Revenge of the Cov Ops

Here lately I've found little time to play Eve, real life does indeed come first. But a few things happened before I started logging in less.

The day after our wormhole acquisition, I logged in and hit DSCAN, as I habitually do. To my surprise, a number of wrecks and three Drakes appeared on scan! This did not make me happy, so I hopped in my stealth bomber to go check out what was going on.

I quickly found them running a combat site, and they seemed to be fairly standard Drakes, and exhibited all the signs of being run by a single person behind the curtain. I decided to find out where they came from, and rapidly found an incoming K162. It was guarded by a Brutix, and a character I had met before, Gillopi. I believe he was part of this post, an attempt to bait me onto my B274 and jump in numerous battleships, but a large mobile warp disruptor I had anchored ruined those plans.

So he had surely seen my probes looking for his hole, but he didn't react at all to it, and his alts continued to run sites. Unfortunately, I didn't have the kind of firepower at my disposal in this hole to take care of a trio of Drakes. I could, however, gank a salvaging ship when it showed up.

As Chessur has pointed out in his stealth bomber blog, leaving a salvaging ship unescorted is a bad idea. Even worse is when you've seen probes on scan. Ever MORE worse is when my corpmates started arriving, and their ships were appearing on their DSCAN. By the time the Noctis did finally show up, as I knew it would, I had two Dominixes, a Harbinger, a Devoter, and my Purifier. I felt like I had enough to challenge them, especially now that I was sure they were all being run by, at the most, two people.

So I stalked the Noctis, trying to get into point range, and missed it on a couple combat sites, knowing it was just doing our work for us. For the first few sites, no combat ships showed up to support the Noctis, til the third site, when I decided to pounce, and right before I uncloaked, the Brutix warped into the site.

It was strange timing, to be sure. The Noctis left the last three wrecks and warped out. I have no idea if one of my comrade's ship finally spooked it, or there was a disturbance in the Force. I'll never know. But they didn't listen to that ESP like they should have. I found it salvaging a radar site.

The fleet was ready so I crept in, called for the warp in on me, and uncloaked and pointed the Noctis.

80 kilometers off, one of the Drakes sat, unable to do anything to me at range. I fired off my torpedos and had the Noctis in half armor when the Brutix showed up. I turned and burned, unwilling to sacrifice the bomber with my fleet already showing up within seconds. My fleet landed and the Noctis exploded. Unfortunately I was out of point range of the Brutix as our two Domis tore into it with Ogres and Hammerheads, as the Devoter got stuck on some POS module, and arrived late to the party. *Mental note, assemble fleet at POS away from all modules before calling for a warp-in....* I also neglected to remember one of the Domis flown by me had a Warp Disruptor on it. Oops.

The Brutix warped away and so did the Drake. I gang warped the squad to the K162, and all three Drakes jumped ahead of us. I jumped through on the SB to try to point one, but all three had warped quickly away before my fleet showed up. So we sat on the WH contemplating what to do, as we were not going to charge across what looked to be not their system, when a Nemesis uncloaked and jumped.

My entire fleet followed.

I was already sitting on the other side in my Purifier, and I hit my MWD and uncloaked as he did, getting the point and stopping his cloak from going up.

I don't think he even got a torpedo off.

And with the Devoter there this time, the pilot had no chance for his escape pod to escape.

Karma is a bitch of a mistress.

So we cleaned up the system, unfortunately losing a good number of wrecks to the time we had to spend going to buy a Noctis and fitting it, and then closing the open wormholes. A little while later we were up 100 mil and two more kills on the board.

We managed to take care of the ABCs in one grav site, the Average Frontier Deposit, which we despise, and most of the AB on a second. I bought the modules and items needed for producing Hulks, and set one in the oven.

Next day, I logged in to find Freethinker Zun telling me both the grav sites we had previously been working on had vanished. With a sinking feeling, I started to scan. I was pretty sure what had happened, as I had in fact done it before to some other invaders who decided they would live in what was our home. Four out of the six grav sites that were there the day before were now gone. The former owners cov ops had been hanging around, and obviously had been sowing its mischief. The two remaining grav sites had actually spawned after we had seen the cov ops last, so we hope they are safe.

Nothing else to be done, except to try to catch the bastard if we see him, but catching cov ops ships is very hard. I hope he has already grown tired of the game, as he can see we are not going to pick up shop and leave just due to a few missing sites.