Border patrol
6th April 2014 – 3.32 pmMy glorious leader is keeping a watch for activity. Fin has even tried to catch a ship, but it was one of those annoying Kryos haulers and so naturally failed, leaving us with a connection to class 2 w-space coming in to our home system and some active pilots who know we're around. Well, they know Fin is around, not me. Not yet.
Fin also reports some cloaky strategic cruisers as being active. Most notably, when she waited in an interdictor for the Kryos on the high-sec wormhole in C2a, she was a little surprised when the wormhole crackled and brought in to the system Loki, Loki, Tengu. 'I ran to high-sec', and so did the Kryos she was shooting. The pair chatted whilst waiting for polarisation to end, then went back to their respective home systems. Sounds entertaining.
Now Fin sits and watches the C2 K162 in our home system, having so far only seen a Buzzard covert operations boat come in and go out again. And it's back in to the system as Fin finishes her sitrep. I think I should scan this signature unaccounted for by our current bookmarks, so launch probes and get them working. I resolve a wormhole, not much of a surprise, as a Manticore stealth bomber comes in from C2a and cloaks.
Warping to the other connection in our home system sees a K162 from class 4 w-space throbbing with the stress of sitting at half mass. Either Fin got distracted by the C2 K162, or this wormhole is actively being collapsed. I approach the connection and loiter, knowing that if it is being actively collapsed I should see another jump soon. I don't, so it isn't.
I'm on the C4 K162, Fin the C2 K162. A Probe frigate warps to my wormhole, turns, and warps out again before I've barely reacted. The ship jumps past Fin to C2a. The Probe jumps past a shuttle too, curiously sitting on top of the C2 K162. It's an odd choice of ship for bait, assuming it's trying to flush out Fin again, because anyone with experience knows it is too small to be locked quickly enough to be caught without a bubble. We ignore it.
We sit and we wait. We're really just monitoring our borders, not even enforcing them, just waiting for our w-space profiling to pick out a good target to haul aside for questioning. A cloaky Loki from C2a is perhaps a decent target, if we could catch it, and as it doesn't come my way I think we might struggle to do that. I also think Fin's seeing all the action. At least, until the Manticore makes a reappearance, dropping on to the C4 K162 and jumping through. Still nothing we can catch, though.
I think my minor excitement is over, but apparently not. A Proteus jumps from C2a past Fin, who tries to catch the pilot's name as the strategic cruiser cloaks. 'Bjurn Ak... something.' No way. Bjurn Akely is poking around our system. I wander in to a channel he lurks in and say hi, in my inimitable way, to see what's happening. Oddly enough, he's trying to catch some ships, but the ones coming from the C4 connecting in to us. Maybe we can help.
Or maybe we can't. More activity comes from my location, an Astero frigate jumping past me to C4a, followed by a Probe frigate. But the timing of the latter jump and the wormhole's crackle doesn't feel right, particularly when the frigate's jump apparently drops the wormhole's mass to critical levels. And so it shouldn't feel right.
A Tengu appears from C4a, but I'm expecting another ship, a bigger ship. There it is. The Tengu jumps back as an Orca industrial command ship sheds its session-change cloak. The Orca follows the Tengu through the critically destabilised wormhole, collapsing the connection. That's our source of ships gone. Now what do we do?
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