Excerpt from the scout pilot’s private journal
Waiting for a suitable wormhole to open for our own POS installation, I decided not to waste the time and scouted the neighbouring system instead. The connection dropped me into a C2 with statics to high-sec and C4. Coming out of warp, d-scan delivered an unsettling picture: a battleship, three cruisers, four Ventures, a single Buzzard. A full fleet, sitting there in the system, waiting for unwelcome intruders.
The first thought was a trap. The anomalies must be already scouted, and somewhere a cloaked Astero could be waiting for the naive scanner to commit to a hack. Or the Buzzard was simply holding probes on standby.
I began scanning anyway. Slow, deliberate — the system unfolded signature by signature: wormholes, data sites, relics. The fleet on d-scan did not move. No change in composition, no combat probes.
The doubt grew alongside the system map. A battleship and cruisers made sense clearing an anomaly. The Ventures could be working an asteroid belt or a gas site. But the Buzzard? A T2 scanner that did not cloak for even a second when unfamiliar probes appeared on scan — that is not a hunter’s behaviour.
A directional scan confirmed it. The entire fleet was parked on one of the moons. Abandoned ships sitting under a POS shield, not a standing fleet.
The decision was to risk it.
The first container returned forty million. The total haul from the system came to eighty-eight.
End of the scout’s journal excerpt.
The Admiral set the report down. His pilot had gambled and won — the fleet on d-scan had turned out to be an empty stage set, not an ambush. The only open question was how long it would take before someone tried the same gamble in their own system, and whether they would walk away with nearly a hundred million in loot.