Xamoyan animals's Story

The sounds of the swamp water bubbling masked the sound of movement. Something with scaly legs with with feathered coats were moving about in the jungle. These were new to the ecosystem, quite easily able to disrupt it and make it their own. Xamatoraptors as they were known on their home planet.

All this ruckus was stirring up not only the raptors but the other animals imported in to this strange new land to them. Things like spinosaurs, giant crocodilians, and other strange and dangerous creatures were loose in the jungles. Some were hungry for new meat fresh for the taking, while others were peaceful yet territorial.

They adapted beautifully to this swampy jungle, the herbivores could even tolerate the normally toxic plant-life!

As the Aschen fleet prepared for the operation, several dozen additional contacts began to filter in through the blackness of space. Roughly a dozen additional Aschen warships flickered into high orbit above Sky's Edge, the Reverence II 'Esteem' was among them. Once in position roughly one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers above Admiral Clegg's fleet, the Esteem began to initiate tactical maneuvers.

The arriving fleet showed up as shimmering green icons on the holographic display, and Admiral Clegg offered a scowl as EVE chirped to life.

"Admiral, I'm receiving revised objectives from the Esteem."

"Keeper of Abbasid, this is Esteem Actual, disregard all black file protocols disseminated by Intelligence, and revert to standard protocol, you've done your part, now let us do ours."

Admiral Hanley's voice echoed through the Keeper's CIC, and Admiral Clegg simply shook his head.

"Acknowledged, Esteem Actual, taking position now." The Admiral replied as he keyed the comms.

The Esteem, and her escort fleet took position, moving into an elongated delta formation as several hyperspace windows began to open up, and roughly a dozen starships that were uniquely not Aschen. Each of the new type of vessels were much smaller, more streamlined, and vaguely resembled bluewater ships, those who frequented the trade circles would recognize them as warships of the Taiyou Empire. Each one of the Taiyou ships bore a blue stripe along their hull, and their radio identifiers showed them as peacekeepers operating under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Defense Force.

With their movements coordinated, the Esteem, and the small floatilla of Taiyou ships began to move towards the planet below.

Hanley had already began the planning phase, they would first seize control of major population centers, as well as major infrastructure points, from there they would move out into the jungle. With strong beachheads established, the Admiral knew it would only be a matter of time before the rebels had been routed.

Slowly, Hanley grabbed the railing of the Command Console as the Esteem shook slightly, slipping into the transition point between vacuum, and atmosphere.

Amidst the chaos, Roland took a deep breath. He spoke clearly into the transmitter using a speech-to-text-to-speech conversion dictation device. The resulting voice was clear and monotoned although maintained the volume and emphasis with which he spoke. The signal appeared to originate from the Command Carrier’s transmitter, as well as every spaceport on Sky’s Edge.

“Hello, Admiral. I’m requesting that you cease this clumsy display of power. This is a planet of warlords. Like the land, they’ve grown into hostility long before your lot ever claimed dominion out here. They adapt to survive. So go ahead, burn this world. The people here will continue to rise from the ashes and their children will finally see who they should have been fighting all this time. End of transmission.”

Roland looked at Jack and smiled. The tension was as high as ever, but Roland could not help but feel a little pride in telling an Aschen authority what for. Behind the shallow gloating, he was genuinely unsure what was going to happen. He knew the planet was well armed, it was just up to those factions to set their sights on the common enemy.

~Elsewhere on Sky’s Edge~

In addition to their traditional armaments, the neverending arms race on Sky’s Edge had resulted in the procurement or development of many fascinating tools of destruction.

A large manned turret was embedded in a jungle settlement, with a 20ft lightning rod on top of a large open vacuum tube. A stray fighter was moving out to investigate the approaching Taiyou ships. The woman manning the turret followed it, aware of what it was doing. However this fighter was from an opposing faction.

She turned to her male superior with the telescopic-binoculars. He turned to her and nodded, smiling. Her eyes lit up, and a devilish smirk struck her hardened expression. She pulled a large lever to the left of the turret and a series of lights lit up all along the lightning-rod. In the turret’s line of sight, past the fighter it was aimed at, a series of dark cumulus clouds amassed together. A few moments later-
*CRACKOOM!!!*
A bolt of lightning came from the clouds and hit the fighter, frying its systems and blowing off of a wing sending it veering off course into the jungle canopy. The Cloud Cannon’s pilot cackled, swinging the gun around to the right and keeping its sights on the Taiyou ships as the distant clouds started to re-align themselves.

Her superior used a primitive comms unit to alert four other mortar crews to abandon camp and man their respective Cloud Cannons.


The fighter had emerged from underneath a lake in an underground hangar. Nine more shot out to locate the Cloud Cannon that took out their comrade, uncertain whether the Taiyou ships were worth worrying about. They were understanding, however, of the clouds amassing above them.

Each fighter was armed with what was known as a Colour Bomb, a remotely detonated smoke bomb that spreads an incredibly thick, bright multicolored smoke in a 10 mile radius. The smoke is thick enough to act as paint for anything that comes into contact with it. A technology appropriated from mass exterior painting tech, the Colour Bomb was used to blind spaces in atmosphere or on the ground, as well as paint its moving targets that otherwise would try to camouflage themselves in the jungle.

They were also equipped with simple Light Beams, essentially hyper powerful spotlights that fired a concentrated UV ray. They could burn through flesh, set standard foliage on fire, and a sustained beam could burn through steel. Ordinarily, the power on these would be toned down to act as standard spotlights.

As for their ballistic weapons, average 90mm cannons for tearing shit up.

One Colour Bomb was fired at the origin point of the thunderclouds (possibly in the path of the Taiyou ships), intended to blind the Cloud Cannon’s target whereas another fighter bombed the jungle in a rough estimation of where the pilot thought it was. They were not mathematical geniuses, and the Colour Bomb’s boundary was a couple miles off of the weather-manipulating artillery.


Chaos like this was consistent in most uninhabited spaces across Sky’s Edge. Civilisation and agriculture was frequently abandoned in these rapid skirmishes for land, only to be taken back when the enemy (or a new faction) showed up with armaments designed to counter what had resulted in their defeat. Bladder Mines for orbital bombardment, Weirdness Sludge for bio-confusion, and Evolution Rays to ruin degradable materials in inefficiently designed tech.

It was likely that EVE would know what the militias called their improvised and traded weaponry, and they only cared enough to hide themselves from whom they were fighting. The exact details of their latest tech, however, would have to be learnt through experience.

The commotion in the jungle canopy would not go unnoticed. As the fighter crashed into the trees and eventually into the lake, this attracted the attention of curious beings.

On its home planet it was known as Tarturoxamos, an evolved species of Allosaur easily 30 feet in length and was 3 tons of pure muscle. There was only one as they were solitary hunters, but they would not be left alone for long. In the underbrush were several Xamatoraptors, their reptilian gaze fixated on both the giant predator and the potential meal in the fighter.

The Allosaur came close, its snouting wrinkling as it sniffed out the new object. Its mouth was lined with razor sharp teeth and its arms were tipped with similarly sharp claws with dexterous hands.

Once the Esteem slipped into the atmosphere, the roar of it's gargantuan engines reverberated far below, amidst the rugged jungle, and amidst the swamps, and the rugged mountainous terrain. Hanley was watching the display from her command console, some kind of energy weapon, it appeared these natives had been amassing quite an arsenal while the Empire's eye was turned. But they had a job to do, and Hanley turned to face another woman, this one wearing a dark, olive green jacket, with an unusual insignia pinned to the collar.

"We won't win this from orbit, and glassing the planet would embolden other insurgent groups." The woman said, clasping her hands behind her as she surveyed the holographic table in front of them.

"Let me handle these gritidiim." The Cosmoran woman remarked, keeping her hands clasped behind her, as she kept her eyes on the jungle below, represented on the three-dimensional hologram. Nabaal knew the place of Admirals, and it wasn't on the ground, it was among the stars. Lord General, the last vestige of an old military branch, finding new and reinvigorated use among insurgent groups, and rebellions within the Empire. She was the Empire's attack dog, the Butcher of Ruston, Lord General Nabaal, with wispy brown hair, and a tanned visage from life in the unforgiving deserts of the Cosmora Archipelago.

"Admiral, that Plateau there, deploy the prefabs there, and the Fiiskire." She instructed. "If you could, and then it would be wise to pull your fleet into high orbit." Nabaal smirked. "Oh, and we can't have the Taiyou fight all of our battles either, I'd prefer it if they stayed aboard their ships, this is Aschen problems, and they require Aschen solutions." Nabaal remarked, while she placed a hand on Admiral Hanley's shoulder, patting it twice, before turning to walk around her, and out of the CIC.

Hanley simply grit her teeth, she was too proud to admit it, but the filthy colonial was right, this was her domain, not the Admiralty's. So the Admiral looked down to the display, and highlighted a landing location.

Above the Jungle, with shields flaring to life with energetic eddies, the seemingly unnoticed Reverence II slipped through the clouds, and began to project a brilliant violet beam of light onto a large plateau overlooking a marshy valley that was riddled with a river that snaked through it.

Massive doors opened up underneath the Reverence II, echoing through the jungle below as metal snarled, groaned, and barked it's protest, these massive doors retracted, moving aside armored plates, and opening up wide, exposing a maw that was roughly a kilometer long, and five hundred meters wide, one could look up into the gaping hangar bays of this massive supercarrier, and see a handful of Aschen cruisers, suspended from trusses embedded in the ceiling of the bay, while a large vehicle, one that could be described as an aircraft carrier on treads began to descend through the gravity beam.

This carrier clocked in at one hundred and twenty five thousand long tons, and five hundred and sixty eight meters in length, it was a slow, lumbering beast that would serve as a base of operations for the Aschen ground forces.

With the Fiiskire deployed, crushing everything underneath it with a deafening 'crunch!' that echoed through the entire valley, the Reverence II ignited it's gargantuan engines, while the bay began to slide shut, shields flaring back to life. Slowly, the thirty kilometer long Planetary Assault Carrier began to gain altitude, while the crew of the Fiiskire was identifying travel paths for it to take, Lord General Nabaal at home aboard it's bridge, surrounded by instruments, steadying herself as massive engines caused the Carrier to lurch forward.

"Let's deploy Construction vehicles, clear this foliage and get the beachhead established. Keep your eyes on the scanner." Nabaal ordered, wincing as the sunlight began to shine through the windows, illuminating the Bridge.

Behind the Fiiskire, a massive ramp opened up, revealing a small army of bulldozers, and lumber harvesting trucks, slowly, they moved down the ramp, and started to work clearing the trees, and the undergrowth by cutting them down.

---

The small group of Taiyou ships moved through the Multicolored clouds with little hindrance, their advanced sensors meant they did not need to rely on visual cues, unimpeded, they touched down in a body of water south of the continent, with no further orders, they remained in position, while the Esteem began to ascend back into the atmosphere, any attacks against it would be rendered largely ineffective against the Reverence II's Gargantuan shields.

Meanwhile the jungle simply watched and waited, for now it yeilded to the orders of Hanley's men and their machines. However, that wasn't to say it was without it's defenses. The jungle held dangers of it's own that these men were now subjecting themselves to, things that the locals spoke of in hushed tones for fear of bringing "la madre tierra's wrath down upon them. The locals were also fond of supersitions and rituals, anything that could potentially offer them an edge against their enemy neighbors. These were things often brought to them along with the cargo and crew of any ship that happened to stick around long enough to trade. Due to this Sky's Edge was a strange mash up of many cultures across the stars where many a young man or woman thought there might be easy fame or fortune to be had for themselves.

"You think that's going to work Cossack?" Rei asked more amused than not. Most people in her experience didn't have the guts to tell the Aschen where they could stick their gigantic troop carriers. But she had seen the trick he had pulled off, managing to bury their signal in noise of the planet and shadow generated by the Aschen ships. It wasn't something she had ever really thought of, but it so far had bought them a bit of time, and that was better than nothing. "Because I've never known the Aschen to be terribly smart in the department of leave it the fuck alone."

The warlords of the planet would more than likely take this as an invitation to use some of the worst weapons they'd managed to devise to date. Never mind the discrete, signal-less, bladder mines planted in the jungle where Hanley's men forged a path forward, keen to bend nature to their will. Instead, there were things that the Aschen hadn't yet dreamed could come out of a back water planet to be seen.

Sky's Edge and it's population had had centuries to cultivate their collective hatred against their so called lords and masters that the Aschen deigned to call themselves, into something not unlike a fine wine. And this was something that the Children of Ash had taken full advantage of. Quietly and carefully, they had taken time to refine this anger, this collective hatred of otherness, into a brilliant and crystalline suite of emotions, thoughts, and things. Things that were especially designed to communicate their hatred against those who would have left them forgotten, and abandoned.