Chapter 10
The Long Autumn
Weeping may endure for a night, but cheese cometh in the morning.
I. A Tenth of a Light-Year
The Waifu Accords were signed on the twenty-third of August. The next day, reparations or no reparations, FL33T helped kill a Snuffed Out Avatar in Old Man Star. A week after that, autumn came early.
On the thirty-first of August, BearThatCares was doing chores with a game running in the background when Faymm of Dreadnought Diplomacy pinged: did FL33T want to help shoot the Fraternity in Evati?
He flash-formed.
The morning rats answered.
The titan's bridge came up a tenth of a light-year short.
They scrambled for carriers. One turned out to be unfueled. They conduited through the one that was, and the late arrivals joined in after.
The fight that followed destroyed six hundred billion ISK, most of it in under an hour. The Fraternity alone lost thirty-three dreadnoughts and twenty-nine Barghests.
BearThatCares had meant to write up the Avatar first. Then he caught the flu, and the Evati record went out instead.
II. Shaking Off Rust
September was a month of grinding back to form, and the battle records from it flattered no one. Target broadcasts went out late. The fix, as one of them put it, was simple: "We just need more grids to fight on, and more time on grid."
Deepwater Hooligans and Sedition were not handing out grids. Forty BIGAB Barghests farmed drills and refused anything that looked like an even fight.
The rust was still there on the fourth of October, when FL33T and KNONO, the Know-Nothings, formed to contest BIGAB drill timers in Dal, in Heimatar. Comms went to chaos as tackle scrambled for a BIGAB Avatar titan.
A cyno went up.
Heavy tackle secured.
FL33T's tackle had caught it, and everyone else took the kill. KNONO's dreadnoughts landed first, and Snuffed Out piled on with the rest. FL33T finished with less than a tenth of the damage, and BearThatCares called comms a nightmare.
The drill repaired again.
The titan did not.
III. We Like the Game
That autumn, Minmatar Fleet put a team together from nothing for Alliance Tournament XXI. It won its way through the feeder rounds and lost in the main bracket to a shield rush. The write-up went through every match and signed off: "We like the game."
IV. The Dronelands Begin
By the second of November, Frontlines was counting drills.
INSURGENCY ENDS, ASTRA RECALLED, APOC BOOTED, AND 27 MOONDRILLS GONE!
Six days later, BearThatCares led a hundred Cyclone Fleet Issues into LXQ2-T, in Etherium Reach. They had come for fights, and to cost the locals money.
They fought SLYCE's Cormorants first, the nullsec banner BearThatCares and Ibn Khatab had flown under years before. Then a hundred Goonswarm Federation pilots arrived, and it took a boosh and a reship into Imperial Navy Slicers to settle it. SLYCE alone lost seventy-three ships that day. Before midnight FL33T added a Pandemic Horde Thanatos.
A jump clone went into Uemon. Three days later, FL33T shipped in heavy missile Lokis, toasted sovereignty hubs across the Reach, and farmed content off nullsec groups who did not know how to fight them. Home, for the moment, was a freeport Keepstar.
The same day, the alliance's propaganda had the Minmatar Republic Tourism Bureau recommending Vard for a relaxing vacation away from nullsec.
By December a pocket had taken shape in the Dronelands, and a new series began under the name PVP FL33T Mining.
ADMs pushed.
Thirty-one miners on grid.
Five and a half billion ISK of ore from a single operation.
The pocket was defended against BIGAB entosis runs and NPSI roams rolling through.
V. The Bill
The bill for the summer had come due in late November. On the twenty-second, a Sedition fleet came onto the Watermelon's grid in Sosala, and somebody who was not even a rat was in the structure's seat, and its fighters killed a Local is Primary Naglfar. It was not enough.
The Watermelon belonged to Black Omega Security, which had just spent a week losing its Sotiyo and four Fortizars to Goonswarm in Etherium Reach. Three nights later, Sedition came back to finish it. Local is Primary was on the killmail, and so was Task Force 641: the same Amarr names FL33T had fought over Auga two and a half years earlier.
In July, nearly ninety dreadnoughts had come to keep it.
This time, the only Minmatar Fleet name on Sosala's killboard that night was its own.
Nobody formed.
The next night it was Vard, where the Fortizar belonged to Soltech Armada, one of the alliance's member corporations. FL33T formed for that one. Both fleets flew Tempest Fleet Issues, and Deepwater Hooligans, leading the other one, had more of them.
FL33T killed the Deepwater Moros Navy Issue that was doing a quarter of the damage. The Fortizar died four minutes later anyway, and BearThatCares's Damnation a minute and a half after that.
Two years earlier, Mikal Vektor had called Minmatar Fleet a pet on Deepwater's leash. If Deepwater Hooligans had ever held one, this was a strange way to use it.
VI. The Siege of Eugidi
All autumn, a slower war had been running in Eugidi, the Metropolis constellation that holds Turnur and Floseswin.
The alliance's first guide to the warzone, back in YC125, had accused the Dragon Riders, or Dragon Ride as it called them, of pledging allegiance to both Amarr and Minmatar "with the cunning of double-agents," farming in Eugidi and awoxing the farmers. MINMIL chased them out in the spring of YC126. They were back within weeks.
The propaganda never let it go.
THE DRAGON RIDERS AWOX EMPIRE MUST FALL!!!
The name that kept turning up was Ibaka Wilkins. The year the guide came out, he had been flying for a corporation called Red Blood Dragon Ride. Now he was enlisted in the Minmatar militia, with Justice League of Republic.
In November, that Minmatar militia pilot killed forty-three Minmatar Fleet pilots across Eugidi, two Kronoses among them, and the Amarr militia was on nearly every killmail with him: the both-sides act the guide had described, still running two years on.
The siege took ten weeks. The New Eden Yacht Club — Y4CHT, a militia corporation that had joined the alliance in October — ran the plexes, cycling through the vulnerable systems one by one. FL33T's combat wing was the quick-reaction force. When BIGAB or the Fraternity came to contest a timer, FL33T formed and held the grid until the plex was done.
On the seventh of December, MINMIL captured Isbrabata, the last holdout in Eugidi. The same day, Vard fell to the Amarr.
Deepwater Hooligans, it turned out, had another Avatar. On the twenty-second they warped it onto a structure grid in Isbrabata and doomsdayed a FL33T Phoenix.
