem, whilst his gruff yet wispy, aged sergeant voice just barely exposed his jest to those who would listen.
"Well Jalqan, we'll just have to hope it doesn't get any rarer in the near future now shant we?"
And with that, the two of them burst out laughing. Jalqan was the forbidden third squadmate who'd been with Hornblower when the Mantis Death Squads had attacked all those years ago. So many thought he was dead, but what they didn't know was that had it not been for Jalqan, things may have ended very differently that day.
He'd thrown back all of his unit's energy into creating a single titanic Aggrobomb explosion that tossed their ships clean out of orbit! Hornblower still remembered gaping after he woke up, and seeing stars... the backdrop of outer space!
For three years after that, he'd believed him to be dead... but following a tip from a Mizar jailbug, Hornblower had tracked him down.
They say he pulled Jalqan out of that bar on commerce Central by the scruff, and set him straight after all of the mushy "I thought you were dead!" stuff had finished spilling out. Though some of his crew had been there, it wasn't something the often talked about.
Jalqan now led an army of super STAM-R Storms from the Sol System. They were the new prototype ship fresh off the rack these days, and were known to be far more reliable than the latest prototype, dubbed "Parsec" by the engineers, after the distance that the closest retrieved piece was recovered from after an incredible malfuntion.
See, the parsec had too many problems at present to even be considered flyable at all, despite the efforts of the best engineers in the cosmos. Engine explosions, ion reversals in the ionicatalytic capacitation chambers (really unpleasant way to die by the way), the works... it had exploded so violently, in fact, that they never did manage to find all of the parts!
"So Scruffy," That was Hornblower's nickname... something only Jalqan could call him, because of the way he once wore his facial hair. "I'm curious, did you ever get about to fixing that old Mizar ship of mine?"
"HAHaha, same old Jalqan... tell ya what, if you can find me the parts-"
"HELL naw. HAHAHA- hm? ...yes, what is it?"
Hornblower raised an eyebrow, his curiosity hooked.
And that's when everything got more serious. Jalqan's face contorted, exposing a small level of shock.
The admiral's brow furrowed. Jalqan was cool enough to gladly make a gas joke before getting killed. But when his face contorted... it usually meant-
"Hey Hornblower, get this. Quick. We've been *TCchhhhhhh*-ing around for too long here."
"My, my... who's it in trouble this time?"
"Well, what planet are we orbiting?"
"Prosperous. Why?"
"Then we're the ones in trouble admiral."
Hornblower was immediately at his post again. "ALL HANDS, Get to your stations! 20 Seconds!"
A quick marching and a "shtchh" sound 5 seconds later revealed that already his crew had somehow managed to reach their locations, and for a moment he sat stunned, wondering how exactly they had managed to get there so fast.
"Well... jeez, that was fast. New record I believe, under five seconds computer?"
A robotic feminoid voice blared over the comm channel. "That is incorrect commander. Five point oh-oh-oh-oh-two-six-eight-seven-fi-"
"Thank you Cehidra."
"Hornblower," It was Jalqan, getting impatient.
"Right. Scans boys and girls! Make it happen-"
"But it's already up... we've been keeping an eye on it this whole ti-"
Jalqan interrupted. "Scan again, because they're SCREWING with the-! INCOMING, PREPARE FOR-"
There was a massive thud that shook the entire ship, and the power went out.
The coffee flew halfway across the room, landing with a pitiful *crash* as the admiral stumbled to his feet.
His beverage was now the last thing on his mind.
"Engineer team, what's going on."
The engineer, who sat at a high terminal to the far upper right of the massive cockpit was shaking his head. "Sir! It's our energy! Those-...they somehow leeched our-!"
He was interrupted by the sound of the Stam-R storms as they surged past the bridge in a titanic battle formation.
There were thousands of them! How had the Sol branch managed to find that much Cryonite!?
The sheer magnatude... so much-
"was that a Terrorizor class ship?! NICE!"
You didn't have to look back to hear the heads turn to stare at the source of the voice, who quickly grew very silent. "just trying to help the mood... jeez."
"By Mars... what have you been doing in the underworld Jalqan... oh, my...god..."
"Admiral Hornblower, we await your instructions."
"hm..."
There was a quiet chatter beginning to spread across the room... that meant his men weren't sure what to make of the EMP either... heck, if the engineers were stumped...
Well, maybe a cyber-eye gigacomputer interface wouldn't be toned away by human error.
As such, he did what he always did. He had the cybernetic Eye interface with the ship, and as the data flared into view, he quickly had his answer.
"It's some sort of dispersed Stun-Charge... but it's not a stun dome..."
The Antimatter weaponry that flew left and right beyond the bridge was casting an eerie light into the now darkened room, lit by only a few screens that had somehow escaped the power outage.
"Why... it's almost as if..."
The cyber eye brought the power online, and the first thing that Hornblower did, was have it bring up a cam feed without having to utter a word... but what he saw was the exact opposite of what he'd expected, so much so that the entire crew gasped as he did a double-take.
Some kind of robotic mantis unit was boring into the ship, and emitting a perpetual stun-wave after securing itself in the armor! The impenetrable armor!
There were thousands of them... but that meant...
"JALQAN! CAN YOU HEAR THIS, they're using some kind of droid! It's-"
There was significantly less mantis laser fire, but there was also something that seemed to be drifting away from the battlefield...
And just where they had flown so fiercly but a moment before... now a powerless STAM-R storm, the most powerful ship there was as far as damage were concerned in the cosmos, blew past the cockpit with it's nose down, it's lights off, as it traveled in an arc on it's side...
He could see the horrified face of it's pilot. It wasn't Jalqan though... but what did it matter!?
Prosperous's own gravitational field was pulling it in! The mantis objective was never to destroy the shield directly! They couldn't! Why hadn't he realized it before?
There was a panicked mumble that turned into a shout as the once proud Sol ship fell upon the radiation shield... but that was nothing...
The true moment of horror, was as it crashed through one of the great glass lenses, and began to burn up as it plummeted down... down... down...
And as it dropped... Admiral Hornblower could see the green part of the planet that had been once protected... he could see it burn away, as a grey cloud slowly emanated from the hole in the shield...
for it was only dust that remained... as the rest were burned away by the blaze.
"EVERYONE, I want the sniper blasters active, and I want most of the power going there! The targets are the droids on those Stammers! Turret division, get the upper deck! I don't care how many shot's it takes but get those leeches off of my ship!"
He quietly gave the command to the prosperian E-cannon operators on the ground to fire up some additional energy. Orbs were a thing of the past... this was raw energy, fired straight upon the recieving ship... and it was as powerful and potent as energy ever got, with a rate of 3000 energy per half second, to go towards the Guardian Star's immense Cap of 239,350,250 energy.
But the technology was developed on this planet, and only existed on this planet so far.
<All the more reason to hold our ground...> Thought he.
"AYE!" The Engineers.
"MOVE IT, MOVE IT MOVE IT! OUTTA MY WAY!" The Stun Cannon operators.
"LET'S ROLL PEOPLE, YOU WANNA KEEP WHAT YEH'VE GOT? THEN GET TO YER STATION!"
The heavy gunners were always a little gruesome with their wording, but they made him chuckle with how brash they could be... and they made him smile with their bravery.
"Get in touch, get it warmed, get em gone, simple enough!" The sniper cannon operators.
And within moments, only Hornblower and a couple of his most elite men remained in that room, terminals blazing with commands, information grinding across the screen, as bits and pieces of an unknown droid joined the falling Stam-R storms... and lasers flew out across the noses of these ships in a desperate attempt to remove as many of those terrifying maniacal Mantis Droids as possible.
And the admiral?
He made one final call before returning the the battlestation, and launching his Mizar and mixed Sol Squadrons into the creepy battle zone with an unknown kind of threat.
"This is Admiral Hornblower to all star systems, all pilots, and anyone that wants to keep their life. If you be civilian, then get off of Prosperous as fast as you can, run for your life, and don't try to be a hero right now. If ye be with the GDF, then if you trust that your ship is one of the chosen few that was well produced, we demand your presence in the prosperous orbit immediately. If ye be in another system, and if ye be a warrior, this is an urgent call, because one flagship, no matter how massive, is not enough to hold the planet anymore. They have come."
***
Location: Somewhere on Teresa, in a minors resort hotel.
"Ay..." There was a kick. That one was annoying, but he'd keep feigning sleep.
"Ay... you, get up, maggot." So someone was after his life again. How pleasant.
"Dakl, screw it, let's just gut him with th-"
He responded now. "What the heck do you want."
"Hehehe, oh, so now he talks. Fraid for your life? W-"
"No. not really."
The man trying to wake him up were what his kind called pirates.
Probably in with that last big criminal circle.
He spoke, yawning as he did.
"yaou... ah, aahwoke meah ahp... ah.. you woke me up just to threaten my life...?"
He said it for a reason. He was just playing dumb.
He was listening, trying to figure out how many henchmen this pest had brought with him.
His comment served it's effect, and "Ooooh's" and "aaaaaaahhhhh-haha-hehehehehs" filled the relatively large room.
He sat up, and the mirror revealed a face, with sharp, accentuated features hidden behind a matted parlay of dark brown hair that fell upon his head such as a pale faced whisper reaches it's intended ear...
This man was not a strong man as far as his physique was concerned. his arms fell short of being average in build, though by a slight margin... and the blue jean's (even eon's later, gasp, they're STILL in style? Who would've thought?) fell relatively slim, but not nearly enough so to be considered form fitting by any stretch of the imagination. The last piece of attire he wore, as he rose from what remained of his sheets, was revealed to be a T-shirt, with brilliant fluorescent and X made of two segments of some uknown fabric-like gem-style material.
And he'd been sleeping like that. No pajama's... another thing, that remained, like his jeans, rather common eons later. As he rose, he looked like someone fresh from the Teresian slums, and being that they were not very big, it is a considerable insult to anyone to be identified with such, for unlike the folks of old, these were the people who had become so lost in the paradise-like parts of the planet, that they never did anything else.
"Jeez... you'd think I could finally, someday, catch a good nights sleep without being threatened at..."
The man, in his early 20's, peered upon his watch... it was set to earth time.
"What's 1:30 am earth time translate to here?"
The men looked at him as if he'd just tried to kill them.
"You think we're playing with you, huh? Is that it there?"
"Yeah. It's like that. Am I mistaken?"
The man drew a blade, made of deluvian steel. These blades were lightweight, but it was said that they were tougher than any weapon in existence... for deluvian steel, was not steel at all... it was stronger.
"Well then, let's make good on our claim!"
As the men advanced, the man who sat up in bed heard his earpiece buzz as it caught a frequency. "Localie: Gemini System. Forwarding now:"
"If ye....thhhhhhhxHHHHHHHHHHHX... in the prosperous orbit immediately. If ye be in another system, and if ye... TChhhhhhhhHH..."
"Ay, cut the static." The man suddenly caught himself, he hadn't meant to say that out loud.
"Hey, he's got a comm!"
The comm continued to play to his ear, and his alone.
"...is an urgent call, because one flagship, no matter how massive, is not enough to hold the planet anymore. They have-"
It is not quite known what happened next in room 3694.8x. What is known, is that an Anln Heavy Transport outfitted with absolutely nothing as per eyewitness reports, erupted quite abruptly from the room, straight through the wall, and hyperwarped to the Anteres stargate from a proximity that was dangerously close to the hotel. The entire structure was severely compromised.
The time of the first sightings of this ship were at approximately 1:10 PM, Teresian Time...
or rather, 1:31 AM, Earth time...