Sansha was still running rampant throughout the universe, though the strength of his forces had diminished significantly and his guerilla style attacks were consistently being met with overwhelming capsuleer resistance.

Last night, while I was engaged in a recon op deep in nullsec, I received reports of a surprise attack by the Angel Cartel against the Genesis Vault on Oddelulf III in Molden Heath, my home. 

We couldn’t break comm silence. We could abort our operation after so many weeks of preparation. Our window for success was very narrow and the fleet commander did not veer from our objective.

I was filled with immense anger and sadness at the same time, my emotions threatening to overwhelm my common sense as they often did. The weak would always prey on the weaker. They would think themselves strong for it, but what victory can be claimed with the easy fight? I wanted to break formation. I wanted to return to my home region. I wanted to at least tune in to GalNet, but duty was duty, and I was a soldier through and through.

—

Hundreds dead – scientists, civilians, innocents. The reports were still flooding in hours after the attack. Capsuleer fleets had quickly gathered and repelled the Cartel, though not without significant effort. There was still no clear motive for the attack though there was much speculation.

The Amarr, of course, released an official statement of condolence, but many Amarr capsuleers went on public record to reveal the deeper sentiment of their kind:

Although going to such effort for some horrid Matari ecology seems a bit much to me. Unfortunate the Imperial Navy didn’t do a better cleansing job the first time around – Silas Vitalia

I snarled inside, reminding myself that our militia, the Tribal Liberation Force, had all but decimated Amarr resistance across the low sec regions. They could brak as loudly as they wanted; they held little bite.

The newsfeed ended with the question that had been on my mind since first tuning in, put forward by a prominent member of my former alliance, Ushra’Khan:

A Cartel attack on a major Minmatar Corporation? We haven’t seen anything like this since the Skarkon incident… It looks pretty clear from those intercepts that the Angel’s were not merely after hydroponics equipment. Native Freshfood are not known for their radical R&D projects, so unless the Cartel are suddenly desperate to boost their hydroponics yields then NF may have some explaining to do.

But not half as much as the Cartel themselves. What will the Shakor government have to say I wonder? – Ugleb

What would Shakor do? I used to have faith in this government, and in the man. That evaporated long ago. Nation attacks, now the Cartel, the Imperial Crusade at our doorstep – when would it stop?

It was time to up my game.