Deal With The Devil | Personal Log 01.20.3309
20 Jan 2023Mark Zero
-//Log Entry Start[Date: 01.20.3309]
[Location: Victory-Class Fleet Carrier V4F-21N Amaurot's Legacy, Thadshe]
"Sometimes a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all."
I had an old wingmate a while back who used to say that. Can't remember his name, but we flew together a bit while I was still fresh out of the Pilot's Academy. Back when I had a little more of a fire in my belly, and a little more idealism about "blazing my own trail". I think he said it during a friendly argument over beers about taking mission contracts from subsidiary factions of megacorps, dictatorships, and crime cartels. I vaguely remember having some choice words about the Imperials and their "honorable" system of slavery, too.
I thought I had a pretty eloquent argument at the time about how we Commanders had a responsibility to be discerning about the contracts we take. About how we shouldn't be baited into doing the dirty work of an amoral corporate monolith or a despotic feudal lord just for a credit transfer. But he just shook his head, chuckled in that gruff tone that old men take when they think they're wiser than the upstart twenty-something they're talking with, and dispensed his simple pearl of wisdom with a wry smile before his next swig. "You do what you gotta do to keep going, Zero. Sometimes a deal with the Devil is better than no deal at all."
I quietly hated him for it in that moment. I'd show him. I'd do it different. But I found out the thing everyone with ideals finds out over time; the galaxy doesn't care, and sometimes the alternative to the thing you oppose can be worse. No matter what crucial asset you take down, a megacorp is always gonna have a backup of it. Every brutal dictator or corrupt regime you help overthrow, there's always gonna be somebody in the revolution with ambitions to become the next one. Sometimes that next one's gonna be even worse. Sometimes... sometimes you just take the job, get it done, and do what you can with what you've got.
So why am I ranting into my log about all this? Because in the heat of the war against the Thargoids, who else but Azimuth [expletive deleted] Biotech would come up with a breakthrough we all really need.
The biggest problem with AX weaponry, whether it's conventional or Guardian hybrid tech, is that it puts immense kinetic stresses on your ship. Enough that back when Aegis released the original experimental weapons, they recommended to the Pilot's Federation to never allow more than four to be mounted. Anti-Thargoid pilots have balked at that restriction forever, but when the alternative is your ship's frame warping under the stress and shearing itself apart, you grin and bear it.
The good news, is that in light of the Thargoids launching a full scale invasion on our civilization, somebody finally managed to come up with stabilizer modules to disperse the forces more safely, allowing for at least the number of conventional AX weapons to be increased. The bad news is that someone is Azimuth [expletive deleted] Biotech. Yeah, that Azimuth [expletive deleted] Biotech. The people who caused this mess. Salvation's dutiful little underlings who now just want to help humanity in our time of need (and turn a profit, of course), and definitely absolutely for sure aren't having anything to do with their former leader's catastrophic science experiment in HIP 22460. They were just following orders, I'm sure.
In any kind of just galaxy, I believe that Azimuth Biotech as an entity would be hauled into a galactic court somewhere and fined for every credit they're worth. In any kind of just galaxy, I believe their executive leadership from Torben Rademaker on down would be stripped of their riches and thrown into a cell on some rocky ice ball on the ass end of the bubble for a while. In any kind of just galaxy, I believe that there would be any kind of real consequences for the hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of people who died following along with Azimuth Biotech's doomed plan to wipe out the Thargoids.
So if nothing else, at least I can say I've held a shred of my youthful idealism, I guess.
But we don't live in a just galaxy, and we don't have time for the convenience of justice. Those stabilizers are going to allow pilots to fight just that little bit harder to protect the systems that are being attacked right now. We need every advantage we can get. Even Operation Wych Hunt, with their hard-line hostile stance against Azimuth, has released a statement that they'll support anyone's decision to use Azimuth's tech if they need to. As with everything else right now, the first thing we need to do is survive, and everything else is secondary.
Because sometimes a deal with the Devil is better than no deal at all.
-//Log Entry End