Operation Golden Dawn pt. 1

Nuke the Alien Space Bats for Jesus

Thick streaming clouds of chitinous-metalloid biomechanical hive-vessels swarmed about the oblong planetoid, a riot in pinks, purples, blues, indigos, ultra-violets, and other, more nameless colors. They danced in the void, in swirling whorls that echoed patterns etched into bio-mechanical fungoid-flesh and heavy-metallic exoskeleton. Like crazed dervishes, they whirled in intricate flight patterns. Patterns that clawed at the mind, trapping and dragging the unlucky observer's unguarded gaze through angles and geometries both alien and unsane, to some other place. Starlight-thin gossamer wings twinkled darkly under the thin and far-distant sickly sol-light.

All that great multitude of shapes and sizes flittered about a great looming central shadow. As if ancient and nameless cyclopean insects swarmed forth from some monstrous and eldritch anti-hive. A yawning maw of some unnamed leviathan of the void-black depths, from which poured forth particles of filth and corruption. It appeared as an immense step-sided temple-ship of immense scale. Not so much a thing present in the waking-world as an abscess, the inky shadow of its megalithic slab-sides were speckled with points of unlight. Dark-stars moving in suggestive patterns all their own.

The war had raged for over a thousand years. Mostly in secret, sometime not. Sometimes quietly and coldly and hidden under uncaring shadows cast by the unblinking stare of remote and dim stars across long gulfs of time. Others loud and searing hot enough to tint oceans red. But one way or another, today was to be an end. Cast aside were the masks of youth, used when both Yuggothim and Adamlings alike were content to contend with each other subtly and sub-rosa. No longer are the saucer-shaped Sectoid yrch-craft found amongst the solar expeditionary fleets of Yuggoth. Discarded, they are, like the janissary vat-clone goblins created to pilot them.

The last of that grey-puppet armada is now but jagged flotsam-jetsam floating in ragged funerary orbit of the Neptunian moon, Triton. The wrecks of saucers formed a new ring for that daughter satellite. Where previously her hand had been ashamedly bare, she now was possessed of a grisly wedding-troth. Mankind had long since translated the Antarctic and Martian codices and knows well with whom they contend for mastery of Sol. As such, misdirection was no longer required of those cold, dispassionate fungoid minds that squatted, toad-like upon far Pluto. For the Adamlings had challenged their self-proclaimed betters to face them openly, and command-word from far distant Yuggoth to the leading Ethereal-Prime was to grant this upstart request.

A flock of super-cee autonomous stealth-drones seeded years prior unto obscure and eccentric orbits come alive at the coded signal and engage tok'l-effect pseudo-velocity drives for the first and last time. Screening elements of the fungoid-insect fleet tear apart at the seams in tortured silence. The vast swarm reacts. New screens of escorts flitter forth to take the places of their slain brethren. They are accompanied by larger combatants; hornets and dragonflies to the flies and gnats of the escort and picket analogues. This wave of reinforcements is swept aside in a rippling, flashing wave of nuclear explosions. Sub-munitions trailing behind the now self-immolated kamikaze-drones pelt the swarm.

Each sub-munition was a tok'l-effect enhanced casaba-howitzer that stabbed an electro-gravitationally lensed spear of coherent plasma through one or more of the larger destroyer-analogues, but the destruction did not end there. As each sub-munition flashed, the nuclear fission driven x-ray flux was harnessed by twenty-four independently targeted x-caliber sub-sub-munitions, in effect, fission-bomb pumped x-ray lasers. Many warheads target the same bug-hull, throwing away coherent particle and light beams in spectacular and spendthrift over-kill. Despite this wastage, the second Yuggothim screen finds itself even more shockingly brutalized than the first.

The whole mass seems to pause, if but for a brief moment. One might call it the space of an eye-blink, but Yuggothim do not blink. Another wave of hive-vessels swarms from the ziggurat-hive. They gather around a septenary of cruiser-analogues. These are bloated yet skeletal bio-mechanical hornet-moth-things that dart forward with wicked intent. Before the wave that is building even fully forms, before the crest breaks and turns over, the space before the Yuggothim screen screams. Sensors and linked hive-ship-minds scream along in sympathetic agony. N-dimensional membrane-space expands, twists, and folds with a flash of unsane unlight.

A tactical hyper-dimensional jump's interference wave in the fabric of space-time itself tears apart the remains of the forward screening elements that had somehow survived the previous attacks. There, within the epicenter of the jump-flare's after-glow, lies two-hundred klicks of nickel-iron. The lumpy, cratered metallic potato-shape is encrusted with massive barnacled emplacements. Offensive and defensive emplacements of monumental scale and number thrust gun turrets, missile cells, emitter and sensors arrays, and launch bay doors in all directions. This is the Psyche, she is the first and greatest of Solar-Adamkind's battle-planetoids.