Ice Princess

Ice Princess
Vessel Profile
TypeDropShip

History[edit]

The prospector DropShip Ice Princess was an independent vessel.

Lopez was rendered uninhabitable in October 3080, following orbital bombardment by 14 high-speed meteors on the 12th of October 3080. The meteors were delivered by manmade means, and the attack was widely considered to be the work of the Word of Blake vessel WoBS Erinyes, a ship believed to be responsible for asteroid strikes on various worlds during the course of the Jihad.[1]

Six weeks before the first of the asteroids struck Lopez, the nadir point jump monitoring station received a radio report from a prospector DropShip, the Ice Princess, reporting that a large K-F signature had been detected by the DropShip; the signature fell outside the ecliptical plane of the Lopez system.[2]

The first asteroid struck Lopez at 1:32 a.m., Terran Standard Time, on the 12th of October 3080. Thirteen more asteroids followed the first in quick succession, and by midnight the entire planet had been laid waste; of the 2.6 billion people who lived on Lopez, the only survivors were a scattering of people left in what had been wilderness areas and those who had managed to escape on spacecraft.[1][2]

A number of the spacecraft which managed to escape from Lopez during the bombardment conducted orbital scans, and those scans showed no trace of drive plumes pushing the asteroids, indicating that the method of bombardment was not the same as that which had struck Taurus several years before. In November 3080 the path taken by the asteroids as they approached Lopez was being backtracked by investigators; these investigators discovered remains of the Ice Princess DropShip lying along the same course as that taken by the asteroids. The Ice Princess had been destroyed by capital ship weapons, but the various sensor logs aboard the ship were intact and were recovered by the investigators. When examined, the logs showed that the K-F signal detected jumping into the system was a WarShip with a mass of at least one million tons, and also showed that the Ice Princess had been destroyed thirty seconds after the WarShip jumped in.[2]

The destruction of Lopez, combined with the logs recovered from the Ice Princess, are major contributing factors in the increasingly widespread acceptance of the rumor that the Word of Blake possessed a WarShip capable of killing a planet - believed to be the WoBS Erinyes.[1][2]

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Jihad: Final Reckoning, p. 61: "The Jihad in Review"
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Jihad: Final Reckoning, p. 22: "What of Lopez?"

Bibliography[edit]