What's Left Behind
30 Mar 2024Kasumi Goto
"Taranis' destruction proved nothing, except for our own destructive nature. And this war has simply just gone too far, building upon violence with violence. But now that the sharks have tasted blood, will they know where to stop?"
March 14, 3310
Hyades Sector FB-N b7-6
No Thargoids, no anti-Guardian field... and a deeply darkened cloud.
That's all which awaited me when I approached the location of where Taranis once was. I still had a bad feeling about what exactly was awaiting me, there, in the center of that cloud... but I was going in there regardless. I had to see the result of our actions for myself.
The FSD dropped me out a lot closer than it initially used to, at... just over fifty kilometers from the center, and there was no sensor distortion either. And... basically no activity in the center, but I could still feel something - faint, at best. And after the explosion I'd seen over a week ago... I really had little hope or expectation of finding anything really left alive in there.
There definitely wouldn't be anything visible from here. The cloud was no longer the swirling maelstrom of death it was before, even while the Titan was active, and much smaller in size, but it still blocked the view from, or to, the inside completely, resembling a deep green tone much more than the orange-ish brown it was before.
The caustic substance was significantly less intense, too - the caustic sink I had equipped was filling up at such a slow rate that it seemed almost negligible. Which was all for the better, because I couldn't see a thing in this death cloud, or what remained of it after it dissipated, in the time following the Titan reactor's explosion. It was like trawling through a thick, green goop, and even the enhancements to my vision did... absolutely nothing to help with this.
It annoyed me enough to want to complain about it out loud, even if the only one around me to give any answer was EDI, but I was so laser focused on what was directly ahead of me, and trying to discern something, anything, in this 'mist', if it could even be qualified as such, that the impulse never made it to my mouth. Sensor distortion had started almost exactly when I entered the caustic remnant, not helping matters, and it was impossible to tell whether it was the result of this green gunk, or whatever was left in its center.
The fact that there was no noises or repulsion wave told me to not expect anything active, but it just worsened my feelings. After what felt like an eternity of flying through impenetrable green fog - some would have been tempted to even call it puke, and I wouldn't have faulted them for that - small objects began to appear in the distance, very faintly visible through small reflections of light, about thirty kilometers out. And I reoriented toward them, that awful sensation really beginning to set in. It'd felt like an eternity - but it was more like a minute or two, at best.
Twenty kilometers out, the 'reflections' turned out to definitely be debris, but more... of shattered ice rocks. Smaller and larger pieces of them. The fact that anything of those remained was... surprising, to say the least. I would have expected them to be vaporized in an instant in the explosion.
Ten or fifteen kilometers out - however accurate the nav readout was - the debris became less scattered, denser. But I was underneath it, from my perspective, so it posed no navigation hazard, yet. The first of my caustic sinks was almost full, prompting me to eject it - and with it, any relief which I had gotten by seeing the shattered asteroids left, alongside hope, when I began to see those.
Large wreckage pieces, green, organic in appearance... parts of the Titan. Too many parts of it. And lots of white contacts - remnants of... whatever remained inside at the time of the explosion. Thargoid ships, the caustic mines, meta-alloys, caustic shards and crystals, the 'resin' used in Thargoid ship construction... it all flooded the sensor display as I moved further into the core of the debris field, feeling an extremely strong sense of unease, and shivers going down my spine.
I pushed the throttle back to more reasonable levels from full, still needing to focus on not crashing into the remains - which was an easier said than done task, due to the horribly bad visibility, which even my Thargoid-based augmentations barely seemed to help with. And night vision did... literally, absolutely nothing. I could not see any difference between it and the information from my own eyes.
A particular contact on the sensors drew my attention. 'Thargoid Bio-Storage Capsule'...
Some of the pods had survived.
How... I didn't even want to question it. The pod was next to a big piece, which I could barely see the surface or outlines of. The only good the light of the M-class dwarf did, through the death cloud, was cast an eerie green shine on those wreckage pieces and into the cockpit. Which I was really not a fan of, as it just acted to unsettle me further.
I approached this singular, life-supporting machine, still not able to shake the questions of how it had survived not only the internal heat of the Titan but also its fusion reactor turning into a sun. And, misjudging the distance thanks to my eagerness to get close and the low visibility, I narrowly avoided colliding with it.
This pod... was like a small ray of positivity in this... thing, which felt more like a graveyard. A graveyard of a Titan, many Thargoids, humans... and the beliefs I had in Aegis. All of it pulverized in an instant, like this Thargoid ship. I had a cargo hold, if no limpets, but I could still retrieve it. After watching the machine a little longer, I opened the hatch and carefully brought the pod in. At least this soul wouldn't be left to die, or be forgotten, here. Or in the larger madness which had caused them to be here - in these remains of a dead Titan - to begin with.
I checked my sensor contact again. More meta-alloys, ship building materials, Titan tissues, Thargoid sensors, and other, smaller salvage items which didn't require a cargo hold... large parts of the Titan, internal and external, floated there, forever spinning, without friction to slow them down. Once pieces of a greater whole, now reduced to defunct, useless pieces of a dead ship.
I shook my head, just feeling... disappointed, without being able to put the feeling into thoughts or words further, like I wasn't sure just what I felt, beyond that. And I began to chase after some of those smaller 'material' items... only subconsciously aware that it was a distraction, and nothing more.
There was no recovering this. The unease had partially given way to the, equally uncomfortable, realization that this was all just... not worth even thinking about rebuilding. At best, it was good for salvaging. And I already knew that some idiots would show up all too soon to start pulling everything apart for their precious, stupid credits, or to build bigger weapons to kill more Titans with. That's all this was. Human greed leading to an excessively destructive war that literally had zero point to it any longer. A completely senseless conflict to which there no longer seemed a purpose.
My material chasing had taken me to the edge of the dense wreckage field. I turned the ship around and let it come to a halt, settling the throttle at zero. And, accessing an external camera, I took a better look around with it, rather than remain limited to the restructed view from the cockpit. There was... a lot more left than I had expected, given the intensity of the explosion which had torn apart this... ship, and yet, despite several large parts, even recognizable as the 'edges' of the Titan for some of them, remaining... it was much less than I had hoped for. Why was it not enough to just render the ship defunct and take it out of the war, without literally ruining it entirely like this?
Why do humans always have to be so fucking excessively brutal?
You already know the answer to that., 'Kira' threw at me. If we'd gotten past being idiotic cavemen that shout angrily and throw stones and sharp sticks at anything that isn't human or doesn't agree with our views, nobody would have to put up with this bullshit.
It was as if I could feel her pointing right at the wreckage field directly ahead.
I know. But ...
I sighed, and shook my head again, ordering the camera drone back over to the ship after taking a snapshot. The caustic remnant was not extremely intense, but the drone was not under protection of the caustic sink launcher while deployed, and it wouldn't last as long as the ship without it. The residues stuck to it were quickly diverted away and neutralized. Five charges left, just over halfway through the current one. I doubted I'd stay long enough to go through all of them.
I'd noticed that the debris field was spread along a particular direction, looking at it from further away, now that I had... established some sense of direction, even if it was difficult to see in here. And I could also see a rough center to it all... where the Titan's core had to have been, before. Wanting to find out if there was anything to be found on some of the larger wreckage, and to see if there were any particular major sections left even somewhat intact, I moved back in there.
A particularly large section of the wreck drew my attention, near what resembled a mushroom, of sorts, with the way that piece of debris had formed. I began to fly over it, quickly getting reminded of some familiar formations on it. I chose to flip over to its other side, using another large flee-floating debris piece, with... odd yellow dots on it, as reference, then turned back toward what I was actually investigating.
As I passed over this - definitely big, as it was taking time to move across even at high or full throttle - wreckage part, I soon caught sight of the 'arms' of a Titan section, near where launch tubes used to be. And at least one heat vent remained, too - this had to be... where one of the hearts was, right around the center of the ship. I moved back to the other side, which I considered to be the 'top' of the Titan, and sure enough... the telltale 'pylons' which once fired off defensive fields were there. And I knew exactly where to maneuver to find the core after going near a pair of two.
The whole center was just gone. Only pieces which could barely account for a quarter of it remained, and some of the surrounding sections in that very large section of hull which I'd noticed, just now.
I turned back around, moving 'down' to be in line with this part of the Titan, and got some distance to it. Once a few kilometers away, I stopped, turned, and could very clearly see. One large portion of the Titan wreck remained almost... intact, except for a split that was not quite down the middle, and yet, those two largest pieces looked... mostly intact, maybe even maintaining a seal from vacuum. But... the only way in which that would matter, was if any Thargoids remained alive inside. And I was doubtful of that, with how hot it had to have gotten in there, in the last hour of existence of the ship.
It was very clear how the explosion had taken its way out of the Titan - practically in the opposite direction of where I was. A large enough breach had to have occurred on that other side of the Thargoid ship, and physics had saved some of it when the final devastating blow occurred, by it taking the path of least resistance out. Yet it was, almost certainly, only enough to be pulled apart by scavengers, or any Thargoids possibly looking to recover what they could from the wreckage. But they, strangely, were not here. At least... yet.
I took another camera drone out from the Krait MKII - the one ship which I generally used for anything which related to Titans - and, after positioning it correctly to where I wanted, took another picture, fully showing what remained of Titan Taranis. The intact sections, the wrecked exterior and internal pieces scattered around, some visible through the gap between the two big parts... the amateur photographer in me recognized an 'interesting' contrast between the brown-ish red on the left, created naturally by the sun, and the green of the corrosive remnant to the right, alongside the way the colors blended in the middle and then faded in either direction.
But I wasn't here to play war tourist. Something I knew would happen sooner rather than later, once the caustic remnant fully dissipated, and the idea of it... just slightly disgusted me. All of this was just... wrong. The death, the destruction, and what we would inevitably do with it. But what could I even do about it?
I went back in toward the center of the wreck... I wasn't quite done here yet, and still had caustic sink charges left. I flew over the smaller, free-floating parts of Taranis again, visually surveying them. Still getting no results from the pulse-wave scanner, I did notice... odd abrasions left behind, where sections of the armored hull looked like they'd been knocked away, exposing the interior structure. Once I was close enough, a contact appeared, labelled 'Organic Membrane'. And as much as I hesitated to mess with the remains of a ship that was, effectively, a graveyard now... I was equally curious, and got over myself enough to free a piece, using the beam laser on my ship. One which, it seemed, I used to keep its heat low while recovering humans from an active Titan... in the past, and more recently during a short outing to the Oya Titan. Seeing how, apparently, the Thargoids remained somewhat oblivious to such a weapon going off, and it couldn't even cause any actual damage to the Titan itself.
What I freed was labelled as an 'organ sample', with a strange hexagonal pattern. As if I needed something to feel put off by, or about. I pulled a face but picked it up anyway, for just a short moment... due to not having any corrosion-resistant cargo racks onboard.
"EDI... can you... figure out what that thing I picked up is?"
"Certainly, Kira." Only a second passed before the answer. "A brief molecular scan suggests it is a part of an internal mechanism of the Titan. More specialized equipment would be required to adequately determine its properties and uses. As well as a corrosion-resistant storage unit."
"Okay... throw the thing out. I don't want it onboard."
I waited for the item to be jettisoned before moving on. And... frameshift anomaly warnings appeared, along with four faint sensor contacts, somewhere... further away. I quickly found a hiding spot and waited, observing, as the contacts closed in. Scouts, four in number... I had no way of telling if they appeared as a result of my interfering with the wreckage, or they'd just chosen this precise moment in time to drop in. Nor could I discern what their intentions were - the 'noise', when I tried to focus on and listen on it, was overwhelmingly focused around the fact that Titan Leigong was left exposed to significant damage, and of course the idiots swarming all over it to make it explode in a brutal, unnecessarily violent way. Meanwhile, there was nothing 'active' here, which I could feel drawing Thargoids to the Taranis wreckage.
The Scouts ignored me, instead beginning to patrol the wreck... without an obvious purpose or direction, and ignoring me even within three kilometer distance. So I suppressed the noise again as best I could, and continued investigating, looking at some of the 'petal'-like things floating around... thinking it looked a lot like one of the 'pylons' which were formerly attached to central sections of this dead ship. And then I came across 'Bone Structures'... which looked the part as well, located in a similar abrasive 'wound' as the exposed internal 'organ'. It was corrosive, too, and... evidently, or at least seemingly, served as a reinforcing part of that internal structure. Given how it would've been below the armored hull, in normal conditions. But this was not normal.
I repeated the 'Get rid of it after a brief scan from internal sensors' procedure, then moved along, quickly locating a... weird yellow growth, again. If the organ sample was off-putting, this was outright disgusting and marked as some kind of... 'cyst' growth. And I was beginning to feel some of the food I'd eaten want to come back up my throat when I freed it, which caused a really gross yellow fluid to escape.
"Urgh. That is just... blergh. I want to delete this from my memory.", I remarked, with a no less than matching tone to how I felt.
"I cannot delete them from your implant, I am afraid.", EDI replied.
I shook my head. "I know. Just... scan whatever that gross... urgh. Just scan it and throw it away."
Fucking... nasty, disgusting... thing. I want to throw up.
At least do it somewhere there's gravity if you're going to.
My lunch decided to remain in my stomach, in the end. And the scan of the absolutely horrid 'cyst specimen' which I actually just wanted to turn around and fire at to remove it from existence, apparently only formed around the time of the Titan's destruction. And, however it came out, it appeared to primarily be 'attached' to the remains of the Titan's hearts. I definitely couldn't recognize anything that visually resembled a 'heart', or the significantly upscaled equivalent which would be within a Titan.
I hated this place. It was eerie, creepy, too quiet, and yet everything made unsettling crackling noises. As if it was not quite dead yet, despite this effectively being a grave. The presence of Thargoids which I couldn't tell the motive or directives of, and whether those included attacking me, made that even worse. And when the large sections of the Titan wreck lit up in an eerie green, followed by an unexplained loud noise which deeply startled me, I just couldn't take it any longer and left, needing to burn off a little bit of caustic substance before I was out of the corrosive cloud, fifty kilometers from the core.
I stopped a little beyond its edge, looking at this - for light - impenetrable remnant, which not long ago had still been a swirling death sentence for anyone that dared enter it. Causing me to build false hopes, only to see... this. It itself was not the madness, but the direct result of it.
I wanted for humans and Thargoids to get along, with each other, but instead, all they did was keep smashing each other's heads in in more and more violent ways, with bigger and bigger sticks. And with this, the destruction of Titans, it just felt like the war had gone right over and past me without even stopping. I no longer had any purpose in it. All it had become was a contest of who could kill the other side in worse ways, and someone who desired peace no longer had any place in it. And both sides were to blame for it, not humans or Thargoids alone.
I sighed, putting my head into my hands, just... lost. I didn't know what to do any longer. The world didn't want me, the purpose I thought I wanted to fulfil in the war had just been smashed apart like a ceramic plate hitting the ground, and had been stomped on for additional insult on top of the injury. I'd just been left behind, and didn't know what to do with it.
I managed to pull myself out of that downward spiral and started writing a message. One that I knew I wanted to write down.
To: Alba Tesreau
From: Kasumi Goto
I've been to the Taranis wreck site. Saw what your torpedoes did to it. I'm just tired. Tired of it. Of all this stupid, pointless violence.
I hope you're going to get something good out of this, and not just make more weapons to kill more Titans out of it. If you do, I don't want to hear of you any longer.
Attached image
I sent the message off and plugged in a course back to the carrier, waiting in a nearby system. I'd need to just stay there and clear out my head. In the worst case, I could... always just distract myself with my body, maybe in a shower with low rotational gravity in the hab section. If nothing else, having this form was good to temporarily pull my mind out of a shitty spot. Especially one like this.
But I already knew I just needed to distance myself from this war, and focus on something else completely. The Far God - if it even existed - knew, there were plenty of problems to be solved internally with humans. But first, I'd maybe just have an hour of fun getting carried away under a stream of water.