Between The Darkness And The Light

Well, the Shadows actually start to flee. They didn't have any actual ground forces. Just ships in the atmosphere firing on ground targets. Once the Rheans joined in, the Shadows did the figurative double take and ran like hell. They withdrew from battle. So much for the neat idea the Burninites may have had.

The White Stars do not follow them. Instead, they stay around Sikarra for now.

At least they've learned two things. The three superpowers combined scare them, though that could be because the Rutians have gained some new technology that's similar to their own. They're affected by telepaths.

Oh come on, you know exactly what the Burninites wanted the Shadow Ships to do! It was a clear two step plan. Place proximity mines, make ships unwittingly go to proximity mines.

The Burninites collect their proximity mines. They'll try the tactic again next time.

"Think you have enough data to come up with a workable jamming code?" Teresa asks the scientist.

"I definitely don't. Thorgood might be able to come up with the right frequency, but I definitely can't."

"Fine," she says. "So my plan was best." The scientist rolls his eyes.

Teresa on intership: "Looks like you didn't really need our help. You're the ones with the weird ships and telepaths. All our plans failed."

Arren cuts in on the communication. "I'm not so sure about that, Teresa. They might have been cautious at first, but they managed to tear one of the White Stars apart. They could have overrun us. I think it was the fact that the Rheans showed up that made them run. They were fine with testing out our defenses at first. As to the telepaths, I'm not sure how that's going to work. There was only one on board that ship, and since she's dead now, we can't exactly question her on how that works."

The majority of the White Stars clear out, leaving two at Sikarra. The others may be going to Arianasol, Swarming Cute Kittens, and Elianam. The Shadows have yet to attack the main planetary systems yet.

There's no reply from Teresa. Nothing to say really.

The Burninite fleet mostly vanishes, with the exception of Teresa's ship, which is still analyzing energy signatures in an attempt to help come up with a way to disable the Shadow ships.

With the job done, the Imperial fleet returns to Rhea.

The energy signatures are so advanced it's going to take a while to analyze them. However, with time it may be possible to follow them. Whatever travel they're using, it's not the interdimensional travel the Burninites use. Even though they seem to shimmer in, it's just different enough from the Rutian's popping in to show they're not folding space. There's some other way of travel that they're using. The Vorlons haven't been so forthcoming with that information. They also haven't been overly helpful with the location of the Shadow's base of operations, but one could guess fairly well where it might be, based on the first encounter.

Arren contacts Teresa again. "We've been trying to figure out a way to track them. The one we managed to get a homing device on somehow shook it off. What I do know now is that we can hurt them. We need another encounter with them, honestly. One where every ship has a telepath on it. I don't know how much good it'll do, but it's worth a shot. If telepaths can hurt them, or stun them, and we have enough to cover all ships, maybe we'll have a fighting chance. I'll have Shein make the official request to place at least one telepath on each of your ships that might encounter one of the Shadow ships."

"I'm not sure if Thorgood will be cool with that," Teresa replies. "He'd rather we just find a way to disable their FTL drives."

The Spotlight continues to pick up data on the signatures.

Arren responds after a moment. "From what the Vorlons say, the FTL may be too advanced. It's nothing we've come across. The only thing we can really understand about it is something called Thirdspace, but I have no real clue. What I do know is that both the Vorlons and Shadows use some kind of organic technology. They've let us experiment on one of their fighter ships not attached to them. We've tried acid compounds that eat through anything organic we have. Didn't make a single hole in their ship. We've tried just about anything, including trying to give it a virus. The only technology they're really not sharing with us is their FTL method, and from what we can tell by observation, it's the same that the Shadows use."

"Well, basically, our tactical officers have three ideas. One, my idea, create several small minefields in the battlefield, then chase their ships until they teleport into one. Two, Thorgood's idea, find a way to jam their FTL. Three, my tac officer's idea, beam nukes into their ships and then detonate them. Only mine can be implemented without serious tech overhauls at the moment."

(OOC: Sorry. Been sick the past few days.)

"That's assuming their sensors don't pick up the minefields and avoid them. The nuke idea might work. Not sure about the jamming of the FTL since we don't even know how it works. Of course, we could combine your idea and your tac officer's idea. Maybe plant some nukes in an asteroid field and set them off by remote detonation when they get close enough to one."

"Turn the sensitivity up on your scanners, and you'll see all sorts of space debris out there," Teresa responds. "There will be nothing out of the ordinary about the part of space that we select to lay that trap. It won't even look like a debris field. It'll just look like an ordinary part of space, then BAM.

"It's the tac officer's idea that creates the most difficulty. I don't know if you've noticed, but we usually beam large objects, as in people, onto even more large objects, like planets. Beaming a small nuke onto a moving target that is pretty darn small is going to be far from easy."

Anyway, the Burninite ships have collected all the data they'll need, and depart to return it to science teams for analysis.

Arren probably considered all of that. The point he was trying to make was that they don't know the sensitivity of the Shadows scanning technology. For all they know, they'd pick up the differences without a problem.

It's going to take a while for the analysis and most of it is going to be inconclusive. There's too many missing pieces. Anything they think they've found is eventually invalidated by a further discovery.

Thorgood and Jenova decide to take no further action, though Thorgood sends a team to work on increasing the efficiency of the teleporters to make it 10,000 times easier to beam a nuke onto a moving ship. This way, instead of a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of hitting, it's more like 1 in 100. Or better if the ship stays still.

Basically, they'll wait until they're called upon again.

(OOC: *Does CPR on this thread*)

After some amount of arguing over costs, the Rhean planetary shield is set up. Ships that touch will be vaporized instantly. They can make adjustments in the shield to let ships in, of course, and to let any planet-based projectiles to fire off into space.

The Shadows don't seem to be interested in Rhea right now. They're pretty much ignoring them. Even their ships aren't being attacked. If anything, the Shadows are avoiding them.

Burnination is experiencing much the same thing. They're not being attacked. Same thing. The Shadows are avoiding them.

The Rutians, however, are being attacked left and right now. It's almost as if the Shadows are far more concerned with the Rutians at the moment. The others haven't done anything worth they're attention. One of the things the Rutians have done is to place at least one telepath on each of their ships. There's been some success with this tactic, which makes the Shadows fight harder. Desperation can make a dangerous enemy.

Well, given the time, Thorgood will certainly refine the teleporters enough to allow for beaming nukes onto moving ships. So as long as the Rutians hang on until Burnination is ready, they'll hopefully be able to bump their danger meter a bit higher in the eyes of the Shadow ships.

If they have eyes anyway.

The Burninite defense grid is put on high alert.

The Rheans are waiting to be called on for aid as they prep their ships for combat. That, and they finish work on modifying their shields to jam teleporter access to their ships, both to prevent boarding actions and prevent bombs from being teleported in. They learned from the last war they fought against Burninites.

(OOC: LOL Panzer. You're the only player that's even possible against; your ships are so darn big we can't miss!

In all seriousness, beaming actions of anything onto ships doesn't work well. We're only going to try bombs because it doesn't risk anyone being reintegrated in the middle of a wall, and we have no other options.)

The Rutians haven't called for help yet, but that's not exactly unusual. They're holding their own for now. Those White Stars seemed to have created a bit more even playing field. Well, okay, that and the fact that the Rutians have telepaths.

The Rutians did manage to get one shot of MIDAS off where about twenty Shadow Ships tried to ambush them. The resulting explosion took out all but one Shadow Ship, though it was heavily damaged and eventually destroyed.

The Shadows, you'd think, would retreat and run. They've met a race that has something that can kick their butts. They're unaware of what the Rheans and Burninites have. Logical conclusion would be for them to go after those other two. Instead, the Shadows begin attacking deep inside Rutian space. Their target proves they know more about the Rutians than they were letting on. They pick the worst place to hit. Dreva. While the Rutian commnet is still available, all communication from Dreva is suddenly cut off.

(And what occurs will be in the next post. Just reactions for now.)

"What on..."

"What is it Radeck?" Thorgood asks. Radeck is his new assistant. Very close second to Thorgood as far as scientific achievement actually.

"The entire Rutian comm system is acting oddly. Hold on....yes, part of it has vanished. Looks like Dreva is offline."

"Let me see that," Thorgood says, grabbing the comlink. "Yeah. It's Dreva."

"We're done here," Radeck says. "This is as good as we're going to get the algorithms, and you know it."

Thorgood nods. "I like to check all the math again just to make sure, but yes, we're done if there are Rutian planets disappearing."

"I just like to get it all right in the first place," Radeck comments.

Thorgood rolls his eyes and calls up Jenova. "We're done and uploading the new Teleporter protocols to every Burninite ship now."

"We're ready for beaming nukes?" her voice replies into Thorgood's headpiece.

"Yes," Thorgood replies.

"Good," Jenova says. "Execute military order GH-18 7 then."

Thorgood taps a few buttons, and...

A Burninite armada appears near Dreva, and can have a nuke on every shadow ship within 75,000KM in under 4 seconds. Because some of the nukes would materialize in such a way that they would fail to detonate, about 2 in 3 ships attacked in this way would explode if they're stationary. If they move or try to counter, this decreases to more like 1 in 5 ships.

Noting that the Rutian CommNet is down, the Invidious pops up at Dreva, while they start warming up the Galaxy Gun to fire with low yield city-buster particle disintegrator warheads.

And everyone shows up to a major battle around Dreva. The Shadows and White Stars are going at each other. What's disturbing is that Dreva itself is slowly being surrounded by a cloud. Anything fired at the cloud just goes through it. There doesn't seem to be any way to stop it.

It should be noted that the Raptor is in the middle of the fighting. The Shadows don't seem to be chasing the Raptor though. They're having their own troubles with the telepaths that are attacking them from the ships.

Several boom tubes open up as missiles fly out and target Shadow ships. The following description will suffice to demonstrate what happens to ships they hit.

"A particle disintegrator warhead depended on an external power plant to ignite a nuclear chain reaction, which was perpetuated into previously inert materials, causing complete destruction on a molecular level. The only check on the extent of the chain reaction was the magnitude of the power supply. A typical warhead had the capacity to destroy an entire planet, although the chain reaction could be moderated to affect just a select continent or city."

City-busters were selected.

The Spotlight scans the cloud to determine composition. If it's matter, they can use an MD Device to disperse it. A scientist onboard also works to jam the aliens' FTL again.

The rest of the ships start attempting to beam nukes into the Shadow Ships. They look for ones that don't seem to be actively engaged at the moment, because those would be moving the slowest.