Wait, what? It was one of our own guys?
Oops.
Specifically, it was Bre, who actually isn't part of our corporation, just a friend. In fact, she's supposed to be marked as a trusted friend of the corporation, and we thought the tower guns understood that, but when we think about it, we realize that she's been flying a cloaked covert ops ship almost a hundred percent of the time, and has never actually been visible to the guns at any point, except when she was safely inside the tower shields.
Until now.
Oops.
The reason Bre was decloaked outside the tower was to set up a pair of 'mailboxes' outside our tower and the tower of ze Germans -- password-locked containers, floating in space, where our two corporations can leave each other bookmarks to all the cosmic locations we scan down -- just one more way we can establish a good relationship with our neighbors.
(I don't think I put this much effort into getting to know the people I actually live next to.)
Bre was handling this part of the project simply because she's the best scanner we have and she can fly around the system without fear of enemy ambush (friendly ambush is another story).
I'm annoyed that we still haven't gotten the security on the tower set up correctly, and the Germans sympathize, because they still haven't figured out how to get their tower to stop shooting at us either, which seems to embarrass them more than a little.
In fact, they seem to feel particularly bad about the fact that Bre's ship was destroyed while she was distributing bookmarks for their corp as well as ours, and three of their leaders each send her a sizable bit of isk to compensate her for the loss -- more than enough to replace and refit her covert-ops frigate. This makes quite a good impression on us -- words are nice, but actions speak considerably louder, and in EVE, actions involving money speak loudest of all.
The tengus slumming in our system the night before seem to have cleared out all the local sleeper sites, but luckily we have a persistent connection to class 1 wormhole space. Some exploration reveals that there are dozens of small pockets of the semi-dormant homocidal drone ships in that small abandoned system, so I start cracking them open and pulling out their candy-like ancient technologies while Bre builds herself a shiny new Buzzard cov-ops ship.
I'm going after the Sleepers solo, because Gor is out for the day and CB is still back in Empire space after his encounter with roaming bombers the night before, but my Myrmidon battlecruiser takes longer to reach the ships than blow them up. I bookmark a wreck in each site, leaving them in my wake as I go, so that the cleared sites despawn and drop off of the system scanner. The wrecks will remain for several hours, but there won't be an easy way for ... let's say ... a pair of stealth bombers to locate and drop in on me when I come back in my salvager ship.
CB is online, however, and we chat on voice while I slap the evil drones around. He's still analyzing the ambush, and bemoaning the loss of so much ore. Our lessons learned from the event are two-fold; CB decides he need to adopt a 'save early, safe often' mindset, and 'waste' some time flying the ore back to the safety of the tower more often than he's used to doing in high security space. For my part, I think it's fairly likely the fragile bombers would have left CB alone if he'd had a pointier ship nearby -- rather than running around doing errands, we might have saved ourselves a ship loss if I'd played bodygaurd the night before; you'll always be safer with a friend than flying solo.
In fact... it occurs to me that I'm solo right now, and flying a fragile salvager ship. Hmm.
I hurry the last of the post-combat cleanup and skitter on back to the tower. There's plenty of time left in the evening, but I think I can wait to share the profit (and risk) with another pilot.
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