Damned Ashmarir

14 December YC 120

I was making my way home and chatting with Aura when I was thunderstruck by the name of the next gate – it was Ashmarir! After saying good-bye to Behrooz I was so desperate to leave the Blood Raiders station as quickly as possible that I completely forgot to include Ashmarir into the avoidance list. And now I was staring at the gate that was leading to a system where two kills were registered not three hours ago.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I warped away from the gate to a safe spot where I could linger for a while. Firstly, I tried to plot another route which bypassed Ashmarir. It wasn’t pretty – I had to go almost all the way back to null-sec and make eleven additional jumps. Then I loaded a killboard to see what actually happened in Ashmarir. There weren’t good news, either. The killer was notorious pirate Gumpenkind Fuerchtenix from Darwinism alliance who piloted Deimos-class heavy assault cruiser. The victim was Nik Win who became a capsuleer just 2 days before me and was also flying a corvette. Apparently, the pirate killed indiscriminately, as one couldn’t expect to extract much value out of Impairor wreck. Therefore, there was no chance he would ignore my Ibis.

On the other hand, the situation was not completely hopeless. For one thing, Gumpenkind was guarding the Arzanni gate which led to the hi-sec. It meant that if I jumped through my Kaira gate to Ashmarir I would not be jumping into his gate camp immediately. Then, when I warped to Arzanni gate, time between my exiting warp and jumping through the gate should be too short for any pirate to target me. It was worth trying.

“What do you think, Aura?” asked I. “You might lose the memory of the period between leaving the Blood Raiders Station and arriving to Arzanni gate.”

“Well, neither of us is gonna die,” said she, “and we can always make better memories.”

“So be it,” decided I, and we jumped to Ashmarir.

When we emerged on the other side first thing I noticed was that Gumpenkind was no longer in the system. There were a couple of other pilots but they were not from Darwinism alliance and they were not on my gate.

“It looks like it’s your lucky day today,” chuckled Aura.

“It is, indeed,” replied I and warped to Arzanni gate.

The gate was not guarded, so we jumped to the hi-sec unmolested. The rest of the journey was blissfully uneventful and we safely made it home.