Backing Away from a Siege

Evening, EVE.  Let's see what you've got for me tonight.  I am hoping for a good connection.  I have some evil plans that require some new stuff.

I log in, and our system is almost certainly zipped.  Just the one wormhole, fairly freshly created.  I warp out and scan it down habitually.  I bookmark it but don't fly there yet. If there was anything to do while zipped, I'd do it.  Ah.  Actually there is a gas site that needs to be sucked out.  I log Von off and get on my alt with the gas mining skills.  He heads out.

An hour later, the cloud is gone, and that means the site is gone.  Hurrah.  One less sig to clutter things up.  Now we are down to one sig, where I like it.  Time to open up and greet the universe.  I log off the alt and get Von back on.  Then I fly to the wormhole, and jump.

Drones?

Dscan from the wormhole is atypical.  There is a tower and two ships: a Vexor and a Dragoon.  That's a bit odd; what really weird is they have drones out.  That means they are out in space.  Why?  What could they be doing?  Perhaps escorts for a convoy of people in and out.

This bears quiet investigation. I slip off the wormhole and cloak.   I get my narrow dscan ready and start pointing at things to find the ships and drones.  They are not at the tower.  They are not at any planet.  They are not at any of the anoms. 

OK, they must be out in space somewhere, almost certainly (as I had guessed), sitting on a wormhole as pickets.  I probably won't be able to scan them without alerting them, but I might. 

But before I do anything like that, I want to see what other ships there are in the system, if any.  There are two planets out of my dscan range.  Never engage in PVP without getting as full information as you can assemble.  Time to check out the parts of the system I cannot see.  Conveniently, I notice an old personal bookmark I have made of a tower in the outer system.  That's as good a place as any to search from.  So I warp to that bookmark at 70 km.

I land on grid, and the tower is still there.  Maybe not long though.  There are also many bubbles -- I am on the edge of one -- and many ships.  It's a tower bash, in progress!  I quickly back off the bubble I am in, but I am still cloaked so it is fine.  There's time for a snapshot.

Someone's losing something here.

I look at the attacking fleet.  Oracle, oracle, oracle x5, Talos, Talos, Talos x4, Tornado, Tornado, etc. ... Nope, I don't think I can do much here.  Especially not without my corp mates, who may or may not be logging on tonight.  But certainly not yet.

I feel like a guy walking alone in the woods, and suddenly he sees a bear.  You freeze.  You hope it does not see you.  Then you back off gently and slowly, all of a sudden being very self conscious about being quiet.

They don't seem to know I am here, so I will just quietly sneak out.  I warp back to my wormhole and dscan.  There are no probes.  It's possible that the attack fleet has already scanned it down, but I doubt it.  I was not out of range very long, maybe a minute or two.

I think they have not noticed the wormhole yet.  So there is time for me to try to pop our wormhole.  There is some chance they will see me doing that and try to kill me, but more likely they'll happily let me do it, since they are busy.  There is also a chance they are not paying attention and won't even notice me until I am done.  It is only the two guys in the inner system, and possibly cloaked scouts, who would be able to see my ships.  Of course, anyone in the system can notice the new signature at any time.  Discovery scanner, grrrr.

Will we see a scout?

Someone was blown up.

I get out my alt and we both get battleships.  I am pretty nervous doing the first passes, but once I get the first two done, and the wormhole is destabilized, I calm down.  I wonder as I orbit the wormhole whether I will see anyone come through it.  Doubt it.

It takes a while to close a 2000gg wormhole at 300gg per pass, but it all goes smoothly.  Each pass outward, I dscan to look for probes or changes in the alien picket force.  I don't see any changes until my final time outside my system, when there is a pod on scan.

I wonder what happened there.  But by now the wormhole is highly disrupted, so I'm not looking.  I take my final pass back, and poof.  It's gone.