On Opal, a battleship breaks through the sky.
A heavy frigate dips lower in Opal's atmosphere, cutting through the cover of thick, noxious clouds left behind after Smith Shimano abandoned the world so long ago. Its guns bristle as they fire round after round at the octahedral vessel and the small sea of greywash writhing around it. The UNS Toussaint doesn't flinch in its approach as it cuts through thin clouds of nanites, each one stripping it as it passes through. The ship had been entirely red when it entered atmosphere, now it has a number of tasteful silver accents. It comes in as close as it can to the vessel and pounds it with everything it has, a tide of greywash rising up to eat away at it, each round fired into it causing the nanites to swell up and pop like bubbles around lead. For a few brief seconds it's as if the earth were boiling, before the ship is forced to rip itself up and turn for another pass.
Many miles from this point, the UNS Robespierre holds a position in the north. In the southeast the Brahmaputra does the same, the Sun Dragon and its corvette escorts likewise hold the southwest. The battlegroup split into a crude triangle for purposes of containing the swarm at every angle as best as they can. Each of them has a feed being broadcast across Union, Albatross, and IPS-N frequencies. Back aboard the Toussaint, a number of frames stand ready in the hold, each of them recording their surroundings, the feed is broadcast across those same local frequencies. The noise of cannonfire and the roar of the ship's engines in atmosphere overpower most other sound in the broadcast so the chatter is difficult to hear. When one of the Everests begins to pull open the door to the hold, the sound of rushing wind makes the task of picking out meaning in the noise impossible.
When the doors open, all hell seems to break loose as nanites swarm the hold, eating away at the metal within the moment it makes contact. A discharge of energy colors the whole of the feed purple for less than a second as a number of nanites are rendered inert. Each frame levels their weapon and begins firing, punching out the remaining nanite clusters, and this proccess repeats a few times. The frames in the hold drawing the swarm to them, and disabling as many as possible to keep them from devouring the ship. The octahedral ship appears in glimpses through the haze as the punch of each successive round fired from each frame roars over everything else in the feed, and seems to shake the world around it.
Still, little seems to be accomplished. The Frigate's canons have yet to make a dent.
Throwing up occasional hand signs to the rest of the frames is a Sagarmatha, looking hastily modified for the sake of operating as an RPV, the guts of a long range omnihook in place of its cockpit. One of the Everests tugs the Sag's shoulder as it's fitting a fresh drum-mag onto its massive shotgun. As the sound of gunfire lulls, one can just barely make out the Everest saying-
The Sagarmatha turns to face the other frame, taking a second to proccess what it said before going back to reloading its gun. A voice crackles over the broadcast, drowning out the sounds of conflict
"Albatross, this is Captain Samson. Me and my guys'll take the heat off a little, now that we're here!"
The frigate begins to turn, giving a panoramic view of the vessel below as it continues firing, the magazine goes into the Sag's shotgun with a meaty click! before a map of the region appears in the corner of the feed, the triangle formation illustrated on it, alongside the maw vessel in the center.
"We got vessels at points Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie to hopefully keep this thing boxed in. Triangled in? Whatever. Math for this is pretty shaky, but by our estimates it can't make jumps far enough to get outside these bounds effectively. Not faster than we can stop it anyway-"
As she's speaking, the vessel below disappears in a blink, the guns of the Toussaint start to wind down, and one final swarm of greywash blacks out the sky beyond the doors of the hold. Electromagnetic discharge. A round from the shotgun, and another, another, another-
"Way I see it, our only chance right now is to wear this thing down. We can't stay on top of it forever, you can't stay on top of it forever, but if you're able to get on top of it when we're not, and we're able to get on top of it when you're not, we can hit this thing back and forth until it has to come apart. Like- you ever play ping pong? Kinda like that."
Her voice, in spite of being layered over the noise of the feed, threatens to be swallowed up each time she fires a slug into the mass of greywash at the mouth of the hold.
"We're late to the party, so I'm gonna let y'all lead this dance. Just know we've got pieces on the board."
