Taking a Breather

Mining.

If somebody had told me at the beginning of my career that I’d look forward to a quiet day of mining, I’d have laughed him off (and probably put into structure). But yet here I was, sitting in our corp Orca, enjoying the live feed from the Alliance tournament while cracking the ganglink whip over my minions. Sun shining on the ‘roids, drones merrily playing hide and seek with the Sansha locals, and in the bowels of the barges the Arcturian mega-space hamsters running in their wheels to power the strip miners. After all, even a CEO needs to take a break once in a while (as long as it generates a profit).

It felt like we had just left our previous wormhole (I distinctly remembered the subsequent days of freightering across New Eden to collect our belongings), but in fact it had been several weeks - long enough for our Alliance to get the itch again and look for a new WH to occupy.

A suitable system was soon found - a nice, cosy Cl.4 with not too many neighbors. But being a Cl.4, it’s most convenient access was through the daily neighboring Cl.3 into a lo-sec system, which made the initial move into the WH quite interesting.

Our Alliance boss had had packed up his Orca for days then, and when a suitable connection opened up, the call went out to the Alliance for scouts. Our corp was just about to embark on some missions, but much as we tried, our sense of duty prevailed and we exchanged our combat ships for flimsy CovOps and headed off to the Citadel. Once in the system, we did a quick evaluation of the situation: only one unknown in the system, safely docked in a station, and three gates - no problem for us five to keep eyes on.

But of course life wasn’t meant to be so kind to us. The Orca was just a jump or two out when we a got a newcomer in the system, an Omen piloted by a person of rather ill repute, and the way he dashed off from the gate to a safe spot told us that he meant business. Our CovOps were safe in their cloaks, but we had nothing to fight this guy with - what do do? While we were thinking, our handyman Marconi put out a flight of combat probes, to probe down the safe spot. Almost immediately he got a hit on the Omen (plus a number of abandoned sentries elsewhere in the system). While proceeding to narrow down the location, the Omen moved, only to be quickly located in the vicinity of an asteroid belt.

Hmm - this guy didn’t know what we were flying, and he’s obviously not keen on having us demonstrate it to him. Maybe, if we continue sending our probes after him, we can keep him busy enough to not pay attention to our Orca arriving. Not that Marconi needed any encouragement, as he was having a grand old time keeping the pirate on his toes.

This game continued for a good ten minutes, then suddenly our adversary showed up at the hi-sec gate, and jumped out. At first we couldn’t believe it - A Pirate! Running from us! - until somebody stated the obvious: “Six people in local, five from the same corp, none of them on scan, and somebody is chasing you with combat probes. What would you do?”

Getting the Orca through this system into the wormhole then was mere routine in comparison.

Since then, more people from the Alliance had moved into the wormhole (some of them in a way that threatened to give me grey hair despite them not even being in my corp), including a few Frequent Fliers, bringing their own little towers along. And while this was probably very character building for them, it meant that it was time for the full Frequent Flier Wormhole Setup to be brought into play again - besides, I had caught up with all the other things I needed to do.

...right after we finish that big rock over there!