Recon time!
This time the doctrine would again feature the use of the Entosis Device in disrupting TMA's orbital, but at a long range with a fleet of Caracals providing stand-off missile capability.
I did my thing and went in there a couple of hours before the fleet arrived, to do some scouting. TMA were typically unadventurous. Occasionally, a Harbinger or a Typhoon or an Ares would emerge from their station, sit there for five minutes, then dock again. Occasionally one of them might shuttle off to their POS then return, but that was it. I even had the time to fit in a bit of exploring as a wormhole manifested itself which, unlike virtually every one of the damn things I've found recently, did not lead to Anoikis. This one led to the Pertnineere system in Solitude, a part of New Eden I have yet to visit. I resolved to use this wormhole when this operation concluded.
When the fleet showed up in A2-V27, it seemed as if this session of Entosising would be as uneventful as the last one I wrote about [see the previous entry].
It wasn't.
It appeared to start smoothly, and as usual TMA appeared resigned to passivity, to the extent that a Typhoon emerged from the station in the full view of our fleet and again just sat there.
But then someone else showed up and took exception to the event with intent to disrupt it.
The 'fog of war' means I still don't know who the hell they were, but then DARKNESS showed up with a fleet of Cynabals and it kicked off. Our Caracal fleet was quickly immobilized and cut down like wheat before the scythe.
All that was left was an Overview full of the pathos of orphaned drones and identifiable frozen bodies.
I got out of there, not by the gate to Kaira and back to Khanid, but via my wormhole to Solitude Lowsec. I scuttled out of there unseen like a rat down a spacetime sewer...
I instantaneously arrived in Pertnineere. There was a Jove Observatory in here. I checked it out. If the damage that the Drifters have been inflicting on this one is typical of the rest then they are all in danger of falling apart; yet the Drifters haven't been seen since the Nandeza Incursion last month. In fact this is Gallente territory here, so the Drifters and their apparent doctrinal concentration on the territory of the Amarr Empire means that visiting this system at all is uncharacteristic of them.
This visual perspective - of the Verge Vendor, Cauldron and Cloud Ring nebulae as visible from Solitude - is something new. Something else that's new is the evidence that we need much bigger and more powerful vessels if we're to do anything serious in A2-V27 and eventually hold on to it.
Postscript: the curious factoid about this operation is that my wormhole escape route led directly to a region which hosts a significant Ni-Kunni enclave that immigrated here from Aridia and that evidently flourished, as by the standards of Aridia at least, the Solitude region is prosperous.
I could have ended up anywhere, yet I got transported here. I take that as a sign that I should stick around for a while, because having contacts and a 'safe harbour' within the Fed and into which I could disappear for a few years, could be useful for that point in the future when Khanid becomes a no-go area for some reason yet to be determined, like, say, the breaking down of a certain Coalition...
