Ambushed!

Been a little slow getting a chance to sit down and write about the past weekends events but sometimes paperwork can be just a little overwhelming and prevents me from making my own personal logs about my experiences. Either way, this past weekend certainly was interesting.

A summons was sent out a few days prior to the weekend alerting the alliance that a mission had been given that would take us into the low security sectors near to our headquarters. I was a little hesitant about answering the call myself, given my lack of training in combat. However, the desire for something a bit more exciting than my usual humdrum activity in the mining business was too hard to pass up. I figured it'd also be good experience for myself and some of the other younger pilots in my corp to get a feel for a high level mission in lowsec so i mustered as many of my corpmates as I could and we set out to meet up with the rest of the alliance at a station one jump away from the mission location in lowsec. Once the troops from all the alliance corporations were formed up at the station, the call was given by the fleet commander to move out. In a large assortment of ships ranging from small rifters to the massive rokh we undocked from the station and set course into lowsec, our scout flying ahead to make sure the area was clear.

There was a slight problem at first, being a pilot that was recently ejected from the alliance due to the discovery that he had gotten himself involved in piracy. Our alliance stands firmly against pirates, going so far in fact as to have a team dedicated soley to the purpose of hunting down any pirates that dare to enter our home system and an adjacent system where we tend to go for our mining. The pilot was of course angered by his dismissal and we were a bit concerned about him possibly being a problem but determination drove us and we made for the gate anyways. By the time we reached it however, he had already moved on. That didn't mean he wouldn't still be a problem but to what extent we didn't know and chose to carry on with the mission as planned.

Jumping into lowsec, we quickly made our way to the acceleration gate, the entry point where we would begin our attack on the drone base located at the other end in deadspace. Our suicide dummy jumped in, gave us a report of the situation and after first sending in the larger vessels to aggro the drones defenses, the remainder of us followed. That, by the way, was a mistake we would end up paying for. Warping into the area, my eyes grew wide at the vast amount of drones already engaging the larger ships. Missiles and gunfire lighting up the darkness of space in one explosion after another. Quickly I gathered my senses, looked through my targeting list and selected the closest nearby fighter equivelant in size to the rifter i was flying. I quickly powered up my cannons, locked the drone into my targeting crosshairs and pushed the throttle to max. Immediantly, a sentry gun locked onto me but our support ship sent me more than enough shield boost to make its attacks nearly unnoticable. Being small and quick, it was my job, like the others who flew in the smaller ships to take out the small drone fighters as the larger ships would have difficulty fighting such nimble vessels. In the meantime, they focused their firepower on the larger, slower moving drones, picking them off one by one while us frigates did the same to the smaller drones. The battle was going quite well, having yet to lose a single ship when our singular mistake came to bite us full force in the ass.

A note and warning to those who take on missions of this nature in areas of lowsec. Always leave a man behind at the entry gate to watch your backs. We really should've known better but on this day, the thought didn't even cross our minds. As they say, hindsight is always 20/20.

Anyways, as i was saying, we were doing quite well with nearly two thirds of the enemy drones having been neutralized. I was focused myself on a particular drone that was really aggravating the hell out of me in his ability to avoid my projectile cannon's punches when suddenly my radar screen lit up with blinking red lights like christmas come early. "what the..." i stammered. Glancing out of my cockpit windows, the looming forms of numerous battlecruisers and battleships filled the darkness of space before me. Pirates! Not one or two but somewhere in the vicinity of 6 or 7 large ships had just warped in, weapons at the ready. Quickly my mind sifted through this turn of events and I realized that there was nothing I could do to help. Against such a force, I would find myself detached from my ship and possibly my body in a very quick manner so I did the only thing I could think of doing. It seems the fleet commander was in full agreement as well. With us already having the aggro of the drone enemy, there was no chance we would survive a fight against both forces. Tucking our tales between our legs, we all turned and fled...except the rokh. Well...he turned to do so but a ship of that size takes some time to make that happen. Just after I hit the button, shooting myself into warp, I heard the news over the com. The pirates had laid down a Cynosural Field, thus preventing our poor rokh pilot from being able to escape. Surprisingly, he held his own for quite some time up until the arrival of the pirates motherships. Against such a massive force of both drones and pirates, it was only a matter of time. Fortunately for our pilot, he managed to eject from his ship just before it blew and rushed to escape the resulting shockwave of destruction.

Regrouping at the station, we licked our wounds, patted each other on the back for having escaped so narrowly and made our way back to headquarters.

So should we have stayed and fought? Should we have done our best to protect our rokh pilot and his ship and most likely lose our own? After a long discussion about the events it was determined we had all done the only feasible thing there was to do. Run. If we had stayed, it would likely have only been worse. But hey, at least we were blessed with the knowledge that the pirates felt the need to bring in such a large force to tackle what was otherwise a pretty small fleet in terms of firepower. Hopefully soon though, even those tables will turn.

Before I sign off though....one last thought that was shared amongst the fleet. Given the ejection of the pirate from our ranks, there is the possibilty that the massive pirate fleet that ambushed us might have been tipped off by this rogue pilot. I mean....could these pirates really have assembled a fleet of that magnitude so quickly without a previous heads-up? Maybe....but the question still remains....

-ML-