UECNS Nemesis

'“You’ve had two thousand years. Two thousand years to hunt down a single damaged vessel. None of you have done this. No Tribune has out-fought it. No Thoughtful has out-thought it. No Watcher has killed it. No Builder has forged greater.”'

Echo to officers of Execution Force Renan

UECNS Nemesis is the first and only extant example of the Nemesis-class deep space fleet engagement vessels. Equipped with a first-of-its-kind stable AI, Red One, Nemesis is the largest, most heavily armed and most technologically advanced vessel ever constructed by human hands.

Commisioned in late 2791, she would be held back from the front lines to prevent an even heavier Compact response to current Confederate naval units until 2792, when she and her accompanying Task Force, TF97, was sent to engage Expansion Fleet Bankala after they were confirmed to have recovered the location of Earth from a wrecked Confederate vessel. TF97 and Expansion Fleet Bankala practically destroyed each other, but it was not enough to prevent Earth's fall; thus began the start of Red One's Long War.

Design
Main article: Nemesis-class deep space fleet engagement vessel please look here if you're doing fanart for a hull plan description!

Compact-Confederacy War
The first known commanding officer of Nemesis was Commander Theodore William Billingsly, of UEC Science Fleet. While Nemesis was still under construction, command was handed over to Captain Yasmine Nishiko Aalimah Sudoki, an experienced battlecruiser captain and under whose command the ship would be trialed and the crew drilled over the next several months. Her first officer was Commander Charles Sansbury.

The Confederate Admiralty was unwilling to immediately send Nemesis into battle. While Nemesis could easily defeat anything short of a Chariot, the possibility of the Compact massively ramping up attempts to find Sol (and the shipyards capable of building more dreadnaughts) through brute-force exploration upon seeing her first combat deployment was deemed far too high to reveal the ship without it being absolutely required.

Battle with Expansion Fleet Bankala
Main article: Battle between Task Force 97 and Expansion Fleet Bankala

Task Force 97 sortied in early May 2792 in an attempt to destroy Expansion Fleet Bankala. The original plan was to intercept it as it shocked into the Proxima Aleph system, as Red One could accurately predict the shockspace emergence location and TF97 could then ambush the Compact ships before their sensors recovered from the realspace reversal. Once it was confirmed that the Fleet had obtained the location of Sol, TF97 attempted to intercept it before the fleet could reach Compact lines.

Before either fleet was within missile or gun range, Nemesis opened fire with her meteor cannons at a distance of 97 million kilometers. In total, eleven Compact capital ships were destroyed by impactors as both sides attempted to get in range of each other.

Once the distance had closed, Nemesis formed the centerpiece of the Confederate formation, with all other ships in the Task Force being dedicated to keeping it as undamaged as possible while charging into displacement engine range of CSFWV Bringer of Light. While the Chariot was destroyed, Nemesis was left crippled by its guns, and nearly every ship in both of the present fleets was completely destroyed. Admiral Tartarsky, Commander Sansbury and most of the bridge crew were killed instantly when shrapnel from a penetration of the ship's armoured core entered the deck, with Captain Sudoki dying of blood loss shortly afterwards. Red One refused to accept this for several hours, instead choosing to believe that her sensors on the bridge were merely malfunctioning.

With no living crew remaining, Red One attempted to return to Earth immediately after the battle. However, damage to the shock drive instead meant that Nemesis was flung off into deep space. Much like with her Captain, Red refused to accept that she was not in Sol, and so broadcast a distress signal on every frequency available while scanning for the radio emissions from Sol. Once she realised she was not in Sol, she attempted to jump towards Sol again, and once again failed. This repeated for at least a month while auto-repair systems struggled to keep the ship running. Eventually, Red One accepted that she was alone aboard the ship, and so decided to wait for repairs to be completed before attempting another jump.

Return to Earth
On the return of Nemesis to Earth, seven Compact vessels had been left in the system to destroy any late-arriving patrol, or civilian ships looking for allies. In their arrogance, they attempted to attack Nemesis, not realising exactly what it was and assuming it would be yet another kill to add to the tally. The first two were destroyed by missile fire, the next three destroyed by gunfire, one rammed with a partially charged displacement engine and the last simply broken upon the dreadnaught's prow.

Even without support infrastructure, Red One decided to embark on a guerilla war against the Compact, in an attempt to punish them for what they had done to her creators. Unbeknownst to her at the time, this war would go on for over 2000 years as she outwitted and outfought every Compact commander that ever tried to hunt her.

"Encounters"
Main article: Encounters List

The Compact Intelligence Service (CIS) asset tracking group for "Gravestone" logs each confirmed or highly suspected Encounter with Nemesis and her creations''. ''