Frontier Daze #2

 Dad,

Just got home (and no, NOT via the clone vat), and have both beaut loot, and a couple more stories.

So, I overnighted in Tash-Murkon, after that wormhole closed up behind me. Next morning, I woke, had some coffee and plotted the 46 gate jumps back to Sinq. Undocked from the station, and there's several cosmic signatures to scan down; so, got knuckle under again. Three Sansha data sites, and no wormholes, but the sites did have more choice loot. Closer to being rich, but no closer to being home.

The next few systems were a mix of combat sites (which I wasn't kitted for), wormholes to J-Space, and a couple more data sites. Working my way, gate by gate, closer to home, I noticed more and more bung kinos lingering on the gates with ill intent. I dropped my probes for a scanning run, a Tornado, with safeties off, just sitting on the gate behind me; I was one jump out of Odin.

There was only one sig in the system, and it turned out to be a wormhole. As it danced around the scanning display, I keep looking back at the gate, where a Dramiel had joined the Tornado at the gate, and he was sweeping around, hoping to uncloak me. I finally got a lock on the wormhole's sig, and bolted flat out. Once on grid with the hole, I broke out with a smile; a wormhole to Thera. Wormhole Shortcut Heaven.

I jumped into Thera, docked up at one of the nearest stations, and pulled up the datafeed from EVE-Scout, see if any of the wormhole connections in Thera would get me home-ish. I laughed as I squizzed a connection to Inari, just a couple jumps from dyadya's place. I could drop of this hold of choice loot and then gate 15 jumps home; so I undocked, and warped to zero on the location marker for the wormhole to Inari.

As I arrived on-grid with the Inari wormhole, three things happened in the blink of an eye: the wormhole disappeared, a Sabre uncloaked, and a warp disruption bubble appeared. It was a trap.

Now, a more seasoned veteran might interrupt me here, and say something like, "Well, duh; any High Sec connection to The Forge or Citadel area is going to be camped." Nonetheless, this only occurred to me as I saw the Sabre and the bubble. I did the only thing I could do, which is about the same thing I do when warping into any system; I vectored in a random direction and cloaked up. And coasted. 

And waited.

And prayed a bit, as I watched the Sabre orbiting around, trying to find me. A Legion also arrived on grid, and cloaked up as well. I held my breath.

The bubble disappeared, and both my hopeful assailants had cloaked up, so I took the opportunity to align to a different station, dropped cloak and warped to the docking ring with hope for a different plan. Checking again with the EVE-Scout datafeed, I found a Low Sec Thera connection that was 11 jumps from my home station.

Both ends of that wormhole were clear, and the exit to Low Sec was only one jump from High Sec space, so it was a choice route after all.

Anyway, back home, and with a modest amount of production materials that dyadya will find useful. Time to have a beer or two with Gabi, watch the Dodixie Destroyers match against the Tama Tornados.

Cheers,

Wai