Ménage à trois

Whilst ship spinning in my HiSec base, Willow Windwalker pipes up in an intel channel that he's on grid with a Kronos and a pair of Guardians running sites in a C4 shattered wormhole. The intel channel is conspicuously empty and even though I'm only eight jumps away from the entry, there's little chance the two of us could crack a Kronos, especially with a pair of Guardians keeping him capacitor stable and all repaired up between bastion cycles. Just as I'm resigning myself to the fact we'll have to let this one slip by, Trinkets logs in. Knowing he's comfortable dual boxing suddenly this looks do-able. Meanwhile, Willow is rustling up support from the Wormhole PvP Channel who happen to be fleeted up and roaming about and before you know it, we have a sizeable gang en route.

It's a kitchen sink affair with no Logistics but heavy on the eWar and being so close by I'm the first to arrive on the scene, planting myself on the entry to the C4 for the fleet to form up on. It was at this point that Willow had to log out which is a damn shame considering he found the target, but I suppose real life does come first. With Trinkets on the entry as a warp in I jump into the C4 to find exactly where our target is. I'm flying my Rook so there's no danger of being spotted on D-Scan and after a bit of warping around system I am able to locate them down a 15 degree bearing less than 5 AUs from a planet. Unfortunately, they're not idiots. It seems they're only doing the combat Data and Relic sites so they'll be tipped off about being discovered the moment anyone tries to probe them out. As we're considering our options the HiSec connection collapses, compounding our issues. The new HiSec is soon found but it's quite a trip for most of the fleet, short cutting through LowSec to save time. The delay may prove costly, however.

Just as our fleet are finally coalescing, I briefly spot an Astero on D-Scan with a familiar moniker. I know I've seen the ship identifier of  Æ before, I just can't remember where. Either way, there's a good chance our prey have been discovered by a third party with similar intentions to our own.

We jump our combat prober in to get a fix on the target but we're too late. The other hunters are already in system and shitting up D-Scan with all manor of armour tanked cruisers. The race of the combat probers is on with aplomb with no less than 32 combat probes on D-Scan. With all that going on a Legion lands 100km's from my Rook and starts burning towards me. I was near a celestial so I'm not sure if I was probed or it was coincidence, but Combat Recons are pretty tough to probe out so fast, I think it was just a coincidence. I help him close the gap with the fleet ready to warp to me... 80km's... 70km's... just as he gets to less than 50km's away he suddenly warps off. I guess his gang caught the Kronos. Very shortly after with all those ships still on scan our fleet is en route too, landing in the Sabre bubbles left by the Low Class gang [I knew I recognised that symbol!] and immediately calling primary and secondaries targets of the two Guardians whilst spreading points where possible. It seems the call went out fairly early on with the Low Class guys to bug out as they were sorely outnumbered & that's fine with me, I just want the Kronos. The Guardians were being jammed out and dropping fast when I made the call that the Kronos was in jump range of the Wormhole but it seems only two of us were in range to jump with him if he bailed. As the second Guardian popped, bail he did and I followed straight after, praying to Bob that I might be in scram range on the other side. Bob didn't see fit to answer my prayers however, leaving me 18 km's from my target and forcing me to watch him warp away to safety. I'm pretty sure Bob did this because I was in a fleet with 6 ECM Cruisers. Penance has to be paid, after all.

I jumped back into the shattered hole to find the last remaining Low Class pilot stuck in one of his own gang's bubbles, his Jamgu neuted dry and counter jammed, so I whored on the kill and scrammed what turned out to be a pretty shiney pod.

Back slaps were exchanged and the fleet moved back out to HiSec together, but I can't help feel a bit pissed off that we missed out on that fat Kronos. I'm not blaming anyone, Low Class did what any of us would've done, it was just bad luck. But two Guardians and a Jamgu help to ease my suffering. It truly was a ménage à trois; one way or another, every one of us got fucked.