...continued
Mil decides to warp the three PVE combat ships back to the wormhole leading to our home system so we can cover the retreat of the salvage ship, if a battle breaks. We sit there for a few minutes and the probes disappear back off scan. The Helios has pulled them back in. We briefly see the Helios on scan again, and then back off scan. And... we wait. And wait. We sit there for probably 10 minutes or so before we decide it's safe to go back to the sites. The assumption is that the Helios left the system to go find other things to do.
Milwaukee warps the three combat ships back to site #5 and we continue to kill NPCs while Hala continues to salvage site #4. All is well until we all shout, almost in unison, "Broadsword on scan!" "Phobos on scan!" Two heavy interdictors. These are ships built to drop warp disruption bubbles that will prevent ships from warping away from a battle. The idea is to hold your enemies in place so you can pound them with everything you've got and get the kill. A pilot can motor out of one of those bubbles, but three of us are in heavy, slow ships and motoring out takes time. Time you don't always have in a PVP engagement.
I've got a bad feeling about this...
We get jumped
Mil tells Hala to warp back to the wormhole and then warps our three combat ships to the hole where we once again hold position to provide cover for Hala in the salvager. eGO leaves no man behind. Furthermore, his ship has no defense and it's carrying all of the loot, which is already worth more than my ship and EXE's ship combined. While we're waiting on the salvager, the Broadsword, the Phobos and a third smaller combat ship land on top of us at the wormhole. This is when it starts gets bad.
The Broadsword deploys his warp bubble on the wormhole. In response, Milwaukee, EXE, and myself open fire on that ship while waiting on Hala's Cormorant to get out of the hole. Since it's late and nobody else is online to help out, our goal at this point is to just jump back into our home system and warp to the safety of our (heavily defended) space stations.
Oh yeah... Where'd that Phobos go? Crap. It just jumped straight through into our home system without even trying to engage us. I think I know what's coming next. Hala gets to the wormhole, and the four of us jump through together to our system... and find ourselves right inside bubble #2. Great. We open fire on the Phobos and begin trying to motor out of the bubble so we can warp to safety. At this point all they have on the field is the two Heavy Interdictors and one smaller combat ship, so I'm thinking this might not end too badly. Somebody's probably going to lose a ship, but they can't destroy all of our ships.
And... so much for optimism. As I'm thinking my positive thoughts, more ships start coming through the wormhole. I begin to call out ship types, "Gila, Myrmidon, Gila, Stiletto, Rapier..." Eventually there are so many that I give up. All told there were roughly 15 ships engaging our four. 15 ships fitted for PVP action against our three PVE combat ships and one non-combat ship. At this point, we know we're done. In addition to the warp bubble, the attackers are jamming the warp systems on our ships so that we can't warp off once we -- if we -- do get out of the bubble. All we can hope is to get our ships out of the warp bubble before they blow up. There's a brief period after our ships blow up that the aggressors won't be able to target and jam the warp drives on our defenseless escape pods. If we don't warp our pods off in this brief window of time, we get killed. Furthermore, if the enemy destroys our pods, we "respawn" in a clone a good distance away from home and have to fly back. But it's not just the inconvenience of having to fly all the way back home. Each of our characters have implants in their heads that cost 100mil or more. Getting "podded" is both embarrassing and expensive. Now we're no longer fighting back. We're fighting to stay alive.
Eventually, Hala Kast, Milwaukee, and myself all manage to get our ships out of bubble #2. So, while we may -- no, definitely will -- lose our ships, we should still be able to save our pods, right? Well, two of us do anyway. Milwaukee was flying the most expensive ship and they really wanted to get that kill. By this point in the engagement, the Broadsword has jumped into our system and drops a third bubble right on top of Milwaukee's ship. In the end, only Hala and myself got out alive. EXE was still trapped in bubble #2 when they popped his Drake and Milwaukee's pod got trapped in bubble #3 after they popped his Nighthawk.
Epilogue
After we've licked our wounds, I hop into my own covert ops ship and fly out to see if they're gone. Thankfully, it looks like the aggressors left our system shortly after the engagement was finished. In fact, Milwaukee ended up talking to one of the attackers later that night. It turns out that they were setting up their own station in that system and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the end, I don't think any of us feel any ill will. We do more or less the same thing to anybody that comes into our home system: pound them into submission and hope they never want to come back. It's a very Machiavellian tactic, but it's been successful so far. Thankfully, since the wormholes that exit our solar systems change on a daily basis, the chances of our two systems being connected again are very slim. We shouldn't have to fight against that group in the future. At least, not in the near future.
