Duty, 16: For Those in Danger
27 Nov 2022Meowers
Damn I was falling apart last day. Was ready to give up everything for a bit of a sleep. Talked with the survivors via ship comms, rerouted their channel to the open so other pilots could chat with them as well. Talking helps, you know. For them, it was a reassurance that they weren't left here to die. For me... Well. Something that kept my mind away from those annoying thoughts about me chilling out in the cockpit instead of taking any action. Even if I knew there were no other options. But that's how it works, that thing just sits in your head and yells at you, 'go and do something, you useless'. Argh.
So, Federal military folks. Some brought their families here, to live with them. And now, thanks to the Thargoids, they've been trapped in that squashed and slowly freezing tin can, in the middle of a snow desert. And their installation magically turned into a pile of smoking, goo-covered rubble. And... Being a military in the Federation might be better than being a low-level corpo wage slave, but they mostly weren't so sure about a possible rescue operation. Three hundred MIA's more, three hundred MIA's less, Fed statistics usually cares about greater numbers. That's what I've got from their words, in general, and, I'm not surprised at all. Higher ranked officers left the place on the first ships, and those poor fellows didn't even know why whoever is responsible for their AA defences has been so reluctant to let us join. So you may guess what kind of morale they had.
We tried to analyse why all this have happened. Thargoids are less interested in planets with atmosphere suitable for us, humans. They like ammonia stuff. And sometimes they drop their seeds, larvae or whatever disgusting things they're shitting out, on planets with little to no atmosphere. So, something drove them to attack this place and even those Fed folks didn't know what it could be. They said their facility was a simple outpost, they weren't conducting any Thargoid-related research, and neither they had meta-alloys in their storages. And, the Thargoids. They weren't concentrating their fire on anything in particular.
A dull place of lesser importance like that wasn't especially heavily guarded or whatever, as I've said, their superiors even let their families to move in and live in the buildings nearby, and they never had any serious Thargoid attacks before. Explains why they had such a second-grade AX weaponry. Unlike 'our' settlement which was 'known' by the Thargoids and attacked from time to time. They were monitoring their human rivals' activity, Imperials, Alliance, independents, whoever else in that region, or, as I presume, just occupying this place and adding years of distinguished loafing around service to their records.
But now, aliens decided to come with force and wipe that place out completely. For some reason. Was it a warning for us? Or maybe they thought two settlements are somehow connected? Or maybe it happened because we shut everything down and went off the sensors, and that Thargoid party had an 'order' to 'destroy the settlement', but they blasted the wrong one? Uh. A bad sign anyway. Definitely something for our strategic minds to think about, I don't have the full picture, at least not yet.
And, yeah. Hours of waiting paid off, finally. A group of ships approached and began landing nearby; locals sent a similar T-7 with an escort of AX wing, and the freighter carried medical supplies, food, portable heaters and two bulldozers to punch through the snow. So we had a time to relax a bit. And... Well. One of their AX Chieftains landed right in front of me, nose-to-nose with Marshmallow, and I saw a pilot waving their hand.
It was Mion. She opened a private comm and said sorry about what happened earlier, even before I had a moment to say hello. So, when she heard about the Fed firework show and us sitting there and waiting, she volunteered to fly an escort, she and three other pilots. I was a bit of hesitant to let her know about my bad sleep, but something in her voice told me that she was dealing with the same thing, so... Looks like she wanted to talk. Not the best atmosphere obviously, but we had several hours free, with that ground stuff going on.
Yeah, while not being happy about that street encounter, she also wasn't in peace with her own reaction either. Said she'd seen enough of that shit before and it just 'clicked' something in her. Even if it was, in theory, a self-defence. So she spent last hours thinking how to say me all that without making me feel myself guilty. Ow... Yep, I guess I know how it works. Anyway, I told her I'm here to shoot Thargoids, not humans, and he wasn't looking like Thargoid, even if his gibberish sounded almost like that, hah.
However, that incident with Feds caused a bit of a stir in whatever they had for upper ranks here. Some of the local figures didn't agree with the decision, because Feds were never there to help the settlement; but then, the settlement was cooperating with us, AXDF, and we are here to repel the Thargoids no matter where the attacks are happening. So that flight was mostly an AXDF operation and nobody expected that things could go that way. And now we've got almost three hundred people in danger, they should live somewhere, they should eat something, many of them were wounded, and their ship was damaged beyond any repair. And, what I've got to know from talking with them, almost twenty of them died in the crash. Including their pilot. Luckily, there were some pilots in escape pods around, who ejected from their ships during the battle. But... They had no ship.
Hope our command will sort that stuff out. Maybe I should read something about building refugee camps, hah. Okay, GalNet, how many people can live in a cargo container?.. But, yeah. On a serious note. Of course you heard speeches about us, humans, being good at exterminating each other, and 'animals don't do that'. But there's also one thing that animals don't do, and what differs us from the animals.
Caring for those in danger.