Brutal Lessons in the Pleiades
17 Feb 2018Random Chaos
Fighting the Thargoids is something else. You think you're ready for it, you've got the best gear money can buy, and then the excrement gets sucked into the turbine, your friends are yelling, your ship is dissolving, and Charlie starts doing the Foxtrot.Commander Erinia Scantyar, in the Crimson Autumn, and my Intransigent sortied out to the Pleiades Cluster to meet a contact of hers this morning, and test anti-Thargoid tactics. Instead, it was we who were tested.
The first Thargoid encountered was a Cyclops. Through the chaos, our guide did the best he could to share his wisdom, and I did my best to alternate between keeping my guns on target when it was vulnerable and getting out of the way when its shield was up.
With patience, we were wearing it down, but matters took a turn when the Thargoid concentrated on my ship. We took a direct hit to the bridge, I was knocked unconscious by flying debris that thankfully didn't stop my helmet from deploying, and the engineering team had to take over from auxiliary control and limp back to port. The telepresence console, and my lead pilot Kate Wyatt, who had joined as a raw recruit and worked her way up to a Master rating, were gone.
All we could do was expedite repairs, which involved crudely bolting armor plate over all of the holes, running a veritable stampede of repair limpets through the ship, and waving fat stacks of credits at everyone who even looked like a mechanic. The Intransigent returned in time to help put the Thargoid out of our misery.
A hard-won victory, and the only victory of the day. A Basilisk drove our squadron away shortly after our triumph, and the Cyclops after that had an ace pilot who seemed to know what we were doing before we did. My ship was the last one out. It was a miracle we even got the corroded frameshift drive to hold a charge, and that the bug had relented for a moment. The acid undermined the hull all the way back to dock, and by the time we returned, we had electrical fires on all decks, the canopy was on the verge of giving out, and the computer was estimating structural strength to be at 2%.
Against the damages, hazards, and personnel losses suffered, the Pilot's Federation combat bond for 2 million, for the day's lone victory, seemed almost like an insult.... but these things can be beaten, and these hard-won lessons will be used to train others, and will ultimately pave the road to victory.