Calm between the storms. After Sansha ransacked Oruse and did damage at Uedama and Anyed, things settled for a day. Moira. forces were redistributed and our nets were cast wide for intel on any upcoming incursions.
The Informant had apparently spawned an infosite on the datasphere, collectively analyzed and assessed by pod pilots across the universe, and from there had come the recent leaks, however the flow had, for now, stopped. Across the Empires pod pilots grouped and patrolled, on edge and waiting. Whatever item that cargo ship in hisec held that the Sansha felt was important enough to create a separate incursion to retrieve, it is a worry to every free-thinking citizen and soldier.
I took a break to comb separate intel for traces of my Brother. With the Sansha onslaught I hadn’t had an opportunity to meet with his former Corp, the one he robbed, to see if I could glean any details, so I sent some electronic mail to try to get that ball rolling. Killmail scans told me he had been quiet lately, or his kills had gone unrecorded.
At the moment I was burning through Amarr space in the Madilirmire system, home to another Sansha attack a couple of weeks ago. It was a different place, with recovery and rebuilding underway. Still there were great swathes or wreckage spinning in the dark as probes and drones interlaced the starfield to coordinate salvage. My trusty Purifier cruised past the corpse of another Purifier, its pod-creche gouged out by laserfire. I nodded internally with respect for the loss as it passed off my field of view.
I spiraled toward the sun while blasting sensor scans, tuned for the faintest echolocation or anomaly to indicate a wormhole.
Blip…..Blip.
Core probes found a newly opened wormhole. Madilimire had been ransacked twice by Sansha’s Nation, and I’d rolled the dice that it might happen again. The anomaly that represented the new wormhole was 25 AU away and found faintly under wide-spread 5-side-dice formation. I tightened the radii as I warped closer to the area, far off the core in an arc between planets 4 and 5.
Warp tunnel collapsed, a bit more scanning, and I had a lock. I cloaked mid-warp as my heart began to thrash in my chest. I wouldn’t broadcast on FCORD until I could be sure that what I was seeing was a new incursion. In the seconds before exiting the warp tunnel I prerecorded a warning of the incursion and had the ship’s computer set to transmit should in the seconds before my destruction, should they be waiting.
There it was: a massive hole in space, no one else around for many AU’s, my lone quivering frigate beholding the ripple-edged beauty of an exception in nature. Nothing had come through, according to shipboard analysis of the energy levels. No mass destabilization. It had to have appeared within the last three minutes. Then it rippled and perhaps the first of many Battleships crested the event horizon to become real on the Madilimire side.
It was an independent mission-runner, and not Sansha. My heart skipped a beat then downshifted as I saluted his scarred vessel. He must have noticed his hisec exit dissolved and immediately scanned down the new transfer, as I did.
Sometimes it’s a big story for me, and sometimes it’s a lot more domestic than I expected. They can’t all be winners, folks!
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