Cargo Run

I hated cargo runs. The Occator class transport was an unwieldy beast of a ship, based on the Gallente Iteron III. But the nimble Viator didn't have enough cargo space to bring in the materials to build out the squad of Vagabond-class cruisers I had commissioned from Bruna. His materials list read like ancient earth latin. Nanotransitors. Hypersynaptic Fibers. Fernite whatsit. Hundreds of millions of ISK in the cargo hold wrapped up in those odd materials. The Occator was the best ship for the job. It had the tank and speed to crash a stargate if caught by an pirate fleet, and advanced electronics to prevent a warp scrambler from affecting the warp drive. But it flew like a fat pig in thick mud.

The only reason I was doing it myself was the cost. Many of the couriers I've used recently had suffered setbacks, or made stupid mistakes and lost goods. So I was going to move it myself, from Jita. Once passed Uedama, I relaxed for most of the flight. I had a scout waiting in Deninard, to check the losec passage through Onne and Vitrauze. Onne and Vitrauze are interesting systems. There's a great Losec pipeline that goes through most of empire without a single hisec stop. We called it the Silk Road, although I had no idea why. Onne and Vitrauze are part of that road. Because of that, there are fewer camps than the well-know Parts/Obalyu gate, but often larger fleets. This makes them ideal for my purposes, but not safe. Deninard was busy. Based on local chat the Goonswarm crew was maintaining their Ice Interdiction, not ganking transports on the gates, so I was jumping into Onne before my scout reported two signatures in Vitrauze.

Two ships aren't much of a threat to a calm transport pilot. It's the rare PvP ship with dual point/scram in losec, so it's usually easy to split two attackers on a gate with aggression tactics, and get out one side or the other. But this wasn't even a PvP pair. Twins, it appeared, one in a Bestower and one in a Rifter. My heart didn't skip a beat as I passed the Bestower in warp in Onne, and landed on the Vitrauze gate with the Rifter in range. I jumped through and aligned for Droselatory, a hisec island on my route. Imagine my surprise as the Rifter jumped through with me, accelerated towards me and tried to warp scramble my ship. I almost cancelled my warp just to watch him die to the gate guns, but I was so busy laughing I couldn't complete the command. I simply warped off as his ship fell to the gate guns.

A few jumps later I was laughing it up with Bruna, after he had begun construction of my Vagabonds. What fool in a Rifter tries to tackle a Transport ship on a gate in losec? My only regret was forgetting to activate my ECM before I warped, to get on the killmail.