Wormhole three-way
2nd July 2013 – 5.06 pmI'm three rock sites in to scanning the six signatures when a Drake warps in to the local tower. I hope the pilot of the battlecruiser wasn't watching his directional scanner when coming on-line. Maybe he wasn't, as moments after decelerating in the tower the Drake warps directly upwards, stopping a couple of hundred kilometres away and... what the bloody hell? The battlecruiser launches scanning probes.
Well, if the Drake's scanning the pilot may not be watching d-scan so closely, and I may as well keep scanning for the static exit to high-sec. 'It would be funny to drop a bubble on the wormhole', says Fin, waiting on our static connection in our home system. Although the ship we were hoping to make itself vulnerable has gone, a scanning Drake sounds like an amusing new target.
I scan. There aren't many signatures in this class 3 w-space system, and I know over half of them already. Even so, I resolve the high-sec exit moments before the Drake starts moving, and towards the direction of the wormhole. I enter warp to follow behind, seeing the Drake at the B274 connection and crawling towards it. Fin and I both know what could happen next, and the anticipation is already building. Fin, jump and hold. And there goes the Drake. Fin, warp to me.
I decloak my Loki strategic cruiser and get all my systems ready. But could this really be so easy? Yes, sometime it is. The wormhole flares again, seconds later, and the Drake returns. Oh, there's a second ship too, a Tengu. The unexpected appearance of the strategic cruiser registers, but as I have Fin in our killer Legion strategic cruiser the Tengu looks less of a threat and more like a secondary target. Then again, maybe it's just a really bad day for the Drake.
The Drake is targeted and engaged, and not just by me. The Tengu is not his colleague but another opportunistic ambusher, perhaps from high-sec, perhaps not. That his corporation isn't tagged should have tipped me off. Either way, the Drake is really getting beaten up, and more so with Fin joining in too. We all pile on, and the pilot knows his ship is a goner. The capsuleer ejects early, trying to get his pod clear, as a second Drake appears through the high-sec wormhole. It doesn't work.
Whether the pilot thought he could get his pod back to high-sec, or was fumbling with bookmarks to get clear, I don't know. But my sensor-booster Loki gets a positive lock on the pod, and my guns rip it apart in a single volley. His Drake blows up shortly afterwards. But the fight isn't finished. We may have had a common target but we're not allies. We're Loki and Legion versus Tengu and Drake.
Fin becomes the primary target, letting me scoop the corpse and loot the wreck, autocannons chattering away at the other ships. The other Drake gets battered quite nicely, but this isn't really a serious engagement. Little can be when fighting unpolarised on a high-sec wormhole. When the battlecruiser's shields get low he bails out, jumping through the wormhole to safety. The Tengu is targeted next, but by this time Fin has taken a beating and is encouraged to leave by the Scorpion battleship and Vexor cruiser that come through the wormhole.
With Fin gone it's just me fighting for our side, against three of them. Even without capacitor juice being drained, warp scrambled, and jammed, there's little I can do. Any of the ships could jump back to high-sec to avoid obliteration, which is what I do when rendered ineffective. And that's that. Fin and I are in high-sec and safe, Fin docking to repair her armour, and after a short while the other ships all return from w-space, including a Scythe cruiser that sneaked in at some point, and warp clear of the wormhole. They were only here for the opportunistic kill of the Drake.
That was a fun little scrap, and unexpected. It would have been more tense had the brawl occurred on anything but a wormhole connecting to high-sec, but a little penetration testing never hurt anyone. Well, expect for the Drake that polarised itself, and the 150 million ISK of implants I find in his corpse's head. I'm still not sure why he was scanning in a slow, non-covert battlecruiser.
2 Responses to “Wormhole three-way”
Hopefully the poor Drake pilot bookmarked the highsec side.
Either way works for me.