User:Eik Corell/sandbox

USS Damocles
Upon arrival of the main invasion force into low orbit over Stroggos Prime, it was at first assumed that the ship tasked with tactical suppression of ground defenses, the USS Damocles, had miscalculated its subspace jump, leaving it isolated from the main force, and in range of planetary defenses. However, rather than receiving instant, overwhelming firepower from the surface, the ship was hit by an experimental Strogg weapon; a nanite-carrying energy beam originating from the surface, impacting the ship's communications array, causing the ship to transmit indecipherable and nonsensical gibberish and noise on all channels. As the ship was assumed damaged, a distress signal launched by the now dying crew of the ship was assumed to be merely another glitch. Suspicion only arose when, rather than playing its instrumental role in launching strategic orbital bombardment on Strogg air-defence installations, the Damocles instead sat silent as 95% of the initial invasion force was wiped out by directed EMP weaponry from the surface, after which the ship set a collision course for the USS Tokyo, leading to the destruction of both ships.

Post-battle analysis revealed various critical pieces of information:

1: The ship's communications systems had been left undamaged by the initial strike, but carried through the beam were nanites that infected and subverted it in order to mask their commandeering of the ship. In the initial confusion, the damage was taken for granted and so not a single ship bothered to scan or analyze the ship's sub-systems. Had they done so, this tragic loss might have been prevented.

2: The initial misjump of the Damocles was not an anomaly, but a calculated Strogg strategic maneuver enabled by sophisticated subspace technology, allowing both the detection of local subspace activity, and the ability to manipulate relevant exit points.

3: The Damocles could have done much, much greater damage if it had directed its weapons at its fellow ships, but did not. Examination of the wreckage revealed substantial attempted sabotage of ship subsystems, most notably -- and successfully -- of the weapon targeting systems not by the nanites but by the crew. We believe that the effective sabotage of the weapons subsystem by the crew led the Strogg to improvise and that this is what drove them to instead use the ship itself as a weapon.

4: All remains of the crew were putrefied, revealing the existence of disassemblers. Disassemblers are nanites specifically designed not to build or engineer, but to tear apart organic material at the molecular level. One shudders to imagine the last moments of the crew as their pleas for help fell on deaf ears while they were literally being torn apart from the inside by these horrible, microscopic machines, and powerless to stop their involuntary betrayal of their own brothers in arms.