My experience as an AX pilot
03 Aug 2019Venus
I come from a family that lives on the edge of the bubble to avoid power play war and fighting. In doing this we’ve exposed ourselves to another danger, the Thargoid race, ruthless human killing “bugs”. My home was destroyed by Goids and we were forced to evacuate our home system and find asylum elsewhere.Now that I am grown I’ve decided to leave the edge of known space and become something more than I am now, so I hitched a ride in a dolphin towards HR 1185, the home to the Anti Xeno Initiative, a group of pilots from the federation, alliance, and empire banded together to fight for a common goal, protection of humans and destruction of Thargoids.
I arrive in HR 1185, specifically a planetary base named Ceres Tarn. I contact my family and let them know I’ve arrived and they are proud of what I’m doing.
My first day in the AXI is hard, I’m a recruit and I must battle my way to full membership. I hear layers of conversations between other pilots that range from glory kills and fallen friends I hear faint discussions of how pilots engineer their ships, which modules to pick, how to save weight, with keeping the firepower. I hear pilots sighs of agreement to a speaker talking about how the Thargoids were a mistake and that the human race is facing total destruction unless we become merciless killers incapable of understanding what the thargoid brings are or what they plan to do. I watch as members banter and haze recruits and officers walk past myself as I walk to an overseers office to get my first assignment.
I reach the office and Commander Mackenheimer gives me a ship and directs me to the shipyard to engineer and outfit my ship. A mentor speaks to me about outfitting and what engineering modules and guardian tech I should equip to my ship, they’ve awarded me with a viper, a small ship with the quickness and speed of a true viper. I head to several engineering stations and guardian ruins to collect guardian tech to defeat the big horde. I return to The Indra and await further directions from one of the overseers.
Here goes, me and other recruits ride on the backside of the pack into a system that holds a very popular engineer named professor Palin, we ride to protect him from the bugs that seek to destroy him among with everyone who shares his species. We jump to the system, regroup and fly to the nearest threat. We find a threat 5, an easy target for seasoned pilots but for myself and my fellow recruit brothers, were terrified.
”wing beacon on, drop on me!” the flight leader says, as we follow him towards the threat in supercruise, and finally, we drop, my skin sticks up and jumps off my body with fear. But I feel something, it’s joy, pride, and happiness, I feel the adrenaline filled smiles of the pilots around me. . And I see it, the green flowerlike alien ship that destroyed my home and millions of others throughout history. In a snap pilots deploy weapons and move into combative positions and the fight begins, communications flood with callouts
”my shields are down!”
”Shoot the f***ing bug already”
”Bug is 2 mikes out and closing fast!”
The battle ends quickly, but lasted forever, I’m scratched up but I should be okay. As for the other recruits, not so much, I see a dead pilot floating across empty space and to the left his ship with a shattered canopy. Ripped apart from damages taken in the seconds of the bug attack. We give him a pilots funeral and return to The Indra. The mentors and other pilots congratulate me in my first real battle with a goid, they pat my back and cheer me on but I’ve done nothing, I fought amongst brothers and sisters of the AXI, legends in space.