Engineer’s Log Day 217.1
Wait I probably should’ve… Hey, can you hear me? Alright, looks like they can’t. Ok, so right now I’m sitting in the HARP which is currently wedged into an inin’s landing shuttle with several combat-ready xythans surrounding me. Given my opening statements I feel like it doesn’t need to be said but I gotta talk about a few things, both to prevent the butterflies in my stomach from evolving into a full-on stomach ache and to touch on some important things because I’m thinking about doing some stupid stuff. First and most importantly though, we were successful in defending Camp Treaty from the second inin incursion.
That isn’t to say it wasn’t a bit touch and go throughout the whole process but no plan truly survives contact with a semicompetent enemy. I gotta say though, all things considered, Sarlunt’s gamble of a plan held up surprisingly well. Not that it didn’t try to go spinning off the rails as fast as possible because believe me it did try.
The main idea behind Sarlunt’s plan was to let them get a little closer to us so we had some extra time to identify their commanding officer. The main rub was that we needed him alive and the rest dead which could possibly be a bit of a problem if he were to say, I don’t know, throw himself at the wall and accidentally be splattered by one of my turrets. With that issue in mind, we decided to employ a multilayered approach.
In an ideal world, we create a screen of our scouts and identify their captain before they even reach us and then I very tactically hit them with my EMP rounds until they stop moving. In our less than ideal world, they apparently had a pretty good idea about where our people were and took a bit of time to root them out. Honestly, I’m super lucky I wasn’t spotted all things considered as that would have been an unmitigated disaster. From what I saw, they had enough heavy weapons to put me down if I got too close. I almost wonder what they were looking for since they also visited one of the weather spike sites I’d set up forever ago. I bet we could’ve wasted more of their time if we’d realized.
I think I’m beginning to ramble so back to the story. I know I talked about it a while ago but while I was getting the HARP combat ready, the xythans invested a good amount of time setting up some explosive defenses. Obviously, there were the mines but they also rigged the entirety of the area surrounding the base to go boom at the touch of a button. As a fun fact, I was technically able to finish installing the last set of turrets, I just didn’t so that we had a few “obvious” weak points that the xythans were more than delighted to make less hospitable.
There was the catch 22 with the explosives where there was a limit to how much they could actually plant without risking them being found before hand but it seems like they managed to find the balance. I’ve heard through the grapevine the mines were a little sketchy which gives me all kinds of sweats.. Apparently, there was a miscommunication in the creation process and they had to go back through all of them since somebody in the supply line apparently gave some incorrect numbers. I only dug the holes but man I feel like you want those things consistent.
Honestly, that whole mess was such a logistics nightmare I feel like I should be glad so few things actually went wrong. Credit where credit is due though, setting the pillars to drop on them was a stroke of genius. It didn’t wipe out the inins entirely and we had a firefight break out but it was pretty grim start to the fight for them. We did have a bit of an upswing in luck though when that dumbass commandant announced his position. I nailed his whole group with enough EMP to make a faraday cage wince.
I don’t have much to say about the actual fight itself, most of my shield generators along that wall were fried from the fighting and several of the turrets are no longer operational. We cannot get our defenses set up again fast enough to repel another attack which makes this whole operation even more vital. Worst part is we lost more people, about a third of our remaining xythan forces, which is just grim…
The one silver lining is that we were able to grab the commandant and, believe it or not, he cracked even faster than Rat did. Turns out, leaving an inin tied up inside his soon to explode shuttle will cause a rapid shifting of loyalties. Our guess about them having check in codes was confirmed when he overshared and gave us a whole list of codes from shuttle access to landing codes for their battlecruiser to the code locking his personal minifridge. How very considerate of him! Since he gave us our wings, I’ve decided to call him Gull, our flying rat.
Speaking of Rat, he’s clearly been feeling the pressure to perform recently with Gull’s appearance and was actually able to give us enough information to somewhat confidently identify the cruiser’s model. Apparently, it was originally made by some lanky frog-lookin’ race called the eldih or something like that as a bodyguard ship for their merchants. I bring up the lanky bit because today it is quite important as it means that I’m actually going to be able to bring the HARP for this excursion as the hallways should actually fit it. I’ll have to crouch a bit for the HARP but that's fine. This is particualrly important for me as there is a zero percent chance Sarlunt would have let me come along if I wasn’t riding a walking tank. Blah blah diplomat and all that stuff.
There is a notable downside as this model of battle cruiser packs a lot more heat than most ships its size. If they get annoyed, a fully stocked ship of this midel will have more than bombs to saturate our defenses and wipe us off the face of the planet.
Publicly and from what I’ve been told, the plan is just a smash and grab where we bloody their nose enough to make them screw off for easier opportunities. These pirates do have a streak of committing to risk-averse behavior but I’m not nearly optimistic enough to believe a simple bloodying will fix that. Pirates, in addition to being cowards, have a long and storied history of being spiteful and petty as fuck and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon. Additionally, when dealing with weapons of mass destruction, playing defensively isn’t really an option even if they don’t have enough to get in since just one getting through means we lose and no defense is perfect. Sarlunt knows this as much as anyone else and will be planning to adjust for that.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Our main objective today is to get the xythan captives out of here and, if we’re lucky, human captives also. Now, unofficially, unless I’m dramatically misremembering who is who, I’m seeing a few to many of the folks who worked demo with me to not have some suspicions as to what sort of secret plans Sarlunt may have cooked up. Someone needs to make sure the weapons on this ship aren’t aimed planet side and I’ve a “vague” idea on how they aim to do it. I’ve a few guesses about what they’re planning but they’ve decided not to tell me which kinda implies this is a suicide mission for them. That’s not cool by me so I’m currently putting together a plan in my head. Its a terrible idea so far.
One last bit of bad news to be looking forward to in this upcoming raid is that we don’t know the exact location of our hostages. Fortunately, I came prepared for this with a few mechanical scouts. With a bit of luck, we’ll find them quickly and scoot them out of here.
Today, I intend to bring my full arsenal to bare and reminding these inin fuckers why you don’t mess with engineers.
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To say the deck leader was frustrated would be an understatement. The captain had received word that the ground forces had been routed again and that only a single shuttle had managed to escape. Deck leader felt his tentacles curl in frustration, the captain’s normally overbearing presence had evolved into a micromanaging nightmare that seemed to leak into every aspect of the ship but especially into the bay. Everything about this had to go just right or the deck leader would have peace of mind again. Quickly running through a short checklist in his head. Speaking of things going poorly, the returning shuttle was apparently damaged. They weren’t responding to any of the requests for a video connection and were just spamming that they were damaged.
The deck leader coiled his tentacles together in an attempt to avoid letting his frustration show too much. The shuttle would be in visual range soon enough and then he would be able to take a better look at the damages. Perhaps he would be lucky and those that remained were simply incompetent and or unwilling to troubleshoot. Just a bit of exterior damage and some idiots he could sacrifice to the commander, that’d be ideal.
A faint vibration on the bulkhead characteristic of a landing ship dragged the deck leader back to reality . Shaking away the mental fog, he confirmed that it was in fact the correct ship and began running diagnostics. To his delight, most if not all of the electric systems were completely intact and in more or less the same condition they had left in. Allowing himself a quick celebratory wave, the deck leader gave the signal to his subordinates to begin assisting with whatever the issue was. Perhaps he would be able to get out of this mess with minimal hassle after all. The ground troops’ general incompetence was his victory.
Turning around, the deck leader began the process of alerting the captain when several things happened at once. First, a small fleet of what appeared to be bombshells blasted out of the still opening hatch of the ship and tore off towards the cruiser’s interior. Secondly, and perhaps a little more immediately relevant, a war machine crawled out of the shuttle followed by several free xythans.
For an awkward moment, everything went quiet in the bay as a brief stare down commenced between the war machine and the inins. The quiet was broken when the deck leader sounded the alarm and activated the automatic defenses.
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Darana was losing her mind. It was probably a mix of the general boredom of captivity, stress, and the terrible food. She was no stranger to eating stale foods, her finances hadn’t been fantastic following her husband's death, but she also strongly suspected that the food she’d pushed into the corner hadn’t originally been green. Pushing it a bit farther into the corner, she leaned back on her bunk, closing her eyes as she trying to ignore the situation at hand.
Before she could sink too deeply into her fears, a cacophony of sound erupted from outside. Jumping up and pressing herself against the small viewing window afforded to her, Darana saw a small, familiar bomb shaped device roll into the room with two inins in hot pursuit. Staying just ahead of the inin, the bomb swerved and skidded about the cells, beeping cheerfully as it began to broadcast in rough sounding xythan.
“Guess who!”
Darana couldn’t help but chuckle to herself.
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Engineer’s Log Day 217.2
As much as I don’t want to say it, this is kinda fun. Their automatic defenses were designed for infantry and have about a 14-0 track record for actually breaking through the HARP’s shields so… Oop hello there.
Crash
Sorry, a 15-0 track record. We’re making good progress but the blast doors they repeatedly insist on closing have forced us to get a little creative with how we’re getting around. The main halls have a lot more reinforcement so we’ve been forced to stray towards the sides of the ship where the blast doors are a lot skinnier and I can physically punch through. We’re on a pretty strict timer and gotta hurry cause it’s only a matter of time before the inins manage to pull their heads out of their asses and properly hunt us down with some heavy weapons. Believe it or not, I don’t have any particular desire to be on the receiving end of their heavy weaponry.
Oh, forgot to say but my bomb drones have done their job admirably. We were able to fill out all the missing gaps in our maps and have a lock on the prisoners. Before we left, I had juuuust enough time to quickly make two different types of the suckers. With the first design, I installed a speaker in it to cause some confusion around the ship and communicate and organize with any prisoners. Since they’ve already achieved their main goal of finding people and warning them, right now they should be scooting around making noise and generally obfuscating our location. The second design is a bit spicier as I’ve filled them up with some of those remote detonation explosives. Those are actually part of my master plan. The more of a clusterfuck it is for the inins, the better things will turn out for us.
I’ve about got my plan finalized and I gotta say I’ve really outdone myself this time since I think it’s one nobody is going to like.