Imperious Will, Task Force Bride Price
Oort Cloud, Edenstar System
Pentagram Cluster, Solar Hegemony in Exile
Hours later, and the Zindari Fleet still hung, cloaked in cold oort clouds far 'above' the ecliptic plane of E594515716E4. In the command centre of the Imperial flagship - Imperious Will - Lord Aretwe and his followers stood at the head of a large holo-table, around which stood the expedition's ranking spacy and army officers, along with the assembled lesser Zindari Lords attached to Lord Da’ath Aretwe’s expedition. The holo-table itself projected a model of the system’s worlds far, far below, based on information provided by both stealthed probe-drone scans and those conducted in the past by the Exploratores Corp's own stealthy scout-ships.
“Thanks to intelligence collected by the Imperial Exploratores who preceded us, once this settlement was detected by long-range drone-recon,” Prentice Verathun began, dressed in the plain black warrior's robes of a Da'ath's prentice, he was a severely handsome square-jawed young voidborn Atani male, well-built, with the voidborn's typical marks, albino colouration, albino-red eyes and hairless pate, he wore his stark white facial hair in a neatly trimmed goatee and long moustache, which he stroked, in imitation of the cheek tendrils of the red Zindari who had fostered him. “We know the world below us is a new colony of an Atanic based late ion-age to early neutronium-age technic-civilization located elsewhere. This world seems to be their local locus of control and hypothesized capital world for the local cluster of five known settled colony-worlds. This potentially makes our task easier or harder. Easier in that should the population be amenable to immediate or easily negotiable compliance with the imperial will, they will be able to communicate with and administer the local region as an effective client state. More difficult in that, if they choose to resist, bringing them into compliance without destroying the very technics-base and skilled population that makes them potentially valuable subjects in the first place, becomes that much harder.”
"The good news" Verathun continued, "Is that since these aren't low-technique primitives, they have lots of delicious EM-spectra for the intelligence shop to wash through their auto-brainiac kybernet. After a few thousand cryptographic comp-cycles we cracked their codes and few thousand more we worked out a rough translation of their language, which, according to initial reviews by the guild-of-archivists is, and I quote, 'yet another long-lost cousin of Aeldamari-basic mutated by time and distance.' So, we can listen in and we can even talk to them."
"Alright then, this is what we know." Verathun said as he launched into the briefing proper, handing out sheets of data-film and flimsy in cellulose briefing folders of the bland off-yellow colour that was probably universal. "These people are as close to stock-generic Atani as we can discern with current intelligence, another lost-tribe as it were, and they call themselves 'The Solar-Hegemony-in-Exile, whatever that means, although Q-shop extrapolates that we're looking at the losing faction of a civil war, which seems plausible. This Solar-Hegemony-in-Exile has settled a cluster of five worlds. This world is named 'Eden' and there are also 'Ariel', 'Circe', 'Arcadia', and 'Salem' in the local cluster, which the locals refer to as the 'Pentagram cluster'."
The Archivists are researching the Proper Names, looking for Mythopoetic and Formal Correspondences, but at the moment, we don't have a lot of context for them, nor do we expect any in the short term without some sort of breakthrough. We can extrapolate that this cluster is over one thousand light-years distant from their homeworld which is a rather long way for late ion-age technics, leading us to lean towards assuming they are in fact capable of early neutronium-age techniques. As far as we can tell, they have some sort of primitive hyper-drive that operates in 'hops' on the order of tens of light-years. This along with their seeming reliance on pre-annihilation fusion and fission powered heat engines for dirtside and voidside power generation leads us to conclude they do not yet have access to industrial-scale proto-material annihilation."
“Now, the opposing forces brief will be handled by my executive assistant for this operation, Princess Lizrael, Princess?” he said.
Princess Lizrael, now changed into a crisp set of starched and pressed mess dress whites of her own, to match her martial audience, schooled her features and closed the open folder she had been using to hide her scowl and then used the time spent as she smoothed invisible wrinkles on her uniform tunic to get herself under control and devise some sort of spin to use on these hungry base vortha that would so openly defy her father's wishes, and her own hopes and wishes for betrothal and marriage.
“Ahem, Q-shop is still developing our SIGINT on this Solar-Hegemony-in-Exile, however here is what we know for certain. This,” Princess Lizrael gestured at the holotable where star charts and orbital readouts were replaced with a sleek yet brutal warship of visible menace, roughly cylindrical, with a blunt, clipped prow, sensor masts projecting above and below midships. Hulking and brutish, stridently marshal in architecture, if without the aesthetic grace of the Zindari's dagger bladed and richly decorated vessels. "This is the Ess Eich Vee, that is, the Solarian Hegemony Vehicle, Stirling's Pride, the name-ship of the Solar-Hegemony-in-Exile's premier battleship class. Her displacement mass is one million, nine-hundred thirty thousand tans, her maximal length stem to stern is one thousand, four hundred and five metrons. She carries an estimated sixteen hundred tans of slush hydrogen fuel to feed her triplet of fusion-torch realspace-drives for an estimated max rated thrust of two point five standard gravities before her structural integrity fails. Our current estimation is that her neutronium field-effect core could provide mass shielding equivalent to our class one ship defence-screens."
The room became respectably silent at this information, the technology was certainly quite primitive, perhaps extremely so, but the quantity had a quality all of its own and in the black void, big masses and high velocities mattered.
"Her armour-belt ranges from two metrons thick to five metrons in combat critical areas and is composed of an ablative woven composite of foamed mono-crystallic ferric-carbide, spun carbonite fibre, and depleted uranium lattice designed to maximize the energy dispersed by ablation. Her armament consists of at least twelve forty centimetron class high-velocity autocannon in four triple turrets, two turrets forward, ventral and dorsal, and two aft, twelve five point five centimetron phased-photon guns in independent ball mounts, again focused in fore and aft arcs, six capital missile launchers, two each fo' and aft and two amidships, and forty-eight broadside heavy ion beam clusters, twenty-four port and again starboard. Oh, and her hangar bays are capable of hosting a combined fifty fighter and strike craft, plus miscellaneous shuttles."
"Who the flak are these people!" one of the spacy officers muttered, rather more loudly than intended.
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