Antique Logistics

Mission Log

Author: Captain Nathan C. Jackson

Mission 11, Entry 1

Well, it seems that things only happen while I sleep. There was a whole fiasco yesterday regarding a base pod that could not be found. Asteri and Tara supposedly tried every form of search, except a ground inspection. A ground inspection would only be possible if there was a site to conduct the inspection on. But if the pod's ballpark location cannot be detected then there is nowhere to conduct the ground inspection on. Well, technically we could scour every square kilometre of the planet for the pod. It would just take me... quite a while because I'm the one who's eventually going to be doing the searching. Asteri did calculate how long it would take, but I could not be bothered to remember it. And that's not taking into account the contested area of... whatever it is down here. We need to come up with a designation for those forces.

That aside, the spaceport also began construction 2 days ago. And the more observant of you would have noticed that this is a mission log, not a journal entry. Yes, I am back on Beta II's surface, I got here a day ago. I should have made a record sooner, but I couldn't find the time since landing here between running constant scouting and patrolling missions around the area and then taking the time to rest after them. Turns out Tara figured out how to make my general restlessness useful. Anyhow we also scoured the nearby area for any presence of the lost pod. May as well, if we're going to be here a while anyway. No luck, unfortunately, but the scouting did pay off and we found a cave with pretty impressive mineral content. So, we also committed some mining facilities to the location. This location is extra nice as it is also a ways away from any nearby hostile contacts.

As our weather satellites came online, we have been benefitting greatly from their use. It seems my earlier impression of a world crawling with trouble around every corner was, mercifully, wrong. While there does seem to be a lot of activity around the world, they are mostly constrained to city-sized outposts. That might sound large, but remember, this is a planet we're talking about. The outposts are also spread out few and far between so, no man's land is available aplenty. Asteri has been working to map out all the space we can get as well as what space may be worth contesting in the short run as well as the long run.

We’ve also decided against pursuing the suspected command post of the hostile forces for the moment... man I need to come up with a name for them. Securing a proper and steady source of resources of our own currently takes priority over anything that we can do to damage their command structure. Speaking of command structure, Asteri has been prodding through the historical databases again. He’s been trying to discern how we’re going to build ourselves an army. Yeah, this is getting real. This isn’t some sort of bullet-hell shoot-em-up videogame where the protagonist destroys each branch of a state’s armed forces over a bunch of missions aboard a single fighter. As much as I enjoyed those fantasies when I was a kid sitting in front of a PC, the Hornet is not some sort of indestructible superweapon. It barely scraped by with relatively inaccurate pot-shots fired at it and the cannons it is currently equipped with can’t store ammo to fire a consistent barrage any longer than 30 seconds- and that’s already very impressive by a strike aircraft’s standards. But to capture or destroy a hostile outpost is going to take far more than a 30-second barrage of fire from a single scout craft turned strike fighter.

So, what could be found in the database? Quite a lot. In the event this log is discovered by someone who is not well-versed in human history for whatever reason, I’m going to give you a basic idea of what our history was like before we strived to become an extra-solar civilization. It started rather peacefully as we cooperated. Somewhere down the line, however, one group started hating another, and that group hated the first group back. Then they threw rocks at each other, then spears, arrows, bullets, cannonballs, rockets, shells- as in ballistic ones, missiles and bombs. It took us the horrors of nuclear weaponry before we decided to take a step back and think of what we as a species wanted to achieve. This was followed by a global effort to foster peace between our nations and now I, as a descendent of that era, would be inclined to believe that it succeeded. At least that’s what our history books said back when I was in school. So, as it may seem, much of our history is categorized by periods of war and conflict. And war breeds the development of weapons. Asteri marvelled at the fact that humanity managed to not blow itself up at some point before we managed to pull ourselves together. I told him that was apparently the one question we asked ourselves throughout the entire process and that we never really got around to answering it afterwards.

Anyway, the weapons we are looking for are in no shortage. We have tanks, mechs, artillery pieces, planes, ships, drones... You name it, we probably built it and put it to use to shoot at something, either directly or indirectly. The only thing we are missing is the blueprints for all those machines. Asteri and Tara want to have a conversation with me in the hopes of getting some idea about the inner mechanisms of the war machines, but I am not an engineer and not particularly well-versed with anything that is not Air Force-related. I am a soldier that’s not familiar with weaponry. Well, sue me. I am a soldier in peacetime, and I became a pilot because flying is cool and because I played bullet-hell shoot-em-up video games where the protagonist destroys each branch of a state’s armed forces over a bunch of missions using a single fighter.

Video game power fantasies aside, preparations for a launch have been underway since yesterday and with any luck, we’ll be ready to launch within the next few days. I have been in my fair share of space launches, but this one will be my first long-distance trip, not counting the voyage from Earth to Beta II of course. Here’s to hoping it’s successful.