Cath

The Cradle

The Bertha didn’t waste any time once the target was marked. Shifting its field of fire, it fired a sharpened tungsten round toward the enemy cruiser’s engine and reactor core. The dead metal projectile had a better chance of disabling the target without provoking a large explosion and destroying the QV hitchhikers, but nothing was guaranteed. The QV were strongly encouraged to disengage, but either they were too badly damaged or too deeply attached to make a quick getaway.

The Tindrel planetoid was rapidly approaching for a third time. They had adjusted their course into more of a diagonal strafe of the entire line. The Admiral signalled that rather than maintaining their unstoppable momentum, they would be attempting a ‘crash stop’. After attempting to ram through as many high value targets as possible, they’d bring the full weight of their conventional weaponry to bear on the enemy ships.

By way of an opening salvo, the enormous asteroid launched hundreds of torpedoes. They divided up to target some of the smallest and most vulnerable ships, with the aim of drawing fire from supporting battleships that will in turn weaken their own defenses.

---

“It's an interesting lead…the previous inhabitants of Outremer built an entire city around the Cradle. Their structures suggest they actually had very similar physiology to the Morgrawalai, now I think about it…” Freyr trailed off, before eventually looking to Marae.

“There must be some kind of pattern - what could we be missing?”

The Cradle

“All units, form a line of defense in the asteroid field! I want to see overlapping fields of fire on my screen!” The Tindrel admiral commanded. He had taken a more sober tone as he examined a giant holo simulation of the situation on the planetoid’s map table. The Planetoid itself had cleared the asteroid field again and was arcing around the entire thing to strike the enemy from behind and below.

The QV were yelling to each other as their large combined surged back towards the relative safety of the asteroid belt. An enemy ship sailed in front of them and hit them with half a broadside. The QV vessel smashed into them and the gelatinous skin wrapped the whole way around the other ship. The ships inside began firing straight into the opposing hull and otherwise trying to prise it apart.

A blinding exchange of fire flitted to and from the Outreman vessels which had now presented their thin backsides. That was, except the battle group’s Bertha class rail cannon platform, which was hidden behind an asteroid. Though large, it was poorly armed and armoured except for a formidable rail gun which made up most of its mass. While this sort of armament had featured heavily in Humanity’s early spacefaring armoury, it had gradually been phased out as it became clear that the galaxy wasn’t empty. Whenever a ship fired a tungsten bolt at blistering speeds, it was going to ruin someone’s day - that may not be who they originally thought.

The Bertha latched onto the mammoth asteroid like a spider and fired straight through it, using small thrusters on either side to manoeuvre its field of fire from one ship to another.

---

“Possible anomaly detected.” A Rothian scientist raised their hand from a workstation on the opposite side of the general area from Dr Wetherall, closer to Marae. As Freyr and Vreta walked over, Dr Lang asked him: “Why am i getting a bad feeling about this again?”

The Cradle

Immediately after the enemy fleet jumped into close quarters combat, the battle group’s comms net lit up like a Christmas tree. Foremost the Tindrel screaming with anger, but urgent and stressed instructions from captains of individual ships as they allocated rally points.

The small number of Qalian-Vosh ships began grouping together and sharing their mobility bubble, becoming more than the sum of their parts all while under heavy fire. One of them didn’t make it and erupted into a goo-based fireball…then started heading out of the battle area to await the end of the simulation.

The Outreman portion of the battle group were caught on the broadside with open space cut off by the mass of enemy ships. They were also strung out in a line with only partially overlapping fields of fire. However, the OSC had trained to survive this sort of gambit before , and their ships immediately began turning so they were headed into the asteroid field. They redirected most of their shielding power to the stern, and used all their armaments on their sides to support the ships to either side. They then attempted to retreat into the relative safety of the asteroid field, leaving the QV vessels nearly surrounded.

---

“Negatory. They look like they’re on the move…aaand they’re bouncing off every satellite in the system. There aren’t that many signatures, but they could be bundled together. We aren’t experts in signals from known civilisations, we’re equipped to notice anomalies to known patterns. We’d need the military or, or… Naval Intelligence or something.”

The Cradle

“Admiral, recommend immediate abort. You’re vulnerable in the channel.” The most senior Outreman captain in the battle group sent over comms.

“Watch them run!” The Tindrel Admiral replied immediately - the rapid clicking of their species laughing could be heard.

“Press the attack!” The ramming ship had looped around now and was building up unstoppable momentum for a pass through the freight channel. In preparation for a mini-jump at short range, they weren’t charging up their secondary weapons to fire at full power during that moment of chaos when they made contact.

---

Masgard laughed. “Not quite bi-planes, but you already knew that. They are advanced in their own ways. Very different to us, in tune with nature. They have a symbiotic relationship with large worms that act as transport, food and fighting forces.”

“Human, Tindrel & QV signals on the planet.” Dr Wetherall announced.

Song Reference time

Weee look good together, alllways down whenever
We are weird and painful, just like Ross and Rachel
Let's take a shot at something wonderful

The Cradle

“Push them into the clear channel! We’re coming back around!” The Tindrel commander screeched. The capital ship sent a visualisation of a gap between two tight clusters of space debris. The factory complex was nearby - they had cleared this channel to allow large freighters to quickly move to and fro. Based on the relative positioning of the asteroid field and the system’s general gravitational alignment, the planetoid’s second pass would come from ‘above’.

Ordinarily, the Outreman fleet would have flushed the enemy fleet out from their hiding places with seismic charges. They could have smashed the asteroid belt into small and less dangerous pieces and lit hostile shields up. However, that sort of weaponry was incompatible with a simulation where they couldn’t actually go around wrecking the place. Especially when there was a real factory complex nearby that was already signalling for them to use caution on their property.

The Tindrel ships paid no mind to that, however. It was largely their own holding, after all.

“CHARGE!” Their captains screamed as one, forming a war cry. The full weight of their force swarmed into the depths of the slow-moving asteroid field, seeking to rapidly gain ground on the enemy and do battle. The formation they had from the beginning was totally ruined. The large Outreman vessels couldn’t navigate into the tightly-packed core, so they began skirting around the edges, firing at enemy elements which broke cover to assault the planetoid. Their smaller destroyers and frigates joined the Tindrel.

The Cradle

The channel was flooded with bloodthirsty cheering from the Tindrel camp as blinding explosions erupted from the two disabled battleships. They had waged war like this on their planet and in space ever since they reached it, so it must be nice to validate its continued effectiveness.

The planetoid ship came under fire from several directions. Its large shield generators absorbed most of the hits, though one torpedo found a gap in the front as energy was directed towards the more vulnerable spindle off the back. It burst through and crashed into the side of the rocky face, tearing a small simulated slab off into space.

Barely slowing down, the Tindrel capital ship narrowly missed a cluster of hefty asteroids and sheared off and away from the engagement. It would turn in a wide circle for another ramming run if possible. Point defence lasers on its stern fended off numerous munitions as it departed.

This left the comparatively weaker Tindrel vessels to fight without their carrier vessel alongside the Rothians and Humans. However, the imminent threat of another devastating charge on the flank by the planetoid had proved a powerful distraction in previous engagements. They made short work of the support vessels which hadn't retreated, then most of their ships attempted to get to cover afforded by the asteroid field. Their ships excelled in short range combat, but their shields wouldn’t hold up in a protracted long range engagement.

Despite a snarl-up between the helical Outreman formation and the chaotic and rapidly spreading Tindrel fleet, the closest remaining enemy battleship wasn’t able to take advantage of this troop confusion. The OSC heavy cruiser Valkyrie pulled up alongside the hostile ship while deploying a swarm of countermeasure drones between the ships. While still manoeuvring, the enemy battleship fired a massive broadside which would have likely disabled several small vessels behind. The Valkyrie’s counter measures intercepted roughly 40% of the munitions before they hit its shields, though the heavy cruiser still took a battering. The Valkyrie’s shipboard AI was able to simulate a violent shaking motion in some parts of the interior, for the purposes of realism.

Moments later, the Valkyrie returned the broadside, before re-engaging its thrusters and dropping down underneath the enemy battleship to avoid another salvo while its shields recovered. Two plucky frigates above the enemy also jostled to find a firing position for their main guns before releasing jets of energy through space towards the ship.

---

“The locals call that stuff the Morgrawal. Say it's all one entity.” Masgard pointed to the massive root system covering Psi-Helios. He hadn’t been far from Dr Lang since they’d boarded the Rothian vessel, though he kept a relatively low profile and seemed to be working on other things most of the time.

“How do you know that?” Freyr asked.

“We do our research. The natives are so entwined with it that they refer to themselves as the Morgrawalai.”

The sophisticated net of scans being unfurled by the Magnificent Horizon was gradually peeling back layers of the planet. Freyr observed that the obvious ‘Morgrawalai’ population centres were varied. There were some that appeared to be inside the large trunks of the tree, some underground and some in the circular clearings near lakes that the Morgrawal had left.

The Cradle

The channel was flooded with bloodthirsty cheering from the Tindrel camp as blinding explosions erupted from the two disabled battleships. They had waged war like this on their planet and in space ever since they reached it, so it must be nice to validate its continued effectiveness.

The planetoid ship came under fire from several directions. Its large shield generators absorbed most of the hits, though one torpedo found a gap in the front as energy was directed towards the more vulnerable spindle off the back. It burst through and crashed into the side of the rocky face, tearing a small slab off into space.

Barely slowing down, the Tindrel capital ship narrowly missed a cluster of hefty asteroids and sheared off and away from the engagement. It would turn in a wide circle for another ramming run if possible. Point defence lasers on its stern fended off numerous munitions as it left.

Hello

Welcome to the Guild!

The Cradle

“You could run and get me some more coffee?” Freyr smiled sweetly, before continuing.

“Joking aside, if we can find something concrete here, we’ll be in a much stronger position to scan other populated worlds. Dr Hou was working on a theory that Human DNA contained clues about another location, because he…well.”

“Ma’am, topography is ready.”

One relic of Earth’s dominion over the Diaspora was Outremer’s planet classification framework. All of their software still compared the new planet being scanned with the cradle of Humanity, rather than the world all of the Human scientists present were more familiar with.

Psi Helios was 12% smaller than Earth, and had a broadly similar evolutionary journey too. Larger planets like the gas giant stopped it from growing too fast and being pulled towards the red giant star, rendering it uninhabitable. It had a circular orbit and a stable axis, with a tilt of 17.9 degrees. There was a higher degree of tectonic activity, and about 20% less water, but still enough to make this planet an attractive place for organics to develop.

This was evidenced by the tangled mangrove-esque root system covering 75% of the planet’s surface and rising miles towards the sky.

“They sure pick good places to hide.” Freyr breathed, putting her AR glasses on as data began flooding the lab.

---

“Ramming speed! All units, close for battle! Tindrel elements, prepare to disengage!” The Tindrel commander of their planetoid ship shrieked over battle group comms.

The group’s capital craft was now moving frighteningly fast towards the middle of the three battleships and a cluster of smaller craft coalescing to face the threat. It became obvious a few seconds beforehand that it wasn’t going to stop, and planned to smash straight into the fray. If it looked like they might miss, they had the option to enact a small warp jump to adjust course at the last moment.

At the same time, Tindrel cruisers and destroyers were unlatching from the double helix structure protruding from the back of the planetoid and fanning out to begin fighting. The biggest hitters would time their disconnection until they were right among the enemy, so they could attempt a devastating broadside. Outreman vessels had to make emergency adjustments to their attack run to avoid a catastrophic pile up, meaning they lost speed and their tight helical formation.