Captain's Log: Who Fired First?
31 Aug 2021Pon Pon
Well, I returned to finish my salvage of the crashed Anaconda, christened the "The Bug Killer," and found... a bit of a terrifying tale of the confidence of youth.I spent the night--well, it's always night in space, so saying I slept 8 hours is probably more appropriate--on the independent fleet carrier I docked to last night. Good thing I woke up in the same system, I've heard horror stories about people sleeping through the "impending jump" announcements and ending up hundreds of lightyears from home with no way of getting back. Well, I'm a light sleeper so even if the carrier did jump I would have been fine.
I undocked, and headed out to the crashed Anaconda. The Thargoids are, for all intents and purposes, a peaceful creature (or so I've been told), so I was relatively assured that scavenging with the Thargoid Interceptors overhead would be perfectly safe. Flying out, I pondered her name: "The Bug Killer." A rather rude way of referring to the Thargoids, but the intent of that ship was more than clear once I put two and two together--and, to be fair, the presence of Thargoids shouldn't have come as a surprise to me yesterday, considering I'm smack in the middle of the Pleiades Cluster.
So, yeah. Everything was rather obvious now that I think about it, but hey I've been in the Pleiades Cluster plenty of times and never seen hide nor hair of the Thargoids--apart from chatting with Anti-Xeno Initiative members at the spacebar on the evacuation fleet carrier while at Donar's Oak. Call me unprepared, but all's well that ends well. And the Bug Killer, well, is a not-so-friendly memory of the Thargoids. Another obvious thing that I completely missed during my landing yesterday? The ominous cloud of slightly caustic green fog dotting the landscape. On my approach, I noticed patches of it far away from The Bug Killer, seemingly at random, and The Bug Killer herself was surrounded by it.
After my landing, it wasn't long before the first Thargoid Interceptor arrived to scan the place. Still a little leery, I sat in my ship while it scanned... Well, everything. Me, The Bug Killer, some random cargo crates... Whatever it was looking for, it didn't find, and I deployed my SRV after it left. The Thargoids, for whatever reason, seem to have a vested interest in this ship, though I have no clue why, because they seem to come to look at it extremely frequently. At times, I would have two Thargoid Interceptors overhead, and only in brief respites were there none. The whole time, apart from the occasional scan of me and my SRV, they left me alone, even when I was blasting away at cargo racks or flying through the sky after catching some air.
So overall, apart from sending some of my instruments haywire whenever they were close to me, the Thargoids and I had no interaction. Just as expected. So I finished up my scavenging and got to scanning the comms controls, to learn the true story of this ship. And it was disconcerting to listen to: CMDR Clark Barrow, some hotshot pilot, was flying out in the Pleiades Cluster. He had one goal: To be the first human to take down a Thargoid. He was, undeniably, unequivocally, the aggressor. Or, was he? I don't know for sure. It was a rather simple story: After encountering a Thargoid Interceptor, CMDR Barrow opened fire on it with beam lasers. Its hull was mostly unhurt, and CMDR Barrow reported that his sensors were malfunctioning and there was "no visible damage." As the fight turned sour for him, he jumped to another system, only to be pursued by the Interceptor. His ship low on both fuel and hull, he attempted an emergency landing on the then-uncharted planet. The logs ended there, but...
The story felt incomplete. Surely, with the ship mostly intact, CMDR Barrow survived the landing. On my approach, I had picked up an SRV signal relatively close to the crash site, so after loading my SRV back into the Reichweite II I set off to see what was at the signal. What I found was CMDR Barrow's final log. It spoke of how he ditched the now immobile ship, and the Thargoid's pursuit of him. The logs don't say what happened to the SRV, but judging from its damaged state, I suspect the Thargoid was satisfied with incapacitating the SRV and leaving CMDR Barrow for dead.
After all, there was an occupied escape pod not far from the wreckage.
The level at which CMDR Barrow's situation reflected mine is rather eerie, and a grim reminder that while I made it out, it was due to the benevolence of the Thargoids, and not any action of my own. CMDR Barrow was certainly the first to fire on that particular Thargoid. But the Thargoid's response, firing back despite being unharmed, could also be said to be an affirmation that it wanted to fight. Even now, the Thargoids behaviour is rather mysterious. They attack stations like Donar's Oak, and megaships like the Alexandria, causing no small number of human casualties, yet leave independent pilots such as myself alone.
...I should probably leave the speculation to the professionals though. Professionals like the Anti-Xeno Initiative. I flew out to their base in HR 1185, and dropped the occupied pod off on their stationed megaship, The Indra. Didn't stick around to see if CMDR Barrow was actually its occupant, nor if whoever was inside was still alive. Not my problem, and frankly neither is the war against the Thargoids. After that, I flew off towards another, less aggressive-to-Thargoids, system. I'm here in Ngalia, docked at Green Enterprise and rekindling some old contacts in Sirius Inc.
So yeah. I'm done with salvage missions for now, and, hopefully, have enough materials to start engineering my ship the way I want. My as-of-yet unnamed Alliance Chieftan just needs a power boost, but Ms. Farseer said she won't be able to get the output I need. In other words, I'm stuck currying favour with my current contacts to try and see if I can find someone who can make what I need. Hence, as of now I'll be running errands for Sirius Inc, and working to improve the Reichweite II's modules courtesy of a Ms. Elvira Martuuk.