For the want of carrier skills
28th October 2013 – 5.59 pm'Hopefully I am not stuck in high-sec.' Holy crap, I'm getting a sitrep. I'm no longer used to this, and I try to follow the best I can but my puny mind cannot process it all at once. Something about bringing in minerals for our industrial projects through a dying wormhole connecting to our neighbouring system, where a Thanatos carrier and shuttle are in one or other tower, and I dunno. Something like that. I need to check for myself, keep my routine going for now.
I launch probes and scan the home system. All looks clear and as my glorious leader left it, unlike the class 3 system she's returning through. A Helios covert operations boat is spewing probes somewhere, not in time to spot or chase Fin's hauler, but it's good intelligence all the same. And as Fin comes home I am leaving, to see what the Helios is up to.
C3a looks as Fin described it. Two towers, Thanatos, shuttle, probes. I sweep my directional scanner around the system looking for the towers Fin forgot the positions of, seeing the shuttle at one, the Thanatos and Orca at the other. And Orca? I think I'd like to find that.
Locating the right moon isn't difficult, and I'm soon floating outside the tower holding the industrial command ship new to the system. The Orca's piloted, naturally. And it's not doing anything, also naturally. A bit of movement gets my hopes up that we'll have a fat ship to shoot to ease Fin back in to w-space life, but the Orca wallows over to the tower and, well, does something. Shove fuel bricks in to its furnace maybe.
I doubt anything more will happen with the Orca, particularly nothing stupid. 'What can I do that's stupid?', says Fin, quickly concocting a plan to bump a frigate in to the tower's force field, claim it's broken, and ask the Orca pilot for the password. It's not even that dumb, as the tower lacks any defences beyond some shield hardeners, and if either of us could pilot the Thanatos I'd tell her to go for it. As we can't, I'm hitting low-sec to look for more wormholes.
The static exit from C3a takes me to a system in Kor-Azor, holding a stinking pirate and a wormhole. Sadly, the wormhole is the K162 I'm sitting on, which leaves me wondering what to do next. Watch the Orca all night? Naw, let's collapse our wormhole and start again. We both head home, swap our boats for massive ships, and throw them both ways through the wormhole until it implodes. But using more maths than I imply, so that we end up on the right side when the wormhole dies.
ISK from anomalies, or look for opportunity through the replacement wormhole? ISK, we think. We have some anomalies, we can always use more ISK, and we don't want our loot being stolen too often. Besides, clearing anomalies in your home system is as good as risk-free, 'thanks' to the discovery scanner. Collapse the wormhole, clear the scanning results, and simply watch for new signatures popping up. No pilot input required. It's not just insulting, it's boring. Where's the threat?
The most discomfort either of us feels in our Sleeper Tengu strategic cruisers is from the bloom of doom in the second anomaly. Maybe I shouldn't fly us in to the cloud, but we kinda need to get in to heavy missile range of the Sleepers. Considering how dark and shadowy space normally feels, this is somewhat of an overcompensation.
Still, we can fly using instruments, and the Sleepers feel our casual indifference towards our cohabitation. We're just after their inherent iskies. Sweeping up behind us in Noctis salvagers gets some too. It's not a great haul, but raking in an easy 175 million ISK from the two sites will keep our wallet heading in the right direction.
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