Old Cult-territory (2)

Drakador_Chaos

jbox1
...as Jake approached the planet the scanners started giving some actually useful data, it appears the "anomalies" on the surface seemed to be ruins of some sort of civilization, while this was nothing out of the ordinary considering it was Cult-territory, after a while it became clear that the civilizations downfall apparently pre-dated the CUlts arrival by at least 50.000 years...
...there seemed to be a small group of lifeforms moving down there through the buildings...Jake scratched his chin...loot? Hm...

jbox1

Drakador_Chaos Jake: We've found something!

Half the crew rushed to the control room, unbalancing the ship slightly, but also revealing to them Jake indeed spotted something. Jake started to descend to get a closer look.

Drakador_Chaos

Dumb
...after another while of travel they eventually reached the end of this pre-made sort of tunnel, from this point it would still be quite a while of travel from what little the scanners showed, but considering their small size they should get through at a decent pace, notably as they reached the end of the tunnel, some of the lifesigns seemed to have stopped moving, as if they would observe what they would do next...

Dumb

Drakador_Chaos the squadron stops as they reached the end of the tunnel,after a while,the dulfim class carrier finally catches up to the squadron and they proceed to move towards the middle section,occationally evading asteroids and deflecting some with its pinpoint barrier

Drakador_Chaos

DarkPearl
...as it appears one of the groups seemed to be a sort of semi-insectoid space faring race (@Jenwuf ), there was a small group of ships surrounding one considerably bigger, while the other fleet showed a mix of Cult and Rift signatures (@RandomCommander ), their "ships" seemed to be bigger though not quite as big as what the other group carried with them, about half of the data of both groups was partially unintelligible, which was most likely either due their technological advance or their completely out of the ordinary physiology...

Drakador_Chaos

RedAndCosmoteer
...as the small fleet moved further into Cult territory they noticed that the ship they originally met had disappeared after calling reinforcements, which entered the field before them, while in the distance the other fleet had seemingly left the territory for some point outside of the borders...
...after a while of travel, they eventually stood infront of the asteroid field they already detected from a distance, something within the asteroids seemed to heavily affect their sensors, considerably lowering their effectiveness...

RedAndCosmoteer

Drakador_Chaos The Eontenvian Ships simply try the brute-force method on the asteroids, firing railguns and a mining laser at each asteroid in their way.

Drakador_Chaos

boombox
...it appears the symptoms were caused by what seemed to be a constant low power psionical signature coming from within the borders, which caused parts of the mind and brain of the individuals to sub-consciously emit fear and anger as well as causing the mild paranoia on occassion, while they were able to detect their signature with some of their rather experimental sensors, blocking psionics was past the current technology of the GSR (at least to my knowledge)...

boombox

Drakador_Chaos
The experimental GSR sensors were used to track down the psionical signature to the fields perimeters, and drones were launched, to fly into the field and find the signatures origin. If a lifeform was nearby they would power down and hide until the lifeform would move away agfain. They are fitted with the experimental scanners too.
In the meantime the guarded mining ships start going back and forth from the field to the station and mining the meteors...

Drakador_Chaos

LeftHandofGod
(Corvette)
...as the corvette passed the cruiser in a considerable distance it seemed to go undetected at first...that is, until the cruiser suddenly turned around to face the corvette and started following it, even more worryingly, for a ship of it´s size it seemed to be quite nimble and had apparently the speed to nearly match that of the Corvette...
...though, only nearly, in a long term the corvette would outspeed the cruiser...
...the cruiser had apparently been "parking" above one of the barren plents which showed small anomalies on it´s surface...
Totally not suspicious image title

(Fleet)
...while one of them examined the weapons they found out that they apparently didn´t have to depend on a large scale targeting AI unlike the current heavy Turbolaser models, however, these were apparently only able to be side-mounted as they lacked the steering capacity to (well or the SourceshipCollisionDelay) be effective while mounted on top of the ship, on the other hand the shield technology, while probably having been state of the art when they were fabricated, were indeed quite outdated, though still reliable...
...it took a while until the restorative AI was able to make sense of some of the data, but it seemed the ship was carrying darkmatter to some place that was now apparently within Cult borders, the Cult had probably expanded on top and past of whatever the installation was...
...in the meanwhile the fleet made a decent distance through the field it would not be long now unjtil they reached the other side...

LeftHandofGod

Drakador_Chaos
While continuing on its path, the corvette AI woke the captain and he sent a message back to the cruiser. "Hello, who are you? We're just looking around right now."

While an interesting development, the Turbolaser models are deemed too outdated to be of use. The shield generators, though have hints of an interesting development. They seem to have the ability to be networked together for better coverage and shield strength! This would invaluable as the Imperium ~~wages war on its neighbors~~ expands into the galaxy at large. Then there's also the dark matter to consider. A group is sent to the cargo hold to retrieve it and all useful finds are stored aboard the task force's ships. They then lay antimatter charges throughout the ship and leave to catch up with the main fleet. Sometime later, the wreck atomizes in a flash of blinding white light and gamma particles.

Drakador_Chaos

Dumb
...despite occassionally having to make detours due to oddly dense asteroid cluster the travel went relatively well up to this point, progress was not overwhelming but at least decent, the lifesigns that they detected did not seem to show any anomalous behaviour relative to what they already did before either...

Drakador_Chaos

jbox1
...as it appears each of the anomalies were the ruins of what once probably was a bigger city, the lifeforms they detected beforehand were apparently moving through the biggest one, even considering the age of the ruins there was not much left of them but there seemed to be vast amount of underground structures, even though big parts of them had probably collapsed, though no enegry or life-signatures apart of the small group on the surface were detected...

Jenwuf

Drakador_Chaos
With more ships arriving, they decide it is pointless keeping the drones waiting.
Many, many drones launch from the ships, two per anhysbys in fact, recharging every 4 seconds.
Within mere moments there was around 40, and very quickly their numbers had doubled.
They for now, moved in a circle around the one that launched them, but would move into two swarms should combat break out.

They continued moving however, approaching the battlefield slowly.

Catplayz

Drakador_Chaos
Pleased with his progress, Kelran continued with his journey and started preparing himself for the challenges that may await him upon arrival.

Drakador_Chaos

Catplayz
...only a few hours after moving into the Hunter core-territory Kelran already ran into his first issue, directly in his path there seemed to be a red giant, constantly spewing solar-protuberances, orbiting it a few barren planets one of them extraordinarily fast with a orbiting time of only a few hours and what seemed to be the debris field of a former battle, while moving around the obstacle would require some time there would be probably another way to move through this area without, though Kelran couldn´t quite grasp the idea yet...

KarolOfGutovo

Drakador_Chaos
Few ships are separated to investigate anomalistic planet, and rest land on one of barren planets, to scavenge for resources and warp fuel. They also scan other planets for possibility of colonization.

Drakador_Chaos

KarolOfGutovo
...at a closer distance they detected what seemed to be ruins on the planets surface, rather old ones at that, though going there would yield a considerable risk, the ground of the planet they landed on seemed to contain just some basic resources, no warp-fuel though, in the meanwhile scans were run in regard to the other planets, though as expected they were utterly uninhabitable, the planet closest to the dying sun was emitting a vast amount of radiation due to the state of the star, and the constant solar fury had swept away all sorts of atmosphere and water, apart of the outmost planet which seemed to have pretained an icecap on the backside of it´s surface, but even that only due to constantly facing the star with the same side...

Drakador_Chaos

LeftHandofGod
(Corvette)
...for a while there was a pause, in which it started to become clear that should the cruiser reach full velocity they might even catch the Corvette, though it would take a while regardless, however then a message was sent by the cruiser, on the visuals there was a tall humanoid moth-like creature which seemed to have folded it´s wings around it´s body like a royal mantle, the wings were black with red patterns on them...
"...remove our presence from your sensorlogs and you may pass."
Whoever he was he did not seem to be in the mood to discuss any sort of terms and the amount of weaponry systems on the cruisers certainly supported his "argument"...

(Fleet)
...due to the smaller size of the ships it did ot take them too long to catch up to the mainfleet, additionally to that it appeared that they were close to the outer borders of the field, soon they would be able to leave Cult territory again...

Drakador_Chaos

boombox
...as the drones entered the field the signature seemed to be just as subtle in strength as before, either it was the territory itself that was emanating the signature or the source was a considerate way further into the territory...
...in the meanwhile the mining ships seemed to go undisturbed, as long as they stayed at the borders of the field, there seemed to be no need to go further in aswell due to the extraordinary massive dimensions of the field...

Dumb

Drakador_Chaos the VF-27y seemed to be anxious to find opponents as it surges forward from the squadron,meanwhile,ghosts are rapidly going into and out of the dulfim class carrier for minimising repairs

jbox1

Drakador_Chaos Jake runs a scan for magnetic edie currents (A fancy way of saying he uses a metal detector) to locate any possible loot he could find

Drakador_Chaos

RedAndCosmoteer (At each of them? Or at every one of those that are in the way while trying to move into the field in a literal staright line?)

Drakador_Chaos

RedAndCosmoteer
...the group of ships forced their way through the field, the noticed their sensors started malfunctioning, trying to detect something past their ordinary line of sight got exceedingly difficult, occassionally blurry lifesigns showed up on the sensors, though they disappeared as quickly as they appeared and the crews startedgetting the feeling of being wtached...

DarkPearl

Drakador_Chaos
The Contingency moves further, scaning the lifeforms, with the intention of leaving the field, and if possible, assimilate the creatures.
(How deep are we inside the field?)

Catplayz

Drakador_Chaos
After a few moments of thinking and letting his computer run the math Kelran came to the conclusion that he could use the fastest planet as a "shield" of sorts to protect him from the stars effect. Should the planet rotate in such a way that one of its sides would face away from the star during the travel he could even land on the planet and rest a bit, though he would have to find a suitable and safe landing location.

RedAndCosmoteer

Drakador_Chaos (Those that are in the way. Edited.)

Drakador_Chaos

DarkPearl (You are currently just outside the field and approach @RandomCommander and @Jenwuf )