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.

That Got The Blood Flowing!

So after waiting around for a WH seller to get us into a C2 that was in our current wormhole's region, the deal fell through and we had time on our hands. I had run most of the combat sites, so I and Soulofchaos decided to poke our heads into our C3 static. I was itching to try out my new Purifiers, so I headed in and scouted around.

I am not that good at combat scanning people down, I'll just say that right off. But my new shiny stealth bomber can't fit an Expanded Probe Launcher anyhow, going from a fitting on Chessur's bomber blog. So I've got Core Probes only, and of course, my DSCAN.

DSCAN is a powerful tool in the right hands, which are not mine if you were wondering. I can't figure out on which degree or exactly how far people are away, but I'm trying.

So this is where I found two Retrievers, a Hulk, a Mammoth, and an Orca on scan. There were two POSes in system, and I assumed the Orca was at one of them. And then it disappeared from scan. I found it at where the other POS came on scan, so it must have warped between POSes. Interesting, wonder why it did that.

So the Mammoth was moving back and forth from a grav site I couldn't find without dropping probes. Oh well. I headed out to an outer planet out of scan range and dropped probes, telling my corpmates, who now included Raphid and Freethinker Zun by this point, what I planned on doing. Hopefully they wouldn't see the probes, I could get up close, and have them jump in and help kill something worth killing.

Well, wouldn't you know, I probed down the grav site, stuffed my probes back in the bay and arrived....to find nothing. There was no one in the site.

Hmmm. They are definitely mining. There must be two gravs. So repeat, but this time I take too long, and they see the probes and get out of dodge. I scan the site down anyhow and warp to it, recalling probes as soon as I can. I arrive there to find, Sleepers? Looked like the Sleepers spawned as I probed them down, so maybe they were fleeing the Sleepers and not my probes. So I broke out a soda and waited to find out.

Over at the POS, a Cheetah appeared on scan. Rats. Means they saw my probes and were trying to find where they came from. Off to our connecting wormhole I went, watching the probes move about, until finally, they disappeared.

I let everyone know the Cheetah would be incoming, and to chase it back through when it arrived and found our welcoming committee. Waiting for it were Soulofchaos in his Tengu, Chaosofsoul in a Nighthawk, Raphid in a Zealot, Freethinker Zun in an Ares, and Nyslia in a Devoter.

On queue the Cheetah uncloaked, and it was indeed the corp I believed it was, with 41 members. This could get sticky.

The cov ops jumped into our home and I swear I heard another activation, so I jumped the Devoter through and bubbled the other side, when Soulofchaos reported the Cheetah was still in our system. Whoops.

But he was sufficently rattled that he jumped back to his side, our fleet in hot pursuit. I uncloaked and waited to see which way he would go, as we would only have the one chance to get him near the wormhole.

And there he was, 15km off from me and heading out. But Freethinker was quick on the draw in his interceptor and stopped him from cloaking. A few shots later, his ship was spacedust, and for some reason he floated in his pod, stunned and disbelieving, so we helped him on his way to his next clone.

Since they were obviously not going to come out and play again following the death of their scanner pilot, we called the Orcas over and started to collapse the wormhole. On the final pass, combat ships started to appear on scan. First an Abaddon, then an Apoc, a Domi, a Proteus...and a Stabber! Guess that was the anti-ceptor ship.

But, with only the jump home remaining, we collapsed the wormhole behind us, leaving their angry impotent fleet to rage about the system.

Onward to more targets! Our bloodlust having obviously not been satiated, we opened the next C3 static and found a C3 with nullsec static, NPC kills, jumps and a ship kill in the last hour. Hmm, looks like it might mean some business.

I headed out into the system and got a Nighthawk on scan. Hmmm. He was running a combat site, and I only had one on scan. I thought maybe it was bait, seeing there was a ship kill in the last hour, bu I warped into the site to see what was up. I found a Nighthawk busy running the C3 site solo, salvaging and using a tractor as he went. So his DPS was a bit nerfed. A conversation ensued since I hadn't had much experience getting shot at with missiles and wether or not they could hit me going 1.5k in the bomber.

In the end I figured, what the hell, that's what I bought them for. I have three fitted out and ready to explode, in a fashion after the Flight of Dragons Punisher experiment blog. So I crept in as he finished a wave and made my first mistake. I should have timed my attack for when he was almost done with the wave. Instead, I attacked while four cruisers were on the field.

But, I had him tackled and my fleet was on it's way. And then all the Sleepers switched to me. Whoops.

So my bomber quickly turned into glittering shards of tritanium, but not before my glorious corpmates arrived to resume the trap I had sprung. Freethinker's interceptor resumed the warp disruptor as the Devoter was warping in, but he too was targetted by the sleepers, and had to warp out as well. All our guns then turned to the Nighthawk as I headed home to reship in my Legion.

Somehow in the fight, I believe the Nighthawk continued to shoot the Sleepers, and triggered the next wave, including an advanced battleship. These are extremely nasty, and it and the wave turned on Raphid's Zealot, and he warped out of the site on fire after being webbed and focus fired upon.

But the Nighthawk went down in a blaze, and I activated the warp bubble to trap his pod. Nyslia's Devoter is going to need some time in station to wash it all off her nose.

So while spamming scan, we cleaned up the rest of the site and Freethinker slowly salvaged the site with the single salvager he mounted on the ceptor to salvage our kills, taking entirely too long as we glanced nervously about, knowing an entrance was open nearby, but not seeing anyone. Having performed an object lesson in how easy it is for people to sneak up on you in combat sites, we expected a null fleet to blob us out of nowhere, but we finished off the site and headed home before we tempted fate too many times.

Four Orca passes later and the hole went pop.

After perusing the T2 salvage, and counting all the sleeper loot, we found we had made 250 mil! Minus my Purifier, we had made 230 mil in profit. Not bad for a little roam, and we all sunk our teeth into some PvP and came away tearing huge hunks, blood spattering the walls....okay, too much.

High fives all around for some fairly well executed kills. We made mistakes, that's for sure. Hopefully we'll live long enough to learn from them.