SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 8: Shadowhunter - @bloodsword (WINNING STORY!)

The body Imrulan would be wearing, however, was human, down to the finest detail. That was the first step in her disguise. The second would be penetrating the admittedly strong human defenses around their information network to create a persona that she would adopt to grant her access to the primary human facility on the planet, a vast, floating city called Atalan.

It was here, in Atalan, that the occupying government made its home. So it was to that floating city Imrulan would go, to find her quarry.

A soft chime from her navigational interface let Imrulan know that her ship was ready to slipstream. Another flutter of her fingers and her ship thrummed with the syncopation of her slipstream drive spinning up.

Looking up at her main viewscreen, the niski nodded in satisfaction as she watched the familiar twist of a wormhole forming directly in front of her vessel. 'Here we go!' she thought with the thrill of setting another operation into motion. Then she was guiding her vessel directly into the center of the twist's maw.

Alarms were chirping by the time awareness faded back in after the tumult of her wormhole transit made her senses drift. Focusing on them, Imrulan frowned as she let her fingers dance across her interfaces, specially designed to interact with her energy form.

Ah, it was the passive detection grid the humans had put into near Nuranis space to alert them to the approach of any ships that didn't belong to them. In full stealth mode, her own vessel had pulled up short just before crossing the grid's outer perimeter and let her know what was in front of them. Good; she was expecting the grid, mentioned by her intel brief. It meant she was right where she wanted to be.

Another dance across the interface extended her ship's sensors until another alarm let her know it had come into contact with the detection grid. Eyes narrowing, the niski leaned forward, intent on the readout that detailed the sensor's contact with the grid.

If the humans followed logic, and they often did, they would've set up the grid with field projectors at regular intervals around the planet. Those projectors, in turn, would link to some sort of control apparatus, perhaps a guard station, also in orbit. That station would then have a comms link with a ground station, and a tie-in to whatever network the conquerors had set up on the planet.

In other words, all she had to do was hack her way past the detection grid and she had a way into their network. Of course, as an energy being, she was no ordinary hacker. Imrulan would hack the network by interacting with the very energy fields that made up its parts!

As an image of the energy grid appeared on her sensor array's slave screen, the niski reached out with a gossamer hand and placed it directly on the screen's face. Instantly she could feel the dance of light and information that gave the screen life, the culmination of the sensor array's efforts to detail the detection grid.

Pushing past that, she found herself touching the grid itself, a vast web of excited particles reaching out from several projectors hanging in space nearby. Good. Again that was exactly where she expected them to be. Focusing her mind, she pushed her senses down along the closest particle beam line to the projector itself.

A moment's worth of work on the projector's relatively dumb control systems and it belonged to her. Another moment and the entire grid was hers. Tuning its resonance to let her stealthed craft slip through without causing as much as a ripple in the web, Imrulan then eased her ship closer to give her better access to the anticipated guard station.

Ah, there it was, hanging in geosynchronous orbit. Perfect! That should give her access to the more active detection grid in place around the planet as well as the commlink to the ground.