Sleeper bookends
13th June 2011 – 7.50 pmWhat news? 'Nada.' Fin's monitoring the C3 and reports zero activity, and my heading in the other direction sees one connection to be reaching the end of its natural lifetime, so I leave it alone. We may as well try to be productive and, despite there being no anomalies in the C3, there is a magnetometric site we can plunder. Fin and I clear it easily in our twin Tengu strategic cruisers, but returning home to get a salvager and analyser to realise our profit sees an Iteron hauler and Imicus frigate on d-scan, the new ships meaning new pilots. Fin gets an analyser boat out to the C3 to get the expensive loot home whilst I reconnoitre the local tower in my stealth bomber, to watch for movements against us.
Being out of range of the directional scanner, the locals may not even know we're here, which is handy. Fin recovers all the Sleeper artefacts and returns to loot and salvage the wrecks, all without the two piloted ships making a move. I pass the time by starting a rumour that Mick has turned spy against us, thanks to the corporation-wide notification that our tower was attacked, and I'm perhaps a little too credible in my claims. There is talk about locking down our hangars to prevent access and putting him on a shoot-on-sight list. I'm sure he'll see the funny side. And he turns up to help Fin with the last of the salvage, but it's just as likely he is just stealing our loots. On a more serious note, the Iteron pilot swaps to a Drake battlecruiser, but only after the magnetometric site loot is all returned to our tower.
It's a fake-out! I swapped my view to look at the Drake instead of the Iteron, but the pilot swaps back and initiates warp. It's not possible to 'look at' a ship in or entering warp and I cannot get a accurate bearing on the Iteron's vector, but luckily the two ships needed to be close for the pilot to switch and I can make a good guess at where he's going. I push my Manticore in to warp towards what I think is the target customs office. And dropping out of warp sees the Iteron has indeed come here. I decloak, lock, and start shooting the Iteron, disrupting its warp engines to prevent it fleeing. As the armour drops rapidly under torpedo fire I try to bump the ship to disorientate the pilot moments before his pod is ejected in to space, but it's not quite enough.
I don't lock the pod in time to give me another corpse to scoop, and in frustration—or incompetence, I'm not sure which—I shoot the wreck of the Iteron before I even see what loot survives in its hold. I assume it was empty anyway, given that this was its first trip to a customs office and I attacked before it had time to transfer planet goo to its hold. But I am wrong, as apparently I destroyed six command centres along with the ship. I have no idea what they were doing in the hold, however. And now we may have repercussions from my unprovoked assault, as the two local pilots swap to Drakes.
Mick and Fin are up for a scrap and are getting ready to engage whatever comes. But I get a bit panicky and tell them to run when a Devoter heavy interdictor appears on d-scan, probably arriving at the second tower, and its quick disappearance is a concern. I do my best to monitor both towers and see that the Devoter pilot isn't being sneaky or threatening, merely having connection issues. And without him the Drakes are not leaving their tower either, although whether they would or not with a HIC for company can't be determined. Either way, we're not getting a fight. We'd better collapse our wormhole if we want to continue being productive this evening, so that we aren't waiting for the Drakes who aren't coming anyway, whilst isolating ourselves from any sneaky retaliatory ambush if we try to shoot more Sleepers.
The collapse of our static wormhole is smooth, a simple scan of our system also confirming no new K162s connecting in to us. We finish the evening by tackling one of the radar sites in our home system, taking three remote-repair Tengus in for some spider-tanking Sleeper combat. 'Let's start with the hard ones', says Mick, making me wonder if I should have started that rumour about him being a traitor. But the harder radar site rewards us immediately with a deserted Talocan cruiser, which is something I haven't seen in a while. And our only real problem with clearing the radar site is having to hack one of the databanks to initiate the third wave of Sleepers, but a simple reconfiguration of one of our Tengus gets that done without compromising our fleet.
We salvage and hack, bringing home another hundred and fifty million ISK in salvage and loot, plus the hull and databank loot, to go along with the hundred and thirty million ISK plus artefacts from the earlier magnetometric site. It's turned out to be quite a good evening overall.
4 Responses to “Sleeper bookends”
fascinating, good kill on the itty, shame you melted the wreck. Seems like they were somewhat disorganised with the HIC? Great stuff nonetheless keep up the good work.
lol - wh space gives me cabin fever also
ps - keep up the good work regarding blogging - it is now one of the first places i look for after getting online !!!
Thanks, chaps.
I think the HIC was just have troubles with his net connection, coming and going as he did. I dunno if they'd have come to fight had his connection been stable enough.