Interceptors Are Our Business And Business Is Good

I embraced the philosophy of the jump clone for the first time.

The principal, founding tenet of the capsuleer is the separation of mind from body: treating the body as merely a disposable vessel that carries the consciousness. If that body gets damaged or destroyed, just insert the consciousness into a new one and carry on.

The jump clone facility allows the capsuleer to maintain more than one vessel just as we all have a hangar with more than one spacecraft in it.

I was resistant to the idea of having more than one vessel for my mind, as I'd got used to the idea of there being more than one version of me consecutively, but having multiple iterations of me concurrently seemed like a passport to psychosis.

But...

It's not like I'm inhabiting all of them at the same time with one mind in multiple bodies, like the opposite of schizophrenia. Also, having a bunch of exploration-focused cyberware in my head that is worth more than the GDP of half the provinces of Mishi IV had inadvertently made me risk-averse. I had become too comfortable with my 'back office' POS-maintenance role in what is actually a lowsec pirate alliance.

Then, one recent evening, in our corporation's comms channel, Nizzle Ma said: "Why don't you come on any of our roams?"

I couldn't, wouldn't, didn't want to get away with answering: "Because my head's too valuable and I don't want to get killed and besides you lot are always going on about doctrines that change every five minutes?"

Then the boss announced an upcoming interceptor roam. This I could do by using the jump clone which every other capsuleer does as a matter of course. I already had Infomorph Psychology (jump clone capability) on my training roster but had never used it. Interceptors were no big deal.


Fast forward a few days...

I now have two bodies. The expensive and intelligent one that can scan down relics-'n'-wormholes from light-years away in the blink of an eye, was now a void under stasis somewhere else. This unaugmented body that I was in now, a 'clean clone', technically a meathead and with a new willingness to do smack talk and take risks, was in Nandeza with a new Malediction, waiting to launch off to the deep nullsec of all points south of Khanid - Querious, Delve, Period Basis - in what is known as a small-gang roam. There was no fixed objective in mind, just the spreading of the word.

The word of Mortum Ravagers. We're here. In yo' face mo'fos 'n bitches of Southern Null. We comin' fo yo territory...

So, da crew: me, Tryce Jaor (FC/boss), Gettosmurf, Nizzle Ma, Marc Moonglow, nitereper, Gryndor, Serigil, MrTheGeoff and Sul Glass, all set off with fire in our hearts and a determination to not take any of it seriously. My job would be 'long point', otherwise known as the use of a Warp Disruptor module with 20 kilometres range. Maledictions are apparently very good at it. I on the other hand am not.


[Sidebar: quantum uncertainty produces some inconsistency in the generation of neuropathways in a new clone which can have personality-altering effects. None of the below was technically me. Or is that just an excuse to learn smack talk in Local?]


Delve and Querious

"a wretched hive of scum and villainy"

 

Nothing to report for the first few systems. Nothing even in the notorious choke-point/tollbooth of border system 1-SMEB. The interceptor routine: send someone through to scout. We dive in behind and fan out: check out asteroid belts and Cosmic Anomalies. Look for smug, complacent nullsec alliance fodder. Look for ratters, independents and 'neutrals'. Look for miners. Look for everybody.

There were a few brushes with possibility. Odds were weighed. Sometimes the strongest army elects to not fight.

In the meantime and during these fast-moving system scans, I found some extraordinary Covenant facilities. Predictable, since Delve and the OK-FEM region is the core territory of the Covenant, but I'd never seen anything like this before.

These non-standard stargates were something new too.

I lagged a system-or-two behind the crew a couple of times because of my compulsion to look at the scenery and document everything. The Cauldron, receding in my 'mirrors' with every stargate, was no bigger than my hand at this distance. The Cauldron is home, where my science-oriented and more sensible other body currently resided: the one that enjoys culture, fine ale, reads books without images in them, has a social conscience and is recreationally bi-curious with two women (Taltha in Conoban and Alisu on Mishi IV. You've read about them before). This body on the other hand, wants to drop 200 million ISK on a pair of those GDN-9 'Nightstalker' goggles that are so cutting-edge. This body wants to try boosters and insult people.

Eventually we tracked down a lone, unattended Mobile Tractor Unit. We shot it. It was a start.

We found a 'VNI' - a Vexor Navy Issue - trying to take down a Covenant facility. We rudely interrupted him and shot him.

Then we shot him again. He may have been 'afk' as he didn't seem to notice...

We moved on...

Period Basis

"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there..."

This is the region with one of the most southerly planetary systems in all of New Eden. The region extends out from the rest of the cluster like a swamp vine tendril. Its remoteness reminded me of something I'd read about during my time in Hedion University. An ancient expression: ultima thule. Something about 'the borders of the known world'.

Period Basis is also full of bubbles.

Warp Disruptor Bubbles: the visible manifestations of the over-inflated capsuleer ego that thinks it can outlive eternity. Newsflash: outside the capsule you're as mortal as any meathead. All I have to do is cap yo' ass in yo' sleep and you as dead as dead!

Then I got delayed again and arrived late to one of the parties in the form of this guy's capsule:

He had a lot of headware. This is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

Tryce found a target of opportunity in the form of a Prowler apparently chilling in orbit around Y-CWQY VI.

The Prowler's pilot had a cloaking device available to him, but he wasn't using it. Now he's chilling for good. A bio-tombstone. Orbiting frozen meat. Shame about the wasted planetary interaction equipment. A whole command center. Those skills!

Later, we negotiated the most committed of gate-camps using brilliant strategy and teamwork.

We evaded superior forces like ghosts -

  - and we reached the end of the stargate line in MVUO-F.

 

Now that I'm reporting on this roam from my other, more sensible augmented body, I can be more artistic and scientifically-literate about the experience.

There are other stars to the galactic south of Period Basis that are still within the gravitational bounds of the New Eden cluster, but they are few in number and not on the stargate network. We know virtually nothing about them except what we can discern through distant survey. Some may even be inhabited by an unknown pre-Dark Ages fragment of humanity that speaks no known language. There may be a generation ship inbound from one of them right now that is in for a hell of a shock when it eventually arrives somewhere like this and meets a capsuleer with a 'NBSI' policy.

This place is nothing like, for example, Domain with its warm, comforting and enveloping bronze nebula that you can barely see outside-of. Period Basis is also known for its high concentration of pulsars: ticking clocks that never slow down because their 'tick' is a lighthouse beam of deadly radiation emission. The Vapor Sea is the only lighthouse pointing the way back to civilisation. The Caroline's Star Remnant doesn't cover even a tenth as many arcseconds of diameter as it does from Vale of the Silent. The Cauldron is not even visible. This is the end of the road - the end of the world.

Pulsars are the product of core-collapse supernovae which also go on to form nebulae from which other stars are formed. Those ancient supernovae here in Period Basis may have triggered the formation of the New Eden cluster. We owe our existence to them.

* * *

Nandeza Or Bust - Last One Back Buys The Beers

We had set out in the full expectation of returning by way of hostile action and the pod express. Two of us ended the session as 'gate camp sacrifices' (because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few), but the rest of us unexpectedly survived, which was actually inconvenient as we all had to get back to Nandeza in time to do mundane stuff like holovid boxset binges, do the laundry, clean the quarters and feed the fedos etc. etc.

On the way back to Khanid, Tryce experienced system malfunctions and fell behind, so the rest of us took refuge for a while in 'Barf's Burger Barn' in the C3N-3S system in Delve and waited for him to catch up. This station was under Freeport status as a result of its home system being contested, which, as it happens, is nothing new.

A bit of history: Barf's Burger Barn is actually a historic outpost as it was the focus of one of the biggest 'sov' battles in New Eden history during YC112. Incumbents Nulli Secunda and Southern Coalition fought Goonswarm Federation and Pandemic Legion for possession of this station among other system assets in a battle that involved capitals, Titans and up to 1,800 capsuleers. You can read about it on the EN24 service's archive.

In the interests of absorbing a bit of that history I would have taken a look around here, but time was against us so we docked in temporary berths and remained jacked-in. After Tryce caught up, we undocked and all went our separate ways in an informal race back to Nandeza.

At the notorious 1-SMEB border, I evaded a freshly-formed gate camp that wasn't there when we passed through two hours earlier (interceptors totally rule), and because I'd cocked-up my routing a couple of times in an attempt to program 'avoidance systems' into the nav system, it was actually me that was the last ship back to Nandeza.

Beers were on me.

* * *

Epilogue

The reason why interceptor roams work is that they are the purest form of piracy - fast, nimble vessels that operate under no political agenda, and in small co-ordinated raiding parties seeking out targets of pure opportunity. This doctrine is exactly the same as the method used by those pirate ships that used to sail the seas of Athra. If you're an Amarrian you'll have read about them in school.

Furthermore, now I've left my sensation-seeking, 200-million-ISK-goggles-wearing gung-ho combat head in Nandeza and I'm back in my rational and sci-curious explorer head in Danera, I'm lobbying the boss to make interceptors our 'go-to' ship. Because they rule. I've also done some recruitment propaganda which you'll soon see on holo-boards, forums, station dock atriums and even your favourite trade hubs. Come down to Khanid and join us!

Finally, the jump clone has liberated me from risk-aversion and eliminated the need to crawl light-years across New Eden in order to do something. Now I can go to sleep in one place and wake up in another.

I think of it as taking a holiday from myself.

Outer Ring, Fountain, Shattered Planets

Thera dumped me into 33FN-P in the Wield constellation of the Outer Ring region - another place where I find the remoteness appealing. I don't know why it is that I favour places like this, light-years from the eternal noise of central cluster politics where the players may change but the game remains forever the same. Perhaps I've just answered my own question.

This system, like so many others throughout New Eden, features planets in highly-inclined orbits around the primary. It is supposed to be a fundamental tenet of astrophysics that the more extreme this kind of arrangement, the younger the system is on the universe's calendar because tidal interaction between bodies always results in the system being 'ironed out' over the aeons. The prevalence of these systems throughout the cluster is therefore a rough guide to the cluster's youth relative to the galaxy around it, which in turn indicates why we've never found any evidence of non-human advanced intelligence in the cluster in either the past or the present.

Outer Ring is where the ORE company originated from. The spectacular Cloud Ring nebula is prominent. During the time of 'day' I was there, it was also quiet with very little traffic or trade of any kind, but I don't know how normal that is for the region. I found a Serpentis Relic Site and decided to hack it, a process which, in null security space, is not good for my nerves. This site also featured a circle of equidistant asteroids with an Amarrian dome icon at its centre, which was unfathomable given this site was of Serpentis origin. Maybe those Gallente-born Serpentis corporatised drug pushers went completely crazy out here amid the isolation of null, seeing ghosts where there was nothing to see and appropriating the icons of other races in order to cling on to something. Anything. 

The hacking process: orbit the wreckage at 2,500 metres. Hack it as quickly as possible while looking at either Local or the directional scanner (or both) every few seconds. If someone new appears on either, get ready to move. If your instinct tells you to move, listen to it!

I successfully hacked every wreck, in part due to my headware being optimised for the task. I now had 33 million ISK's-worth of loot in my cargo hold and decided to set myself the challenge of routing back to Danera with it the long way, through the nullsec of Outer Ring and Fountain and the lowsec of Aridia. Just for the hell of it. Just to see if I could. What were the odds against me... 

After a few jumps I arrived in the 3HQC-6 system. This is one of the notorious 'shattered' systems that were all laid waste by simultaneous novae as part of the Seyllin Incident during 3/10/111. The ORE mining facility that was resident here in 3HQ was vaporised during the event, leaving no witnesses in a dead system. Humanity's tendency to memorialise is entirely absent here.

Wormholes, Anoikis, Thera (where I just came from), Sleepers, Caroline's Star, Drifters, cosmic mayhem and imperial assassinations all followed this event. Nothing in New Eden will ever be the same as it was before these planets had their surfaces stripped away by either coronal mass ejection or the rumoured Isogen-5 substance, or [insert favoured rumour here].

For all we know it could happen again tomorrow. None of us is safe anymore.

* * *

Later on I docked in our allies Lowsechnaya Sholupen's outpost in BYXF-Q in Fountain, called 'e6acpaHck'.

It was virtually deserted. I was the only ship docked at a facility where almost every sign or notice on-board was written in a non-Standard language, even the pod gantry's ship status displays.

I understood nobody (not that there were many to speak to), and although, despite the language barrier, it felt like a relatively safe harbour at the time - causing me to contemplate basing some stuff here for explorations - I checked it out on the DOTLAN service and found it had changed ownership five times during this year alone.

This is nullsec, where if you are cursed with a vivid imagination, the quietest systems become the most dangerous of all...

Cobalt Edge and The Infinite

 I found a way back to Thera.

I hung around for a while and contemplated the significance of this place that is so big that light takes more than two days to cross it; where if it wasn't for the fluid router it would take nearly a week to get a response from the other Sanctuary station on the far side of it.

This place, where lost human histories converge and coexist, but shouldn't. 

Then I found a new way out:

I emerged in SBEN-Q in Cobalt Edge: closer to the edge of New Eden than I've ever been, 80 light years from the other side of the cluster in Fountain and 73 light years from my base in Danera.

The far side of the Drone Lands.

Cobalt Edge:

"Many strange tales have been brought back from the Edge to the stopping points and waystations of the growing colonies in the neighboring regions: tales of rare solitary drones, specialized beyond normal experience, wandering the systems; stories of these lone wanderers being hunted by packs of 'normal' rogue drones; weird rumors of the 'lonesome ones' actually helping capsuleers in dire circumstances. Most of these tales, not least those claiming aid from rogues, are dismissed out of hand. Yet they persist and are joined by more every time an explorer from the Cobalt Edge sets down in a bar to drink and talk."

I saw a permanent drone hive in here, with drones that had designators I've never seen before and that were as big as a battleship. Then I found this extraordinary nest of disruptor bubbles, out here, around the single stargate in this dead-end system with no other access except the transient wormhole I used. There can be no passing trade here. Evidence of previous action or an excess of expectation?

The Wormhole Distance Perception Paradox: the 2,600 light-year round trip I took through Thera in order to get to Cobalt Edge from Khanid felt like nothing, because it was two jumps. The 73 light-years to Danera from SBEN-Q - via the 'normal' route - is a small fraction of that distance yet felt insurmountably greater. To look the other way, outwards, towards the visible galactic plane and the infinite, was humbling, as if I'd reached the shoreline of a landmass and that the galaxy is an ocean with an unreachable horizon.

Distance and time are inextricably linked unless divorced from each other by the wormhole and its contempt for spacetime.

But what would it be like for us if there were no stargate-wormholes and no warp drive? Without that capability, it would take two hundred centuries to cross the cluster in generation ships.

We would all still be island-dwellers.

Perhaps we always will be.

J164710 - Vidette

The Drifter faction hasn't been seen in New Eden since the Nandeza Incursion several weeks ago. The incursion followed soon after the brazen assassination of Jamyl. Then - nothing.

No proliferation, no mass assimilations, no futility in the face of deadly superweapons and no more 7:1 kill ratio.

Starting it in the remote, underpopulated parts of Khanid made no sense either.

Where did they go?

Since then, occasional sightings and loggings of the 'Unidentified Wormholes' that led to the four Drifter complexes known as Barbican, Conflux, Redoubt and Vidette, have continued, so one way to find out what happened to them would be to go and ask them.

I've wanted to dive in and explore one of the complexes again (I did the Barbican a while ago) but whenever I saw them on Overview, I was either in the wrong ship for the task or committed to some other job for the corporation.

The situational geometry wasn't working for me.

Then I saw one while passing through Ashmarir two days ago - an Unidentified Wormhole with the attendant massive Sleeper constructs that appear to be an essential piece of the puzzle.

I was in my Anathema - perfect. I dived straight in.

I found the Vidette complex.

Deserted.

No Drifters.

Just the massive structures as previously reported by others; still active yet attended only by a token Sleeper drone presence.

Shattered planets, with the same type of Turbulent Blue Subgiant star as in all the other shattered systems - Seyllin, T-IPZB, Thera etc. - except here, they're all shattered.

As is always the case with all these places in Anoikis, wherever you are, there is always something sinister nearby (in astronomical terms) which generates that constant feeling of helplessness because, unlike a Drifter battleship, it threatens death on you in ways you can't see and can't do anything about.

J164710 is a 'magnetar system'. A magnetar: a deadly neutron star - a supernova remnant - only 20 kilometres across but more dense than a K3 yellow dwarf like Mishi; saturating the vicinity with X-rays and gamma rays, and generating a magnetic field so strong that it would be lethal within 1,000 kilometres of it, because it takes the atomic nuclei that make up your ship and your body and your brain, and distorts their shape from spheres into cylindrical rods. Can you imagine what that would be like..?

It's a common theme in the cosmos: the deadliest stuff often shines the brightest. Drawing you in, seducing you.

Sidebar: Magnetars give off gamma ray bursts that should be detectable from the New Eden cluster, which would allow more accurate determination of where Anoikis actually is. If Anoikis is 1,300 light-years away, it can't be possible that this magnetar and the others within Anoikis all formed within the last 1,300 years it would take for detectable gamma ray bursts to reach us, because we would have seen and recorded the supernovae that generated them. Also, a powerful gamma ray burst from that distance has the ability to make a planet's own magnetic field ring like a bell. We wouldn't miss it...
 
The Sleeper structures in the Vidette complex are still there: one damaged yet still powered. Whatever dreams the Sleepers were having; whatever world they were inhabiting, would this corrupted shape be a part of it? Would they be living in a virtual hell?

Eventually, one Drifter battleship showed up. I dared not decloak. Would it have ignored me, or one-shot me? A 50/50 chance. One that I'm not wasting a ship on.

I couldn't progress any further into the Vidette complex because it is still necessary to be part of a fleet in order to achieve the simultaneous hacking of the complex's data cores, so I saw no more reason to stick around.

I tracked down a few exit wormholes and dived into one of them, emerging in MOCW-2 in Insmother, 49 light-years from home base in Danera. A single-gate dead-end system that serves no purpose except to cultivate sov-fodder.

Another sidebar: the Ginnungagap Nebula near the Kalevala Expanse is prominent and easily visible from MOCW-2. More than any other nebula I've seen so far in New Eden, this one looks terrifying, because whatever is in there that is causing those directional jets of incandescent gas, nothing good can come of it. Unlike the other nebulae in New Eden, this one is active.

I tried docking at the resident Outpost in this system in Insmother just for the hell of it, but I got a big fat lockout signal that was very rude. I'm not having that...

So nobody followed me out of the Vidette complex with its angry magnetar. No Drifter battleships were hovering around on the 'normal' side of the wormhole either.

I had no more answers than I did when I went in there. I only had more questions.

What the hell are the Drifters doing in there?  

What are they waiting for..?