Close to a Widow

9th March 2011 – 5.14 pm

A new day brings new wormholes to find, hopefully without the raucous neighbours this time. Or maybe we will have unruly company, as the first wormhole I resolve in our home system is a K162 coming from class 5 w-space. Thankfully, though, the wormhole is critically unstable, already having had almost too much mass passed through it, and even one more ship passing through may collapse the connection, which should mean we won't see any visitors from this direction. The second wormhole I resolve is our static connection, which is plump and healthy, and I jump through to the class 3 w-space system beyond.

My directional scanner shows me two active towers in the system and two core scanning probes, but no ships. My notes suggest one more tower too, after having last been here four months ago where apparently there were three, and warping around finds them all to be in the same locations. This corporation is nicely settled, it seems, as well as providing us with some entertainment in the past, this being the system of the three little ducks, and the corporation who presented us with our first Noctis kill. There isn't much hope for action here at the moment, with no ships around, so I'll just launch probes and take a look around.

One anomaly and three signatures makes for quick scanning, and causes me to wonder why there are still other probes visible on d-scan. It takes a couple of minutes to resolve the magnetometric site and exit to high-sec empire space, and I already know the third signature is the K162 home, and I'm finished. Taking a shufti at the exit system puts me only four hops from Jita, which is mighty convenient. I am also only nine jumps away from the second Widow I own.

Yes, I have two Widow black ops ships, but I only bought one of them. The other was stolen when we took control of the C4 pulsar from the previous occupants, colleagues sacking the tower and making the system open to claim. I recovered the Widow to high-sec before planting my scanning boat in the C4 in advance of moving in, and now today's exit puts me closer to the stolen Widow than any other since leaving the ship in dock. I think I'll get it back.

Jumping back to the C3 finds no change, the lack of ships encouraging me to continue with my plan. I get home, stow my scanning boat, and take my bare pod to high-sec, making the jumps out to greet the Widow. I board the ship and head to Jita to replace the advanced cruise launchers with standard modules, so that I am not entirely without weapons when moving the expensive ship through w-space. At least I can use the drones in its bay, having managed to train in advanced light and medium drones in the time between recovering the Widow and now.

Launchers replaced, the advanced versions in my hold for potential later use, I return to w-space, now seeing a lack of even scanning probes in the C3. Maybe the probes simply decayed, having been left out in space and forgotten. But getting the Widow home safely and exploring the C3 in my Manticore stealth bomber finds a can at a tower labelled with today's date and as having bookmarks inside. I suppose a scanner was active, but maybe not completely focussed. There remains no overt activity in this C3, so I get back to our tower and take a break.

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