Deliverance

It seems I spoke too soon the other day about never having the need to hurry on Ahambra. Only a few hours after I wrote the last post, a treacly chime and flashing icon signaled the arrival of a message on my datapad. It was a DED mail: AEOS HQ was under attack by two members of a corporation called The Last True Socialism named Gameboy4ever and FitzTavi. It was pretty obvious from their profiles that these guys were outlaws in the business of preying on unsuspecting wormhole colonists and their facilities.

This turn of events shouldn't have really bothered me that much. I had already made more than a billion and a half in liquid isk for not all that much work. There was nothing of immense value there other than the structures themselves. No ore or minerals in the refinery; no Sleeper salvage in the corporate hangar. And before my vacation, I had unloaded the vessels stored in the ship hangar and re-loaded them into the Orca's ship bays. Amber had then parked the Orca, cloaked, in a deep safe spot.

Nevertheless, I found that I just couldn't let it go. Hour after hour, the Neocom chimed to alert me to the arrival of another DED mail—control tower at 75% shields, now 50%, now 25%, now in reinforced mode. Would they come back in two-and-a-half days when the shield reinforcement generators ran out of strontium clathrates? Somehow, I had a feeling they would.


To hell with it. I wasn't about to let AEOS HQ die, just after we had saved it. I immediately booked passage on an Airship traveling to Khanid Prime IV's orbital launch facility on the other side of the globe. By spaceplane, the trip would have taken no more than 45 minutes. Airships, on the other hand, are built for luxury, so the trip was going to take a little more than two and a half days, possibly longer, if the prevailing winds didn't cooperate.

The winds didn't cooperate, as it happens. The trip was already heading into Day Three when the strontium clathrates ran out and the attack on the tower resumed. Who were these guys? Their two battleships (I presumed) had already been pounding on the POS for more than twelve hours, and they were going to have to keep pounding on it for at least 12 more. Obviously, what they lacked in numbers, decency, and common sense, they more than made up for in their dogged determination to fight through boredom. And so the control tower's armor steadily dropped, while I was drifting along Ahambra's breezes like a plastic bag in the wind, helpless, hopeless.

Until it stopped. For some reason, the DED mails weren't coming in anymore. The last mail reported that the control tower's armor had been pummeled to less than 25% efficiency. I assumed this was because the tower was now nothing more than an expanding cloud of debris. Since the airship had finally docked at KP IV's orbital platform, it was time for me to get back into space and find out. Zipping along in a Pilgrim-class force recon, I took less than half an hour getting back to J124654.

What I saw when I got there brought only one word to mind: deliverance! AEOS HQ was still there, but just barely at less than 20% armor. And more than 100 kilometers away from the tower floated two battleship wrecks, as well as a frozen corpse belonging to Gameboy4ever (what a stupid name, by the way).

Seconds afterwards, the Neocom chimed to alert me to an incoming comms request. I spoke briefly with Chrinoh, who informed me that he and his fellow wormhole colonists from the Arkai Confederation had chanced upon the siege and dispatched it with righteous fury. They even massacred one of the pods, sending its pilot back to the cloning tanks in known space via the murder express. So overjoyed was I at this unexpected turn of events that I wired 50 million isk to Chrinoh and his good samaritan mates, no strings attached.

When they left, I sent out the call to Prime, Amber, and the rest of the APHID crew. We were going to have to put in alot of overtime work to get AEOS HQ up and running again, not to mention figure out how to properly fit a control tower. Tune in next time and I'll fill you in on what we learned.