Lurker Post
Il-Qhaganate Cruiser Surakat
The Surakat's spacious bridge was dimmed slightly to give the displays better visibility. The noise of verbal reports and talk between stations was a constant background buzz. Yekaterina ignored it completely, concentrating on the shared scout formation display in front of her. A massive contact dominating the picture and the young captain regarded it with the upmost suspicion. It was definitely a megastructure, a dyson swarm by the look of it, transmitting a huge amount of apparently human artificial traffic. What was more worrying was the bright flashes in the IR and Gamma spectrums, suggesting beam weapons being fired and nuclear weapons detonating.
Right now the Surakat and its escorts were relatively far away. A network of FTL probes and long range sensors were showing her this image. Fuzzy and low resolution, mostly just showing dark and light spots on the structure.
There was a fight going on ahead. A big one.
The question was though, between whom and for what purpose?
"Communications: bring up the formation channel." Yekatarina ordered.
The icons showing that her subordinates were connected lit, each accompanied by a small picture. "Alright. We've no idea what's going on here and signals analysis of the radio traffic isn't telling us much. I want the [i]Hvar[/i] and [i]Indra[/i] to make a close, high speed approach and get a look at what's going on with their main sensor arrays. Keep it fast and stealthy. The rest of the formation will provide cover."
The Captain of the Hvar grinned "Cool! I love watching aliens shoot at one another." She waved "We won't let you down boss!"
Yekatarina sighed. That girl was incorrigible. The other Captains acknowledged in turn and signed off in a more formal manner and Yekatarina pushed her fingers in the display, touching each ship and dragging ships where she wanted them to be relative to one another as the two frigates detached. The Surakat's drives lit and she began to move forward rapidly after the two forward scouts. The formation made a short FTL hop and then the structure was there, looming in front of them. It was so big that even at this distance it completely filled the display and the pictures on the ships forward cameras
The two frigates approached rapidly, their drives now in hard to detect stealth mode. Indeed the [i]Surakat[/i] could only detect them easily because they were linked to the same information warfare network.
The two ships moved close to the structure and Yekatarina saw things clearly now. A large force of battleships and smaller frigates were battling... a series of abominations. Dark behemoths of twisted, cryptic flesh flew through the space around the whirling structure, launching hails of blackly glowing spines (how was that even possible?) and flashing green beams at what had to be the defenders.
The two frigates were moving away now, the picture growing less clear as their much larger arrays grew more distant, forcing the formation to rely on the smaller probes they'd left behind. The battle showed no sign of ebbing though.
"The frigates are returning to formation." Tactical called, a little unnecessarily.
"Right." Yekatarina frowned "Navigation, plot a formation course back to the armada. They need to know about this."