Grand Theft Supercarrier

 

The A-3ES3 System, Syndicate

Our allies in the Intaki Business Logistics Union had an interesting time earlier this year when the two constellations of 'Synco Pocket' were invaded by a capsuleer group of gangsters led by somebody called 'Tinkerhell', who, in apparent reprisal for some perceived smacktalk/insult that took place in Placid, attempted to take the Pocket's space for themselves. No agreements, no discussions, no treaties, no cooperation, just pure belligerence. Not even the kind of honour-code criminality that the various factions in the Syndicate are all about. Just pure bullying capsuleers again.

The attack took the form of trying to hijack the highly mineral-rich moons that proliferate throughout the area and which the Intaki Syndicate permits Synco to administer. Not just the moons, but the mining stations that orbit them too.

In other words, the kind of resource war that happens all the time. Everywhere.

Synco successfully repelled the invasion and eventually a form of ceasefire was reached when the aggressors were pushed back to the 'dead-end' system of A-3ES3, where they were left to it.

I had nothing to do with the defence of the area at the time as I was engaged back in Devoid. More recently, when I based myself in our Cathedral in XS-XAY, I went for an initial reconnaissance of the local systems and found a Hel-class supercarrier parked in a fully-shielded and heavily-defended starbase facility in A-3ES3.

It was one of theirs, just sat there. I reported the sighting in our intel channel and somebody suggested stealing it. I did think about it for a few seconds. I mean, it's been done before.

This happened like three months ago. The starbase was a staging post for the failed invasion and nothing else has happened there since. The Hel hasn't moved, and the attention span of most capsuleers dictates that probably nothing will happen, because even a week is a long time in New Eden.

The last time I looked it was still there though. I mean you don't just park one of these things and leave it there and forget about it.

Or do you..?

Funeral in Palas

'They don't make 'em like this anymore'

'Good!'

Overheard at the Novae Prismaticae, the Girani-Fa system, Genesis, during 03-YC124

The Armageddon battleship is actually a bit dreck when viewed dispassionately by military analysts, because its age and general obsolescence mean that it is outclassed in its category by virtually everything else in the cluster.

But I own one, and I have a soft spot for it. 

I got this one at the beginning of YC124. It was for sale on contract in the Villore system, which is deep within the Fed. What was an Amarrian battleship doing there? I felt a completely irrational desire to rescue it. According to the contract, this one was stripped of all modules and equipment.

It was ancient. It had been used by the Navy for a long time, most notably during the Drifter invasion, then struck-off charge shortly after and sold to the private sector, where it passed through a few different owners before ending up in Villore being sold to me. 

It was worn out when I got it. Bringing it back to Empire space was an experience. I contracted a temporary skeleton crew to make sure it did not fall apart in transit to the Novae Prismaticae, our administrative HQ and Astrahus in Girani-Fa, where I based it at first. On the way there it made bizarre and unsettling noises that manifested through my auditory nerve inputs as rattling and twanging noises when it used its warp drive, and I feared it would not decelerate from hyperspace on more than one occasion as it did not always answer the helm - the 'helm' being in my head of course - which led me to suspect an extremely cheap and dodgy capsuleer conversion by engineers not familiar with the type, probably the work of the Fed, who let's face it are preoccupied with self-indulgence most of the time.

Those engineers hadn't even done a bridge conversion on it. As a capsuleer you don't need a bridge because you don't use it and you don't need the crew, so normally all the panels and terminals and chairs in there get removed and blanked off and you just end up with a big room with a scenic view. Not this one. Neglect was obvious all over the ship. Whoever had stripped it of equipment under its last ownership had been quick and wilfully careless: wiring looms hanging like vines, missing sections of hull armor, exposed pipes and ducting, unshielded compartments, life-expired components, desecrated altars, leaking cryogenic tanks, strange blood stains on the ceilings of the crew messes, inconsistent artificial gravity, human remains (!). I could go on...

I consulted its extensive maintenance history - extensive - and according to the Navy's registries its former name when it was commissioned was TES Lux Sidra, so I decided to use that name again, to resurrect it. We're given special dispensation in LUMEN to use the prefix so it seemed appropriate.

So I based the ship in Girani-Fa for a couple of months while our engineers went to work on it. I already had a bunch of Super Kerr-Induced Nanocoatings for it stored in my hangar so I bought some more, and spent some time shaking it down doing some missions for the local authorities in Genesis, because I was working up to something...

* * *

The Kor-Azor region, three months later 

In the Societas we are mostly free to do our own thing when there are no major alliance strategic operations going on, so I subcontracted myself to the Ministry of Internal Order, where I found myself involved in a security/policing action in the Kor-Azor region involving yet another dispute between a couple of the Houses Minor. This is what they do all the time. All that political manoeuvring for favour at Court. But this one was serious as there were allegations of treason and collaborations with Sansha's Nation. It had to be serious for the Ministry to get involved. It had to be even more serious for the secretive Ministry to recruit an outside contractor. 

It was good to spend a few weeks back in my own home region and operate in the vicinity of my homeworld of Eclipticum. My own loyalty is to the Empress - peace be upon her - and to House Kor-Azor, but as a capsuleer and a Ni-Kunni from a wealthy family background I am unofficially exempt from many of the requirements of such fealty; it means I can move more easily between the strata of Amarrian society, and my family's position as owners of the Proxima Direct Spacelines shipping company going back several generations meant we escaped the worst of Aritcio's 'excesses' back in the day. As a capsuleer, today, I enjoy a certain level of respect from the hierarchy that as a Ni-Kunni I might not normally be entitled to. All of this means I can be as observant as I wish, and objective when I wish to be, and can get away with it.

This position, or status, was useful during a series of missions in which I was required to use the Armageddon against my own people. These were rank-and-file Amarrian ship crews that were caught up in something they had no control over: their master's personal treacherous power play and ego trip. 

I was initially based in the Nishah system, but as this thing became bigger than I imagined, I ended up ranging all over Kor-Azor, working-for but never actually meeting face-to-face with the agent Riff Hebian, who worked from his own Armageddon in the Palas system.

While this series of missions developed I spent millions of ISK - millions and millions - on different weapons specifications to try to get the Armageddon to work properly against the traitors and the Sansha infiltrators I kept running into. I tried beam lasers, pulse lasers, torpedoes and cruise missiles, with various armor configurations, eventually settling on a 'Snipergeddon' setup, but not for the reasons you might think. 

While skirmishing with these fleets I was often up against fifteen or twenty ships at a time. The 'Armageddon' took so much punishment from these fleets, such a hammering for hours at a time, and dealt with so much armor ablation and hull damage, that I started to have a problem with members of my contract slavecrew freaking out and committing suicide by airlocking themselves or finding sidearms or knives from somewhere and using them on themselves and each other. Every time I'd dock there would be a report from the slavemasters carrying a double-digit number of 'missing persons'. This and the blood stains and the remains I found in it when I first got the ship made me wonder whether it was cursed, and whether I'd have to get Brother Theodosius Savnar to perform an exorcism on it.

As if that wasn't ridiculous enough, the other thing was going through so much Nanite Repair Paste and breaking-off skirmishes to use a friendly nano-repair tether so frequently, that I started to wonder whether all the constant hull and armor regeneration meant that it was no-longer the same ship that it was when it was built.

So the 'Snipergeddon' strategy was in part to offset all of this by warping into the location of a fleet of variously Sansha, Amarrian heretics, 'Independents' and Mercenaries and immediately Micro Jump Driving over a hundred kilometers away and picking them off slowly, gradually, not letting them get anywhere near me, with cruise missiles. Thousands of missiles. It worked. No crew suicides anymore. No more armor regeneration. But my God it took a lifetime...

But the ship soaked it all up - even while taking down a Sansha Battlestation:

And even while taking down massive comms arrays pointed straight towards the Stain region - the origin of Sansha's Nation:

And then the Snipergeddon even had to get into hacking a station's mainframe with a jury-rigged and hotwired Data Analyzer installation ('Hackergeddon'?), and later getting into extracting an undercover agent from a complex of chapels.

But in contrast, the final face-off in the Choga system with the renegade Terrus Harkan - the renegade at the centre of this affair and the heretic I had helped the agents Riff Hebian and Aralin Jick uncover - was an anticlimax, a formality. The Snipergeddon found purpose and resolve when it was called upon, even against the fleet of Nightmares that Harkan was being protected by. Harkan was a blasphemous heretic and a traitor. Like all those who follow this path he became convinced of his own religious purity and destiny and hubris and had to be purged. I drew little satisfaction from that. But it had to be done.

Purged, along with his unholy, abominable Nightmares with their undead crew, all sent to His judgement.

For God and for Holy Amarr.

I returned to Hebian's Armageddon in Palas after it was over and received the usual thanks and blessings, and I was honoured to be of service. I really was. But we are all ultimately in the service of God. The only reason I had got into this mess was because somebody - Harkan - thought they were an exception. And this will happen again, you can guarantee it. It's why the Ministry of Internal Order exists - to deal with the excesses of human nature.

A contract fulfilled then, and through God's will, a ship that performed its duty when it mattered. The Armageddon may be old and obsolete, but because it doesn't specialise in anything it is extremely versatile, as I proved by using four different weapons systems on it. 

Probably the only reason it survived all this punishment was the amount of modification and improvement that comes with a capsuleer conversion, which leads to the argument again that this is not the same ship it was, not a standard Armageddon.

But the fact remains that it is built like an asteroid and will last forever. Mine will probably outlive the heat death of the universe. 

So when that happens and I am that 'last capsuleer alone with God', it will be in this ship.

[OOC: this was the Amarr Epic Arc. You need +5 with the Ministry of Internal Order to do it and Eve University has an excellent walkthrough of both permutations of the storyline. You may wish to use a T3C for speed and efficiency, or if you want to take your time and look at the scenery then a T1 BS will serve you well, despite the received wisdom on r/eve... ]

Covenant Network Disruption

 

Syndicate, 10/124

It seems the Sani Sabik abominations have started their annual 'Crimson Harvest' again. These vile heresies are like insects. I must have killed literally millions of them in their spacecraft but they keep on coming. It is among the highest of religious duties to purge them.

And yet they persist.

This time the Order of St.Tetrimon has stepped up and declared its intention to fight the Covenant during this 'event'. All of us in Khimi Harar are committed to assisting the Order wherever we can.

For me this takes the form of locating the Covenant's comms and data network nodes here in Syndicate and hacking into them and shutting them down. The fact that these installations exist out here in Syndicate at all is remarkable enough, but they are here so they must be eliminated.

These Covenant nodes are well disguised, hidden deep within fields of rubble surrounding fractured planetesimals, and it takes considerable scanning power to pinpoint their location.

It's a primordial setting, dangerous enough with drifting rocks bouncing off my shields and the possibility of the node blowing up in my face if I mess up the hack, but then with the added risk of opportunistic capsuleers trying to stop me from doing this important work and 'ganking' me and looting my ship, which would be a magnet for them since they would see 'Pacifier' on their directional scanners and know it's worth three-quarters of a billion ISK.

Of course, the flip side of this is the other work I'm doing to defend the Order's own network nodes from those same opportunists who would disrupt the Order's work for personal profit, and from the absolute scumbags who are actually siding with the Covenant. This of course means me ganking them.

One of the scumbags I caught attempting to hack a Tetrimon node didn't take it very well when I destroyed their ship -

- because this happened:

This capsuleer I killed (the other name is some random who was passing through the system), turned out to be one of that group who insists on communicating in a non-Standard language, so I had to use translation algorithms on her rage:

She called me a bitch. I mean, how rude!

But the translation algorithms are a bit off as it otherwise doesn't make a lot of sense, except that it's obviously insulting. Salty, even. I don't think I ever got salt before. The thing is, I've always found it funny how so many capsuleers can dish it out but can't take it. If the tables were turned, this capsuleer would not have hesitated to take down my Pacifier, and would unquestionably have gloated about it because, as I said above, my Pacifier is worth three-quarters of a billion ISK. Her Probe was worth a tenner, tops. She had a few choice modules and loot that survived the destruction, which was useful, but the real imperative here was the prevention of the interruption of the Order of St. Tetrimon's work against the Covenant. This is God's work.

Anyway, I didn't actually kill this capsuleer at all, just her ship. She warped away in her capsule and delivered the polemic I've just described. You could even argue there's no point in killing them, because a TEBS cycle and a new ship and they'll be back. That 'cycle' will repeat, forever.

As long as capsuleers exist, the names may change, but the game will always stay the same.

That is a terrifying concept...

If Only Bombs Were Legal in Low-Security Space

 

The Ahbazon system in Genesis. Yesterday

It's been some time now since a direct stargate link between the State and the Empire was restored - in record time, it should be said - after Niarja was drawn into Triglavian Abyssal Deadspace, and, in all likelihood, lost forever; severing the previous direct link between our two great civilisations. 

'Our' end of the new link is in the Ahbazon system. 

It is now permanently camped:

The tactical situation at the Hykkota gate in Ahbazon, obtained while station-keeping at-range in a stealth bomber under full EMCON. Non-detection by these scumbags confirmed.

Thousands of lives and billions of ISK are lost every day as a capsuleer fleet sits on this gate and destroys anything that passes through it in a constant orgy of piracy and looting. They are able to do this because the shady bureaucrats of CONCORD have determined that the Ahbazon system should have a system security status of 0.4.

Let that sink in. The Amarrian end of the only direct interstellar hyperspace transport link between the State and the Empire is in low-security space, which means the Navy is legally powerless to do anything about the pirate capsuleers, despite there being a Navy facility within sight of the gate.

This is the cluster we live in today. Corrupt, shady, impenetrable bureaucracy with multiple hidden agendas on one side, and pure sociopathic greed on the other. Perhaps they are all one and the same.

The same legal fine print is the reason why it is not currently possible to launch a volley of bombs at that gate camp and dispense with it in short order, as would be God's will. A few days of sustained bombing would see an end to it for good. With bombs, there may be collateral damage, of course, but that would be a price worth paying. Knowing capsuleers as I do though, this would probably result in reprisals in the form of an escalation to multiple 'wardecs' across several regions and the loss of countless further lives. I doubt the LUMEN board would accept this...

A fleet of Dreads would also do it since Dreads in lowsec is permitted, but that would be hard work. Hassle. It would take time to set up. It would also be a siren call to every scumbag for twenty light-years around. And we don't have Dreads anyway.

No, just picture it: the righteous and cleansing holy fire from a fleet of bombers instantaneously turning these infidels into ash, that would gently float away on the solar wind. And then doing it again the next day after they 'reship'.

But CONCORD won't permit it.

This means then, that CONCORD's bureaucratic authority is more powerful than God's will.

Was that a heresy.?

Has It Really Come To This?

Amarr Prime, 5/8/124 

Another Foundation Day is upon us. It is once again time to praise God and all that is Holy Amarr - its people, its territories, its faith - and give our thanks to the Great Prophet himself for establishing his church on Athra - Amarr Prime - all those millennia ago.

Khimi Harar's Foundation Day Parade played its customary part:

Foundation Day is a time for the rest of New Eden to look to Amarr as the example to follow; and for us to look forward piously, righteously, to the time in the future when all of New Eden will be united as one Holy Amarr, for the time will come. Maybe next year, maybe centuries from now, or millennia.

It is God's will.

We will prevail.

We are in no rush...

Amarr Victor!

And yet...

Lately I've been having this recurring dream, where I take a Providence into the Halls of Liberation above Pator IV and detonate its engines, just to get things started, so that all the outstanding business can be settled once and for all. 

It's not personal, it's strictly faith...

The Societas is moderate. I am moderate, I believe in our mission of diplomacy above violence. I really do. The Pax Amarria of Heideran VII and his advocacy of peaceful relations is the way, the example. But these dark thoughts occasionally come to me when my subconscious mind is filtering the activities of the day. Like on this Foundation Day when the terrorists of Ushra'Khan attempted to disrupt our parade formation with a large fleet of Thrashers, right above Amarr Prime, above the Holy Sanctuary itself, right in front of the Empress Catiz Honor Guard (peace be upon her).

My God, the sheer audacity of this, an act that was nothing to do with causing material loss; instead an act designed only to cause a loss of face, of prestige, to Khimi Harar.

If this is what we're up against, there can be no peace until the surfaces of all the worlds of those who will not believe are melted by the Holy Light of one thousand Doomsdays.

We've done it before (up to a point), we may have to do it again.

You cannot reason with the unreasonable.

When nobody will listen, the Word is not enough. Diplomacy is not enough.

One must be persuasive.

The rational part of me knows that not all capsuleers are terrorists, scumbags, criminals. and abusers of their incredibly fortunate position as pseudo-ersatz-immortals of great wealth and power and capability. It's just a minority, in the grand scheme of things.

 

But every day I read the news and it gets more insane.

And what has the cluster come to, when I, a former member of the pacifist Signal Cartel, have become a fleet commander!

Where is my path taking me..?!

Drugs, Guns, Booze

The Vicinity of the Fourth Moon of Jita IV, earlier this year

'This place is unbelievable. You know ever since they built the extension, that's no space station anymore, it's another moon. I don't know why they don't just call it that. Tow it into orbit around the planet and leave it there. But yeah then they built the elevator, so at least there's that.'

'You can get anything you want in this place. Anything. Think of anything you might want no matter how straight-up or deviant you are, and somebody else will be doing it here. Or selling it for that matter. Commerce is the only religion here. Vices, virtues; sins, morals;  redemption, ruin; it's got the lot. Fortunes are won and lost, sometimes all in the same day. To most Caldari this place is a cathedral. Where else can a dress cost more than a battleship? How messed up is that?'

'Nobody knows where this place is controlled from. How can you control anything so big from one place? Easier to think of it as a microcosm of New Eden itself. You know, different regions. But then it's also the purest expression of the free market that has ever existed, and ever will exist. Nothing but the market. No borders, no regions. Everything comes from the market and everything gives to the market. The market giveth and the market taketh away.' 

'You know there was the Amarrian who lived here and went mad and started rounding up Matari - he'd advertise some sort of tribal reunion or something and they'd show up - and then he'd lock them in a cargo container. The inside of the container would be full of lights and cameras and audio. He'd hack into a live broadcast feed, he'd take the container out in his ship and cast it into the atmosphere of the gas giant and recite Amarrian scripture to them as they got incinerated, and this is what he'd broadcast live. I mean what a sicko. He kept going on about "cleansing infidels with holy fire". He did this twice a day for about five days before he disappeared. I mean somebody must have got to him, right?'

'This place kinda polices itself. There's a security staff of some kind, and there are thousands of them, but they only investigate high level stuff that interests them. Think about it, the place is so big you can't police it. Keep a low profile here and you can get away with anything. Murder is rife. Rife I tell ya. Don't get me started on what goes on right outside the front door with all them eggers. They're out of control I tell ya. But then without them this place would still be a manufacturing plant for the Navy.'

'I took a job on a loading dock for a few days while I was on layover between assignments. I was bored, really, you know, 'cos even in a place like this you can still get bored. But I got scared to death so I quit. I saw a dude get chopped in half by falling armor plates and they just left his dead body lying there, I think they put cones round it. It was like an hour before some robot cleaned him up. I saw a dude get dissolved in front of me when some nuke shells he was handling leaked on him. It ate through the damned floor and landed on some other dude's head on the deck beneath and there was just his legs left. And then I saw some really shady stuff like containers full of active stasis pods where the manifest said biomass for clone regeneration, so that was literally like people who thought they were colonists or passengers or something but they were going to end up having their bodies used for parts or their minds replaced with something else. It was going to somewhere in Delve. I mean, Delve! You know who operates there don't you? And nobody said a damned thing!'

'The volume of trade in this station at any given time exceeds all the other trade hubs in New Eden combined by a hundredfold or more. The Grand Concourse is so big you can live your whole life there and never see all of it. It's so big it has weather. Actual clouds. It rains. I'm serious. Get me another drink will ya?'

'I heard somebody does actually live in a penthouse apartment right at the top of that tower. But nobody knows who. Maybe it's like some sort of God. But then I heard there's a room up there that has a portal to UUA-F4 in it. You never know. This is Jita, it could be anything. I mean a large part of the whole station is given over to engineering and maintenance and manufacturing the equipment needed just to run it, just to keep it going. But even then the place is still massive. There are huge spaces that have a biosphere or terrarium or whatever the word is. There are communities that live in them that probably don't realise they're in a space station.' 

'I think it's a mining station down there. DCM runs the elevator. I think it could be a theme park. Not many people come back. One-way tickets are very popular I hear. Don't know why. It's an airless moon. Some people just love a hard time. Maybe it's full of monks. But this is not Domain. Maybe it's the Feds. There's a lake you can swim in. It's under a bubble. In low gravity. Imagine that!'

'You know how they say you can get away with anything? There was this woman who ran an organ-harvesting operation, something to do with biomass for clones or whatever. I never saw this place myself but there was an advert on holo that ran for a couple of weeks. "Experience life as a capsuleer" it said. Plug you into it somehow and you'd do some sort of video game capsuleer holo-immersion thing in your head but it was really a euthanasia machine. People would pay this woman a bunch of money and they'd think they were experiencing capsuleer death, you know, she'd kill them and they'd be excited about it. I mean a capsuleer simulator? Didn't the name tell them anything? That lot regenerate afterwards. Some people are just idiots. But then the worst of it is I heard the the other thing she'd do is sell some of the meat to restaurants without them knowing what it really was and she made a ton of money and left for Molden Heath. She was never caught. I heard it was human ears in fried batter, you know, people loved it!'

'The holo billboards on the outside are bigger than battleships. You know in different radio frequencies they're brighter than the sun. The power generation for that, you could run a planet. This place couldn't exist without ISK. It is ISK. But ISK doesn't exist because it's not a physical currency. There's your paradox. This place is so big, if you blew it up you'd get a nebula. A nebula of money.'

'I'll tell you what it is. It's like a damned ant farm. With spaceships.'

Excerpts from 'Rough Guide to the Trade Hubs of New Eden, Vol 1: Caldari Navy Assembly Plant, Jita IV-4  - Chapter 10: Culture and Lifestyle - What to Expect When You Visit'