A carrier that got away

The wormhole life is not for everyone. It requires immense  amount of patience. As will probably to read this post. Days can go by without a single shred of activity, especially if you live in higher class wormholes. The daily routine is scan scan scan, roll the wormhole, scan scan scan, rinse and repeat. In C5/C6 class wormholes, sometimes you do find activity, which turns out to be too much for your small gang. Or sometimes just few pilots are active, which, you know, won't be doing much apart from scanning.

Different story when you talk about C4 and below class wormholes. They are fully soloable and if you find a guy at a pos you can indeed expect something more to happen rather than just ship spinning. I sometimes like to go on my so called pilgrimage. It's the trip I make where I just roll myself and my alts out from home and venture into unknown. Preferably find active wormhole with residents and wait for an opportunity to strike. I will dedicate few posts just for this topic in the near future, writing about my adventures. It is really fun.

Today as usual I logged to my system that I'm stalking in to see if there's any activity going on. Unfortunately it was as dead as it could be, without any anomalies and only one sig. That is really depressing, because main activity happens when I'm at work. But patience is a virtue and I don't give up so easily. I take out my probes and do some scanning. Connecting system has a lot sigs, but only few wormholes. It's one thing when you scan half of gas sites with 8AU probes and another thing when you need 1-2AU range to map a lot of sigs. It is time consuming and annoying as hell.

After checking C5, which did not have anything going on (surprise), I warped to C3. Upon entering system I did not see anything on Dscan. Getting tired of empty systems, I don't even play stealthy and just launch my probes and warp around. Lucky me I send probes to empty moons, while the opposite side, as it turns out, has ships on scan. I quickly finish scanning system, while i check the tower.

Upon landing, to my surprise, I see all ships piloted. 3 oracles, a hugning and a chimera. Something must be up. After watching the tower for 10 minutes I decide to fuck it and check out the connecting wormholes. I take a look at the lowsec, which turns out to be only 7 jumps from my home C5 wormhole. Neat, I was looking for a convenient exit.

I go back and take a last look at the pos just in time to see all ships warp to an anomaly. The moment I saw Chimera leave pos my blood pressure went up and I was getting excited to say the least. Seeing a capital doing sites in a C3 is a very rare thing. Immediately I give a shout out in the corp, send out a ping and get the fleet going.  It's a race against time. Chimera and 3 oralcles are melting sleepers like sun is melting icecubes on a hot day. 7 jumps suddenly feels like 30.

As soon as fleet is 3 jumps out I see only 4 sleepers left. Decision has to be made if I go balls to the wall and tackle, hoping to last long enough, or see what else will happen as I could swear it was the last anomaly. I decided not to go as there was no scenario where I could hold it long enough and not get killed or jammed until fleet arrived. To my big relief I managed to miss one anomaly from big excitement. The game is on! Fleet is jumping to the system and I am finishing 200km bookmark. I see 4 cruisers and a battleship in anomaly. A quick google look shows that BS means a last spawn.

I also notice that Chimera has his speed up. Without no anomalies left that can mean only one thing. No more time to think. I initiate warp, drop cloak, activate my sensor booster and spam lock on chimera. Session cloak timer seems like eternity. Finally time is up, target locked and....lock disappears. What happened? Chimera is still in same place. Did I get jammed? No, it's just slow acceleration. I can't do anything, but helplessly watch it warp away.

Oh well. I tackle 2 leftover oracles. We hold the fleet and send 1 proteus to do the dirty work. Unfortunately slowly killing oracles and looting sleepers did not get any reaction, apart from suicide interceptor, which, I assume, intended to tackle and kite, but ended up in a scram/web range of a proteus. Fleet goes home and I go back to my pilgrimage.