The Chronicles of Lich King's Landing

The Founding Part 3

Lysandrania latched her appendages tightly to the control interface on her command throne in Drynari Alpha Fours main bridge. All around her, alarms were blaring and the ultraviolet stroboscope of Drynari emergency notifications flashed from the control screens.

"Status report!" she sent via priority message to the bridge crew. But she didn't need the details her rapidly filling head up display presented to her in dull red colors. A quick glance out of the bridge's thickly armored windows was enough to understand what was happening. The usual starscape was replaced by glittering, seething mass of hundreds of miniature novas, each one corresponding to a capital ship making the transition from FTL to realspace.

Drynari Alpha Four was under attack.

She never had thought someone would be foolish enough to try that. After the utter destruction her grand-grand-father had suffered at human hands about eighty cycles ago, she was the first of the family who managed to claw her way back through the court to some significant rank in the Drynari empire. This post as the station's custodian should have been a quiet but prestigious stepping stone for becoming captain of a planet-devourer class harvesting ship, a luxurious position every Drynari strived for.

She prompted her suit AI for a brief summary of the situation. Her HUD told her, that according to sensors, approximately two hundred and fifty-six human capital vessels were exiting hyperspace all around the station.

Humans.

She felt a strange tingling sensation in her appendages.

Anger. And the promise of revenge. Was this a curse? Or a chance at redemption? She settled for anger and revenge.

"Blast them to bits!! Fire at will!!!" she sent to the weapons crew, using double and triple amplifiers to punctuate the intent of her orders.

"Yes Ma'am! Torpedoes away!" the weapons officer announced excitedly mere moments later. He must have had the targets locked in and his eager appendage hovering over the launch button already, expecting her order. She triggered her on-board AI to look up his name and add it to the list of potential promotion candidates.

She followed the bright streaks of the rapidly accelerating plasma warheads and gripped the appendage-rests of her command throne tighter. She was appalled by the obvious stupidity of these humans. These should have bested her grand-grand-father? That must have been sheer luck. And now they would pay the prize for this arrogance.

After all, everyone in the galaxy knew how space engagements worked. First, the capital ships dropped in. Then the two fleets - or in this case, a rag-tag and technologically inferior fleet and an invincible state of the art space station - fired torpedoes at each other until either the munitions or the shields of one side were depleted. And Drynari Alpha Four wouldn't run out of both, since it possessed significant on-board and on-demand munitions assembly capacity and a reactor with a power output that rivaled a small star. Then, the loser of the engagement would launch a swarm of defense drones to shoot down the incoming torpedoes and cover his retreat, while the winner sent his attack drones in to make this as difficult as possible. Of course, this usually didn't prevent the escape, but it sent a message. These unwritten rules of civilized warfare reduced casualties on all sides to a minimum. But humans were not really yet part of the galactic political landscape yet. Their weird society of conservative planetary-based rivaling nations and independent, obscure space-faring clans that had no allegiance to those governments probably just didn't know better. And their hubris in turn gave her to opportunity to bring the full force of her space station down on these upstarts. Today, she would harvest the vengeance her family had been denied for so long.