War Journal: Vigilant Tyrannos

[Aria_Jenneth]

Once again, it’s been a while since I did something like this. But, here we are.

In a funny way this should perhaps have been the longest-running of the journals I’ve kept; the Amarr Empire declared war on the Drifters after the assassination of Empress Jamyl I and the incursions that followed. Since then the war kind of went cold and stale: there was only so much we could do against the Drifters beyond striking at their Hives, and they didn’t seem very inclined to give us any special attention.

They’d found somebody else they were more worried about.

That’s all changed, now, I guess. Whether it’s because of the Deathless making progress on stuff they can’t permit or because they’ve decided taking Pochven from the Triglavian Clades isn’t happening so they’ve decided they need one of their own, the Drifters are now probing at our defenses for weaknesses with kind of surprisingly horrible attention to detail.

There are construction units in the Hive nexus chambers. If you’ve ever been in one you already know why that’s worrying. If you haven’t … well, I’ll probably post some images but really you should try shooting your way to one yourselves. Even if you don’t feel confident enough or able to scrape together the ISK for an ARC-style hive doctrine, a flock of 20-30 EM rapid-light Caracals should be able to carve its way in quick enough with only a few losses.

And we could kinda use the additional people giving the Drifters a reason to pay a little attention to defense and not to just, like, torturing monks to death, which is the sort of thing they seem to be getting up to in Amarr.

(I kind of get the whole human experimentation “tolerances and breakpoints” thing, but seriously-- a monastery? What are they expecting to learn from that? What else are they targeting, libraries, schools, and orphanages?)

(… I might be taking that a little personally. I was raised in an extended-family-run monastery on Achura and even if I don’t remember anything about that or even what it looks like it still feels … kind of an extra special level of horrible. Maybe precisely because I can’t remember it; maybe I just hear or see the word “monastery” and it automatically feels like it should be like home.)

… anyway …

During the Triglavian invasions we at least had a pretty clear idea of what was likely coming. We were diving the Abyss, watching them building their world arks. The specifics-- the degree of stellar manipulation they were capable of; the scale of change they could introduce; the realization that the Abyss is likely artificial– were surprising at times, but it wasn’t too much of a mystery that, for example, a world ark was probably going to be a sort of super-duper capital ship that worked as a mobile base of operations for, like, everything. A singularity reactor is a technological wonder, and its implications are both astonishing and really pretty scary.

But we have the language to describe it.

Caroline’s Star, the somehow supraluminal (it appeared in everybody’s skies at once), Drifter-green micro-nebula that seems to have either heralded or been the actual cause of the Jovian Directorate’s fall, we never did get a clear read on. Nor do I have the language to describe the small warehouse of Drifter elements I’ve accumulated by now, although, “cognitohazardous, partially-reified concrete abstraction with excessive data noise that’s somehow usable as a reactor component” seems like a start. But it’s really unclear what that would mean or what you’d even make it out of?

I apologize if I’m meandering. The fact of the matter is I’m really scared. All this time, all this study, and we still don’t really know the principles behind what they do, even in theory.

Or what the nexus room is for. Or what it means that they’re rebuilding (resetting?) the structures there.

I do know that today, at Tadadan, I saw space itself tinted green and blue-- Triglavian-style existential weather, painted in Drifter energies and aflicker with “lightning.”

I can hardly guess what this means, but this much is a cinch: “Nothing good.”

More to follow, over time.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Looked in on Tadadan just now. It looks like the Drifters have decamped.

Which is good. Probably.

Now I’m wishing I’d taken more shots from my camera drones while I had the chance, though.

Well-- this probably isn’t at all the end of it, though.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Tash-Murkon Prime

The Drifters aren’t shy about hitting high-profile targets, are they?

An Enervating Kopis off the Hilaban gate, near TM Prime II. By usual naming conventions, this is a battleship-scale energy neutralizer unit. I was lucky enough to slip in from Bhizheba between hostile patrols so I don’t yet know what this would do to my Anathema.

The “weather,” as seen from that same spot. “Lightning” discharges are frequent, which doesn’t make a lot more sense here than it did when the Triglavians were doing it.

Just … marginally gloomier, and with a cooler color scheme.

Effects are … let’s see … warp and sub-light ship speeds both up by 30 and 20% respectively. Shields and combat drone effectiveness weakened. I wonder if that’s something the Drifters will be doing consistently-- they like shields, too-- or if it’s just while the armor-based Sleepers are the main battlefield units.

CONCORD and Customs on patrol. Neither is engaging the attackers or being engaged; guess that’s not their job. Still doesn’t feel quite right. This is the familial home system of the Empress of Amarr. You’d think interdicting smugglers could take a rest for a little while.

Interesting that the Drifters’ Sleeper vanguard isn’t picking this fight, either.

Top-right, what’s left of a Sigil that didn’t get the news in time. Lots of wrecks around.

TM Prime III, one of two temperate planets in the system. Doesn’t look like it’s on fire yet at least.

TM Prime V (Ooo, pretty!), also not on fire yet.

I don’t envy the planetside civilians right now, though-- not with the Drifters doing destructive testing on Amarrian monks and maybe making plans for things like strikes on urban areas. It’s got to be chilling looking into a cloudless night sky and seeing not stars, but glowering celestial clouds aflicker with impossible lightning.

TM Prime actual, so to speak. No obvious meddling; no stellar transmuter or other weirdness beyond the existential “weather.”

Can’t help but notice it’s a blue star, though. Can we check the colors of the other systems the Drifters have been poking at, maybe? Might be they and the Collective have been after the same thing.

Local weather, Bhizheba gate: overcast, with queasy green coloration, periodic lightning, and no noticeable occlusion of Caroline’s Star (visible at center-left).

… What could they be doing, and from where, to create this effect? We see something similar accompanying Sansha’s Nation when there’s an incursion, but it’s never made all that much sense.

What would the empires do if they worked out this … local-reality modification tech?

Pilot Aer Ren bravely risking her Zephyr for the sake of testing Sleeper aggression. Taken off the Remoriu gate about a second before a whole patrol opened up on it.

She jumped out safely, in structure. Seems they’re not going to consider anything of ours harmless anymore.

[Aria_Jenneth]

After much observation and thought, I have reached the following conclusion:

Drifter weather in its pure state, undiluted with starlight, looks like moldy pea soup.

Mildewed, to be needlessly specific.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Tekton

Went with ARC on a Drifter hive op, a couple days ago. A large part of the purpose of these operations has always been monitoring Drifter activities there. It’s always been obvious that the Drifters were a threat, but the specifics have been, and remain, unclear.

Historically changes have been rare. If anything, between SoE tinkering allowing easier infiltration and what seems to have been an overall reduction in Drifter presence even within the Hive itself, the Drifters seemed to have decided that an occasional highly-specialized team busting in, shooting their Artemis, Apollo, and Hikanta units, and taking their stuff is acceptable.

We might cost them some high-value assets here and there, but it’s not like they had trouble replacing them and they had a larger war to wage.

Now, though, things have begun to change.

This is the Nexus. It’s an area, or event, or apparatus that exists at the heart of every Hive. You can access it without reaching the Hive proper, but we always finish a full sweep before coming here.

It looks a lot like a debris field, and maybe that’s even-- kind of-- what it is.

A lot of the question is whether this is really just wreckage and whether whatever it’s the remains of was destroyed … or deployed.

You can see the reason for thinking it might actually be some kind of device in current operation from long range. That debris field is hundreds of kilometers end to end.

This was always the most likely place for there to be … changes … of some kind, of the sort that would be dangerous to leave unobserved.

Well, now there’s a construction unit deployed there.

Meet Tekton. He’s apparently an industrial unit in a battleship chasis, and … well, fights like a lot of his resources are eaten up with things that are not guns.

Reminds me a lot of Kharybdis, in fact-- the Drifter battleship units in the Abyss. It’s similarly slow and similarly not a particularly good shot. It does, however, have that nasty green overshield, which you can see here. That’s the giveaway that it’s armed with the Drifter doomsday weapon.

The good news is that there’s just one of it at a time, per Nexus. I wonder why. It’s not like they seem to have trouble building more.

But, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Let me sketch out how these fleets work. (Not giving away secrets; ARC’s published this stuff itself.)

“Vigilant, Bored, with Gunstar.”

This is me, most fleets. I’m an old hand by now, so I tend to get restless waiting for fleets to deploy and start wandering around the rally station while FC goes through the basics with our (very-welcome) newcomers.

Along with the Guardian squad, the Vigilants are part of the core “officer” units that make ARC’s hive doctrine work. The main challenge of bringing down a Drifter outside the Abyss (and other than Arithmos) is always the retaliatory doomsday strike. They tend to go for high-value targets, so the main trick is to make them miss whatever they try to shoot at.

The fleet, underway. General composition is: 1-2 Vigilants; 3-4 Guardians; 2 mostly-noncombatant command ships for links, one heavily-tanked to draw fire from one specific Drifter. Everything else is a beam- and tracking disruptor-fit Confessor.

In combat with a Drifter, everyone holds fire. The Vigilants and Guardians will orbit at close range, each in its own orbital slot. Confessors circle farther out; they’re not likely targets anyway. Vigis hold the Drifter still, Confessors keep it from landing hits too efficiently, and Guardians keep everybody in one piece. Once FC is satisfied nothing expensive is going to explode, we hit the overshield, re-lock (the overshield dropping makes everybody lose their grip), reapply-TD, and watch the poor thing waste its best attack on an astronomically-unlikely-to-land shot.

We then tear it to bits.

Traversing the hive is pretty straightforward. We mostly stay formed up, keep repaired what needs it, and ignore the Sleeper drones.

Mostly.

There’s a certain chamber right before the hive itself that we always clear, partly because it’s the most efficient spot for looting wrecks and partly because the very next room has the hive, and its guardian, so a little getting-ready is called for.

This is the hive. As space stations go this one’s … colossal.

I can only guess at conditions inside (though I’d hazard a guess at “efficient and sterile”). Maybe kind of like the Caldari aesthetic without all the warm hominess.

(Self-consciously chilly as the Caldari can be, we’re still living ordinary human lives, after all. Food, family, community-- all important. Life’s not just about work, you know? Even for us. If the Drifters have those kinds of things, they probably just do it all virtually.)

And it’s guarded by these.

This is Hikanta, not that you can tell just by looking. This nasty piece of work starts out around 130 km from the warp-in, has much nastier guns than the Apollo or Artemis, and will be blasting away the whole time she’s closing range.

Which, thankfully, she does. Thank the gods they don’t kite and snipe.

During that approach, a couple lucky hits can blow straight through a Guardian’s defenses before repairs can land. For this reason the first thing into the chamber is a heavily-tanked command ship (Damnation for preference). Everyone else comes in only once Hikanta is in close (Guardians first, then everyone else).

At which point it’s pretty much the standard “how to take on a Drifter” routine.

That’s kind of the basics of the thing from a fleet member’s point of view.

Fleets are public-- they can be because security’s baked into the operation’s structure. We don’t really know where we’re headed until we’re headed there. If somebody’s interested in coming along on the next one, maybe join channel “Consortium Operations.” You can find the fit for the Confessors there, among other things.

So, yeah, that’s kind of what we’ve been doing every couple weeks or months for close to ten years now.

I’m sketching this out here in detail because, quite frankly, we could use some help keeping an eye on this. One run every couple of weeks is probably the best we can do with just ARC’s own public fleets, and if there’s something happening in the Nexus it should probably be kept a closer eye on than that. At the very least whatever it is seems important enough that the replacement rate on the Tekton is really quite high, even by Drifter standards, so the Drifters really don’t want whatever is happening in the Nexus interrupted.

I wonder if something could happen if all the Tekton units went down at once, though I kind of think probably not and it would take a huge operation to make that happen anyway.

Oh-- a note about Tekton? It likes to hang out right in the middle of the debris, which creates a navigational hazard for avoiding its reactive doomsday. You can chase it out, though-- just have to get whatever it’s shooting at to charge it and get it to fly out of the debris. It takes a little patience but it moves pretty quick considering it doesn’t seem to have an MWD.

Like I said, it’s a bit like Kharybdis.

And then you can get the necessary done without worrying you’re going to crash into a mysterious pylon at a bad moment.

If someone does do a run like this (for that matter you can do it in massed Caracals if you don’t mind taking some losses), please let ARC or us, here, know if you see any changes.

(Maybe not if you just think there’s more lightning at the Nexus. There’s always more lightning.)

Comments, criticisms, and questions welcome, by the way. I’m not looking to be the only person talking here.

Fly safe, pilots.

[DutchGunner]

Thank you for the well written and pleasant to read account. I envy your ability to do so.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Well-- I’m no kind of leader after all, ma’am. Reporting a little on what we’re doing so maybe you’re not stuck FC’ing the whole hive-side of the crisis yourself seems like the least I can do.

Not only would it be good to get more attention on what’s happening in the hives, but burning you out would be a catastrophe, so.

[Aria_Jenneth]

Klir

Made a visit to Heimatar today, supporting ARC.

(Yes, I work for Directrix Daphiti of LUMEN, faithful and loyal servant of the Amarr Empire. No, we don’t see any contradiction here. Even if I had something against the Republic as a nation or Matari as a people, some things are more important. We’ve fought side by side with Electus Matari, defending Phoenix Naval Systems or ARC. I’ve flown alongside U’K members on incursions into Drifter space. This isn’t new, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time.)

Things were … well, they were kind of similar to how they were in the Empire, except that in the Republic the Drifters seem to be targeting clan commons facilities for destructive testing.

I got my first really good look at these horrors today.

A destructive scrutinizer, scrutinizing. That bluish beam seems to be its “experimental” projection, currently aimed at the clan commons station you can see part of on the right. It shuts the beam down almost immediately once opposition arrives; I guess they’re battening down the hatches in the correct expectation they’re about to come under attack.

The scrutinizer about to get attacked, as well as its attacker: the lancer dreadnought about to lance it.

In this kind of confrontation, our job is to stay alive and feed power to the lancer; the destroying things is its job.

Well, one thing in particular.

I’m really quite impressed with the lancer’s firepower. Three shots is all it takes; it just has to get out of siege mode each time and get its capacitor back up.

The scrutinizer having a bad day, which I think is a good look on it. It should wear it more often.

The Sleeper drone in the foreground is a battleship unit we’ve been seeing a fair amount of. Speaking of which, we also saw this:

This is something new, at least to me: a Seeker/Ephilates-like drone (you can see the little swiveling “head” out front-- I wish I’d got a better shot!), but with pure armor instead of shield-based defenses, sort of bridging the gap between the regular Sleepers and the more Drifter-like shielded units. Interesting.

Anyway, here comes the final blow.

Such a good look for it.

Really.