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.