[color=lightcoral][center][h3]Fringe Space, Draconian Empire, Colony 257G of the Forerunners[/h3][/center][/color]
[color=Peru]Draconia smirked. Were they really so new to biological warfare that they thought the gas would work? She did frown, though, as reports of casualties came in over the network, but she sent a planet-wide order to RTB. It was really quite ridiculous; any planet that's colonized must be terraformed, an atmosphere created and bad gases filtered out, with good ones replacing. Two things can do that efficiently: clouds of nanites and terraformers. This was a colony planet; there were sixteen terraformers on the surface, heavy bunker-like constructs that have a personal power plant beneath them, and their own shields, and every MAV-ULB has a fair amount of reprogrammable nanites for medical or biological reasons.

So shortly after the chemical weapon exploded overhead, towers raised up from sixteen bunkers and started sucking it in, while clouds of nanites rose to counteract unfamiliar particles in the air around troop formations. A Draconian's scale wasn't completely organic, so it did provide some protection. Only the soldiers with their face uncovered were incapacitated; the rest simply hid in the environmental shields surrounding the tanks and heavy infantry units. 

In return fire, more missiles arched up, electronic warfare compartments making it appear there were six to every one missile, scrambling the signals and making it impossible to get a solid lock, and next to impossible to just score a lucky hit on the seven different targets. As their bombardier began its retreat out of the atmosphere and back up into space, a missile struck it. While its shields may be good against energy, and it may have thick armor, antimatter persuaded it to become dispersed into individual particles. 

Dozens of MAC rounds began flying up, their crews safely protected between kinetic and environmental shields. Nanites, too, had been released at each site, keeping the environmental shields relatively untouched. 

Really, if they wanted to use chemical weapons, they should've made it target everything mechanical. Nanites weren't even touched by the gas, and they broke it down and turned it into harmless chemicals without trouble. However, it took longer than normal natural gases due to its nature and origin. Environmental shields had as much trouble keeping the organic-targeted gas agent at bay as it would anything else- that is to say, very easily. Still, several thousand soldiers were killed within a minute, from the effects of the gas eating through eyes faster than anything else, and digging into one's brain and nervous system without much resistance.

But either way, the Draconians recovered and adapted, and were still well within firm control of the planet. They moved to their bases, and made sure to keep from clumping. If they were all clumped in their own separate military bases, it would be far too easy to get precise bombardment to take them all out. Tanks were like campfires in the dark, where soldiers huddled around and watched the walls of wispy, swirling green outside the tank's shields with the unease of a snake under an overhang eying a circling hawk- not in immediate danger, but it would be so if one tried to run.

The enemy fleet was struck down to forty ships in the first blow, and they were getting damaged as they moved to wipe out the satellites. The satellites themselves weren't defenseless- the first few shots at them would miss completely, from false readings, and then as they zeroed in, their shields would flare up for a couple more shots before giving out and self-destructing. Each satellite was a menace, built to inflict as much damage as possible before being torn apart. Even with forty ships, there were at least a hundred satellites immediately in range, and each of them focused fire to both scan enemy ships and get a good look at their structures and how they work, vital for future battles.

They won't be able to last long under the bombardment. Antimatter missiles trailed both great big hunks of metals and actual rounds, armor-piercing rounds that shoot penetrator rods out when it pierces a hull, in an attempt to depressurize every compartment possible to the void. First, the lowest ships- the one that fired the gas, especially- was pummeled by the great MAC rounds and anti-orbit railgun shots, then burst into miniture suns brighter than a nuclear bomb. 

On the ground, Draconia's evil smile began giving way to an enraged snarl, as she realized just what weapon they had used. It was likely meant to be a fallback, a superweapon, but had this really [i]been[/i] a planet of any other species, it was likely they just attempted mass-genocide without even trying to take out strategic units. She respected their thoughts- if they could kill everyone, the battle would be over with few casualties and all the new technology they wanted. Except, of course, they tried to gas what was clearly a modern military society whom they have no idea what they have, with significant evidence to state that this wasn't close to an advanced society- there were plenty of city-sized craters, but there weren't any farms, there weren't any industrial nodes, no significant presence on the planet. That, and a world civil war would have torn up most of the planet, not just a couple battlefields.

[i]The fools! They try to gas us out with primitive chemwar! A good idea, if they weren't fighting a military state who has defended against worse! They will burn! All of them![/i] This all ran through her mind as she systematically began ordering her fleet here [i]now[/i], at the attempted genocide of her people. Weapons output increased; rounds began arcing up into the sky at a slightly faster pace, if slightly more inaccurate. 

Ten minutes later (which really isn't that much time at all, in such warfare), a fleet appeared outside the planet's orbit, a Draconian fleet, of the Forerunner fleet numbers: about two hundred and fifty ships, in a very loose, spread-out formation. Four troop transports were accompanying, of course, and sixty of the ships were Forerunner custom models, each of them with a different set of abilities. One of them was a bit larger than a scout ship, but was completely covered with antennae, dishes, maser communication arrays, and who-knows what else. This ship was the epicenter of the entire fleet, despite its small size, and it took a moment of its powerful electronic warfare capabilities to sweep the enemy fleet with active sensors. For the fleet of 42-and-decreasing, this single ship was probably the highest priority, even if they only used passive scanners to try and look at the fleet. The small scout ship had so many links with all the ships in the fleet, it could easily be assumed that hitting it would destroy the entire fleet's coordination.

The problem was a dozen Forerunner warships that took up the front of the fleet, each one different from the other, each one the size of a battlecruiser or larger. All of them had a slight similarity- at the very front, they had a nose that tapers down to a small triangular opening, like a really organic stubby barrel. From the waves of energy that emanated from it, detectable by even the dullest sensors, a very obviously dangerous weapon, or a superpowerful sensor.[/color]