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.