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"We've stripped out a lot of the weapons systems from the most badly damaged Kree ships Jean and company captured, to give us a starting point though none of them are online yet of course. We pushed really hard to finish work on the trap device, it put the rest of our work even here on Mars behind."
Doom nodded, staring from one screen to another, well pleased that his contributions had made such an impact. "When are we estimating the next attack from the Kree will be arriving?"
"Within another week at most. I wish we could be more accurate than that, but we can't. Reed and the FF have agreed to hold off getting involved on anything on their end of things for a few days starting tomorrow, and I've got the Custodes ready to move up here just in case after that. Jean's still grounded thanks to her condition, and Amora isn't really all that dangerous up in space, but the rest of the team will be here. I also have a com connection to Cyclops and the X-men just in case."
Harry looked at Doom. "Do you want to join with one of the teams or take one of the days on watch yourself.
Doom thought for a moment then replied in the affirmative. "I will take two days at the end of every week. I will also bring some of my Doombots and tow squads of Latverian infantry just in case."
He looked at Harry sharply. "You fear as I do that this next force will be a full fleet?"
"Something of that nature. I am also afraid that we can't count on running into a third enemy commander who is willing to come in fat and arrogant." Harry said grimly.
OOOOOOO
Harry's concerns on that score were all too accurate. Commodore Carnit'rika, or Rika to his very few friends was a dangerous, ambitious man who had served as commanding officer of battleship squad, or six two-ship divisions, for five years now. He was of middling height, but wide in the shoulder, and had pure gray hair, cut short to his head, a scar running from the hairline on the left side of his face to the back of his neck. It had been caused by shrapnel from when his command console exploded when his ship was nearly destroyed during a battle against one of the Skrull infiltration ships, the Skrull equivalent of what a human would call a Q-ship.
Rika was due to be promoted sometime in the near future, and he was an expert on solo operations and commerce raiding. This pacification wasn't quite anything he had dealt with before, but the command of a Planet crusher, his new flagship which was named the Devastator, was a sign that promotion was coming, and a sign of the seriousness Ronan the Accuser had assigned to this task, pushing for the ship's inclusion against the logic of the Supreme Intelligence.
He also had access to everything that was known about Earth both from the two previous expeditions and the even earlier meeting between a Skrull Sentry and the group called the Fantastic Four. This gave him enough information to plan out his assault, though he was intelligent and seasoned enough to make certain his commanders bought into it too. He had thus called for a face to face conference before the last hyperspace jump to Earth from the edge of Kree space.
Turning from a screen showing the starry sky of his home planet he looked at the officers of the battleships assigned to this mission. Half of them he had worked with before, indeed two of them had come from his old division, which had been split up before this on various security missions. "I could hope we had more information about Earth's current technological level, but I suppose we will have to be happy with what we know."
One of the other men at the table, a young hard charger named Tab'lekt, grunted. "We have our orders, complete pacification. The planet's inhabitants are to be wiped out or at the very least made to submit by the annihilation of 85% of the planetary population. Even with the Fantastic Four we should have more than enough firepower to do that. But then again, I would have thought We'hnt had enough ships to do that too." he finished slowly, looking at the information Rika had put on another screen in the center of the conference table.
"Exactly. Judging from his last hyperspace drone's report, We'hnt had decided to come out of hyperspace fat and happy right into Earth's orbit. We have to assume he ran into something that took his entire force out before he could get even a single hyperspace drone out. We have no idea what damage he did to the planet, what that something was, or what has been going on in this 'Sol' system since." Rika replied.
"Judging by the information we have on them the Fantastic Four should only be able to disable three, perhaps four ships of battleship class or above." Said another man, an older man than even Rika who had been a battleship captain for longer than Rika had been a commodore.
"Our shields should stop the Thing for a time from getting to our hulls, and while he'll be able to burn through them the Torch should be unable to burn through our ship's armor quickly enough to destroy more than a few of our ships in time to stop the rest from bombarding Earth. In space the other two are no threat. Killing the Four might be tougher, but we can wipe out the home of humanity simply enough."
His eyes narrowed and he locked eyes with Rika. "But if the Fantastic Four have help, then a close range bombardment might not be the best way forward."
"Indeed." Rika nodded, going on decisively. "So here is the plan. First we will be coming out of hyperspace just outside this outermost planet's orbit around the sun, as well as directly above and below the system's aphelion in a similar distance. A long range scan will tell us if they have developed any kind of spaced based defenses to back up the Fantastic Four. We will split up there, jumping to cover the entire system from different angles to make certain that we won't be missing anything."
"From that far out our sensors won't be able to see much, and if we split up that far communication will be an issue." No race had been able to find a scientific way around the light speed limit lag nor had any race been able to figure out how to communicate via hyperspace beyond ship's drones. And the Kree had no telepaths of their own.
"Agreed, but as long as they cannot break our communications net, we should be alright." Rika replied before going on. "From there depending on what we find we will micro-jump into the system, with each division coming in at the angle they have already assumed, including the Devastator. We will come in as one from every direction, pulling the defenders attention every which way. Our objective will be to cleanse the planet, which will be our first target. The defenders, these Fantastic Four or whatever else, can be left to die afterward. I would prefer to leave with more ships intact and the main objective completed rather than go for a clean sweep."
He frowned thinking before nodding decisively. "However, given how little information we are dealing with, we cannot assume we will be victorious, let alone live through the fight. To that end, each ship will keep a hyperspace drone on standby ready to jump with in a moment's notice or the ship's destruction."
There were more than a few scoffs at that, but most of the other commanding officers simply nodded at that. It was actually a relief, knowing that even in death they would serve their empire. Rika nodded back and straightened up decisively. "In that case, let's get this done."
OOOOOOO
The ships came out of hyperspace as Rika had ordered, separated by a distance of several hundred light seconds from their target and from one another. Shields were at full power and enough firepower to annihilate a star system was online, searching for foes. But there was nothing close enough to threaten them, not at this range. The ship's sensors reached out as far as they could with the Planet Crusher's more powerful sensor suite doing so faster and a little better than the battleships' sensors.
Rika sat calmly in his captain's chair, exuding the confidence his men needed to see despite the unknown nature of the threat they faced in this system. At times like this creating that aura of calm was one of the most important things an officer worth his stripe could do.
His sensors techs worked silently as a well-drilled team for several silent minutes before the various ratings had compiled their reports, reporting it to their section officer who moved to Rika's chair, saluting him quickly. "Sir, we have a sensor report but our various sensors do not seem to agree with one another. Or we might be seeing the first sign of what Commodore We'hnt ran into."
"Coms, open a channel with the other ships." The order was redundant of course, his com officer had done so the moment they came out of hyperspace. "Continue Sensors."
"Yes sir." The younger officer replied, his back straightening as he spoke to both his captain and the other officers in the attack force. "Sirs, I imagine your own sensor specialists have reported this, but I will say it aloud. Our gravitic sensors and our planetary rotation database is not reporting the same position for the target planet as the rest of our sensor systems. We have heat traces, light reflection, and every other system in our sensor suite telling us the target planet is here."
With that final word he gestured to the image of the star system on the main screen of the Devastator's bridge, an image that was no doubt being formed on the Battleships' bridges as their own sensors filled in the information. "Our information on the speed of the other planter's rotation around the sun is spot on for every other planet, but not for the target, the third planet out from the sun. We can see where that planet is, and it is at least a planetary rotation behind where it should be. We are also not getting a gravitic return from that planet. Everything else, every other sensor we have, is telling us one thing, the system gravity analyzer is not."
The communications officer popped up a series of screens showing the other commanding officers on their far flung ships and Rika and his men waited the two hoursit took their communications to reach the other ships. Then the officers all reported the same thing, though their ship's sensors didn't have as good a sensors array, and their SGA was nowhere near as powerful, being an extremely power intensive and very expensive system. Indeed, it was nearly as expensive as a superdreadnought.
"Tactical, your thoughts?" Rika asked, looking over at his first officer, who was also his tactical officer in traditional Kree fashion. Despite this latest oddity it was a captain's task to teach his officers, and putting the man on the spot as he had already done with the sensor officer was one way to do that.
The tactical officer nodded slowly. "Sir, I have been wondering and I know I'm not alone in thinking of how We'hnt should at least have done some damage to the planet regardless of whatever defenses the humans have been able to put in place. But am I correct when I say the sensor readings we have of the planet don't show any discrepancy from the earlier readings the Sentry and the Hellion passed on?"
"Yes sir!" The sensor said, standing to attention. "I double-checked that before giving my report. All the heat signatures, the cities on the third planet, are where they should be. The fourth planet seems to have lost its atmosphere in some kind of catastrophic event, but we don't have any information about what kind."
"So, it's some kind of highly advanced decoy, or illusion." Rika mused, nodding his head to the tactical officer and ignoring the unimportant part about the fourth planet.
"That is what I would assume sir. The real planet might itself be covered by a similar illusion field somehow, though the how would be something to discover. A planetary shield of some kind or course yet the type and how of it is well beyond what even our own scientists are capable of putting in place. Judging by the information we have on him however, this Reed Richards might have been able to come up with something, and the last information we received from the Hellion's spy mission says he was not the only genius among the humans." The tactical officer replied calmly even as his eyes gleamed with eagerness at the idea of such a technological marvel, and what it could mean for the Kree if they could figure out the how of it.
"So the real planet would be where the SGA is telling us. Good, that will give us the target then." Turning to the screens the coms officer had opened he ordered formally. "All ships will jump to hyperspace onto the pre-approved coordinates. Shardow, Numalin, Brishtol, and Torvrack will join the Devastator in assaulting the planet, firing plan genocide."
This firing plan assigned each bombarding ship with a sector of the target planet to bombard, so there was no overlap. Cities, mountains, oceans, that didn't matter with the amount of firepower they could unleash. Battleships weren't actually the best for this kind of mission, but their firepower should be enough backing up the Planet Crusher.
"The rest of the ships will hold fire and target any defenders or defensive emplacements that reveal themselves. I acknowledge that the humans might be able to mask their presence somehow by our scanners, and ships, no matter how large would not show up at this distance." Rika finished, nodding his head. "For the Kree Empire!"
Instead of waiting to acknowledge the orders Rika ordered the coms officer to cut the connection. While those orders crossed the intervening distance Rika ordered the hyperspace communication drone loaded with all of their thoughts and sensor readings launched. Then they waited for his orders to reach the other ships and an instant later the Devastator jumped into hyperspace once more.
OOOOOOO
An emergency alarm blared in the headmaster's quarters of Camelot, throughout High Note, the Baxter Building and even in Doom's dual purpose laboratory and castle in Latveria forty minutes after the Kree ships had appeared in the solar system. The distance was such their sensors couldn't make out any details, but the human's own sensors were good enough to spot the hyperspace footprints.
"Emergency, Kree ship's inbound!" Shouted the voice of Pinoptes and the Custodes and their allies responded.
A few seconds later the Custodes minus Magma had joined the Thing and Johnny on High Note, fully kitted out for war, as did Dr. Doom and over two dozen of his Doombots, though these were not the body doubles he routinely used. These were multi-armed gun platforms with only their torsos and heads resembling Doom. Carol too was there, linked in from the command room of Fortress Mars, and she nodded as Guardian turned first to the AI then to her "What do we have Pinoptes, and are you ready Carol?"
"Four distinct hyperspace splashes, situated around the system at the very farthest my current sensor suite can see. I estimate they will jump back to hyperspace for the inward journey soon," the AI reported crisply. It had been teaching Douglas and a few other students at the time its sensors had picked up the readings, but even so he had enough of his attention to spare to analyze them as he raised the alarm. "Unfortunately, our sensors are just not up to telling me more about what made the splashes."
"What they are matter little, if they are here at all, they are here to assault Earth." Doom replied, his voice even more sepulchral than normal coming out of his iron mask.
"Carol?" Harry asked.
"Sir, the gravitic trap array is online and ready." Carol asked formally, her 'Uzume' helmet under one arm.
They hadn't taken the system up to full power just yet, but it had passed all of its physical tests up to this point. What the gravitic trap would do once fully powered up was a question, but it would be interesting to see anyway. "Your um, your little surprise is also still… moving around out there."
"Good. Start it up. Storm, Jean, Torch remain here," Harry ordered. "The rest of the Custodes and the FF with me. Your majesty, if you could split up your forces? Have as many who can move in outer space remain here just in case, the rest should join us."
Jean grimaced angrily at being left behind like this, but couldn't argue with it. And the others being left behind told her that Harry was serious about using them as a final line of defense too.
For his part Doom merely nodded, even though he also raised a sardonic eyebrow under his mask wondering what surprise Harry had put in place. With a few crisp instructions into his communicator the doombots, which had remained in High Note's hanger bay, split up. Half of them flew back into space while the others marched further into the space station to join Doom as he fell into step with Harry.
A moment later they appeared in the receiving bay in Mars. There Reed met them, handing out jet packs. The same variety the FF had used in the Negative Zone, to those who needed them. Reed was already wearing one, as was Thundra. Susan, a week further into her pregnancy than Jean, was not here. She had been relegated to watching Franklin, something she enjoyed, her place on the FF taken by Thundra, who apparently was now in a relationship with the Thing.
From there Harry used his magical powers to pull the rest of the team up into space over the dead, atmosphere-less planet. There they saw the gravitic trap system activate, the spires of the artificial gravity generator flashing and buzzing with energy against the black of space and behind them Doom saw the surprise Harry had emplaced.
Hundreds of tiny asteroids, none of them the larger than a human was tall, were moving through the space in front of them all around the red planet. That space was large, so the effect wasn't nearly as impressive as the asteroid rings in science fiction movies were, but it was still enough to make for a very dangerous area to hyperspace into.
To one side of their current position rested several of the most badly damaged ships from the derelict fleet, their hulls patched roughly in an effort to make them seem like combat worthy craft. Despite that, Doom knew an unshaken enemy would see right through the ruse. Still, with the rest it might prove beneficial.
On top of that Doom, with the senses his mother had begun to train him in the moment they freed her soul from Mephisto, saw the magic that Harry had used to set them into motion. Those objects would keep moving at that same high speed around the area which itself was marked by more magic. "Interesting bit of magic there."
"My godfather was a master prankster, and he also taught me once how to play pool," Harry said, his voice muffled by his mask, though the nostalgic tone still filtered through.
"He taught me how to put down a spell to keep the balls bouncing around as fast as they started out. Certainly kept the game interesting. I have no idea how much damage they'll do to the Kree ships, I suppose that will be decided by how large they are, but they should work to bring down their shields whatever the enemy's size. Now, let's spread out and get ready. I'll be almost literally throwing you all forward just like those asteroids. Be careful, but be ready."
An instant before the teams were in position the gravitic trap array activated. The equivalent of a sun's gravity shadow reached out into hyperspace, covering Earth in its penumbra for just an instant, pulling the ships aimed to Earth towards it. If that power had been allowed to inhabit the material plane, the results would have been catastrophic, but directed into hyperspace the effect was limited. At least on Earth and Mars.
OOOOOOO
Rika gripped the edges of his command chair as alarms warbled around his ship and the Devastator screamed in agony all around him. "Report!" he barked, staring over at first the sensor specialist and then the damage control officer.
"Sir I don't know, it's like we just ran into a gravity well that wasn't there a minute ago!" the damage control officer screamed over the tumult of wrenching metal and the alarms. "Our engines are…Skaza!" the officer cursed suddenly. "We just lost the engine's entirely, coming out of hyperspace now!"
The Devastator came out of hyperspace not like the monstrous shark of space it was but like a drunken sailor staggering in after days of shore leave. The battleships accompanying it were no better. Worse, they came out scattered, even the pairs assigned from each initial jump point were too far from one another to provide any support. Damage reports immediately started to come in, their com systems undamaged, but it was obvious to Rika that none of their ships were going to be jumping home any time soon, not without significant amounts of repair.
Nor were they anywhere near the target planet. If the scanners were right, they were near the fourth planet of the system instead of the third, and…
Rika's thoughts cut off as one of the battleships, marked on his system by the purple of friendlies, went to umber indicating damage. "Sir, we're under attack, some kind of, of asteroid assault? Like someone had loaded a giant gauss cannon with dozens of tiny asteroids!"
The sensor specialist said. "Also incoming ships, they look like captured friendlies!"
"Damage to the port fourteen and nineteen, damage to aft 3," The damage control officer reported, now much calmer that they were back into normal space. "Minimal damage, shields holding for the most part, but we had severe bleed over in the engine rooms, we are down to three shield generators rather than the five we should have, and if the battleships had the same amount of bleed over…"
The damaged battleship, the Procurdo, disappeared, and then the rest were starting to take damage too. Rika's mind raced even as he began to bark out orders. "All ships move into a defensive formation with the nearest consort. Tactical take us to Inheledon's aid, all weapons free on those tiny asteroids, save one battery of rail guns. Those you are to use against the captured vessels coming towards us." The Inheledon was the nearest one to the Devastator' current position.
"Sir we're going to have a hell of a time targeting the asteroids, they don't have any heat signatures and they are damnably fast," his second in command replied. He did so however only after he had relayed Rika's orders to his men. "Suggest we assign at least one weapon out of every three to search out incoming heat signatures of all sorts beyond the ships we can already see. The Human Torch…"
"Excellent suggestion, pass it on to the other commanders Tactical," Rika replied nodding to the man even as his thoughts raced, taking in everything the plot could show him. The computers had now analyzed the number of high speed asteroids that were careening through his scattered formation, and also given him an estimate of the other ships' damages.
With his ships all firing at them they were slowly destroying the asteroids, but even so the things had done a lot of damage, and the bleed over from whatever hyperspace defense system the humans had somehow developed had done a lot of damage to the smaller battleships. Only two of them had their shields fully online, the rest were either down in patches or sputtering entirely. A second battleship, the Numalin, disappeared from his sensors, destroyed with all hands.
The Devastator was of course still combat capable. The damage to the Planet Crusher's engines might have been total, but the rest of the damage was negligible, and as his ship's weapons spoke, they wiped out whole swaths of the incoming asteroids, despite their target's speed. That usage left several dozen weapons systems not currently in use, since they were not designed for even anti-ship defense, but before Rika could decide what to do with them the tactical screen updated with new information. "All ships, see if you can target those incoming groups of heat signatures. All ships are to prepare for boarders."
OOOOOOO
"SHITE! That ship's the same size as the Death Dealer!" Harry bellowed into his communicator, teleporting forward with the Custodes around him. "I'm heading for that ship, that's got to be their flagship!"
Doom's doom-bots and the ships of the scrap fleet had thankfully covered their approach for a time, but as the battleships and the even larger flagship slaughtered them and the billiard ball asteroids, he and his people had begun to take fire too. Doom had taken a blast that halted all his forward momentum, though judging by his roar of affront he was still alive. Piotr had been struck a glancing blow, but his armored form and Juggernaut armor had taken it with surprising ease.
Still, they had come close enough to start boarding the three battleships whose shields had collapsed up to this point. Those shields had healed very well against the asteroid-billiards, but not well enough. Dropping off Paige, Banshee and Nikolai on one and Wyatt, Dani and Piotr on a second however Harry ignored the third, leaving that to The Thing, who smashed into it like one of the asteroids, his shout of 'It's Clobbering Time!" ringing out over the com net.
"Agreed," Doom growled. "I will take out the ship which had the effrontery to assault my person and join you presently Potter." With that Dr. Doom teleported from where he had been flying to directly below the ship which had hit him, flying up to aim his hand towards his enemy. A searing bright spark of energy flew out, and the battleship's shields flickered and died for an instant, allowing Doom to close with the battleship.
Harry grunted in acknowledgement, then shot out his own energy assault, overloading the superdreadnought's shielding in a tiny area. Before the shield's generator could respond he was through and heading inward. He knew that this was sort of grandstanding, going in alone, but the number and size of the ships here made it impossible to do anything else.
This close he was able to dodge the few weapons the giant ship had which could range on him, but it was damned hard, the gunners on the other side of those guns keeping him away for several minutes.
OOOOOOO
Pouring over the data beyond the current battle, Rika closed his eyes, gritting his teeth before opening them and moving over to the weapons stations. Two of the men there had moved over to help their fellows but he called them back quickly. "Do we have enough data here to launch missiles at Earth from here?"
The weapons officer in charge of the Planet Crusher's missile systems had to work at his control for a few frantic seconds, while the others continued to try and keep the human away from the ship's exterior hull. Rika idly wondered who he was, the scanners had spotted someone who could only be the Thing, but decided it really didn't matter. The human was obviously confident enough to think he could take on the Planet Crusher alone, and given what the targets with high metallic content were currently doing to three of Rika's battleships, he wasn't willing to say he couldn't.
"Um… we have a good enough gravitic reading on the planet sir, yes, but it'll take at least twenty minutes for our missiles to reach the third planet from here, and shouldn't we target the planet beneath us? The sensors indicated that whatever it was that dragged us out of hyperspace is based there."
"That is what the stellar cannons are for ensign. Your job is to kill that planet…"
Rika was interrupted as the human reached the Devastator's hull and the damage control officer shouted "Sir, he, he just ripped up a part of the hull! He's inside. The interior security cameras are coming online, blat doors closing. Sector five will be left to space."
Rika moved over in his direction, motioning the missile system's ensign to follow him. His tactical officer met him at the damage control section and the two men looked at the cameras as the human appeared on them.
The reason he had been confident enough to take on a Planet Crusher alone became apparent as they watched, the human slamming his hands down onto the floor of the hallway. A dozen metallic… creatures of some kind pulled themselves out of the twisted remains of the hall's floor and walls, moving forward of the man and into the first security team to respond to the breach.
Rika watched in something approaching shock as the metal creatures, standing about a head taller than most Kree, ripped into the security team tossing them around. Two died in the doing, but they took twenty of Rika's men with them, then the human was there too, lashing out with different colored energy blasts and some kind of invisible assault which exploded a security cannon the moment it dropped down from the ceiling.
The captain and his first officer shared a look and the younger man saluted wordlessly before rushing out the door, intent on taking command of the interior defenses personally. Rika watched him go for a moment before turning back to the ensign who had followed him over from the weapons section. "Ensign, we might well lose this fight, realize this now. But I refuse to not succeed in my mission, and that was to wipe out that planet. Fire all missiles rapid fire, hold nothing back."
The ensign nodded, his pale skin even paler for a moment before he turned to race back to his console. Rika followed him, nodding to one of the other weapon's officers. "You have a lock on the energy signature of that trap?"
"Yes sir," the man replied, moving back to his own station from where he had been helping his fellows finishing off the visible ships. Ships which, Rika now knew, had been nothing more than bait to sucker his ship's attention away from the real threat. "We've lost two of the five main guns, but the others are all reading as operational."
"Good. Fire all the remaining stellar cannons. Destroy that planet."
OOOOOOO
Missiles were not a normal part of Kree or Skrull military doctrine. There were a number of very good reasons for this most of which were centered around computer technology and economic concerns.
For one thing, ship-based computer systems had evolved far beyond what missile based computer systems could deal with. ECCM had far outstripped missile based ECM, so you would have to wait until the opponent's ships were within range of your own computers to do much good. That said nothing about how quickly computers could lock onto and engage missiles with ships weapons. Magnetic pintle mounts such as both races used were hellishly quick able to change from one target to another faster than most sentients could blink, and equally accurate.
So even the human equivalent of a frigate could easily spoof twice its weight in missiles and destroy still more before they ranged on it in turn without true anti-missile systems. On top of this, missiles would cost more than the frigate to actually construct. And they cost more in rare metals and internal systems, their drives being rather fiddly little things. Under most circumstances even the Kree and Skrull felt it was not worth the expense of having them aboard ship.
Planet Crushers were the exception to the rule, and like many such they could prove devastating if used appropriately. Planet Crushers had a hundred and twenty missile launchers scattered around their massive hulls amongst the myriad other weapons the massive ships boasted. Their purpose was to, as the name of the ship class suggested, to destroy planets or targets on planets, in the missile's case beyond the range of their normal weaponry if they could not get within range of the rest of their weapons for whatever reason.
Occasionally groups of Planet Crushers had launched missiles like this against an enemy planet. The Skrull did the same thing in order to destroy said planet despite being unable to actually take the system. It was one of many reasons why the war between the two races was so bloody and drawn out.
The Devastator was the only Planet Crusher in the system. It only had a hundred of its missile launchers remaining, and five missiles per launcher with no way to get the other missiles out of their original tubes. Even going to rapid-fire, the Devastator could only get out a missile per tube every 40 seconds. That gave them only about a maximum of 500 missiles.
But the humans didn't have a fleet between them and the target. They didn't have a fleet with the computers that could so easily detect those missiles even when coasting on momentum. And Earth's defenders were already either inside their ships, or grossly out of position.
About to enter the battleship that he had chosen to be his personal target Doom turned as his armor's computer registered the missile launch from the Planet Crusher. His computer system had belatedly noted the differences between the giant super-dreadnoughts and the Death Dealer that Jean Grey and her group had brought back and had labeled this new ship an example of the second variety of said class.
Seeing the missiles racing off into space away from the red planet he snarled angrily keying in his communicator. "Potter! That ship you're on just launched missiles towards Earth. If they disappear into the dark it's going to be monstrously hard to find them!"
A bare second later he watched the ship fire what had to be its main weapons system. Massive white and silver beams of power flashed out from the ship, so much energy coming off them that Doom realized if they had fired on him or even the Thing and Colossus they could well have been immolated. Luckily they were not the target of those monstrous beams, so large they were almost as large around as an American carrier.
Not so luckily Fortress Mars, or rather the entire planet of Mars, was. The weapons slammed into the planet, tearing through rock and other minerals as if they were not even there. The Hyperspace trap device disappeared, along with dozens of construction droids which had still been working around it. Those beams of energy were also not pulse weapons, they were continuous beams, and they began to literally dig through the crust of the planet, intent on coring the small red world.
"They have also started to open fire on Mars! I estimate they are trying to crack open the planet!" Doom shouted, before turning back to his personal battle as more of his target's weapons tried to range on him.
OOOOOOO
Harry paused as he was about to summon more golems to do his bidding, then finished the incantation, his mind awhirl. Gathering his magical power, he pointed his way out the same way he had come, towards the outer hall he thought though he didn't really care at this point and intoned one of the most powerful assault spells he knew. Fragor unda fortitudine!"
The ravening beam of barely shaped magical energy slammed into the bulkhead of in front of Harry then through it and kept on going, tearing a gaping hole in the powerful ship. But Harry wasn't done. He wrenched his hand to the side, tearing a massive cavern into the ship's side from the inside, trying and failing to keep the beam on a straight line, but after a moment he realized that hardly mattered.
The magical assault hit one of the remaining ship's generators, which exploded, taking out a large portion of the ships side and flinging it sideways. The loss of the generator however was more important than the damage it did, since the ship had already lost two of its generators thanks to catastrophic bleed-over from the damages done to the ship's engines. And two generators were not enough to keep everything on the ship, especially the large main guns, up and running.
The massive beams cut out, and Harry heard Carol shouting thanks from where she had remained inside Fortress Mars, directing the control of the gravitic trap device.
"Carol, quiet down, this battle isn't over yet. Make certain all your people are safe, I bet that attack will have started shock waves through the planet's crust at the very least. But before that tell Phoenix and the others they have incoming!"
OOOOOOO
"This is the apparent route of the incoming missile system before they were too far away from our limited sensor envelope near Mars for us to track. I do not know when along their route they will turn of their thrusters to conserve power for final burn, but I would estimate it would occur somewhere around here." Pinoptes voice was calm as it overlaid a map of the star system between Mars and Earth with over 400 flashing dots.
The A.I. also idly noted the massive coruscation of energy that had dug deep into Mars along one face of it from the Planet Crusher. Jean too noted that out of the corner of her eye as she raced like Storm and the Human Torch out of High Note's command center then through space towards the incoming missiles, moving faster than any Kree or Skrull warship could have over the same amount of space.
Hela was also with them now. She had come up to watch the goings-on having no real interest in fighting aliens, though she was interested in watching Harry's combat tactics. This however was a direct threat to Earth, or Midgard as she thought of it still, and she decided to get involved.
That still left them woefully unprepared for this, and the rest of their forces was just too far out of position to do much good. Individually the attackers could wipe out whole swaths of missiles, but finding them in the depths of space once they cut out their internal power would be next to impossible with their given sensor technology.
They arrived at the area where Pinoptes estimated the missiles would be, and indeed found several dozen there, their internal power still on. These must have been the missiles of the second wave, since they hadn't yet had the time to build up the momentum and slightly divergent flight paths that spelled life for the murderous devices.
Phoenix, Storm, The human Torch and Hela all spread out, swatting the missiles out of space before they could turn off their engines, killing dozens of them. Phoenix was particularly thorough, lashing out, lashing out with blasts of TK power in strength and size fit to wreck cities, while the others were a little more surgical. Despite this differences in style however they were still effective, and all of the third and fourth waves of missiles were destroyed.
After that initial success however, while the main battle raged on, the four of them slowly first ran out of targets. The Torch had gotten lucky and nearly ran into an unpowered missile hurtling through space on momentum, but without power the things were damned hard to find. Ororo too was lucky enough to spot them moving across the blackness of space, subtle differences between them and the background alerting her to their presence.
But as the quartet spread out, they realized with horror that the missiles were just too good at hiding for them to find them all. Ororo's magic availed her not at all here, they had no mind for Phoenix to find, and they were too spread out now to let a saturation attack like that which Jean used to get more than one or two at best. "Damn it Pinoptes make a note, you need more fucking eyes! No offense but this is impossible!"
"None taken Phoenix," the AI replied. "I had not anticipated the usage of missiles like this, none of the prisoners mentioned it, and it was nowhere to be found in any of tactical doctrine we were able to get off the Death bringer's computers of even the computer systems of the rest of the derelict fleet.
"While later it might make me feel better about our failure to not anticipate this sort of assault right, it does not help us now!" Storm said. "Find us a way to find them!"
"Should we fall back and wait for the missiles to engage their engines again?" The Human Torch asked, his voice barely heard over the crackle of the fire of his body, though the fact Reed had come up with a communicator that could survive his body's fire-form was impressive.
"A thought, but your backs would be to the wall at that point. I would recommend that you pull back in jumps of a quarter of the distance between you and Earth, try to find them for a few minutes, then jump again." Pinoptes replied. "Our sensors will find them the instant they power up, but I have no data I can use to anticipate how close they will be when they enter their final burn."
"Let us do that then," Hela said imperiously, her hands crackling with purple and white energies. "You, Human Torch, create the most massive fireballs you can and launch them in every direction. The rest of us will be on the lookout for something that reflects the light."
"Good thinking sexy!" Torch said then shut up quickly as he barely dodged a bolt of something that looked like a cube set on fire. An instant later Storm and Hela teleported them all, with the Human Torch moving with Storm and Hela taking Phoenix.
They got lucky following Hela's tactics, destroying forty more missiles before they came close enough to be seen from Earth.
OOOOOOO
"S, Sir!" stammered a tech from a sensor station on board the helacarrier, his voice rising over the general hubbub in a loud squeak. "Um, you, you better get over here!"
Hearing the fear in the man's voice and recognizing him as one of the techs who watched their Space Watch sensors Nick, fresh from his first vacation in decades, hurried from where he had been doing some computer work of his own at the main command station to the man's side. He and his section had been put in charge of the sensors Tony Stark and Hank Pym had begun to develop to try and monitor anything going on in space, primarily to see what Potter was up to up there. They had had scant success at that, since Potter's magic defeated any planet-based scanners they had, though a few of their older records had shown that several nearby asteroids had disappeared for one reason or another.
Now however, over a hundred red glaring dots seems to be appearing on the edge of the screen heading toward Earth spreading out in every direction.
"Son," Nick said slowly "What are those things, and why they making for Earth?"
"Sir, those are reading like missiles, huge missiles that just lit off their engines! We don't know if they came from cloaked ships or coasted to that point before restarting their engines but they are aimed for Earth. No specific target just, just Earth." The man stammered again.
Nick frowned angrily then watched as a few of the missiles disappeared, and other things started to appear on the screen. One was a massive heat signature, which he easily recognized as the Human Torch. Others were unidentified flying objects though unlike the old Roswell one's these were probably human-shaped.
"The Custodes Mundi," said one of his other specialists. "Holy hell! I have no idea what's going on up there, but I really hope that the Custodes Mundi live up to their name."
"Estimate on their payload?" Nick asked his voice almost detached. This wasn't the first fight he'd ever seen that he wasn't a part of, but there was something dreadful about watching those red dots come closer and closer to the planet he was pledged to defend.
"Unknown sir. Probably… well judging by the size of their engine signature I guess anyone of them is about five times the size of one of our ICBMs. In terms of payload, I have no idea. Even if they're just nukes, we're looking at enough firepower to lay waste to a continent."
"Tony?" he asked looking over the communications officer.
"Already got in touch with the Iron Man, and he's heading up as we speak along with a few of his 'spare suits'. They should be appearing on our screens sometime soon." Nick's second in command replied. The 'spare suits' were actually a term used to describe the first few suits Tony had created that could be remote controlled. They weren't very dangerous since the commands they could recognize were few and far between, but with Jarvis at the helm they could be a decent, if dreadfully linear fighting force.
An instant later Iron Man and his suits appeared rocketing from Washington DC being picked up on the radar first before being passed off to space watch as he broke atmosphere. He immediately rocketed towards two of the lead missiles who were aiming towards that portion of America, or perhaps just above them in Canada, blowing them out of space.
After that everyone fell silent, more and more of the sensors techs and bridge crew coming over to look at the little sparkling red lights of death coming for them and everyone they knew. They all watched as missile after missiles intercepted, sometimes swaths of them disappearing from the screen in a massive unseen explosions of heat and fire, but there were too many missiles.
"Go baby go," said more than one voice, and even a few heads were bowed in prayer around Nick as he stared at the screen.
OOOOOOO
They weren't going to catch them all. Jean had done a magnificent job, clearing out entire sectors of space with her power, but she was flagging now. The TK blast she was using wasn't very powerful normally speaking, but to cover that wide an area was the next best thing to insane, and she was approaching exhaustion. Johnny too was running on literal fumes.
Of them all Hela was the only one who had endurance to spare, but she was also the least able to catch up with the missiles even with Pinoptes' aid in finding them. Not that this seemed to stop her. As that thought hit Storm she saw nearly out of her sight Hela ripping a missile in two with one hand while throwing her sword like a spear well out of Ororo's eyesight. That sword soared for more than several hundred kilometers to impact another missile.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Storm muttered into the communicator even as Iron Man raced through the debris of several of the frontrunners and, though he could not see them the Ravenspire, Forge and High Note in orbit over Earth. Leaving this area of the battlefield to her friends, Storm fell back, getting in front of the missiles using her mutant-based control over solar winds to hurry her along.
She bypassed High Note entirely, zooming down into the upper atmosphere of Earth before halting turning back to stare up out of the gravity well into space towards the incoming missiles. Luckily the missiles were still constrained by the angle of their initial launch, so only one hemisphere of the planet was in danger at this time.
Gathering her mutant power Ororo reached out, taking control of the weather all around her. Then beyond her line of sight, then beyond again. Storm pushed her mutant power to the maximum, wishing that her magical power could somehow bolster her strength when it came to wielding her mutant power. But despite that lack Ororo pushed her mutant power to the breaking point, taking control of the weather of this entire side of the planet.
This wasn't as 'easy' as it would have been on the ground, considering how high into the atmosphere she was, and how much more air per inch that added. But she kept going, gritting her teeth as she felt the power she was daring to try and control beating at her mind, threatening to tear her apart. Is this what Harry felt when he faced the shadows, or when he faced the spirit of Balthakk? I will do no less than my love, I will overcome this!
"I am Ororo Munroe!" she howled to the winds she had gathered, unseen and unheard by any mortal ears. "Goddess of the storm, Chosen of Gaea, love of Harry Potter, and I call forth the lightning!"
Lightning lanced from her fingers, and spread like a web through the atmosphere of Earth. It was a light show to put the Aurora Borealis to shame. So visible was it that even the people on the ground far, far below Storm could see the lightning web, mountain sized streamers of lightning marching in each direction away from Storm's current position.
It was an act of desperation, it was an act of madness. The planet's weather system would be messed up for weeks even with Storm and Gaia later on working together to get it back under control.
But it worked. The last 30 missiles which had evaded everything Jean and the others could throw at them slammed into Storm's impromptu lightning shield, and exploded. Enough power to slaughter a continent went off in the upper atmosphere of Earth, and then faded. Earth was saved again.
Storm smiled widely, her arms falling to her sides as her power faded, failed and broke, and she fell towards Earth.
Before she had fallen more than 100 yards however, Hela was there, grabbing her up into a bear hug that would've been fit cracked people's ribs if she wasn't also being very careful. "That was a magnificent light show my dear, one even the Thunderer himself would have been proud of! You did it!"
OOOOOOO
Cheers erupted all over the helacarrier's bridge, in secret and not so secret federal agencies, military bases, and even hundreds of scattered private and even several million civilian telescope owners the world joined in as everyone who had the eyes to see into space saw that they had been saved. Few knew from what, but the news would spread, no cover up would ever be able to hide what had just happened from the public now.
But Nick, staring at the now cleared screen as the unidentified symbols slowly faded out despite Iron Man's attempt to intercept, or rather communicate, with them, couldn't bring himself to care. The Custodes Mundi has lived up to its name yet again and where does that leave you, Fury? You with your paranoia and your irritation with Potter and his wayward ways. Where does that leave you, when you are unable to do your job and wary of the individual who's stepped up to the plate instead?
OOOOOOO
They had lost, and Rika knew it. He'd known that when he had ordered those missiles launched, but had hoped to salvage something from this. Yet the close in defenders were ready for more missiles now, indeed the entire planet her crusher was surrounded by some kind of energy field, which had intercepted the final missile launch, exploding the missiles almost as soon as they left their ports, doing more damage to the Devastator than anything else had saved that odd energy attack from its own interior.
Indeed, that whatever it was had stripped his ship of exterior defenses, and destroyed much of their remaining weapons. This also included slagging the boat bays, and thus halting the launch of any follow on hyperspace courier drone.
With his ships boarded, with their engines wrecked, and with no weapons remaining to him there was only one more duty available to Rika. He looked over to the communications officer. "Ensign, do we have a translation of, I think it's called English?"
"Yes sir," said the young man softly as the din of battle outside the bridge rose to a crescendo. His tactical officer was doing his best, but the boarder's ability to create more troops out of the very material of the Devastator was possibly insurmountable.
"Put me on," he said simply, hoping that for all their superficial resemblance to his people the humans were more like the Shi'ar in how they dealt with prisoners. "To the humans assaulting my ship, this is Commodore Rika. I hereby ask for the terms under which you will except in good faith the surrender of my ship and its surviving crew."
OOOOOOO
Steve pulled open the small communicator Harry had given at him smiling as Harry's face appeared there, looking rather wan and exhausted. "Harry. You had a damn busy day yesterday. All of those here on Earth thank you."
"Always nice to hear Steve," Harry said quietly leaning his head back in the screen, his eyes closed wearily. "It was close, really close. We didn't see those missiles coming at all, and they nearly caught us with our pants down. We thought we knew their doctrine, which didn't have any place for missiles in it but we didn't have any prisoner who had served on one or had any information about Planet Crushers. We should've figured that those ships might have tricks we didn't know about."
"Still, we survived, Earth survived." Harry went on briskly, his lips twitching in an exhausted parody of a smile. "I'll be getting another soirée about it all, you'll be receiving an invitation for yourself and a plus one. I'd suggest bringing Nick Fury along as yours, unless you have someone better in mind?"
"You're not nearly as funny as you think you are, though I'll see if I can get him into a dress in any event," Steve said with a laugh, before saluting the man on the other side of the magical communication device and turning it off.