I am invulnerable, apparently.
03 Feb 2018Tristan Pacheco
Back in Eta Cassiopeia, for the first time in a while (at this point I've just accepted that nothing can possibly kill me; will explain; read on), on R&R, also for the first time in a while. After helping out the ambassadors, we were given orders to return to the Pleiades. This time we were working alongside, although not with Aegis. Our mission was to provide protection for rescue vessels operating in the area due to the recent string of station attacks. We were also far more prepared on this trip, with full loadouts of AX weaponry, courtesy of the Navy. Of course, that didn't make things easy. There are three known classifications of Thargoid vessels and one unknown. Our ship OS's had to invent brand new threat levels just to describe them. They are, in ascending order: The Cyclops, the Basilisk, and the Medusa. Our first hostile contact upon arrival was, for better or worse, a Cyclops. My Corvette's hull was nearly reduced to slag before its shields even dropped. One of the hallways near the prow was completely destroyed and required extensive repairs. Fortunately Mueller was on the bridge during this event. Since its primary focus was on me, my wingmen fared far better, and, after a bit of experimentation, we managed to destroy the thing, netting us a fairly hefty combat bond. We then proceeded to Titan's Daughter, which was, at the time, still in a very bad way, and assisted with the rescue effort for a few hours. At this point my ship was still damaged, and the rescue ship was too crowded and hectic to give me time for repairs. Still, I helped as best as I could. The ship crew and I set up caution tape over the bulkheads leading to the destroyed corridor and taped a bunch of "this way" signs for emergency passengers. My wingmen did more or less the same. Actually entering the station was a terrifying experience. Two of the shield generators that kept the docking bay pressurized had failed completely, but the station climate controllers had violently overcompensated, flooding the entire bay with enormous amounts of heat; far too much for the ship to handle for an extended amount of time.
The normal station controller had died in the initial attack, so we were stuck dealing with a clearly overwhelmed emergency coordinator that, despite her best efforts, was not very good at directing the massive influx of traffic. Thus, flying in towards my assigned pad, not only did I have to contend with star-level amounts of heat, and enormous, renegade debris rotating at velocities high enough to crush a Sidewinder, but I also had to worry about an Imperial Cutter trying its best to avoid the same obstacles, except it had no idea that I was there thanks to the lack of experienced controllers, so we very nearly collided. Behind me, the Cutter and my wingman's Fer-De-Lance DID collide, but fortunately their shields saved them from any real damage. As I approached my pad at a speed I'd normally not dare approach at, one of the station's power substations right beneath the floor of the bay exploded violently. My ship is huge, but it was still turned nearly 45 degrees to the right and pitched down quite a bit as well. At this point my heat was approaching 200% and I myself was about to have a goddamn heat stroke as my life support systems struggled to keep the temperature low enough to not fry Mueller and I to crisps. Finally I landed, and the pad instantly went down, where it was far cooler. At the end of the hangar, what seemed like a hundred men, women, and children were crowding at the rails, waiting for my landing pad to slide back.
I don't know whether they were reassured by the fact that a Federal Corvette was there to help or terrified by the fact that smoke was billowing from every surface and part of the nose looked like it had a bite taken out of it by an overenthusiastic Gollunk. Either way, the moment the pad came to a stop in the back of the bay, they all started rushing onto the pad. I ran down and helped them find places on board, but I couldn't hold even close to all of them. Seeing their faces was intense. A lot of them had lost family and friends in the initial attack, and the station was still damaging itself due to internal malfunction, so even more had perished thanks to that. I could kill criminals and Imperial spec ops all day from the safety of my bridge, but seeing the victims of violence and circumstance up close was too much. I didn't get much sleep that night, and it wasn't because of the noise of ships docking above us on the rescue ship (we elected to sleep there, since it could jump away in case of Thargoid attack while we slept). The next morning we continued rescue efforts for another few hours before receiving an emergency ping from a listening post in Asterope: another Thargoid vessel. We made our way there as fast as we could and tracked it down. This time, it was a Medusa, which I had never seen before, even in photos. My hull was still at 65% from the severe damage I had sustained the day prior, and this ship was far more dangerous. It set upon us the moment I could feel G-Force again. This time Mueller rushed to the remote fighter controller and started deploying our new AX fighters, which basically served to distract the dizzying number of "Thargons" the Medusa had deployed. This ship also didn't shy away from me when I flew close to it. On the contrary, it shot some sort of beam at me, which, horrifyingly, almost destroyed the electronics on my ship, dealing a lot of damage in the process.
Fortunately my wingmen managed to capture the thing's attention for once, and it started ripping through their ships instead of mine. We had the procedure down at this point, fire, exert, destroy heart, rinse, repeat, but implementing it on this vessel was much harder. By the time the ship finally exploded, my ship was almost completely disabled, with the list of individual component failures too long to list here, with my comrades not much better off. We limped back to Maia Point for repairs, and waited for a while, listening to the emergency traffic coming and going. After a few days, Titan's Daughter was repaired, and then Obsidian Orbital was attacked (among others, but that was our primary objective). Long story short, we continued switching between helping civilians and attacking Thargoids until last night, where we finally got permission to return home. I haven't been able to get the pictures of the civilians out of my head, so I've switched to the Chasing Infinity, which I haven't flown in quite a while, and started exploring star systems close to the Bubble. It at least occupies my thoughts. I've been thinking on how much I've been through since first hearing about the possibility of the Thargoids. It's honestly incredible. I could've died about a million times, but I haven't. I keep thinking that I'm lucky to be alive, but I don't think that it's luck...
No. I think it's something much greater than that.
I'm just fucking invincible.
Until next time,
RADM Tristan Pacheco