Opening to Adhocracy

We have been rolling wormholes and scouting chains for a couple of hours without seeing a single living soul. Unfortunately, this has been the norm for the past couple of weeks. Tonight's activity has found an unusually high number of wormholes which are at the end of their natural life.

We open a new wormhole and for the third straight time it is a null-sec/C5 static. Exciting! Ummm, that is said with extreme sarcasm. There are a couple of after downtime signatures so we start scanning and locate the outbound C5, the outbound null sec and an outbound C4. I have never seen a periodic C4 in this type of wormhole so that is at least new, if not exactly interesting.

In both cases, we appear to have opened the connections when we land. The jump to null sec reveals we are deep in Pure Blind and with no stations, it isn't exactly a surprise that there is no one in local. I jump the C4 and start looking around while one of my corpmates jumps into the C5.

WRECKS!!! SHIPS!!! Lots of them! After reminding him to take a breath and calm down, I get a list of ships which includes a Thanatos, a couple of Revelations and a couple of Lokis amid a variety of other ships. From my notes, I realize that we have connected into Adhocracy's home system and caught them running sites on a Friday night.

They put probes out almost immediately and I order everyone back home. We cannot take their fleet heads on, but I intend to set a trap and use their natural aggression to potentially get a couple of good kills. I have tangled with them before and I am expecting them to field a solid T3 fleet with a boosting command ship and possibly logistics if they have any suspicion of finding something to kill.

We quickly jump battleships and then cruisers through our wormhole and get it very close to crit status without tipping over into crit condition. Meanwhile, we leave a cloaked ship in the C2s ready to jump through and collapse it when we are ready. Now we sit back and wait for them to come searching.

It takes about 10 minutes for the first scout to jump through the wormhole. At this point, all they have seen is the Tengu which initially jumped into their system and we are pretty certain they do not have any names. The scout comes through in a cloaky Proteus and scouts around a little before deploying probes. Once he deploys probes, a Legion pilot joins him in the C2. At this point, we de-cloak the waiting ship, wait a few seconds and then re-cloak to make it appear that we are collapsing a wormhole.

The probing ship locks our wormhole and then the Legion pilot jumps into our system and crits the wormhole on the way in. We have a couple of innocuous ships on d-scan and an Absolution and a Navy Hookbill sitting on the wormhole. Our original intent was to let his reinforcements arrive but with the wormhole going crit, we are afraid our trap might be suspected and he will just jump back to the C2.

We jump the battleship, collapse the wormhole and de-cloak our fleet which consists of a Devoter, a Legion,  and a Proteus in addition to the Abso and Navy Hookbill already visible. The wormhole collapses just as their wormhole flares and I see a Legion, Hurricane Fleet Issue, a command ship of forgotten type, and a couple of Proteus. It is really too bad that the wormhole crit as their scout jumped in, the fight would have been a good one.

The Legion pilot burns away and cloaks. However, we are quickly able to de-cloak and lock him. He makes no attempt to agress and appears to abandon ship just before it explodes to preserve the skill points. A very cool headed move in a situation where he had no hope of winning. The Legion explodes and we provide a free trip for Loch Verus back to his cloning vat.