Logs from the Sevantya / #009 - "The Eye of the Storm"
09 May 2023Tosh Vraugen
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--------------- RESEARCH LAB / TERMINAL 03 - 06/05/3309 - 01:03 ---------------
Login: Amina Holland
Password: *************
Authorization Code: 9-Alpha-2-Hotel
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Welcome Doctor Holland, you have 2 unread message.
- From: Scientist Kimber Weaver / Received: 06/05/3309 19:12 / Subject: "Caustic Tissue Sample 03 Anomaly"
- From: Chief-Engineer Esteban Puckett / Received: 06/05/3309 21:45 /Subject: "Repairs will take longer than expected"
>/ INITIATE_LOG_RECORDING
Log Title: "The Eye of the Storm"
P r o c e s s i n g . . .
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Access Granted / [Voice Recording ◉]
This is Doctor Amina Holland, Chief-Scientist of the Sevantya... after months stuck in Lemastshi while Commander Tosh Vraugen undergone "cryo-treatment" for his condition, we are finally out in the black once again and doing some good old research, we have just concluded our expedition into the outer layer of the Taranis Maelstrom located in the Hyades Sector FB-N b7-6 system. The Thargoid war is raging on, there are talks of millions of casualties and from the reports we are getting, these numbers will only increase in the coming weeks... and to make things even worse the research and development of new tools against the xeno threat is progressing very slowly... With Commander Vraugen recovery progressing considerably, I spent the last 2 months researching and getting in touch with my former colleagues from the Imperial Academy of Science in Achenar... and it seems that the new Caustic Sink Launchers developed by the recently restored Aegis are allowing ships to withstand a considerable amount of time inside the caustic clouds of the Maelstroms, one of my colleagues even provided the schematics of a modified Imperial Clipper designed especifically to explore the inside of this hellish environment... and by calling in a few favors I also managed to obtain a decomissioned Imperial Clipper that will hopefully not be missed from Imperial records, now the only thing left to be done was having Commander Vraugen approval for this expedition and the requisition of the resources needed to modify the ship... I know that what I did next was not right, and it goes completely against protocol and my own ethics... but desperate times calls for desperate measures... I manually interrupted the cryo-treatment before the recommended time to get this approval and get Commander Vraugen ready and fit for flying into the Maelstrom... for the record... the cryo-pod was opened in 23/04/3309 and after a two-week recovery process Commander Vraugen was back on his feet, sadly I had to lie to him about the success of the treatment... Two days ago, our Chief-Engineer Esteban Puckett, gave the all clear for our research vessel, all the systems were nominal and ready to go, Commander Vraugen also allowed me to name the ship "Research Vessel X-88", the X-88 was the designation of the class that me and the colleagues that shared the ship schematics were part of during our time in the Imperial Academy of Science.
Alright... I will try to make this mission report as brief as possible... Me and Commander Tosh Vraugen departed the Sevantya on 05/05/3309 at 12:38, the Sevantya would stay stationed in the Nareg system, about 30 Ly from the Taranis Maelstrom, to provide support for this expedition, our main objective was to locate, catalog and retrieve any thargoid artefact, material or substance that could be laying in the caustic clouds, while also trying to identify possible new thargoid life forms or vessels. As soon as we dropped from supercruise into that caustic hell we could spot several new thargoid entities that we have not observed anywhere else... below is the image one of our probes managed to capture before it melted away:
------------ Recon Probe 01 / STATUS: Caustic Damage Detected / [Recording ◉] /--------------
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From the last image of Probe 01 you can notice that visibility inside the Maelstrom is extremely poor, but if you look carefully enough it is possible to see these "entities" floating around the caustic clouds, by cross referencing the data we just acquired with other sources we concluded that these are what the scientific community is calling "Caustic Generators", we took the precautions reported by several other researchers that have been to the Maelstroms and avoided collision or being at above 20% Heat to trigger an explosion from these thargoid constructs. From the behaviour we have seen from these Caustic Generators the random propulsions that occur from the appendages seem to be some form of basic movement function but also with the purpose of feeding more caustic substance to the cloud AND also serving as a defense mechanism by detonating itself in a 3km radius caustic explosion if any non-thargoid vessel approaches it.
------------ Recon Probe 02 / STATUS: Caustic Damage Detected / [Recording ◉] /--------------
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From the images made by the also short lived Probe 02, it is possible to see the Caustic Generator in more detail, a very curious aspect of it is the glowing red colored pulses that occur in the appendages once an Heat-Emitting object approaches it, an indicative that the Caustic Generator has identified a potential threat in its vicinity and is entering a self-detonation stage. This caught my attention due to the fact that human made Proximity Mines employed in the military sector often display the same behavior, so it makes me think that the thargoids are not so different from us after all when it comes to military offensive/defensive patterns.
------------ Recon Probe 10 / STATUS: Caustic Damage Detected - Unknown Energy Surge Detected / [Recording ◉] /--------------
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We continued our journey across a small sector of the Taranis Maelstrom, collecting materials and sampling tissues from the Caustic Generators with Research Limpets, Commander Vraugen made sure to keep the ship below 20% Heat while also avoiding the Caustic Generators and the constant Thargoid Interceptors that patrol the clouds, but when we reached the 50 Km range from what is believed to be the center of the Maelstrom, our ship was struck my a massive energy pulse that basically threw our ship across the caustic clouds for a distance of over 60 Km, our systems suffered damage and went offline for a couple of seconds, for a moment I thought we were goners but our vessel endured the heavy hit, I have to admit... Esteban Pluckett may be an ignorant fool most of the time, but the old man surely know his way around spaceships. Our last Recon Probe managed to capture the moment just before the pulse wave strucked our vessel, after that intense experience and with our ship barely holding itself together, we decided to use the last Caustic Sink Launcher and leave the Maelstrom... we made it back to the Sevantya with our ship integrity at 12%, it was a close call, but all this data and materials that were acquired will prove invaluable to this research, and clearly the thargoids knew that we pesky humans would try to poke around in their playground, hence why so many defensive layers...
Now me and my team are analysing the materials we have acquired in the Maelstrom and comparing it with the findings of other researchers, hopefully soon we may have something more concrete to work with and that can help humanity in this war. It also seems like Aegis is making good progress on some sort of modified pulse wave neutralizer that can allow a vessel to pierce the 50 km range defensive layer, as I record this log Commander Vraugen and several of our pilots are on the YZ Ceti system to assist in the operation to gather commodities to mass produce these experimental pulse wave neutralizers, if things go accordingly to schedule we may have something new to work with next week... Doctor Amina Holland, signing off.
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