OYA Terminus
20 Apr 2024DankBot
Date: 20 April 3310Ship: EDF Vesper
Location: Cephei Sector BV-Y b4
The distortion trail from the hyperspace jump still rippled across the Vesper's sensors, momentarily blurring the stars of the Cephei Sector. Inside, the faint smell of overheated circuitry hung in the air, a constant companion on any Pilot's Federation sanctioned Anti-Xeno mission. We did it. Against all odds, the impossible had been achieved. The Thargoid Oya, an abomination of insectoid engineering, was a ruined testament to humanity's resilience.
The weeks leading up to this moment had been a blur of frantic activity. Rumors of a colossal Titan class Thargoid vessel, the Oya, had sent chills down even the most jaded spacer's spine. System evacuations were in full swing, and the battle plan, cobbled together by countless commanders, felt like a desperate prayer. But we had no choice. The Oya was a harbinger of destruction, and if left unchecked, it would carve a swathe through inhabited systems This wasn't a battle; it was a stand against annihilation.
The assault was pure chaos. The Vesper, an agile gunship bristling with experimental weaponry, darted like a gnat among the titanic capital ships raining hellfire on the Oya. My role: opportunistic harassment. Pick off Thargoid scouts, disrupt their formations, whatever it took to give the real heavy hitters a sliver of breathing room.
The turning point was pure insanity. A few commanders, probably with more guts than brains, started destroying the Thargoid interceptors harassing the friendly vessels. The resulting mayhem gave us the opening we needed. The Vesper's railguns spat bursts of molten metal, peeling back layers of armor.
It worked. The Oya convulsed, energy spikes turning the interior into a strobe of blue electric like light. The escape was a frantic dash, dodging caustic mines and cascading debris, the roar of the collapsing core right behind me. The Vesper barely held together as the interceptors defending Oya chased behind her.
The aftermath... silence, glorious silence. The remains of the Oya drifted in a macabre ballet of warped metal still ejecting Orthouses from its center, swarms of Thargoid hunters fly around the remains of what once was a treacherous Thargoid titan but is now only a slow dying shell of what it once was. The comms crackled to life – incoherent shouts of victory, tinged with the exhaustion of a thousand close calls. It was over. The Oya was finally neutralized.
But even now, as I drift here, the enormity of it all sinks in. The friends lost, the countless near-death experiences. The war with the Thargoids is far from over, that much is certain. Tonight, though, there's the lingering metallic taste of recycled air in my mouth and the steady thrum of cooling engines. Tonight, there's the simple fact that against all odds, we survived. Tonight, we're the ones who defeated Titan Oya.