Risen: Niekro's War

Chapter 1: Unexpected Resistance

Space twisted then breached to disgorge the sleek, streamlined shape of a Cygnet-class long range courier, one of the newest additions to the expanded Risen fleet. Equipped with a N'vorn tech, Builder-modified slipstream drive, she could jump from Earth to any point within 10,000 light years in a matter of days, carrying cargo and data too sensitive to trust to standard subspace transmission. And when she wasn't cutting through slip stream space like a banshee, her Hammerhead-sized sub-light impellers had enough thrust in normal space to take her to just shy of light speed in one helluva hurry.

 But the Cygnet wasn't just a pretty set of legs. Packing a full load of Shrike ship-to-ship missiles with anti-matter warheads along with a weapons array bristling with beam and pulse energy weapons, this black swan could mix it up nicely in a fight, and make the enemy keep on hurting with a dark matter rail gun running along her belly. If anything tried to take what she carried, they'd get their teeth knocked down their throat before they even got close.

If they did manage to get close enough to take a shot, her zero-gap armor sheathed in the latest K'ethik-based shield technology could take a hit like a heavy weight champ, her vital systems well protected against aggression. She was the best possible design and build for what she did, using only the most powerful technologies available to the Risen and the Avatar Alliance.

Inside the cygnet's cockpit a lone figure in N'vorn-style pilot's armor waved aside the tactical display that was overlaying the forward view out the canopy. The display minimized before dropping into the bottom left corner opposite status, navigation and positional displays in the bottom right. Then its gauntleted hands were touching its primary control interface and the cygnet smoothly banked to the right.

As it banked, a massive shape moved into view. An alert popped up on the HUD a heart beat later, flashing red.

"Oblivion Control, this is Cygnet 724 acknowledging your access query and transmitting ident and approach vector," the pilot said as a series of numbers and symbols scrolled up the right side of the alert notice.

"724, this is Oblivion Control," a voice replied in the pilot's helmet. "Your ident is valid. Continue on your current vector as you are cleared for approach. Stand by for docking redirect at the outer marker."

The pilot nodded as the alert changed to green before it disappeared.

"Roger that, Oblivion. 724 is standing by," the pilot said, the shape continuing to grow in size as the cygnet flew closer. It would get much larger before the cygnet even reached the outer marker, already the size of a large asteroid in the view through the canopy. Such was the immensity of the Risen presence in this sector, the titan known as Forward Base Oblivion.

Forward Base Oblivion: it was a massive, flattened ovoid built nearly fifty thousand light years up the Orion Spur from Earth. With multiple decks on an outer toroid yielding hundreds of square kilometers of space and a gigantic bio-dome in the center with enough room to house a medium city, the titanic space station could hold thousands of colonists and scientists in relative comfort.

Except Oblivion wasn't built for comfort. It was built for war. Assembled over two weeks using a combination of K'ethik, Builder and N'vorn technologies and techniques, it was a metal-plated and heavily shielded outpost armed to the teeth with the latest and most powerful weapons the Risen could get their hands on. The living space housed a hundred thousand troops, both ground soldiers and crew for the mighty Risen fleets that called FBO home, and the outer toroid had enough work space and internalized docks to maintain those fleets as well as crafting any replacements they needed, up to and including the powerful Orca Mark II's, the backbone of the Risen's naval power.

With Risen making up the bulk of the forces at FBO, the bio-dome was equipped with a world entity garden larger than the original and the Gagarin gardens combined, possessing crystals from all fifteen avatar races as well as Earth. It's capacity to generate replacement goa was second only to a living planet itself, easily recharging the ship-board crystals in the fleet as well as supporting the personnel on the station.