Engineer’s Log Day 210.3

I’ve been working on the size of my ulcer today and I think it’s been coming along nicely. If the stress can keep up the current level, I should be able to get it up to a very nice size soon.

A lot of shit has gone down today so it’s been stressful. The invasion finally kicked off and I had the absolute privilege of starting in a fight and now Darana is gone and I just don’t know what to tell Bayfur like fuck this man. Just what am I supposed to do.

Sigh

Since my last log, I’ve abandoned the old base and made the trek to Treaty. Everything is loaded up and turned on so it’ll still be a pain for the bugs to get at us. Got into a fight with them there and grabbed the last of the military stragglers including Glysia before legging it into the forest with everything dangerous I could carry. We caught up to the engineers, gave them the explosive drones and sprinted ahead to the battle. Steamrolled that and made it the rest of the way to Treaty.

We got pretty lucky all things considered as my defenses did their work quite well. Both my original base and Treaty were attacked while they were muting us and I’m pleased to say that neither fell. This doesn’t mean this is the end of it because, while it didn’t end up being that close today, if they return with some heavier weapons, they should be able to break down my stuff plenty well. They’ve presumably managed to sack a full human ship so they should know their way around those by now. Not to say I’m not making contingency plans, this is the part where stationary defenses get interesting in war theory.

There’s numerous things that I’ll need to be getting going but I have a whole team of properly motivated xythans working with me to get some of these off the ground. Obviously, we’re going to need a few extra layers of security if we want to maintain our ability to defend our remaining numbers. I have a few ideas that should make for a bad time on invaders but that’s not to say we aren’t stealing some of the old classics.

In so far as how everything started happening, near as the xythans and I can tell, the rat bastards snuck down with the bombardment that started yesterday. Used the warheads they were lobbing as a smokescreen for their ships to slip in. If it weren’t for the fact that it's us they’re attacking, I’d be impressed.

Their next step was to fill the comms with an obscene amount of static that wouldn’t look any different from the normal background noise. No talking or planning for us. This was once again fairly impressive thinking and a very difficult maneuver. Shame they used it to scuttle their way from outside our perimeter and pick off our scouts. With both a surprise and an informational advantage, they kind of steamrolled our watchmen via ambush and we didn’t get anything out of it.

Things also took a turn for the worse for us when Sarlunt noticed one of our launchers went down. Those things are hardwired so he didn’t even realize that there were any problems with the communications. Took a team out to go and repair the launcher just as the enemies attacked leading to the nasty situation where the Commander couldn’t be reached physically or digitally. Worse still, his squad was one of the ones attacked.

I want to blame him for missing the fighting with the civilians but I just can’t. If I hadn’t gotten lucky, I would have missed the static and been completely unprepared myself and from what I hear, he ran a train on groups he did encounter. Shame he missed the main group. Slaver bastards.

Oh yeah, I don’t think I’ve mentioned my favorite part about this whole thing. The pirates aren’t here for the gear my people left or the planet’s resources. I mean they’ll take them if they can but that isn’t their main objective. The attack on my base was just a little opportunistic raid, they were planning on hitting the xythan village. They were here to collect slaves. High gravity folks like the xythans or humans apparently sell really well on the black market. That was one of the warnings we’d received all the way back in training before we came out here since it was such a big risk with the colony.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The horrendous thing is that it also means when we tried to move all of our people through the forest on foot to try and avoid anyone getting caught in the crossfire, we were just playing into their hands. The shitty thing is that only about half of the civilians made it over. Bayfur got out but Darana didn’t. Last the little man saw was her running to help one of the soldiers who got shot. Stupid… just… run Darana…

I’m going to introduce those bastards to a new form of hell.

I don’t think I’ve actually talked about the enemies yet, the inins. It a stupid name but it took us a bit to identify them but some of the folks in the xythan’s biologists were finally able to get a lock on their species. They’re from an aquatic planet with gravity about half of this one’s and grew up near the seaside. Professionally I have to say, nature did them no favors. They look like someone decided to take a sea anemone, hit it with the ugly stick, replace all the tentacles with spider legs and eyes, and then hit it with the ugly stick a few more times to make sure the ugly took. All those eyes and legs make them quite horrifying. If I have to look at them much longer, I’m pretty sure my mild arachnophobia is going to evolve into a more severe form.

Physically, they aren’t anything super impressive if they aren’t in shallow water though they do have 360 degree vision and can change directions on a dime. Omnivores apparently though they mostly stick to fish. On a galactic scale, they don’t tend to interact with others outside of trade and generally tend to be pretty laissez faire about the value of life.

The bio nerds have been picking through the files and have made a small list of areas that we can abuse them biologically. First, they need their suits to be able to do all that much planet side. They may be amphibious and perfectly fine walking around on the land but without water to help support them in this level of gravity, they can’t really move all that far or fast. That’s not to say that they aren’t dangerous in a fight. They don’t have limits on their range of fire and can snap their gun to whatever side of them they need at a moment’s notice and their suits only serve to enhance that with multiple little gun attachments. That said, if we can somehow disable the suits, we’re in a winning situation.

A second interesting tidbit is that they can’t actually hear. They can sense some amount of vibrations around them but they’ll struggle to differentiate various sounds. Interestingly enough, this was how we managed to identify them in the end. A few of the folks who’d fought them pointed out that they never seemed to talk and mostly used “hand” signs leading us to look for nonverbal races. To speak, the inins basically use a form of sign language that involves waggling their arms around in a complex manner. When the inins need to talk long distances, they use a buzzer attached to their combat suits that buzzes in a pattern not unlike Morse Code. As an annoying aside, they don’t really have verbal names per say as much as a set of gestures each goes by that don’t translate super well.

Psychologically, as mentioned before, the inins are opportunistic at the best of times and downright predatory in the worst. Fortunately, they are relatively far removed from human and xythan territories most of the time although from what little information we have on them, it isn’t super unusual for them to be this far abroad from their usual territory.

The last tidbit of info we got was that the inins have a strong survival instinct and are willing to great lengths of humiliation to survive. This has worked quite well in our favor as the inin we knocked up has woken up. We didn’t even need to lean on the man at all, he just woke up and immediately began begging for his life. Like with resolve like that, you almost wouldn’t think the man to be a pirate. Funny thing there, since he doesn’t really have a name that we can say, I’ve just decided to call him Rat on account of his behavior and for whatever reason its stuck..

We were able to get a good bit of information out of him actually. Initially, we had identified a battlecruiser and two frigates in orbit but apparently we missed one and there are three in orbit. Fortunately for us, we had it confirmed that all three of them are only resupply ships which means the only one we really need to worry about is that battlecruiser. Still a battlecruiser is a battlecruiser and I know for a fact that they can have a lot of manpower on those things. Currently, Rat seems to be of the opinion that there’ll be a second attack sometime soon and from the general look of things, I’m inclined to agree.

Fortunately, Sarlunt’s got a plan and while I won’t go into details right now, just know that it’s risky, dangerous, and puts me right in the heart of danger. Its a bit of a turnabout from his previous thoughts on the matter but that's fine.

Because frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.