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.?

The Eye of the Hurricane

Who dares wins

24th Imperial Crusade Advanced Tactical and Strategic Frigate Doctrines, Vol III 

 

LUMEN has resumed fleet patrols of the warzone since the Pochven campaign ended. Our most spectacular 'kill' during the first of this new series of operations was the ambush and destruction of a Hurricane-class battlecruiser, no less, in the Hadozeko system, deep within the Minmatar border zone.

The Hurricane should have been able to make short work of a fleet of frigates, but it was God's will that we should prevail and take advantage of a few tactical errors that the Hurricane's capsuleer commander made during the engagement, most notably not ensuring the destruction of Directrix Lunarisse Aspenstar's Crucifier Navy Issue first, which used its optimised Targeting Disruptors to stop the Hurricane from tracking any of us properly, preventing it from destroying more than the single one of our ships that it did kill - kudos and in fact probably an official commendation to Faith Griffiths for sacrificing her ship by being first on the scene to tackle the Hurricane so that the rest of us could bring it down. 

The Hurricane's commander probably also should not have completely ignored me, for my Tormentor-class frigate TES Fair Warning cut through his armor and hull like a knife through butter once his shields were down, since my ship was outputting over 200 'dps' with Tech II-class Pulse Lasers. It must be said that I did have to nearly melt those guns through overheating them in order to achieve that firepower. And of course I was not the only one there. I'd be very interested to know exactly how much cumulative damage-per-second our fleet of seven frigates applied to the Hurricane. It is noteworthy that mine and Amicia Cora's Tormentors both applied over 56% of the total damage to the Hurricane, according to the independent 'zkill' statistics service. The class's reputation as a point-blank range brawling monster is justified.

Every fight is a learning experience. In the heat of the moment I made at least one mistake: basically forgetting I had ECM drones on board and not using them; although it is questionable what good they would have done against a battlecruiser, but by not using them at all, they did nothing.

But such perfectionism should not detract from the fact that this was an extremely well-planned and executed ambush by our fleet, where the odds were actually not in our favour. 

Our faith in God's will ensured we had the skill and bravery to win this fight.

Amarr Victor.

[Afterword: it's also noteworthy that the whole fight took less time than it took you to read this journal...]

Peace In Our Time

 

- is perhaps an optimistic and even unrealistic attitude to take in the long term (especially with respect to recent 'Emergent Threats'...), but given the status of the border systems between the Empire and the Tribal Hordes and the CONCORD-refereed 'eternal war' between us and them, we must rejoice in the fact that right now all the systems on the Empire's side of the border are safely under the Empire's control and authority once again.

Also, a number of systems on the other side of the border are currently being repossessed and indeed Reclaimed from the Tribal Hordes and will, if God wills it, stay that way, and the proper status quo will return - namely that the Empire will prevail once again and we will be able to reintroduce what our enemies refer to as 'slavery' - which is merely the imposition of the structure and discipline that humanity needs in order to thrive. 

It would also seem that our allies in the State are pushing the Fed back to where they belong. If this resurgence of our two sides is anything to do with Empress Catiz I and her efforts to forge a closer alliance with the State after her ascension to the Throne of Amarr, then the future is indeed bright.

Amarr Victor.

All Roads Lead to Khanid, Part II: Poacher Turned Gamekeeper

The Trailing L5 Point Behind Ibani V, in the Ibani System in 'Cabeki Pocket' aka The Budar Constellation, Khanid - 12/5/119, 1105 hrs

I left the wormhole, because my work there was done.

Shortly afterwards, I left Signal Cartel, because my work there was done too.

It was a sudden thing. In the wormhole, over the course of a single day, I came to a series of realisations about my own ethical stance towards exploring Sleeper and Talocan archaeological relics.

In the wormhole, I'd seen enough, done enough, to know that I could no longer tolerate those archaeological relics and paleo-technological artifacts that I saw there, being plundered, ransacked, stripped, and stolen by capsuleers, all looking to make a quick and dirty profit by taking this stuff to a trade hub and selling it to some collector or industrialist, in return for a bunch of non-existent digital fiat currency that has no intrinsic value in the real world. Plundering those sites, when they actually need to be studied and learned from.

Studied, not sold.

A new, overall awareness arrived in my conscience like a beam laser through my forehead: if I can stop just one of those looters, then one fewer looters out there could make all the difference to understanding what the Sleepers and Talocan were, and to understanding the Drifter threat. It could be me that finds that piece of data that explains where they went and what they were (and are), instead of that data being found by some 'explorer' who doesn't stop to understand the significance of it, and goes on to flog it to some collector who doesn't give a shit, puts it on a shelf and leaves it there, forever undiscovered; or some industrialist who recycles it and turns it into something else, something designed to limit human knowledge rather than expand it.

I have the means to stop looters in their tracks. It is time to use Empress of Amarr as it was designed to be used: not as a ship of peace, but as a protector of a technological faith. It is made of Sleeper tech. It is part of what they were.

So I made the move. I locked the doors to my quarters in the citadel, resigned from Signal Cartel and re-emerged from the wormhole, back into New Eden.

There was just one corporation I wanted to move to.

To return to.

Outdated Host Productions - [PHP1] - the corporation I first joined when I left Hedion University, dozens of lifetimes ago.

I opened [PHP1]'s public channel and reached out. I got a swift and welcoming response, as I knew I would. I'd left on excellent terms 500 days earlier, and it was like I'd never been away. I had missed the Big K and its mostly-uninhabited lowsec 'pipe' that I had re-visited precisely once during my time in Signal Cartel. I missed the calming presence of The Cauldron in my cam drones' synthetic imaging algorithms. I missed Borgin's one-liners and Crystalline's urbane wit and elocution and passion for post-op cuisine. I even missed Jzma and Mechoj's turbulent leadership style (although I found since I rejoined that both are no-longer prominent in the Darwinism alliance now).

I missed the dulcet tones of Sul Glass, Bishop of the Seevadin Constellation - his ongoing doctrinal schism with Amarrian Orthodoxy alive and well (Sec Status -7.6) - now leader of Darwinism, which means Darwinism itself is guided from above. It was all the same old crew: Garen, Gettosmurf, Madrocks and Endiir, all still there like a universal constant (Endiir, what happened to those dreads man??).

Some other names I remembered had moved on since I was last in [PHP1], but that core foundation was still present.

All was well with the universe.

I considered the sudden and radical nature of my personal course-change once again while lobbing massive destruction at somebody's industrial facility today in Ibani - somebody I've never met, never even heard of.

It's about interests and objectives and how they align organically with those of others.

It's how and why, in the cam drone stills you can see here, I'm jacked into a stealth bomber as part of a fleet asserting Darwinism's presence in Khanid.

It's part of my job now, and I like it.

You might wonder how it is possible to live with what outwardly appears to be a complete 180-degree reversal of principle that comes with moving from a pacifism-oriented service corporation, to returning to a corporation that practices piracy and does crimes. The answer is in the principle itself and how it led to the realisation I arrived at that day in the wormhole: I never totally believed in the feasibility of Signal Cartel's pacifist policy in the first place; I just went along with it because it served my purpose to do so for as long as I wanted to stay there. My time in Signal Cartel was overwhelmingly positive, but now its core policy would become an impediment to the preservationist stance that I was about to take up, and as Signal Cartel itself states, if you can't abide by the credo, you can't stay.

I could no-longer abide...

I've left friends behind in Signal Cartel (on good terms, I hope), but progress and change and evolution are the dominant forces in the universe and resistance is futile (where have I heard that before..?).

There is nothing new about any of it. I'm just doing what humanity has always done: looked after number one. But I'm also looking to preserve knowledge.

Explorers: I'm coming for you now...

All Roads Lead to Khanid, Part I: Manifest

The Yulai System, Sanctum Constellation, Genesis. Directive Enforcement Department Logistic Support Station - Yulai VIII (Deck 4, Section 8 - Licensing Dept.)

Weary-looking middle-management-filing-clerk-type enters what back in the day might have been called a 'Records Room', where, back in the day, millions of hard copy files might have been kept in reverent seclusion in a warehouse-sized space, with an army of people tending them in silence like a form of clergy. These days, it's just like a bunch of terminals in a small, under-lit office where no more than five people sit, day after day, performing the never-ending task of updating the DED Starship Registry Database. It's nowhere near as visually impressive. There aren't even any windows in here.

Weary-looking middle-management-filing-clerk-type sits down at his assigned terminal for the day (for hot-desking is a thing at the DED), and logs-in. The second thing that happens during the login process is that The System asks the person logging-in a question. This time it's 'Does your work at the DED fill you with a sense of purpose?'

Middle-management-filing-clerk-type reads this and gets a gigantic flashback to the fork-in-the-road-of-life that was the time when he got chopped after Year One of capsuleer school; an event that caused the kernel of a lifetime of bitterness to form within his then-young soul, a soul too young to recognise that kernel for what it was: the poison of thwarted ambition.

His response to getting chopped was a few wasted years of oblivion spent in bars and pleasure hubs. When the hangover wore off, the opportunity to move sideways into being a regular starship meatbody had kind of passed him by or not even occurred to him (because the glamour of pseudo-immortality is everything!); so the only remaining choice was to return planetside from whence he came, or embark on an oxymoronic 'career in admin' with the DED.

Thus it was, or is, that middle-management-filing-clerk-type reads the question that The System is asking him, here in the present moment, and he sees the abyss of failure encoded within it. He clicks on 'Skip To Main Menu'...

Then the swoosh of the door opening behind him announces the arrival of a boss/leader type, whose name he doesn't even know, because it doesn't really matter. This boss person approaches his burning hot-desk and its expectant terminal and hands him a sheaf of printouts and says: 'Here's today's updates for The System. There's a new one for the Watch List.'

That last sentence generates a brief flicker of interest in the filing clerk. He says: 'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah,' the boss says. 'Legion-class, recently returned from a long deployment to the Anoikis Cluster. Spent the best part of a year there. '

'What's unusual about that? Happens all the time doesn't it?'

'Yes, but this one, its captain has changed employer at the same time. Left a research-focused pacifist group with no record of criminality and joined - or rejoined a group that's based in low-security space. Thing is, she's worked for them before. It's all there in her history. We've seen this pattern many times. It's a slippery slope, and who knows what the hell she's brought back with her from that place.'

Middle-management filing clerk takes the sheaf of papers and turns to his screen. The boss-type turns and swooshes out of the room.

Filing clerk starts typing...

>DED: A DIVISION OF CONCORD

>STARSHIP REGISTRY ENQUIRY: READY

>WATCH LIST: NEW ENTRY

>Legion-class Strategic Cruiser
>Ownership: Private
>Registration: ARX/O/12883745/III
>Name: Empress of Amarr
>
>Crew Manifest (see appendix for further crew details):
>
>Ship's Master: Cassandra Orizi-Habalu-Dannidaana.
>Security Status: 5.0 (provisional - subject to change - see below)
>Personal Details:

Birthdate: 10/28/90.
Ethnicity: Ni-Kunni.
Homeworld: Kor-Azor Prime IV.
Assessment:
Subject is heiress to the Proxima Direct Shipping Company fortune (status restored after recent Imperial decree clarifying capsuleer legitimacy within the Amarr Empire citizenry). Subject also known to possess interests in the Aridia region where she is a prominent political activist in her role as co-founder of the Ni-Kunni Capsuleer Development Foundation. Also known to possess interests in the Genesis, Tash-Murkon and Khanid regions. Operational track record demonstrates non-aggressive tendencies in general, except towards Covenant interests wherever found. However, recent activity involving a prolonged deployment to the Anoikis Cluster with her previous employer indicates the subject retains a strong interest in Jovian/Sleeper/Drifter culture, with a presumed interest in the acquisition of Sleeper-derived technology beyond that which is already developed as part of the baseline architecture of the Legion-class Strategic Cruiser she commands. 

Subject's addition to the Capsuleer Watch List is therefore based on the subject's recent change in employer within the context of the default operational strategy of her new employer, combined with the presence of a former Amarrian Templar in her bridge crew in the role of Chief Weapons Officer [see appendix for full crew manifest], a combination which requires the DED to assume that unverified Sleeper-derived technology will be used in flight operations in low-security space with her new employer outside the authority, control and jurisdiction of DED/CONCORD.
>
>Status: Expected to change. Watch-listed as of 10:49 NEST - 14/11/119.

>FILE Y/N?

Seyllin: A Decade On

'Shattered worlds were once terrestrial planets, torn asunder by some immense cataclysm. All such worlds in the New Eden cluster are products of the disastrous stellar events that occurred during the "Seyllin Incident". However, reports continue to circulate of similar planets discovered in the unmapped systems reached exclusively through unstable wormholes. How these met their fate, if indeed they exist at all, is unknown.'

CONCORD Aura Database
 
Prologue - Cause and Effect

I'm back in the Zoohen system for the first time in a month. I arrived here by way of three wormholes, emerging in the Kador region in a system only six jumps or so from our head office, so it seemed as good a time as any to dock here and find out a) if I still have a job, b) if I still have a quarters of my own because I could not remember whether I'd locked it when I last left, and c) what the hell happened to my pirated, subscription-free Impetus feed that had stopped working a fortnight ago.

I'd got it rigged up through several fluid routers so I could receive it from our citadel in Anoikis over a thousand light-years away. But a fortnight ago, while I was chilling in my quarters in the citadel and watching a new episode of UUA Is So Far Away, right at the point where the heroic exiled Jove is about to get cornered by a load of Society of Conscious Thought agents who want to silence him, the damn screen went black, then a load of noise and random symbols flashed up on the screen, then 'NO SIGNAL', which I thought was ironic.

It can't have been the fluid router(s), because that's quantum entanglement so it's not like you can switch it off. It wasn't the citadel's own comms systems because I had the citadel's engineers check them out, so I had to wait for wormhole geometry to arrange itself favourably enough for me to return to 'The Zoo' and get it fixed, so I could catch up on the show and also avoid finding out what happened until then.

But then I mentioned this the next day to Quinn Valerii while we were in the lounge in our office in this huge citadel, and she said that she had her own Impetus feed and, because she's a Jin-Mei it was totally legit and that she was also a big fan of UUA Is So Far Away and that actually all I had to do was ask.

So back in Zoohen, I got to my quarters and found that the only reason why my special pirated Impetus feed router had dropped was that the damned cleaners had been in my quarters and unplugged it. It blew my mind to think that something as trivial and insignificant as that would have consequences in another location over a thousand light-years away.

But why am I even telling you this?

Because just as a river always finds its course, humans always become accustomed to our surroundings and eventually take everything for granted. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that; if we were constantly amazed by everything around us then we would go insane. Becoming familiar with something is a natural process. Then there's the one about filling our lives with trivial superficial inconsequential ephemera that only wastes our precious, short window of time (unless you're a capsuleer in which case there will always be a tomorrow, I mean I could have travelled to Zoohen just by running a TEBS cycle and self-destructing in the capsule outside the citadel, but I refuse to engage in behaviour like that as it is wasteful and vulgar in its self-indulgence).

Thing is, we frequently ignore the universe trying to tell us how insignificant we are, so we continue to go prodding around in places where we shouldn't, and things happen that remind us of who's in charge; that something happening here can have consequences elsewhere.

The Butterfly Effect.

The Original Shattered Planet

A few days earlier, before I returned to Zoohen, our 'highsec static' manifested one jump away from the Seyllin system. This coincided with me needing to travel to a trade hub to resupply. In this case the Dodixie system was closest and the Seyllin system was on my route, and since I'd never visited Seyllin before it seemed like a no-brainer.

Eight years ago, half a billion people were killed in a single day when Seyllin I was blow-torched by a focused coronal mass ejection from the Seyllin primary. That CME was so violent it destroyed the planet and permanently reduced the mass of the star that produced it, so the Seyllin primary of today is a kind of mutant dwarf blue star that should not exist; but it does exist, and today it sits there and kind of taunts us by making us wonder why it happened and whether it will happen again.

Nearly a decade later, we still don't know exactly, conclusively, why the Seyllin Incident happened. We know that an unstable isotope of Isogen was involved somehow; we know that the exact same stellar disruption event also happened on nine other stars in New Eden simultaneously - to the second - on that day with varying degrees of loss of life; we also now know that of those nine systems, two of them were uninhabited star systems that are not connected to the stargate network; we know that it also happened to at least two systems in Anoikis. The reason why Seyllin is the one everyone remembers is obvious: it had the biggest body count, it was the only event in regulated, populated space - 'empire' space - and it also nearly caused the State and the Fed to go to war again.

Anyone with a cosmic perspective also remembers what else happened in conjunction with this event: immediately afterwards, the traversible wormholes started appearing all over New Eden that allowed us to (re)discover the Anoikis Cluster, to find the remnants of the Sleeper and Talocan presence that somehow made its way there millennia ago, and to start using those wormholes for typically-human selfish desires, ignoring the bigger picture. Only a minority of us are interested in finding the answers, joining the dots, learning the truth about all of it. The rest just want to blow things up.

So for this trade hub run I was using my Astero frigate, a ship that I use as a high-speed, uncatchable frigate-class blockade runner, so I knew that transiting through the Seyllin system would be relatively safe even though it is still low-security space, which I find bizarre, because with the ongoing significance of this place and what happened here, you would think it would be upgraded to a 1.0, especially since Seyllin I is under permanent quarantine.

I arrived in the system and warped straight over to Seyllin I. It's not the first 'shattered planet' I've ever seen (for the record, that was the one in 3HQC-6 in Outer Ring a couple of years ago). I held station well clear of the extensive debris field that encircles this and all of these ex-planets: the remnants of crust, melted, displaced into orbit and resolidified into asteroids and other detritus.

Seyllin itself casts its calming blue light over this scene of overwhelming devastation with a kind of innocence, like it wasn't really anything to do with it. The star appears benign now, today, but since we don't know exactly why it happened, then we don't know if it could happen again tomorrow.

As I held station, I called up some documents from the extensive-but-inconclusive archives on the whole Shattered Planets thing and refreshed my memory of it.

Noteworthy:

- There was a system of stellar monitoring satellites in the Seyllin system operating under the designator 'Cassandra', which is a cool name if ever I've heard one. If it wasn't for this system detecting the exact trigger of the Seyllin event - a bizarre and still mostly-unexplained explosive event halfway between the primary and the planet - then to this day we'd all be under the impression that the star itself started it, which it didn't. This explosive event acted as a focus and as an amplifier of some kind, causing the star to erupt towards both it and Seyllin I.

- The exact same process happened on all the others.

- One of the most scariest things to come out of the Seyllin Incident was the Sisters of EVE issuing a now-legendary statement that predicted the commencement of cluster-wide spontaneous wormhole formation that has persisted to this day and that we now live with as if it's no big deal (see above about humanity taking things for granted). How the hell did they know? Of course we now know they were in Thera years before any of the rest of us found that peculiar subcluster that Thera sits in, a system with its own shattered worlds, and a subcluster that we believe contains a considerable number of  'shattered systems' that may have all been laid waste, not years earlier during the Seyllin Incident, but during the Caroline's Star event at the end of YC116.

- Today, eight years later, Seyllin I is still largely in a molten state. It also still emits huge amounts of off-the-scale radiation, so lingering here is not recommended. In the case of Seyllin I, it is like loitering over a mass grave; it's ghoulish and morbid to stay here and look at it for too long. Some of the radioactive half-lives involved here measure in the thousands of years. The heat from radioactivity that intense means Seyllin I is on slow-cook and won't be done until we're all long dead.

- Then there's the primary. Since myself and the ship are one and the same, I warped over to it. According to the (revised) catalogue, it's a small blue star. That can't happen, but here it is. It lost a load of mass during the Incident, but it still seems to have retained enough mass to remain hot enough to be blue. I still think this thing could go off again at any time; it represents a discontinuity in physics and this sort of thing has happened before: scientists have compared the event's violence to the collapse of the EVE Gate. The similarities cannot be ignored. Go and visit New Eden. Tell me how many planets you see.

- There was another possible precursor to the Seyllin Incident in the form of the bizarre event during YC109 when a nova occurred that was named the 'Bootini Star'. Just like Caroline's Star during YC116, it was visible all over New Eden for a short time before fading. At the time, speculators even declared that event as the visible manifestation of the collapse of the far side of the EVE Gate, its light finally reaching us 15,000 years later. That theory was eventually disproved. I mention the event here because nobody's ever definitively said it wasn't an event like Seyllin in some other distant part of the galaxy.

- The ex-planet Seyllin I is quarantined, but the rest of the system isn't. You can travel here freely. People still live here. Seyllin III is temperate and inhabited. There is a Roden Centre in the system with a load of those obnoxious holo-billboards surrounding it. There is another Roden Shipyards station and a CreoDron station. I don't know whether it's like a kind of denial or something.

After an hour or so I'd seen enough. More than enough. I left the Seyllin system to head to the trade hub, humbled. 

Half a billion people in one day... 

Ignorance is Bliss

I've seen other shattered worlds both here in New Eden and in Anoikis. If you live in Anoikis, like I do now, you're constantly surrounded by the implications of the shattered worlds and the events that caused them.

We now know there are over a hundred shattered systems, the vast majority of them in Anoikis. The five Drifter Hives and Thera are also classed as shattered systems. It is not possible to determine if the hundred of them in Anoikis were all destroyed at the same time, although we know that two definitely were.

Here in Signal Cartel, we've been running a mass test for a few months now of an AI construct called ALLISON, designed in-house by our own quantum programming genius A.D. Parrot (who calls himself 'A Dead Parrot' in informal circles...). ALLISON is a navigational aid, developed from a project that Parrot was involved in when he worked for CreoDron years ago. It is designed to operate in conjunction with the Aura program, to act as a data and intel-gathering aggregator which enhances the capsuleer's knowledge of what's going on in the space around them, improving the ability to navigate safely and accurately and greatly increasing survivability, particularly in openly hostile space like the Anoikis Cluster. 

In the process of testing the ALLISON construct in the field with many of us carrying iterations of 'her' on our ships, Parrot has assembled navigational data that implies that Thera, the five Hives and the 100-or-so shattered systems in Anoikis are not actually in Anoikis at all; they're in a separate 'sub-cluster of sub-clusters' that is situated as much as a hundred light-years away from Anoikis. I know all this because Parrot asked me to co-author a document about it so I had privileged access to the data:

///enlargement available///

///enlargement available///

With this information, if it is accurate and verifiable, it seems logical to assume that the Drifters are the New Sleepers, who migrated from Anoikis to this other, new sector of space at some point in the deep past when we were still emerging from the Dark Ages. Perhaps the Talocan went with them. Perhaps there was a deal done where they all lived there together in ultra-high-tech utopian harmony, merging virtual and real worlds in an enhanced cybernetic hyper-euclidian paradise. Then something disrupted them - us, Caroline's Star, Seyllin, all of those things, whatever - and laid waste to most, if not all of the systems in this subcluster, and now they want to kill us all in response.

Here's what else I think. Here's what else I know: those wormholes are a system. That system got reactivated during the Seyllin Incident. Something is running it, but not correctly, because there is a limited amount of randomness to their manifestations. Conversely, they're not random enough to be occurring naturally. I have no proof of this theory whatsoever. But then nobody else does either.

This is the torture of knowing something about impending doom, but not knowing exactly what it is, and knowing nobody will believe you because you're up against the wilful ignorance of vested interests - politicians, corporations, power-crazed immortals.

It's times like this that I don't want to know too much. I want to reach for my brain-numbing media feeds and immerse myself in the trivial again, like a baseliner who lives on a planet and has a job. Maybe I should return to Kor-Azor Prime and open a skateboard shop and be a nobody.

It's times like this that I don't want to know anything at all... 

The Price Of Safety In Aridia Is One Trillion ISK

Sisters of EVE Academy Station, Erindur VII, Metropolis Region, 8/16/118 - 23:44 hrs

A few days ago I received the feed below from the boss of my previous corporation, Outdated Host Productions [PHP1], over in Khanid. At the time, I was idling in the Sisters of EVE Academy station which orbits the second moon of Erindur VII, which is on the outer eastern edge of the Minmatar Republic: a region I have not spent a great deal of time in. There are semi-obvious reasons for that, namely that I originate from the Amarr Empire and this is the territory of its most deadly enemy, but more about that later.

I was in one of the station's lounge/bars which at this hour was populated mostly by identically-dressed SoE apprentices who all maintained a kind of passive exclusion zone around me as if I, a capsuleer, was too exotic to approach. In another time I might have engaged with them, but not today. I was thinking about my new ship. I was sat at an elaborately-carved wooden table adjacent to a large armoured glass picture window that facilitated a commanding view of the station's docking bay, where I could see the ship I'd brought here: a Caldari Buzzard. I hadn't used a Buzzard before because I'd only just qualified in it. This was a bit of a test op so I needed to prepare for it.

That test op was to be another relic-gathering excursion into null-security space, this time in the Buzzard. Erindur was my staging system into the 'far east'. From a cosmic perspective, the system is actually in an interesting area of space, being on the edge of the blood-red Metropolis/Heimatar nebulosity that is all around you everywhere you go in the Republic, and must be the fuel for Mataris' constant state of rage. The Konora system is also nearby, from where the miniature Ginnungagap Black Hole is supposed to be visible, (noteworthy: there is some dispute in the scientific community over whether the black hole has in fact evaporated and ceased to exist, or whether it is in a dormant and invisible state).

Something else that was new to me other than the Buzzard was the fabulous fish dish I was shovelling into this newly-jump-cloned body that I'd returned to after pre-positioning the ship here a few days earlier. Eating something for the first time in a new body is an odd sensation, because infomorph transfer reliability tolerance means your sense of taste always changes at a barely-noticeable level. Sometimes it is enhanced, sometimes it is diminished. They never tell you about that in capsuleer school. Matari cuisine, by the way, is universally dreck, which is one of the other reasons why I was not docked in a Matari-operated station...

There are actually two SoE stations in Erindur. The station I was docked in was an old Amarr Trade Post, no-doubt dating from the era of occupation, before the Minmatar Rebellion and the formation of the Republic. I expect it still survives today as the obvious edifice of a hated regime because it is in a relatively remote part of space, and also when the Sisters of EVE moved in at some point and established an Academy, it became effectively neutral territory.

Sisters of EVE Academy, Erindur VII - Metropolis

The consequence of the SoE's presence in here then, is an outwardly-Amarr station but with an overwhelmingly non-Amarrian population that has changed large parts of the station's interior design, like all the former churches and chapels being repurposed into lecture theatres. There is not so much strident architectural piety any more; corridors lined with empty plinths where statues used to stand; comfy chairs instead of pulpits; holovids instead of hymns; actual intoxicating beverages; former slave pens used as storage rooms or apprentice dormitories after considerable decorative improvement.

This bar I was sat in overlooking the docking bay was a former chapel library, and all the religious and scriptural iconography on the walls had been removed and replaced with various holofeeds, animated images of the cosmos, or portraits of noteworthy Sisters of EVE (thereby replacing one form of religious iconography with another). One of those portraits was of ex-Sister Silphy en Diabel herself and it didn't even have 'Wanted' beneath it. What was that about? Have the SoE forgiven her?

In accordance with its previous role, all the furniture in this ex-chapel-library-turned-bar was even made of actual wood cut from real trees in the forests of Erindur IV, instead of that ultra high-tech nano-assembler stuff you find in other stations that emerges from the floor on command ('chair please...'). It all had real grain in it and it had no embedded holo or tech or anything. The stone floor was something else entirely; a spectacular indulgence in a space station and a typically ostentatious statement by its previous owners.

However, a particular ambient vibe that this station's cultural fusion could not hide behind the usual station-noise you get anywhere, was the ongoing subtext of undisclosed secrets permeating its atmosphere that all SoE stations have, especially those in Thera (are they ever going to tell us how they got there first?). 

My other reason for being here in this Sisters of EVE station was because my former mentor, Aire Arryns (lecturer in Exploration at the Hedion University station in Conoban), once told my class in that fire-and-brimstone way of his: "At some point in your capsuleer careers, you're going to go to the Republic. I'd rather you didn't, personally, but if you do go there, do not ever, ever entrust your infomorph to a Matari, otherwise your consciousness could be transferred into a fedo. It's happened. I've seen it. They make it look like an accident, but it never is. It's always about reprisal.  Do not ever entrust your ship to Matari station techs, otherwise expect sabotage. Do not fly Matari ships either, because they are all garbage. Until we can Reclaim them again, Vitoc is the only way. It is the Amarr way!"

He went on to label all Matari stations in the Republic as enemy territory to an Amarrian capsuleer, which is technically absolutely true as we're still officially at war, although I've said it before: as capsuleers we're supposed to take a cosmic perspective and rise above all this nationalism. Not all of us do (not all of us want to), but at least we do in my line of work. In fact none other than Signal Cartel top boss and 'Space Mom' Mynxee is a Brutor, but she doesn't act like one (in fact Mynxee has this ultra-calm demeanour that belies a murderous Brutor past, and it comes across as if she's been to the future and has returned to tell us all not to worry and that everything will be OK. It's very reassuring...).

Arryns was merely trying to scare us into vigilance towards baseliners' default nationalist programming, so this is the real reason why I only dock in neutral stations on the very rare occasions I actually operate in this region, because when it comes to baseliners, you just can't be sure.

* * *

So I was chilling in this ex-chapel lounge/bar with its stone floor and wooden furniture, eating a specially-imported Luminairian javelinfish, which was Sister Alitura of Arnon's idea ("Tell them I sent you," she'd said, "be sure to ask for the fin spike, and let it sit for 13 minutes before you eat it otherwise it might kill you").

I was also reading Emekur's classic Origin of Life, Minimal Convergent Traits and Biosignatures on my datapad. No, that's not true. I can't lie: I was actually reading a trashy Impetus celeb feed called In Your Face, which headlined the acrimonious twelfth divorce of Synchellian film star Myriestene Mahatta. I can't get enough of it. I went for the top-level cluster-wide subscription so I'm gonna use it. It's expensive, but I can afford it so what's the problem? I can't always be into science!

So I was sitting here among the background station noise and subdued foreground chatter of all the SoE apprentices around me when the message below chimed in on my datapad. It was [PHP1] boss Crystalline Entity with an update on the constant changes in the Khanid-Querious-Delve-Aridia situation and [PHP1]/Darwinism's part in it. I'm still on excellent terms with my previous crew and I always look forward to updates from their part of the cluster.

Considerable attention has now been focused on this volatile sector of the cluster in recent weeks after the winding-down of 'World War Bee' and the defeat of Goonswarm. When information leaked out that Goonswarm were co-ordinating a massive move operation to the Delve region, feeds all over the entire cluster lit up with speculation about whether the region I used to operate in would become the next big conflict zone. When Goonswarm's planned route to Delve through Aridia was also leaked, my own personal take on it was a) wondering whether all the locals including [PHP1]/Darwinism would get in on this, and b) how in Divinity's Edge would Goonswarm get past the elite denizens of Aridia - LowSechnaya Sholupen - intact?

Based on Crystalline's bit of inside information below (it's the raw feed), it appears that every alliance really does have its price:

---

[AmarrCertifiedNewsTextFeed/Gehi IX/Royal Khanid Navy/In-Station Associate Corporation Channel:[PHP1] mode:public-feed/yes/no/.../NODE: ALL] [autoforward: NODE: Metropolis/soe/recipients:0022866cassandrahabalu/]

[msg: 8/16/118 - 1324]

[Subj: Goons! Querious!]

Over the mid-year period, Khanid was unsurprisingly pretty quiet. The usual unfortunate stream of hapless industrialists and mission runners attempting the Ashmarir run dried-up and the Darwinism pirates grew frustrated at the lack of action on all fronts. Even the Mid-Khanid Coalition of JIHADASQUAD (led by the renegade Musashibou Benkei) seemed unusually quiet.

Then the announcement spluttered over the fluid routers: ‘Goonswarm are leaving Saranen and heading to Delve!’ The wave of excitement was palpable, a slew of bookings at the Vezila III ice resort of Vritilia were cancelled as the capsuleers of Darwinism and Brute Force Solutions cancelled their planetside excursions and booked shuttles back to the orbiting spaceport.

Goon interceptors, transport ships and other vessels of war started heading south from Saranen to Sakht in southern Aridia. To the surprise of all capsuleers the infamous capital and supercapital hunting alliance LowSechnaya Sholupen (LSH) granted 'blue' status to Goonswarm. Persistent rumours and reports from reliable sources all say that Goonswarm paid LSH over a trillion ISK for this privilege.

Darwinism's capsuleers manned the ‘barricades’ of Ashmarir and Perbhe [entry systems into Khanid], and deployed cloaky hunting ships throughout the region. Goons started to die… oh-so-many dead. Wrecks and corpses littered those entrance systems into Khanid. Where Goons go, others follow: the latest arrivals are DARKNESS, Short Bus Syndicate and TEST alliance all on deployment. Circle of Two is reportedly on the way as well.

Two interesting developments in the nearby null-security space was that the Infamous alliance was haemorrhaging pilots, and the Play Hard and Pray Harder alliance was successfully dismantling the Querious Fight Club coalition [QFC]. Information on the collapse of QFC was hard to come by, as there was a propaganda war raging across the regional news outlets but it was safe to assume that QFC would not fold unless there was good reason to do so.

For Darwinism this led to an opportunity to take the H-6HGD constellation in Querious once again. The station in A2-V27 has been unable to be captured due to dreadful timers and other groups third-partying the station. However, 03L-95 and A3-LOG have been upgraded a little and pilots have used the opportunities to make ISK during quieter periods. Darwinism fully expects to lose this space in due course to Play Hard and Pray Harder or another one of the alliances that is headed towards the area.

The positive side of Infamous collapsing was that Brute Force Solutions spotted a Hel supercarrier moving up towards Khanid. Darwinism pilots responded and after a fruitless grid search in 0-W the Hel then jumped to Upt where it was probed and tackled by Darwinism probers and Heavy Interdiction pilots. Heavier assets were brought in and it died shortly thereafter.

Later LSH called upon Darwinism again to tackle and then kill Simon Riley of ex-Darwinism traitors Nekogami Band in his Aeon in Neda. [PHP1]'s Quantum Finish caught the ship with his Heavy Interdictor.

Khanid will never be at the forefront of cluster politics, because its inhabitants are dreadful pirates with a myriad of personality disorders, but it is their wasteful destructive personality that make transiting the region a dangerous experience for the careless traveller.

[ENDS]

[this media release is brought to you by Amarr Certified News Capsuleer Liaison. Amarr Victor!]

---

One trillion ISK? One trillion ISK!!

The situation changes so fast over there that the feed above is already technically out of date, as other more recent reports indicate that the Querious Fight Club coalition has collapsed, making the region basically a free-for-all. 

Unbelievably, even Signal Cartel has interests in what's happening in Querious because until this week we had docking rights in the YB7B-8 constellation thanks to the Affirmative alliance (another Querious Fight Club member) holding sovereignty over it.

Just a couple of days after I received the above from Crystalline, and after I'd left Erindur and was deep into my excursion into the eastern nullsec regions, I got notification through the corporation's private channel that the instability in Querious had caused Affirmative to withdraw, and in the process of doing so they had transferred the sovereignty of the entire constellation to Signal Cartel!

Signal Cartel has sov! Without firing a single shot! Citadels! TCUs!

Signal Cartel Territorial Claim Unit! Actual sov!

(cam drone still: Ristora Arbosa)

Affirmative's transferral of sov to us was a political statement aimed at the other residents of Querious. Our sov will not last; in accordance with our pacifist credo we will not defend it, and Signal Cartel was never interested in holding sov anyway because everybody knows it's not our thing, so probably by the time you read this, somebody else's logo will be on that TCU.

But it cannot be denied: WE HAD SOV!

If Signal Cartel can have sov in Querious, then anything can happen. Expect to hear any time soon that Jamyl is alive and well, and living in Querious.

In 'Squirrel Central'.

The Traumark Installation

The last time I tried to visit this place was the first time I died.

That was well over a year ago. I've died several more times since then and a lot more has changed besides, both to me and to the owners of this relic of an ostentatious past.

The Traumark Installation is in an isolated part of the Saminer system, which is at the southern extent of the Tash-Murkon region and at the end of a 'pipe' of low security space. The system is one of the southern extremities of the Amarr Empire and beyond here is nothing until the wastes of southern nullsec.

It is seriously remote.

House Tash-Murkon built the Traumark Installation ages ago as a monument to their legitimacy as a ruling family and as a visible demonstration of wealth; a self-indulgent exercise in vanity with no expense spared. Why House Tash-Murkon built it out here in Saminer though, instead of in the heart of their region where it would have been more visible, is not clear. Perhaps it was in part a form of holiday resort, a gigantic luxury villa for tens of thousands of favoured House acolytes and business partners, populated during an earlier period of overt prosperity and calm here in the Anidaza constellation, before Sansha moved in. 

Information about the facility and its exact fate is restricted, as is common with anything in the Amarr Empire that constitutes visible evidence of failure. We know the official version: the Installation had its time, its pomp and ceremony, but at some point in the past this remote part of the Tash-Murkon region was overrun by Sansha's Nation and effectively laid waste. The system was downgraded to lowsec, the Traumark Installation was evacuated; and wrecked, looted and destroyed by Sansha, leaving these massive derelict husks behind with visible evidence of conflict scarring their outer hulls. Time froze for them then. House Tash-Murkon withdrew, and orchestrated a collective forgetting.

 
On the evidence that I found when I arrived, there could still be some pockets of Sansha fanaticism hiding in there, handfuls of undead, stalking perma-dark corridors in zero-G like wraiths, never understanding what their flashbacks of a former life actually mean. On the other hand those towers probably are as dead as they look, but the handful of Sansha's Nation vessels hanging around them, waiting to prey on passing trade, at least raise the possibility of it.

The Saminer system is deep lowsec. As I said at the start of this, the last time I tried to visit the Traumark Installation, I was fresh out of Hedion University and totally clueless, doing everything by the book. I didn't even get to Saminer; I got ganked in the Sagain system next door by a frothing, foaming-at-the-mouth boostered-up scumbag in a Gnosis, who sent me back to Conoban by the pod express, where Taltha regenerated me. For bringing me to Taltha, I should probably thank him.

Over a year has passed since then. I never tried to return to the Traumark Installation during that period, but since I moved most of my personal affairs to Tash-Murkon Prime, the Traumark Installation has appeared on my radar again and its proximity - six jumps - has taunted me as a piece of unfinished business.

This time I used my Astero, which was built for this sort of op (lowsec tourism). The principal risk in Saminer now is not Sansha, but nullsec capsuleers that use the system to bring jump freighters into Empire space by the backdoor. On this occasion though, Saminer was deserted apart from me and those Sansha ships, to which I was invisible and undetectable. 

On seeing it now, for the first time, I understood how massive the Traumark Installation really is. It actually dwarfs anything in the Throne Worlds. Three full-sized stations, totally inert, still retaining bits of their gold armour plate, long-since dulled by the sleet of cosmic radiation and tarnished by the arrow of time. Fragments of shattered metal drift around it as if gravitationally-bound to this edifice to thwarted ambition. You really wonder what it might have become if Sansha hadn't purged its soul forever.

As usual with places like this, I departed with more questions than I'd had when I arrived, which is the torment of every explorer. If only I could dock, unjack, suit-up and go inside that huge central dome where it would be as cold as the surrounding vacuum.

As cold as Sansha's heart.

Who the hell knows what relics are left inside there.

Or horrors...

A thought occurred to me while I was speeding back to Tash-Murkon Prime: it is timely that I returned to Saminer and finally got a look at this epic ruin, with its spellbinding backdrop of the Domain Nebula - the heart of the Empire - because later this year, Empress-elect Catiz Tash-Murkon will ascend the Throne of Amarr and all of what lies within (and without) that nebula will be hers. Perhaps she will look favourably upon this forsaken relic of her family's past and restore it.