This one's just in, we've come back from it a couple minutes ago and I'm sending this from Ronneburg.
About an hour ago I received a distress call from Major Hessler. And before you make any jokes, he wasn't caught out in Gamma pants-down flying a pink Odin. Hessler had found Nomads wandering around Omega-5, but that wasn't the worst part. I'll get to it later.
I scrambled from Vogtland and moved my damn pretty ass over to Five as fast as I could. As I entered Omega-5 I got joined by Leutnant Jones, she had already been preparing the Elster for a launch and took off from Ronneburg as I passed by. And then we moved on, towards the Hammen Hole.
That was the first thing I saw as I picked up Hessler on the radar. He was busy at work already, and we joined in. What we found a moment later was a handful of Nomads, one of them a... I don't know, I think you call them "Scorpions". You know what contraption I'm talking about. After a while we got reinforced by Oberleutnant Dresner, flying the Volkspistole, and Flieger Reiniger, flying his Falcata.
The Scorpion itself didn't pose that much of an issue, but we were facing a more difficult problem. I'm sure you all remember comrade Shaf Hauzen? Right? Comrade Hauzen was present, commanding his Vidar. The issue was that somehow the Squiddies had done their dirty work, trying to take over Hauzen's mind from what I gathered. Our comrade fought back, tried to resist, the ship's whole crew tried to resist, but to no avail. Unfortunately the Nomads had managed to get Hauzen to discard his Cruiser's Battery and Bot supplies, somehow... "feeding" the Nomads. I'm not exactly sure how they can use supplies like that, but it worked as it does with our own ships. You can guess how that went.
We ultimately managed to trash the Scorpion however, but before we did, we lost Flieger Reiniger. Not the Nomads, mind you, but to some really wicked kind of Ion Anomaly. Hell I don't know, maybe the Squids did it, I'm not sure, but his ship suddenly got vaporized. His pod, from what I've heard, made it safe to Ronneburg however. Things seemed alright as we started to fight the smaller Squids, wearing them down slowly, bit by bit. Unfortunately at some point Hauzen couldn't resist anymore, nor could his crew, and they sporadically started firing on our own ships while slowly making for Omega-55. We didn't want to risk our comrades' lives, but we were faced with that or them possibly ending up infected.
So Major Hessler issued the unfortunately necessary order. From there on we kept fighting, joined by a passing-by Mercenary, known as "Fantasme". While he... she... too much static back then, while Fantasme wasn't exactly talkative, he did help us out as we chased the Squids to the Fifty-Five hole. And beyond. Oberleutnant Dresner, engaged in a duel with one of the creatures, opted to stay behind in Omega-5 while we gave chase.
One got fried. The other seemed too difficult to hit, as if it was shrouded in Ion... come to think of it, given what happened to Reininger, might've just been that way. That left one. Dresner was still fighting it in Omega-5 for a while, telling us to stay back, opting to take advantage of the duel-situation and hurting that thing as much on his own as he could before it would, inevitably, run.
And run it did. Into our guns. With the last remaining Squid hovering close to... some kind of installation, asteroid-base, don't exactly remember, but with it hovering near that installation, under protection from its artillery, we decided to return to base. We fought the Squids back today, but at a steep price. Oberleutnant Dresner will tell you more about the whole ordeal, I'm going back out to see if I can't help find more of the Vidar's crew. I heard Hauzen is safe and survivors are coming in every minute, but another pair of eyes won't hurt.