Defending the Delta

[Sombs]

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These log entries are created in secret and aren't available neither to the Core nor any other entity.

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Captain's log - Ezrael Vertiga

I'm a bit concerned about all the things that happened in the meanwhile. But first of all, I'm concerned about what did not happen. In my last log I talked about the story about Yuki Hideyoshi and Order Captain Tantalus. Well, I'm waiting now for a little while. I don't know what I should think about this. Captain Tantalus said he would meet me at the Freeport for our little tour. But I'm on a daily basis at the freeport and nor saw him neither her. I can't even contact him without the risk of the transmission getting intercepted by Core or Order. I can't even risk getting my ship too close to the Dabadoru Station, since the Battleship Apothis would interfere.

As long as I don't have an upgraded communications system for invincible encrypted messages, I can't do much. Whenever there's a window of opportunity, I should try to get one. Maybe from the Invicta Research Center?

Talking of this station. I had a meeting with David Shepard from the Invicta Research Complex in Omicron Rho because I desperately wanted one of those cloaking devices. The deal is, for some nomad remains and the schematics of the Apahanta, he would give me the Cloaking System with a little discount. A few hours later, everything was fine and now my ship has a cloaking device. Best investment ever. Well, it's not perfect. Like the most cloaking devices, they emit some weird background signals. Our Battleship Scanner can detect those signals, so we now if someone around us is cloaked. Unluckily, we can't use this kind of cloaking radar while we're cloak ourselves.

There were some incidents in last days and I still think it's better to not report all of them to the Core. I try to put my memories together as best as I cam, but I fear I already forgot about some relevant events. Maybe it's the strong radiation in these systems. I should get a health check. But maybe it's just a bit to much stress. Omicrons are going hard on me, to be honest.

There is a girl called Maren. I still don't know her last name, but I'm sure she's from Rheinland. Her ship is called "Wiegenlied", what is the rheinlandian term for lullaby. While this girl is, I don't know if I remember it correctly, an ex-rheinland military officer, she's was a common sight at the freeport, listening to the travellers stories while not really talking about herself. All I know is she's one of the poor souls who seem to live exiled and she's addicted to cardamine. And she's about 27 or 28? And she never had sex. I asked her, because they say cardamine-addicted people can't have sex anymore. Anyway, didn't see her in the last few days. I got used to call her "sweetheart" or "sugartits", while she called me often "Captain Handsome". According to her, she already has a boyfriend.

Hm, looks like I drifted a bit off. There was a situation when Maren talked to a stray Crayterian pilot, Emily Sawyer, who was looking for an old, weak signal. After a long chat and some nomad action in Delta, I remembered the abandoned installation in Omicron Lost in the orbit of planet Moros. Welp, exactly what she was looking for. While we were in Omicron Lost, she shared some information with me. According to her, there are alien ruins on Moros, causing the weird "ghost" signals in the system, similar to those in Major. At least, that would explain why the nomad activity around the jump hole to Lost is significantly higher than in the rest of Delta, aside from the nebula.

Knowing there's a bit more about Omicron Lost, I decided to patrol it more often.

Some days later, we made another found in this system: A Gaian panther and a nomad. Well, the nomad part is nothing new here, right? Wrong. This was a very unusual situation.

There was some kind of nomad mind-sharing on going when we arrived. The nomad, poining exactly at the cockpit of the gaian fighter, didn't react the whole time. It was just there, literally staring at the pilot. Again, a girl. Boy, the omicrons are dominated by girls. Anyway, the gaian girl was babbling some shenanigans, saying she didn't want to hurt humans but weirdly enjoys it. Even I was able to see there was something fucked up happening, and the nomad was causing it. But, whatever there was happening, I didn't want it to end by shooting the nomad. No one would have known the results. Maybe it would have killed the gaian girl too. Those mind links are something we know very little about. So I gave order to gently ram the nomad, and accidentaly we also ram the gaian ship. The result was a short moment of consciousness for the gaian girl, still very confused, and then it seemed the nomad was invading her mind again. We positioned the Apahanta between the two ships, but that alone didn't help. I warned the nomad, gave it some mortars slightly passing it, but I didn't stop. So we tried the ramming method again, and it worked. The girl just needed a little bitch slap and then she was fine. According to the IFF, the girl's or the ship's name was Forest Nymph - a stereotypical gaian name, if you ask me. When I was about to kill the nomad, she told me to stop, since she wanted the nomad to do what it did. She said she wanted to know about the intentions of the nomads, their goals, their motives... and the nomad has shown it to her doing this mindfuck thing.

But my inferiors put me in a difficult situation here. The Core would have wanted me to bring that girl to a lab to find out what the nomad did to her. I wasn't even sure if she now was sort-of infected or not. The nomad could have done everything to her. Our scanners showed no weird life signs from her ship. And when the mindshare was over, she seemed to be very clear in mind. Not like those very suspicious acting wild guys. More about that later.

So I had to decide what to do now. I didn't trust her, and she knew it. The nomad was still around, passive, doing nothing, and the gaian girl thought she would gain my trust by killing the nomad. But, even though she killed it, I wasn't sure. In the end, and making my inferiors questioning me, I decided to let her go, giving her 30 seconds to leave Omicron Lost and telling her she better don't make me regret it.

Speaking of nomads and infected, the wild...

I joined a battlegroup of the Core to patrol Omicron Delta one day. According to Core Command, there were some mysterious signals detected near the Lichtefelde Complex. We're watching the nomad installations in the nebula for a while now, and we know when there's something going on. The new cloaking device has proven to be very, very useful on spying the nomad activities without getting shot by the whole invading fleet. We collected data about the nomad battlegroup and shared it with our allies. Seeing some human built and captained ships among the nomad fleet remembered me to record every suspicious, potencially nomad allied ship. At least I was sure now the RNC Nestor was full of nomad infected humans. Raven was absolutely right.

Our ships engaged the nomad battle group, and the Apahanta was in the support role. Most of the enemy's ships were snubs, and with our snubs entering the dogfight, our weapons weren't able to get a clear target. So we took the opportunity and collected as much data about the nomad and infected ships as possible.

In the end, we won this skirmish, but the Nestor escaped. That was until yesterday, when the Nestor reappeared in Delta while I was talking with my new Sirius Coalition Revolutionary Army-friend, Miss Pimakhova from the Pyl'nist'.

I was just talking about infected, specifically about the RNC Nestor, when it decided to decloak within sensor range. That was a weird coincidence. The radar didn't even notice any background signatures. Nothing. It was just there, trying to play us a fool. But not this time. And the infected captain knew he would trick me anymore, bringing a nomad cruiser with him, which just decloaked right behind him. Designation Lahar. When the Apahanta was shot down under the command of Captain Farnham, it was the Lahar and the Nergal who killed him. Thanks god I wasn't on duty <when Core and Order decided to jump into Omicron Iota> and get the shit beaten out of them. We lost some good men over there, and I fear, I will see some of them in the future, on the wrong side, fighting for the nomads...

Thankfully, the guys at Alabama Shipyard know their work. Repairing a very heavy damaged Mako just needs some days. Wonder oh wonder.

The Nestor and the Lahar were in Delta, and I was with Pimakhova and two Core pilots about ten kilometers away from the freeport, sitting next to the Kiribati Asteroid Field. Captain Jess was at the freeport, woken up by the alarm sirens, launching the WV-Danger Zone to engage the enemy in terrible mood. I warned the Nestor multiple times to leave Delta, but they decided to stay. Captain Jess took the lead, we engaged the nomad cruiser and the battle began. The Lahar was shot down very quick, so our battlegroup, including Pimakhova, focused on the Nestor, giving it a hard time and finally destoying it. However, some of their rescue pods escaped.

Erh, I should get some sleep and continue this later.

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