Strolling through the station corridors until reaching the docking bays I yawned, having just woke up from a nap after a lazy day doing nothing. Boarding the ship, I logged into the various comm channels only to find all hell breaking lose. There was excited chatter and people talking, yelling and shouting over one another.

I decided to wait a few moments before announcing my arrival to glean some information and figure out exactly what was going on. I’d managed to deduce that a small gang had tackled and were in the process of taking down a Domi. The pilot was refusing communication and rejecting ransom requests, so it looked like his ship was heading for the big space graveyard – when suddenly and unexpectedly he ejected and flew off.

The Domi was quickly boarded and docked up. It turned out to be a fully fitted T2, Trimark Domi – a very nice bit of loot indeed, especially intact. Even more beautiful was the fact that later that evening the pilot paid to have it back, so there was no need to strip and resell it.

I’d just cleared the station docking perimeter as the Domi was being hoisted away.

“Deimos heading to planet one!” someone yelled. I hadn’t been fleeted at this point, but instantly set a course and warped to the planet arriving about the same time as a few of the others. Flicking the overview into “battle mode” I locked the ship, and his accomplice. Before I could start my attack the Deimos was melted into scrap metal, just as I was activating my modules to fire. They switched over to the secondary ship which was hit hard with ECM attacks, the missiles had launched at the Deimos were speeding randomly into space.

“Blackbird at planet one!”

“Primary the blackbird” yelled the FC.

“Blackbird is friendly, it’s Alia” I repeated twice – just to make sure they heard me. It turned out the accomplice ship wasn’t a target, but another associate who wasn’t in fleet and I’d not had standings set.

After a quick and mostly harmless blue-on-blue we were both fleeted and my overview updated. Having barely got ourselves together once again another gang member had found a mission runner in a plex in a vengeance. It proved to be a nightmare to get to and was giving us the run around, taking up valuable time so we decided to spend our time more productively and moved on to bigger and better.

To that end we organised the squads into fleets and subsections so we could be as efficient as possible. Squads “Anus Fur” and “Shaved Ass” were formed, along with “Jam Doughnuts” which caused an insane amount of laughter on the Vent server as Flashfresh calmly recited the names without so much as a smirk, finishing off with “I can’t believe I kept a straight face through that” – which made it all the more funny.

We moved through a few systems, spreading ourselves out a little in the hope of maximising our chances of finding something juicy. That chance came to fruition when a Maelstrom was found in a mission. Arriving at the gate in staggered warps we proceeded through. The tacklers caught the mighty battleship dozing and quickly had it immobilised whilst the DPS laid in. Keeping the DPS and tacklers safe, I was up to my usual tricks and keeping his offensive capabilities to zero.

The ship was burning up, but not before a corp mate of his arrived to help in his Thorax.

“Incoming Thorax” I yelled as it appeared not too long after getting a hit on my scanner. I quickly locked the ‘rax and switched a couple of jammers over to him. One of the tacklers locked him down quickly and he exploded very shortly afterwards.

It was then back to the business in hand, and finishing off the Maelstrom. Which we did, and collected the loot. Not wanting to hang around too long as there were other members of the corp in the solar system and one jump over (nice of them to come help, huh?).

After the loot was safely tucked up, we headed down to Gurkala. The gang was split over several systems and waiting GCC’s and so on. A Jaguar was playing merry hell with our tacklers and dps one jump over. When they could get it pointed it was tearing chunks out of them, and it was very very quick indeed. I offered to go help, and left the rest of my gang members in their safe spot. Heading into Gurkala I warped to the tacklers chasing the Jaguar.

Dropping out of warp about 60km from the action I fired my sensor boosters anyway, it looked like this was going to get out of hand quickly. Locking and jamming the Jaguar kept some of the heat off our tacklers, which meant they had to concentrate on keeping him tackled rather than tackling and living.

“Ma’am, we’re about to lose our lock on the target” reported tactical.

I nodded and punched as much power into the ships engines as possible. Their bright blue ion glow light up the night sky as we made for the action at best speed.

We had no chance of catching this thing, not a hope in hell but that wasn’t my intention. The ship was a maximum speed, pointed towards my gang mates. As soon as one of them….

“Warp Drive Active!”, the ship was flung across the 150km distance to a nearby gang member landing me smack-bang in the middle of it once more. Re-locking the Jaguar at point blank range we unleashed our attack again.

“Load a full compliment of EM missiles” I said

“Aye Ma’am”

We could at least see if we couldn’t make some damage to their shields and help out the tacklers and DPS. Targeting data, trajectories, distances and massive amounts of other computations flowed into me via the pod/neural interface. Calculating and correcting as the missiles launched towards the speeding target, they struck well considering they were heavy missiles against a small, fast, moving target – but I’d always had a knack for that

Another rinse and repeat followed as I’d had to re-warp to gang members again, but the Jaguar was going down. Arriving this time, the tacklers had it dual webbed and it wasn’t able to return fire and keep them at bay. 20 minutes after the initial encounter it was finally dispatched.

A very skilled pilot, who probably deserved to live after all that – but it had made us even more determined not to let him. It turned out he was faction fitted, whilst it made him trickier to catch and kill, provided some very nice loot indeed for such a small ship.

We set a course homeward bound and were greeted by a command ship outside our “home” station, a combination of tiredness, a possibly broken overview readout and no standings/war dec in addition to being too close to the station guns got me attacked for my trouble.

Warping in a maximum range to try and keep out of sentry fire I locked up the target and started to attack, but I was too close! The sentry guns instantly swung round and spewed their projectiles at me.

“Ma’am we’re taking heavy shield damage”

“Active barrier! Full resists, lets get out of here ASAP” I said, wasting no time. I couldn’t head to a gate or a station as I had a GCC.

In the few moments it took to switch overview and get a planet up, our shields were knocked out and we were taking heavy armour damage.

“Alia, what’s going on?”

I didn’t answer at the moment as I was busy navigating the ship out. We were aligning to a planet and I willed the warp drive to kick in, but it seemed to take forever.

“Alia! Get out! Get out” yelled Flash as more sentry fire melted our ablative armour and bit into the hull.

The ship stained under the massive pressure of the manoeuvre to get out, it’s structure severely weakened. Alarms and sirens were sounding, damage reports scrolling down my vision, fires breaking out, consoles exploding and crew members running like headless chickens to either escape pods or trying to contain the damage.

Another salvo from both guns smashed into the ship, tearing through the hull in several places as pieces of ship armour, structure and contents were blown into space.

“Engineering reports there’s nothing more they can do Ma’am” said one of the bridge crew in an oddly calm matter. “We’ve got plasma fires across several decks and the external structure is burning”.

In what would have been split seconds from the guns “coup de gras” our warp engines finally kicked in and out – heading to the relative safety of a planet.

“Report” I yelled!

“Shields down, armour gone, but the structure is holding Ma’am – although we’re an embarrassment to even a minmatar ship at the moment”.

I couldn’t help but chuckle. The final damage report indicated we’d escaped with a sliver of structure left, a mere 8% which had been just and just enough to hold the ship together for our emergency warp out.

“I’m good! I’m good!” I replied over the comms letting my gang mates know I’d escaped.

All in all a very fun roam indeed, with some good kills and loot. The atmosphere in gang and on vent was superb and I can pretty safely say I think everyone enjoyed it. One of the most entertaining nights in recent memory – including the oddly named squads :s