Must come to an end. Yes, this is a farewell post. I did not expect to be writing it, but as all of you know, real life can rear it's head and the world of serious business of internet spaceships is the first to fall.
After some pretty serious thought about what is going on in my personal life, I have made the decision to cease playing Eve Online, and therefore, my presence in wormholes is at an end. So I planned to pack everything up and move out of our home and get everything safely back to Empire.
Or so I thought. Plans never survive contact with the enemy, and everyone is your enemy in Eve. As I was letting my close associate Soulofchaos know about this decision, he informed me he had been contacted by one of our corp members.
"The POS is under attack by Russians."
"Ha ha, very funny." I replied.
"No, really, it's being attacked right now."
"FFS."
I logged on to find no less than 18 ships in the immediate vicinity, with more on scan, most likely watching the wormhole exits.
I began logging on POS gunners.
Eight accounts logged in, and I took stock of the sitation. Most of my ECM, Energy Neuts, and Warp Disruptors were incapped. The enemy consisted of mainly battleships, a few battlecruisers, and five Basilisk logistics ships. It appears they had moved on to taking out my guns, so I started out by onlining any remaining ECMs and Neuts that were still anchored. I offlined any of the storage facilities, as I had plenty of time to re-online them in case I did indeed need to GTFO.
As many of you know, I have had alot of practice in running many accounts simultaneously. Normally that involved moving very little between most of the screens. This pretty much took the cake for information and screen management overload. I tried not to tip my hat that I was now about to control 32 POS guns and modules, so put most of my characters into transport ships and tried to appear scared and disorganized, while assigning a single ECM to four of the Basilisks, and the single remaining neut I had to the fifth.
I then picked a target. One of the group was flying a Harbinger, not exactly the best shield tanking ship out of the bunch. I then locked him with roughly 20+ guns and a webber and prepared to fire.
Switching screens eight times while making sure you don't turn off modules you already have going is a serious PITA.
The Harbinger exploded brilliantly, the Basilisks who did manage to start repping him could not keep up with the damage. I had announced my presence. Unfortunately, this group proved to be fairly adequate to the task, as time would tell.
As soon as the battlecruiser exploded, the enemy fleet commander shifted his fire back to Warp Disruptors, and I was quickly left trying to keep one online ahead of the firepower.
I examined the fleet and found a Talos, one of the new Tier 3 battlecruisers. I knew two things about this ship; it was most properly armor tanked, and that it was supposedly a glass cannon. Both turned out to be true.
I re-targetted my guns on the Talos and let fly the beams and projectiles of my turrets. The Talos' shields quickly failed, his armor melted, and he dipped into structure....and his shields began to re-appear. As more of the Basilisks began to rep him, his structure dipped and pulled leftward....but the Basilisks pulled him back from the brink and began to keep his shields at maximum. Curses.
I began retargetting my small guns onto the Basis, but they were far too close and too small to be touched, even when webbed. That surprised me, as even small artillery wasn't hitting them. So my only real option of stopping this attack was with my already smoldering ECM and Energy Neut platforms, which apparently the attacking force already knew.
And since I hadn't been logging in regularly for the past few days because of my situation, the perfect storm had developed. I would normally have been logged in at the time of the attack and would have stood a good chance with all my ECM and Neuts intact.
What followed was a game of trying to make sure I had as many Basilisks ECMed or neuted while trying to alpha ships. I managed to almost destroy a Hurricane, a couple of Drakes, a Dominix, and had the Talos on the brink of destruction again before he returned in a sturdier ship.
In the end, I slowly onlined all of my shield hardeners as my final ECM and neuts were silenced. No warp disruptors remained to hold any ship I took down into the red of structure. I took stock of my situation and was not very dismayed.
I had actually been removing alot of the material we had spent the past year and a half accumulating. All regularly sold items including all nanos, profitable PI, etc, had already been removed to high sec in the previous days. We stood to lose a few hulks that weren't able to make it aboard the Orcas, and a Proteus I had no one to fly. Numerous T1 and some T2 cruisers were going to be left in the hangars, to take their chances when the ship array exploded. Also in storage was a grav site's worth of ore that I hadn't gotten around to compressing.
So, as I've said before, everything in the hole is paid for. If you don't have the isk to replace everything, then you shouldn't be in here. So I started chatting in local.
A few of my corpmates logged in and we continued perfectly the bug out plan, and I got the invaders talking. They said they were in it for the fun, no one hired them, and they were looking for fireworks.
Fireworks, eh? I and my corpmates decided if they wanted fireworks, then maybe they were after something specific. So I flew over to the hulking behemoth of our Revelation dreadnought and boarded it. Immediately I was greeted with hope that I was bringing it out to play with them.
"Nope." I said as I set the self destruct sequence.
The tone of the conversation immediately changed to questions about why I would do that. I answered with the truth, that I was going to be doing it anyhow, we were already planning to move out. We were certainly playing on a hunch here, and it paid off.
The Revelation exploded in a flash of light, its lifeless corpse slowly doing a barrel roll as it lazily floated off center. The poor ship had never fired a shot in anger, and I had been looking forward to using it's weapons on the villianous Interbus customs offices before my decision to end my Eve life.
This really got their attention. The tone turned to trying to rationally explain that I had all the reinforcement time to try to save them, that the shield wasn't even past 90% yet. Again, I responded with the truth, that we might as well have the fireworks now since we were, truthfully, moving out.
I didn't bother to inform them I had stripped all the fittings prior to the self destruct.
My pod slowly moved over to our Archon carrier, my personal favorite carrier out of all of the ones I had built. Its sleek Amarr lines always greeted me at login, a sign that all was well in the wormhole and its power was always at my fingertips.
Now they wanted to fight my carrier, to at least let my ships go down in a fight. It was cowardly to self-destruct them inside the shield! But by now it was apparent why they were here. For the love of killmails, they had been driven to spend hours and hours of their lives in the vain hope of being one of many to strike off an armor plate from my capital ships. They had hours of striking the shield, plus 1 day and 17 hours worth of reinforcement time to wait through. Surely I would rather force them to go through that? In all, days would be devoted to the destruction of my creations. Wouldn't that be punishment enough for them?
"No." I said as I set the self destruct on the leviathan. Two minutes later its glittering shards of cooling metal were spiraling off the insides of our starbase shield.
All that remained inside was the mighty Rorqual. This graceless ship had paid for it's construction many many times over. My pilot had sat at it's controls for hours, watching over the assembly lines of sparkling arkonor as it rolled past on the compression lines.
Firtilis settled his pod in and began the self destruct sequence. By now the invaders had ceased to fire at the station, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable conclusion of their endeavor and thoughts of their capital ship killmails fell apart. In the end it all worked in our favor. These three ships were destined to be destroyed before they ever set their plan in motion.
After all three capital ships were orbiting wrecks, the russian invasion fleet retreated to a medium staging POS they had erected. I hadn't even noticed it since I had been insanely busy performing my impression of an ant colony. A medium POS? Any decent sized corp could have torn this invasion apart.
We began watching them, and they were being very careless in their movements with both ships and pods, so we set up an ambush, and caught an Iteron hauler as it came into the system and started to align too soon. Their entire fleet responded, and security tightened after that.
The next day, I surveyed our still smoking POS. 59 modules were incapacitated. The only ships destroyed were the capital ships we self destructed. What the attacking force did not know was that I had sold our Chimera carrier to a corp who we allowed in to share our system. Also, our Thanatos had been logged out, and kept logged out, during the whole ordeal. This carrier was subsequently sold to the same corp.
We saved everything else. All the ore, PI, ships and POS modules were carried out of the wormhole to Empire, where they were couriered by Red Frog Freight to Jita, for sale or storage.
I decided to leave the POS anchored, all guns and modules where they fell or stood. Until they day they are either destroyed, or I return to claim them.
Thank you all for reading the story of my journey. I do indeed hope to someday return to the universe of Eve Online. On that day my story will continue.
If you happen upon my POS, Omissa Spe, nod and smile, because you know that the Sleepers aren't the only thing that waits in wormhole space to awaken.
