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Month: January 2024

Outrider

A close call with a Thargoid Hunter left hull marks, scoring that seeped into the armor plates. The usual trick of dumping my heatsinks and thrusters at full didn’t fool this one. Several missiles hammered the hull as I pulled into FTL. I’d thought i was safe until the hull breach alarms flashed, something was eating the outer plating.. quickly.

The problem with briefings are the timing. Always at some ungodly hour, in some byzantine format about a foe you’ll likely never see. Years later, hundreds of light-years behind me and I was struggling to recall even a scrap of those ill-timed dispatches. It was reported that sufficient heat at a short duration would burn off the enzyme eating at my dwindling hull. Now was that 120 or 150?

I pulled hard at the helm, diving into close range of the star I’d just arrived at, the hull groaned as the heat built up. I watched with more than a little concern as the thermal registers climbed.. 85, 90.. 98.. 100..

Alarms blared, warnings about internal damage and system failure.. 105.. 110..

Registers cleared 120 and moments later the unexpected corrosion of the hull cleared. I ordered a full service on the hull at port, having that much alien gunk eating at the structure mandated it.

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Hupang, part 2

After a little cat-and-mouse I was able to join up with my friends at Brash’s Folly. Intense fighting lit the sky over a darkened planet. Brash’s Folly burned while Thargoid Interceptors and Scouts buzzed about it’s perimeter, harassed by human opponents. Anti-Xeno spread thinly as some mixed with the scouts, screening their allies for attack runs against the larger Interceptors.

Thargoid munitions ripped through ships as fast as they could be repaired and put back in the field. Docking crews worked hellish shifts keeping the threat at bay.

One of the Interceptors hit me, sudden and intense staccato of enzymatic blasts and caustic ozone from a destroyed scout, and a sinister groaning took up in the hull. I put up for repairs one last time as I considered my options.

36 tonnes of medical escape pods loaded I plotted a course for a rescue ship and braced myself for the escape. Two of the larger Interceptors had stationed themselves on the exit path from either bank of launch pads hungry for whatever prey it could catch. Docking clamps released and I punched the throttle, low and fast across the surface. Weaving to avoid a straight line, 5 clicks out I angled for jump and made the first of many leaps away from Hupang.

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Hupang, part 1

I was called to join some friends in the Thargoid fight early in the afternoon. With little preparation I was off to Hupang. I’d heard of variant Thargoid ships appearing near their motherships. I was lucky enough to encounter a Hunter as it pulled me out of witchspace on approach to Hupang.

The helm pulled and the hull groaned as conventional space welcomed me back into it’s bleak and chilly embrace. Alarms blared as signatures were partially deciphered..

..Frameshift Anomaly detected..

I pulled hard on the controls, thrusters burning as hot as I could make them. All to no avail. Thargoid Hunters are fast and as much distance I gained I lost just as fast when it decided to make another run at me. Some kind of missile, dripping in enzymes that make terrible work of human spacecraft, hammered into me again and again. The ‘Oracle groaned as bulkheads started to suffer the deleterious effects of exposure.

Luck won out, as I found running did me no good I tried to fight. Some hits scored seemed to have scared it back. This gave me the margin of time necessary to make a short hop to another system and patch my wounds before trying again.

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