Deadly sleepers

A few weeks ago, the citizens of Eve Online were confronted with a change on a, literally, world shattering scale. The first planet of the Seyllin system was destroyed when a natural wormhole opened. Pretty soon these wormholes started appearing throughout known space:



The first few daring souls who entered the wormholes reported ending up in uncharted, new solar systems, where they encountered natural phenomena unknown in New Eden, causing equipment to malfunction, making it difficult to navigate.



On top of that, the wormholes are unstable, meaning that, if you don't return in time, you may find no way back as your entry wormhole has collapsed in the mean time. And finally, the wormhole solar systems are occupied by the fearsome Sleepers: huge, powerful drones still watching over their long gone masters' posessions. Their instructions are still active, even though the programmers who created them have been dust for thousands of years: protect our assets, destroy any object perceived as a threat!

This is what happened yesterday evening too. An expedition of five of my corporation members entered a wormhole from the Jurlesel system. On the other side we encountered the much rumoured sleepers and we engaged them in battle:



We were able to defeat some of them, but in the end their superior firepower proved too much for us; after losing several expensive drones and, more importantly, two of our ships, we retreated back to normal space - but not without looting the defeated Sleepers' wrecks and salvaging anything useful from them. In the end, the gains from the loot and salvage were not enough to cover for our losses. Obviously, we won't stand for that, so next time we'll bring better, more powerful ships, that's for sure.

For those interested: larger sized specimens of the snapshots above can be found at my Koinup site!