Risen: Shatterverse

Stellar Vagrancies

Tusk frowned as she watched the last of the simulations run through, showing the defense clouds in K'eth orbit rupturing enough to let the strike force in shuttles pass through and land on the surface.

"Earth Mother bless me." She looked over at an expectant Tate and a smiling Grint. "We're not talking about this again, are we?"

"This newest plan has merit, Admiral," Voguun noted from where he stood just off Tusk's shoulder, the n'vorn officer intently examining the simulation's final result. "The hive hierarchy is strong in the k'ethik species. We eliminate the elders and their entire command structure should collapse!"

"Our thoughts exactly, ma'am," Tate added with a quick look at the thoughtful n'vorn. "Using a combination of Hammer's Shrike-based disruptors and Legion's iso-magnetic pulse generators in sync with the Swords, we could easily cut our way to orbit with minimal casualties."

Tusk jerked a nod of understanding even as she readied herself to respond.

"It's not the getting there that I'm worried about, General," she said, folding her arms beneath her breasts. "It's the 'how are you going to find the elders' on what would presumably be a very well defended surface following the Velkin's abortive attack several years ago, that concerns me." Tusk turned to point at the various secondary displays that bracketed the main display, each currently occupied with sensory data about a dozen different star systems currently at risk from a k'ethik cloud assault.

"Besides, we still don't know exactly where K'eth is," she pointed out. "We barely know where the next attack is going to take place! Even with Juniper's algorithm."

"Legion is working on that, ma'am," Tate noted. "He's downloaded thousands of memory cores from the attack on Lansik, along with the cores our teslas have been examining. He feels a data scrub and a thorough cross-reference will yield K'eth's location."

Before Tusk could react to that, a notification alert chirped on the Tactical workstation.

"Admiral, we have cloud movement on target delta," the Tactical officer announced, looking back and up at the command dais to deliver their report.

Nodding, Tusk turned away from Tate and Grint to lean over the railing.

"Time to intercept?" she asked.

"Delta will be fully involved in less than five minutes at the current rate of advance," was Tactical's grim reply.

"Nav, make us a hole. Comms, prep the fleet for a transition and immediate combat." The veteran naval officer was then looking back at Tate.

"Prep your troops for a ground defense, General," she tightly directed. "I'm tabling this discussion until we can get this next round of targets safe from k'ethik incursion."

"Understood, Admiral," Tate said. He then looked over at a thoughtful Grint.

"Let's get our people ready!"

As it turned out, Tactical was conservative on their estimate. Even as the fleet exited from the wormhole out of Collectorspace, the main viewers were quickly filled with the vision of no less than five larval clouds wrapping around the blue-green planet in front of them.

"We're reading massive dump outs, Admiral," Science reported tersely. "They are putting a large amount of larva directly onto the surface."

"Strange," Voguun noted as his fingers danced across a data tablet to bring up numbers on the planet itself. "The planet is only tech level four, with minimal ability to travel up their own gravity well. Why would the k'ethik devote so many resources to land when they can consume the planet at will with little to no resistance from the inhabitants?"