Back to the Grind

“Stupid. Stupid Stupid! STUPID!”, I cursed under my breath while giving the commands to fire up the warp drive and move the ship away from this location. Outside, another beam from a laser battery danced over my ship, taking out more large chunks of my armor.

“What? What did I do?”, asked Sio over comms - my cursing apparently had made it out after all.

“Nothing!”, I replied, wishing my ship to accelerate faster. “It’s what _I_ did!”

War, it is said, is boredom punctuated by sheer terror. Well, whoever said it obviously hadn’t had tried their hands at supplying a POS in w-space, otherwise they’d have added adjectives like ‘endless’ and ‘defenseless’ to it. Spoiled, all of them.

It had been only a few weeks since our little altercation with our lo-sec POS next door, and since then we had been living in constant anticipation of our neighbouring ‘landlords’ dropping the hammer on us. But as days passed by with nothing happening, we had to park our freshly insured PvP ships back in our hangars, and getting back to keeping the alliance humming. Specifically, resupplying our w-space POS which had been cut off for quite some time now.

Not that we were lacking for help: Sio and Keilidh were eager and able to help, so I contracted them the latest set of bookmarks and told them to come out in their haulers.

Of course I forgot that both were new to the corp and thus not accustomed to our w-space operation.

Of course I forgot to tell them that there was an occupied Cl.3 systems between ‘our’ w-space system and Empire.

Of course I forgot to tell them that some of the bookmarks were observation posts, where I’d be watching the Cl.3 POSes from my CovOps.

And definitely I had forgotten to move away from the observation warp-ins, as it is my usual custom.

As my ship reached warp speeds, away from the POS and Sio’s fateful pod, the POSes battery lit up once more, sending a last greeting my way, rocking my ship violently.

“Lance?”, I called out on comms to our resident miner. “How far are you with the Hulks?”

“I just dropped off the last one.”, came the crisp reply. “Why?”

“I need you to get your Helios and take over POS scouting for me.”. Embarrassment crept into my voice. “I need to go and get a new ship.”