Okela Cleanup – Part 2

Lonetrek region – Okela constellation
Nourvukaiken system

11 December YC 126

I planned to raid Guristas Burrow in Jouvulen system but it was already being taken care of by another capsuleer, so I moved on. The next system was Nourvukaiken and it contained a hidden pirate base – Guristas Guerilla Grounds – which manifested itself only as a cosmic signature. During my first flyover on the Buzzard, I scanned the signature down, and now I returned on a destroyer to pay the bastards a visit. Aura had found the following description in DED database:
The Guristas Pirates, despite being an extremely modern and high-tech faction in their own right, often turn to old tactics to foil their Caldari Navy foes. The most common tactic is to launch a series of guerilla raids – led by a Dread Guristas Irregular – on numerous soft targets. State forces become harried and stretched thin, allowing the pirates to carry out their real objectives with minimal inference.
DED Threat Assessment: 3 of 10

As I warped in, my overview showed 15 pirate frigates.

Guristas Guerilla Grounds - First Room
Guristas Guerilla Grounds – First Room

“Hmm… I don’t fancy fighting them all at once,” I mused.

“Maybe you won’t need to,” remarked Aura.

“How’s that?”

“Remember the old saw about dividing and conquering? Well, they have already done the first part for you.”

I looked at the tactical display and found that, indeed, there were three groups of frigates, each group located far from the other two.

“Smart girl,” I praised Aura, and she beamed proudly.

The closest group was within my firing range. I targeted all five ships at once and opened fire from my railguns. That attracted their attention and they started moving in my direction. The other two groups seemed uninterested.

“This reminds me of the pirates’ tactic in the Hideaway but on a larger scale,” I noted. “Here, instead of sending all wings at me at once, they sent just one. An improvement on the Hideaway approach but still a wing of frigates is not a threat for Merimetso.”

“They probably have a better trained personnel here,” said Aura. “After all, DED considered this kind of base significant enough to assign an official threat rating to it.”

“Then let’s make sure that they have less such personnel,” I winked at Aura, as I was finishing off the last Pithi Plunderer in the first group.

As expected, the same approach worked for the second group which attacked me on their own when I targeted them. Then came the turn of the last wing, and soon the pocket was clear. I activated the acceleration gate and arrived to the second pocket. Looking at the tactical display, I gasped in shock.

“By the Void! Is it what DED calls a ‘soft target’ these days? They should choose their words with more care!”

The view was dominated by ruins of a large Caldari station, destroyed by the pirates.

Guristas Guerilla Grounds - Second Room
Guristas Guerilla Grounds – Second Room

“But if their terminology is correct,” I continued angrily, “then Caldari Navy needs to make sure that our stations are not considered soft targets which can be pulled down by a bunch of frigates.”

“Talking of which…” Aura said pointedly.

I shut up and concentrated on the pirates. Apart from the fact that there were 18 ships, the situation and the tactics were the same as in the first room – I attacked each group separately while others pretended that a destroyer rampaging in the middle of their base was none of their business. I was happy with their attitude and made sure that they became my business, collecting bounties for each kill.

When I jumped to the third pocket, things got more dynamic. Firstly, the overview showed 28 Guristas frigates and one Gallente Point Defence Battery. Secondly, all of them immediately took interest in my person, and four wings of Pithis accelerated in my direction.

Guristas Guerilla Grounds - Third Room
Guristas Guerilla Grounds – Third Room

“I think they’ve learned their lesson,” Aura remarked with a wince.

“And now we must learn ours before they take us apart,” I exclaimed.

“What do we do?”

“Run!” I cried, and willed Merimetso in the direction perpendicular to the ecliptic, away from the approaching horde of pirates.

The Cormorant was a sniper, not a brawler, so it made sense to maintain distance from the frigates which were typically fitted with short-range weapons. In this room, however, there was one hostile entity which could potentially reach me from a greater distance – the battery. As I was speeding away, I quickly acquired a target lock and concentrated fire of all seven railguns on it. Just before Merimetso reached the edge of its optimal range, the battery exploded in a bright sphere of overheated gas and debris. Now I could give my undivided attention to the frigates.

There was no way to fight wings separately as at some point all of them merged in a menacing swarm. I targeted the seven nearest hostiles, allocated one railgun to each, and continued my flight. My situation was actually not too bad – the frigates could not reach me with their weapons while I was inflicting steady damage to them. When I destroyed the first of the pursuers, things got more hectic. First, I had to acquire a new target, then I needed to assign an idle railgun to it. Since the first seven targets were defeated almost simultaneously, I had to perform that exercise seven times in quick succession. If that was not enough to keep me busy, the guns started running out of ammo. While the reloading was automatic, the reloaded gun did not continue shooting at its former target, so I had to manually (or rather mentally) reassign them to the hostiles.

Suddenly, I started getting damage from the frigates, while my rails stopped hitting them. A glance at the overview showed that they finally overtook me, and were running circles around my ship. One cycle of the microwarpdrive improved the situation, and I was back to my gun and target micromanagement. After what seemed an eternity but was, in fact, just six minutes, I reduced Guristas fleet by 28 Pithis.

“That was intense,” I said, breathing heavily.

“You did well,” Aura replied encouragingly.

“Although this bar may be low for some, but being in one piece after this encounter makes me agree with your assessment of my performance,” I smiled sardonically, and proceeded to loot the wrecks. The loot was as cheap as dirt and might not have been worth the trouble, but the process helped me calm my nerves and gather resolve for the next room.

The fourth pocket was a tougher version of the third – there were six sentry guns and 35 frigates, all of which targeted me as soon as I arrived. I didn’t waste time on the sentries, as I couldn’t take them all out at once, and just made sure that I was flying away from them and the frigate welcome party. I then settled in the same routine, targeting hostiles and assigning guns to them.

Guristas Guerilla Grounds - Fourth Room
Guristas Guerilla Grounds – Fourth Room

Just as I started getting comfortable, Neocom informed me that a railgun ran out of charges and there were no more Iron Charges available. Luckily my cargo hold had a variety of small hybrid charges which I picked up from the wrecks, and I fed plutonium ones into the empty gun. Then I had to do the same with another railgun, and one more. And then I ran out of plutonium charges and had to switch to iridium ones. That juggling act was wearing me out and my DPS declined. Nevertheless, I was still able to stay at a safe distance from the pirates by periodically pulsing my MWD, so the only thing I lost was time. In the end, my stock of Tech I ammo proved to be sufficient to get rid of all Guristas ships.

“Aura, you know what, although Tech II ammo is an overkill for this rabble, I’ll be damned if I continue fiddling with different ammo types. It’s no fun. We have plenty of Spike and this is what I’ll be using for the sentries and the next pocket.”

Aura, who also looked pretty frazzled after fleeing and fighting 35 frigates, just nodded in agreement. Spike ammo increased my firing range and I was delighted to discover that it was greater than the sentries’ reach. All the sentry guns went down without any drama, and I jumped to the fifth and, as it turned out, the last pocket of Guristas Guerilla Grounds.

Initially, the defenses didn’t look as tough as in the previous room – same 35 frigates and only three sentry guns. But then a particular icon caught my attention on the overview.

“Uh-oh,” I said, grimacing, “they’ve got a cruiser.”

Aura ignored my comment and blurted excitedly, “Vlad, we have found it!”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“The commander. Look, there is an Overseer Frigate!”

Guristas Guerilla Grounds - Dread Guristas Irregular
Guristas Guerilla Grounds – Dread Guristas Irregular

Indeed, one of the ships was classified as Overseer Frigate and named Dread Guristas Irregular. Dread Guristas were elite pirate forces, and it made sense that one of them was in charge of that guerilla operation.

“Well, it’s still a frigate,” I smiled evilly, “Soon they will learn that putting the brain into an eggshell is not all that smart.”

And we started the familiar dance – fleeing, targeting, reloading, accelerating. All was going well until at some point I felt a massive whack and my shield went 56 HP down.

“What the hell was that?” I cried.

“It’s the cruiser,” yelled Aura, “It fires heavy missiles at us.”

Another blow shook my destroyer, and more shield was coloured red.

“Do you still fancy flying a frigate?” I asked Aura.

“I withdraw my suggestion unconditionally,” she shouted, wide-eyed.

I wasn’t ready to fight both the frigate swarm and the cruiser at the same time. My first impulse was to flee and I turned on the MWD. A look at the mid slots reminded me that I also had some unused defense modules – a couple of shield hardeners – which I activated too. In the hindsight, I should have used just the kinetic hardener, as the cruiser was shooting Scourge missiles. Anyway, I burned through the capacitor until I was out of the cruiser’s range. A quarter of my shield and 70% of my capacitor were gone by that time, but finally there was no incoming damage neither from the cruiser, nor from the frigates. I had let frigates come into my firing range and resumed their extermination from the safe distance. At one point I popped the Dread Guristas Overseer Frigate, and could finish my raid, but I still had a score to settle.

When all the frigates were gone, I approached Pithum Inferno cruiser, stopped at my optimal range and targeted all my railguns at it. With deep satisfaction, I was watching my hybrid charges paint a red semicircle on the cruiser’s shield indicator, when I felt a familiar wallop.

“Vlad, you are in the range of its missiles,” exclaimed Aura, “Get moving, you, lazy ass!”

“I didn’t know it could fire missiles that far,” I explained lamely, turned on the hardeners, and willed Merimetso into a 50-km orbit around the cruiser. That didn’t stop the incoming damage but slowed it down considerably. In the end, it came down to DPS/total HP ratio, and I won that contest, earning 74,000 ISK for the destruction of the cruiser.

As in the fourth pocket, the sentries did not present any problem. Having cleaned them up, I approached the wreck of Dread Guristas Irregular and inspected the loot. It contained a usual pile of metal scraps, 75-mm ‘Scout’ Accelerator Cannon, 7th tier Overseer’s Personal Effects and a Worm blueprint.

“Hmm… Not much for that kind of trouble,” I complained.

“Fifteen million ISK is not much?” Aura raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“Where do you see all those millions? The most expensive part of the loot is Personal Effects which are worth 600,000 ISK.”

“What about the blueprint?”

“What about it?”

Aura rolled her eyes, “It does not appear on the market but if you check the contracts, you’ll see that 15 million is the lowest price at which it is sold.”

I whistled, “Whew! That’s an expensive ship, if just the blueprint costs that much.”

“You have no idea! The ship itself will set you back 65 million ISK.”

“Hmm… I am not sure I want to sell this blueprint. Although I don’t plan to fly frigates against such pirate forces as we saw here, I don’t mind having a powerful frigate in my hangar. Maybe I can ask Yakub to build me one. Should be cheaper than buying on the market.”

And that was the end of Guristas Guerilla Grounds. I continued my journey through the constellation and was disappointed, but also pleased, to find out that other capsuleers didn’t waste time and had taken care of all pirate bases I discovered that day. Okela constellation was safe for the moment, and I returned to my base in Tsuguwa.

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