The Soul of Our Homeland, 6: Humanity in Arms
09 Dec 2024Meowers
( 09.12.3310 / 21:50 GMT )
( Groombridge 34 )
I record this and the ground trembles under my feet. I record this and everything around me burns. Groombridge 34 is being hit hard. Two stations in the system are fighting, Sawyer's Pride on Jaya, right under the main star, and Matthews City deeper in the system, orbiting New America.
It's only half-gravity on Jaya but ships and debris fall from the sky and explode like bombs. Buildings are in flames, surface passages are littered with shipwrecks and bug guts. Surface navigation is impossible. Unless you want to get lost and then squashed by a Thargoid corpse. Several underground tunnels are blocked by the rubble, with emergency teams spread thinner than my fucking sanity. Wounded, just everywhere. In every wide corridor, there are stretchers or bunks with shot, burnt, or in any other way injured people. Blood. Blood on the floors, and we just don't notice it anymore. At least if you bleed, your triage score will be painted with yours.
Damn hell follows me everywhere. I'm here, as always, to fight and... do something. So, yeah, we stopped them in EZ Aquarii. A, relatively, easy ride, on paper. If only three more my pilots can't say the same because they're fucking dead. Tau Ceti, 61 Cygni and Epsilon Eridani, secured in the meantime. Now most of the combined humankind's forces are spread over LHS 380 and Luhman 16, where the bugs are stepping on the brakes already. And my order took me here. To that hell. Perhaps it's a twisted mark of honour, of sorts, to be sent into the most disastrous places.
Sent seven ships back to the carriers, they can't take any more of that shit, they're just falling apart and quick field patch-ups can't help. One has a piece of Medusa lodged so deeply into the armour that you can't properly access the power plant for repairs. Two more are hanging on a fucking duct tape and ropes. One has to quickly burn out so much acid goop from the hull that the cooling circuits just melted, there's so many leaks we can't trace them all. And so on.
I even remember how it happened.
A dying Hydra, one heart left beating, targeted Roan, my wingmate. He smacked a heatsink and pulled up sharply, evading and goading the bastard to follow him. I myself got two heatsinks running, took a position between the Hydra and Roan, repeating their moves, and opened fire point-blank. Right in the face of that bastard. The rest of my wing supported me from behind. With each hit, the beast shuddered, a web of cracks running wider on the damaged carapace, as shrapnel tore green slimy chunks of exposed insides off the body, sending them spinning down to the ground. The last heart shattered to pieces, disappearing in the cloud of acidic blood, and we kept firing, not giving the Hydra any chance to raise shields. Dying, roaring of pain and helpless anger, it dashed towards another one, engaged by the fifth wing, and exploded halfway, turning inside out and spilling its innards through what once was its face. A particularly big piece struck one of the ships, disorienting the pilot, and the ship tumbled into the freshly formed, highly-concentrated acidic cloud, where it was also hit by two caustic missiles from the second Hydra.
Saunders, damn good pilot. Got his shit together, smacked the silent running switch and boosted away, cooking off the goop by shooting weapons. Then straight to emergency landing. But, yeah, that ship is toast.
Phah... Remembering how we shred them makes me less angry. How does that work?..
See, G-34 is mostly an independent system, one of the few in the core, and it doesn't seem like any of the major corporations have their presence over here. So the Feds, assumingly, have sent more promises than actual evac ships. And those guys have been fighting on their own for almost four days straight, with little support from the outside.
And that got me thinking... Just how deep fighting Thargoids has rooted into the common human knowledge. Common attitude of humanity. Back then, when I myself was a green trainee, we had months of rigorous training, discipline, and we maintain that tradition. Which, perhaps, sets us back in numbers. But we were strong and we are strong. Back then, saying that you fight Thargoids could've made others look at you as if you, yourself, was from some different species. And it truly required an entirely different mindset, to leave everything behind and head to the nebulae, to throw your life on the line between them and the inhabited zones. Stories of pilots joining us were mostly tragic, oftenly inspiring, sometimes intriguing, and anything but ordinary.
Would've been our survival possible if they attacked our core systems right after that nutjob Salvation shot his giant screwup firework? Without all the recent research on Thargoids? Without the new non-Guardian weapons, maybe less devastating, but easier to mass-produce and obtain, and equip thousands of ships? Without lots of people showing interest in the knowledge accumulated by those who fought Thargoids before? Even without the horrible display of what Thargoids are capable of, if not stopped? Right now, it feels like almost the entire humanity is in arms, and we reached that over a couple years when the threat has, finally, become obvious. What if we didn't have these two years?
And the most sore question. Would the Thargoids become our eternal foe?
I hope not. I am tired. I want to live.
But if I'm destined to march through this hell to the end, I might as well make it feel my every single step.
