Cloud Ring And The Legends Trial Arena

Hypothesis

As I mentioned last time, Signal Cartel has a programme aimed at new recruits that are also newly-qualified capsuleers. The programme provides those new recruits with standard-class frigates carrying an exploration-optimised equipment fit, all at the corporation's expense and free to the end-user.

Free ships!

The philosophy behind the scheme is obvious: ISK-poor new recruits are not in a position to easily replace the ship they are more likely to lose during that initial learning phase, and that crucial period can breed terminal risk-aversion. On the other hand, exploration is arguably one of the riskiest occupations that a capsuleer can undertake because of the long list of uncertainties that preface every mission, so a risk-averse capsuleer has no future in exploration, which is a tragedy to be avoided - unfulfilled potential etc.

The free ships are available by contract at all three of Signal's bases. I decided to check out a 'contract Heron'. I did this because it was high time I actually did some exploration after spending three interminable weeks moving and consolidating my assets. I needed to start doing what I joined this corporation for. In the process of that 'Move Op', I said goodbye to my base in Danera: I lived there for well over a year and during that period I saw it evolve from a quiet backwater highsec refuge into a bit of a centre for industrialists with a concomitant increase in ganking activity, so this was a good time to move on.

I felt a momentary pang of guilt while taking delivery of the contract Heron at Zoohen, because I'm not really its target user. I am no longer an inexperienced novice, I have a nine-figure sum in the virtual bank now, and I have three Covert Ops vessels and a number of standard class frigates in my hangars already. I could buy a hundred Herons and barely notice the impact on my bottom line.

The reason I embarked on this experiment was to prove just how good a standard-class frigate can be at doing science out there, while giving me the practice I needed to get properly current on exploration doctrine again (because despite my reputation for exploring within [PHP1], I hadn't actually done any for ages).

When I took delivery of the Heron, I got the station's engineers to make a couple of minor upgrades, replacing the ship's Nanofiber structural mods and Inertial Stabilizers with their Tech II-class equivalents. A ludicrous extravagance on this ship, I know, but this modification, my overall skills and experience and my navigation-oriented headware collectively gave this Heron a 52% improvement in performance over standard spec; with aligning-from-rest and acceleration-to-warp reduced to 2.6 seconds - not the 'magic number' of two seconds that virtually immunises a ship from gate camps, but not far off. More than acceptable in fact, because that level of performance places the onus on the aggressor rather than me. Smartbombs aside, I am more likely to survive than not.

Mitigation of risk is everything in this occupation.

Assume nothing.

Assume everything.

Experiment

I dislike prolonged immersion.

I've been jacked into the contract Heron now for a week. The last time I was in-capsulo for this long was one time last year doing ELINT/recon in A2-V27 for [PHP1]. I remember docking again after that ordeal and thinking what a glorious thing it is to be able to smell the air and taste food and drink; how I sat in our now-defunct bar in Nandeza just staring at a spiced chai, watching the steam rising from it, and thinking this is what it means to be human and how baseliners take the realm of the senses completely for granted. How life is wasted on them.

I undocked in the contract Heron from our station in Zoohen a week ago not intending to stay out anything like this long, but as is normal with me, I fall prey to a degree of impulsivity. A couple of wormholes brought me to a lowsec system in Placid, close to the border with the Cloud Ring region and the vivid green halo-shaped nebula that bears its name.

Cloud Ring is all nullsec. I hadn't done serious null for ages. I needed the practice. This ship needed the validation of null, so I dived in.

Operational doctrine suggests crossing regional borders into nullsec is excessively dangerous because of gatecamps. With the proper diligence and intel-gathering, the time-of-day when camps are less likely to be present can be deduced, and anyway, my licence says I'm a 'Border Runner' and my father was involved in a smuggling operation so really I was just following an ancestral imperative.

I arrived in the Placid - Cloud Ring border system of F7C-H0 safely enough, but there was a camp on the far side of the system. More intel-gathering from the usual literature - the DOTLAN service, the Zkillboard service and others - and I deduced that the lone capsuleer camping the stargate in question was some sort of professional gatecamper who spent eight hour stints at this gate (!), trapping ships in a disruptor bubble and using 'fleet boosts' to kill them. I know he was using boosts because he said so in Local.

Not to me, mind, but to one of his buddies passing through. Being out here in remote and unpopulated nullsec clearly messes with your head enough to make you give the game away like that.

Risk assessment: this guy could one-shot me while I'm in the humble contract Heron. I could avoid the disruptor bubble easily enough by approaching the stargate 'off-axis', but with the Heron lacking a true Covert Ops Cloaking Device he'd see me coming, so ideally I needed this guy to disappear. From intel, I knew his pattern. I decided to wait him out, because patience is underrated in this occupation. As capsuleers, we enjoy a unique luxury that baseliners do not have: the absolute certainty that there will always be a tomorrow.

In situations like this, program a sleep cycle. Put yourself in hibernation. Your capsule can sustain you for up to ninety days before the neuroembryonic fluid needs changing and even then you'll get a few more days before infection sets in.

Wait them out. Nullsec sov fodder doesn't like it and prefers the instant hit of self-gratification. Use it against them.

Cloak up, sit tight, and disappear like the Ghost of Omist.

Method

The Cloud Ring Nebula surrounds the region that bears its name like a cosmic necklace; a huge swathe of green gas light-years thick - the visual legacy of an ancient supernova. It's an arresting spectacle and I rate it as highly as The Cauldron. It's easy to speculate on what effect the redistributed heavy metal elements released in that stellar explosion will have on the future evolution of planets in this sector of the cluster. Heavy metals means planets with iron cores that become mineral-rich rocky terrestrials that beget life, millions of years hence, long after we've been forgotten by the universe's callous disinterest.

The noted Intaki astronomer Alnadil Jouber was the first to study the Cloud Ring Nebula in detail, and he theorised that the supernova that caused it may have triggered waves of gravimetric distortion that spread out like ripples on the spacetime pond. He went on to speculate that when those ripples reached the EVE Gate, they destabilised it and caused its collapse into the raging, deadly flaw in spacetime that persists to this day.

Jouber's theory is not widely accepted today, as there is plenty of evidence that the nebula is much older than the EVE Gate, but whenever it happened, that supernova must have been an incredible sight and will have been visible from every part of the cluster. Were there any indigenous lifeforms around at the time to observe it? Archaeologists have certainly never found any evidence; maybe the explosion wiped it out in a blizzard of atmosphere-frying cosmic rays - it would have been an extinction-level event for everything within 30 light-years or so.

Politically, current intel indicates that most of Cloud Ring is under the sovereignty of the Psychotic Tendencies alliance. Intel also indicated the region is mostly deserted for most of the time. During my mission here I saw single-figure jump counts on the DOTLAN service through most of Cloud Ring's systems. This lack of activity is at odds with some of the news reports I've read about huge battles taking place here over the last few years.

Most of the infinite looping playback of alliance politics passes over my head, but it appears I visited Cloud Ring not long after the winding-down of 'World War Bee', which was fought mostly in the regions nearby. If that ceasefire was the reason for the inactivity here in Cloud Ring then I wasn't really concerned because as an explorer-scientist I exist in a world without borders, but I took full advantage of that quiescence when I realised that the notorious Legends Trial Arena was in this region and just a few jumps away from the border system I was sat in. The pro-gatecamper was not present when I awoke the ship, as predicted, so I set course and enjoyed the temporary freedom of totally empty nullsec.

* * *

The Legends Trial Arena is in the PPG-XC system, which is in the Assilot constellation in Cloud Ring. I warped to the facility's marker beacon and got a hell of a surprise as I wasn't expecting anything like this:

This weird facility, a quasi-gothic fusion of high tech and barbaric ceremonial ritual over a hundred kilometres across, features a pair of Gallente-style stations placed at either end of a semi-circular arrangement of nine identical asteroids, no-doubt all deliberately carved like that. 

One of the stations is connected to its adjacent asteroid, but the other asteroids are not themselves connected to each other and just hang there in space. A thick cloud of dust and gas permeates the area but does not spread beyond it. Bizarre globes of hot gas float around aimlessly like sentinels. The system's red giant primary shines through the gaps between those asteroids like a baleful eye shining upon a Dark Ages stone circle: an arrangement that must be deliberate.

The reason this place exists is because of the event that it's named after. The Legends Trials was, and still is a deathmatch tournament that used to be held within the borders of the Fed and was obscenely popular among its citizens. The event moved to this purpose-built facility here in Cloud Ring for the publicly-cited reasons of expense: insurance, liabilities, operational costs etc. all being cheaper out here in the wastes of null. The real reason it moved out here is because of the increasing influence of organised crime on the event's conduct. Allegations persist of rigged fights, widespread odds-fixing, harrassment, threats, disappearances, all deniable and none diminishing the spectacle or affecting the event's popularity in any way.

The facility was not currently being used when I saw it. If there were any people in those two stations, they will have been caretaker staff. Certainly the facility paid no attention to me and the Heron, although that dust cloud in the centre was so thick that it obscured my sensors and inhibited my cam drones so I couldn't have known for sure who or what was watching me. Visibility was practically nil.

The only other signs of activity here were the group of Gallente COSMOS agents whose ships were parked nearby. This was a bit odd, as the Serpentis Corporation will have a large influence here and yet here were four of the Fed's Finest in plain sight.
 

The mesmerising spectacle almost made me forget where I was: deep nullsec. I had this system to myself for the vast majority of the time I spent here, but periodically another capsuleer would show up on Local. When this happens, I keep one eye on that Local channel and count to thirty. If they don't disappear from Local within that time (which they all did in this case) then the capsuleer in question would not be merely transiting through the system, so I would have to start assuming they were commencing a system-wide search for me.

If they wanted to kill me, a tactically-minded nullsec sov-fodder capsuleer would not find it hard to deduce my whereabouts in this system: one look at my database profile and who I work for would indicate the strong likelihood that I was at the tourist attraction because of the scientific curiosity thing. If I was one of them, that's where I'd look first.

Imagine my surprise then, when one of those transients actually spoke to me in Local:

I'd heard about this phenomenon before I joined Signal Cartel: that its position as a non-aggressive corporation dedicated to science and knowledge means that some of the other capsuleer alliances out there consider us unofficially 'blue' and don't target us. It's like an honourable code thing because of the wormhole surveying stuff that we do and how those other alliances decide to use the information we generate. Not killing us is a form of payback.

I spent a not inconsiderable period of time here just holding station and using cam drones to get a detailed look at the place. I decided that the Legends Trial Arena is without doubt one of the weirdest places I've encountered yet. The last thing I did here before I warped away was to overfly one of the station skydomes. In other Gallente stations they always look so tranquil with their circular boulevards and bodies of water. In here, they're just venues for various creative methods of killing.

Conclusion

After the encounter described above, I spent a couple more days in Cloud Ring, moving slowly and methodically through each system and finding only three archaeological sites. Cloud Ring is therefore a wasteland. So I set course for Outer Ring, where I performed the same routine: look for sites, remain as silent as the vacuum itself and exercise the patience of a glacier. In the process I found loads of sites here and I've covered less than half the region's systems.

Eventually I docked in the Outer Ring Excavations Mining Outpost in 4C-B7X with salvage, archaeological relics and miscellaneous techshrapnel worth 62 million ISK in the Heron's hold, which is still only a quarter full.

Result.

Sidebar: among those ancient relics is something the database identifies as a 'Yan Jung Thunder Kite', which is definitely a keeper for the collection because the Yan Jung civilisation is believed to have been a contemporary of the Talocan in pre-Dark Ages New Eden. I'm all over that stuff. Not just that, but I also found evidence of a Sleeper presence here in Outer Ring in the form of a 'Limited Sleeper Cache'. This is why exploration is such a satisfying career choice: so much uncertainty, so many surprises. Not unlike peeling the layers of one of those things called an onion.

Eventually, I'll find a convenient wormhole that will take me back to civilization via the 2,600-light-year Anoikis Detour and with what I hope will be a full cargo hold. I might be out here for weeks, but it doesn't matter because there will always be a tomorrow. The long-duration immersion will be worth it, because I will look forward to the sweetest-tasting spiced chai in all of the Empire when I eventually get out of the pod again.

On the other hand, I could keep the ship here in 4C-B7X and jump-clone back to base, returning at some future date to continue where I left off with what I might call the 'Signal Cartel Outer Ring Survey'.

Management will like that name.

The main conclusion I'm drawing from operating the contract Heron is this: a fully-equipped Covert Ops ship can become a crutch and can make you feel that you can't undock without it. This is nonsense and leads to that risk-aversion thing I mentioned at the start. With the right experience and knowledge, a humble standard 'T1' frigate like the Heron can do almost everything in the exploratory role that a Covert Ops ship can do, especially if you know about the Rule of Six when hacking sites.

Successful conduct in hostile space requires skill, experience and knowledge that no ship by itself can give you. With the right implants and training you can compensate for most of a T1's shortcomings, and experience will do the rest. Of course I'd always bring a Covert Ops ship when available because they do have undeniable advantages, but don't ever think you have to have one before embarking on a career in exploration, because you don't. You don't need that bling Astero either. Learn your trade first in a ship like the Heron (especially a Heron), then in time your Covert Ops ship will become a surgical knife that can slip past hostiles and hack through sites with impunity.

There is of course the untapped potential of the interceptor as an exploration platform too, but that's for future reference...

Signal Cartel @ The Devil's Dig Site - 9/7/118

Prologue: Theology Council Tribunal station orbiting Zoohen III - 1900hrs

Signal Cartel is incredibly professional. The outwardly-informal, communal, inclusive, egalitarian and chilled-out vibe that the corporation projects externally, has a deep specialist knowledge of the craft of exploration at its core. Signal Cartel therefore manages the rare feat of walking the walk and talking the talk. Then there is the strict non-aggression ‘credo’ that is enforced by the velvet-glove/iron-fist policy of the boss, reformed pirate Mynxee. Flight data recorder telemetry aka the ‘killmail’ tells no lies and if you appear on one that is not your own, then it’s tea & biscuits with management. If you don’t believe me then check the feed below:

As well as access to an unparalleled knowledgebase, members also have access to hangars full of exploration-equipped frigates provided at the corporation’s expense and much more. This means we also act as an education and training facility for new capsuleers that is far more effective than the cookie-cutter syllabi of the basic training academies. Here in Signal it's all about the practical operational advice that does not appear in any instruction manual. Yet in no way does access to any of this resource imply an obligation in return. Members are entirely free to base themselves anywhere and do their own thing if they want to so long as they refrain from killing people, which is fine by me, because as I’ve said many times on this journal, I’m a lover, not a fighter.

I became a capsuleer for science: to learn, to discover, to see parts of the cluster that my long-dead baseline self would never have experienced.

This is why I fit right in here.

So I was excited when shortly after I joined Signal, management announced an expedition to the Devil’s Dig Site in The Forge. It would be a fleet exercise, focused on exploring and investigating an archaeological site in the Otitoh system that is known to contain evidence of human occupation of the cluster in the pre-Dark Ages epoch, possibly even pre-dating the collapse of the EVE Gate.

This was exactly what I joined Signal for: not just doing my own thing, but playing an active part. I signed up for the expedition immediately.

In the meantime, since I started operating from Zoohen I've found that having a base in an outlying system just a few light years away from the Fed means it is far easier to procure trashy holofeeds from across the border, even in this Theology Council station which conveniently does not have its own Censor.

It's easier because there is a Core Complexion station right here in Zoohen that receives the feeds direct, so thanks to corruptible comms engineers and several untidy hacks through that station into this one, I’ve got into this drama series from Impetus (who else?) called UUA Is So Far Away, about an exiled Jovian trying to return to his homeland but discovering that it no-longer exists; so it's got historical accuracy, existential crisis, philosophical quandary, a torrid love triangle and totally inaccurate science.

For my sins I was binge-watching the seventh series of this compulsive dreck when a familiar chime sounded the arrival of a message. New corp, new message. It was the Devil’s Dig Site Expedition Briefing from expedition leader Markus Vulpine.

This is what I mean about total professionalism:

After reading the briefing I decided to raise my game. I joined the ‘Hacker Wing’. I would bring another Anathema; not my regular Hayabusa, now docked in Thera, but a new, purpose-built Anathema. The comprehensive briefing ensured the liberating certainty of a known objective, so unlike a standard exploration/investigation fit where contingency is everything, with this operation there was no need for either a cloaking device, a suite of Scan Probes or a Data Analyzer, because we were hiding from nobody, we knew exactly where we were going and exactly what was there. I could specialize my ship’s fit around the required Relic Analyzer and the need for some armor tank against an expected hostile intervention from Rogue Drones known to inhabit the site. Even then, the Hacker Wing had at least ten combat-equipped vessels to call on as a defensive screen - the ‘DPS Wing’ - some of which would be battleships and Tech-III-class cruisers.

This would not be amateur night.

Total professionalism.

So I resolved to spend some time equipping the new ship (which would be named Hacker Republic), before starting the long transit to the Okkelen constellation in The Forge, where the fleet was due to assemble in a few days' time at the Lai Dai station orbiting Otitoh IV's tiny 500km-diameter moon.

I would have time to kill because I intended to arrive early, however from this Caldari megacorp station there was no way I was going to be able to receive Impetus broadcasts, so I couldn’t finish the seventh series of UUA Is So Far Away.

This was probably a good thing.

Part 1: Gods Walked Among Us

Two days later…

The expedition fleet assembled in the Lai Dai place. Some had rushed over here that afternoon from the first day of the SeyCon5 conference in the Seyllin system. All of top management were here and there were nearly 30 of us in total. The docking bay was a fabulous sight, with far more than its normal share of exotic ships that are designed to be neither seen nor heard, using the language of curiosity rather than death. I’ve seen a Nestor precisely once before and here there were two in one place. Several examples of the ubiquitous (to us) Astero, some Stratios, a Navy Omen, three Tengu and a Drake, and a ‘Logi Wing’ that was assigned to repair the Hacker Wing if any of us were attacked by the Drones. Conversely, my Anathema was the sole example of its type.

Unlike in Darwinism where a fleet departure time was always an abstract concept that was communicated to nobody until after Jzma and Mechoj had already left, here in Signal we had a precise zero-hour and we damn-well stuck to it. At the exact appointed time we undocked from the Lai Dai station and assembled at a pre-determined safe-spot elsewhere in the system.

[sidebar: it was good to see Kobura Juraxxis in this fleet. He won’t remember, but a year ago I crossed paths with Kobura somewhere in Cobalt Edge and we did comms in an otherwise empty Local channel for a while. This is how I knew about Signal Cartel back then, and how I knew it was meant to be.]

At this staging point we finalised briefings, at least four of us took some cam drone stills and we set up the live broadcast feed (!) for the rest of the corporation to tune into from afar. Then we set off for the site. Being part of a fleet, this was where I got a chance to see the new instantaneous vector symbology at work on tactical, which is another of those mandatory capsuleware upgrades that fall into the category of 'solutions in search of a problem'. At least it looks nice.

The nominal entrance to the Devil's Dig Site was where the baseliner scientists, academics and archaeologists live in those standardised hab modules you see all over the place. They appeared to be guarded by Caldari warships who didn’t see fit to bother us, probably because it wouldn’t have lasted long (for them).

We briefed some more while slowboating over to the acceleration gate at the site entrance, then we hit a point-of-no-return. This was it: it was on.

 

 

When we activated the gate and warped to the first part of the Devil’s Dig Site itself, we split up as briefed and the Hacker Wing got to work. There were a large number of artifacts to investigate. A couple of times I got to the required distance from an artifact and discovered somebody else was already hacking it, so that wasted some time, but I found one eventually and went through the usual drill with the Relic Analyzer. All of this while under constant threat of attack from hostile Rogue Drones.

 

These were difficult hacks that were full of restoration nodes, and I thanked God that I’d had the foresight to fit Hacker Republic with an Emission Scope Sharpener modification otherwise I would not have completed them.

The artifact I found contained the expected evidence indicating this site’s builders were the Talocan civilization, which dates this site to at least 15,000 years-old. This site in Okkelen was where the first evidence of this pre-Dark Ages civilization was ever discovered; a civilization that is now suspected - believed - to have attained a higher level of technological achievement than we have now, even surpassing the Jove, and going on to inhabit Anoikis an unbelievably long time before we ever found it by accident. 

You’ve heard the rumours about what Anoikis is; the feeds about Caroline’s Star; wondered what all those Talocan structures are doing in Thera and elsewhere in Anoikis; the arguments, theories, papers about not only what Anoikis is, but where it is and when it is. Anoikis was manufactured they say. Anoikis is New Eden in the future, they say. Caroline’s Star was no accident of nature they say. The spacetime metric in Anoikis was modified by the Talocan to suit their purposes they say. The Talocan could remake the universe in their image. The Talocan are Gods and we are not fit to look upon their likenesses.

Rumours, not answers.

If I’d had more time - with less external risk - to riff on the significance of these objects being tractored into Hacker’s hold, I think I might have put them back. I have some small-scale Talocan stuff in my own collection of hangar artifacts along with Sleeper Data Libraries and other related, incredibly ancient and utterly inscrutable relics. Sometimes it scares me. I look at the alien symbols on them and I swear they say don't get too close because you are not yet ready for the truth.

Then again, my own ship contains tech derived directly from relics appropriated from this location. The databases classify the object I retrieved from here as a ‘Solid Atomizer‘, which is used in the production of cloaking devices. I’m already flying around with Talocan tech. What kind of explorer-scientist would I be if I didn’t follow this experiment through to its conclusion?

While I was once again taking a cosmic perspective, the Hacker Wing cleared this part of the site with no failed hacks and a complete take, but sadly, Cali Estemaire’s Catalyst got the full focus of the Drones’ attention and was destroyed before the rest of the fleet could intervene. We knew that the Drones would deploy this focus tactic at some point so we were ready for it, but now the DPS Fleet was one ship down.

After clearing this section, the rest of us gathered our composure, made repairs, recharged, re-briefed, and got ready for the core of the Devil’s Dig Site. To her eternal credit, Cali stayed on the field in her capsule and did some media when she had every right to leave the site.

Total commitment.

 Part 2: The Ancient Temple and the Sun Reader Monolith

We warped into the site’s centre and saw for ourselves how the ancient Talocan temple based here has been desecrated and transformed into a monstrous Drone Hive. There were even more hackable artifacts here with correspondingly greater opposition from the Drones, which one must assume have all learned to adapt and absorb the Talocan tech into their own architecture. What in Divinity's Edge will eventually emerge from that obnoxious mashup?

This part of the site is also the location of the ‘Sun Reader Monolith’. There is, to our knowledge, precisely one other example of this bizarre structure in the whole of New Eden: the monolith in the Dead End system more than 30 light years away in Genesis. There are known to be considerably more of them in Anoikis. The monoliths emit nothing, reflect everything EM including visible light and are, to us and our tech, essentially gigantic dead mirrors. I was sad that I didn’t get chance to view this one close-up because I was so busy hacking and busy not getting killed, but then if I had, who knows what it might have done to me?

The scientific principle of the simplest-explanation-being-the-truth would dictate that the Sun Reader Monolith is also of Talocan construction given that it is co-located with the ancient temple. It could be anything: a monument, a tomb, a nav beacon or even a transit conduit of some kind, and if it is, can it be activated? Would anybody want to? Where the hell would it lead to? To the other monolith in Dead End? To Anoikis where the others are? To wherever the Talocan went? Did they transcend themselves out of this reality into one of their multiple dimensions of hypereuclidian mathematics?

Maybe the monolith is just an inert lump of material, taunting humanity’s dislike of an information vacuum. Maybe seeing this thing from afar means I just became a more ardent believer in the Old Earth Myth. The implications of this place, its contents, and the ancient, long-extinct culture that built it here are that our civilization is playing around in somebody else's house. One day its owners might return and take it back.

Sometimes I get scared by this career path I chose. Possession of knowledge requires responsibility.

As before, the DPS Wing drew the attention of the cruiser-sized Drones and kept them away from the hackers, although one of the Drones got within 6km of me - thank God for the Anathema’s low observability and signature otherwise, even with armor hardeners, I would have been toast. The hack during this phase was more difficult and took three attempts to get through another forest of restoration nodes. I may even have been the last of us to finish the operation, which meant for a short time I had every defensive ship in the fleet watching my back, which was nice. 

By the end of the operation we had successfully hacked every single artifact. A 100% success rate, with just one ship lost to the Drones. With more Drones arriving on the grid, we wasted no more time and returned to the safe-spot outside the site. 

 

Part 3: The Aftershow Party

As is usual when I visit scientifically-important places, I left the Devil's Dig Site with more questions than I'd arrived with, and with answers to none.

Talocan. 

What were you? 

Where are you?

On the other hand, a fleet of ships in one place is always an impressive sight.

Time for a post-op photo op:

 

Then we invoked the standard post-op fireworks procedure:

 

 

 

We returned to the Lai Dai place and docked with the collective satisfaction of a job well done: our raid on the Devil’s Dig Site was a resounding success, a testament to sound planning and perfect execution. The whole thing took less than an hour too. A speed hack in every sense.

Hacker Republic had performed perfectly. I was never targeted even once by any of the Drones, not even during that close pass. Covert Ops ships are awesome.

So are fleet warps:

 

We even laid down some more fireworks outside the Lai Dai station. This is why the Zkillboard service - that ceaseless accountant of competitive killing - rates Signal Cartel as 98% Snuggly.

Some of us (including me) stayed at Lai Dai and didn’t leave the Otitoh system until the next morning, with the safe knowledge that capsule neuroembryonic fluid cures hangovers. A few of us left immediately to head straight back to Seyllin for day two of SeyCon5. Some more left for parts as-yet unknown.

We don’t hang around. We only look forward.

Because the explorer's path never ends.

Because you can’t stop the signal.

Footnote:

As I mentioned briefly above, I wasn't the only one of us who documented this expedition. For more righteous imagery of the cosmos, the Devil's Dig Site and more ships, check out Cali Estemaire’s image file, Thorin Shardani’s image file and Razorien’s image file.