In order, about a week or so ago, one of the guys in Jim Bridger’s alliance tried to organize a freighter gank. Too many 0.0 ratters with security status to burn, so they all got in battleships, came to high sec, found the right freighter, and so forth. Semi-comedic errors were made, and ultimately they failed to deliver enough DPS to the target. But hey, it put ideas in old Jim’s head.
And then, of course, there was the big story a few days ago about the Kestral that got popped in Jita with 74 Plex on board. (22 billion ISK, six and a half years of game time, $1,200 U.S. dollars. On autopilot. Piloted — if you can call it that — by the CEO of an alliance at war. Durr….)
Now there are ideas in EVERYBODY’S head.
So there’s a public jump clone facility in the corridor outside the Ironfleet hangars in our main base near Jita. It’s dusty and mostly unused, but yesterday it made a funny whiirr-thump, whiirr-thump noise as I was drinking my afternoon coffee and perusing my copy of The Citadel Times. About ten minutes later, Jim Bridger walked into my office like he hadn’t been gone for a year, sat down on my couch, put his goopy wrinkled bare clonefeet up on my desk, and spoke a line from an ancient Arth movie: “Cletus, I’m bored.”
It turned out he was feeling the weight of his security status and wanted to engage the services of Ironfleet Towing and Salvage to do a spot of loot pickup, just in case he should “accidentally” get a little bit twitchy with his artilleries somewhere in high security space. He’s got a Maelstrom with eight very large artillery cannons (somebody once said you could fire a Volkswaagon out of one, but I don’t know what that is, some kind of pre-space Arth personnel transporter I think) and Jim is a master with an artillery cannon. He’s of the opinion that he could one-volley the average hauler on autopilot, and all he needs to do is find one loaded with appropriately valuable cargoes. It’s a little bit shady, but hey, there’s a space recession going on, or didn’t you hear?
So I had the hangar crew dust off an old Bustard I like to call the “Grab ‘n Go” and spent much of the day following Jim around while he scanned the cargos of autopiloting Badger IIs. He didn’t find the perfect one, but he did dock up and switch into a cheap Thrasher named Popcorn (nothing but T1 guns and T1 gyros) when he found a shuttle sitting neglected in space in Jita. The pilot was sound asleep, slumped forward with his face mashed against the forward view port, drool and snot kinda oozing across the plexi; and a cargo scan revealed one implant aboard worth about 20 times the ship Jim was flying.
Jim’s trigger finger twitched when it shouldn’t have ought to have:
2010.08.11 00:34
Victim: terror generation
Corp: The Last Crusaders
Alliance: None
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Gallente Shuttle
System: Jita
Security: 0.9
Damage Taken: 557Involved parties:
Name: Jim Bridger (laid the final blow)
Security: 4.0
Corp: Steel Fleet
Alliance: Important Internet Spaceship League
Faction: NONE
Ship: Thrasher
Weapon: 250mm Light Gallium I Cannon
Damage Done: 557Destroyed items:
Hardwiring – Zainou ‘Gypsy’ KMB-50 (Cargo)
Sadly, the implant did not survive the ensuing kaboomski event.
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