We were on the return leg of a deep patrol and station holding for position transmissions. We were the advance of 3rd fleet and pathfinding so we needed to recalculate. This was just after what’s he saying I didn't catch that so everyone was set to lethal and moral was pretty low. We were skirting a nebula when Oligar - he was the hailer on the Casanova - he had something on long range and he called Skip here and asked if we were picking it up too. We slipped into low EM and waited. It was a nevermind its not important. Our orders were to find a route around them, but if we could pinpoint their location without tipping them off - that was even better. We knew we had to get a message back but here was no way we would hit translight or get signal off without being discovered. We waited and we just watched them.
It looked like they were hanging around for something to happen, and sure enough after two days a durugh ship dropped out of translight. Well that just changed things up since we had intel that the duruhg were engaged with the 7th and 23rd at would you get to the point. They must have been staging up for a sneak attack! Now we had to try to get word back to fleet, even if it meant getting caught. Skip here set up a crypto pack and we pulsed it out and at the same time we fired up our transwarp. They must have had some kind of spike or counter-measures up though because as soon as we broke translight there was a huge feedback surge and all our the systems went dead. It took too long but we got life support back up and when we rebooted the nav and tried to position - well we were here in The Bottle. I was pretty banged up and we had lost Sven and McMurphy and over on the Casanova they lost Kt' l' ak, their medic, and Captain Bonner. We tried to figure our position, but there just wasn't anything out there - you know - not even any stars but the dwarf. Skip picked up the wreckage and a signal beacon on the rock - that's the one you picked up in the other crater. We didn't recognize the code so we assumed it was oh my head hurts and so we went silent. I think that’s what saved us since a lot of of those wrecks out there look to have scoring like the Casanova got so I figure they hailed the beacon and the squids took them out.
I don’t know who they are. Rex here says his people have heard of them and they are called Ged. Says they are ravagers. Says their ships land and they spill out and lay waste. The Woodies have been here longest of us and them squids were here a long time before they came. It’s hard to pin the Woodies down on that, but they have a way of talking that makes me think their idea of a long time is a bit bigger than ours. I figure a couple hundred years at least judging from the damage on some of those hulks out there. That ship they have is some sort of carrier/dreadnought and the crew are all in cryo with just a few out slinking about keeping a big ol eye on things. Its a good thing too because they are nasty business. Fast moving and hard to see. One of them kraken bastards took out half my people and ripped Woody 2's arm off before we drove it off. He was out hunting. They like to hunt. It's a big ship, there must be thousands of them on there, but like the stickman says, they are sleeping. They are just as stuck here as the rest of us.
