J131401

Entry: six hundred ninety-eight.

Yesterday a call came out for backup. N3MESIS apparently needed some help to deal with a gang of W-spacers coming in and out through a connection in 9SBB-.

Only a few short minutes passed before Cascade began forming up in 49-U6U. A few of us didn't wait for the main Cascade fleet to formup and just burned directly. It was only a few minutes after the initial formup that the fleet began burning furiously for 9SBB- as well. The thirteen jump trip itself was rather uneventful except for the frantic urging by N3MESIS and the Cascade FC to get to 9SBB- as fast as possible. Orders were passed down en route  to hold on the 9SBB- gate in 3-F, and I arrived only scant minutes before the rest of the Cascade emergency fleet did.

Just moments after the fleet landed and joined the N3MESIS fleet on that gate, N3MESIS jumped in and warped to the wormhole entrance, telling us to do the same only a minute later. There was a pause in orders as N3MESIS waited for the situation to develop on the other side of the connection, then began screaming for everyone to transit. The fight had finally escalated.

My stomach twisted sickeningly as I traversed the connection, only relenting once the other side was reached. The situation that greeted me was just as bad as traversing the connection had been though. Two FCs were calling targets in the same fleet against the enemy targets. Only when Cascade's FC relented and let the  N3MESIS FC call primaries did things become organized.

The enemy arrayed against us was Transmission Lost, a dedicated W-Space alliance that some of my fleet members had run across before once or twice. Their force was bubbled on the connection to 9SBB-, but they had an Archon in triage. Their sub-capitals were attempting to defend the triaged Archon while the Archon attempted to keep them alive. To make matters worse for them, when N3MESIS and Cascade had transited into J131401, the way back had collapsed due to the sheer mass that passed through the connection.

With no chance for escape, over fifty of us versus thirty of them, they went out fighting, all but a few of their ships too deep within the bubbles to burn for the edges and warp away to safety. Enemy sub-capitals were eliminated over the course of the next few minutes, before the Archon was finally destroyed in about a minute's time.

With no immediate route back to Querious, the fleet looted the field while a Prober scanned out new wormholes to get us back to K-Space. It was during this wait that I learned that the fight I had just been involved in was a revenge fleet. N3MESIS had apparently been in and out of skirmishes with Transmission Lost in the preceeding hours, and in the final skirmish before the revenge fleet, they had been whelped rather badly.

Being used as a tool for someone else's revenge just isn't as fulfilling I'd hoped it might be, and the several hours of waiting just to re-enter K-Space wasn't the best repayment either. Still, the loot was nice, and should deal with some of the costs of fitting a recently acquired Tornado, courtesy of Militaris Industries. I suppose it all balances out in the end.
 
After all, I could have ended up doing nothing all as opposed to having a little fun.
  
Computer: terminate recording.