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Author Topic: Into the Heart of the Swarm (A Crossover with an Original Universe)  (Read 892 times)

Bien

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   “What the hell are we doing on this rock anyway?” The marine at the back of the formation whined, boots kicking up dust, “There’s nothing but rocks and dust… and more dust!”
   “Shut your fucking mouth, Colins!” The sergeant at the front waved a gauntleted hand at the marine, “Command wants us to check this shithole for anything interesting, like your mother.”
   The whiner shut up and continued walking, protected from the heat of the burning sun by his matte black powered armor. They all wore the same Mark-12 Powered Infantry Armor; only it was configured differently for the sergeant and his specialist troops. Their sniper for instance, had advanced optics and targeting systems built into his helmet and linked to his Linear Accelerator Rifle, while the sergeant had extra detection and communications gear built into his ‘backpack’.
   The pointman passed by a particularly large rock and froze, holding a palm upwards as he looked at something.
   “I’ve found a body… unknown armor system, unknown IFF. I don’t think it’s any of ours.”
   “Markings?”
   “Yes sir. The armor’s all blue… serial numbers and a pinup of some sort on the shoulder plate.”
   “Cause of death?”
   “There are spines of some sort embedded in his chest, they look organic.”
   “Ouch. Alright, everyone be on guard. There’s no telling if the killers are still around.”
   “Contact! Seismic sensors are on the fritz!”
   The ground shook faintly as yellow contacts popped up on the small sensors window on Colins’ HUD. A worm of sorts burst from the ground, swinging the wickedly curved scythes tipping each of its arms at him. Colin ducked under the scythes and lifted his rifle, firing a short blast at the creature’s armored carapace. A beam of cerulean energy lanced from the rifle’s accelerator housing and burned its way through one of the arms. The beast screamed in agony and brought its remaining scythe down on top of him. The blade sparked against his defensive shielding, causing it to flare.
   “Fuck!” Colins said, rolling under the next swing.
   Another beam speared into the mouth, vaporizing the creature’s spinal column and brain stem. The body hit the dust. And then everything dissolved into chaos, dozens upon dozens of four legged creatures dug their way out of the ground, stabbing at the surprised marines with the claws mounted on their backs. Colins vaporized a few by setting his rifle from ‘pulse’ to ‘beam’ mode and panning it across a swathe of flesh and carapace.
   The sergeant ordered everyone to retreat onto the rock, giving them a better firing position. Spines sailed above Colins’ head as he turned around, one such projectile sparked against his shields, depositing a thin layer of corrosive liquid on the energy barrier. Colins spotted the source of the projectiles, it was one of those worm things.
   “Atlava! Toss a few detpacks into this Charlie Foxtrot!”
   “Sir!” The demolitions specialist unclipped a set of detonation packs, no bigger than her fist, and tossed them into the swarm.
   A second later, vibrant azure explosions leapt up as plasma and thermite were released into the air, reacting explosively as they clung to carapace and flesh. A sizable chunk of the horde was knocked out around the rock; their numbers were beginning to thin. Everybody unleashed streams of charged particles at the rapidly dwindling numbers, switching from beams to pulses as soon as circumstance allowed.
   The last of the four legged creatures was put down by the sniper, a hypervelocity gauss slug tearing it into a dozen pieces while still retaining enough energy to convert to plasma upon impacting with the ground. And finally, everything was still. The scorched and trampled dust was littered with craters and gouges, splashed with blood and gore, and shot to hell by more firepower than an average Terran Marine could shake a gauss rifle at.
   “Stealthed contact!” The sniper warned.

   November Annabella Terra, or “Nova” as she was known by her callsign watched the group of soldiers wearing strange armor march their way across the desert wasteland of Mar Sara, which had been reclaimed from the zerg yet again almost a year ago, following the defeat of the Queen of Blades by Raynor. She noted that the armor was rather thin looking compared to the CMC suits, however it looked to be light and maneuverable, and perhaps even comfortable as the soldiers seemed to exert no effort whatsoever as they trudged through the hot sun. She assumed that the armor was slightly more advanced than the CMC.
   She zoomed in on one of the soldiers, taking a close look at his kit. He was holding an advanced looking rifle with one hand. Grenades clung to his chestplate and thigh, as did the large caliber sidearm and combat knife. She quirked an eyebrow at the soldier’s equipment decision, as if a combat knife could slice through neosteel armor. They passed a rock and began inspecting the corpse slumped against it. Nova shifted her focus to what appeared to be the team’s sniper. The size and apparent firepower of the rifle he was holding made her jealous. She was broken from her observations by the appearance of a hydralisk in front of the soldier at the very back of the formation.
   “He’s dead.” She whispered to herself.
   She was wrong. The soldier ducked under the scythes with superhuman speed and fired his rifle. She expected it to be a projectile weapon, she was very wrong in that aspect. A cerulean beam lanced from the rifle and into the hydralisk’s armored carapace, doing serious damage to the zerg. Its scythe bounced an energy field, doing no further damage, she quirked an eyebrow. The other soldiers opened fire with their own energy weapons as zerglings and hydralisks emerged from their burrows. One of the soldiers panned his rifle across a clutch of zerglings, burning through them as he climbed onto the rock for a better firing position. They were fighting against a relatively small force compared to the swarms that had so often drowned Marines, Goliaths, and even Siege Tanks in blood. Fantastic blue explosions leapt up around the rock and engulfed the writhing mass of zerglings trying to make their way towards the unknown trooper.
   Bits of cooked flesh rained down upon the soldiers and everything fell quiet. And then the soldiers turned in her direction, too orderly to have been mere chance. She had been found.
   “Shit.”
   

Note that this will be updated weekly, this bit here's only a part of the prologue.
ED: What I meant with this is that I'll be moving forward a chapter every week.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2010, 08:24:24 am by Bien »
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Supermikhail

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Re: Into the Heart of the Swarm (A Crossover with an Original Universe)
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2010, 12:27:32 pm »

Yay! A piece of meaty action.

However, could have used a bit more introduction. It's aimed at people already familiar with... whatever it is? Starship Troopers? Warhammer 40k?

Anyway, nobody says "Damn" when a huge bug tries to kill them. They may say "Fuck!", if they want to say anything.
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Bien

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Re: Into the Heart of the Swarm (A Crossover with an Original Universe)
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2010, 08:20:17 am »

That was only a part of the intro actually. The rest of the background will be revealed gradually throughout the story.
---
   Commander Konrad Samakyev’s face met the tactical table as the Shrouded in Shadow entered realspace, her damaged Somtov-Miroslav Tunneling Drive giving out under the strain of keeping a three hundred meter long, sixteen thousand ton frigate chassis in rift. The black armored marines were, unsurprisingly, the only ones still on their feet after the re-entry. He smoothed out his battle dress uniform and straightened his cap, which was a standard amongst the bridge officers of his fleet.   The ship was drifting in the outer radius of an unknown system.
   “Report!” He barked, dabbing a handkerchief over the cut on his forehead.
   “Tunneling Drive is offline… we could have it back up and running in a month, a week if we’re lucky to be around a populated area with nanofabs.” The officer manning the Engineering console shuffled through holographic lists, “Long Range Grav Sensors are also inoperational, they’ll be up again in around an hour. And we seem to be rather lost...”
   “Deploy recon drones and scout for resources and habitation; we’re doing this the hard way.”
   “Aye sir.”
   Samakyev closed his eyes and sighed. He was a commander of a ship in the Confederate Navy’s First Fleet, not a recon jockey. But if it was orders, it was orders. Apparently, the High Admiral had seen fit to assign his stealth corvette to a ‘simple reconnaissance patrol’, as the AI had worded it. Damn the AI was wrong; the Shadow had been ambushed three days ago by an Earth hunter-killer taskforce. Thankfully, the T-Drive was charged and ready for operation despite the cloak.
   He sighed again. Everything had gone to shit when the Orion Arm United Nations attacked Fort Kirmanovich, Exeter Fleetyards, and Armestia all in one day, catching the Confederacy, and therefore, the entire Perseus Arm Alliance with their pants down and dicks in the molecular disassembler. Five planets were literally reduced to rubble in little under a week by intense OAUN kinetic bombardment. High Admiral Miroslav, back then, was only just a Commander like him. He had a lot of friends in the Admirality, and when it was time for the Admiral of Admirals to be elected, he was chosen as one of the candidates. Samakyev trusted the man, even if he was a little soft in his eyes to OA POWs and civilians.
    “Contact!” He was broken from his reverie, “Flight of frigate size warships… unknown designations… marking as neutral until further notice.”
   “Engage cloaking measures and triangulate their origins. Begin evasive maneuvering.”
   “Sir.”
   The Shadow hummed with energy as the cloaking systems powered on, capable of hiding the ship from most visual, radiation, and even gravitic detection systems. The NAV officer’s fingers flew over his control screens, slowly piecing together a rough estimate of the unknowns’ starting point. That was the Confederacy’s edge over anyone in known space, their technology. Larger Confederate warships have wielded antimatter lances and exotic particle cannons against their much cheaper, less advanced counterparts. However, said technology was extremely expensive, and they were outnumbered on a four to one basis in almost every battle. Because of that, Confederate personnel are extremely well trained to compensate.
   The GRADAR holo flickered to life in front of him, showing an incomplete picture of the surrounding area.
   “Our mystery contacts seem to have originated from this planet, sir.”
   “Deploy scouting probes to the planet, scan for anything that might be of use.”
   “Sir!”
   The Shadow easily slipped past the unknown ships and closed the gap between itself and the dusty rock of a planet that seemed to be a military base. Her matte black hull rendered invisible by the cloak, she was only a tiny speck of dirt to any other sensing system. Samakyev’s frown turned to a smile of relief as he discovered that the planet was inhabited. Dropping into the atmosphere and announcing the ship’s presence was suicidal at most, he decided to scout the area manually with marines and send down a few people to make contact.
   
   Jim Raynor leaned over the tactical map, “Well what have we here?”
   “It seems that an unknown vessel has jumped into the system… and disappeared, sir.”
   “I know Matt. Now we have to find them.”
   “I suggest that we launch several flights of fighters and spread out our battlecruisers to increase our chances of finding the contact.”
   “Good one Matt. Carry it out.” Raynor walked out of the bridge and headed towards the bar for a drink.   
   “You know I’m Terran up the night!” The jukebox roared, antiquated speakers straining to blast the music.
   Jim smiled at the song as he looked around. There he saw the red haired ex-ghost and former Queen of Blades. The news had all said that she had died on Char along with most of the swarm, but Raynor and the crew of the Hyperion knew differently.
   “Jim.” She waved weakly, still having not recuperated from her latest dosage of the drug.
   Jim waved back and sat beside Sarah. She acknowledged his presence and leaned on him for support, “You shouldn’t be walking around, Sarah.”
   “I know. I know.”
   “Come on; let’s get you back to the med bay.”
   
   “Sooka.” High Admiral Kazimir Aleksey Miroslav cursed as OA kinetic slugs pounded into his flagship’s energy barriers, “Give me a targeting solution on the enemy battleship, open fire with main particle lance batteries!”
   The gunnery control officers leapt into action, working in tandem with each other and the ship’s AI to generate an accurate targeting solution. A second later and a barrage of azure particle beams lanced from the main batteries, arcing against the shields of the smaller warship. While a single Earth battleship was no match against a supercapital class warship, or Sovereign as they were known to the Confederacy, a dozen was a major problem. The Dawn over Darkness shook as the next salvo of kinetic rounds smashed into the shields, causing them to flicker wildly as they dissipated the energy.
   “Primary antimatter lance array is at ninety five percent capacities, ETA to firing time is six seconds.”
   “Helm. Fly us into the formation, launch spoofers and face their asses when we’re clear. Fire the antimatter cannon on my mark.”
   The DoD responded eagerly to the helmsman’s commands, her drives flared brightly and pushed her towards the enemy formation. The Earth warships had focused all of their shield energy towards the frontal quadrants, doing that would take a few minutes to equalize barriers. Kazimir felt a smile break out across his face despite his dislike for the deaths of yet more conscripted civilians. One battleship was sliced in half by a salvo of particle beams, both halves floated away from each other, venting atmosphere. The breached reactor cores went out in a cascading explosion, finalizing with a flash of light and energy. Only a third of the original mass remained unionized.
   “Primary antimatter lance array is at full charge. Ready to fire.”
   “Helm. Turn us around. Fire the cannon at my mark.”
   “Killing drives and… reversing course.”
   The Dawn over Darkness killed her drives and pointed her split bow at the rapidly expanding debris field, allowing inertia to take her further away from the battleship formation. The Sovereign was far  faster and more maneuverable than any Orion ship of equivalent size, bringing her on par with Orion cruisers. Kazimir looked at his wrist computer, which was currently set to timepiece mode. He waited for five seconds.
   “Mark!”
   A bright white lance of antimatter, no thicker than a pencil shot from the main array and connected with a piece of debris. It didn’t matter if it was a direct hit. The resulting burst of energy ionized the hulls of four battleships and left two of them completely irradiated. There was no doubt that thousands of crewmen were permanently blinded by the blast, as were the sensors on the Earth ships. A focused salvo of particle bolts pounded another battleship into scrap. It died in a flash of light.
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Tellemurius

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Re: Into the Heart of the Swarm (A Crossover with an Original Universe)
« Reply #3 on: December 07, 2010, 12:14:39 pm »

the earthlings are back?

Bien

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Re: Into the Heart of the Swarm (A Crossover with an Original Universe)
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2010, 12:35:33 am »

the earthlings are back?
UED? No actually, the OAUN and PAA are from an original universe.
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