Khanid: What A Time To Be Alive

Meanwhile, back in Khanid, the political situation in the separate universe of the empyreans has changed totally since the last time I reported on it. Where once it was MORTR and DRWIN and the Khanid Coalition against enemies that I can't even remember, now it's DRWIN vs Pandemic Horde locked in a battle throughout Southern Khanid for valuable resource-rich moons otherwise known as 'R64s'. The Royal Khanid Navy remains content to leave us to it.

I was going to get into an update on the current state of affairs in Khanid Lowsec, but then I got the text below from corporation boss Crystalline Entity yesterday. He wrote it in the third person. He must have been on the kanar again.

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[Gehi IX/Royal Khanid Navy/In-Station Associate Corporation Channel:[PHP1] mode:secure/yes/no/none/recipients:redact/visuals:attached]

[msg:3/2/118 - 2214]
[Subj: Chairman's Report]
 

Crystalline sat there brooding; contemplating the last few busy, hectic and bloodthirsty months.

Much had changed. Mortum Ravagers collapsed due to conflicts within its leadership structure as to the direction of the alliance. Some individuals had left to launch a campaign in Immensea as part of the Darkness coalition. Others had left to join The Initiative and aid them in their wars - a war without end, the black universe of New Eden.

 

It was said that the ancestors that founded New Eden had been looking to escape the violence of their galaxy. How that had failed...

The remaining Mortum corporations polled their members and elected to join the Darwinism alliance. Darwinism was always the primary leader alliance in the Khanid Coalition and seemed to be the logical choice.

Pandemic Horde are now the new enemy. Horde is made up of pilots that are individually skill-poor and pretty bad when you catch one on their own, but when Horde is poked as a whole, they can pull 150-man fleets together easily and never without their parent alliance being far away to tell them what to do (although they always claim they can stand on their own collective two feet). Darwinism has to call in many favours from a number of different alliances to match those numbers, although Horde always spins it to their members that they have more "groups" facing them instead of numbers. Heh, spin!

Darwinism continues to be very effective pirates but sometimes struggles in large fleet engagements, purely because the numbers involved on each side is usually the deciding factor, and Horde remains able to call on a large agency of capsuleers whose ambition outweighs their talent (and where that talent appears limited to the ability to talk smack in Local).

 

There had been five large scale engagements against Horde over the past few months, all over valuable towers. Only one engagement could be truly considered a proper victory. Let the academics argue over ISK-equivalent-killed vs number-of-ships-lost vs ships-holding-the-field, thought Crystalline as he poured himself another glass of kanar.

Our corporation Outdated Host Productions is doing well with a number of new active and keen members being recruited since Mortum fell apart. Combat activity continues to increase in Khanid (even if losses are mounting more heavily than expected) and the region is an ongoing buzz of activity.

These are good times. Special projects are underway, doctrines and tactics are improving constantly and the battle for Khanid and Querious is intensifying.

Watch this space... 

[msg:ENDS]

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[PHP1] continues to recruit. Wanna try something new? Come to Khanid and join us!

The Ni-Kunni Capsuleer Development Foundation

1.1.118. Drinking establishment in a side-street off Avenue Of The Water Barons in the city of Grava-Kunstler, on Mishi IV

Year Crossing is celebrated in a number of ways across New Eden. For me, I went planetside, back to the homeworld, my adopted home town and my apartment. Alisu even went to the trouble of abandoning her own obligations during this festival - her famous artist husband and his entourage - in order to join me, which I was really pleased about.

We were sat in the corner of a bar, partly to shelter from the abysmal weather outside. A planet without axial tilt or elliptical orbit is seasonless; but Mishi IV generates most of its climate from internal heat through tidal interaction with its single moon and the system's other planets.

A rotating planet has diurnal variation of temperature and therefore weather. The oceans, artificially-created by the Ancestors during the pre-Dark Ages era as a terraforming attempt, generate weather just like they do on any other planet: heat causes evaporation, water vapour builds up and moves inland somewhere because the thermal ascent of air masses over the tundra causes a vacuum at the surface that must be filled, and eventually one of the 'seasonal' storms occurs: massive cyclonic systems that dominate the hemisphere and release torrential downpours of the morbidly salty ocean water that eventually becomes part of this planet's economy (you know where Aridian Black Salt comes from, right?.

I saw this latest storm from orbit when I arrived here in The Aridia Express two days previously. It was sat right over the top of Grava-K.

The storm was still active when I reached Grava after the requisite 41 hours transit time from my hangar at Mishi VIII (non-warp-capable transatmospheric shuttle etc.). The storms take days to work through, then that's it for rainfall for about eight months because on a seasonless planet, nothing changes quickly, then it happens again.

So from the safety and warmth of the small side-street bar that Alisu and I were sat in, the soundtrack from the band in the corner carried a background hiss caused by the heavy rain splashing on the tiled pavement outside and forming small streams in the concave drainage channel carved into its centre. What few people there were outside studiously avoided going near it while running for shelter. What few children there were still out at this hour after dark, joyfully ran down the centre of it, kicking its contents all over everybody else they saw. The drainage channel stream reflected and distorted the image of the multi-coloured neon sign above the entrance to this place in a manner that made its name resemble another word entirely: a Caldanese swear word. Knowing Alisu's artist set as I did, one of whom owned this bar, I expected that was fully intentional.

Bar name as art installation, visible only a few nights a year.

The night after Year Crossing should have seen a seamless continuity of partying, but the weather had made most of the lightweights call time early. Servitor drones wheeled around the bar's floor instead of the servile, Vitoced-up Minmatar you would find in establishments like this on worlds closer to the core i.e. anywhere east of Aridia. At the centre of that floor was a fountain that was symbolically dry; something to do with respect for the rarity of usable water on this planet. In contradiction, there was no shortage of booze and chai though. Equally incongruously, there was a large fish mounted on the wall that had been subjected to an averagely-skilled taxidermy, a plaque underneath it announcing that this was the largest fish ever caught in the saline seas of Mishi IV; seas that should be devoid of life altogether but for an evolutionary quirk involving blood and acid or something or other.

The rest of the patrons in here were unambiguously middle-class Ni-Kunni: women not wearing the traditional veils because the sun had set an hour earlier, and men with weather-worn faces that betrayed lifetimes of forging a living out of the planet's deserts. Here among this crowd was me, the conditionally-immortal capsuleer, and Alisu, whose father was a Holder which made her a noblewoman, socially-outranking everyone in the city. Not that you would notice given her understated dress tonight. A keen-eyed observer might notice the self-assuredness with which she conducted herself, a trait unique to those on this planet exempt from an economic bottom line, but in here, tonight, that didn't matter.

31.12.117. 21:35 hrs.

The previous night - Year Crossing itself - we'd met in my apartment again. Alisu had redecorated it in the sparse style of a temple while I was away and without me asking her to. Alisu later commented on the extraordinary smoothness of my skin while we were in bed.

"I should confess something", I'd said. I could have just told her a lie of convenience about some new formula of neuroembryonic fluid.
"Remember me telling you about jump clones?" I said.
"Yeah?"
"I'm in one now. That baby-smooth skin you're talking about is a by-product of regeneration."

Alisu hesitated and raised an eyebrow at me as if I had just arrived by materialising before her as a ghost. She followed this inquiry by sweeping her hair away from her eyes as if to get a better look at me.

"You're a clone. I know how it works," she said. Just then, as she rolled off me, the golden light of the magic sunset hour flooding in from the slatted blinds in the window to our right, fell upon her body in a manner that made me never want to leave this place. Alisu was awesome. She was a walking work of art. She had an elaborate vine tattoo that went the full length of her right leg, up around her back and ended at her left shoulder, and every inch of it was on display right now, in the evening light, where it occurred to me that Alisu had planned this - that she'd redecorated my apartment in order to place herself at the centre of this tableau of her own design. Her famous artist husband had done the tattoo himself and signed it in a signature small enough to be invisible unless you knew where to look. I wasn't sure whether his signature was a statement of ownership. I was appalled by that possibility because of all that it implied about Amarrians.

I continued with the thread of confession I'd started: "This time I travelled to Chibi from Danera by jump clone -"
"I love it when you talk shop."
"- and I travelled from Chibi to Mishi in my Astero."
"So? You're here."
"I mean I'm in a different body from the one you saw every time before."
"I wish I could do that," she said. She started looking me up and down as if making mental notes. "I could get up to all sorts of trouble, and travelling around this planet takes so damn long these days, and I could renew my body every six months, change all my tattoos, and -"
"Are you saying you're not concerned about, you know, the religious, or metaphysical aspects of it?"
Alisu propped her head up on her elbow and laughed.
"Oh come on, you know I hardly practice, and when I do it's just for show like the rest of them. All of them. This jump clone thing is no different from what you already do. Besides, I've told you before I find you capsuleers fascinating. You're not the only capsuleer I've met you know - my own brother, remember? The 'Goon', you called him. You know half the people in this city would worship you as a goddess if they knew what you did for a living. All you have to do is show them what's on the back of your neck."

She was referring to the upper cervical socket at the base of my skull. The one that would be visible if I didn't wear high-collared outfits outside. I hide the visible manifestations of my status because I come here to immerse and be indistinct.

I should have changed the subject. "No well the reason I brought that up is because my mother only recently started talking to me again after about eight months, because she couldn't handle the idea of her daughter not being dead when the body she gave birth to doesn't exist anymore."
"That's awful. That's actually some twisted logic. You'd think she'd be extravagantly grateful for her daughter's inability to be die. Your immortality."
"Yeah well it's all resolved now thanks to my father's insistence. Only now though, after I've been doing this for a year."
"Good. That's good. "
"I just thought it might come between us. Between this."
Alisu smiled. "No way."
There was no point in arguing with her. Ni-Kunni women are neither reticent nor prudish. I had underestimated Alisu again, and was about to do so a third time.
She got out of bed, walked over to the wall, and retrieved bottles from a shelf. She carried them back to the bed conspiratorially.
"What are they?" I asked.
"They're oils. Your friend Taltha told me what she uses on you when you regenerate. She sent some bottles of it by way of a friend of a friend who was passing this way. The shuttle brought them in the mail from VIII. Now turn over."
In a reflexively-indignant manner, I asked her: "How the hell did you know about Taltha?"
"I read your journal that you publish for all to see, remember? How many Dr Taltha Romeros do you think there are in the clone bay in Hedion University? I contacted her. We had quite the chat."
This was another example of how Ni-Kunni women can get anybody to agree to anything. There was no way Taltha would normally tolerate the idea of me being with someone else, because she's a True Amarr and occasionally behaves as such. The next time I regenerated in Taltha's clone bay in Conoban would be an interesting experience and potentially combative...
Alisu returned to the bed and said: "Right then, turn over."
I did as she said and replied: "Yeah, OK, well, just don't get any of that stuff in my implants."

An hour later, Alisu said offhandedly and incidentally: "This new body of yours tastes different."

What??

* * *

1.1.118. 19:54 hrs.

In the bar, the next night. The same night as when this journal started. Our reunion of last night's Year Crossing had given way to the risk of becoming a couple. That wasn't part of the plan at all...

We'd asked one of the servitor drones to deliver every form of chai on the menu at twenty minute intervals and to send the bill to Alisu's husband. We sat listening to the band in the corner for most of the time. They weren't much good, but everybody appeared polite and tolerant. I put my datapad on the table next to an empty bong a previous customer had left there and which still smelled of the house specialty.

The datapad chimed occasionally with a message from the Trident mailing list our alliance used. More News From Khanid Again. Capsuleer stuff. Doctrines, fits, yada, yada, yada. Which alliance was I actually in this week?  More fights, A2-V27, Gehi, Pandemic Horde or Legion or whichever it was. Something about 'r64'.The failed nullsec roam of last month (last year?) and my solo dash back to Khanid through the worst parts of southern null seemed a lifetime ago. Another clone, another lifetime.

A ground car splashed to a stop outside in the rain. It was a taxi. Three people got out of it and pushed each other through the bar's front door. They looked like students. A loud crash announced them as their chaotic arrival knocked over a servitor drone. Glass, beer, chai and people scattered everywhere. For a moment a fight looked imminent.

Another notification arrived on my datapad telling me the corporate dividend was in.

"Hey, I'm a billionaire now!" I blurted out.
One of the women on the table next to us turned and looked at me. Ooops.

Alisu raised a curious eyebrow at me again: "Interstellar Kredits?"

"Yeah."

"That means you're the wealthiest person on this planet by a factor of about five, right?"

"ISK means nothing planetside Ali. All I can do with it is buy space stuff with it."

"So? Convert it into hard currency. Give me some of it." As she said this she winked at me.

"Actually I was thinking about how I might give some of it away. I've been thinking about this for a while. It's not like it's all I'll ever have. What do I need a billion ISK for?"

"Invest it here? You'd become a goddess twice over. They'd name cities after you. As long as you get it past the Kador Family and the Ministry of Internal Order. Actually the amount of bureaucracy there - they don't like change and they don't like people stealing their thunder. I don't think the Kador bunch would notice though."

"No. Not here. I'm talking about other Ni-Kunni out there in space."

"The Solitude Enclave?"

"You've heard of them?"
"Of course."

"Something I did think about was the Body Resculpting Certificate."

"What's that?"
"It allows a one-time regeneration in a body with different features that you determine beforehand, and that becomes your new clone from then on."

"You can change your appearance?"

"Yeah. I thought about changing gender. Becoming male for a year or two, just to see what it's like."

"That could be interesting", she leant towards me and whispered: "Very interesting." Alisu was only thinking about sex. 

So was I.

"Actually I don't think they let you change gender," I said, "- which is odd given that capsuleers were a Jovian invention and that lot are genderless hermaphrodite freaks."

"- and hairless", Alisu said.

I looked at the wall momentarily and imagined the image of the mythical Miko Bour staring back at me: Bour, the archetypal Jovian and the only Jovian anyone actually knows anything about.

Alisu said "Why is it that in every image of a Jovian you ever see, they all wear black? How boring."

I momentarily drifted off into making mental notes involving a plan to explore the Curse region, the seat of the Second Jove Empire. The Heaven Constellation and the Utopia system being at the epicentre of this fading legend. I could pre-position the Astero nearby then jump-clone into it at the right time. It should be teeming with undiscovered Jove relics - even after all this time - that would look great on my shelf back at Danera IV; my growing souvenir shelf that currently features, among other ephemera, the grotesque, burned and flash-frozen head of a Covenant 'Foreman' in a jar; the distilled, orange capillary fluid of a rogue drone in an ornamental glass flask with a large rubber stopper in it to prevent what is essentially the drone's cyber-blood and the nanites within it from getting out; a box full of Sleeper cruiser shrapnel that is of a colour that there is no word to describe (the colour of Anoikis...); a copy of the hilarious comic 'Max Amarria'; an example of the -

 "Hello?", Alisu rapped her knuckles on my head. "You were away again. You were out there weren't you?"
"Sorry Ali, pardon? What were you saying?"
"Tell me more about this plan of yours to divest yourself of your wealth in the manner of a saintly benefactor. Are you going to just hand it out on the street or in stations?"
"No. Other capsuleers. About twice per month I have cause to return to Hedion University in Conoban. Or at least pass nearby. It's only slightly more than a year since I graduated from there but I see all those rookies undocking in their Impairors and there's a form of pathos about it. I think about how awesomely inexperienced they all are - how inexperienced I was - and how some of them go on to quit because their expectations and, I don't know, the burden of reality I suppose. There's an inequality."

"Why would you quit after all that training?"

"Exactly."

The servitor arrived with another shipment. Right on time. I think by now we were both somewhat tipsy. The band in the corner had finished their set and now the ignored full-height holovid on the wall had regained people's attention. The news was the weather interspersed with Year Crossing clips from places other than Aridia. The bulk of it was centred around Dam-Torsad on Amarr because it was Amarr Certified News.

I turned back to Alisu and said: "So I'm thinking of hanging out there and anonymously donating moderate amounts of ISK to capsuleers that identify as Ni-Kunni rookies. Only us, mind. And only for a limited period of time too."

"How much?" Alisu said.
"A few million. Maybe ten or twenty. Too much would blow their minds and lead them down a path to indolence. Laziness. ISK should still be earned, Ali. You should still die a few times for it."
Alisu looked at me like she still didn't quite believe that I clone myself and have done so multiple times, despite what she'd seen the previous night and all those nights beforehand. Despite it being damned well obvious because it just was. Did she not believe me? Did she not take me seriously?
"What will you call it, this thing you want to do?" she said.
I thought about this for a moment, then it came to me in a flash: "The Ni-Kunni Capsuleer Development Foundation."
Alisu stood, turned to the rest of the bar and shouted: "Here's to the N-KCDF!"
She raised her glass. Nobody batted an eyelid. At least two people were still engaged in clearing up the mess from the fallen servitor.
She tried again by shouting: "I SAID, HERE'S TO THE N-KCDF!"
A wet, heavy cloth flew through the air at her and she caught it. It had come from the guy behind the bar who knew Alisu well enough to get away with shouting at her to shut up.
She laughed and returned to her seat.

N-KCDF sounds like a nullsec system designator. Perfect

Alisu leaned in towards me again. "You can stay for a few more days, right?"
I looked down at my glass and saw, in the still liquid within it, a window into the unending bickering of alliance politics. It never bloody ends. Ever. It's all based around property and 'kills', yet none of them seem perturbed by the essential truth that there is no victory without a defeat, and when nobody dies, nobody is defeated. Thus the cycle repeats indefinitely without resolution.

At that moment a collective groan sounded out across the bar. I looked at the giant wall-filling holovid opposite, which was showing a news report on how the storm we were enduring had reached Mishi IV's sole spaceport, so flights off-planet were grounded for the duration - which would be at least three more days.
I leaned in towards Alisu, took hold of her hand and spoke softly:
"Yes, Ali. I can stay as long as you like..."

Thera Is A Harsh Mistress And So Is Paragon Soul

The Set-Up

The call came right out of the blue:

Drop everything! If there was anyone who could track down a wormhole for this job, it was me.

The financial incentive helped too.

With Hayabusa's Vmax/warp of 12.78 AU/s I made it from Dan to Nand in record time (sidebar: Danera and Nandeza are less than six light years apart, yet to travel there the 'normal' way requires a detour of 15 jumps well to the galactic south and back up again in the manner of traversing a valley between mountains. It's just the way it is).

For the record: I found a superb route to Geminate and the Eastern Drone Lands via the 1,300 light-year Anoikis Detour (J110121 - a Wolf-Rayet system - below).

In Nandeza, I also found a direct shortcut to Stain and another one to somewhere in Aridia. The decision that came back later on (along with 50 mil in the bank) was: Stain. For the record again, I'd have preferred to go east. For reasons that will become apparent, I suspect the others now wish we had too, now that we know what we now know...

The Warm-Up

I did the jump-clone shuffle, left my science head in Danera and emerged in Nandeza in my 'empty' head. The one that likes to shoot first and not even ask questions. The one that still finds bad sitcoms funny.

We set off from our station at Nandeza IX and headed for the wormhole to Stain. We found that it had disappeared. Evaporated. I swear it looked stable when I'd scanned it and reconnoitred it just five hours earlier, and nothing in the records suggested it was reaching the imminent end of its life. When I found it, it wasn't even wobbling (did you know you can tell how unstable a wormhole is by looking at its event horizon? The closer it is to collapsing, the more 'wobbly' it gets).

This is the risk with actively using these things to get around. They don't do as they're told and they can ruin your night. This would not be the only one that ruined ours...

Plan B: Thera. Thanks to the excellent work of the Signal Cartel and their 'EVE Scout' service, we merely had to look up where the nearest route to the Thera system can be found. On this particular evening, Thera and its hub of 'magic doors' was facilitating a route to Feythabolis from Ashmarir, which was not far from us.

Ashmarir: gateway to Querious, gateway to the feared Khanid Lowsec Pipe and part of the region's central 'desert' where you can travel through up to eight systems without seeing a single orbital. There are only 38 orbitals in the whole of Khanid for that matter, and only five between here and Aridia; yet we have one of the most spectacular scenic views in the whole of New Eden. I didn't notice until now just how undeveloped Khanid actually is.

Once again, we set off. Endiir brought the means to find the wormhole to Thera in his Hecate destroyer, and sure enough, we found the magic door.

Some of us made it through to Thera, including me -

- then the wormhole collapsed!!!!

 

So now, two of us (FC/boss Tryce and wormhole scanner Endiir) were still in Khanid while me, Gaybrushki, Nizzle Ma and Nitereper were trapped, 1,300 light-years away in the Thera system. Just take a minute to get your head around that: our two groups were separated by a distance that is more than ten times the north-south extent of the New Eden cluster. Without wormholes - which, let's face it, are capricious, mercurial zephyrs of the cosmos that are not meant to be used as a transport network - it would take several hundred thousand years to transit back to New Eden at sub-warp speed, even if we knew exactly which direction it was in, which we don't.

We were really in the shit now...

...unless we could procure the means to scan wormholes ourselves, or if Tryce and Endiir could locate another entrance from their side.

Cue suspenseful music...

Will they make it? Who survived and who got blown up in a ball of fire? Tune in next week to see if our intrepid heroes can find their way out of Thera and continue their small-gang roam!


Actually we did both.

Thera is in no way a trade hub and doesn't possess a functioning industry because its planets are quarantined. Nevertheless, I knew there was some token trading going on here in the Sanctuary facilities, mainly in armaments. Signal Cartel's activities indicated a strong likelihood there would also be scan probes for sale here, albeit at a substantial and predictable markup. Sure enough, there were.

Note: if you ever get trapped in here like we did, then this is your way out. Don't worry about the inevitable price-gouging. Just remember it for future reference: bring your own stuff here and sell it to trapped capsuleers like yourself. Capsuleers like us.

Fast-forward about half an hour by which time Tryce and Endiir had found another way in via Genesis...

I found the wormhole that led to Feythabolis with what was now my hybrid explorer/interceptor.

But then...

This wormhole was camped by some group looking to interdict gangs like us, probably just for fun, possibly because this was a premium shortcut to distant nullsec territory. Bubbles blew up, ships appeared, Nitereper was destroyed, and Endiir and his Hecate were destroyed. We jumped back and forth through the hole a couple of times to try and shake them off.

The Roam...

We made it through to Feythabolis, but just a handful of us were left -

- a handful of disparate stragglers, in damaged ships, stranded light-years from home, left to wander Southern Null with no hope of rescue etc. etc. Cue even more dramatic music in the background...

We did the lot: Feythabolis, Esoteria, Omist, Paragon Soul. We found nothing except occasional neutrals, Blood Raider enclaves (one of which was the domain of the Covenant officer Mizuro Cybon), Angel Cartel gate camps near non-standard stargates, other faint signs of human habitation, but nothing else -

- except a noteworthy scenic view.

There were more clusters of disruptor bubbles that may have been here for years.

I lost count of how many systems we searched for a suitable target. Every neutral we saw registered in the Local channel appeared to be docked in a station.

We even passed through the most southerly systems in all of New Eden when we got to Paragon Soul -

- home to featureless ice worlds and gas giants that display no history and answer no questions. Does anyone know how many human settlements there actually are out here other than Kuvakei's sick experiments in artificial totalitarianism? Have all of them been subsumed by Kuvakei? 

Then, in 2I-520, we found a Harbinger. It was doing that standard nullsec tactic of planet-hopping between stargates as a means of avoiding disruptor bubbles and scanning the gates in advance to see if there is any 'trade' there. In here the 'trade' was us lot.

Now here's the thing: if we hadn't been depleted in numbers, if Endiir's Hecate was still here and we had the full complement of interceptors, we could have taken the Harbinger down. But we couldn't bring enough firepower to bear. The 'Harby' just sat there and the capsuleer inside it probably laughed as he mentally sent the command to his ship's AI to release two waves of drones upon us.

Tryce's ship was destroyed; so was Nizzle's. Nitereper was killed a second time. Gaybrushki and I retreated and let the Harbinger go on its way. Then we had the indignity of 'killing' the boss and Nizzle in their capsules to facilitate the pod express.

This roam was over - put out of its misery. That Harbinger had done us the favour of administering a coup de grace.

Now I was stuck in Paragon Soul, in hostile territory and without a meaningful human settlement for light-years. I had to get out of here as it would only be a matter of time before Kuvakei's minions found me.

I chilled for a bit and considered my options for getting home.

- I could have self-destructed and taken the pod express myself. I would have woken up in Hedion University in Conoban and probably been subjected to considerable verbal hassle from clone bay boss and occasional lover Dr Taltha over this new failure. Not to mention wasting a Malediction.

- I could have just set course for Nandeza by the most direct route, but didn't feel like risking the notorious gate camps in Delve.

In the end I took advantage of a political situation - our recent (and ultimately short-lived) alliance with Darkness - and headed for the P-ZMZV system in Querious. Darkness had a major facility there that we had docking rights in. That would do for an overnight stop.

I powered up again and set off. As I progressed north through all that ocean of nullsec, each system seemed to merge into the next to form a seamless blur of sameness. Delve, Querious, Period Bloody Basis and its pulsars. All the same. Madness is the only endgame for anybody who lives out here.

I was glad when the Cauldron Nebula and the Vapor Sea finally emerged from the void. The Cauldron was home.

After what felt like years, I arrived in P-ZMZV and found the safe harbour of 'blues' I was looking for. 

I docked and decided to use the pod gantry to get unjacked in order to cleanse myself of the total failure of this roam along with the sticky capsule fluid, with artificial gravity washing both away down the drain.

I spoke to nobody while I was here. Nullsec stations don't have the cosmopolitan mix that even the most devout Amarr facilities have. Here it's all cliques and hushed tones. Suspicion is the default state, especially when one's hosts are at war.

The only reason I could dock here at all was because the previous week our alliance had agreed some diplomatic thing with Darkness involving us establishing a presence in Querious. We started getting all manner of comms and mails telling us - ordering us - to go here and there and everywhere, telling us what we could and could not do, and achieving nothing other than total confusion. It was obvious even to my inexperienced eyes within just a few days of the agreement that there was no coherent plan behind any of it and that it could not last. I resolved to get planetside as soon as I could and just wait it out; to see how the dust settled.

By the time you read this, our temporary alliance with Darkness that allowed me to dock here will have reached the end of its short noisy fuse and exploded, taking Mortum Ravagers with it as collateral damage. Some of the ex-Mortum lot are still in Querious now. What they are doing there is - who cares? We in [PHP1] on the other hand, have aligned ourselves with Darwinism - our third alliance in a year - and now have what amounts to the Freedom of Aridia. My beloved Aridia: home of my ancestral homeworld.

From the standard issue couch I sat on in the standard Gallente-template Captain's Quarters here in P-ZMZV, all that confusion and low signal-to-noise ratio still lay in the future. From this couch, over a few beers, I considered the essential truths that not every roam can be a success; that I was lucky to escape with my ship intact on this one thanks to learning when to make a tactical withdrawal; and that most alliance politics is garbage.

Postscript: I left P-ZMZV the next day and routed back to Khanid via the Sib constellation. I found the regional border gate in Efa being camped by the first of a new wave of Drifter Incursions.

So that lot are back now too...

A Closed Gate

I was in Tash-Murkon doing missions for the House. I have no particular affinity for House Tash-Murkon although I do on the whole approve of their more tolerant attitude to life - in that respect, think of House T-M as a half-way House between House Khanid and House Sarum (what the next ruling lot will actually be like, only the granting of power after the Championships will tell).

What draws me here periodically is the desire to bathe in the hot bath of light from T-M Prime itself which paints a blue wash over everything in the system that I find rejuvenating somehow; along with the concurrent desire to face off against Sansha Kuvakei's minions who populate this sector in preference to the Covenant.

I brought Sid Vicious to this game and enjoyed taking down Succubi with a single shot, ending the torment of their occupants who allegedly make Amarrian slaves appear opinionated. My combat-mode datalogging recorded 'hit points' on Succubi in four figures once or twice, when the targeting geometry favoured it - when charging at them straight on (zero transverse velocity) and with Gleam S focusing the 100%-proof distilled power of the fusion reactor. To paraphrase something I saw on a holovid once, a light that burns twice as bright burns half as long and Gleam S burns so very brightly. With Gleam crystals, you have to be close enough to count rivets on Succubus hulls, but one shot is all it takes.

Imagine it: pure energy focused through the crystal and brought to bear with the turret, belittling shields, dismissing armour as an irrelevance and puncturing hull like the skin of a balloon. If an access corridor or gangway happens to be the other side of it, the focused beam will part the air in that corridor like a bolt of lightning - a shockwave will expand down that corridor at supersonic speed and kill anyone present long before any explosion, radiation, depressurisation or other trauma gets them. These gunnery implants I'm carrying in my head allow me to visualise like this and riff on it.

It's a beautiful thing.

I digress...

* * *

One of the missions the House sent me on brought me to a dormant, off-grid stargate of Minmatar template, right here in T-M Prime. I can't remember the exact details of the mission other than the gate being besieged by Sansha's Succubi and Phantasms, with crews all too strung out to recognise that the cloud of vented gas around the gate meant nobody was transiting through it any time soon.

This gate though, sitting there in a dormant state, was unexpectedly spellbinding.

The reason why is because there is never any time under normal operations for loitering at stargates in and around the mainstream network. There is absolutely no justification for hanging around them because to do so is to invite any number of dangers: being subjected to the attentions of either a gate-camp, CONCORD or gankers; being cargo-scanned by someone for future reference, being run-over by a decelerating freighter or just having your systems disrupted by the EM/graviton interference that manifests over your audio channels as that unholy choir you always hear when in close proximity - the signature of a power so great that it can reach down into the quantum foam of spacetime and pull open one of those bubbles big enough for you to pass through, into hyperspace, and back out again.

This Minmatar gate didn't make any sound at all. To paraphrase something else I heard once: you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

In being granted the leisure to look around this thing that can defy the laws of the universe (or could do, but has since been rendered inert for some reason), I discovered some aspects of stargate design that I hadn't fully appreciated before, including how damned big they are. 

The site was superficially well-defended and there was some power being supplied to the gate, but nothing moved and nothing twitched - there were no crew here. Maybe that Sansha blockade took them. In destroying those ships, maybe I killed them...

This stargate wasn't the work of Sansha's Nation despite them blockading it. This won't be the only clandestine stargate in the cluster either. There could be a whole sub-network of these things that operates under our noses. Unless the House gets hold of it, some other group is bound to come along and reactivate this thing.

Maybe [PHP1] should.

The Forge, Jita, Freighter Roulette

I've been operating in and around The Forge for a few days because despite being a capsuleer for just under a year now, I had never visited the trade hub in Jita.

Reason: never felt any particular need to go there because for my purposes, Amarr is just as valid as a trade hub and is far more convenient given that I live in the Khanid Kingdom (the fastest route to Jita from Khanid is through Amarr, so why bother going the extra 20 light years?).

I selected Revolution for this trip, which I've optimised for speedy warp and fitted missile turrets (Magnates do not favour any particular weapon system so you can fit whatever you want) for the inevitable encounters with Guristas.

It's worth noting that the journey up here passed the notoriously heavily gate-camped systems of Ashab, Niarja and Madirmilire. Ashab in particular was on form. Anybody who leaves this sector to their autopilot systems is an idiot.

The Forge itself is far busier than our 'neck of the woods'; the sheer number of industrial facilities and orbitals is mind-boggling, even in the Jita system itself - as well as the trade hub there are 13 other stations there, which makes me wonder how that station in particular evolved into being the hub instead of one of the others, especially since its origin is military rather than commercial.

There are some celestials in the State with two or three stations in orbit around them. The Nonni system in Lonetrek has 22 stations in orbit around just six planets and is only 7 AU in diameter.

This is obviously the manifestation of the functioning of the Caldari State and it makes me feel like some sort of monosyllabic backwater hick who can't handle double-digit Locals.

The Forge is also full of incredibly vulnerable freighters all heading for Jita on 'roll-the-dice' suicide missions that the slathering hordes around the Jita undock are all looking to put their stamp on. Bowheads, Orcas, Charons, Obelisks, Providences etc. I saw them all. I safely avoided the slathering hordes of gankers too when I got to Jita, but that was probably only by dint of programming 'Instadocks' and 'Instawarps' into the navigation system and actively using them. There was double the number of capsuleers registered in the Local channel compared to Amarr.

The trade hub. The Capsuleer's Capital City Of New Eden:

The shattered dome icon near the hub - capsuleer anarchy. Surely all those metal fragments and detritus represent a Hazard To Navigation? 

Operating a Bowhead must be like steering an asteroid from the rear. All that space with just the small crew compartment aft. Imagine what it could do if you filled it with explosives?

By the time you read this I'll be back in Khanid. I wonder how long I've really been away, because now Darkness and TMA are 'blue' whereas before I left they were 'red'; the Khanid Coalition no longer exists and we are at war with Pandemic Horde. I'm not actually sure why though.