Song Of Evacuation

A few weeks ago, I got addicted to a PC Game I bought from the pirate-vendors of Quiapo. It was a space strategy game that earned some praises from game critics around the world, and had kept me awake until daybreak after playing it the whole night.

The title of the game is Sins of a Solar Empire and its main objective is to expand beyond your home world to gather resources and acquire new planets before your alien-enemies beat you. I must say that the game is highly addictive and uses much of your adrenalin every time you play it. Who wouldn't be? I'm sure you don't want to see your prized space fleet getting pulverized by your enemy's battle armada.

One element of SSE that brings out the master tactician in me at 3 in the morning happens during an enemy siege of one of my strategic colonies, while my main fleet guards a wormhole or a core planet that is too precious for the enemy to occupy. The hostile fleet suddenly jumps out of hyperspace and starts sending missiles or fire their laser cannons on the structures orbiting around the planet they are attacking.

The drama happens when the scramble to defend the colony begins: Flak frigates assigned to patrol the planet engages the enemy fleet. Despite their fate of becoming heaps of iron scraps floating in space when the battle is over, they go to their deaths knowing that an entire planet hangs on their ability to delay the enemy before back-up ships arrive. Gauss Cannons orbiting in space start firing at the enemy fleet. Their mass driver weapons penetrate the shields and puncture the hull of hostile ships, but this is not enough to push back the raiders. Squadrons of bombers are called from a nearby space hangar. They deliver incendiaries hoping that it would finally get through the enemy ships that were hit by mass driver weapons earlier. The bombs did render some damage to ships. Some are even disabled. Unfortunately, the patrol frigates - that are now destroyed have lessened the colony's chances of surviving the assault. The Gauss Cannons are taking multiple hits from back-up enemy ships that have jumped out of hyperspace.

With the reliever fleet still two jumps away from the besieged colony, The colonial government has no choice but to call for the complete and immediate evacuation of the planet. All available ships used by the traders must carry with them civilians - women, children and the elderly out of the colony. Meanwhile the situation in space is getting hopeless every minute. Four out of the Six Gauss Cannons protecting the colony has been rendered useless. The enemy has commenced orbital bombardment of the planet - while the civilians are still pushing and shoving one another for any available space inside the cramped merchant ships down the surface. Without any military escort, these unarmed space vessels have a very slim chance of getting out and into the safety of homeworld. But they still try. Back on the surface, commotion and mass panic has separated mothers from their children. Cries for mercy can be heard throughout the spaceport on each cities. Infants are getting crushed between sweaty bodies as their mothers push themselves inside the cargo bay of a trader vessel. A teenage daughter pushes her mother out of a ship already in mid-air, her eyes fixed at her daughter's while her weary body plummets back to the burning city below.

Out of twenty merchant ships carrying civilians from the colony, only five were able to get out of orbit. It is not known how many are able to jump into hyperspace, knowing that the alien's final goal is the complete extinction of humanity. The reliever fleet arrived too late. The enemy ships are already bound for the next planet they will assault. What they found after the alien attack is a burning desert planet with no signs of life even in the fringes of space. Ship debris are everywhere with bloated, bloodied remains of pilots still stuck between twisted metal that eventually becomes their grave.

Of course, the last two paragraphs are rendered in detail from a boring orbital bombardment once your defenses are insufficient to scare the enemy back from where they came from. But when you are bound to delete half of your online accounts due to some very personal reasons, you cannot help but relate to the evacuation scene I wrote above with the situation I am going through right now.

The scramble to keep what is unnecessary and what is valuable gets confusing amidst the rush to leave everything behind. With my blog as the home world, I wonder if this too would have to be evacuated in the coming weeks.

I hope not.

And now that my phone got lost inside the jeep this morning, the coming days would be total hibernation for me.

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Multiply
PEx
YM

I wonder what's next