It was a normal day in New Eden, or seemed to be.
Rayne was making a typical run from Metro to Essence to see one of his R and D agents. He had taken on the responsibility of inventing T2 ship BPCs for the corporation to manufacture for sales within the area, as well as for its own members. Unfortunately, he didn’t have that great of a reputation with a Mechanical Engineering agent any closer to his normal stomping grounds, so once a day he made the series of jumps to the Yona system to do all he could to maximize the flow of datacores. As it was, his inventing was going very slow.
Well, the meeting with the agent had gone fine and Rayne was on the way home with a few new datacores and hopes that this inventing run would be successful, as he was going to try for an Ishkur BPC. Realizing that he still needed to install salvaging rigs on his Catalyst, he pulled up the Market interface and found a good price in Dodixie. He figured he could use a break from the capsule, and it would only take him 1 jump out of his route, so he made the purchase and adjusted the nav computer setting to route him through there.
When he dropped out of warp, Rayne noticed that there was a pretty hefty amount of system traffic around the Federation Navy Assembly Plant at Dodixie IX Moon 20. This made him a little nervous, as he was not used to that level of traffic, and knew that he was still relatively new to being a capsuleer, but he figured he was relatively safe in a 0.9 security level system. Chalking the traffic up to the fact that Dodixie is a trade hub, Rayne shoved any doubt out of his mind and coordinated with station control for a spot within the station’s traffic pattern, and for permission to dock.
Getting out of the capsule, even just to stretch for a few minutes, was nice and helped ease the tension Rayne had been feeling. The fact that the station was Gallente was a strong impetus towards that feeling as well. Rayne liked the Minmatar, and liked living in Metro, but it still didn’t quite feel like home. After stretching out the kinks, Rayne checked in with the dock control offices and made arrangements for the salvaging rigs, and his ship, the “Garbage Scow”, to be moved to the fitting bays, so that the rigs could be fitted right away. It didn’t seem to make sense to haul them home in the cargo bay, since he was flying the ship they went on anyway.
Having slugged down a Quafe, and after making sure that the docks had installed the new rigs correctly, Rayne sealed himself back into the Garbage Scow’s capsule, fired up all systems, and requested launch clearance from station control. This was when this seemingly normal day went all topsy turvy.
Station control very calmly granted launch clearance, and the Garbage Scow was tractored into the launch ports and ejected, like every other time. What Rayne didn’t expect was to be ejected right into the back of this monolith of a ship that was ahead of him in the launch sequence, as Rayne maneuvered the Garbage Scow to avoid a collision, he realized that what he had almost hit was a Dominix class battleship. Whew!!!
However, this wasn’t the end of the fun. Rayne realized that he was accelerating and maneuvering around a virtual fleet of Domi’s, all heading out of the station. This was odd enough to create concern on Rayne’s part, but the excitement had only just started. It exploded into Rayne’s consciousness that these Domi’s were all firing at something. At the same time, Rayne made a hard bank to starboard to miss what he later realized was a Drake class Caldari battlecruiser, which was firing back at the daunting line of Dominix that were exiting the station.
With another quick scan, Rayne also picked up a Caldari Raven class battleship within 20km blazing away at the Domi battle line as well. Of course, it finally started to register with Rayne that his Catalyst was being rocked by the passing charges being fired back and forth between these aggressors. The typically comforting bulkhead of this unarmed and untanked salvaging destroyer all of a sudden felt very thin, and while it had always been enough before, the afterburner just was not moving the ship as fast as Rayne wanted. He was wondering if it would help if he got out and pushed…nah…probably not.
Once Rayne got clear of the launching Dominix battle line, he locked the nav computer onto the Vylade gate, realigned, and hit the jump button. Rayne’s breathing slowly returned to normal as the Garbage Scow accelerated into jump and the battle fell behind him. That was just too close for comfort, and was definitely a reminder that no matter how safe you think a system is, that the minute you undock, you are a target.
When Rayne opened corp com channels and told his mates about it, they were at first surprised and then seemed to think he should have hung around to see what was really going on. A number of hypothesis were floated, but none seemed to really fit what Rayne saw. Honestly, at this point he didn’t really care what had been going on, as long as he was able to get clear with himself and his ship intact.
Finally, sliding into dock in his home system, Rayne could not help but reflect that he had learned another valuable lesson for a capsuleer. Once you think you know exactly what to expect, and you get complacent with your surroundings, is when you become a danger to yourself and those around you. Well, he thought, now it was time to go put those datacores to use and invent that Ishkur BPC he had been hoping for.
Rayne Stryker