Challenge Accepted
30 Aug 2020Eronion
This certainly ended up being an interesting adventure. It all started with CMDR Nirakoji commenting over the squadron frequency that he'd been hearing strange things out of the HIP 16217 system and thought someone should check it out. I volunteered and prepared to set out. It was only 400ly from where I was, give or take, so why not?I decided to take my DBX on this trip. It has the second longest jump range out of my ships, but, with the trip to Colonia, I've been flying my AspX so much this last year that I felt my other ships were being neglected. So it was just me and Guardian Seeker on our way to HIP 16217. Everything seemed normal on the way there, but as soon as I entered the system and began my scans I knew things were going to get interesting. There were non-human signals all over the system. I carefully made my way through the system, systematically mapping each planet and moon, and nothing was raising any flags until I got to a moon designated HIP 16217 AB 1 A. It seemed to have the highest concentration of signals around it, but I was also registering a human signal on the surface. I came out of cruise a handful of kilometers from the surface and locked onto the human signal. It identified itself as a penal colony. Curious. As the colony came into visual range, I realized that "interesting" was going to be an understatement on this outing.
I landed on a mesa nearby and transferred to my SRV. I misjudged the path down to the valley and took a bit of a tumble down the slope. Thought that was going to be the end of my journey and an ignoble end to my illustrious career, but the SRV weathered the fall likely due to the lower gravity of the moon. After a few repairs, I resumed my trek to the penal colony.
I entered the compound through the gate near the landing pad. Everything was dormant, even the defensive turrets, and the odd green haze gave things an even more creepy atmosphere. I suppose I should be thankful that I was daytime on that side of the moon or else things would've been even worse. Possibly as bad as those first Guardian ruins I explored so long ago in this very SRV.
As I explored the interior of the compound, I found some data access points I could access and listened to the final logs of the chief warden. It was as I suspected: a Thargoid attack. And according to the logs, they took every prisoner and guard in the place except for her. Her they left to freeze to death, locked in the command center. What are they up to? It's certainly a worrisome prospect. My wonderings were short-lived, however, as I found an access point labeled "Generator Emergency Override" and activated it. That's when the defensive turrets started shooting at me! Luckily, they couldn't seem to actually hit me, even when I wasn't moving. I can only imagine that I was too low for the anti-aircraft guns to properly track. I did end up getting tired of the flashing of laser blasts and left the compound in hopes they would reset if no available targets were nearby. My hopes were rewarded when they didn't fire at me on my return, however, I also had company.
For whatever reason, its attention was entirely focused on the colony's processing center and it completely ignored me as I returned to the interior. When I got back inside, an idea occurred to me that, in hindsight, was entirely reckless, but boy was it hilarious at the time. I activated the "Generator Emergency Override" again. As I'd hoped, the turrets started shooting the Thargoid.
While it was hilarious to watch all those turrets firing on the Thargoid, it completely ignored them. For a while. Eventually, I guess it got tired of them and then slowly destroyed each one. After the turrets were destroyed, it went back to constantly scanning the processing center. I observed it for quite some time before I resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't going to do anything else so I recalled my ship. That got its attention for a second as my ship came in and landed on the colony's landing pad. It moved over to the landing pad to investigate, then went right back to scanning the processing center. From about 600m above my ship. That was a literal facepalm moment, let me tell you. I got my SRV loaded back up, took a deep breath and with some fancy flying managed to take off and get away without crashing into the Thargoid or drawing its attention. Then it was back into witchspace and on my way back home. I'm sure the rest of the squadron will love hearing about this one.