I christened my Zephyr prototype probe ship 'Spider' and took her for a workout the next day. Her special core probe launcher, the Iris system, could collect vastly more data with much sharper resolution.
No one else was up and about at that time and the station machinery ground away in solitude. I did a few loops around our base and kicked her into a solar warp. I scanned down the new exits to place as bookmarks in the corporation hangar. The highsec led to Pavoudis. This was unfortunate.
KAIRS had been growing lately with more and more active pilots. Doc P and two others had been waiting fir the wormhole to transfer onward so they could find the new access system and join us. Our new link was in a tight pocket of highsec systems in a sea of red, superhostile systems. We were an island, a 6-system buffer at minimum cut us off from civilized space. Our resupplies from the major resource centers of the galaxy would have to wait, or be blasted through several conceivable pirate blockades.
I headed back home and found the new C4. I popped through, put at ease by the fact that any sudden attack by the Sleepers, mysterious dark aliens that inhabitedmany wormholes, wolud be negated by the sensortag of my specialized ship. Spider was a dream to fly, responsive, smooth and with excellent inertia.
I sent out my probes then flitted in close to the pink sun to help hide my signature in case of pirates. The data was streaming in almost immediately. I was safe. No Sleepers detected, no players in-system. Just the wormhole to Veronica.
I cruised the system a bit more and scanned down a few plex sites for the corp. No mystery ships.
I made a mistake in my joyride. I didn't investigate the other hole first. C6, as big as it gets, infested with player pirates. In the time I had been scanning, they had spilled in; I assume the link has relatively fresh. They were my opposites, I was an early morning inquisitor, they were the vanguard of their invaders. Drakes, those flattened reptiles, had been nearing me. They found me at the third planet. Klaxons sounded as they began to lock. I knew I had maybe 5, 6 seconds. I didn't have time to align the Spider to warp out, I assume if I did that I would have been scrambled, locked in space as this fine ship was taken back by entropy. For all its sensor suite goodness it had bare minimal defenses. A single rocket would smash me.
I saw the first thing straight ahead: Planet 4 of the pink system. I set the computer in a rush to Warp to 0 meters and kicked the solar warp pedal. Not fast enough. The nearest Drake snatched a lock on my fragile vessel. Some sort of mortar-like sprays cascaded through the space between us. flashes of directed metal fragments shredded by port solar sails. Another lanced straight through my ship. On both sides of the spherical pilot section there was decompression. Small tools, wires, anything loose whipped about, some refuse briefly plugging each hole before tearing through. Each hole was widening by sucked-out micro fragments of my hull., A section of the staging harness for the starboard sails was blown off. I had a second to look through the porthole at them. All I saw was the blunt forward face of a massive torpedo. It felt unreal;death, reeling me in 100's of meters at a time. I closed my eyes as the fiery explosive reached the Spider.
The Spider bucked once hard, as I saw this, and then I was watching the torpedo explode in the space I had just filled. The whole scene whipped to a pinpoint behind meas I careened through warp. The symmetry loss of the sails, the fact that 65% of the solar intake was simply gone, meant that the solar warp was unstable andat an angle. I missed Planet 4 by several astral units. I could feel them transiting after me, so before I caught sight I nosed her to the warp exit, had the ship redistribute the remaining sail sections for proper alignment and launched at full warp velocity through the system, not stopping as she passed through the Veronica wormhole, not stopping until she came to a skipping halt at the Red Queen hangar. I broughtcast the emergency, we battened down the hatches. Our CEO, now online, brought our heaviest artillery online, all our secondary and tertiary shields crisply came into being.
They never came at us. Repairs are underway on the Spider. I'm alive.
Monday, May 17, 2010
A chance discovery
The next day we ran some patrols of our home space. Thaeddin, a director, and I scanned down the
new C4 wormhole exit. It turned out the Deepari link was unusually durable and still existed today,
but the C4 and its mysterious inhabitants and shifted away from Veronica and something new awaited. We flew through in our covert ops dual fleet. He found several Sleeper sites we could attack and pillage later, but also something curious: A lone Zephyr, parked dangerously close to the C4 system's bright yellow Sun. IT was equipped with that prototype ship's specialized probe launcher and 36 probes.
I didn't want to leave my CovOps ship adrift in an alien system while I piloted our discovery home. It was also conceivably a trap. A ring of cloaked destroyers might appear when I took the bait; I found this unlikely, however. The solar radiation at that proximity to a hot star would have fried their cloaking circuits over time.
Blasting back after parking my Anathema, I warped to the heart of the system.
Alarms met my arrival; my pod was being damaged. Panicky scans told me that without armor and proper ship shields the solar radiation was frying me alive. Instead of warping out a did a quick thruster burst and barreled toward the podracer-style probe ship.
My circuits locked on and the pilot-installation process bega, but the heat in the pod, the snap and sizzle of electronics burning out and sparking into vacuum, overcame me and my sight went dark.
I came to in a marvelous, alien ship. It was unlike anything I'd seen before, the controls pencil thin but unbrittle, readings all acute angles, a steely grey, uncomfortable interior. The ship was designed around the large probe machinery that appeared to be this ship's function. Engineering later explained that it seemed to be designed for solo wormhole exploration. It was powered by enhanced solar sails, a sort of flexible steel parachute that lead spidery main hull through anomalous space. As I caught a solar wave and hurtled back toward home, we could only wonder what had become of the pilot. Had he been stranded,unable to scan down an exit, and ejected into space to end the starving torment? The ship storage had no food, no personal possessions. OR was it something stranger still some rip in space-time that aligned the stars such that I would find this majestic relic of a lost race? As I'd decided to devote my life to Wormhole study, it seemed apre pos that the Zephyr also turned out to have an enhanced signature ID masking system that meant no Sleeper ship would ever attack it first. It was a piece of this strange environment, home to it more than I. I would learn from it.
new C4 wormhole exit. It turned out the Deepari link was unusually durable and still existed today,
but the C4 and its mysterious inhabitants and shifted away from Veronica and something new awaited. We flew through in our covert ops dual fleet. He found several Sleeper sites we could attack and pillage later, but also something curious: A lone Zephyr, parked dangerously close to the C4 system's bright yellow Sun. IT was equipped with that prototype ship's specialized probe launcher and 36 probes.
I didn't want to leave my CovOps ship adrift in an alien system while I piloted our discovery home. It was also conceivably a trap. A ring of cloaked destroyers might appear when I took the bait; I found this unlikely, however. The solar radiation at that proximity to a hot star would have fried their cloaking circuits over time.
Blasting back after parking my Anathema, I warped to the heart of the system.
Alarms met my arrival; my pod was being damaged. Panicky scans told me that without armor and proper ship shields the solar radiation was frying me alive. Instead of warping out a did a quick thruster burst and barreled toward the podracer-style probe ship.
My circuits locked on and the pilot-installation process bega, but the heat in the pod, the snap and sizzle of electronics burning out and sparking into vacuum, overcame me and my sight went dark.
I came to in a marvelous, alien ship. It was unlike anything I'd seen before, the controls pencil thin but unbrittle, readings all acute angles, a steely grey, uncomfortable interior. The ship was designed around the large probe machinery that appeared to be this ship's function. Engineering later explained that it seemed to be designed for solo wormhole exploration. It was powered by enhanced solar sails, a sort of flexible steel parachute that lead spidery main hull through anomalous space. As I caught a solar wave and hurtled back toward home, we could only wonder what had become of the pilot. Had he been stranded,unable to scan down an exit, and ejected into space to end the starving torment? The ship storage had no food, no personal possessions. OR was it something stranger still some rip in space-time that aligned the stars such that I would find this majestic relic of a lost race? As I'd decided to devote my life to Wormhole study, it seemed apre pos that the Zephyr also turned out to have an enhanced signature ID masking system that meant no Sleeper ship would ever attack it first. It was a piece of this strange environment, home to it more than I. I would learn from it.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Exploring
Our latest quantum leap brought us in line with the core Amarr worlds, Deepari, 4 jumps from Amarr, 10 jumps from Jita. We were in familiar territory, systems i'd run missions in early on. I reprenished some supplies for my amarr ships, different frequency crystals, cruise missiles and more.
I was also discovering scanning. As practice I scanned down both the new exit to Deepari and the new exit to a C4 on my own, though their bookmarks sat for anyone to download from the corp hangar.
I equipped probes on my Battleship, confident that I could traverse the linked highsec systems of my brethren without worry. I found nothing in Deepari, moved past Abaz to Kudi and found one signal.
I was firing my probes at different ranges all over the system, and it took another half hour of shifting thair perimeters and widths to track down a 100% signal. Once I had that I locked my navigational computers on it and barreled in 100k from target.
Another wormhole. It warped and restitched the spatial fabric around it, skewing the bloody background glow of a red dwarf.
Anything could be on the other side. It wasn't worth the risk. I warped home to Veronica and brought out my Covert Ops ship. Back at the wormhole, I scanned it directly. It read that it was on the verge of collapse. Damn my adventurers spirit...
I cloaked as soon as I was spat out on the other side. Moving to a blind, empty corner of this alien system I appeared just long enough to launch 5 expanded probes into the dark reaches of this pocket universe.
The Data came streaming back. This was a high-ranked C4 alive with the dealings of Aquila Inc. I had my First Officer summarize from their datasite:
Aquila Inc. is an ambitious, multinational corporation made up by friends working together to make themselves a nest amongst the stars. With only a 1 million skillpoint minimum, we welcome both veteran players and new players alike. We work as team, and every pilot plays an important role in the success of Aquila.
Goals:
I. Erect and maintain our own POS.
II. Build up our industrial and security divisions;
III. Work with other corporations to build an effective alliance.
IV. Research and build advanced technology.
V. Expand into low security regions.
Members of Aquila do not make a difference between their success and the success of Aquila. Those who work for the success of Aquila do so with the confidence that they are backed in full by their comrades.
Clearly they had graduated past owning a single POPS and now commanded sovreignty over a powerful wormhole universe. I flit through the system, never closer than 100k to an item. Hulks and Roqs floated unmanned between vast towers of ship maintenance arrays. Several player shuttles moved between structures. It was a hive, and with the 0.0 security status of everything in here I couldn't afford to be found sneaking amidst their operations. Any respectable defense force, in full knowledge of the lack of CONCORD response, would eliminate, and fast.
Taking the stick once more I aligned to the hole back to the known galaxy and warped striaght through, a gut feeling telling me i'd been lcuky to stay a fly on the wall even this long.
Back in Veronica, our activities seemed comparitively sleepy. Lazy Battleships lolled between stark structures, everything under the haze of our Blue Shield.
I docked, found my cabin on board the POS station.
I checked my communications and heard news that my old
When I woke up we'd be tethered between two completely different anchors, one guranteed safe, one that could be anything.
I was also discovering scanning. As practice I scanned down both the new exit to Deepari and the new exit to a C4 on my own, though their bookmarks sat for anyone to download from the corp hangar.
I equipped probes on my Battleship, confident that I could traverse the linked highsec systems of my brethren without worry. I found nothing in Deepari, moved past Abaz to Kudi and found one signal.
I was firing my probes at different ranges all over the system, and it took another half hour of shifting thair perimeters and widths to track down a 100% signal. Once I had that I locked my navigational computers on it and barreled in 100k from target.
Another wormhole. It warped and restitched the spatial fabric around it, skewing the bloody background glow of a red dwarf.
Anything could be on the other side. It wasn't worth the risk. I warped home to Veronica and brought out my Covert Ops ship. Back at the wormhole, I scanned it directly. It read that it was on the verge of collapse. Damn my adventurers spirit...
I cloaked as soon as I was spat out on the other side. Moving to a blind, empty corner of this alien system I appeared just long enough to launch 5 expanded probes into the dark reaches of this pocket universe.
The Data came streaming back. This was a high-ranked C4 alive with the dealings of Aquila Inc. I had my First Officer summarize from their datasite:
Aquila Inc. is an ambitious, multinational corporation made up by friends working together to make themselves a nest amongst the stars. With only a 1 million skillpoint minimum, we welcome both veteran players and new players alike. We work as team, and every pilot plays an important role in the success of Aquila.
Goals:
I. Erect and maintain our own POS.
II. Build up our industrial and security divisions;
III. Work with other corporations to build an effective alliance.
IV. Research and build advanced technology.
V. Expand into low security regions.
Members of Aquila do not make a difference between their success and the success of Aquila. Those who work for the success of Aquila do so with the confidence that they are backed in full by their comrades.
Clearly they had graduated past owning a single POPS and now commanded sovreignty over a powerful wormhole universe. I flit through the system, never closer than 100k to an item. Hulks and Roqs floated unmanned between vast towers of ship maintenance arrays. Several player shuttles moved between structures. It was a hive, and with the 0.0 security status of everything in here I couldn't afford to be found sneaking amidst their operations. Any respectable defense force, in full knowledge of the lack of CONCORD response, would eliminate, and fast.
Taking the stick once more I aligned to the hole back to the known galaxy and warped striaght through, a gut feeling telling me i'd been lcuky to stay a fly on the wall even this long.
Back in Veronica, our activities seemed comparitively sleepy. Lazy Battleships lolled between stark structures, everything under the haze of our Blue Shield.
I docked, found my cabin on board the POS station.
I checked my communications and heard news that my old
When I woke up we'd be tethered between two completely different anchors, one guranteed safe, one that could be anything.
Our Neighbours
I'd joined a ragtag wormhole crew fresh from a legitimate highsec alliance. War had driven me away but I was soon to learn that wormholes bring their own dangers.
While our pocket of existence would daily shift relative to the known galaxy, so would others, and these pockets would sometimes intersect.
Our wormhole system was a class 2, relatively light on those darkspace criminals known as the Sleepers. Sleepers inhabit every wormhole.
The Sleepers race is one of the four known ancient races which are Sleepers, Takmahl, Talocan and Yan Jung.
The Sleepers are, as the other ancient races, descendants of humans and populated New Eden thousands of years ago before they vanished. These days the only remains of them in New Eden are ruins and strange artifacts.
Some of those ruins can be found around Minmatar space these days.
The technology of the Sleepers is said to be comparable to Tech 2 level in some areas, in some other areas they had much more advanced knowledge. From those few known artifacts it was also deduced that the Sleepers were masters of virtual reality, neural interfacing and cryotechnology.
But the Sleepers were the least of our worries. While Veronica was always connected in one wormhole way or another to highsec, it also had at any point in time a link to a Class 4 wormhole. This would be a step deeper into non-space; passing from highsec to us, then from us deeper to whatever c4 is linked to us, are grades further into non-space.
While tethered to Appen, we were also tethered to an unknown C4, omething that, for all we know, is teeming with player pirates ready to burst into our zone and pillage.
While this is a danger, KAIRS home base is nearly impregnable. You see, any wormhole tunnel can only allow a certain mass to pass through before it is caused to collapse from the strain. This means that something like a Carrier would quite significantly damage the tunnel, a shuttle very little, and a Titan would destroy it just by trying to pass through. This means that no sizeable fleet can move into Veronica to assault us, offering a degree of safety. There's nothing to prevent them from slipping into Veronica cloaked and ganking us during missions, mining, any activities that take us out of the protective blue bubble of our home station, The Red Queen.
Firefite had scanned down the 2nd C4-linked wormhole since the last jump, and he said it was inhabited. Having just leanred scanning, as a practice I scanned down the wormhole entry independently (it hovered just beyond the 2nd moon of the first planet), and confirmed his readings on my directional scanner.
Firefite cloaked and made some close passes of the alien inhabitants; human, descendents of a Finnish organization. We pulled up their datasite on the net but their language was indecipherable. Their imagery had a stark, cold war mentality, however, which did not put us at ease.
A Corp member named Darkon had a suggestion when we discussed internally the threat the latest adjacent heavy-duty system's inhabitants might pose. Since large ships decayed a wormhole tunnel more quickly, we could use a battleship pilot to cross back and forth repeatedly, between Veronica and the intruding C4, to wear out the stability of the wormhole linking us.
It sounded like a plan; from my understanding, for the most part uninhabited, innocent C4s would normally be tethered to Veronica, the sooner we could shuffle the Finnish refuge along the better.
There were concerns. I asked, what if the tunnel collapsed suddenly as a result of the rapidcrossing while the pilot was in the C4? They would have performed an honorable service detaching us from danger, but they would be lost in space quite literally. Worse than being left behind in Empire space, they might, without probes to find a new exit, be stuck forever, short of obliterating their pod and all the implants they'd installed. Even then they might be left recloned in a station far from the system we currently link to in highsec.
It was decided we would propose it to the CEO, and I volunteered. Why? Because the BS would be insured, i'd be reimbursed, i'd take probes to find a new way out, and, well, I think it would be cool to be stranded in a hostile player-inhabited wormhole system left to my own devices to find my way back home. I'd probably take a cloak, too.
While our pocket of existence would daily shift relative to the known galaxy, so would others, and these pockets would sometimes intersect.
Our wormhole system was a class 2, relatively light on those darkspace criminals known as the Sleepers. Sleepers inhabit every wormhole.
The Sleepers race is one of the four known ancient races which are Sleepers, Takmahl, Talocan and Yan Jung.
The Sleepers are, as the other ancient races, descendants of humans and populated New Eden thousands of years ago before they vanished. These days the only remains of them in New Eden are ruins and strange artifacts.
Some of those ruins can be found around Minmatar space these days.
The technology of the Sleepers is said to be comparable to Tech 2 level in some areas, in some other areas they had much more advanced knowledge. From those few known artifacts it was also deduced that the Sleepers were masters of virtual reality, neural interfacing and cryotechnology.
But the Sleepers were the least of our worries. While Veronica was always connected in one wormhole way or another to highsec, it also had at any point in time a link to a Class 4 wormhole. This would be a step deeper into non-space; passing from highsec to us, then from us deeper to whatever c4 is linked to us, are grades further into non-space.
While tethered to Appen, we were also tethered to an unknown C4, omething that, for all we know, is teeming with player pirates ready to burst into our zone and pillage.
While this is a danger, KAIRS home base is nearly impregnable. You see, any wormhole tunnel can only allow a certain mass to pass through before it is caused to collapse from the strain. This means that something like a Carrier would quite significantly damage the tunnel, a shuttle very little, and a Titan would destroy it just by trying to pass through. This means that no sizeable fleet can move into Veronica to assault us, offering a degree of safety. There's nothing to prevent them from slipping into Veronica cloaked and ganking us during missions, mining, any activities that take us out of the protective blue bubble of our home station, The Red Queen.
Firefite had scanned down the 2nd C4-linked wormhole since the last jump, and he said it was inhabited. Having just leanred scanning, as a practice I scanned down the wormhole entry independently (it hovered just beyond the 2nd moon of the first planet), and confirmed his readings on my directional scanner.
Firefite cloaked and made some close passes of the alien inhabitants; human, descendents of a Finnish organization. We pulled up their datasite on the net but their language was indecipherable. Their imagery had a stark, cold war mentality, however, which did not put us at ease.
A Corp member named Darkon had a suggestion when we discussed internally the threat the latest adjacent heavy-duty system's inhabitants might pose. Since large ships decayed a wormhole tunnel more quickly, we could use a battleship pilot to cross back and forth repeatedly, between Veronica and the intruding C4, to wear out the stability of the wormhole linking us.
It sounded like a plan; from my understanding, for the most part uninhabited, innocent C4s would normally be tethered to Veronica, the sooner we could shuffle the Finnish refuge along the better.
There were concerns. I asked, what if the tunnel collapsed suddenly as a result of the rapidcrossing while the pilot was in the C4? They would have performed an honorable service detaching us from danger, but they would be lost in space quite literally. Worse than being left behind in Empire space, they might, without probes to find a new exit, be stuck forever, short of obliterating their pod and all the implants they'd installed. Even then they might be left recloned in a station far from the system we currently link to in highsec.
It was decided we would propose it to the CEO, and I volunteered. Why? Because the BS would be insured, i'd be reimbursed, i'd take probes to find a new way out, and, well, I think it would be cool to be stranded in a hostile player-inhabited wormhole system left to my own devices to find my way back home. I'd probably take a cloak, too.
It began as something simple
Was it a new galaxy, not full of cold expanses but fuzzy bears to the horizon?
X Corp had joined us under the thread of a third party. As I was later able to put together, the Corp had had a butter defecter in their upper ranks.
This pilot had broken off with a vengeance, presumably hauling a significant portion of the corporation's wealth with him.
It was quiet from his end, the corporation griefed and thenthey started to get over it.
The bitter pilot returned with a vengeance. He' holed up in a wormhole POS and with the wealth he'd torn from the clutches of his previous 'tormentors', he paid a hefty tab to Murderous Muskrats.
This was a very small tight, very well-repped mercenary group for hire.
I was one mid level pilot in a hundred-strong corporation that had juoined a fresh off the presses alliance of pacifists in highsec.
In the end I found out a lot as they murdered us. A 5-corp alliance had been routed by mercs. Somewhere the traitor laughed as our ceos swore into alliace, corp and audio chats.
There was no organized regroup. People just ran for their lives. Most of those corps hadn't been in a war before and though they had significant industrial resources they had put off any sort of pvp fleet development based on their plan of infrastructure preceding any sort of political engagekment
People were popping in every system we works in, stretched ina loose net in Tash-Murkon space. Vent was attrocious, poeople trying to relay intel before they themselves were burned out of space.
Saeger was a SPC CEO. This was partly his doing. The traitor was their friend and whatever happened between them, this was the result. He pioneered an attempt to move the alliance's majorr holdings to the edge of Amar space, a bottleneck system that's easier to defend.
I'd seen this all coming, of course.
I'd been in talks with Kairs of SPLU fame to begin working with them to harvest resources from their wormhole. As I was only interested in peaceful building at this time,it seemed like a lot less headache.
I finalized things with KAstorey, their CEO. They lived in a wormhole, something that would shift about relative to trhe known universe. A subspacetunnel had opened up, temporarily connecting them to Bomana, a Khanid backwater planet that happened to be only 14 dangerous jumps from where I was based.
How would I get out though? Saeger's pilgrimage out of the system was having trouble.
One convoy leaked through a rarely used stargate at the back of the system. While it wasn't camped, the Meerkats did have some cloaked spies watching all entrances and exits to pimebeka and other usedsystems. Within 5 minutes astrike force of frigates caught up with and swarmed them, setting them on fire against the background of the blazing sun.
Saeger himself led a small force in an indirect action involving jump clones, leaving their ships behind in station, but were somehow scanned down and obliterated at the exit system.
Me? I failed once before I succeeded. My fully rigged battleship was launched while two other corp members in the system were under fire. I tookthe gatecamp less travelled. I made itt through into I waited a bit. I came roaring out of Pimebeka station in my Anathema. Targetting klaxons bled into my ears as I kicked the microwarpdrive, had my head pressed into the seat and WENT. I made it out of the Pimebeka ambush and next steamrolled through a Tash-Murkon camp. At this second engagement I lost all but 15% of my hull. Fighting back was difficult as I was a weak ship and my warp core stabilization system meant my cruise missiles were slow to aim.
I had 13 rocky jumps to make within 3 hours or it was likely the wormhole to KAIRS that represented my salvation would collapse, leaving me in hostile territory with no way out.I did make it, joined with my new Corporation in their space-beyond-space in their wormhole system. The ripple in spacetime we jetted through brought us to blue-lit homebase. He warped us to the POS, I looked around at anchored hangar bays, maintenance arrays, shuttle and worker drones buzzing in all directions. I was home.
"Welcome to Veronica", said our CEO.
Soon after our link to Bomana was snipped away. The pilots bunked down after securing their ships. We were on the same EST time zone and this spatial shift that caused a new wormhole tunnel at random would happen sometime in the night.
In the morning the news came that we'd moved onto a Heimatar region, Appen. It was a sleepy highsec system with a scandal. Everywhere we lookedwere aimless floating cans brandinded with the same message: Internal Fire are bot miners! Kill them on site!
The art of mining was an honored though rustic art guided bythe hands of skilled craftsmen, and it was abhorrent to drop a robot behind the proverbial wheel.
These systems, including the closest thing to an industrial trade hub, TRer, were sleepy, backwater and, clearly, abused systems. I searched for these mineral sinners and found the wreckage of one of their bestowers in an asteroid belt and little else. Who knows whether this was the result of an npc raider attack or the righteous punishment those cans demanded?
The wormhole was short-lived. My readings told me it would collapse entirely soon. I made a few ventures into empire space, all the while feeling strangely out of place outside of my happy wormhole.
Gistii pirates had made a small operation smuggling liquid gasses in Eddar. I strafed them in my Maller, laser flares flickering across their hulls. They blew apart to replaced my larger ships, and soon the onslaught was too much. In the midst of battle I received a comm from Firefite: The wormhole home was collapsing.
Fires had broken out in the fuselage as Saboteurs disabled my warp engines and slowed my thrusters. Damage reports and casualties were coming in from every deck. I had the ensign force-align the ship and perform a reckless warp-ahead. Thoguh we were spat out in a system asteroid belt, we were safe, and as we put out the fires I had the cruiser boost to the next stargate home. 3 nervous jumps later we entered Appen and received a chilling comm: "Its not on scan, I think we left you behind. As I broke from warp I frantically scanned for the worm hole. At first I began a heart attack; I didn't see it. Then that familiar ripple in space came into view to aft. I had a chance, but white and blue threads were already thrashing along the length of the wormhole's mouth, and the edges of the tunnel it created were phasing and blurring into and out of reality. Even attempting to pass through could cause the passage to implode around my ship.
I held my breath, and by the time I let it out I was awash in the familiar blue glow of our home star.
It wasn't 20 minutes later that it collapsed entirely. It was late and our ships were docking; sacanning down the new highsec gateway and determining where we had ended up could wait until the morning.
the Maller docked and secured, my Battleship safe though inaccessible, my twin covert ops vessels stored in my personal inventory, everything locked down, I let my head hit the pillow.
I'd made it.
Was it a new galaxy, not full of cold expanses but fuzzy bears to the horizon?
X Corp had joined us under the thread of a third party. As I was later able to put together, the Corp had had a butter defecter in their upper ranks.
This pilot had broken off with a vengeance, presumably hauling a significant portion of the corporation's wealth with him.
It was quiet from his end, the corporation griefed and thenthey started to get over it.
The bitter pilot returned with a vengeance. He' holed up in a wormhole POS and with the wealth he'd torn from the clutches of his previous 'tormentors', he paid a hefty tab to Murderous Muskrats.
This was a very small tight, very well-repped mercenary group for hire.
I was one mid level pilot in a hundred-strong corporation that had juoined a fresh off the presses alliance of pacifists in highsec.
In the end I found out a lot as they murdered us. A 5-corp alliance had been routed by mercs. Somewhere the traitor laughed as our ceos swore into alliace, corp and audio chats.
There was no organized regroup. People just ran for their lives. Most of those corps hadn't been in a war before and though they had significant industrial resources they had put off any sort of pvp fleet development based on their plan of infrastructure preceding any sort of political engagekment
People were popping in every system we works in, stretched ina loose net in Tash-Murkon space. Vent was attrocious, poeople trying to relay intel before they themselves were burned out of space.
Saeger was a SPC CEO. This was partly his doing. The traitor was their friend and whatever happened between them, this was the result. He pioneered an attempt to move the alliance's majorr holdings to the edge of Amar space, a bottleneck system that's easier to defend.
I'd seen this all coming, of course.
I'd been in talks with Kairs of SPLU fame to begin working with them to harvest resources from their wormhole. As I was only interested in peaceful building at this time,it seemed like a lot less headache.
I finalized things with KAstorey, their CEO. They lived in a wormhole, something that would shift about relative to trhe known universe. A subspacetunnel had opened up, temporarily connecting them to Bomana, a Khanid backwater planet that happened to be only 14 dangerous jumps from where I was based.
How would I get out though? Saeger's pilgrimage out of the system was having trouble.
One convoy leaked through a rarely used stargate at the back of the system. While it wasn't camped, the Meerkats did have some cloaked spies watching all entrances and exits to pimebeka and other usedsystems. Within 5 minutes astrike force of frigates caught up with and swarmed them, setting them on fire against the background of the blazing sun.
Saeger himself led a small force in an indirect action involving jump clones, leaving their ships behind in station, but were somehow scanned down and obliterated at the exit system.
Me? I failed once before I succeeded. My fully rigged battleship was launched while two other corp members in the system were under fire. I tookthe gatecamp less travelled. I made itt through into I waited a bit. I came roaring out of Pimebeka station in my Anathema. Targetting klaxons bled into my ears as I kicked the microwarpdrive, had my head pressed into the seat and WENT. I made it out of the Pimebeka ambush and next steamrolled through a Tash-Murkon camp. At this second engagement I lost all but 15% of my hull. Fighting back was difficult as I was a weak ship and my warp core stabilization system meant my cruise missiles were slow to aim.
I had 13 rocky jumps to make within 3 hours or it was likely the wormhole to KAIRS that represented my salvation would collapse, leaving me in hostile territory with no way out.I did make it, joined with my new Corporation in their space-beyond-space in their wormhole system. The ripple in spacetime we jetted through brought us to blue-lit homebase. He warped us to the POS, I looked around at anchored hangar bays, maintenance arrays, shuttle and worker drones buzzing in all directions. I was home.
"Welcome to Veronica", said our CEO.
Soon after our link to Bomana was snipped away. The pilots bunked down after securing their ships. We were on the same EST time zone and this spatial shift that caused a new wormhole tunnel at random would happen sometime in the night.
In the morning the news came that we'd moved onto a Heimatar region, Appen. It was a sleepy highsec system with a scandal. Everywhere we lookedwere aimless floating cans brandinded with the same message: Internal Fire are bot miners! Kill them on site!
The art of mining was an honored though rustic art guided bythe hands of skilled craftsmen, and it was abhorrent to drop a robot behind the proverbial wheel.
These systems, including the closest thing to an industrial trade hub, TRer, were sleepy, backwater and, clearly, abused systems. I searched for these mineral sinners and found the wreckage of one of their bestowers in an asteroid belt and little else. Who knows whether this was the result of an npc raider attack or the righteous punishment those cans demanded?
The wormhole was short-lived. My readings told me it would collapse entirely soon. I made a few ventures into empire space, all the while feeling strangely out of place outside of my happy wormhole.
Gistii pirates had made a small operation smuggling liquid gasses in Eddar. I strafed them in my Maller, laser flares flickering across their hulls. They blew apart to replaced my larger ships, and soon the onslaught was too much. In the midst of battle I received a comm from Firefite: The wormhole home was collapsing.
Fires had broken out in the fuselage as Saboteurs disabled my warp engines and slowed my thrusters. Damage reports and casualties were coming in from every deck. I had the ensign force-align the ship and perform a reckless warp-ahead. Thoguh we were spat out in a system asteroid belt, we were safe, and as we put out the fires I had the cruiser boost to the next stargate home. 3 nervous jumps later we entered Appen and received a chilling comm: "Its not on scan, I think we left you behind. As I broke from warp I frantically scanned for the worm hole. At first I began a heart attack; I didn't see it. Then that familiar ripple in space came into view to aft. I had a chance, but white and blue threads were already thrashing along the length of the wormhole's mouth, and the edges of the tunnel it created were phasing and blurring into and out of reality. Even attempting to pass through could cause the passage to implode around my ship.
I held my breath, and by the time I let it out I was awash in the familiar blue glow of our home star.
It wasn't 20 minutes later that it collapsed entirely. It was late and our ships were docking; sacanning down the new highsec gateway and determining where we had ended up could wait until the morning.
the Maller docked and secured, my Battleship safe though inaccessible, my twin covert ops vessels stored in my personal inventory, everything locked down, I let my head hit the pillow.
I'd made it.
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