Carrier Loss Aftermath and a New Attack

One effort to evacuate citizens in lowsec ahead of the invasion had ended largely in disaster.    The Sansha menace loomed large, as more analysis and speculation was heaped on the little intel we still had.  Through it all I knew my sole aim was to find and ruin my Brother, however I couldn’t do that if he and I were both mindless Sansha slaves.  There was a growing possibility that the Sansha had many more tricks up their sleeves, enough sleight of hand to bring the whole house of cards down.  If they massively invaded hisec with their warships, if Concord and the factions collapsed to Sansha Nation rule, I would never have my revenge.  The invasion had become a threat to my vengeance, and so I would help to head up the defense for a short time before getting back on task.

I had escaped the Oruse ambush, leaving the Archon wreckage and the expanding corona of it’s loss behind.  My Manticore friend likewise aligned to the slowly retreating dropships bristling with citizens to see that they were unmolested as they fled to the adjacent system.

Our leader in Moira., Julianus Soter, perhaps the most recognized name in the universe right now, had plans to defend both lowsec Oruse and hisec Deltole.  The issue was getting our warships that far down south through pirate territory without falling to the same fate as the Archon carrier.  He made his way downtown with a plan; find a wormhole that would connect from near Oruse to near Pelisle, our stagin ground on the edge of hisec.  This was a million-to-one shot, but he’d already posted a 20 million reward for any pilot that located a decent link.  Oruse was dry, he moved on to Hare and I to Heleule.  I had a couple of close calls with pirate traffic but my Anathema and her warp stabilizers got me out of it.  

With amazing luck, Soter chimed in on comms: “FOUND ONE!”  With 30,000 planets in New Eden, he had found a direct link from Hare to Grispire, the system next door to Pelisle.  While this handy link was intended to route our warships into the area of the lowsec invasion, it soon had another use.

The FCORD announcement landed in our intel folders simultaneously.  Adye was under attack.  It was a hisec system that seemed to be 16 jumps from everyone.  From Osure it was far more, but I needed to get there fast.  Wormhole!

Soter and I hurried to the lowsec end of the hole and burned through, dephasing a brief moment before being spit out adjacent to the Corp’s home of Pelisle.  From there it was a dozen jumps, with various fleets beefing their numbers along the way or merging, by the time SYNE and FCORD arrived in numbers we had a sizeable fleet.

At Planet III numerous corporations aligned with FCORD/SYNE motives arrived in warp or cyno bursts.  Hearts beat fast a sensors swept the scene. 

Compared to the 1400 ships in  the Uedama incursion, this strike force was relatively small and came in two waves, the second being a cluster of 15 Battleships.  In each case the combined might of the hisec defense was enough to repell them.

While countless pilots breathed easy and others questioned whther Sansha resources had finally begun to run thin, somewhere in the mass, a lone freighter chugged.  In it was stored, perhaps, the key to the fall of the Empires.  We don't know what (or who) was being transported...

Intercepted Sansha communiqués indicated the reason that the incursion was so small; they were not there to destroy, they were there to pick something up.  Whether the freighter slipped through the hairball unnoticed to be enveloped by a Battleship, or a cloaked Sansha ship had sped through the system to scoop up the precious cargo while the warships at the wormhole distracted the defenders, we cannot yet know.  What we do know is that the Sansha apparently have plans beyond simple enslavement and zombification.  

We pushed them off and the remaining Battleships in the second Sansha wave flickered out of existence as one, presumably back to from where they came.  Capsuleers careened amidst the light wreckage recovering people and salvage as the debates rages in numerous channels.  The immediate danger now past, forces redistributed to Deltole to prepare for the next day’s expected invasion (unless this too was a distraction).  While most considered travelling to Oruse in lowsec to defend that backwater world not worth the danger or effort, Moira. Flocked back to their temporary wormhole and Julianus led a force to the Oruse area to set up camp.  We might be a loose-knit force of dedicated defenders when the wormhole tears itself open over planet 7, but those we could not save via evacuation would not be let down by the immortals that cruise the heavens beyond their horizons.

A calm settled over the galaxy.  We knew They were coming, busting out of the void, ripping holes in space, ramming massive fleets through to bombard humanity.  If they were walking organic robots, having done away with emotion and passion, then they were turning back on their parents, the very source of humanity, in an effort to snuff out anything with more mental freedom than a slave.  This was a war to protect what made us human, the instincts, the creativity, the love and hate that greased the gears of civilization’s crawl to Utopia.  The Sansha believe complete uniformity will eliminate strife from the galaxy.  

They’re right.

What they are not considering is the use of strife.  Should a calm gray apathy descend on life in the universe, conflict would vanish, as would invention.  Ancient names like Einstein, Oppenheimer, the greatest leaps forward have come as a result of desperation, war, pain, jealousy, vengeance, affection, drive.  Humanity, if it could still be called that under Sansha rule, would stagnate.  Research would stop.  With nothing new added there would only be opportunities for already-discovered technologies to slip away.  Decades, perhaps eons may pass as the Sansha de-evolve with no creativity to rein in the atrophying, the entropy, the relentless directive of chaos theory.  How long before the technology to maintain their mindless slavery itself comes to problems?  Would we survive waking up in a virtual stone age?  These are all simple projections on my part; in any case, the Sansha might win the war, but with no further battle, they will lose what remains of their souls.

Sansha Continued

While all that went on, there was more behind the scenes I would only learn later.  We had one SYNE-sanctioned force working to hotdrop their Star, an giant vessel filled with thermonuclear explosives.  It was foiled when the invasion's leader learned of the plan and destroyed the logistics of the effort less than a minute before their plan came to fruition.

Confidentiality ensured that no one else knew about a crack Stealth Bomber force that warped just off the core of the furball.  Their plan was to cruise along the edge of the wormhole and discharge a mass of gravimetric bombs directly onto the portal's event horizon, hoping to collapse it.  Again the Sansha were prepared, as their fleet was uncloaked and scrambled.  A number of bombs were released but those ships never made it home.

At the same time a cloaked recon vessel slowboated cloaked to the rim of one of the three intruding wormholes at Uedama II.  It uncloaked and dropped over 13 points of grav on the lip, but a close-flying frigate crashed into him, knocking him from stealth and drawing the simultaneous fire of 140 Sansha Battleships.  It became nothing in a second and a half.

When the debris left by the end of the invasion was being cleared away the next day, there came new information, a leak, quuite possibly from the mysterious Informant.  It pointed to a pair of attacks, one in hisec at Deltole and the other shortly after in dangerous lowsec, Oruse.

Immediately SYNE and FCORD went into action.  One small segment was dispatched to push through lowsec space in order to light a cyno and teleport in a vast Arcon Amarr Carrier.  With a capacity for 800k civilians hollowed out, it was there to pull people to safety 24 hours before the Sansha war machine roared to life at their doorstep.  There is only one life-sustaining temperate planet there, and so the choice was obvious.

A scattering of covert ops ships set out into pirate territory, myself among them, in a scouting chain.  We hit the Oruse gate with an almost eerie lack of hostility; no gate camps, no bubbles or snipers.  Nothing uncloaking to make everyone gasp.  We breathed easy as we coasted in to planet III and set a tight orbit.  A Drake had been reported in the area roving for advantage, and we knew we needed to act quickly.

At the staging area for the hotdrop we had a pair us cov ops in position.  The Manticore uncloaked a lightyear off the Western hemisphere and lit the fuse that would allow the Carrier to come through.  Doing so would somewhat disable the Manticore for long minutes, and I was prepared to sweep in should some drifting Rifter try to seize the opportunity.   Local seemed good, and we commenced.

JUST off my bow the massive ship came into view in a corruscating burst of blue-ribbon energy.  She creaked and groaned a moment before settling into lowsec space, then lurched into the short warp hop that brought her to the upper atmosphere.

Operations began immediately.  Dropships started to cascade down to the planet in waves.  Politically, it was not clear-cut planetside, as many citizens disbelieved the knowledge og the upcoming attack or refused on the basis of their fear of capsuleers.  A storm brewing showed up on planetary scans, moving from the vast ocean toward the major population centers.  It roiled and lightning flashes were faintly visible from space.  ON terra firma FCORD volunteers ushered meagre families pulling crying children into their cargo bays.  Some stubborn parents ordered their children off-planet, too scared or stubborn themselves to make the jump.  Rain drove down, decisions were made, eyes darting always for danger.

The pirates had timed it well.  The dropships were just cresting the horizon to reach the waiting carrier in 5 Hurricanes and a smattering of other pirate warships either warped in or uncloaked in a ring around the carrier.  In my combat-useless cov ops I cloaked and broke my carrier orbit to plummet straight toward the planet, hoping this unexpected direction would throw them off if they tried to microwarp drive through the immediate area to decloak me.  Above me the Archon flashed with incoming missilefire and release waves of drones which tangled with the rogues. 

Some level of diplomacy was attempted.  The Carrier had backup a few jumps away that had just come under fire as well.  Though the tank was holding, any real backup was far away, and it was a matter of time before her capacitor ran dry and her repairers slowed to a stop.

Meanwhile the dropships in upper position jerked their trajectories and aligned an emergency warp straight out of the planet's magnetic field toward the nearest gate, looking for any immediate safety.  Luckily the pirates were there for the Carrier's salvage and little else, and one by one the dropships and their passengers slipped out of the trap.

I added a gentle arc and came about.  "Options?" the Manticore asked.  They were scrambling the huge ship, it could warp out.  The Manticore lit a new cyno flare but the pirates were dampening the jump drive as well.  The Archon tried to activate a triage program but the data had been somehow purged.

As shields gave way to armor and then structure, we gave a final salute and prayer to the pilot and had to watch him erupt, splinter and burst, scattering chunks or Amarr wreckage across one entire continent. 

If, before, the people below doubted that violence had come to their home, they knew now.

A storm was coming.

O...M...G! Sansha invasion to the max.

Battle began in low-sec in the first of a three-tier onslaught the Sansha pitched against us.  I work with Moira, the vanguard of the Sansha response, both IC and OOC.  They work in space and in the CSM to forward the goals of a Nation-free universe.  With the upcoming Incursions people had been coming out of the woodwork to flock to Moira and Soter's leadership.  Ships, crew, ISK, stockpiles were streaming in to fuel our war machine.

When Lenar came under attack the word went out slowly.  It was downtime in Moira and our people needed a few minutes of being shacken to attention before we began streaming down from highsec or our lowsec base in Pelisle to funnel into the assaulted system.

The fact that the invasion was in lowsec was a concern, pirates of any type could crash the defense and doom whole clusters of defenders at the worst possible time.  I was gathering intel for Moira and came barrelling South-East and had the final jump gate propel me in a prosphorescent shotgun blast into Lenar.
The local chatter was awash with the usual Sansha public drivel, the craving for mindlessness, the preaching to a zombie choir.  I tuned it out, pointing my Punisher frigate to Planet 4 where the reported action was and punching the warp.

My tunnel whiplashed out of view as I spat into realspace.  A wall of battleships and frigates, the familiar spiked design throughout, sprawled before me.  Against the massive invasion fleet, backlit as it was by three guerrilla entry holes, there were a scant few players, a handful of battleships, some interceptors; New Eden hadn't formed up a response yet.  I listened to Local again as the SAnsha gloated over their successful extraction of countless poor souls on the nearby planet.  It was literally 100's to 1 odds, and their grinding menace of a blob dominated the horizon, handily at just such a range as to keep me off their agro list.  I had no cloak and no sizable fleet for support, but I blasted my afterburners to move in as close a I could before I was primaried and had to run. 

The pirate uncloaked only a thousand meters off my forward bow.  In a Dramiel he boosted toward me as fast as his ship was able.  Apparently he'd been in wait for easy, early pickings.

The wall of Sansha rippled and pushed toward us.  It was a wall of metal fire, ever advancing.  Warning klaxons inside the frigate sounded as the menacing fleet began to border on targetting range.

I and the pirate tangled.  His Dramiel sent his chunky missiles spinning in and against my hull.  Shields collapsed and it fell to my armor repairer to keep me alive long enough to figure out what to do.  I yanked her to the right and made a generous arc to come about.  He was looping to follow. I aligned as his warp scrambler knocked out my drive.  I would try to bring him into the path of the advancing Sansha, hopefully snuffing him in the process. More missiles rained down and internally sparks exploded and shot through smoke.

As the first few support ships began warping in to the defense, my Punisher exploded, and I managed to hurtle my pod to the nearest station, nearly at the center of the conflagration.  Sansha vessels ignored the station for now as they focused on funneling the humans from the planet below into their transports for processing.

As I signed for another Punisher and quickly fitted it out, the interior of the station was madness.  Residents didn't know whether to flee the system or hide in the basement.  Some people carried the belongings they could lift and scurried back and forth, scrabbling for a seat on a departing escape pod.  Here, in the departure bays of the massive station those pilots who could reasonably assure escape were in high demand.  Huge ISK offers were shouted at the captains of Covert Ops and Force Recon ships, civilians trusting in their ability to slip past the invasion and take them to safety.  I saw one single mother dragging her malnourished son through a bulkhead, having given away all her belongings for a spot on a departing Manticore.

I pushed off the confusion and relaunched.

An anonymous source had broadcast across the networks his prediction of the Lenar attack.  In the same post he divined an attack on Uedama 16 jumps away minutes later.  Lenar had come true, shockingly, and as some wondered who this mystery man was and how he came about his information, we turned our attention to Uedama.  How could we have known that what we saw there would make Lenar seem a walk in the park.

In Lenar we still did not have an appreciable strike force and in the lap of the Sansha, pirates still danced, picking of the weak.  Meanwhile the last of the transport ships carrying the kidnapped civilians rendezvoused with the Sansha fleet and they began to ooze back through the portals they had earlier opened.

\\\back in the action, I saw a single Manticore forced to uncloak, while making a run to escape the system.  The markings told me it was the same that mother had dragged her child onto, and with a gasp I watched as it too became primaried by the agressing forces; it was pounded into debris in a flash, all hands incinerated.

As more and more pilots joined up in fleet and connected on comms it was decided to make a strategic retreat to the Uedama system in expectation of a second attack.

The player fleet left some scouts in Lenar and the 40 pilots we had broke into wings to explore the various planets of the Uedama system.   The Informant had given the exact time of the Uedama attack, supposedly, and we held position, hoping we could make up for the loss in Lenar.

Five minutes before the Uedama invasion deadline, the calls came cascading down from deeper into highsec:  A major Caldari planet was under attack, on the heels of Lenar.  Conspiracy theories flew on comms, some citing the Informant as a source of disinformation.  Now 50 strong, the fleet left a pair of scouts in Uedama and ordered a withdrawal of general forces to reinforce the Caldari invasion.

Most of the fleet, anguished by the desperate calls for help echoing down from the new slaughter, had traveled only 4 jumps in the five minutes to deadline, when the scouts we had left in Uedama blared into comms that the Sansha were there, too, as predicted.  A prediction we thought was a strategic feint by the Sansha via misinformation had come true.  More questions raised, but there would be other times to investigate.  En masse we returned to Uedama, although some of the speedier ships who were a hair closer to the Caldari system simply kept on their away on orders.

While one light flight plodded to support the interior world, we came roaring into Uedama.  What we beheld at planet four was a horror;  in what was surely a record for this type of event, over 1400 Sansha ships spread themselves across the starfield enveloping their three entry holes.  It was daunting, and similar gasps came from every pilot on warp-in.  There was a supercarrier at the center of it all, tubular and dreadful.  Pod pilots were piling in now from all directions, Uedama's various gates flickering machinegun style to keep all the defenders incoming.

Now things really ramped up as most of our 50-man fleet formed up and made a stand.  We had to focus on the hundreds of frigates first to lower the scrambling rate.  It was two powerful waves crashing into each other as New Eden's best rallied and drove against the soulless interlopers.

Too numerous to count were the wildly expensive vessels that threw themselves on the flames, Tengus primarily bravely cruising through the line of fire for the greater good.  Billions were lost, pods were ejected and pilots reshipped, and again and again more and more Sansha vessels poured through into the system.
Slave Beta loomed in the core of the hairball in his supercarrier.  He spouted dogma as his forces rocked the system.  An entire planet was scrubbed clean of 4 million souls.

StalinGrad6 had concisely organized the capsuleer resistance and in true leadership fashion had planted his powerful vessel in the center of the action, raining fire down on the Beta supercarrier.

Malarthi Behemoth > In warp
Malarthi Behemoth > I need the wormhole stable!

Malarthi's people had a present in store for the Sansha, the fruition of extensive planning and logistics: a Star would cyno in in minutes.  A Star was a massive freighter filled with something along the lines of clustered thermonuclear detonators.  All ships were waiting on the order to burn outward at the appropriate time, before that monster would be hotdropped and create a nova that we hoped would swallow the bulk of the Sansha fleet.

WCPistolPete > Who's near the carrier?
SincII > I am
SincII > 29k away
Ilix E'ka > ETA on bomb freighter?
Gareth McGillicuddy > 1/3 shield left
Malarthi Behemoth > Bugging out.
Demyen > Gorrammit
Malarthi Behemoth > The Slave knew.
Malarthi Behemoth > That was 40 seconds ahead of schedule.

The Slave knew.  Sansha had their own intel, and the ships associated with the Star manoeuvre were quickly primaried and dispatched by the roiling mass of their armada.

Impossibly, to add insult to injury, there was yet another invasion, this one within the Uedama system at Planet III.  With the Star maneuver bulldozed a mass of pilots had to be diverted to this new uprising.

I don't know if the leading Sansha fleet at Planet III was destroyed in the minutes before I rejoined Squadron 3 there, but when I arrived the majority of the defense force was rung around a single Slave carrier.  Whether it was a diversionary tactic by the Sansha to allow their Planet II force to gain ground I cannot say, but long minutes passed as a massive fleet of capsuleers poured damage into that huge thing.  I lashed out and took numerous warships with it, but in time we wore it down and the invasion at Planet III was ground to a halt.
We rallied back to the original invasion area

StalinGrad6 > KILL THAT DAMN THING
Malarthi Behemoth > Goumeka, are you still on Beta?
luceax > DAT SANSHA :D

Slave Beta's supercarrier continued to shred defenders.

Now Althea, known to most capsulleers for her involvement in New Eden's Sansha defense, took center stack, herself roaring into the hairball and rallying all remaining pilots to focus fire on the final supercarrier.  Between her and StalinGrad6 they coaxed a ragtag force of defenders to unite in bombarding the last moral figurehead of the invasion fleet.

We had no time to wonder how the Caldari system in the interior was faring, but we had to assume it was a force similar to Lenar, that it was a feint in itself to draw us off and that what we were now grinding against was the primary thrust of the day's incursions.

Slave Beta was realized to be Heavenbound.  A Slave that had rmapaged across previous battlefields, as lead of the remaining Sansha force that pilot was primaried by the entire defense force.  We lost many ships in doing so, but en masse New Eden's defenders ignore the countless remaining cruise, bcs and battleships on the Sansha side to put an end to their figurehead.  I was locked down and bombarded as I made a close pass of the supercarrier.  My lasers lanced down into a bursting hull, and I brought her about and burned straight outward as the massive dark ship rippled, breached, then burst in all directions.

Althea Ekran > Bounty payment From:  CONCORD <br>Sent: 2010.11.27 21:49 <br><br>For your termination of Slave Heavenbound02 we have paid you the bounty that was set to his head: 5,000.00 ISK
Althea Ekran > too bad the bounty was so crappy. -_-
XPCES > link second chimera
Demyen > Dude, that blows -_-
Akrasjel Lanate > Lucky you
luceax > LOL
luceax > do we have the second killmail ?
Shpenat > Do we have logs from that E system?
Darranibal Colpia > can't believe i got a measly 300k isk bounty in exchange for nearly a billion worth of ships and modules lost
Akrasjel Lanate > Damn
D'Argent > yeah, that return is not good
Gareth McGillicuddy > antyhing else to kill, or are we done?
Shpenat > I think we are done
Pertrenius > yeah i managed to loss 2 ships and just as i got the 3. it was over
Gareth McGillicuddy > kk... thx for the fleet, FCORD.
Polar69 > there are more in <url=showinfo:5//30001377>sarekuwa</url>
Lorren Canada > more sansha?
Polar69 > so I hear.. haven't been there myself
Darranibal Colpia > screw that, not at that loss rate
Shpenat > Pilot Colpia, do you need some ISK backup?
Polar69 > what happens with all theese cans?
Lorren Canada > peeps on live saying sarekuwa is a false alert
Darranibal Colpia > do you have like a billion spare? cos other wise no
Shpenat > only 350mil
Shpenat > As I lost no ship this time I feel bit odd
Polar69 > lost a raven... :-(
Lorren Canada > :(
Ikarus Gaul > me too
Ikarus Gaul > lost a navy domi
Darranibal Colpia > lost my brand new hello kitty, and a Nighthawk, both faction fit
Ikarus Gaul > craptastic
ross2by4 > well it was great flying with you guys, im off back to, whatever it is i do :)
Ilix E'ka > o7
Lorren Canada > cheerio
Shpenat > Colpia, do you want logs?
Darranibal Colpia > sure, and please CC them to Jandice too
Ilix E'ka > can i get a cc fo my blog?
Darranibal Colpia > sure
Darranibal Colpia > Since Jandice is back, i wll begin updating the map
Shpenat > Is she in the pod right now?
Darranibal Colpia > no shes planetside
Darranibal Colpia > cane got primaried Pete, i'm flying a slasher atm
WCPistolPete > Hehe
WCPistolPete > So did my drake. ;)
Darranibal Colpia > did your drake survive?
WCPistolPete > :)
WCPistolPete > they got me to 80% shield! :O
Darranibal Colpia > smug bastard
Darranibal Colpia > :P
WCPistolPete > I kept playing range games with them
WCPistolPete > If the scram frigates started getting close I warped, then returned to my BM about 20K away
WCPistolPete > I kept the BS at about 50-70K
Lorren Canada > were the sansha salvaging the wrecks?
Darranibal Colpia > bah well i got in close among the BS and did some heavy damage, but that got me primaried the moment they realised i was using torps, despite my tiny signature (had halo implants) they pretty much popped me in one go, combat log shows 140 BS fired simul
WCPistolPete > :O lol
WCPistolPete > Maybe 140 guns ;)
Garandar2 > i got some nice kills :)
Garandar2 > and barely got out 1 time :)
WCPistolPete > I concentrated on the frigates so others could maintain warp capability.
Darranibal Colpia > [ 2010.11.27 20:25:27 ] (combat) Sansha's Tyrant aims well at you, inflicting 139.7 damage... followed bt 140 pretty identical lines lol
WCPistolPete > 20:59:38 Combat Sansha's Tyrant misses you completely.
Darranibal Colpia > okay i'm headed back to wuos, gonna hand over to WCPistolPete, since he like has a ship that isn't a smoldering black lump
D'Argent > Same, I took out more frigates than i care to think of, fast little fuckers. My AB Iskhur was having trouble keeping up until i started to scram and web them.

Just leaving you a little post-battle capsuleer chatter.  I did get CC'd on future distribution to counteract possible Sansha invasions...

From: Malarthi Behemoth
To: Ilix E'ka, 
I'm proud to report I have completed system centrality analysis, and am outputting the results below, with the caveat that these are for 13 jump results, 14 jump results and above cause burning smells to emanate from any computer I've tried to run it on.
Perimeter
Sarekuwa
Tash-Murkon Prime
Amamake
Botane
Kaaputenen
Meves
Kamela
Amarr
Aphend
Renyn
Kor-Azor Prime
Ourapheh
Chantrousse
Several regions are excluded because they were low scoring. Not all of these systems are the top scorer, but they are all in the top 5. This is to facilitate movement of cargo and willingness of participants to relocate. I would not recommend using all of these locations, instead, pick several that are spatially distant and house your ships there. In this way, we can be spread across the cluster, ready to respond to a Nation attack anywhere, any time.
Regards,
Malarthi Behe
Good work, Malarthi. 

This involvement in New Eden defense takes nothing away from my pursuit of my Brother.  I need to be where the action is to ask the questions, and I did broadcast my message at some choice moments when the chatter was light and I didn't think I would contribute to choking the commms.  The Dramiel which hunted me down in Lenar, it occurs to me that might have been a hit.  If so, fail.  My pod escaped, you can tell my Brother i'm not that easy.

Next up, a daring strategy to bait my nemesis.

I am working on an interview I can post with one of the members of the wormhole corp my Brother robbed, till then I took a break from missions in the aftermath of the crushing blow the Sansha had dealt my home Empire.

I've decided I need to hone my pvp skills in advance of confronting my enemy.  I knew now he flew Rifters exclusively, and so I assembled one on the edge of Concord space before plunging into lowsec.  I would feel out his ship from the inside, I would know it as well as he does in case that knowledge comes to bear in an engagement.  I want to know every strength and weakness of his chosen vessel.

INVASION

It was calm in Madirilime.  Close to the galactic headquarters of the Amarr empire, no pirate, cult or rogue fleets would dare tread.  That there was a Sansha attack that was swiftly defeated not long ago may have given the system a deadly overconfidence.

There were three Tengus, T3 war machines forged for fire.  They alone happened to be in-system when the void tore itself apart, chasming a hole in spacetime, a fount for darkness to spill through.

The Sansha ships are bulbous, heavily engined, and mohawked by a line of menacing spikes that crown their hulls.  Seeing them warping into an area is like watching a line of bayonnets thrust.  They had congregated at planet 4 before anyone had time to react.

The Tengus met them there as the first line of defence, one that lasted briefly.  First one, then another, then the third exploded in the far upper atmosphere of the planet, while below shocked and uninformed citizens saw fire-blossoms in the sky and had a moment to wonder why before countless Sansha collection ships began burning into the atmosphere.  Soon their confusion was eclipsed by the shocked realization that, yes, They had come, and, yes, They were here to take THEM.

Across the planet, on every continent that hosted a population center, the spiny vessels cruised to the surface and began to herd.

In space, orbitting the planet, the Slave that commanded the invasion decimated turreted defenses and any soul who lifted a finger to stop them.  Massive battleships were there to protect the invasion, equally dastard in their rough-shod, utilitarian design.

Spiked invaders blasted into the atmosphere of Madirilime IV.  Miners, civilians, politicians, all the people there realized at once that they were liabilities.  Cattle to be herded,  they soon were.

As Corporations responded to the distress call the damage was done, as thousands were rounded up into the drop ships before they blasted upward to rejoin with their fleet.

Moira came in roaring.  We warped to zero on the planet and spread across the upper atmosphere to stop the withdrawal of Madi civilians.

Aglow in the backlight of a living planet, we traded shots and lanced each other.  Some ships destined to extract citizens were shot through the hull and crashed deep below, others captured 1000's of citizens just to have their engines blasted out to crash on the terrain below.  In some daring acts troopers contained in attackships rammed into the invading crewships and stormed them, retrieving valuable personnel.

The Sansha had coated the plannet with force, spikes and spines and autocannons filling the starfield.  In the end vast groups of interconnected corporations spilled their top-notch battleships and fleets to clog the flow of humans from planet IV to the deadmind space of the Sansha home systems. 

Make no mistake, humans extracted would be reprocessed and lost to us.  As far as we were concerned, they would be retrieved or killed.  Many Sansha gatherer ships were burned from the sky even as others pushed through the loose bloackade to deposit their "cargo" Carrier-side. Yes, the Carrier, piloted by the Slave commander, it loomed behind us all, and as the dropships and frigates carrying their mindless hordes for mental reprocessing returned and docked internally, the banded ships of the highsec defense saw that the invaders had had their fill.

Rarely had I seen such savage violence. Beams and missile/rocket trails had crisscrossed the system.  Humans had been harvested.

It was at the wormhole portal that the Amarrians made their last stand.  The pilots downed in the initial attack, stripped of their tengus, returned, and brought the thunder alongside countless others.  Wild kinetic backlashes and fiery thermic and explosive concussions ravaged the Slave carrier hull.,  Contained within were thousands, perhaps millions of lives, as the entire defense fleet focused fire on the nefarious Carrier.  It came to 500m of the exit point, and all around it in a corruscating cascade that signaled their passage from the zone, Sansha freighters, frigates and battleships, all be-spiked, travelled home.

We didn't save those people.  Thousands of humans were taken, we fought as hard as we could but we could not grind that carrier to a proper halt.  Next time we will be more ready, they will feel more pain.

A distraction from my core quest, but a welcome one.

More WH Theories, and a Parallel Universe

Intro: This blog is about mye hunt for my half-Brother.  We hadn't spoken IRL in years but he looked me up in-game, got my trust, then took all my posessions and left me for dead.  I've since begun to build my way back up, and this blog is a tool to spread the word to help me find him and grind him under my heel.  Come with me, and Lets All Kill My Brother!

Recently I realized the man I hunt lives in his own wormhole system, flitting about in the ether.  I need a great plan to do him in, and I decided to start big:  is it possible to collapse an entire wormhole systm, planets, stations and all?  Looking into the wild possibility of such a thing, I came to a chilling thought about my own place in the universe.

I dropped the latest research datapad.  Summaries?  Wormhole systems are caused to branch off ours, sometimes by virtue of someone looking to see if they are there.  We know they distort spacetime by the way they send people through space (and quite possibly time) to enter an isolated branch of our own universe.

They are not limited pockets of space, in that they are mirrors of our universe but with sleepers instead of humans, and like our own universe, it is likely that the pocket has infinitely expanding edges resulting from a pseudo Big Bang, what I will call a Mid-Bang.  

They do not follow logic.  They are interlaced with the 5^th dimension.  They have the same system-wide gravitational distortions that are commonly identified with classic extradimensional spaces that exist BETWEEN full-on parallel universes.

A parallel universe is likely to be a perfect mirror of our own, with the same people doing and saying the same things, with perhaps some distant alterations between them that cannot be perceived, things like a particle bouncing a different direction or the light from a sunbeam in a Kentucky window diffracting in an abnormal way in the dust.

Separate from my grand plans to collapse my Brother’s universe as a whole, it brings up an intriguing possibility:  if extradimensional spaces exist in the spaces between full-on parallel universes, then how do we know that when we return to known space, it is the same version?  Could it be that people who travel back and forth through wormhole systems left their home universe behind them? Might they return to the Amarr homeworld, watch the news and catch an item that makes no sense?  Maybe the layout of a station is different than they remember, even though records show no change since inception.  The average battle-hardened pod pilot, after numerous resurrections and brain-rattles, might dismiss these anomalies.  But perhaps they are there.  I shudder to think of what details and alterations have been wrought in the universe I call home beyond my notice.  People I might have met that now lived different lives, lifted from my path by inexorable physics.  

Which just now leads me to another thought.  My Brother, (really my Brother from another Mother), what I knew of him growing up, he was a sweet guy.  I fail to see how he could evolve into a creature of bitterness and anger like the one I hunt.  Is my old Brother a hundred parallel universes away?  By passing through the membranes of universes and thinking I had returned, was I in fact distancing myself from the one plane of existence that makes true sense to me?  This New Eden is cruel, but it did not always seem that way.  Its almost enough to keep me rooted in Empire forever, to prevent further changes.  I miss the old Bro, and the idea that he still exists somewhere is heartening.  But the one in this universe? He got's ta die.

Back to the idea, the EDSs have strong changes in radiation.  So does a birthing and dying universe.  We know there is a time dilation effect between us and those in wormhole systems.  Are they collapsing, rather than expanding like ours?  Huge spikes of radiation accompany the Big Bang and the Big Crunch.  Somehow generating massive levels of radiation in the core of a wormhole system might simulate its heat death and cause the premature collapse of the EDS.  That would require tremendous energy.  The formulae involved tell me I would need to start the effect by collapsing the star at the heart of my Brother’s domain and then convert the energy to pure radiation and siphon it outward.  I can’t do that without a Titan. 

Still thinking.

I Will Destroy The Universe

I need two directives:  Seek and Destroy.

Seek is underway, I know the Corp he robbed, I know the ship he flies, I know where he has been, and I know where he will be, his PI headquarters in a wormhole space, I just don't know how to reach it (and then camp it).

Destroy?  I need to collapse him entirely, simply podding him to have him wake up elsewhere will not cut it this time.  I need to yank his supports and watch him tumble down, and in a perfect universe he would fall, and not be able to get back up.

I need to use his power against him.  He's isolated in an impregnable wormhole fortress that can only be found when it wants to be?  Good.  He's not in the universe of normalspace, he is in paradox; an extradimensional box that is not properly attached to the real.  I will destroy the box, not the man. 

I want to cause a collapse, not of the wormhole that links his box to the eve universe, but the wormhole system itself, all the planets, all the stars, all the stations and ships and clouds and particles, all the souls, I WANT THEM ALL TO BURN.

How?  Idunno.  But i'm starting to get a picture.  Some of the following has been gleaned from reputable sources.

A wormhole system is an "extradimensinoal space." (EDS)

Technically, EDS is an infinite amount of dimensions (while the real universes or interdimensional spaces, IDSs, have some fixed amount that's usually less than 15, but hard to tell) that may or may not interact with each other.

We notice wormhole systems with various strange gravitational effects, higher or lower mass attraction, negative energies, bizarre anomolies that seem to effect the space of the system in all directions.

I looked up an expert, Professor Sundrum:

"The extradimensional picture may actually contain an inflation mechanism which, under favorable circumstances, would produce observable gravitational waves, the details of which may give away some features of their extradimensional origin."
"In EDS, it might or might not have drastic effect. However, the destruction of an IDS is not a big thing in EDS, except possibly for the place (if it's a place at all) in EDS where the rift initially appeared, provided it did not relocate. "

A graphic illustrates the effect of passing from one plane of existence to a divergent pocket dimension.  Like Schroedinger's Cat, or the smallest units of quantum theory, it is thought that these pockets are affected by the observer.  The pockets appear to be replicated from elements of the universe proper.  Referred to some as the 5th dimension (separate from the 11 associated with string theory), it in itself is an infinitely expanding universe, like ours, essentially a parallel universe with none of the people.

(Click the above animated gif for an example of a 5th dimension entry) 

Duel Aftermath

I'd lost.  A few notes about the previous post's duel, obviously some things are more story elements than mechanics.  For instance, his chasing me through the asteroid field was real, I would fly between two of them then angle left, his auto-follow would cause his nose to bump a now-intervening asteroid, bounce him, saving me a few seconds and lowering his transversal such that I was able to get a good shot in.  This pattern was all that allowed me to warp off once I was free of the debris field by 2k.

Back in the station under the watch of local authorities, with a few of my corp mates at a rear table in case there was trouble, I met the pirate.  Over drinks we talked and eventually he opened up a bit about my Brother, I was taking it easy and ordering him stiff drinks, and so, the duel technically incomplete and with no ISK changing hands, I got some tidbits.

1.) He ONLY flies a Rifter
2.) He DID rob the wormhole corp.  They sent convos and mails after booting him but he never responded.  One of their members used a locator agent but he appeared to  be at the extreme edge of the known universe, and so they did not pursue.
3.) He's a right bastard
4.) Aside from theft, his wealth comes from T3 resources which he apparently produces himself and sells at alternating trade hubs, he has done this for months.

The last info was what got me excited.  As he went on I came to see that the most likely source of the resources he was offloading was some level of planetary interaction.  Somewhere out there were three or more planets with small industrial settlements on each.  I could only imagine the suffering of a workforce under my Brother's careless iron fist.

Weakness.  The first hint of it.  If he has planets working for him, he has something static.  To reach T3 he must've found a wormhole system with three specific planet types with specific resources in a certain proximity and it would've taken months to set it up properly and make it work.  To now, if he kept moving, it was possible I could never catch him, but to update his planets he'd need to return home every 96 hours to reset the industrial cycles and check on the crew.  My old wormhole cannot be his current base because the planets did not align there to create anything higher than T2.

I had a hard destination now and some hope.  Slim hope; a wormhole system, from a certain perspective, moves about the universe every day, relative to the links to highsec, lowsec or nullsec that pop up.  But there are ways.  I might not be lucky enough to catch him in Hisec and follow him home cloaked, but there are ways.

But what to do when I get there?  Next up, making crazy plans.

Duel with a Pirate

We met in the third belt, in a jagged strip of dense veldspar. As rocks drifted and bounced fine metallic mineral sprays would sparkle like glitter in the spaces between asteroids.

I arrived in a dependable Punisher with a dual light pulse laser setup, a web, scram and afterburner, and otherwise fitted for a fast armor tank. I piloted her through a warp tunnel and was spit out between two of the largest boulders in the belt. At first nothing appeared on scan but I assume it was my proximity to dense minerals disrupting sensors, because a Rifter menacingly drifted sideways out from behind a distant boulder. I saw her tail glow blue as a microwarpdrive propelled my enemy toward me at break-neck speed. We’d agreed not to destroy each other’s escape pods if it came to that, and suddenly I was worried that this would not be honored should I go down first.

This was a pirate used to losing ships, recklessness, treachery. He likely had me pegged as a highsec carebear who would be stumbling nervously into the engagement. I needed to shake things up. My own exhaust flared a lesser shade of blue as my afterburners launched me forward as well, angled for collision. I had to think like a pirate, that death is not to be feared, that pain is welcome, risk is reward. It was a game of chicken.

Our targets locked. I lanced multifrequency pulse lasers forward, creating rippling islands in the smooth shell of his shield. I overheated those turrets from the get-go. For his part, his autocannon barrels spun and sent antimatter slugs into my own shields. In only a few shots I was down to 15%; my strength would be my armor.

Passing blurred mineral debris out my viewport I came within 10km, 5km, 2km and closing. No one twitched untiol the last half-second when each of us angled our noses aside just a few degrees before the impact rocked us in our pods, emitting a shrieking photon grind of shield on shield as both vessels glanced off in a lazy spin. We recovered, my ship coming under control just in time to avoid smashing into the nearest veldspar chunk.

We came about once again, beginning to tightly circle as we chipped away at each other. I left my AB on as his MWD was off and my speed tank was helping me to gain an edge; I was 10% into my armor, whereas his shield were down to 10%. As his shields were the powerhouse equivalent of my stalwart armor, I was perhaps a hair ahead of him at this point. Choosing to hide it up to this point, I engaged the stasis webifier to slow him down enough to take some pulverizing pot shots. I took the time to make a wider loop in order to bring my Punisher to bear straight on for the web-assisted barrage I was about to let fly. As I arced away momentarily, firing from rear turrets, he overheated his speed mods and fired up his microwarp drive, barreling toward the outside edge of my web range. I fired one full barrage before he escaped my web range, making an extended S-curve to come about at 15k range beyond my molasses effect. Then he let fly, his turrets now overheated as his engines. Antimatter rounds came crashing in faster than my armor repairer could mend. Pieces of hull and fuselage were being scraped off into the oblivion, the debris of my ship spinning in all directions, some of it impacting sensors. I was being torn apart.

AB still active but capacitor running distressingly low, I broke off. His shields were down now but his paper-thin armor was holding, while mine was down to 33%. I propelled myself amidst the two asteroids I had originally warped in between and banked left, placing one of the between us just in time for the rock to catch incoming antimatter fire. It literally erupted in a rocky spray, confusing targeting computers and glancing off hulls.

I was forced to continue this pattern, swaying left and right between large and small veldspar deposits to allow them to intervene in the path of his autocannons to my hull. I let my turrets and mods cool down. Armor was back up to 55% but was looking worse for wear due to mineral impacts. I would need to make a move.

A well-placed shot threaded through the rocky debris, through where my shields once were, and deep into the armor of my port wing, slicing it off in a smooth action. The golden metal fin went mad-speed flipping end over end and stuck edge-first into another deposit like a shuriken. I brought her about, now continuing to overheat my turrets, now adding my afterburner to the list. From a lazy arc I jerked my nose at him and launched forward through a trio of concentrated veld chunks. Lasers pulsed ahead and bit deep into his armor. Flames erupted and trailed only my frigate as we blasted past each other and came about for another pass. I was in poor shape. Breaking from the 2nd pass formation I pulsed the AB and began to jet toward the edge of the asteroid field. I couldn’t afford 800 million ISK, that’d been a bluff; But maybe I could save face and my life if I could disengage. That way I could save face, and perhaps some alternative payment could be made. I’d bitten off more than I could chew; no one mod of tactic had countered me, just a superior pilot who had planned better. My weapons did not damage his ship as much as his ship’s weapons damaged mine, because of the types of tank mods we had used. Maybe he got lucky in this regard. I thought not.

Another autocannon round broke the last of my armor apart and passed through the center-left of my Punisher.


The round had passed through some vital systems. Instantly I felt gravity and inertial stabilizers drop off. The biofluid in my pod crèche began to drift upward in perfect bubbles. Fear, adrenaline, anxiety.

Another round clipped off the starboard wing, and the transfer of kinetic energy caused my ship, now resembling more of a pinched, golden cylinder, to enter an involuntary spin. With no gravity the centrifugal force made things inside a trial, and I mentally flailed to gain some sort of control in the anarchy. One of my engine ports erupted in fire and I was at half speed while the afterburner flickered between life and death. Behind me PirateXYD dodged furiously to close the distance while avoiding the asteroids in the belt, picking off pieces of my ship with his staggered incoming fire. At this time I right the ship just in time to see the mineral field fall away on both sides. Inertial dampeners came back online for a final few seconds and so I took the opportunity to funnel all other remaining power to the warp engines as I passed 2k from the nearest veldspar.

In the time it took to align I lost more of my ship, until I felt staggered that she was holding together at all. He released a final spray of ammo as his dented Rifter came roaring straight at me, and the welcome embrace of an azure warp tunnel gathered what remained of my vessel and transitioned it from the normally 3-dimensional universe. There were further internal explosions within the warp tunnel itself but fire control teams, no longer dealing with incoming fire, were able to cover them off. Trailing pieces of myself, the tunnel deposited me at our Corp headquarters at the bottom station. He emerged back into realspace hot on my heels but in such close proximity to the law and order of a public space station, he could only watch me enter docking queue and then disappear into the station.

I’d lost.

Aftermath next time.

Ebb Tide; A Challenge

The Red War had died down. The Russians were no longer losing ground but had dug in their heels, while the Northern Coalition’s forward press had eased off. Certainly, territory had been taken, but the big push was over and the local channels of once-hotly contested systems began to cool. Large convoys and fleets had already begun redeploying to safer staging areas, and I came to understand that what I had witnessed in this last week was merely the afterglow of a white-hot conflict. With the number of hulking, broken wrecks my invisible bomber had piloted through, I could only imagine the scale of the destruction I had narrowly missed.

And in the middle of it all, a clue. PiratXYD was a former Caldari Navy pilot who gained significant rank before an unspecified “situation” had him booted out of the war machine. Now he made his living in the shame corners of lowsec, killing for money to pay for killing. In talks I could sense the inbred sense of pride and honor and as well the filter of pirate ruthlessness through which it was forced in his new profession.

He knew my Brother. They were in the same Corporation, a wormhole corp, for months earlier in the year. It is my assumption that he learned the types of wormhole and POS mechanics that made his toppling of my empire possible. And, according to XYD, he robbed the corp of close to a billion ISK. Ships, modules, resources, minerals, personnel, all had vanished, along with that bastard, in a single night in August. The very resources that were put to use in his plan for my undoing. Could I find an ally in this corp he had wronged? I had to know more, but the pirate knew the score and he was asking for 400 million for information leading to my Brother’s capture. I once had that and much more, but no longer.

I saw his skills did not far exceed mine. I also sensed he had a strong sense of pride in himself, and in his pirate infamy, so I did the only thing I could; a duel for double or nothing. I challenged him in 1-on-1 in T1 frigates, if he won I would pay 800m for the information, if I won it would be 200m, something I could afford if I sold everything but my Purifier. He agreed.

At this time I had moved further back toward the interior and was 20 jumps off the Amarr homeworld in Pelisle. Pelisle is home to Moira., the corporation that I had served in defense against the Sansha preceding my time in the wormhole, and despite the broadcast of my official death in the takeover, I had cleared the paperwork and was an active member once more, though rarely in the area for Ops. It’s not that I would cheat and call in backup, but Pelisle is lowsec and he’s a pirate, and pride or no pride it may be a trap; I want friends ready for warp-in if that’s the case.
Give me an hour and I’ll let you know how it goes. If there are no further blog posts, you will know what happened, but this is a chance I have to take

Waralytics

After all my research, I find I need more research. It seems like all the non-hisec major players are involved in this campaign of invasion. The Russians field their stalwart Battleships and the Northern Coalition drives them back with Heavy Assault Cruisers and Drakes. A week ago a red swarm of 50 Drakes had poured into LXQ to turn the tide. Mammoth stations and installations are being shredded in space as the tide ebbs and flows.

Its very real. There are supply lines in the form of Jump Bridges, vast stable tunnels of warp energy that can hurtle ammunition and equipment from a safe home base into the fray. The universal nexus of trade, Jita, struggles to pump out enough T2 missiles to keep NC operational, some of their fleets dropping to T1 as things become scarce. There are trenches, blobs, gatecamps, desperate escapes, dramatic advances. A major NC supply tunnel which wormed through many systems to the nearest replenishment point was squeezed shut by a barreling surprise attack.

Wreckages drift, comm channels blare, people scream for help or scream to push on. I thread myself like a needle through all this, not part of a conquering or defending force, not swept into the carnage, but looking for one man, and for the key to his undoing. Between bursting Battleships and blinding blue cyno, I seek, unseen.

A standard warship has barriers around their computers; its not easy to break in and hack their databases. But just maybe one of these databases will have the name I seek, will make clear the path I must take to undo him. And so I broadcast still, and I drift, cloaked, near the most badly beaten vessels. There is a moment, before they combust but after their edefense collapses, when those databases are raw and unprotected. It take half a moment to copy it into my own shipboard computer. In this way I have discovered many secret things, sifted through a gargantuan amount of useless info and spreadsheets, and one day, I hope, to find my target this way. Someone knows him. Someone out here, with all this death and darkness, must know him very well.

Amidst the Warriors, A Mistake

I cruised into a contested area of Etherium Reach. Several jumps back, as I entered the thick of things, I had had to dock my Bestower and Vengeance in favor of the warp-while-cloaked stealth bomber. I did my broadcast as a pair of minor engagements were erupting near the two main gates. Flipping between safespots, I received my first response:

TelarUS > I can help you with that, gimme one sec.

Me > /Nod

A full minute passes and instead of a convo I receive a fleet invite. I accept. He immediately drops out of fleet and I receive the convo I was expecting.

TalrUS > Oops wrong invite. Ya I do know him, we’ve flown a few times. Are you sincere about the 10m?

At this point something happened. With a metal flash he erupted from a warp tunnel and came to a stop less than 2k off my bow.

It disrupted my imaging sensors and in an instant and my ship wavered out of cloak. I’d made a mistake. I was about exactly between two temperate planets in empty space, pre-aligned to my next safespot. I heard the chime of a lock in progress as the blue steel Drake brought it’s enormous missile launchers to bear on my little frigate. Looking down the barrels I could see the missiles loading and prepping to fire. During all this I mentally commanded my bomber to blast forward to safety.

It was one of those thrilling, down-to-the-millisecond moments. My reactionary autolock aborted as the warp drive engaged, as the Drake managed a lock, as the missiles let fly, as a scrambler began its cycle. Was it the end? I set my view to external, and all but squeeled in triumph as I saw my hull jerk ahead of the incoming projectiles by no more than a few meters. The stars and blackness distorted into the familiar warp tunnel. The leading missile seemed to glance off my receding shields, and in the next second it detonated, causing the others to explode it a fiery corona that engulfed the space my ship held a moment earlier. I was free. Lesson learned.

The Universe in a Nutshell

I need to get the word out that I am looking for that scum-sucker. One system would be to mass mail Eve players, rapidly evemailing every player in Jita. However thats not realistic to the way i'm trying to make this all happen. Instead, as I mentioned yesterday, I broadcast. In time I will find the major players in terms of intelligence gathering, minicorps I know exist but can't yet find that deal in the darkness, will get things done for a price. Until I can find the right people, I broadcast.

But where? I need to reach the maximum number of people. In Jita, the comm traffic is enormous and my message would be lost. I need places where people's eyes are glued to Local even though it is not overly active: warzones.

I could park near the largest hisec-lowsec or hisec-nullsec bottlenecks. But half the people passing through are newer pilots and won't have possible encountered a top-tier pirate like my Brother. Instead I will follow the greatest wars in the universe. Right now that means Dronelands.

NC has invaded the Russians' home space beyond the edges of Empire. (OOC really? You attack the Russians as Winter is coming? You NEVER fight Russians in their homeland in the Winter!)

I've done a tremendous amount of research the last few couriers, which I am mixing with combat missions in the Vengeance now. All this reading and watching has allowed me to distill a highly fractured universe into something salient:

Eve universe sovreignty rotates clockwise.

By this I mean that the major alliances will move a step clockwise, take over or get pushed back. If they win they move another hour forward clockwise. They will reign there and become bored and not want to move back the way they have come, so the only way is forward, more clockwise behaviour. In this way one can predict basic fluctuations in the sociopolitical currents of the universe. This does little to help me short-term, the rotation is slow enough that you are never hard-pressed to catch up with the front. Obviously the sovreignty regions aren't perfectly organized in this rotation, some stay put, some go backwards, but you can draw a generalized path that to the layman approaches prescience.

Right now, the most intense hour on that dial is 2pm, the Northeast, where the Russians have dug in to guard their home. My next task, after increasing my wealth through missions at least 4-fold, will be to find and contract the right tranportation corp to load my HAC, SB and Hauler with all my equipment and crews into their carrier and sweep them past the more dangerous regions between Amarr space and the Dronelands conflict.

Once there, I will need to be careful. I'll find a way into the heart of things, perhaps directly after downtime in a warzone I can reach dockable station, deposit my ships, undock with the Purifier, get invisible and safespotted and insert my message between the shots across the bow. Ten million ISK for information on my Brother. The most massive conflicts of the void will always attract mercenaries, pirates, scum-suckers looking for scum to suck or looking for cheap thrills by involving themselves in the conflict. Who knows? Maybe i'll find him myself out there.

That is my dream. I picture him cowardly, in a large fleet of pirates or mercs, picking off Russians only when safe. He and his friends engage an isolated and broken down battleship as it arcs away from the conflict for repairs. As it explodes, their Rifters rock and are blinded, and when the light subsides I am there, uncloaked and behind him, launching bombs and torpedoes and smiling.

but that won't be enough. My revenge will need to be complete, a taking back of my things and a theft once and for all of his. I need to find out how he killed all my clones that day. I need to do that to him before I drop the hammer. I am considering a radical possibility: what if I were cloned into a completely different body? Such procedures have often ended in disaster, with the new host body falling apart in short order, but if it could be stabilized, it might be the only way I can gain his trust and infiltrate his kingdom. I wonder, too, what he is doing with my wealth; the universe is his oyster, and I am the shell. Soon, I will snap shut.

Immortal once again! A few more couriers and I have enough ISK to install an updated clone at Amarr Emperor Family Academy. A certain intangible weight has been liofted from my shoulders. I suppose as a pod pilot I took it for granted over the years that I could not die in any conventional sense. My week-and-a-half of vulnerability was a strong reminder that not everyone can make decisions without factoring in mortal danger.

I felt powerful, It was the familiar feeling of being stowed away in complete safety far away, and astrally projecting myself into a ship out in space. This projection now had enough to purchase a brand new Purifier. I interfaced immediately and steered her in a generous S-curve along the length of the station, before a microwarp-driven boost about the circumference of the nearby planet.

Now that things were coming together in terms of materiel (not a typo), I had to get moving on intelligence. Google and other conventional methods turned up nothing. I needed to cast a net. I needed PI (playertary interaction.). Everywhere I went I would broadcast the same message.

> Any information I receive on the whereabouts and/or activities of ‘_____’ is worth 10 million to me

I was also searching for the identities of the pirates he had hired to help destroy me. I had little to go on.

(OOC I did see the names of the pilots alongside him, but my character doesn’t know so I won’t use that to help me find him. I’m trying to stay meta here. Why stay true to RP when I could use locator agents and the names of the pirates to track him down? Well, alone I might pod him. With a blog fanbase behind me, I could do much more. My theory is that if I stay 100% true to how I’m allowing my character to play this out, it will appeal more to the casual blog reader, it will maintain more integrity by amusing people with the way I incorporate game mechanics. I could be wrong, but I’m sticking to my guns)

I don’t have ten million to spare after buying the stealth bomber, but if I get a good enough tip I’ll sell the Purifier to cover it, I can get another later and now that my sweetheart ship is dead and gone I’m not overly attached to any one ship.

Next post: ways to cast the intel net.

Gatecamp!

On my third run to lowsec I encountered a gatecamp.

I came in at 100k and they came down hard, I thought I was done for but managed to warp[ out and pass through safely later.

My new base of operations

11 courier missions later, and I was able to buy her fresh off the line...

Its the new "Nerfana-2"! My minifleet of Bestower base and a Purifier for ops is coming together. I've begun running higher capacity cargo hauls to continue slowly rebuilding my financial empire (baby steps!). Next i'll aim to track down some contract that run me to upper lowsec, a little risk taking is in order, I think, to jumpstart my income. The short-term goal is to upgrade to an Assault Frigate like the Vengeance for rapidly running down combat missions when i'm able to move on from hauling.

Its awkward to be behind the controls of a simple freighter hauling cattle. I was in this position years ago and its a shock to think i've come full circle with nothing to show for it. But there is something: knowledge. My skills have improved, I can control ships and equipment I couldn't back then.

Now I just need to afford them.

From The Ground Up

I have a shuttle. That is all.

I was a titan of industry with an entire wormhole system pumping out high-tier products, my own personal space station, a fleet of ships, three colonized planets and reams of crew and employees. How could I return to that? But it had been done by others.

I needed a proper ship. I'd first work toward a Bestower freighter, which would allow me to haul goods from system to system for paltry amounts. As of now I have a cargo space of 5 cubic meters, not much to work with to start making money. It would be a problem of finding the right courier mission, one with a single important piece of cargo between .1 - 5 m3. I asked around, did some research, and decided Sister of Eve seems to have the highest frequency of those types of courier.

It took long hours of visiting stations, consulting with agents, being referred, but I found an active courier agent in the Arnon system.

I was asked to carry some mission reports 6 systems over. At this point I did not know my Brother's plan, or if it was even still in effect. The longer I stayed in any one place the more chance he had of finding me and trying to finish what he started before I could take him down. I immediately departed...

I was hauling soem mission reports about 6 jumps in a path that skirted but did not touch the border to lowsec. It was uneventful, but a novelty after my years away from civilization. En route I checked in with my Carthum R&D office. Apparently notice of my death had been broadcast to official channels, and upon hearing this 'official' government release of my passing, all my stored datacores were divided to pay any outstanding debts. Truly penniless. Until, that is, I returned from my courrier mission. I am now the proud owner of an Amarr shuttle AND 46,000 ISK.

I had to continue flying about Sisters areas looking for that rare combination of variables that made a shuttle courier mission possible. I found a half dozen more, extremely time consuming but a helluva lot easier than an Angel Extravaganza.

Day 7: A Timely Rescue!

Trailing plasma, on the edge of consciousness, all hope abandoned, it was with some hallucinatory haze that I perceived a response to my now-automated hails, a real live human!

Me > I am in service to the Amarr Empire. My pod is adrift. I will offer considerable resources and gratitude for the chance to return to Highsec. Please respond. This message will repeat. I am in service to the...

Me > I am in service to the Amarr Empire. My pod is adrift. I will offer considerable resources and gratitude for the chance to return to Highsec. Please respond. This message will repeat. I am in service to the...

Dragon's Breath > I read you. You're pretty far from home. Are you receiving?

Me > (After a few long, groggy [afk] minutes) YES i'm here! Please come in. Are you still there?

Dragon's Breath > LOL ya no worries. How long have you been stuck in here?

Me > A week. It's a whole thing.

Dragon > I'm surprised no one else came along.

Me > Lots of people who ignore local channels, or are too skittish to stick around. You got to me just in time.

Dragon > Implants?

Me > Expensive ones. I was robbed out here as well, lost everything but 15m and a beat-up pod.

Dragon > Ah that's a coincidence. I charge 15m to get people out of wormholes.

Dragon was a swindler, but he delivered. He took every last ISK I had left and it bought me my life. I hooked into his fleet-comm and leapt into his warp tunnel as he led me out of this spacious prison. I would not miss it.

With a ripple-burst of energy Dragon's Punisher frigate and my own pod emerged through the Highsec exit into Empire space. Immediately the comm traffic of the region erupted from my internal speakers, and I knew by the bustle I was bad in the arms of civilization, for better of for worse. When secluded and adrift, there was little I could do in the way of vengeance. Now I had a fire lit, and I was anxious to begin to rebuild my Empire with the aim of using it to stamp out my brother.

Dragon Breath took a bit of pity on me and left me with the funds to purchase a single Amarr shuttle from the Emperor Family Academy station by the Amarr homeworld, just eleven jumps from where I was spit out of wormhole space. My trusty pod made the distance and as I purchased and prepped the shuttle, I received more bad news. Yes, my clones and jumpclones had all been exterminated in the lead-up to the betrayal. To ensure that no help came from Moira., my corporation, my resignation papers had been forged and sent a week ago, and by virtue of being framed for actions against Moira., those bridges had been forever burned.

[OOC I had recently learned of One Red Paperclip, a real story of a guy who kept trading up from paper clip, to a pen, to an ornate doorknob, until he eventually traded for a house. I am still listed as part fo Moira. but for the purposes of my gameplay and blog I will pretend to be going it alone, in that from this point of owning a single shuttle and no ISK onward, I will take no donations or assistance to get back on my feet and then use those feet to stamp on my Brother]

Exile Day 5

His voice haunts me, what I remember of it. Its been years. Recent contact was text only, now I know why.

A Sleeper Battleship cruised nearby my pod today. I have been parked near the central star, hoping the increased radiation levels will partially shield me from roving sensors.

I barrel-rolled my cramped vessel between two solar flares ear the Northern pole and managed to avoid a lock. But one of these days i'll slip up. I've assumed my clones have been exterminated in the conspiracy, and the idea of eternal, mindless darkness is more than I can imagine.

I think back to employers. I've been committed to Carthum Conglomerate for years now. Somewhere currently beyond my reach there's a level 4 Research & Development agent stowing away datacores in case I ever make it home.

A piece of mineral debris smacked into my pod not long ago, it dented a main solar collector inward. I am now running at an energy deficit.

I can't stay current on popular pod pilot blogs, but to pass the time I've read buffers of past posts from the wicked cluster of top eve authors, The Eve Blog Pack. I recommend you all check it out, there are some wonderful stories to follow, all true.

I've thrown caution to the wind, broadcasting on all local channels all the time, bolting between safe spots to avoid the inevitable Sleeper crackdown. These....things, don't respond to comms, they are without reason, a simple driving destructive force, smash, collect, render, smash.

I entered the upper atmosphere of the only temperate planet in this wormhole system. My basic sensors picked up no advanced intelligence.


The damage to my pod meant that I couldn't safely land; atmospheric entry would roast me through the latest cracks in the outer creche casing.

I called up information on my Corporation. I'd joined Moira. when the Sansha first began their Highsec attacks via manufactured wormholes from their hidden space. At first it was incursions on other factions, but then came the day a gaping portal opened in Amarr space, and I enlisted in their task force whose aim was to bring the Sansha to their knees.

Passing the time, I reread their abbreviated mission statement...

"With the start of the Nation War of Resurgence, Moira. has joined the fight alongside allies from every faction of New Eden. We have ceased all activities of factional warfare due to the ongoing Sansha threat.

In response to the return of Sansha Kuvakei and his minions, we will conduct military operations to halt and destroy Nation military incursions throughout populated space, wherever possible. We are also recruiting and training combat pilots for any future escalation of the current conflict.

This is no longer a matter of race, faction, or creed. Sansha's Nation is a threat to all human life. Under Kuvakei, all human beings, capsuleers included, would be subverted to the will of a twisted megalomaniac, and those that resisted, would be destroyed and reprocessed into biomass.

These are dangerous times. Moira. stands ready to face them. Join us, and you will become the tip of the spear against Sansha's Nation and all other threats to the survival and prosperity of humanity. "

We'd been doing just that, roving the borders of Empire space, bolting to the scene of the latest Sansha incursion. We'd lost many ships in our efforts to prevent all those innocents from being swept up by their evil and robbed of their souls. But their xenophobic war machine gobbled them up, whole cities, whole worlds. Moira. had been among a specialized arm of the defense that had tried eclectic tactics, things like warp disrupting the incursion's portal, attempts to cut off the harvesting ships before they could reach colonized planets. In the two engagements I was involved in I piloted an Armageddon Battleship, and both times was forced to move off with extensive system damage.

My most chilling Sansha memory was the first incursion while under Moira. I missed it, arriving minutes after the final Sansha warship had withdrawn. What I saw froze me. An endless graveyard of empty, charred hulls; proud Amarrian Battleships broken along the spine; and the screams of choking, burning crewmen on the comms. I did what I could in the disaster response but I'll never forget that day. My surveillance camera took a photograph, one I glance look at from time to time to remind me of the gravity of the choices that are made between the stars.


You can see the in the distance, mammoth and pulsing, the now-collapsing rift that made their inhumane raid possible.

Exile: Day 4

The black currents of the vaccuum surround my pod. Nothing changes, nothing varies, there are no variables here, just the constant of solitude and slow, approaching madness. I have little to do in the chemical pod that houses me. I pulled up an old copy of the EFT Ship Fitting Tool and began to play with configurations for my proposed Bestower/Purifier roving intel setup.

Somewhere in my peripheral this morning there was a flash, the subspace ripple of a wormhole opening. It is torture; I have no precise way to reach it, and I have no idea where it goes. Unseen in dark reaches beyond my vision is the static highsec, and home.

One of these mysterious Sleepers popped up on directional. It was just a frigate but I was in no position to fight it off so I popped into an asteroid belt, cut the power and drifted, managing to stay off it's radar.


A close call. I shall have to be more vigilant.

Memories In The Void

You'll notice more posts today due to the simple fact that I have little else do to as I await rescue. It is infuriating knowing that somewhere within this C4 is a clear path home to Amarr, I simply didn't had the equipment to pinpoint it. As no one had come ratting I knew that the mysterious Sleeper anomolies would be brimming, it was only a matter of time until someone came for a profitable Op, and that would be my chance.


I thought back to my lost home. My bond to that wormhole pocket was wholly forged when I was forced to defend it. It was shortly after drawing a contract with a Carrier pilot; I would have an Amarrian Carrier parked at my POS, if there was trouble he would rush to me, hop in, and let fly. The mere presence of the ship floating outside Nerfana-1 was hoped to be its own deterrent.

It was 5 months ago when a pirate-occupied c5 aligned adjacent to my wormhole. I scanned the link down before they did and had a look through, only to see a triad of Ravens orbitting on their side, amassing for a raid. They'd seen the subtle flash of my POurifier's passage, and I recloaked and sped for home before they could get a lock. Now they knew Nerfana-1 was active. I used my station's communications router to transmit to my Carrier pilot, who, luckily, happened to be online.

My guns, as always, were powered up and the main forcefield active. I reached Nerfana-1 and there was a ripple in the bubble as my security codes allowed the stealth bomber to pass through.

There were many details to tell, but I feel a blog like this should deal with events as they happen, it should not be a repository of old stories, so I will be brief.

One scout ship, a Heron, arrived. The bloodsplash of paint on its hull displayed the pirate's garish nature. It took in the defenses, and apparently decided they needed backup. It would be 3 hours before they arrived in force. Just enough time for my friend to arrive.

We were ready when they came. Reminding me of my Ur-Quan StarControl days, he gave the command to "Launch Fighters!" The flock of Ravens were scattered, and although by the end of the engagement I'd lost an Apocalypse and had to distance my pod for safety, we had survived. We waited a few hours to let things calm down, then very carefully I used a Microwarp Driven Abaddon to close the hole. Whoever they were, whatever they were after, I'd sealed them off from my pocket, likely forever, and from a certain viewpoint both systems bounced off each other to spiral through the cosmos in randomly distant directions.