[X] Activate the diffraction field generators and move out of the area. Hopefully, your engines won't give you away.
No. of Votes: 3
Pyro Hawk
Asmodemus
Nevill
Attention focused solely on the rapid approach of the two red triangles that denote the aircraft. With the kind of lightning-fast decision making you honed during your tenure at Agent Ops, you settle on a course of action and rapidly bark out a series of orders to your crew.
"E-War, get our diffraction fields up. Helm, take us away from the intrusion zone. I don't want to be here when those things get close. Sensors, go to passive only."
Before you've even finished speaking your crew snap into action, fingers flicking invisible buttons and mouths forming silent commands as they get to work. Idly, you notice that the
Return is already trying to determine the nature of the contacts from its sensor feeds through their, somewhat limited, stealth systems are hindering the effort.
Yeah, like it'll figure it out, you think to yourself as you watch your crew work.
"Two minutes to visual contact," someone says, and a moment later a flashing red timer appears in your vision as your DART reads your attention and interfaces with the
Return's sensors to produce a countdown.
"Cloaking at ten percent complete," reports your E-war officer as he grimly stares into his station's broadcast lens.
Tearing your attention away from the map that hovers in your vision like a mirage, you watch closely as the
Return's control systems eagerly respond to the bridge crew's commands; power flowing to and from subsystems as the power-hungry diffraction fields suck down electricity like a half-drowned man would air from every system. Slowly, a rumble runs up through your legs as the
Return's engines throttle up and with a gentle sensation of pressure, you feel the massive thrusters slowly start to haul the bloated vessel through the air; their power drawn straight from the
Return's reactor.
With a quick glance to the display walls, you see the air around the
Return gain a silvery shimmer that shifts and flows in strange eddies as if your airship was caught in a vast thermal, and below you, the ocean starts rolling by as the
Return starts to pick up speed.
"One minute to visual contact," comes the voice again as the shimmering around the hull intensifies.
"Cloaking at forty percent," follows your E-war officer, "all diffraction field generators are charged and are spinning up."
As you watch, some of the
Return's hull-plates start to grow fuzzy and indistinct as if covered in a sluggish blue-grey haze, and you feel your eyes start to slide off them as they struggle to focus. Comparing the timer in your HUD with the estimated time until the fields are completely up, you realise that it's going to be a tossup as to what happens first; discovery or cloaking, thanks to the power drain of your engines.
"Forty-five seconds," comes the status report again as the smoky-haze crawls across the hull like an oil spill on water; a note of stress starting to creep into the cold professionalism of the officer's voice as you spot them starting to fidget in the corner of your eye.
"Cloaking at fifty-five percent."
We better make it, you think as you stir uneasily in your seat.
Returning your attention to the map, you spot the supersonic triangles just as they cross the threshold of the second to last circle surrounding your ship. They're now well inside the range of your missile systems and approaching your CWIS limit, and the temptation to shoot them down is growing steadily harder to ignore though you try your best to ignore it. Slowly, an odd feeling starts to settle on your mind like the gossamer threads of a spider web as you stare at the map.
"Thirty seconds."
"Cloaking at seventy-five."
Outside the ship, the smoky blue-grey haze of the cloaking field suddenly disappears and with it go the wide sections of the hull that it covers. Still, large splotches of the
Return's hull remain resolutely visible, and you can't help but feel nervous as the timer in your vision counts down.
What am I missing here? You ask yourself as your crew continues calling out times and readiness. We have aircraft on an intercept course a minute or two after we arrive here, but how? No one could have warned them, and they can't have detected us as the hull absorbs RADAR, we were mostly running passive sensors on arrival, and the active sensors we were running were disguised.
As you watch the steadily approaching markers, the odd feeling suddenly crystallizes into suspicion and you narrow your eyes as you ponder the possibility.
<Plot target course,> you order you DART and an instant later two red lines spring forth from the markers and spear towards the
Return. An instant before they intersect the airship's location, however, you see the lines pass behind the ship. As you watch, the distance between the ship and the intercept point grows larger and larger as your engines push you away from the intrusion zone.
They don't know we're here, you realise suddenly, they know something happened, but they don't know about us.
"Fifteen seconds," reports the sensor specialist, and a moment later the weapons officer reports that the CWIS system is ready to go on your order.
"Cloaking at ninety percent," reports your E-war officer as he hunches forward and rapidly taps the air. "It's going to be dicey."
Glancing to the display walls again, you see more of the airship's hull slowly disappear as the cloaking field continues to languidly spill across its surface and you can't help but agree with his statement.
"Five..."
"Ninety-two percent."
"Four..."
The sensor operator's voice starts to strain as she counts down towards arrival and you can almost taste the electric atmosphere that hangs heavily over the control centre.
"Ninety-four percent."
The E-war officer purses his lips together tightly, face blanching as he stares at a screen that only you and he can see.
"Three..."
"Ninety-six percent."
"Two..."
Clenching your fists, you wince as you feel a sharp pain flare in your hands as your nails dig into the soft flesh of your palms.
We can't be detected already, you think as you force yourself to unclench your hands, your stiff fingers stubbornly taking their time. Not this quickly.
"Ninety-eight percent."
"One..."
Heart thundering in your chest like a stampeding horse, you can't help but lean forward in your seat as you study the swiftly approaching aircraft on your map. As you watch, you see info panels rapidly flicker around the aircraft as the
Return's sensors continue their never-ending struggle to pin a profile onto the triangles.
<SU-38 Razorback, Eurofighter Hailstorm, A-22 Slamhound, F-42 Rav->
"Ninety-nine percent."
"Zero."
"One Hundred percent. The cloak is engaged and field is fully stable!"
Almost shouting, the E-war officer springs bolt upright in his seat and pumps a fist in the air as the cloaking field fully covers the
Return. Moments later, you spot two rapidly swelling dots appear in the display wall to your left and in a heartbeat, they're right on top of you.
Screaming past with barely a kilometre of separation between you and them, two aircraft coloured the same dull grey as the
Return power into a long curve that sheds incredible amounts of speed and takes them right through the area you previously occupied. Responding to almost subconscious queues, your DART immediately brings up a zoomed in image of one of the aircraft from the hull cameras outside, and you get your first good look at the visitors.
Diamond-shaped wings spread out a full five meters to either side of the aircraft's body with similarly shaped tailplanes mounted on a flat tail section that contains a single gigantic engine. Given that the aircraft approached at Mach 1.8, you can only imagine how much thrust the engine has to put out every second for that to be possible. Consisting primarily of viciously sharp angles undoubtedly designed to mess with RADAR, the aircraft has the same aggressive profile common to all modern fighters, and the heavy load of missiles slung underneath each wing are all the argument you need to convince yourself that you made the right choice in avoiding a fight.
As the slow-motion video plays out, you spot a small black blur splashed across the side of one of the fighter's many missiles, and with a single thought to the
Return's control systems, you order the airship to use its massive processing capacity to try and salvage something from the image. Waiting, you watch as the fighters circle the area like hawks hunting for prey for thirty seconds before, without warning, they curve away and start heading north at a 45-degree angle from their original heading.
As the fighters pull away and start accelerating back up to Mach 1.8, the electric tension in the air fades away as the crew
Returns to normal operations, and the
Return gently pings your DART to alert you that it has finally identified the aircraft and finished processing the image. With a flick of your finger, the proximity map fades away and the report unfolds in your vision like origami art.
Amongst a large amount of dry technical data, you spot a designation for the fighters, F-35C, and note that the reason the sensors had trouble identifying them was that, thanks to interference by Syndicates, their designs were never completed before the US government was made defunct.
Well, that's not the case here, you think to yourself as you wonder what weird set of events could have conspired to allow their existence. Pondering the implications, you replace the report with the processed image and 'huh' at the unfamiliar name.
"I wonder who Stark Industries are," you ask the air.
===
[] Follow the fighter craft as they head North
[] Backtrack their previous heading (towards Cuba)
[] Write-in
