Life in a Wormhole: “Last one out…” #eveonline

It’s later on the same day as the short-lived stealth bomber vs. industrial hauler death match, and I’m ready to recover from previous losses. I check in and find Gor moving his massive freighter through the spacelanes of the four Empires, en route to our current wormhole connection. CB is nowhere to be seen, but we’ve collapsed the inbound wormhole connection through which the Purifier bomber snuck into the system, and activity within our system has been nonexistent in the last six hours, so I feel confident in returning to the task at hand.

I’m not alone in this, and soon Ty, Bre, and Tira are all ferrying ships out of the wormhole, flying each of them individually to preserve the strength of the connection, rather than carrying them out in a wormhole-rupturing Orca. Berke even leaves his precious orca for a few minutes to help take down tower modules using his far faster Crane-class transport, so small ships seem to be the order of the day.

Our group effort works surprisingly well, but gives us a LOT of motivation to come up with a much smaller list of ships to take with us into our new home — since we can’t disassemble and repack any of the ships we’ve brought into the wormhole, it requires a fairly ridiculous number of round trips to empty out our tower’s hangar; the tedium dictates “Small and Portable” as our new ship selection priority.

Gor parks his freighter outside just as we’ve flown out pretty much every ship we can fly out, leaving only his specialty ships. In short order, he’s flown out an Astarte command ship, Harbinger battlecruiser, two Covetor-class mining barges, and finally a battleship to bring the wormhole crashing down. All told, what took us only a single freighter trip to bring to the wormhole will now take us eight freighter trips to get back to our staging system, and I waste no time contracting all but one of the trips to Red Frog — a third-party, player-run hauling corporation/institution that’s been active in EVE since 2007. It’s a 63 million isk bill I’m more than happy to pay.

Ty rescans the soon-to-be-ex home system in search of our new persistent connection and we find ourselves only seven jumps from our home in highsec; a perfect location for the end of this enterprise. Tira and Ty move the last of the utility ships just outside the wormhole (figuring we can get them the rest of the way home later), then pack up Berke’s Orca with everything but the actual tower itself and send him out and homeward.

Finally, it’s just Bre in her industrial hauler, Ty in a Blackbird cruiser to provide a bit of cover, and Tira running overwatch on the wormholes in the system to make sure we don’t get jumped as we remove the last signs of our habitation.

The tower fuel is out and stored, the tower shut down, unanchored, and packed into the hauler. For the first time in two months, there is no shimmer of safe haven anywhere in our system.

The system, I suppose. Not ours anymore. Not really.

Last one out, turn off the lights.

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