Halfway Mark
12 Jun 2024Meowers
Take the warning seriously, be on your guard, all that. Well damn me straight to Torval's mines and shove a Cyclops under my seat if I don't. Yeah, that today's new Aegis broadcast, almost caught me off guard, thing blipped on the GalNet news feed right after I got another portion of the officer stuff done. Which is now terribly easy, like drawing red lines on the map and telling people to go there and kick arse.
Okay, smokes'n'coffee break and I'm off to do the same. It's more like a social kind of habit now rather than a daily emergency brain kick-starting measure though, but... I still like it.
Of course we're damn wary too. And weary. And friggin angry. A rare moment, those who joined just a few weeks ago totally understand those who have been around for a while, from the pre-war days and earlier. I swear this bloody world simply hates us. Thargoids, Far God Cult, fanatics, Azimuth, pacifists, another wave of shitty fanatics that blame us for not offering our naked butts to the bugs, and, before you thought it can't get much worse from here, bloody AXI opens fire on us.
For holy shit's sake. I thought it's a fucking joke when I saw it first time in the reports.
Nah. It seemed like shooting anything but defenceless Orthruses was disrupting their business of stacking war bounty vouchers. What kind of humankind are you defending?
Fuck.
Okay, engines are still spooling up... So, where was I... Ah.
I swear, if I ever meet one of those get rich or die trying types, I'm gonna provide them with both, by stuffing money down their throat until they start shitting coins like a slot machine in the jackpot mode.
Oh we took the warning seriously, rest assured. Even without any strange murderbug behaviour. Human behaviour is enough. Okay, I understand those first diplomacy flops, it didn't work with the more advanced Guardians but some nutjobs were either too bad at history or too good at believe-in-yourself crap and an attempt was made. Then, we've got those shiny new torpedoes, torpedoes kill Titans, Titans and their spawn kill and abduct people, so getting rid of Titans is good, isn't it? Of-fucking-course it's not. Those idiots say we must come up with some 'less cruel' weaponry that doesn't cook them from the inside while they're free to murder and abduct people, and every hour the Titans are alive, they do so. And I tell you, being melted to green gunk isn't exactly a humane and painless sort of death. Less cruel weaponry, you say? I might as well chase them with an old rusty revolver.
"Begone you rude abominations! Pew! You are neither pleasant nor welcome! Pew-pew! Do us a favour please, make our space clear of yourselves! Pew! I'm afraid I should inform you that you smell rather badly! Pew-pew!"
Those morons keep spreading their bullshit absolutely unrestricted while we're dying on the frontlines, and hells do they know how to twist every word in their favour, so the entire human species is now suffering because of us and our fighting, humanity is better off without us, we're repeating the mistakes of the past, we're the reason why humanity is at war and all that crap.
And now this. Rotten cherry on a shitcake.
Remember that refugee camp? Ah, I forgot to mention, I'm on the Atlas now. And the Hercules is one jump away. Damn I miss my chair. At least it's zero-G here and I can float and I, kind of, missed that too. So, AXDF command summoned most of the pilots and now we're on the carriers, doing that funny Titan tour...
Ah, nevermind, I've been talking about the refugee camp. So... folks from the original settlement are seriously planning to retake their place soon, refugees are building houses since most of them have nowhere to go so they might as well drop their anchors, and some even started families there... but, pilots. AXDF pilots. Techs and other non-flight personnel too. Many of them don't want to return home. They'd rather stay in the frackin camp where we reside in metal boxes, a few jumps from places where the bugs behave not as nicely as some idiots may think, and all that after putting their lives on a line month after month after month. Fuck. You know, sometimes I feel so tired of... Humans. In general.
Like, what kind of sick pathetic shit you have to turn your society into, to make a soldier who's been protecting you all that time hesitate over the thought of finally returning home?
Also, this entire war has been looking odd from the very start. Why the heck the Thargoids, with all their advanced propulsion and navigation and stuff, do strategy and warfare almost like it's the friggin pre-FTL era on the friggin Earth? Okay, okay, I'd rather grind them down system by system instead of seeing them popping out of their spooky dark spaceholes in random places to send the brown trousers market up through the roof. But... isn't that a bit strange? Almost like they're... scripted. And quite in a half-arsed amateur way if you ask me.
I mean, they have never been the sharpest tool in the shed, in terms of tactics. And when we got to the grand-scale strategy... I'd say, it looks like they did an IQ test and it came back negative. Thankfully, more people see it now. They're scary and nasty and they make loud noises and spit acid and fart death clouds and stuff, and they fly and jump like they're immune to physics... Yet, do they really possess the military power pacifists love to yell about? Blah-blah-blah, they may be just playing with us, they can get us all killt in a few days but maybe they just don't want to, blah-blah-blah...
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to underestimate them, and you shouldn't do so either. The bugs can, and will take more lives. But, listen, I've seen them in action. Lots of them. They may appear almost anywhere and wreak havoc and panic amongst people... Civilians. Unarmed, or shit-armed. And no less shit-organised. People scream, people run left and right bumping into each other, people shit themselves, people try to fight back on crappy ships with no training and no cooperation, Thargoids are happy. But when they meet a trained military force, they're getting deleted. Even the Hydras. Weaker variants and Scouts? They become poop mist faster than they can say 'oh fuck'.
Gimme that tinfoil hat and say I look cute but something really makes me think there's more stuff going on about that war, beneath that timeless and simple classic of us-or-them.
Ow, shit. Almost missed my take-off signal...
So... PilotFed and superpowers are printing shitloads of money to pay off the bounties, Feds got stuck with their old angry fuming arsehole of a president due to the very well timed 'quake' on Rhea 3, new drives have made Sirius Corp look sad and megacorps don't like being sad, lots of people have lost everything and now they're upset, thousands of pilots are so jacked up you can see an aiming reticle burned into their eyes, also those damn new ship designs that fit the new drives suspiciously well... Even the godsdamned GalNet is being terribly silent, except for the rare Titan strike announcements and that single generic random nonsense pirate attack last week. Something big is going to happen real soon. Even the war looks more and more like ticking the damn boxes on the map. Yeah, I'd like to see humans winning it, yet... What if it's only a... 'loading screen'. Of sorts. To keep people angry and blasting stuff, but with their attention locked somewhere else? Like, on the Thargoids that suddenly started to play weak, for no visible reason, when we're only halfway through the Titans.
Oh, we are wary. We are. But something tells me it's not the Thargoids we should be worried about.