Piracy of a sort is always around. Factions vying for power or jostling for position while trying to ensure their opponents own failure.
BPM 87242 was rife with general mayhem and villainy as I was offered a lucrative sum to get involved. The ‘Thunder pulled her own weight well until a pair of Federal Attack Ships locked onto me. I had eked out victory but at significant cost. Suspicions started to arise as I analyzed the data.
I lost the Vigilant Bard to a short but intense fight with a wing of FAS before. Were these the same aggressors?
A close call with a Thargoid Hunter left hull marks, scoring that seeped into the armor plates. The usual trick of dumping my heatsinks and thrusters at full didn’t fool this one. Several missiles hammered the hull as I pulled into FTL. I’d thought i was safe until the hull breach alarms flashed, something was eating the outer plating.. quickly.
The problem with briefings are the timing. Always at some ungodly hour, in some byzantine format about a foe you’ll likely never see. Years later, hundreds of light-years behind me and I was struggling to recall even a scrap of those ill-timed dispatches. It was reported that sufficient heat at a short duration would burn off the enzyme eating at my dwindling hull. Now was that 120 or 150?
I pulled hard at the helm, diving into close range of the star I’d just arrived at, the hull groaned as the heat built up. I watched with more than a little concern as the thermal registers climbed.. 85, 90.. 98.. 100..
Alarms blared, warnings about internal damage and system failure.. 105.. 110..
Registers cleared 120 and moments later the unexpected corrosion of the hull cleared. I ordered a full service on the hull at port, having that much alien gunk eating at the structure mandated it.
After a little cat-and-mouse I was able to join up with my friends at Brash’s Folly. Intense fighting lit the sky over a darkened planet. Brash’s Folly burned while Thargoid Interceptors and Scouts buzzed about it’s perimeter, harassed by human opponents. Anti-Xeno spread thinly as some mixed with the scouts, screening their allies for attack runs against the larger Interceptors.
Thargoid munitions ripped through ships as fast as they could be repaired and put back in the field. Docking crews worked hellish shifts keeping the threat at bay.
One of the Interceptors hit me, sudden and intense staccato of enzymatic blasts and caustic ozone from a destroyed scout, and a sinister groaning took up in the hull. I put up for repairs one last time as I considered my options.
36 tonnes of medical escape pods loaded I plotted a course for a rescue ship and braced myself for the escape. Two of the larger Interceptors had stationed themselves on the exit path from either bank of launch pads hungry for whatever prey it could catch. Docking clamps released and I punched the throttle, low and fast across the surface. Weaving to avoid a straight line, 5 clicks out I angled for jump and made the first of many leaps away from Hupang.
I was called to join some friends in the Thargoid fight early in the afternoon. With little preparation I was off to Hupang. I’d heard of variant Thargoid ships appearing near their motherships. I was lucky enough to encounter a Hunter as it pulled me out of witchspace on approach to Hupang.
The helm pulled and the hull groaned as conventional space welcomed me back into it’s bleak and chilly embrace. Alarms blared as signatures were partially deciphered..
..Frameshift Anomaly detected..
I pulled hard on the controls, thrusters burning as hot as I could make them. All to no avail. Thargoid Hunters are fast and as much distance I gained I lost just as fast when it decided to make another run at me. Some kind of missile, dripping in enzymes that make terrible work of human spacecraft, hammered into me again and again. The ‘Oracle groaned as bulkheads started to suffer the deleterious effects of exposure.
Luck won out, as I found running did me no good I tried to fight. Some hits scored seemed to have scared it back. This gave me the margin of time necessary to make a short hop to another system and patch my wounds before trying again.
I refit into the Silent Oracle, her codes still active in some quirky database of GalNet. Reports of Thargoid attacks were appearing all over civilized space and opportunity abounded for entrepreneurs such as myself. With the barest inkling of a plan I set off to see what kind of adventure I could find.
..why is it Djabara.. What secrets do you hide? Who compels me to go?
X-L5QH ‘Fragile Thunder’
I’m running risk with untested new ordinance modifications. But it’s a risk I have to take. Someone wants me in Djabara. A trap? Sure. But a trap I intend to spring.
I dropped into system with days and hundreds of hyperspace jumps behind me. If there weren’t sensors telling me what I was seeing or logs to validate what I saw, I might think this was space madness.
The ‘Thunder slipped out of supercruise, nestling into a cloud of condensed gasses quietly, cautiously. Electrostatic flashes lashed out from the cloud, highlighting the odd structures buried within. Slowly I crept through the cloud, watching those giants’ toys lurking nearby.
The Eta Carina nebula is nearly nine-thousand light-years from Sol. I wasn’t looking forward to the journey, but an opportunity to survey distant worlds and collect data on some lost colonies was difficult to pass up.
It took two days but I arrived at the CRV Concordia late in the afternoon. A welcome respite and chance to patch a couple of scuffs I had acquired along the way. I should have stopped to consider a refit but I felt productive and I didn’t want to let this feeling escape. A much-needed nap later I was back in the seat, pushing my way down to Gria Eork EP-A d0.
I was lacking some necessary resources for this journey, notably my supply of germanium for the jump-fuel booster was low and a crucial stop near the bottom of the Galaxy set me up for a couple of long-reach jumps into Gria Eork EP-A d0.
I almost stuck around for a few days, the rolling hillsides were a splendid shade of sand. But I have objectives and a schedule.
