The last couple days have been…
How should I put this?
Here. This:
There. That. The one and only time you will ever see me compare myself to Brad Pitt in any context.
Moving on.
I vowed to make this day work out better than they have for the last week, and the neighboring class 2 system looks promising. Many anomalies and a juicy radar signature waving alluringly, and between the persistent connections to Class 5 wormhole space and nullsec (both of which I leave closed) and the fairly inactive, PvP-averse corporation that calls the place home, we are go for money-making.
Our system also has an unannounced inbound connection, but like our c2 neighbors, it reads “Mostly Harmless”, if only because the inhabitants are French and not active on our timezone. We have confirmation: Time to make some iskies.
Gor and CB are online by the time I finish finding a lowsec route back to our wormhole for Cabbage, and we head into the anom-rich system to shoot Sleepers and take their stuff. This goes fine until we leave the second site and head to the third. Ty and Gor’s ships leave CB’s lumbering Dominix behind, and as soon as it’s alone, it’s jumped by an Arazu force recon cruiser!
Oddly, while I’m pounding d-scan and working to get turned around as fast as I can, CB is entirely calm about the whole thing.
“It’s just Em,” he explains.
“No it isn’t,” I counter. On d-scan, I can see that the ship is nothing at all like Em’s Nighthawk command ship, nor does it have a callsign I recognize.
“It is,” CB replies. “He’s sitting five klicks from me. I’m looking in his cockpit.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well… kick his ass for me; I about had a heart attack.” I pause to let me pulse slow down. “And ask him if he wants to join us.”
Em readily agrees (once he stops laughing), and swaps ships into the far more familiar-looking Nighthawk. Aside from friendly-fire ambushes, the system remains quiet and we clean the entire system out, then collapse the wormhole connection to find a system with better exits, since Cabbage reports the lowsec gates near our other wormhole are camped and no use for getting supplies and loot in and out.
The new neighboring system has a persistent connection to lowsec, like our own, but the exit is much better; only six jumps from a major trade hub, and immediately adjacent to high sec — an easy run for haulers fit with a few warp core stabilizers, which we happen to have. We all head out and sell our shares of the loot accumulated in the last four or five days, netting each pilot around 100 million isk. All in all, a good day of profitable sleeper shooting, followed by bountiful supply run.
