A badge of pride

When I settle in in a random wormhole, I expect to kill locals once or twice and then move on. Sometimes I may move on without killing anyone if I can't get an opportunity to present itself. While staying in one system, I always look for ganks in the surrounding systems. Sometimes targets come to me, like that random rolling battleship, which was unlucky enough to jump to the wormhole that I was watching. While I try to be as discrete as possible, it is usually hard to do so when you get your hands dirty.

After a Mega gank, I was chilling on the same wormhole. Not sure why, because it's a small chance they will try to roll it again, but the only other option was to watch low-sec exit. And I probably should have, but it's just my bias that more interesting stuff happens in w-space to w-space connections rather than in k-space to w-space. Anyway, here I was, sitting cloaked up, checking d-scan once in awhile when I get an Orca hit. Which is nothing unusual. The tower in range had Orca sitting for whole day. Not expecting much, I do nothing. A d-scan check later now shows absent of ships. Ah, probably logged off again. A one more d-scan later, Orca reappears. Wait a minute, something is not right here. I do my small angle check to the tower's direction and I see no Orca. Spread out again to 360 and Orca is on scan. Holy shit. By intuition, I set d-scan towards low-sec connection next.

Fuck me. How is that even possible? I have killed a Megathron within the tower's range and I know there was an Astero at the time. There is also a hostile corp that has more than few cloaky ships sitting at a pos. Is this guy seriously doing logistics? Unless another corp is not hostile and those tower kills I saw earlier were just a fuck up. I quickly warp to low-sec exit, but Orca is nowhere to be seen. D-scan shows he is back at the tower. I warp to get a visual.

Everyone is being a smart ass these days. I warp to 100 and almost get decloaked by a Mobile Depot. This is why I always prefer to warp to 70km as my default distance. Unfortunately, one time out of 100+ I got decloaked by tower's forcefield and decided those are not the odds I want to take. Problem is, that warping to 100 from the planet is done by everyone, so it's easy to anticipate it and set up containers to decloak you. This time I get lucky. I watch Orca at the tower and pray to Bob that he will do another run.

I see a movement!

Orca warps to low-sec wormhole! I warp to 10 while thinking if I should wait for him to come back or if I should jump after. Tower looks empty and I saw him sitting at the corp hanger for awhile. He must be evacuating assets. There's no way of knowing if this won't be the last trip. But also there's the risk that we'll end up on the opposite sides, outside scram range. If he has even one warp core stabilizer fitted, it could get away as my point would not be enough to stop it.

I land out of warp at 5km and decision to jump or not becomes easy as the fat Orca decloaks me when exiting warp. He jumps, I jump.

I decloak, he decloaks. As I feared, we end up 20km apart. I burn to him and try to get a lock, but unsuccessfully. Suddenly, Orca disappears from the overview. Oh shit, he has a cloak. My ship is decelerating, but I set full speed manually to the direction wherever I was going. Orca gets decloaked and I tackle him. Jump in my Domi fleet and my favorite part starts - the killing!

Orca pilot realizing his doom tries to grasp at straw.

No deal my friend. Orca is a symbolic catch. It's a beautiful ship that appears so rarely. To catch it is a badge of pride.

A badge I like to wear.