Action comes to us

27th April 2011 – 5.15 pm

We partake of some light Sleeper combat to start the evening. There are two class 2 w-space systems connecting in to our home C4, but one has allies and the other is inactive. Our neighbouring C3 is not particularly interesting either, but we may as well make some profit from it before collapsing our static connection, and we take two Tengus and my Golem in to raid the indigenous Sleepers.

Only one anomaly in the C3 is our preferred type, which we clear quick, but there is a radar site too. The extra Sleeper ships and abandoned databases in the radar site offer greater rewards than the couple of other anomalies in the system, so we head there to complete our brief excursion in to this system. Despite lacking a few codebreakers we are still able to hack in to the databases to recover what turns out to be rather lacklustre loot, which combines with the relatively poor salvage to see us bring home a mere hundred and twenty million ISK in profit. We've had better days, but the evening's not over yet.

We push big ships through our static connection until it can take no more and collapses, giving us a new wormhole to find and class 3 system to explore. Whilst Mick and Fin scout ahead I roam behind, checking on the C2 linking in to us. There are some ships around in the two towers in the system, but only a Tengu sits piloted. I warp around to check activity in the rest of the system, which takes a while when the system is 180 AU in diameter, but find none. It's no surprise, I suppose, considering Mick's earlier scan revealed there to be no anomalies at all in here. There's nowhere for the Tengu to go, except our C4, and he is unlikely to come here alone.

The new connecting C3 has a tower and no ships visible on directional scanner, although there are ten mining drones somewhere around. Fin scans their position and scoops them, presumably where a miner met his grisly end. There is no longer a gravimetric site where the drones sit, suggesting any ambushers have long since left the system, as have the locals. All looks quiet and boring again, although my notes point out that this is the system where we collapsed our static connection only to open a new link right back here. Let's hope that doesn't happen today, because with nothing to do here we are going to collapse our connection a second time.

Again, as the wormhole is being over-stressed with big ships I check on the Tengu in the C2, although there's even less to see now that he's gone. A Helios covert operations boat on our static wormhole is interesting, though, and I jump back as Fin announces its appearance. Fin accidentally warps her Orca away from the wormhole instead of jumping back home, putting her on a planet and turning around to return as I warp across the home system and jump in to the C3. I stop in my tracks as an unfamiliar Rapier recon ship drops out of warp at the wormhole, then cloaks. It looks like perhaps Fin's industrial command ship has drawn some attention.

Fin returns to the wormhole and jumps home, the Rapier following behind, no doubt with hostile intentions. I decloak and jump back too, as a Scimitar logistics ship warps to the K162 in the C3. We have quite a party going in our home system now. Fin's Orca is trying to get home safely, the Rapier and Helios are engaging her, and Mick and I are putting up a simultaneous defence and assault. I start attacking the Rapier in my Manticore stealth bomber, switching to the Helios when the Scimitar jumps in and starts repairing the Rapier's shields. The hostile pilots switch to my fragile ship too, and I have to bug out when I start taking heavy armour damage, able to get clear without exploding.

I return to our tower and swap to my ECM Widow black ops ship, needing to break the locks on Fin's Orca to help her enter warp, and acting as back-up for Mick's quite capable Loki strategic cruiser. But my Widow isn't needed, the Orca warping in to the tower as I warp out, happy to be leaving some ECM drones behind. I warp back to the wormhole anyway to provide further support, but as I appear the ships leave the system, jumping through the wormhole to the C3. At least, two of them do. The Helios was quickly finished off by Mick's Loki, and when the pod looked uninterested in leaving he shot that too. We have a corpse and some loot to collect, all without loss on our side.

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