First Encounter

It's already been a few hours since we had seen action and my hands are still trembling as I write this. I had my first encounter with the Shivans today.

They weren't anything like what I had learned at the Academy. Nothing prepared me for going up against what my parents had to live with in fear nearly more than three decades ago, the red glow of scattered splotches drawn across their organic-looking hulls flying in the darkness at us. We should have expected it, but expectations and the actual act of seeing what it looks like up close are two different things. Your gut shifts, the adrenaline starts to flow, and at that point, a world of possibilities open up to you. In my case, it was to grit my teeth and pull the trigger while trying not to get killed. I half expected myself to freeze up when facing the Shivans, but we also had come a long way since the battle with the Lucifer.

The 107th Ravens welcomed me in and I learned that Studi had been with them before several years earlier. Lt Samsa didn't waste any time at the welcome briefing in telling us about the history of the squadron and what we would be using, the Hercules Mark II...an improvement over the original Hercules that served in the Great War. Admiral Petrarch was expected to make a shipwide announcement later that day which gave me a few hours to brush up on my Herc training. It's not a bad ship, I had trained on one back in my academy days. It's maneuverable for a missile platform and has a decent gun loadout, but when put up against faster fighters, it struggles to keep up. Still, it has improved armor and shielding, and you can fill it up with plenty of missiles.

We were all called in to the briefing room for the Admiral's address to the ship and that's when we found out what we would be facing. Earlier that morning, Shivans had launched an attack at Gamma Draconis, destroying the GTC Vigilant with all hands presumably lost. Looking at the other faces in the room, I could see that several of them turned as white as a sheet at the mention of the Shivans. Mine probably looked the same. No one expected to face them out here.

The GTD Carthage and the GTVC Dahshor were quickly scrambled to the system to deal with the threat which they had managed to do, discovering something else in the process...a huge, artificial ring generating a subspace portal and a significant Shivan presence there. Previous surveys of the system made it out to be something that was a barren wasteland and the last one fifteen years ago by the GSC Erikson didn't turn up anything new, much less a giant spinning ring of alien technology. But there it was, and the Shivans were sitting on top of it.

Our wing was sent out to destroy the fighter escorts surrounding the Rakshasa capital ship that was sighted there while the Carthage and Dahshor were to rendezvous with us to finish the job. The Herc did okay, but the Shivans also had a few new ships of their own like the Mara which looked like something of a cross between a beetle and a spider, with striped red markings. It didn't help that it could fly rings around the Herc, but the barrage of missiles we'd send its way still helped to give us a slight edge in the fight out there, even when another Shivan cruiser jumped in. I still can't believe we'd won. Not everyone came back though and some of the pilots that did left a little something for the crews to clean up on the flight deck once they got out of their cockpits. Most of the older pilots, however, just frowned and came away from the experience without another word. Either they didn't know what to say, or there was simply nothing to say at all. We were alive and that's all that mattered to any of us.

I caught up with Takeda and Wilkins in the mess after debriefing. Wilkins' imagination was in overdrive again, thinking that this was just more proof that command knew a lot more than they were telling us. Why didn't the Erikson find the gate fifteen years ago? He says that maybe they did, and were told by command not to tell anyone else. But I don't know...it's kind of hard to hide a discovery like that by swearing everyone on a ship to secrecy, but Wilkins is convinced that it was just a cover up. With the Shivan attack, there was no more reason for it to stay hidden anymore. Takeda just shook his head.