Out of the Box, Into the Fire

14th November, 2557
“You did say you wanted creative thinking, Captain."  
The mood of the officers gathered around the holotank was completely unreadable. There was fear somewhere in that melting pot, along with surprise, disbelief, and a curious kind of amusement at the sheer insanity of the AI’s proposal. Furrowed brows, frowns, bemused glances at one another - but Captain Chen’s own face was impassive. Perhaps he was giving the idea some thought; perhaps he was even considering it.
After a few long, pondering moments, he cleared his throat. “Kadia, this is madness,” was the verdict - the same that was hanging on the tip of everyone’s tongues. “This is nothing short of sheer, absolute, utter insanity.” 
“Yep.” The glowing, neon-lit avatar paused in her pacing, before twirling her bat slowly in one hand, almost casually - then turning to the captain with an ear-to-ear grin plastered across her mask. “Of course it is. Want me to walk you through it?”
----
12th November, 2557
The bridge had been quiet for hours; almost entirely silent beyond he faint hum of the Penumbra's slipspace engines, and the soft clicking of keys and switches at the few duty stations still manned. Other than the dull glow of background lights and control panels, the brightest source of illumination was the holotank mounted in the centre, the AI sitting there in a meditative trance, the outline of a dragon making slow, lazy loops above her head.
The stillness was broken by the sharp, pneumatic hiss of the door opening, a figure striding in with practiced confidence. "Evening, Boss," chirped the avatar, looking up form her trance for just a moment. "Took your time getting up here - the Cap went off for his beauty sleep half an hour ago."
The executive officer snorted as she passed, before settling herself down at the command console, idly twirling a pen in the fingers of one hand. "Captain Chen," she replied, "Left early because he had a briefing to give myself and the rest of the senior staff, actually. But then again, you already knew that, didn't you? Being a fan of dipping into FLEETCOM communiques and all that."
"Well, so what if I am? Just means it's one less person you have to clue in to what's going on." There was a light, bright burst of sing-song laughter from the AI, before she continued. "I mean, some lonely research outpost in the middle of nowhere suddenly dropping off the radar? They may as well have sent you the script to some B-list holovid this time." 
A pause, and a sigh. "Well, when you word it like that? Yes, I suppose our situation seems a little cliché. Then again, we've been told to treat it as possible insurrectionist activity, so it's hardly just-"
"Oh, come on." While it was a barely-visible flicker of light on the avatar, you could certainly hear the AI rolling her eyes - or at least, something akin to it. "You think they'd have sent us, a single Paris-class and a couple platoons of marines, for anything serious? I bet one of the eggheads forgot to lock down their comms dish before a storm, or a stray meteor whacked a relay satellite, or something."
"Mhm." The reply from the XO was quiet, dry, and above all, non-committal.
Regardless, Kadia rolled onwards, either not hearing or not listening to her commander's misgivings. "Anyway, I know this kind of thing doesn't really need command authorisation any more, not if I've been briefed on the situation - or, well, if I've briefed myself - but I thought it best to check with you or the Cap before altering our course. It just felt a bit rude to be steering us somewhere else without asking, you get me?"
"And reading our mail isn't?"
"Touché."
"Well...permission granted. It shouldn't be much of a detour from our current patrol not if what I remember of the region's stellar geography is up to scratch." She paused, before adding, "And keep an eye out for anything odd, okay? Don't want anything surprising us, not while the captain's getting his beauty sleep, as you keep calling it."
The two shared a brief laugh, before the AI got to her feet, pulling up a field of holographic stars before her and stretching, virtual "bones" letting out an audible crack. "Sure, Boss, I'll let you know if I see any-
 
----
14th November, 2557
-ghosts? You're seeing ghosts?" The captain sounded just as exasperated talking to Kadia as his XO had, two days ago.
"Yep. Well, slipspace ghosts. Gravimetric pinching rather than restless undead. Maybe both."
"Kadia. I need you to stay on task and tell us what it is we're facing here."
With a flick of one wrist, the AI brought the star chart back into existence over the holotank - the same one as before - before expanding it, zooming into the star system where their orders were taking them. "Back in '36, Admiral Cole managed to ambush a Covenant artefact recovery fleet in this system. Popped most of the ships outright, but a few others were able to limp to the planet before crash-landing. Seems like whatever they found is still down there." On the map, all that was visible was a vague outline of the star, its planets - and small dark patch approaching the orbit of the only inhabited world. "I can only just make it out from this far away - but whatever it is in orbit is big, and it's not ours. CPV, maybe CCS."
Chen glanced over at his navigator, who gave the captain a nod, confirming the AI's analysis. "And I suppose this is some splinter group here to take their toys back, yes?"
"I'd certainly bet on it."
"And how do we stop then?" Piped up the tactical officer, silent up until this point. "We're kitted out to handle a few Innies popping up, maybe an armed freighter, but any sizable purple force is way above our pay grade." 
"Closest backup we have is the Home Advantage, a Marathon-class en route to Capella. Even if they got our message and did an about-turn right away, they're still the best part of a week out." The XO's response was calm, practiced, and completely devoid of the we're up shit creek without a paddle apprehension that it should have brought with it. "So. We're going to need some creative solutions." 
"Hm." The avatar seemed to freeze in place - the briefest of instants for everyone else in the room, but an virtual eternity for her. "Well, I have...I have an idea. You're not going to like it, but it's an idea." Without waiting for a reply, Kadia closed her eyes again in focus, gesturing up and towards the centre of the holotank as she pulled up seemingly unrelated fragments of information. Footage from the Battle of Earth, a gravitational map of the system, calculations for the power output of the Penumbra's reactor and her MAC rounds, data on atmospheric drag and re-entry velocities, and a dozen other things that were too fast to read. 
Of course, she didn't need to do any of it. There was no spitballing, no brainstorming; every detail of her plan had been worked out in the fraction of a second she had paused for thought. All of this was just showmanship, to see which of the officers surrounding her would cotton on to her plan fastest.    
The captain, of course, was first. "So, you're going to open a-"    
"Yep."    
"In atmosphere." The navigator was right on his tail, since those equations looked awfully familiar.   
"Yep."   
"How do you know the grav-plating can take t-" began the XO.   
"I don't."   
"And - wait - hang on, can we put out enough power for this?" Gunnery, this time, asking a engineer's question.   
"Well...probably."   
"Kadia."   
"Yep?"   
"You're being serious, yes? This is your idea?"
"Yep." Another moment's pause, where Chen could swear the AI was winking at him. “You did say you wanted creative thinking, Captain."            
 
----   
17th November, 2557
 
Research Post 0613-14-Theta wasn't exactly a prime tourist destination, its fields of bitterly cold tundra only broken by impractically tall mountain ranges - and, in one case, by the vast, sprawling corpse of a CAS-class assault carrier. Most of her escorts had burned up in the atmosphere, or broken up during re-entry, but the queen of the fleet had made it down to the surface intact, her outline still just about visible from orbit. The small cluster of prefabricated buildings next to her broken spine, however, were overshadowed - literally - by the Covenant battlecruiser hanging over the wreckage. Banshees and dropships swarmed over the length of the crash site, looking for any remaining pockets of resistance that hadn't been driven back to the settlement, where the researchers and small marine contingent were making a stand.    
Far above them all, however, the Penumbra was making her entrance. Quite the entrance. The transition to realspace, in an orbit so low it scraped the upper edges of the atmosphere, shook the ship to her core, with a number of systems buzzing alerts, politely asking their users to never, ever do that again.   
"All pelicans, launch when loaded." Captain Chen's voice echoed throughout the ship, even before its AI could chip in with a comment of her own. "Pilots, once again, you are to maintain cover behind local terrain before the shockwave has passed. Airspace may still be contested, so exercise caution."    
"First MAC round away, sir!" Came the callout from tactical.    
"All right - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, buckle up!" On her holotank behind him, Kadia was the precise opposite of Chen's measured apprehension, and as the frigate began re-entry, her grin only grew wider.    
"Kadia, anything more useful to say?"   
"Sorry sir. Just over 90 seconds until the next MAC round is ready, and a hair over two minutes until we make, ahem, impact. Gravitational compensation is holding, engines at full power, reactor is stable at maximum emergency output." A pause - then a chuckle - as one by one, the buzzing alerts turned into warning alarms. "All that's left to do is find something sturdy to brace yourselves against."   
A wordless nod from the captain, before she sat herself down again, this time speaking on a UNSC open frequency.                                                            
 Down on the surface, the fight was getting desperate. With all guided weapons expended, the invading forces had full control of the skies, and were dropping in right on top of defensive positions. Then, there was the rather odd advice of the would-be friendly reinforcements.   
"This is UNSC AI Kadia, of the frigate Penumbra. To all friendly forces on this frequency, you are strongly advised to withdraw and seek shelter in the nearest reinforced structure. We are arriving to assist, but cannot ensure your safety if you remain out in the open. This message repeats..."
Seconds later, the first assistance came streaking out of the sky; a MAC round, accelerated well beyond normal speeds and superheated by re-entry. The Penumbra, too, was visible in the distance, plunging down through the sky, following another slug tearing its way down to the waiting CCS. The first punch shattered against its shields, the shimmering bubble around the Covenant ship lighting up once, then again as it struggled to dissipate the kinetic energy of the impacts.    
The ship that fired them seemed to be following, headed straight for fiery oblivion at a dozen kilometers per second - but the moment the battlecruiser's shields flickered, even for a moment, a hole in reality opened itself up inside them. A ring of swirling energy surrounded it, the black disk cleaving through metres of nanolaminate just by its sheer existence, swallowing up debris, plasma, unfortunate crew members - and a second later, the Paris-class frigate UNSC Penumbra. The roar of her passing shook the ground, shattering windows, dislodging long-settled debris; and in an instant, she was gone.   
And then it closed.    
The shockwave from the slipspace rupture flung the two halves of the neatly bisected battlecruiser in opposite directions, scattering them across the landscape, swatting banshees and dropships out of the sky like flies. In seconds, the crash site was a storm of wreckage and debris - and through the dust, the cavalry began to arrive. Pelicans to ferry in marines and mop up the remaining hostiles; to evacuate civilians from the holes they had been hiding in, and to reassure them that the captain and crew of the Penumbra were not, in fact, entirely insane.            
   
"Boom," laughed Kadia, to nobody in particular.      
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(Kadia, the UNSC Penumbra, and all assorted hijinks are used with permission from EvenManatee887)
Category:The Weekly