Log 05X-7

Log 05X-7

-Author: Rinas Rylos
-Rank: C.E.O.
-Corporation: Rinas' Raiders
-Date: 117.04.19

Hey Journal (I've decided on that for the time being, sounds less kiddy) sorry for the delay. Had to deal with some...things, but I'll get to that later. Battles lately have been kind of...listless, I guess? I'm not sure how to describe them, but the closer I get to finally getting out of the business, the more dreary they seem to become. I thought I'd wind up treasuring my time left out on the battlefield, but lately I've started pondering how much time I have left before I'm allowed to just go home. It's a little sad, now that I think about it; I used to marvel at the various landscapes they'd send us out to, even with all the mining equipment or whatever dug into the ground, but these days it's all just...numbers. Not literally, but all I see is cover, good flanking positions, traps to lead others into, etc. Admittedly, I was way worse of a mercenary at the start, but it's still kinda shitty that the wonder of these planets has been replaced by just tactical advantage for me. Maybe I'll be able to regain it once I'm not landing on planets for the sole purpose of shooting/stabbing/exploding people, but...I dunno, we'll see.

So remember when I said that the Gallente didn't let us off their leashes immediately? There's a little more to it than that. See, it wasn't enough to recoup their investments, those assholes, no, they had to make a show of force. I didn't know it then, but all the empires also had the same technology at the same time, and they were going ahead with shows of force to show off just how game-changing all this new tech was. Granted, they'd planned on doing it with a legion of trained commandos, armed with the best equipment and weaponry that money could buy, backed by the full might of the Gallentean military, and instead they got a pack of barely-obedient soldiers who bristled at every command, even after the training from hell. So instead of some kind of colossal nationalistic circlejerk, we got sent off to show off our new,"talents," in another form entirely.

Nobody likes to talk about Sansha's Nation. Nobody sane, at least; It used to be that history classes would spend nearly a whole week blathering on about the "unity of the five empires against the abomination that was Sansha's Nation," and how,"only Gallentean leadership could inspire such a coalition of forces again," and blah blah propaganda blah. I hadn't even bought into those classes even before I had to start skipping to work to provide for the kids, but I will admit that the idea of all five empires uniting to kick the shit out of those mind-controlling pieces of scum was pretty awesome. Not to mention that you've gotta be pretty damn evil to actually manage to get everyone to unite against you, and even moreso to get them to cooperate to blast you off the map. 'Course, that all changed once those two hundred thousand colonists were abducted. The empires had managed to keep the secret that they'd rebuilt mostly spaceside until then, but no one kidnaps that many people and and succeeds at keeping it quiet. Did that actually manage to make everyone stop fighting and take a look at them again though? Not really, god forbid we see a real, insane enemy and try to focus on it once again. I can understand leaving the Guristas and Serpentius and whomever else to the flying space bastards and whomever CONCORD can convince to join their fleet, but Sansha's Nation is a whole other ball game, in my opinion. They're not doing this for cash, or resources, or even respect; They legitimately believe they're somehow paving the way for a better way of living for their...people, and that kind of fanaticism scares the everloving hell out of me.

So why am I bringing them up? Because thanks to the way our minds can teleport and just fling themselves from one body to another, they figured we'd be a good deterrent against their tactics. I dunno the specifics, but apparently it takes time to fit the implants they've got onto their slaves, so it'd be easy for us to just either kill ourselves or get someone to kill us, and then bam! That's one less slave they get their hands on, while we're no worse for the wear. From a tactical perspective, I had to admit that it made sense; Send the people for whom bodies are like trying on clothes to deal with a bunch of enslaving, abducting shitheads, since they can't technically be kidnapped. Once we'd done our damage to the nation, they could show clips of it over the net, talk about how big and bad we were, and show off just how,"excellent," the Gallentean military training program was, while also dealing some damage against an enemy absolutely nobody liked. Personally, I think we should've stuck with something a little closer to home; Most of Sansha's Nation is in Amarr territory, and they're the ones who usually wind up dealing with those assholes, but funnily enough, nobody asked me. Most of the point was to show off just how effective we would be against what was normally seen as a pretty terrifying enemy, and maybe give some hope of protection to the outer colonies we had.

Even as pissed as I was at my,"superiors," for my training, I had to admit that having the power to defend myself against an enemy like that was kind of awesome. I couldn't be captured alive since they wouldn't let me; Hell, even if I'd let myself be taken captive, the suits could accept a remote signal from the capital ship to self-destruct if it was determined we were disobeying orders. Had we been going against anyone else, they'd likely have had to abuse the hell out of that function, but as it was...you have to understand, even the lowliest Gallentean at least has their freedom, something no one else but the Minmatar has the right to claim, and to see that stripped from people on a level that even the Amarr refuse to do? That's...having the power to deny them that kind of victory is empowering, I'm not gonna lie. Even if the Gallentean dream is bullshit, the freedom they can't stop crowing about isn't, and if I'd known that I was gonna have the ability to ensure that those soul-stripping assholes could never, ever capture me like they did others? Shit, I'd have been the first to sign up.

Of course, our superiors managed to fuck even that up. When it came time to actually put boots on the ground, our objective was....almost monstrous, in a way. Our mission wasn't defense, or retrieval, or anything that could've actually made us feel good about what we were doing. No, instead we were fucking attacking. To give you some perspective, even with the folks that managed to survive the first two rounds of testing, we barely numbered eighty. Eighty of us, landing on a planet, to take over some fucking space dock so they could land other, more expendable soldiers on the ground and scour the rest of the damn planet. What they neglected to mention was that this wasn't a military space port; No, we were going for a civilian port instead. Sorta. See, due to everyone being mind-controlled, they didn't need things like "family," or,"travel," for the peons. Instead, you had what amounted to what was basically cargo ships with just enough life support on them to keep the fucking cargo from dying. We hadn't been told that we wouldn't be facing many military targets upfront, or that the so-called,"civilians," would rush us like some kind of pack of wild animals...

I...Life doesn't fuck around when it comes to certain sights. You see something, and you don't get to not-see it again, whether you wish you could or not. Even if you tear it straight out of your brain, you'll still have echoes of it in yourself, one way or another. What we did that day won't leave a single one of us until we're put in the ground for good, and for the life of me I can't tell if that's a punishment far too large or exactly what we deserve. We gunned down so, so many people that day. I guess I can't call them normal, exactly, when they began running at us and trying to tear us apart with nothing but their bare hands on sight, but that really just made things worse; Our training had been for fighting trained opponents with similar abilities to ours: Soldiers, other immortals, maybe local militia at the worst. This? This was...it was a massacre, one way or another. We'd been group into pods of six, with five commanders stationed back on our ship to coordinate tactics and help us keep our heads. They...they tried, really, but it was pointless. You can't see a ravenous group of human beings literally ripping your comrade apart like so many mindless animals and keep a cool head, especially when you've blown off entire fucking limbs with your guns and haven't managed to do more than momentarily stop them. Especially when there's children among them. We killed kids. We fucking murdered children, we are child killers, and none of us get to forget that, no matter what. Our baptism into the world of war left us anointed in the blood of fucking kids, and to this day I still don't know how the fuck I cope. Was it self-defense? Sure, doesn't change the fact that I slaughtered them all, like fucking animals. I watched a seven-year old lose her fucking hand from a grenade, along with half her face, and still come at Khris, and I just...I..

I learned a lot of things about how the world worked that way. About how humans can function despite the shit they do, how much blood the average human can lose without dying, and how well you can take seeing your friends be torn asunder time after time and not just lose your shit. Most of the things I learned that day ended with the reminder that it gets easier, whatever,"It," is. We're born to adapt, one way or another, and I guess one adaption we picked up along the way was finding out how to live with ourselves despite the terrible shit we can do to each other. It's...humanity is really fucking scary sometimes, when you realize what we are and are capable of in its entirety. It's the kind of shit that made me understand why my Dad drinks, and why I'm going to bed.

-End Log