A quantum of vengeance.
11 Mar 2018Random Chaos
The last time I fought the Thargoids was painful. I'd spent almost half a billion credits in building the best weapon I could at the time, only to be used like a chew toy. The memory of barely escaping from one encounter while corroded, and landing mere seconds before the ship came apart will probably always be with me. The losses in credits and personnel during that operation were staggering, and despite being haunted by those memories, I found myself on the front lines again in the Huveang De system yesterday.The Thargoids had been using fighters to harass shipments headed to the Aegis facility at Haignere Port, and I volunteered to sortie with the 10th Legion's anti-Thargoid expert, Erinia Scantyar, to do some pest control.
The Thargoid Marauders are interesting ships, with a discoid hull like the old flying saucers of legend (is there a connection?), and maneuverable, but at the same time, more vulnerable to conventional weapons than the big ones. Flying into a pack of them can certainly be dangerous, but a well-equipped Type 10, even one that was engineered months ago with one-off prototypes instead of the slick standardized upgrades that have evolved since then, can weather the storm.
Wing after wing of Thargoids was dispatched with relative ease. We'd get a distress call from another convoy, and drop in to find a flight of 4-6 fighters harassing them. Intransigent's quartet of AX Multicannons would shred them with ease, and all that would be left was to collect the debris for later study. The pay wasn't terribly wonderful, only 10,000 credits per fighter, but it was easy work...
...until the last encounter. The bugs are smart, and they've apparently figured out how to spoof the signal from an automated distress beacon. The last one we warped into didn't have a convoy at all, just three flights of Thargoid fighters bent on murdering anything that came down. They descended upon the Intransigent like she was a cat at a dog show, and had my shields down before the weapons even came online.
Erinia warped in seconds after me, and I'd like to say we destroyed them all with superior tactics and Imperial elegance. In truth, it was just a merciless slugfest. Instransigent was more than equal to the challenge, and after several minutes of maneuvering to keep ships in the firing arcs of the turrets, or bring the secondary weapons to bear, it was over. Over a dozen Thargoids were destroyed, and my hull integrity was still over 50%.
The single Cyclops kill marker on the Instransigent's hull now sits beside markers for 33 Thargoid fighters destroyed over the course of the day. Several more shipments of material made it to Aegis, and I can sit here in the repair bay confident that I have done my part for humanity's defense, and satisfied for having extracted some payment for our losses in the Pleiades Sector.