[h2][center]Shōrino'ba[/center][/h2]

The arrival had been right on time, just as was in the schedule. The only civilian ships nearby the Iscandarian fleet were old ore freighters on their way out to the asteroid belt, vessels nobody would miss, yet would still be mad enough about losing to justify a war. The last time the Abh had contacted alien life they had been thrown into a seemingly never-ending ground war on a homeworld. They knew better than to blindly trust aliens bearing olive branches, after all, one could easily fashion a makeshift spear from such a branch.

"We read you, Servius. Please dock with Elevator #8, we will bring your envoy down from there. The coordinates are included in this message, the Empire welcomes you to Shōrino'ba."

Everyone knew the aliens wanted to land. They had already put themselves into the perfect orbit, but the Empire wasn't about to let a bunch of alien starships touch down on their beloved homeworld. Aliens, as everyone knew, pumped their spacecraft full of antimatter as fuel and ammunition. A single pin pulled, a single slight magnetic disturbance, and an entire hemisphere could be vaporized in an instant. Normally this was looked on as stupid, but it suddenly seemed very cunning when one realized a diplomatic craft could be used as a disguise for a genocidal bomb.

The Empire was not going to war again, not if they could help it. Luckily for them, everything they had heard about the Iscandarians had been positive. They preached peace and cooperation, with the overarching goal of creating harmony in all things. Officially. That was what had been heard officially. Unofficially, travelers brought back with them stories of cultural genocide and mass graves on planets far and wide. Whether these stories were but the delusions of conmen like the dog-headed people of the North or the truth hidden behind the curtain were yet to be seen.

[h2][center]Somewhere in Deep Space, IAS Tachibana[/center][/h2]
The gigantic Tenno-Class Battleship coasted through space, riding the space-time ripples created by its warp coils like a dandelion seed in the wind. It was the pride of the Tachibana family, which had cemented its power within the Empire by laying claim to and developing the most isolated parts of the Rissan homeworld. At the time of the commissioning of titles after the war, they had been thought to have chosen the short straw by taking the largely agrarian continent that straddled the equator (and also happened to have a giant jungle right in the middle of it). Now, everybody wished they had demanded what had become an industrial center for the entire planet.

Having a need to continue their expansion, the house had sent off their flagship and its support fleet to search for planets that could be colonized. Or, barring that, planets that still hadn't quite gotten a hold of the internal combustion engine. The talent they seemed to have for developing the undeveloped would be easily applicable on both. Now, however, they found themselves in dire straits. Though their great warship could easily make it back to the homeworld, it had performed one too many orbital insertions and found itself unable to muster enough fuel to insert into a stable orbit around Shōrino'ba. The ship might be able to make it back to a less massive planet in the Empire, but it also happened to be short on helium-3. If they didn't find more of both soon, they would find themselves speeding through the universe at FTL speeds, unable to ever stop.

And so they had chosen OXS-897, a system that was full of helium-3 according to old studies. If they could at least get the reactor working, they could harvest gas from other planets in the system to limp back home.

"Are the calculations complete?" Asked Ginchiyo, having just entered the bridge.

"Yes, Ma'am." Responded the helmsman, turning to face the leader of the house. "The warp plume is expected to miss all systems within a two-hundred light year radius. By that point, it will have dissipated anyways."

"Good job, all stations prepare for warpout!"

She sat down in the captain's chair, strapping into her harness. Technically, they weren't actually needed since warp travel didn't actually involve acceleration of any kind, but it never helped to be prepared. Maybe they would need to make an emergency burn to miss an alien starship. If she wasn't strapped in, she would be thrown across the bridge and probably end up with some bone fractures. Not the way anyone would want to start the day.

The projected warp coils disappeared as their negative mass flew off into space, collapsing the warp bubble around the ship. A great beam of radiation and assorted particles was blasted away from the aft of the ship as if it was a shooting star, the plume continuing well into interstellar space. The area surrounding the ship came into view, as did the radio signals and RADAR signatures of all the nearby objects. Unfortunately for the crew, who were hoping for a quick, makeshift mining operation found themselves staring at seven alien starships. A proximity alarm sounded as the ship automatically took evasive maneuvers to avoid the nearest ship, which happened to have two odd protrusions from its hull and seemed to be devoid of any heavy weaponry.

This, of course, was the problem with warp navigation. Nothing goes through the bubble. When you're going faster-than-light using warp coils, you're completely blind. You could be jumping into the middle of an alien fleet belonging to a nation that has been at war with you since about halfway through your voyage. Your homeworld could have been glassed while you were headed to do the same thing to the enemy, and you would only learn about it after your return. Luckily, the collision evasion systems on the [i]Tachibana[/i] were designed to leave plenty of room for errors, and the ship had practically no chance of an impact.

"Shit!" Screamed Ginchiyo "Tactical, load main guns with Type 1 rounds, secondaries with Type 3!"

"Yes Ma'am!"

"Engineering, how long can we run the shields?"

"Ten minutes, Ma'am!" Came the reply over the intercom. "If we siphon engine plasma from our torpedo bomber wings, we can extend that to half an hour."

"Siphon engine and weapons plasma from all of our small craft, dammit! We can't skimp on the shields!"

"Understood, Ma'am!"

The vessel was engulfed in a giant, purple bubble shortly afterwards. The turrets turned to aim at their targets, with most of them aiming at the ships that actually looked like they had weapons. It was a threatening action, sure, but Ginchiyo wasn't about to let ten thousand men and women be killed because she wanted to look nice. The ship could definitely take on what they were looking at, assuming the outlying ship didn't have any weapons. Tenno-Class Battleships were the best vessels the Empire had ever produced.

Then again, the greatest "steel and gunpowder" battleship had been sunk by a wing of bombers. One always had to be well aware of the fact that skill will always best power. The newest fighter jet with a rookie pilot would always be shot down by a veteran flying a last-gen plane. Besides, it wasn't as if the Empire wanted to fight a war against another interstellar power. If they could manage to avoid it, they would. 

"Send an audiovisual dictionary to all ships, then open a channel with them."

The comms officer tapped out the series of commands on his computer terminal, then turned around and nodded at Ginchiyo to signal that the channel was open.

"This is Admiral Ginchiyo, currently in command of the battleship [i]Tachibana[/i]. I humbly apologize for our intrusion into this area of space, we meant no disrespect. We are on an exploration mission in search of suitable colonization targets, and dropped out of warp here in order to refuel our reactors. We want nothing but peace with your peoples, and will not fire unless fired upon. Again, we apologize for the intrusion."