Wild Thargoid Chase: First Time for Everything
21 Jan 2021Lilly Terranova
The by now familiar death scream of the Thargoid Interceptor was particularly satisfying to Alyse this time around, as it was her first time commanding the Durandal in combat, with her commander, Lilly Terranova, piloting the ship-launched fighters instead. It was Lilly's opinion, evidently, that they both needed to be "sufficiently versed in all the ship's systems and capabilities" in these types of fights. While Alyse considered herself a more than competent pilot, and her rating reflected that, she had not been quite prepared to fly the ship herself against such a tenacious foe. In consequence, the Durandal had come out of the fight a little more...battered than was customary. Happily, Lilly had said nothing about making her pay for the damages."I have the ship," Lilly said in her synthesized voice, distinct from the COVAS only in that she did not share its accent.
"You have the ship," Alyse confirmed, releasing the controls as Lilly took over.
"Damage assessment?"
"I'll start checking the system reports, but it looks like we have significant module damage from the caustic missile and the overheating I did to burn it off—"
"The correct decision," Lilly interrupted coolly.
"—and it looks like hull integrity is around seventy percent. We're...pretty beaten up here," Alyse admitted.
Lilly nodded at this, scrolling through system reports as Alyse stared for a moment at the thick green haze still spewing from the Thargoid wreckage. Or was it a carcass? She hadn't studied the aliens the way her commander had, nor did she have any desire to do so. Shooting them was a great deal more interesting.
"I can reboot the systems if you li..." Alyse trailed off as she noticed a ping on her sensor display. "Contact."
Lilly glanced over at her. "Thargoid?" she asked, her digitized voice betraying no emotion whatsoever.
"No..." Alyse said slowly, watching the orange box on her sensor display wink out. "It's gone."
Lilly said nothing, and several seconds passed before she saw it again, flickering briefly on her display so quickly that she might have missed it had she blinked. "Intermittent contact, four o'clock high."
To her left, Alyse heard Lilly pull up her own sensor display. While Alyse's commander was all but inscrutable at the best of times, she had learned to discern subtle hints of expression in her otherwise rigid, marble face. The slight contracting of her brows was a sign of her intent focus on the sensor display, and when the contact pinged again, a faint widening of Lilly's eyes was as close as the woman ever came to registering real surprise. Whatever she had seen, it had very nearly rattled her. As Alyse had seen her land a burning ship on the verge of hull breach on a high gravity world without so much as an elevated pulse, this was...well, cause for concern.
"Input the following calibration into the sensors and begin a sweep near the intermittent contact," she said, speaking quickly as the fingers of her right hand danced over her console, and her left, cybernetic hand, plugged into a specialized jack on her pilot's seat. As the sensor calibration scrolled across Alyse's feed, she boggled at it. Lilly wanted her to tune the scanners to search for micro heat blooms in the open vacuum?
"Commander, aren't we looking for something a little bigger than--"
"Do as I have instructed," Lilly said, her electronic voice grating somewhat. She did not like to repeat herself.
Alyse complied, and began checking the sensors, focusing them around the area of the intermittent contact, which had now vanished entirely with the change in sensor configuration. A moment later, though, she detected a small but exceedingly hot object moving slowly through the space near where she had last seen the contact.
"I've got a small contact... And another a few meters ahead of it now," Alyse said, surprised to see a second showing up only a few seconds later.
"Heat sinks," Lilly said.
"What?" Alyse asked, confused. "Heat sinks? Why would they be popping off so quickly...?"
"It is an old and somewhat outdated surveillance tactic intended to keep a vessel combat ready while still minimizing its thermal signature. If multiple heat sinks are deployed sufficiently close together, they can confuse sensors and keep the vessel sufficiently cold as to be largely undetectable. Open a channel to the ship on a tight-beam frequency. Hail them and send a request for identification."
Why Lilly would know this, Alyse could only guess, though she recalled that Preston had mentioned she might have been a spook. Federal? Imperial? Maybe even Alliance. She didn't know or particularly care. Sending a tight-beam transmission would let the vessel know that they were aware of its presence, and Alyse wasn't exactly sure that was the smart move, but she was clearly a bit out of her depth here, so she elected simply to comply with the instruction.
"Unidentified vessel, this is the Durandal, identification TRN-07, standing down from anti-Thargoid operations. Please identify and state your intent," Alyse said as calmly and politely as she could under the circumstances.
Several long moments passed without response, the cockpit silent save for the familiar pinging sounds of Lilly allocating almost all of the ship's power to its internal systems, speeding up the recharging of its weakened shields.
"Reset sensor configuration to default," Lilly ordered after what felt like a full minute of no response.
The necessity of the task became obvious almost the instant Alyse completed it. The vessel had ceased discharging heat sinks, and the ship's computer registered it as an Imperial Cutter, though she could not yet see it. Rangefinding indicated it was roughly fifteen kilometers away, but there was as yet no further information about it, and they still weren't responding to the hail. So, Alyse repeated it. Again, nothing.
"No response. Range: fifteen thousand meters." The vessel's engines suddenly flared to life, and though it was too far away to see clearly, Alyse could quite distinctly make out the white corona of its thrusters suddenly propelling it straight at them. "...and closing! They're deploying hardpoints!"
This did not seem to surprise Lilly. "Status of the Thargoid's caustic cloud?"
Alyse turned to stare at Lilly in confusion as the commander fed power into the ship's engines, bringing the Anaconda ponderously around, back toward the Thargoid wreckage. Not eager to force her to repeat herself again, Alyse checked her sensors.
"It's hit maximum density and is starting to disperse."
"Overlay density readings on the canopy display," Lilly ordered.
Still not sure exactly what Lilly had in mind, Alyse complied. The debris cloud was about eight kilometers from them, and Alyse couldn't for the life of her figure why Lilly would want to head toward it. Their ship was in no shape for a fight, and the priority now should be getting out of there, not flying through acid that might well breach the canopy, given how much damage the ship had sustained. To her amazement, Lilly was doing exactly that, though. Faint pinging sounds drew her attention, and a glance down at her display told Alyse that Lilly had balanced the ship's power between its internal systems and its engines.
"Hostile vessel's range?" Lilly asked, focused intently on the dispersal pattern of the debris.
"Twelve thousand meters and still closing. Stars, they're fast."
"We cannot outrun an Imperial Cutter," Lilly said matter of factly.
"Even with all the modifications to our thrusters?"
"Even so."
The vessel's battered hull groaned as Lilly slammed the throttle past the overload stops, boosting the engines. Bulkheads rattled and support struts strained against the acceleration, but still the Cutter gained on them. Twelve thousand five hundred meters, three hundred, one hundred... They must have been pouring every drop of energy they could scrape together into their engines. Whatever Lilly was planning, it looked like the Cutter might well reach them before they reached the cloud. Lilly shunted more power to the engines, the rattling growing louder.
"Shut down all internals except shields and sensors," Lilly said, her mask sealing as she switched over to personal life support. Alyse did the same, cutting power to everything she could, offlining several modules specific to combating the Thargoids—the shutdown field neutralizer, the xeno scanner, and so on. She fed this power back to the distributor, and Lilly immediately directed it to the engines, buying them a few precious meters per second more speed.
"They're nearly in weapons range," Alyse reported.
As if to emphasize this point, a dim laser beam lanced a few hundred meters to port. A warning shot, or an overeager weapons officer firing and hoping to get lucky. At this range, it was little more than a spotlight though.
"Under attack," the COVAS announced, prompting Alyse to roll her eyes.
"Thanks," she muttered under her breath.
The cloud of caustic debris loomed large now, barely a kilometer away. But the Cutter was in weapons range now, and the next laser did not go wide. It struck directly on their aft dorsal shielding. Then again. Pulse lasers. Fortunately, the oversized and overengineered shield generator on the Durandal could shrug off an exceptional amount of fire. But if they couldn't escape this Cutter, all this would do was buy them time. The Durandal was outfitted expressly to fight Thargoids. Its gauss cannons would not be especially useful a shielded human vessel, its remote release flak launchers were entirely useless against such a target, and the two small beam lasers were designed more to vent heat than to deal damage, not that they were large enough to threaten something like an Imperial Cutter in any case. Judging by the heavy pulse laser fire hammering their aft shields, the Cutter was much better equipped to fight human vessels. Flying through a cloud of hull-devouring debris wasn't going to help them, either.
"Brace," Lilly said suddenly, as it seemed they were about to fly into the cloud.
Alyse had half a second to comply, during which she heard Lilly rapidly redistributing power. The ship suddenly lurched, pitching upward just over ninety degrees before Lilly fired the boosters. This time the bulkheads and support struts screamed in protest, the whole ship juddering ominously as the sudden acceleration propelled it up along the cloud's outer perimeter. The Cutter, a significantly less maneuverable vessel, which had already been overheating its thrusters to close in on them, did not react so quickly. It flew straight through the cloud, though Alyse had no opportunity to see it as Lilly slammed the throttle forward again, sending them clear of the cloud even as the Cutter struggled to come around, halting the turn partway through as its commander evidently realized they'd get out of the cloud faster by flying straight through it.
Once the Cutter cleared the cloud, it came around, moving to intercept the Durandal. Alyse checked the ship's cameras and saw the green glow of Thargoid acid eating away at the ship's hull. But it was otherwise undamaged, which meant that it would take quite a while to do any real harm. Their ship, on the other hand, seemed almost ready to fall apart.
"Tactical assessment. Give me a breakdown of the weapons, systems, and shields on the Cutter," Lilly ordered.
Alyse rushed to comply. "Looks like two class three and one class four pulse lasers, and the other weapon hardpoints are multi-cannons. Class six Bi-weave shield generator. Utility looks like all heat sinks. Fair amount of cargo space, no shipboard hangar, some minor hull reinforcement, and a lot of scanning equipment."
"Bi-weave shield generator?" Lilly asked.
"Affirmative."
"Flight assist off," COVAS reported.
Lilly flipped the ship end over end, bringing its bow to face the pursuing Cutter, which had just started firing again.
"Under attack."
Alyse saw that the entirety of the ship's power was still being fed into the engines. Her insides twisted. "You're not going to..."
But she was. Lilly hit the boosters. Then hit them again. The Cutter was making top speed straight at them, and they were doing the same. Evidently its commander thought Lilly expected them to blink, and was rising to the challenge. Alyse tightened her harness and pressed herself back into her chair, bracing her arms against her console. Their shields were a shade over fifty percent and still falling under the brutal assault from the Cutter, but that might not matter in the next couple of seconds. At least this time she understood Lilly's thinking. A Bi-weave shield generator was designed for lower capacity and higher regeneration, but the Durandal's Prismatic shield generator was designed for very much the reverse, and the Cutter was using an undersized shield generator, probably to keep its thermal signature smaller. Still, their shields were so low that Alyse wasn't sure it was going to matter.
Suddenly Lilly flooded the weapons systems with power, directing all that remained to internal systems. The ship shuddered as its gauss cannons discharged, then again. The Cutter's shield's flared, but the rounds had barely impacted before the ships themselves collided, the Cutter pilot realizing what Lilly intended too late. Alyse was thrown forward in her seat, alarms ringing through the cockpit as the two ships slammed into each other, both moving at top speed.
"Shields critical."
But Lilly had pitched the Durandal slightly downward at the instant of impact, which created a secondary impact as both vessels were driven downward and their dorsal sections slammed into each other.
"Shields down."
"Hull integrity critical."
Alyse's head throbbed as it slammed back into her seat in the second impact, white spots exploding across her vision. Her years of training kicked in though, and she saw through the dimming edges of her vision that the Cutter's shields were down as well. Its pilot, unprepared for the collision, was not recovering as quickly as Lilly, who had reversed thrust and backed off enough to bring her gauss cannons to bear. Now, bereft of shields, the Cutter, lacking much in the way of internal reinforcement, was extremely vulnerable to the gauss cannons.
Lilly fired directly into the dorsal fuselage, gauss rounds shredding the gracefully curved plating on the Cutter's spine. All four cannons fired one salvo, then another, and another.
"Heat sink deployed."
Another salvo. Another. Another.
"Warning, temperature critical."
"Heat sink deployed."
Lilly was merciless. She continued tracking the Cutter as the Durandal floated backward, even firing the remote release flak launchers directly into the shredded segments of hull plating before detonating them. Explosions tore through the gutted Cutter, and a moment later, Alyse heard COVAS announcing that the target had been destroyed. Several of their own systems had taken an even worse beating in the collision though, and Lilly had exhausted their remaining supply of heat sinks, with the ship's onboard systems too badly damaged to synthesize more. But they were alive. The frameshift drive was...more or less intact, and should at least carry them to the nearby station.
"What was that?" she asked, her heart still pounding, to say nothing of her head.
Lilly did not reply immediately, staring out at the wreckage of the Cutter, which was drifting into the caustic cloud, likely to be entirely destroyed in the process and thus making retrieval of anything from the vessel itself impossible. The slight twitch of Lilly's lips told Alyse that this had not been the outcome she'd hoped for. Frankly, Alyse understood. She would have liked very much to know who had attacked them without provocation.
"Pirates?" she asked, though Alyse doubted this very much. Pirates stayed clear of Thargoids, and there was nothing valuable enough in their wreckage to justify this attack. At least, not so far as Alyse knew.
"No," Lilly said after a moment. "We can discuss it once we have begun repairs."
"I..."
Whatever Alyse had been about to say died on her lips. The sudden turn of Lilly's head toward her made it clear that she was serious, that she had no desire to speak about this here. Perhaps at all. And, perhaps more than that, she saw a hint of...anger in those cybernetic eyes. Or had she imagined it? Whatever trauma had robbed Lilly of her eyes had taken the lids as well, leaving her face far less expressive. She thought, though, that the illumination on the irises glowed slightly brighter, and that her brows had lowered fractionally as if she had been narrowing her eyes. By now, Alyse knew enough to understand that whatever frustration Lilly might feel at having to repeat herself must pale in comparison to whatever she was seeing on the woman's face now. No, this was something much, much worse.
"Right, Commander. Let's get back to the station before something breaches," she said as casually as she could.
Lilly's only response came from the COVAS as she swung the ship around.
"Frameshift drive charging."