I get another message from my broker the next morning, telling me that the buyers are back online and still interested in buying the C4, so I send up a flare and meet Tira online.
Em and Cabbage are already there, and report that we’re currently connected to a “very lootable” class 2 system; Cabbage gleefully reports over twenty sleeper anomalies, thirteen gas harvesting sites, several rarer signatures… all guarded by a single small tower with no guns, no shield hardeners, and no ECM.
It sounds great, and I’m invited to come along on the space-fleecing, but I need to concentrate on coordinating with the broker, buyer, and Tira as she scouts a way out of the Class Four, into a Class One, and from there into (thankfully for the buyer) Highsec empire space.
It takes a little over an hour for the buyer to get to the entry location (I send it to them once the third-party broker has the full payment in his possession), go inside, scan everything, and verify it’s what they were hoping for. Once that’s done, the broker sends me the payment, pockets his 10% cut, and we thank everyone for a smooth transaction. It takes 90 minutes to wrap the whole thing up, but I walk away from it 350 million ISK richer, which I consider an effective use of my time, even if I didn’t get to shoot anything.
Tira is rewarded in the way she most prefers, with a pretty pony; in this case, that means a Taranis-class interceptor named “Pony” and contracted to her in the nearest market system. She declares it ‘shiny’ and takes off for a shake-down.
Once that’s done, I finally join my alliance mates in the nearby system. Cabbage is gone and likely off to bed, but a few more folks are logging in, so while I and Si reship into harvesters that take advantage of our leet gas-sucking skills, Bre gets into a cloaky hauler to move the product back to our tower while Em flies overwatch and blows up the occasional sleeper ship that shows up to defend the gas clouds.
Two pilots with maxed out skills make very short work of the fullerite-c50 gas clouds at various sites, and we leave the less profitable gas behind to hit the highest profit for the time spent, which means killing off all the c50 and moving to the c72.
It isn’t until we reach the third c72 site that we realize there’s actually a proper tower in the system — a well-fit “death star” style Domination-class tower that might have given us pause if the scouts had noticed it three or four hours earlier. It’s a bit of a scouting SNAFU, but to be fair, it’s a huge system that undeniably looks neglected. In any case, our gas harvesting operation is undeterred, and we manage to pull a hundred million isk worth of fullerites into our holds before we decide we need a break.
I return later in the evening to find Em, CB, and Ichiban shooting sleepers, with Gor cleaning up the shattered wrecks lying in their wake in his Noctis-class industrial. Bre and I join them in an effort to speed up the killing as much as possible, since we are nearing the end of life on our connection to this system and we’re nowhere near finished shearing this sheep.
Our caution at not wanting to be stranded in the system finally overcomes our greed, and we head back to our towers with seven sleeper sites still unplundered and roughly 250 million isk in our hold to be split between the involved pilots.
All in all, another pretty damned good time spent with our friends in the home system.