A "CareBears" Journey

As the “Garbage Scow” slid into its docking position at the Core Complexion station at Parchanier VII Moon 1, he reflected on what a productive day it had been.

The day had started with Rayne accepting the delivery of 5 Atrons, 5 Incursus, and 5 Imicus frigates at his “Home” base. Rayne had started these manufacturing jobs the night before to have a ready stock of hulls for upgrading to Taranis Interceptors, Ishkur Assault Frigates, and Helios Covert Ops Frigates. Rayne coordinated with dock personel to move these hulls into the corporations Secure hangar for safe keeping, and then planned out the rest of his day.

With the “interesting” run he had made to Yona previously, he had enough datacores to start another invention job. Since he was lagging a bit behind on Helios blueprints, he went to the corporations “Science & Industry” hangar, gathered the necessary equipment, and loaded it into the cargo bay of the “Cosmic Drifter”, his current Incursus class Frigate. Rayne could not wait to finish the training he was currently undergoing so that he could trade this Incursus for the Ishkur he could almost taste.

Once Rayne had cleared the station, and been cleared to maneuver around the system, he snapped the agile Incursus around on a course for the corporations POS, and hit the jump button on the control panel. Once the Drifter had slid through the station shield, Rayne maneuvered it alongside the lab he planned to use for this round of invention.  Transfering all the necessary equipment and materials to the lab went as planned, and Rayne guided the Drifter back out of the station shield and back to the home station to swap ships.

Rayne had been avoiding it, because he just didn’t like being that far from “home” but he needed to go do some work for Core Complexions so that they would allow him access to some of their more senior R and D agents. Otherwise it was going to take forever for him to do the job VGO had tasked him with. Of course, that did have the added bonus of climbing into the pod of his bruiser, the Myrmidon class battlecruiser “Thresher”.

She had been a hand me down of sorts. Rayne had puchased her from the CEO of VGO, who was her previous capsuleer. This capsuleer had moved on to other ships and other interests. She definitely had her dings, dents, scratches, and scoring, but there was something about her that spoke of a personality all her own. Rayne knew that there were many ships out there that wouldn’t even blink while pounding the Thresher to dust, but it was the biggest and most powerful thing he had ever flown, and he always got a tingle in his fingertips when he belted in to his capsule and hit the engine start buttons on her.

It had been a while since Rayne had flown Thresher, and fortunately the Core Complexions agent handed out a few light missions which barely tested the Thresher’s shields, much less her armor, and gave the drones as well as the rails a good workout. Heading back into Parchanier VII Moon 1 after salvaging behind one of the missions, Rayne’s NeoCom went off, indicating he had a message. It seemed that the Minmatar Republic needed some assistance dealing with the Sansha in the area. Smacking around the Sansha was always good for stress management, so Rayne swapped out the armor hardners on Thresher, climbed into his pod, and requested launch clearance.

The first task Rayne had to complete was clearing out a breeding facility and all aggressors in the area. Once he had cleared the station traffic pattern, he adjusted the nav comp and jumped into the deadspace area that was rumored to contain the facility. As the Thresher came out of warp, Rayne locked on to the jump gate that was there and activated it. He followed this action by spinning up all armor hardners and engaging his sensor boosters. It was time to kick some Sansha butt.

Rayne dropped out of jump in the middle of  two formations of 5 ships each. They were a mix of frigates and destroyers. While this should prove to be simple for the Thresher, Rayne was not about to take any chances and opened up with his 4 250mm rail guns as well as launching a full flight of Hobgoblin drones. Thresher and its drones went through these Sansha like a hot knife through a butter like substance. Rayne destroyed the breeding facility, and every other installation in the area, noted the locations coordinates for later salvaging and headed back to report the results.

The second task the agent had for Rayne was to hunt down two freighters that had been seen in the area flying under Sansha colors to figure out what the Sansha were up to. Again, Rayne warped into the dead space area into a swarm of frigates and these 2 freighters. While Thresher’s Hobgoblins took care of the frigates, Rayne locked Thresher’s rail guns on the freighters and proceeded to pulverize them. Upon leaving nothing but wreckage in the system, Rayne closed in on the freighters’ wreckage to find large loads of construction blocks. That definitely could not be good. Rayne noted these coordinates for later salvaging, and warped out to report his findings.

Rayne’s findings definitely concerned the agent, and while he mulled it over, he sent Rayne on a courier run over to the Vimeini system in Metro. This was going into low sec, which was a bit uncomfortable for Rayne, but he figured that if he kept his D-scan cycling, his eye on the local coms channel, and jumped from gate to gate at 0 km, he should have a decent chance. Fortunately, the courier run went off without a hitch, and when Rayne got back to Parchanier, the agent was ready with a follow up task.

Rayne was being tasked with destroying the Sansha outpost that was currently being built up in the area. Scuttlebutt had it that the deadspace area was composed of 2 pockets, with the outpost in the second one. As Rayne dropped out of jump into the first pocket, Thresher was swarmed by over 20 frigates, with a cruiser and a few destroyers to make Rayne feel welcome. Targets were locked up, the rail guns opened up, and the Hobgoblins went to work. Once the first pocket was cleared, and all structures were  destroyed, Rayne engaged the jump gate into the second pocket.

This inner pocket was not as heavily manned, with a little over a handful of destroyers, a few frigates, and the under-construction outpost. Again, the rail guns cracked, the Hobgoblins zipped, the hardners hummed, the boosters growled, and the Sansha blew up. Finally, all ships were slag, and all structures had been pulverized. With a final set of coordinates for salvaging logged, Rayne headed back in to report to the agent.

Upon hearing Rayne’s report, the agent thanked him, and proceeded to send the information up his chain of command, as one lone battlecruiser was not going to be able to continue to handle the situation. This was fine with Rayne as he was ready to swap to the Garbage Scow and go salvage these battles. While the tractor beams hummed and the salvagers ground away, Rayne decided to do some research on who were the best R and D agents for Mechanical Engineering, and Minmatar Starship Engineering, and that were close to “home”.

Boundless Creation seemed to fit all those criteria, and Rayne headed back into station with thoughts of moving everything home running through his head.

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.