It’s been quiet in the system for a few weeks with logins dragging downward more than a little, but pilots are on and we’re excited to have a fun roam out into null-sec space in some stealth bombers to see if there’s anyone we can kill, or at least annoy.
Our exit to high-sec (via the class two system we’re currently connected to) puts us in territory with which Pax is quite familiar, so we’re happy to let him scout our way as we go, and manage to get ourselves quite far out into the deep water when we notice that one of the pilots on our watchlist just logged on.
This wouldn’t normally be a problem or even noteworthy, except that it’s the only pilot from the enemy “Occupy Wormhole” corp that we haven’t been able to verify is out of our wormhole. We have a real opportunity here to find out if he’s still around, or no longer a threat. I contact one of my agents who can run locator services on anyone in known space (not including wormholes), and Shan logs in an alt to see if there’s anything going on back in our home system.
Which, of course, there is.
“Looks like we have five scanner probes out in the system,” Shan reports. “Converging on our low-sec exit.”
“Well,” says Em, “we need to get back there. Op’s cancelled. Let’s get moving.”
While we turn ’round and head back, Bre (who stayed home) hops into a Crow interceptor and gets ready to drop on the low-sec exit if Shan reports any ships going out. It’s good that she does, since it’s only a few minutes before the pilot we’d been watching for (flying a stealth bomber) decloaks and jumps out into known space. Our situation has now gone from “get back to the hole to deal with the guy” to “get back to the hole before all of his friends show up.”
Bre jumps out of the hole as well, and is almost able to lock the bomber before he cloaks up. She settles for orbiting the wormhole at various distances to hope for a lucky decloaking, but no joy on that front.
“We have a problem,” Em reports.
“Another one?”
“Yeah, the entrance we used to get out is gone.”
“So we go in through the low-sec entrance. How far away is it?”
“… 35 jumps.”
Super. Our pilots scramble from gate to gate through known space while Bre and Shan monitor the situation at home. On the way, we posit theories about what happened in this case, and the commonly accepted one is that the other batch of pilots saw that a bunch of us were on, ran a locator agent to see where we were, saw we were all out in null-sec, and decided to slip back into our system while we were away.
Basically, this means we can’t do anything outside the system without exposing ourselves to more of the same cloak-ship nonsense, and we can’t really do anything inside the system either for the same reason. It’s a bit like being held hostage in your own house by a small buzzing fly… because that fly will randomly open your front door and let in yellowjackets if you aren’t paying attention.
“Well, to be fair, that’s always been true — anyone could do that to us.”
“Yes, but there’s a difference between ‘this could theoretically happen, maybe, if you’re unlucky’ and ‘this is definitely going to happen, every time.'”
“True.”
For a wonder, we actually manage to get back to the low-sec entrance before any enemy pilots show up, and switch to ships better suited for killing the wormhole just as Bre reports that the bomber pilot jumped back inside, cloaked up, and got away.
“So even if we kill the hole, he’s still in here.”
“Yup.”
We close the hole anyway, since we don’t need any of the bomber’s friends in the system to complicate matters, and most of us call it an evening at this point. I stay on and contemplate the nature of bedbugs. Nasty things; they get into the crooks and crevices of your life and negatively impact everything else you’ve got going on. Get them in your house, and your options are pretty much “fumigate”, “burn everything”, or “move out.”
And there’s really no way to fumigate in EvE.