The saga...
It started like any other day in Fountain. Gankor slow boated between the office and the Arcane alliance office to pick up some analyzers for the corp, keeping one eye intel channel with the other watching local. Com chatter was lite and while there were a few hostiles in neighbouring systems - the scanner showed only blues in the otherwise empty systems he passed through.
"fuk fuk fuk" suddenly appeared in the corp channel from somebody who's usually got things under control. Senses going into overdrive with the worry that a Puppet Master Gank squad had tackled somebody - he asked if he could help. Somebody in corp had lost their ship to some hostile Serpentis in one of their hidden and generally closely guarded facilities and needed help recovering anything left in their wreck. While the Serpentis could be tough - they're generally predictable and a couple of corp mates offered to help out. Details of the events leading up to the loss appeared on comms; it appeared that this Serpentis facility was a tough nut - 8 guard towers that included cruise missile batteries & energy neutralising towers - with 8 hostile battleships, cruisers and some nasty scram & web frigs ready to pounce on any ship that entered deep into the complex.
A quick refit and checking on ammo the small group linked their computers and the gang headed out to a neighbouring system from the corporation station in Z30. The first room was empty of any hostiles, just dozens of their wrecks floating in space - evidence of the swift but brutal battle that had taken place in the preceeding hours. The strange disabling effect, that was often coupled with these facilities, rendered their microwarp drives inoperative - so minutes passed slowly as they drifted to the next gate on their subspace drives.
The lead battleship checked his integrity fields were running before activtating the gate deeper into the Serpentis base and braced himself for the onslaught. 5s later the rest of the gang activated the gate. The plan was simple. The battleship would warp into the room, align with a celestial so he could warp out when his tank was close to breaking - while the others entered the room and gathered what they could from their wreck.
The first part worked - the serpentis - alert as always - locked the BS within seconds and started launching missiles towards the battleship. Quickly identifying the smallest ships capable of webbing or scramming him - he locked and launched precision missiles to remove them from the arena. His tank was taking a severe beating however and he knew it would only be 20s or so until he would have to warp out to safely.
The other members of the gang were busy at work getting to the wreck and pulling everything that was available into their cargoholds.
It was no use - after 45s in the room the Battleship captain had to warp. Some of the dangerous scramming & warp disrupting were down but there were still more that would quickly lock. He warped to a nearby safe, hoping others in the gang had managed to get out and silently cursed that not everybody had installed voice comms into their ships. The others appeared out of warp a few seconds later - they managed to get out without taking too much dmg and with all of the loot.
The battleship pilot checked his damage logs and decided to refit a little to spread out the damage a little better while the others decided to clone jump back to empire to get some credits towards replacing the ship they had lost.
Over the next hour or so the battleship took the simple but slow approach - warping into the room, taking out the most threatening targets and warping out when his tank looked close to breaking. It worked well and quickly all the existing frigs were ghostless wrecks and all but one of the neutralising towers were down.
The corp channel starting buzzing to life as others finished playing the "Life" game that was often played as a pasttime throughout the universe. Quickly the gang filled with some supporting battlecruisers and the boulstered gang entered deep in the facility - managing to deal some serious damage to the serpentis cruisers before tanks started to crack under the constant fire of the hostile battleships and towers. They warped and returned - each time taking out a little more and making the room a little safer. The problems started when they started taking working on the towers that pounded them with missiles - a subspace message from one of the dying tower guards called for reinforcements and fresh tackling frigates warped into the battle arena. The call went out to warp but they were too cunning, too swift and too close to one gang member and he was pinned into place. As the others tried to warp back quickly - it was too late. With no other targets the full force of the Serpentis bent their anger towards the battlecruiser and within seconds his ship exploded in a firey ball of flames - and he warped his pod quickly out of harms way.
tbc..
