1 Nov 2007

1 million or your ore gets it!

I was in Wolf and on my travels spotted a mining barge. Golden opportunity!

Quickly scanning him down, I warped in - eager for the kill. The Concord pilot information revealed a new player so I was hoping that pickings could be had. On entering the belt, i was about 50KM away. Quickly re-aligning, I made a note of where he was (thank you jet can mining!) and sped out to a nearby planet. Arriving a few seconds later, I whipped the wolf around and warped back in to the new position I had noted.

Landing more or less on top of the barge, I started scrambling and hitting it. It was busy with two angel cruisers, the mining barge's three hornet drones chewing away at them. Since I had one too many kill mails stolen by an errant NPC; I decided to kill off the NPCs since the mining barge was now down to about 15% armour and was scrambled - surely it wasn't going anywhere?

Ah, my arrogance. As I tackled the angel - I swung too far away from the barge and the scrambler turned off. I did not keep an eye on the range and therefore lost the barge. Cursing, I destroyed the angels and grabbed the leftover drones. Feeling a bit disappointed, I checked the can. It had over 12K of freshly mined omber.

Hmmmmm, surely the miner would come back for his ore? I went back to the nearby planet and kept an eye on the scanner. A minute later, a hauler appeared! Brilliant, at least I can salvage something. Springing the trap, the wolf dropped onto the still-unsuspecting hauler and I got some points on him and opened up with the 150mm tech 2 auto-canons. Frantically, I saw the hauler re-align and then warp out.

The pilot was smart fitting warp core stabilisers.

Stalemate.

I looked at the can and I thought, why not? Opening up a private sub-space communication with the pilot I ransome his ore back to the pilot. For one million isk, he would get his ore back. I shot at the can to make sure that I would make do on my threat.

The pilot was unsure how to give me money but his hauler did come back and made a beeline for the ore. I locked and fired a few salvoes at the can. I rocked violently as my shells started to shred the thin container. Bits of omber floated out.

'One million isk. NOW!' I demanded.

There was silence from the still advancing hauler. Another salvo and the can was near bursting.

'NOW.' I demanded and decided the can had only seconds to live. As I was about to blow up the can, the wallet blinked. Checking quickly, I was relieved to see the nice round figure of 1,000,000isk now in the wallet. The hauler by now had grabbed the ore and was aligning to get out.

We chatted some more, I promised to leave the miner along for today and left the system. Will probably come back to extract some more isk off him?

Yarrr!