INCIDENT # 2893.098.8983.D5G87

There is also a smaller colony located on he third planet out from the central star, Guardhouse III. Barely on the cusp between a class M and class L planet, the smaller colony population was no doubt a powerful testament to the difficult conditions there, for barely 100,000 colonists and their families inhabited the planet.

Approximately four hours out from Guardhouse III at a cruising warp speed of 6.2, the Moscow [Mokba] received a distress call from the Malingala colony on Guardhouse III. Apparently, they were under an intense assault by a substantial force of small, unidentified craft and that some ground troops had materialized in the colony’s central square. Immediately thereafter, the signal was either blocked or terminated.

The Moscow [Mokba] immediately went to warp 9.15 and arrived at Guardhouse III in under 25 minutes. While viscous fighting was still in progress, it sensor showed that the colonists were terribly out-matched against the attackers fast and lethal spacecraft. The small ships the attackers were flying were fast and they had tremendously impressive handling characteristics. Their powerful weapons seemed to be particle beam devices with a tremendous punch. Further, each ship had a fairly sophisticated self contained shield system with excellent dispersal characteristics. This was in addition to the inertial dampening field and the structural integrity systems such vehicles would have to possess. We could not determine the vehicle power source due to it’s incredibly effective engine shielding.

These dark ominous little ships were firing very effective particle beam weapons that we could not apply our recently installed dampening technologies due to the problems with locking on to such quick and maneuverable to get enough of the dampening field on them to have any substantive effect. Amazingly, the Moscow’s sensors indicated that the output of the attacker’s beam weapons was nearly equivalent to the megawatts produced by a class T2Da multi-modality phaser compliment.

The Moscow’s captain launched three class 15 shuttles, all armed with twin phaser banks. Further he called out the ship’s delta flyer shuttle (type NX-21). After regrouping, all four craft ran on heading to the planet’s surface to provide some air support for the colonist now under siege.

The 15’s engaged the enemy almost immediately, damaging several enemy ships without disabling any of them. However, in less than a quarter of an hour, all three 15’s were down and their pilots killed. The 21 managed to persevere for nearly an hour before being ambushed by several of the attackers ship’s firing a relentless barrage of energy bursts. Although she did manage to completely evaporate three attacking ships, this barrage vaporized the 21 in midair.

However, these unknown attackers were waiting for this move on the Moscow’s part and as the starship dropped it shields, dozens of the small ships de-cloaked and converged on the ship like a hive of angry bees, firing wildly and striking the unshielded Moscow in numerous critical systems. The crew of the Moscow responded almost immediately with volleys of photon torpedoes and phaser fire, but it was already too late.

As a handful of lifeboats launched from the mortally wounded Moscow, the ship started to break apart after absorbing an incredible degree of enemy weapon hits. Suddenly, the saucer section blew away from the engineering hull, the frontal section spinning wildly out of control like a medallion tossed into space. The engineering hull, minus the warp nacelles, started falling backwards and downward towards the planet’s surface. The edges of the damaged ship start to glow lightly orange as the engineering section entered the thin atmosphere of Guardhouse III.

The saucer section continued spiraling away from the explosion, still spinning wildly out of control, with one or two additional lifeboats managing to get away from the very damaged starship command section Suddenly the saucer section decomposes in the flash of a powerful explosion, tearing it apart at the seams and into a million pieces of so much space debris.

Meanwhile, the engineering hull is careening down towards the planet’s surface, tumbling clumsily as it flies through the dark blue skies of Guardhouse III. The ship leaves a white contrail in the frigid atmosphere with a smoky gray tail following just behind that. The hulk of the engineering section is awash in flames and explosions as it marks it’s way to it’s final demise. It clearly appeared to observers on the ground that the burning wreck would pass right over the colony and crash the Moscow into the mountains just Northwest of the main city.

But ground observers had no idea that the beginnings of an matter/antimatter containment breach began when the ship was first blown in half. The countdown was on as the engineering hull with the warp core contained within nearing it’s flash point. Just as the Moscow’s remains passed over the embattled colony, about 15 kilometers over the main city, the Moscow’s warp core finally breached and a tremendous explosion resulted, as always. The core breach had a force equivalent to the force of about 50 megatons of trinitrotoluene.

The colony, it’s inhabitants, it’s defenders and it’s attackers were all decimated in the blast. Then the radioactive fallout that followed the event manages to spread around the entire planet in about 72 hours. This account was assembled from recovered EMF messages and a probe launched by the Moscow just prior to it’s demise, as well as the eyewitness accounts of 83 Moscow survivors and a few hundred survivors on the planet’s surface (people who resided away from the main city).

This incident, as we learned later, was out introduction and first contact with the Clatadatha species, an insectoid exoskeletal based intelligent life form, called "chiggers" by their opponents as we all learned later. This incident represents the first and only time to date that a warp core breach has resulted in significant Federation citizen deaths, especially in their own area of habitation.

[NOTE: The Clatadatha conflict lasted less than three months without the loss of a single additional starship. In fact, throughout the rest of the conflict there were only fourteen additional Federation casualties and this was all in ground troops that stormed the Clatadatha home world at Mendaxx IV, in the Echo Urianai system.

Like most intelligent insectoid based life forms, the Clatadatha are an extremely xenophobic and paranoid race, preferring to remain entirely apart from the Quadrant’s other life forms, including other insectoid life forms. They are, however, especially weary of humanoid life forms, including humans. In fact, the Clatadatha leaders maintain a very powerful propaganda mechanism in their social order and there is a frightening degree of anti-humanoid content in the government’s message to the masses. From all observations, it appears that the whole of Clatadatha society accept this as a fact and are extremely uncomfortable, often almost to the point of illness, in the presence of humanoid aliens.

For this reason, the Echo Urianai system is marked off limits on all official navigation maps, in addition to the numerous marker buoys placed around the edge of the entire binary star system and it’s 16 planets, 4 overrun with Clatadatha colonies.