Post by Charlotte on Jan 19, 2019 22:36:41 GMT -5
TA'A CHUME'DAN, HAPES
The First Hour
"Can we be certain this is not a Chiss weapon?"
"What do you want me to say? Orbital patrols report nothing. Our agents report nothing."
"Yet this obviously is something."
Another voice: "They probably think this is us."
"Can we be sure this isn't us?" For some in the room, gathered around the primary projector's stations, it was just as absurd a question as when "us" had been "Chiss" a moment before. But it quieted others. Those others were invariably those turned cynical by proximity to the ongoing political games that had never fully quieted behind the Hapan throne. There were many, many Hapans who did not like the current arrangements with the vanquished Mandalorians, and of those Hapans some had power.
What it looked like on the holo being transmitted by the Battle Dragon Yelora Dowen was a high-velocity large-object impact to Mandalore's northern hemisphere. Mandalore's glow brightened the blue-tone image and the planet's rotation gave the illusion of acceleration as the Yelora made a course correction.
Below the real image were others color-corrected by accompanying data and sharpened. One monitored heat distribution across the planet and throughout its atmosphere. Others monitored radiation, atmospheric composition, and anything else they could net from the Battle Dragon or other ships in orbit.
Every image showed Mandalore with a glaring storm of disturbance in the same place, centered in a northern desert plain. On the true color image, the disturbance was a blood red plume of debris, growing fast. In under sixty standard minutes, the debris shot into the sky already spread to cloak nearly a sixth of the planet, propelled by hurricane-force winds. Projections suggested that in under a standard day all of Mandalore would choke under the cloud. For any survivors beneath it, it was thick enough to hide the System's sun, and trapped within it was a heat that would be turning the sky into fire.
That was part of why it seemed so much like the strike of a giant comet or asteroid. Punch a planet hard enough, and the shock alone could start a chain reaction of catastrophic proportions. But there had been no comet or asteroid.
At least, no ship reporting in in those first minutes had any evidence of one, visual or otherwise.
That was not the only strange thing.
The Yelora Dowen should have been getting readings from within the plume itself, but could not. Nor were any comms functional within the growing disturbance. An early probe, deployed almost immediately as the emergency triggered, had been silenced upon entering the plume and had not yet re-established contact. Without it, analysis even of the material ejected skyward was proving difficult. The models for impacts, being run against what could be seen from the outside, returned all kinds of discrepancies that seemed to contradict known scenarios: the debris moved too fast in one place, too slow in another, and Mandalore's features couldn't quite account for the oddities. Preliminary analysis of the crust-shattering shockwave suggested a deformed shape to it that as yet made no sense. If this was a high-velocity impact, it wasn't fully behaving like one.
Yet still, in the Fountain Palace, no one thought any of these things would long remain a mystery. It was early yet. If it was not a rock or iceball they'd missed (the most likely answer, shaming as it was), then they all wanted to know who. No one honestly wondered what. Not even with extraordinary hivemind activity looming large in recent memory.
They might not even have been so quick to launch the probe and entertain the idea that this was an attack save for a single fact:
A tempting cluster of clan leaders had been within eighteen kilometers of ground zero. And with them: the Mand'alor.
The First Hour
"Can we be certain this is not a Chiss weapon?"
"What do you want me to say? Orbital patrols report nothing. Our agents report nothing."
"Yet this obviously is something."
Another voice: "They probably think this is us."
"Can we be sure this isn't us?" For some in the room, gathered around the primary projector's stations, it was just as absurd a question as when "us" had been "Chiss" a moment before. But it quieted others. Those others were invariably those turned cynical by proximity to the ongoing political games that had never fully quieted behind the Hapan throne. There were many, many Hapans who did not like the current arrangements with the vanquished Mandalorians, and of those Hapans some had power.
What it looked like on the holo being transmitted by the Battle Dragon Yelora Dowen was a high-velocity large-object impact to Mandalore's northern hemisphere. Mandalore's glow brightened the blue-tone image and the planet's rotation gave the illusion of acceleration as the Yelora made a course correction.
Below the real image were others color-corrected by accompanying data and sharpened. One monitored heat distribution across the planet and throughout its atmosphere. Others monitored radiation, atmospheric composition, and anything else they could net from the Battle Dragon or other ships in orbit.
Every image showed Mandalore with a glaring storm of disturbance in the same place, centered in a northern desert plain. On the true color image, the disturbance was a blood red plume of debris, growing fast. In under sixty standard minutes, the debris shot into the sky already spread to cloak nearly a sixth of the planet, propelled by hurricane-force winds. Projections suggested that in under a standard day all of Mandalore would choke under the cloud. For any survivors beneath it, it was thick enough to hide the System's sun, and trapped within it was a heat that would be turning the sky into fire.
That was part of why it seemed so much like the strike of a giant comet or asteroid. Punch a planet hard enough, and the shock alone could start a chain reaction of catastrophic proportions. But there had been no comet or asteroid.
At least, no ship reporting in in those first minutes had any evidence of one, visual or otherwise.
That was not the only strange thing.
The Yelora Dowen should have been getting readings from within the plume itself, but could not. Nor were any comms functional within the growing disturbance. An early probe, deployed almost immediately as the emergency triggered, had been silenced upon entering the plume and had not yet re-established contact. Without it, analysis even of the material ejected skyward was proving difficult. The models for impacts, being run against what could be seen from the outside, returned all kinds of discrepancies that seemed to contradict known scenarios: the debris moved too fast in one place, too slow in another, and Mandalore's features couldn't quite account for the oddities. Preliminary analysis of the crust-shattering shockwave suggested a deformed shape to it that as yet made no sense. If this was a high-velocity impact, it wasn't fully behaving like one.
Yet still, in the Fountain Palace, no one thought any of these things would long remain a mystery. It was early yet. If it was not a rock or iceball they'd missed (the most likely answer, shaming as it was), then they all wanted to know who. No one honestly wondered what. Not even with extraordinary hivemind activity looming large in recent memory.
They might not even have been so quick to launch the probe and entertain the idea that this was an attack save for a single fact:
A tempting cluster of clan leaders had been within eighteen kilometers of ground zero. And with them: the Mand'alor.
