How to beat Deathworlders
The first call to arms Humanity has declared. They mobilize with unseen speed and precision seven of their mightiest Dreadnoughts, hundreds of transports, and amass fifty thousand soldiers, fully armed and trained on the target.
They are headed to a world Humans scouted as having great potential for life to flourish. How correct they were.
In orbit above the planet Chromathium-2-4, the station Truncated Crescent Ellipses was tasked with conducting experiments to test the viability of Human-digestible flora and fauna living on Chromatoff (as the scientists began to call it for short).
When the fleet arrived, the final message from the station turned out to be true - it had crash landed on the surface. From the chaos of the recordings they received, there was a containment breach and the systems were under attack by some unknown electronic waves and incomprehensible code. A hostile act, but by who?
This was two weeks ago. Whoever it was, they would know the wrath of Humanity. Once we find your traces, there will be no hiding for long.
Preliminary scans show the station was dead and only local creatures and plants appeared, in greater density than elsewhere, but no matter. Just some animals.
The first unmanned craft landed and began exploring the wreckage. All of the digital systems were fried, not a hint of power remained anywhere. Attempts to manually power anything up proved fruitless - the data had been replaced with pure garbage code. Then, the drone vanished underground and went silent. Connection failure.
Orbital sights showed nothing, all frequencies were monitored and were free of unaccounted signals. The next group of drones descended and shortly after touchdown they too were seemingly devoured by the ground, all power and electronic signals cut.
A deep scan showed the same dense biological activity, but looking closer at the data it was like a carpet just below the actual surface layer. And for whatever reason the pulse couldn't penetrate below a few meters. Scanning areas further from the crash revealed a much more detailed and sparsely populated map going down the expected three kilometers.
For the third attempt they kept several drones above the landed ones at different altitudes. The moment the drones on the ground were vanished again, a sudden signal struck the ones floating up to seventy meters above and cut them off as well, but didn't seem to reach any beyond that. The visual was not as detailed as they'd like, but it was enough - the tips of large pincers and antennae and beady eyes. Ants.
The fleet maintained a perimeter around the entire system just in case, and spent half a day consulting professionals and former colleagues of the deceased scientists to get a better understanding of the current situation.
Two experiments the team had worked on before and supposedly continued when relocated to the new station stood out - metabolic acceleration, and unassisted neural interfacing via modified brain waves. Far from the wildest here, such as the self-relocating giant sequoia, but ones that offered a plausible explanation.
Ants serve a variety of critical functions in the maintenance of an ecosystem, so naturally they are a part of most late stage terraforming efforts.
Here, however, something went wrong and they evolved alongside technology at an intimate level. Perhaps deliberately made to do so.
They are spreading fast too. Twelve hours ago the "carpet" of underground ants was roughly two square kilometers. Now it was close to three and a half. In mere weeks they may spread across the entire continent, perhaps make it across (or below?) the seas somehow and ravenously consume all life on this planet before succumbing to extinction themselves.
This world is bountiful. Also, we're here already. Hmm...
Eh, may as well. Plenty of us have seen Starship Troopers and only joined to hopefully one day shoot at alien bugs. Guess these are more like home grown critters, but whatever.
With that brazen attitude (and a quick orbital bombardment) the troop ships landed, well, were forced to crash land the final few meters, but whatever electromagnetic warfare these ants were throwing our way didn't account for reinforced alloy armor and hand-held rail guns. Their sharp pincers, acid throwers, and thick carapaces did however.
Actually, fucking hell, they move real fast underground. Uhh...
This isn't looking so good in retrospect. Did they add cockroach DNA in these bastards too? Some of them literally don't care about losing their head, what the fuck!?
Okay, holy shit, abort mission! Good thing we still install regular ignition engines as an added redundancy to the military ships. Not very fast or efficient, but screw you, burn beneath the thrusters. BURN!
*deep breath*
Okay. So. We lost 831 soldiers, and 4625 are injured. And the ant casualties don't matter cuz they're ants. Super mutant ants. Who are going to take over the world if we don't nuke them. Which might not work anyway because HUMAN scientists made them.
Hoisted by our own petard or something.
Right, let's just chalk it up as a... military exercise gone wrong and quarantine the planet. Wait, make that the whole system.
...so this is what it must've felt like to lose the Emu War...
