Stories from Space - My First Kill

This is the story of the first kill I ever made in EVE Online. It took me 8 years, (although the actual time I have been subscribed in that period is far, far less. Possibly no more than 2). First, perhaps some background is in order. It all started when I undocked from my home station, a busy Navy shipyard in Litiura, a relatively safe system on the fringes of Caldari space.

My ship was, in the words of Shakira, “small and humble”. The K3 7RL frigate, the Kestrel, was something I had flown briefly during my days running missions from various agents of the Caldari Navy. This was years ago, of course, and my tastes had rapidly grown to accommodate a desire to fly bigger, more impressive ships. Call it naïve but back in those formative years in EVE Online I believed that the day I found myself in combat with an actual person it would be at the helm of a battleship, bristling with firepower and cushioned by powerful shields.

I can’t remember exactly when it was that I realised this wouldn’t be the case, but I do remember when the realities of fighting another player were really impressed upon me. You see things, out in space, that make you stop and think. I have watched small fighters swarming battleships, I have seen tiny insignificant looking craft materialise from out of nowhere and tear the armour plating on battlecruisers apart in seconds. During one of my all too brief forays into the lawless regions of space I’d sat helpless as a lone stealth bomber, a frigate much like the Kestrel, had orbited my multimillion ISK battleship and slowly tore chunks out of it. Things like that and specifically the moment I lost my battleship in a fight I couldn’t understand haunted me.  The huge, expansive bank of guns just couldn’t pick my assailant up. He moved too fast, too close, dodging ordinance that could cripple space stations all the while ripping through my ship like it was tissue paper. This was the real EVE, a living, breathing world where there is always so much to learn. But, at times, it felt like too much. Too much work, too much risk and little reward. The Corporations, the player run groups that dominate EVE, seemed too obscure and time demanding to appreciate. Even less welcoming was the dense layer of alliances and politics that dominates the unprotected regions of space.  EVE was always presented as a game where you made your own story, but the moment you ventured out into space without the protection of the NPC police force, in my experience it always ended the same way. A vastly more powerful player, with more skill, and more experience would destroy the ship you were piloting and leave you for dead. Weeks, sometimes months of effort, gone in an instant. Undoubtedly things like that contributed to my fleeting and inconsistent subscription time over the last few years.  But equally, they contributed to the mystique of the game too. There is a reason I always came back.

I had educated myself this time and that was why I found myself back in a Kestrel. Cheap and easy to fly, I knew from past bitter experience and as a result of my research that a frigate was all I needed this time. I could handle anything, and anything I couldn’t compete with could be shaken off and flown away from. I had fitted it out according to the advice I had received from a number of sources and I had prepared myself by downloading my consciousness into a new body. Should I die out in space, that same consciousness would be downloaded into my other, day to day body, which was currently floating in a stasis tank back in the station. Crucially, all the expensive implants that boosted my cognitive function and basic senses were safely installed in that floating, dormant clone. Aside from the small outlay to fit the Kestrel with the basics, I had literally nothing to lose.

Litiura has always been my home, for as long as I can remember. It’s unremarkable as far as systems go. A spread of common planets, some asteroid belts and the odd agent dishing out missions here and there. There is enough to get by on, and it has served me and my friends well over the years. What sets it apart from most of the protected areas of space (by that, I mean the areas of space where CONCORD will intervene and destroy anyone who illegally aggresses a players ship) is that it borders a low security region. The jump gate to Passari floats in space like some kind of cellar door, left slightly ajar. It’s an ominous, dangerous object. Anyone making the jump into Passari does so knowing that CONCORD have no authority there and anything goes. It’s a jump gate that, for me, has always represented the first step towards the real side of EVE that everyone talks about. Myself, and the few people I have inhabited Litiura with in the past, frequently saw it as a place of danger. A place to be avoided, where we didn’t belong. We weren’t fighters, we didn’t know what we were doing. We were much safer among the asteroids and agents of Litiura.

But, that way of thinking belongs in the past. As the angular prow of the Kestrel emerged from the docking station I turned her towards the Passari gate and made my jump. Death or glory, I wasn’t going to waste another subscription experiencing the EVE content that I had got bored of many times before. I was looking for a fight.

I approached the Passari gate in short order. The Kestrel, “The Galactic Keegan”, was the only ship present on the Litiura side of the gate. After the jump, as my sensors recalibrated to the new system I counted only two other pilots in the area. I had been hoping for more, but it would have to do.

Since I re subscribed I had been in Passari a couple of times in a scanning vessel, looking for interesting cosmic anomalies to investigate. As a result of this I already had some coordinates to warp to that would keep me safe from the eyes of strangers while I planned my activities for the day. These points in space were simply that, points in space, but away from the normal warp jump lanes that people used to get from A to B. This essentially meant it would take a dedicated scanning ship to find me and I wouldn’t have anyone stumble upon me by accident.

Upon my arrival at my safe spot I shut my engines off and floated for a while. I kept my eye on the local chat channels and started to investigate my neighbours in the system. Of the two there, neither were part of a player run corporation. This was a good sign. Should I get tangled up with either of these pilots it would be reasonable to assume that help wasn’t just round the corner. Satisfied that my quarry were suitable for this, my first outing as the hunter rather than the prey, I began trying to locate one or both of them. Every ship has an on-board scanner that can detect all manner of objects within the system. It is, however, a crude device relying on precise directional scanning to come up with a meaningful result. It is a skill that still evades me, but luckily even the most lacklustre scanner operator can retrieve useful information from it. I set my scan angle to be a full 360 degrees and pushed the scanner to it’s upper range, looking for any results that indicated what my quarry were flying and where they were. Naturally, this picked up everything from inhabited space stations to floating, derelict fuel containers. I was looking for anything that suggested human players in space and soon found some interesting results.

There was a wreck of a mining ship in the system. Whilst not an expert on mining vessels, I could tell that this one was completely unable to defend itself and whoever was flying it was either crazy or stupid. Unfortunately there was no way of knowing whether it had met it’s end at the hands of a human, or computer controlled assailant. I would never know the full story. What my scanner did tell me though was that this ship had no name. As a superstitious man this rankled me. The ships name was simply the default: its class and it’s owners name. The owner was no longer in the system, which left the possibility that one or both of the current people in there with me could have had a hand in this.

Further into my scan results, discounting space debris and distant station structures, I found signs of another mining ship. This time it was a Venture, a tough but frigate sized vessel equally as unlikely to be able to fight as the other floating wreck in the system. I was perplexed. What were the chances of two pilots being out here mining in a dangerous part of the universe? The ore deposits in Passari aren’t anything special. The ore in Litiura is plentiful and crucially, within the jurisdiction of CONCORD. This didn’t make sense. It also presented me with a slight morale pause. I had come into Passari to fight, to duel another pilot and exchange pleasantries afterwards, like some kind of moustache wielding gentleman. But here was the possibility, albeit slim, that I could turn pirate and come upon a mining vessel with a full broadside and waving the Jolly Roger. A fair fight is one thing, but preying upon an innocent and brave/stupid man of industry was quite another.

The other question of course was finding him. There are half a dozen asteroid belts in Passari and he could be at any one of them. My scanning skills really aren’t up too much so being able to narrow down the direction of my scan was possible, but unlikely. So, instead I endeavoured to visit each belt in order, hoping to warp in on him and take it from there. I was still slightly uneasy about this, but I had committed to a course of action and would see it through no matter the stain upon my soul.

Six asteroid belts later, no sign. Some non-player pirates had spawned at one of the belts and I took the opportunity to put Galactic Keegan through her paces. She dispatched the aggressors without taking a scratch. It felt good to make some contact, even if it was only NPC ships. But, what didn’t feel good was the total lack of my errant mining ship. I did another pass, doubling back on myself and mixing the order up just in case my prey had caught my scent. But still, nothing. It occurred to me that perhaps he was sitting at an asteroid belt that he had found using his scanner. Some hidden, rocky enclave that I couldn’t detect with my basic systems.

Then, he disappeared. His name blinked out of the local channel and I was left with the other occupant. There had been no sign of his ship on any of my scans so I assumed he was ensconced within one of the few stations in Passari and he was no longer of any concern to me. By now my frustrations had given way to any nagging doubt about attacking a mining vessel. I’d been chasing this bastard around for twenty minutes. I would not be denied.

I made the jump back to Litiura immediately. If he had snuck back through he would be on the Litiura local channels and I could, feasibly, wait for him at the Passari gate if that was the case. Perhaps he was like me, once upon a time. You want to shake things up a bit so you go on a jolly into Passari to mine ore in the dangerous, lawless space before jumping back to the safety of Litiura, your heart in your mouth and your pulse raised after your daring but ultimately safe adventure. It wasn’t the case though. He wasn’t to be found in Litiura, which left two possibilities.

He had logged off in space. It happens. His ship would reappear when he logged back in, safely in the ether in the meantime. If that was the case I would never catch him.

Or, he had gone to Mara.

As I have alluded to already, the jump gate that leads into Passari had an element of mystery and danger about it. It was the door you shouldn’t open. The door that led to a dark stair case that descended into an inky blackness. Inside Passari is another jump gate, and that leads to Mara. I had never gone further than that. If Passari opened to the dark stair case, Mara was the darkness beyond the darkness. Mara was the faint scratching you heard at night, the bump in the dark, the sound you hoped was the wind. It was the haunted house in space. To a pilot who lived his entire life in high security space, venturing further than that was anathema. You jump into Mara, then you find a gate in there and you jump. You jump, and you keep jumping until all of a sudden you are in systems that don’t even have a security rating. Where the NPC pirates spawn in waves of battleships, where impenetrable layers of bureaucracy inform sprawling alliances and billions of ISK of ships are vaporised on a whim. To think, this pilot, in his unarmed mining frigate had gone in there? I’d spent years of subscription time avoiding places like that, but look at him, that brave nutter. I had to go and see if he had gone in. I had to do it too.

I didn’t stop to think about it, I just set my course and off I went. Galactic Keegan didn’t even whine in protest, the engines flaring and throwing me back into Passari and all the way across until I was right on top of that grey, silent doorway that led into Mara. I jumped.

He was in there.

 I wonder if he was worried, when he saw me appear on the local channel, that moment when my name pop up on his dashboard. That unmistakeable warning that you are no longer alone. Did he wonder if I was chasing him?

I picked one of the four asteroid belts at random. If he was here, he had to be mining. There are no space stations in Mara. No one lives there. It’s a dark, cold void bereft of all civilisation. Mara serves as a conduit, a route into the penultimate stop before the warm embrace of high security space. He had been here too long now to be moving anywhere else, and I know the Venture isn’t capable of scanning out obscure mining sites. He had to be at an asteroid belt, and I was going to kill him.

Warping directly into an asteroid belt is a jarring experience. Space is naturally quite empty and to go from that to the visual clutter of an asteroid belt requires some concentration. I nearly missed him. Small rocks clanged harmlessly off Keegan as I translated back into normal space and amidst the rocks and dust I saw it, a lone Venture carving minerals from a rock about 25km away from me.

Adrenaline coursed through me like cold water. I sprang into action, acquiring a target lock on him whilst I wrenched Keegan in his direction and hit the afterburners. My little frigate screamed into action, propelling itself forward so violently that I immediately had to kill the extra engines lest I fly straight past him. The lock was acquired at the same time I saw his ship start to pull away, aiming for some distant object as a focal point for his warp drives. Keegan was equipped with humble but no less effective warp scramblers and I had to get them online before my prey could escape. I hit the activation keys, turning on the modules that would murder his warp drive and impede his maximum speed in local space. I had to pin him down.

Warning lights flashed up on my screen. I was so focused on my task I barely took the words in.

“Safety settings…”

You fucking what? After all this time, all this preparation, I hadn’t turned the fucking safety off? Despite my best intentions I was still stuck in that high security mind set. I hadn’t even considered a safety mode, but there it was, flashing up on my screen like the most normal thing in the world. All ships have a safety setting, something that turns off any kind of automatic aggression response and acts as a fail safe should you accidentally fire a rocket at a school outing while in high security space. CONCORD are relentless and will kill anyone who acts aggressively, even if it is a mistake. So, a safety setting on your ship prohibits you from engaging in combat unless you very specifically turn it off. Which, as it turns out, was something I hadn’t done. I swore to myself that if he got away and it was because of this I would set my next warp jump to end in the middle of the nearest star.

So there I was, deep in space in a system that I had previously had nightmares about, navigating an asteroid field in a ship that was going too fast, pursuing a target who was firing up his warp engines and now I had to try and locate a tiny safety button then select and confirm one of three options before my most basic weapons would even fire? Jesus Christ, what a rush.

I did it. I flicked the switch and the dashboard glowed an ominous, fluroscent crimson. The Ventures engines died, the lights went out and then my rockets came online. Four launchers spat electromagnetic death and on my display I saw his shields drop in one violent spasm. I vomited more rockets at him and he lurched, pillars of fire erupted from ragged holes in his hull only to be extinguished in seconds by the hungry void and then it was over. A bright bloom of light, metal shards mixed in with the asteroid dust and a lone escape pod birthed from the flames.

I had given in to blood lust. As the second volley hit him I had considered shutting off the weapon systems and opening a comm line with him, perhaps offering some kind of ransom for his ship and his life. But I hadn’t even given myself the chance to do that. The safety had come off, literally, and I wasn’t ever going to stop. I kept those weapons firing and in seconds he was vaporised. As the light receded and the wreck of the Venture was absorbed into the asteroid debris I looked at his escape pod, rotating silently as it lined itself up for a warp jump to the gate back to Passari. My finger hovered over it and I briefly considered targeting it. A single blast was all it would take, one flight of rockets and his pod would split like a Kinder Surprise, ejecting a corpse into the cluttered vacuum around it like a grotesque toy. But instead I just watched him go, let him streak off into space, making his way home where that may be. I let him go, with a hope that this meant as much to him as it did to me. I hoped this would be a story he would tell people, about the time he took the risk and went into the depths of space alone with a mining ship, a dream and a massive set of balls. Because to me this is my favourite story, the best thing I have ever done in Eve. It made me realise how beautiful this game is again. It’s nothing compared to some people, it won’t feature on a kill board or have message boards buzzing. But it was mine. I went into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, finally, after years of being frightened of it. In an asteroid field in that darkness I made my first kill, and it was entirely my own.  No script, no programmed interaction, just me, that mining ship and the god damn safety.