So we had started that day with a plan …
A day spent mining common ores in the belts of Arbaz with an eye on resale on the open markets of Amarr. The why being that the belts of Arbaz are fairly quiet and tend to be free of rats and one rarely sees much in the way of hostile ships beyond the occasional member of CODE with the urge to cause trouble or some newbie pilot out of Deepari with a need to prove themselves by harassing whatever random miner that catches thier attention. That was until we picked up a Leshak on the D-Scan loitering on the system’s outer edge.
Now a Leshak is not a cheap ship by any stretch of the imagination tending to be one of the newer and more pricey hull of the day with a price tag of around 700 to 800 million Isk on a good day and that’s before you start fitting the beast with whatever nasty little surprises you can afford install. Put simply, it’s not a common hull type you’d tend to see lurking around the backwaters of imperial space. The ship was a shark and it was without question out hunting for blood.
Lucky for us we were running scouting runs through the system in a newly acquired Heron with what amounted to an unremarkable name in an unremarkable system so it wasn’t a big deal to narrow down the location of the battleship by using a combination of D-Scanning and jumping from perch to perch to narrow down the location of the beast before finally deploying the combat probes to gain a quick fix and idea on what stage in the hunt it was hopefully without being detected.
…
Now the reality is that it’s not really the Leshak itself that we’re after because the fact is that there is no chance in the nine hells that a lone Heron fitted like ours would be able to take on a hybrid alien battleship by ourselves. Rather the prize we’re hunting for is the wreck’s and scraps that this beast tends to leave in its wake.
Leshak hulls are a type flown exclusively by those so-called Omega Clones who more often than not tend to be rich little boys and girls who we’ve learned over time tend to be rather messy eaters for lack of a better description. Just warping into a high value combat site and ripping the enemy ships to pieces before spending a short period after picking over the wrecks of the slain only grabbing those choice pieces of tech before abandoning the rest to the void and moving on to the next meal.
This basically mean that if your a lucky little Alpha and wait for your chance you can warp in on a freshly cleared combat site right behind them and salvage anywhere from 50 to 100 to 200 wrecks and perhaps snag a box or two of high value tech that the Omega didn’t see fit to haul off site with them when they move on to that next combat site.
This is not always the case however because sometimes you’ll find that the Omega’s are playing another game altogether. Just hitting a regular site and then waiting in ambush any unlucky scavengers that might follow in their wake.
Today however was a good day, because not only did we jump on station just after the Leshak had cleared the first wave and taken the jump gate to the next room but he had been kind enough to leave the first dozen wrecks untouched floating in space just waiting to be salvaged. From there we watched and waited via D-Scan as he deployed a MTU followed by a dozen combat drones not just once but three additional times letting us get a count of the rooms and a timetable on how quickly he was clearing each one.
In the end we harvested around 100+ wrecks and 3 boxes of abandoned equipment with a total market value of just under 50 million Isk. A good haul given we didn’t even need to fire a shot and it was just waiting for us to come and collect it.
Good story Rachell