Pirates Invade

The day gets off to a pretty boring start. The locals do not seem the least concerned that I destroyed all their planet drag bubbles yesterday and the only piloted ship is sitting inactive in the POS shields. This is a good time to scan the system and see what has shown up since yesterday.

Scanning reveals a ladar, grav, and 3 wormhole signatures which I resolve and check out. The static to hi-sec dumps me in Villore. The static to C3 shows a tower but no pilots. The other wormhole is a periodic Z647 to C1. Unfortunately, this wormhole has no activity either so I return home to catch up on my reading for a bit.

While I am reading, one of the locals logs in and begins to run a drake through the C1 connection to collapse the connection. This is the first time I have seen them collapsing a wormhole, so I sit back and watch for a while. Maybe he will get caught on the wrong side. Forty minutes later, the wormhole collapses with the pilot on the right side of the wormhole.

The pilot heads back to the tower and gets a dominix and starts the process of collapsing the C3 static. At this point, I perk up a little. Maybe he is getting ready to run the sites or visit the custom offices. Either way, I am hopeful at this point of getting an opportunity for a kill.

While the dominix is in the process of collapsing the C3, a hostile pilot shows up on d-scan. Within a couple of minutes, I am getting hits on a variety of ships that seem to be warping around. Finally, things settle down and local lights up with a ransom demand, "1.5B and it ends now".

I immediately head to my observation post for the undefended tower. Sure enough, there is a small gang here and they have begun erecting a rape cage around the tower. The local pilot is sitting in the tower piloting a Scorpion, but he is not moving or responding to anything at this point.

The invading group appears to be bored pirates from k-space who happened to find the undefended tower and decided to have a little fun. They plop down a huge secure container and start firing away on the tower. The local pilot sits in the shields and starts swapping ships. He eventually hops in a machariel and makes a run for it managing to get away safely before he is tackled. His alt is not so lucky in the rifter and gets killed trying to get away.

The pirates finally reinforce the tower and only a few minutes later, a scout in a cloaky proteus shows up from Transmission Lost. They were just in here a few days ago so that peaks my interest and I check out the static to hi-sec. A few minutes later, a small gang of 2x legions, 1 onyx, 1 falcon, 1 loki and an absolution show up. The pirates, who I am chatting with, decide they are going to engage so I move into position to watch the fireworks.

Sure enough, they soon engage at range on the wormhole with a small fleet of 1 talos, 1 tempest fleet, 1 dominix, 1 vigil. After a longer skirmish than I expected, the talos and tempest fleet warp off and the dominix and vigil are killed by Transmission Lost. The survivors are hopping around the system avoiding the probes for a bit.

After 15-20 minutes of hopping around, the two pirates warp in again on the opposite side of the wormhole at approximately 100k and the Transmission Lost team engages again. By now the TL team is up to 13 pilots and the fleet contains 3 guardians. The pirates kite TL for a while but eventually they have to break off without killing anyone.

Pilots involved in second skirmish

At this point, the pirates request my help. Since they have offered me a great evening of entertainment, I offer some minor assistance which allows them to escape the wormhole with their ships intact. Thanks to yoyo210, the evening turned out to be a little more entertaining normal.