wintersoldier
EventuaOverture
Feet-first diving into the unknown.
Kamenymir meets the first of their lost kin.
Featuring @Enigmatik
The man pulled on the ragged cloak tightly around his shivering body. Each step in the knee-deep snow was a struggle, even more so now that he neared the mountain pass. Snow from the withering blizzard had accumulated in solid clumps in his long unkempt blond hair, wild beard and bushy eyebrows, and his skin was purpled by the wind and extreme temperatures.
Cold. Pain. Exhaustion. Willem accepted these gifts of the Almighty; sight alone could not fully appreciate the majesty of His Garden. He murmured a prayer, thanking Him for allowing him to witness such terrible wonder. The words were carried off by the blizzard.
Just as he reached the pass, his body gave in. Willem’s legs buckled under him, and he fell face first in the white snow. Groaning, he tried to get up again. He could not.
“Father! Father Willem!” a woman’s voice called out as it got closer. She was afraid for him. He smiled as gloved hands took hold of him, a pair of figures in winter clothes helping him to his feet. Their faces were hidden by layers of clothes and ski goggles, but he knew who they were: some of his flock, waiting for him at this sacred place. “Thank God, you’ve made it!”
“By His Grace.” Willem managed to utter as Cheslav and Luna hauled him towards a small tent, three pairs of wooden skis placed upright in the snow next to it. The wind died down, almost suddenly. The stars were still visible despite the early morning; Father Willem gazed towards the sky. He’d spent many hours contemplating the constellations, and knew the tiny silver lights like the back of his hand.
And there was a new one.
~~~~~~~~ Meanwhile ~~~~~~~~
An alarm blared on the bridge of the Veiled Meteor. “Seydel, report!” Captain Raina Oleska of the Kamenyan Defense Directorate’s Navy was calm as she addressed her third officer. She’d been captaining the Kobalt-class frigate for two years after graduating top of her class in officer school and serving four exemplary years on a patrol craft. Despite her young age, she had all the bearing of any Navy officer in her form-fitting vac-suit, her fiery orange hair tied in a neat bun to keep it out of the way in the zero-gravity interior of the ship.
The puzzled look of the third officer’s face as he silenced the alarm and watched the sensor screens was unusual, however. He was much older than she was, and a veteran of two decades of patrols. “Captain, energy spike detected… Twenty-one mils high, north-northwest.”
“Weapon discharge?”
“I… I don’t think so, ma’am. Readings don’t match any kind of explosive detonation. And it’s huge, too.” He frowned. “Ma’am, it’s the Gateway.”
Raina stared at the bridge instruments. There would have been total silence if not for the familiar gentle hum of the frigate’s systems. And something else, something… alien. Captain Oleska heard faint music, barely audible. She tried to focus on it and it slipped away.
“Captain?”
Her crew was looking at her expectantly, waiting for orders. She shook herself out of her stupor and had the collected data transmitted to Naval Command. The music was gone.
~~~~~~~~ Two days later ~~~~~~~~
Raina could only imagine the effervescence back on Kamenymir. The reopening of the Gateway carried a million implications and potential consequences; it was all too much. She was thankful that she wouldn’t have to remain with her thoughts alone and could instead focus on her duty. The Veiled Meteor was combat-ready, and the closest frigate to the Gate: Naval Command had ordered her to go through, scout the destination system, make first contact if anyone was alive on the other side, and return with as much information as was safely gathered.
Naval Command had also informed her that the destination system was unknown; the hastily-built interface device aboard her ship was fashioned using the corrupted black box of the original colony ship, whose archived databanks had been partially lost during the Second Shards War. There was no telling which system she and her ship would end up in.
Her musings were interrupted by a transmission from HQ. “Captain Oleska, green light. I repeat, green light. HQ, out.”
“Understood, HQ. Departing at this time, Oleska out.”
Gravity returned to the ship as its engines lit up and pushed it through the Gateway. Raina looked at the glitchy camera feed showing the warping outside, and listened in vain.
~~~~~~~~ On the other side ~~~~~~~~
“Good copy, Rending the Bridge, volleys coming in shortly.” Fang Zhelan gave a nod to the communications officer next to him and brought his focus back to the holographic display before him.
As a child, Fang had always been enamoured with old, pre-CoB films. They were, by the standards of modern entertainment, low quality, but his father, much like he had turned out to be, had an appreciation of the classics. He’d known even then it was farcical - bolts of lasers slowly moving across the screen, ships dramatically going up in fireballs… But it was only here, sitting at the bridge of the Pillars of Unity, did he ever gain a real understanding of just how different reality was.
They were the first wing of the Interplanetary Battlefleet, redeployed to the Gateway to fend off the Shenjian incursion- a full spear-fleet thrust hard into their lines, the largest naval battle the Great Struggle had seen in over a year, and the only sign of it was the bridge staff were more animated than usual - the low hubbub of conversation occasionally interspersed by a louder and terser phrase, the chitter of fingers working against tactile controls and the lit up display before him, the ship’s NCM in its element as it tracked trajectories, marked vectors and flagged concerns almost preternaturally.
But that was just the way things were in a Type 001 Command and Control ship. They were bunkered down far behind the front itself, densely packed amidst a crowd of Type 050s all hammering away with their siege rails, but apart from the small blips on the display, there was no way to know that metre-wide slugs were being shot through the void at impossible speeds.
UNEXPECTED SIGNATURE
The notification jolted him nearly out of his skin. Usually, even the Combat Relay’s alerts weren’t this dramatic, but now his Cognitive Refinement System was drawing his attention to…
“Attention, attention,” he projected his voice across the hubbub. “Reading unexpected ship-sized signatures that just materialised behind the firing line. The Pillars need eyes on it NOW!” His mind - trained to calmly react to even the most unexpected events, raced to try to comprehend the issue.
It couldn’t be a Shenjian craft. They had every single one in two million square kilometres flagged, and this had just appeared there - he’d been staring at the display when it blinked to life. Which meant…
Likely probability: Gateway Arrival. The implant confirmed his immediate conclusion. It seemed that the IDF’s explorations weren’t one-sided then, and this was certainly an entrance to remember.
“Reactor OK.”
“Comms OK.”
“Main battery OK.”
The series of reports from the bridge officers was interrupted by third officer Seydel’s hasty answer. “Multiple unknowns, close range! Multiple weapons discharges- Warships!”
Raina saw the icons appearing on the radar displays at the same time as Seydel did. “Engines to full speed, evasive manoeuvres.” Her heart was almost jumping out of her chest and it was a struggle to keep a level voice. She pressed a button on her touchscreen to broadcast through the ship’s speakers. “All hands, brace for high-G manoeuvres. This is not a drill.”
The Kobalt-class veered into a series of high-speed burns, changing its trajectory randomly. At such close range, there was no possible way that they wouldn’t have been detected, and although no incoming rounds were detected, Raina was not about to take any chances.
“Captain.” Seydel had taken a few minutes to analyse the data feed from the ship’s extensive sensor suite. “They’re not firing at us. There’s another cluster about one and a half mils away, looks like they’re firing in that direction.”
“What?” She looked at the projections again. Well, maybe whoever was out there was conducting live fire exercises. Or… “Did we just arrive in the middle of a war zone?”
Silence.
“Transponder on. Send out pings, they already know we’re here, so let’s try to make sure they don’t point those guns at us next. And broadcast the pre-recorded message.”
Seconds later, the Veiled Meteor began transmitting on a wide array of wavelengths, and in several Old Earth languages: “We come in peace, and greet you on behalf of the Kamenyan Defense Directorate. We are one of the colonies established five hundred years ago, and would like to meet with you, on your own terms.” The message was humorously formal and friendly given the circumstances, but it would hopefully get the idea across.
“Cog-Officer.” Ye Mu’s voice sounded in Fang’s head, even with the cog themself was on the opposite side of the bridge. “They just activated… Best estimation would be a transponder - that’s one lighthouse of a signal. Also… Broadcast coming through to you now.” Sure enough, the message came through just a moment later.
There was a ‘note’ from Ye that they had cut out everything but the original and Mandarin translation of the message, but, well… ‘Archaic’ didn’t seem to do it enough justice. Again, he was reminded of those old films and their antiquated original dialogue, and just like those, it was still somehow more or less understandable despite its age.
The ship’s immediate evasive juking and lack of large-scale weaponry suggested that even if it wasn’t genuine - unlikely probability of message insincerity on large-scale if it wasn’t genuine, the ship didn’t pose a true threat to them.
“Passing main management to you, Cog-Officer.” Fang nodded towards his Deputy Officer, then settled down more firmly into the command chair.
“Cog Ye, get us a proper line of communication with that vessel, and make sure we can get Cog-Commissar-Optimiser Wu to the bridge as quickly as possible.” Another voiceless message between the two.
A few moments later and the Veiled Meteor would receive a promising sign - an attempted two-way communication line.
It did not take much time for the Kamenyan frigate to accept the metaphorical offered hand, opening two-way communications on the same frequency. Raina breathed in and steadied herself, before speaking. “This is the KDDN Veiled Meteor. I am Captain Raina Oleska of the Kamenyan Navy. We did not come here to fight and have no intentions of interfering with your operations, over.”
Her real voice was transmitted first, followed by a series of automated translations. She was very much aware that Kamenyan would be all but incomprehensible to outsiders, and she had other study subjects back in college than just ancient languages. The delay before receiving an answer, if any, was killing her as she and all of her officers felt a knot in their gut.
Fang winced a little as the woman’s voice came through, trying (and failing) to make much sense of the words she spoke. When the translations came through in that same archaic Mandarin, it was a little better, but…
Hm. Reality continued to be duller than his father’s old movies.
Immediate language analysis: Structure - Earth/Qinglong Extinct - Indo-European Language Group - Slavonic & Germanic. Suggest Russian Translation Software.
So that was why it had sounded like a garbled mess. Little use dithering here though, this was an active battlefield and the Veiled Meteor was making itself a very juicy target for any long-range hunters.
“Attention KDDN Veiled Meteor, this is IPC Pillars of Unity of the Qinglong Interplanetary Defence Force. Please dim your transponder and cease all broad-spectrum transmissions immediately, we are currently engaged in active counter-fleet actions. If possible, please move towards the vessel currently transmitting - we will be able to extend the point defence net once you’re closer.”
It would be polite to introduce yourself.
That wasn’t his Combat Relay chiming in there, and for a brief moment Fang paused. He’d been in navy routine so long that it hadn’t occurred to him to introduce himself, but… This was a conversation, wasn’t it? He tapped his teeth together, unusually uncertain, then added: “This is Cog-Officer Fang Zhen speaking.”
A collective sigh of relief washed over the frigate’s bridge. The confirmation that they were indeed butting in on a battlefield was certainly still somewhat unsettling, but at least they wouldn’t get immediately blown up by who knows how many weapons batteries.
“Well, it could be worse.” Raina exhaled and glanced over status reports. “Alright, let’s do what they say. Kill the transponder and the open channels. Helmsman, get us an approach vector on that ship and maintain evasive manoeuvres.”
She pressed the button to send her reply. Her Russian was a little rusty, but she wasn’t writing high-brow poetry here. “Understood, Pillars of Unity. We will meet you soon.” She opened an internal channel after terminating the transmission. “Sergeant, I want your Marines on standby in defensive positions. Have two of your men at the airlock.”
A gruff voice replied. “Yes ma’am. Finger on the trigger?”
“Hold fire, but be ready for anything.”
“Understood, ma’am. Romanov, out.”
While the bridge churned, still occupied with the ongoing battle that silently swirled around them, Fang instead descended down to an area he hadn’t expected to visit for another few months - the mating interface airlock. On the way, he’d picked up company - Cog-Commissar-Optimiser Wu, steel-backed and offering only a clipped nod as she approached, Chief of Security and Petty Officer Tang Bao the Yin Zholou, who gave a brief, quickly returned-and-waved off salute, and a small armsman contingent, and Huo Ning, one of the vessel’s administrative clerks - crucial, but not always at the center of attention when it came to a bustling command hub like the Pillars.
The group assembled up smartly in the entryway, armsmen lining either side in parade stance with their weapons by their sides. Fang, Wu and Tang spread out between them - the Zholou a half-step back, while Huo Ning remained off to one side, already deploying a microdrone and pairing it with her omnilink.
There was a soft thunk as the mating interface locked home, then the crack and hiss of an airlock opening. The three-tone display above the door shifted from red to amber, and then amber to green, and with another hefty crack the bulkhead doors began to ease apart.
A handful of seconds passed before the rhythmic thumping of ridiculously heavy footsteps came from the airlock. A golem of black steel came through, lowering its head to avoid hitting the upper frame of the airlock door as it emerged before the assembled officers. A firearm whose size would have been almost comical were it not for the ease with which the giant handled it was clutched in its hands, finger off the trigger.
As the KDDN Marine corporal stepped to the side and stood at attention, Raina followed in with the typical stride of a military officer, her insignia as Navy captain visible on the chest and shoulders of her vac-suit while the symbol of the KDD was emblazoned right below. Her belt held a sidearm holster, which was empty. The difference in size and especially build, relative to her hosts, was striking, emphasized as it was by her uniform, but she knew this was to be expected.
She raised her right hand for a crisp salute, keeping a carefully neutral expression, however her purple eyes already studied the Quinglongren assembly, lingering over their cybernetic implants. Her hand came back down.
“Captain Raina Oleska, Kamenyan Defense Directorate Navy, commander of the KDDN Veiled Meteor,” she said in her accented Russian. “I must apologise for arriving at such… inappropriate times.”
If the QIDF navycogs were surprised at the marine’s massive frame and colossal equipment, they certainly didn’t show it, even as Fang had to crane his head to meet Raina’s gaze. The officer brought his right hand up like the captain did, but rather than bringing it to his head, instead held his fist at chest height, a serious expression across his face.
“Cog-Officer Fang Zhen, Qinglong Interplanetary Defence Force, Flag Officer of the Pillars of Unity. It is excellent to make your acquaintance.”
