[X] Head into the parking swarm. That Crown of Thorns might still be out there.
[X] Add additional signature reduction: You already have pretty good signature reduction but this would bring you up to the level of a tac sleeve, at least if you aren't dressed too heavily.
[X] Add subdermal armour: Provides you with light armour no matter what clothing you're wearing. Of course, if you're wearing armour as well, you'll get double the protection.
The group is a little quiet on the way in. The parking swarm itself is in the orbit of Scythia 5, a massive rocky super earth with its own strange ecosystem whose high gravity makes it difficult to exploit. The Deep Ship joins one of its protected bastions and you drop free in the shuttle. Around the planet are various stations and trade posts, all watched over by a massive fortress and several constellations of hunter killers. Most of the ships in orbit are various types of trader, ships shaped like swords or stretched mushrooms, their flanks filled with bright, hexagonal freight containers.
"Hey!" Reizay cries, breaking the tension. "That's a greatship." The vessel indicated is a massive sword shaped vessel currently unloading freight under the watch of several automated combat escorts.
"A what now?" Luyu squints at the massive freighter.
"It's one of the big slow-zone traders. Really fast drive." Reizay says, then hastily: "I had a girlfriend who was a spaceship nerd."
Aletta orientates you and you download data from the sensors around the planet. There's a lot of debris around Scythia-4. Wrecked space superiority platforms and knocked out hunter killers. The huge shape of a Scythian space force super carrier spins in two pieces near the pole, killed by an energy strike in the first fatal instants of the Nephilim's emergence.
"The carriers will be out in deep space somewhere." Aletta is briefly Juketta. "Ready to alpha strike in the event of a full breakout attempt. Hang on." She's Aletta again, apparently having received clearance. You skip. One moment to orient and then jump again, a microjump that brings you in dangerously low over the ocean. Alietta pops you up slightly and lets traffic control have you.
"Shuttle-491, this is Scythian Naval vessel Tomyris, you are entering my air defence zone, maintain course and speed and prepare for scan, over."
"Tomyris, this is 491, we copy." Alietta says. You pull up a view of the Tomyris, a long, double hulled vessel with a lacquered wood desk and an extraordinary witch's hat of radar on top of it. Heavy missiles and laser emplacement track you and the rest of the horizon as you move in.
"About a dozen air defence emplacements are tracking us." Alietta says, voice without emotion.
"Holy fuck." Luyu mutters as the shuttle pulls up slightly and you get your first view of New Ossetia, the planet's capital. You see what she means immediately. The city is a wreck. Once occupying almost all of the delta of an absolutely massive river you can see that the outside are is in absolute ruin. Flooded streets run with mud between abandoned homes, and partly collapsed skyscrapers jut up from winding, thickly green ecological reclamation forest. Temporary buildings, some wooden, rise amid the intact part of the city. In the crattered outskirts, several massive blocky machines lie, blackened and destroyed, their weapons turrets skewed at strange angles.
On a rocky area of the ridge, a complex of black gardener stone stands overlooking the city. The gardener structure, somehow still untouched and on the surface after a billion years of geological rearrangement, has been mounted with multiple defence aura emitters and weapons, only strengthening the inviolable black material of its structure. Several large weapons are mounted in shelters along the ridgeline, draped in countermeasure sheets that seem designed for something other than human eyes. Each is a boxy multi launcher with several dozen barrels, aimed from the dark stone fort to dominate the whole valley.
"What kind of weapons are those?" Reizay asks.
"They're just multi launchers." Mirareki says. "But they'll be loaded with fusion submunitions. I've seen them used against Benedicts and hostile posthumans before. Each of the rockets contains around a hundred antimatter catalysed fusion munitions. The launchers have forty barrels each. Generally about half of the load will be various PENAIDs, laser drones and jammers. You launch all that and the chances are at least one submunition will get through. A near contact fusion strike will kill even a Nephilim combat construct."
"Kind of sucks if you're near the construct though." Luyu laughs.
"I thought the Nephilim couldn't get in this far." Aleitta says.
"Those are Elioud." Mirareki looks at the brutally designed machines. Each is a massive block on tracks, utterly without aesthetics. "The Nephilim's programming doesn't allow them to come into human areas directly, or even really perceive them, but they still figured out how to send Elioud in."
"It should be okay." Luyu says. "Most of the city is underground."
The shuttle touches down on one of the pads at the edge of the space port. The port is a large area of dark quick stone and smart matter around an ancient, grand looking terminal, hangers, pads and shelters. Forcefield snap up around your runway as soon as you touch, and as soon as the shuttle stops its pulled into a small hardened shelter. There's a clunk as you come to rest and then a pause while an inspection swarm is injected. You sit silently as the cloud of biomechanical insects does its work, then sigh as they withdraw, the force field lifting a few moments later after their integrity has been verified outside.
Outside, the port is surprisingly busy. Dozens of shuttles, dropships and lighters stand in rows, being loaded and unloaded for troops and supplies. You see pallets of hard to fabricate high energy cores, lines of close combat tanks on flatbed trailers, fabricator stock and other military supplies going one way and pallet after pallet of what must plant life and stasis wrapped animals the other.
Things have got so bad that they're trying to save a breeding population of the local ecology.
The port is also full of troops. Gaggles of Chrysanthemum security troops in light stealth armour, tac sleeved Sakura mercenaries painted for war in funeral white, a battalion of flaxen haired Lunarian infantry in biotech combat coverings and many pocketed jackets. There are aliens too. A group of Sza artilleriests supervising the unloading of a battery of brassy, egg-shaped meson guns, a squad of hulking Balwar who Luyu gives a toothy smile, and a group of strange, hairy spider creatures stand with a dozen large crystalline devices with the unmistakable aura of warheads, talking to two women in the blue and green tac sleeves of Scythian military in an alien language.
You pass through a grandly ancient glass and marble spaceport concourse and out onto the streets beyond. Here it's mostly a normal city, just with a lot more people wearing tactical gear and openly carrying heavy weapons. Subways gape everywhere, leading into the underground tunnel systems that contain most of the city.
Luyu looks back and then speaks up "We need to figure out what we tell my friend. We're meeting her at a bar near here. I'm pretty sure she's not in the particular cult of Nyx that we got the ship from but she might object to us having it still. On the other hand, that deep ship's factories would buy us a lot of love from the people defending this place."
A pair of combat fliers go over towards the port. One is visibly damaged, one engine damaged and out.
"What do we actually want from her?" Mirareki asks. "Like, it's going to be different asking for a few guides than an entire combat group. Plus, do we actually trust her to know where we're going?"
"I don't know if we should." Luyu says. "She's had my back before but she's still hard Nyxian you know?"
You actually find you don't, but you get the idea. "So, you think we shouldn't tell her where we're going?"
"The Observatory is one of the most dangerous places on the planet, right near the centre of the Nephilim's civilization, so I'm not sure we should really spring it on our guides either." Luyu shrugs. "I don't know. We could, alternatively, use her to get in contact with other people and try to find someone more trustworthy, but that could take time."
What approach should you take?
[ ] Rely on Luyu's friend, tell her about the Deep Ship and the Observatory and buy a bunch of help that way.
[ ] Rely on Luyu's friend but don't tell her about the deep ship and hope Luyu's friendship sees you through.
[ ] Rely on Luyu's friend but don't tell her about your mission, just that you have the deep ship and a desire to help against the Nephilim.
[ ] Rely on Luyu's friend but just say you're here to help fight the Nephilim without revealing your mission or level of resources.
[ ] Use Luyu's friend to try to find some more trustworthy contacts locally who you can reveal the mission and your resources to.
