Always a Bigger Fish

I'm actually caught up (briefly) with the CapStable interviews, so it's storytime.  I live in Fliet, the home of Aideron Robotics.  A sleepy low-sec backwater it is definitely not.  After the Phoebe changes we soon found that we were within jump range of several large "pirate" organizations.  Add that to the newly resurgent Caldari Militia and there has been plenty of content to go around.

The Worm on the Hook

About a week about we took a mixed destroyer/frigate fleet into the Caldari system of Hasmajala, parked ourselves into a small plex, took a look at the huge number of CalMil pilots in local and figured we'd have a fight (possibly overwhelming) in a few minutes.  When that didn't appear then the smacktalking began, including a quick jibe:

"Hey Templis, do you get the feeling that someone is taking a piss on your lawn?"

Maybe 10 minutes later we got reports that Templis undocked a Sac / Guardian fleet that was 2-3 times the size of our fleet.  Now those can't fit into a small, so what are they doing?  Apparently heading right out of Has and towards our Gallente controlled system apparently.  They then set about reinforcing our POCOs in Deven and Fliet.  Their FC sent a message back:

"So, do you get the feeling that someone is taking a piss on your lawn?"

Oooh, nice CalMil, gotta hand it to you.

So we have POCOs come out in a few days, AIDER brings out Pospreys and reps them up, then they get reinforced again. Fast forward a few days to when I log in just in time to help with the POCO rep and jump into a Posprey...

Red Fish

We're repping up a POCO in Fliet, chattering on comms and I gotta say that discipline is lax.  We get the POCO up above 25% and I align back to our home.  As I hit warp I hear one of the guys say that he's bringing his missioning Proteus onto grid for no particular reason.  Next thing that happens... Cyno.

Mercenary Coalition piles through a cyno on top of our departing Pospreys, the missioning Proteus, and an Atron who had dropped by.  A Posprey and Atron are popped but the Proteus gets away.  The attackers have a mixed bag of armor cruisers ranging from Ashimmu to Vigilant plus a Panther and a Confessor - 11 ships in all it looks like from the killmail.

I land at the FDU station and switch over to a CovOps to check things out, but that's not the end of it.

Blue Fish

As I'm hopping into my Helios I hear that a second cyno has been lit off.  Mercenary Coalition's Arazu is quickly pinned down and dispatched by the new incoming fleet from Overload Everything.  Four Aeon, Ten Nyx, and an Archon.

I bounce off a safe just in case there's someone clever at 100km off from FDU, and by the time I'm back on grid the carriers and supercarriers have re-reinforced our POCO and headed off to the Heyd gate.  Apparently they didn't bring sup-cap support, so they couldn't lock down more of the Mercenary Coalition fleet.

I trail them from gate to gate, putting their fleet comp and travel path up on GalMal intel, but I'm guessing that we don't exactly have the kind of power on call that would be needed to do anything to that force.  At first they started to straggle out a bit, but then they tightened up, perhaps because obvious people like me were around.  After six or seven gates I headed on back home.  Apparently they knocked down the defenses of a POS on their way home, but nobody bigger jumped on top of them as far as I can tell from zKillboard.


"Do you ever get the feeling we're a worm on a hook?" one of my corpmates commented.  Yup, we're small enough that this may be the nature of FW lowsec around here.  It can make for an exciting night though.