It's funny how EVE works. Its often classified less as a space ship game and more defined as a social simulation. Alliances and bonds are made and broken in a moment. Those who once fought shoulder to shoulder yesterday now fight tooth and nail today. It all made excellent stories and lore reading up on it, learning how it shaped the game as it is today. It was such an interesting thing to read about.
I never thought it would actually happen to me.
A short time ago, maybe a few days at most, my corporation was attacked in the Futzchag area. We'd moved to null security space, but we kept our moon harvesting arrays up and running in our old stomping ground to make the corporation money in the long run. Out of nowhere our old enemies struck our POS and reinforced it. I was unable to join the defending fleet the next day, but it didn't matter. The struck when our presence was weakest and when our allies were too far away to help. It was a blow, but not one we couldn't recover from.
They set up their own POS over the wreckage of ours and took over harvesting the moon. We attacked and reinforced it and should be able to destroy it soon enough. But it wasn't the attack that caught our attention, but who was among the attackers.
Some of the pilots of our old alliance, the one we left, were still friendly to us. They still fought alongside us on occasion out of old ties and bonds built and forged in many roams and skirmishes. Among the names of the killmails we found one or two that were very familiar to us.
Our friends were on the mails.
At first, we figured it was a mistake. The ships they'd used were logistics ships designed to repair friendly ships. We knew a small number had come to help, but ultimately been unable due to connection issues and had been forced to leave the field. I had thought their drones had somehow mistaken friend from foe and accidentally gotten on the killmails.
I was wrong.
We discovered there were no Internet connection issues. There were no connection issues at all. They were disconnecting and reconnecting to our team speak channel to listen in and report back to our enemies. They ignored our fleet composition and, we later noticed, took ships to compliment our enemy's fleet. We looked through their kill history and discovered that the two groups had been fighting alongside each other. Not often, but enough that the truth was revealed to us.
So much evidence, so many facts. It was very clear and only grows clearer. Our old friends, pilots we knew and flew alongside many times, had turned against us.
Every asset we have in space in that area, they know. All of our income, they can divulge. Our strength, our activity, our leadership... They have told the enemy. We have become the Abel to their Cain and have been struck a blow that we may not be able to recover from.
Our response was reluctant, but necessary. We set them to red, signifying to our corporation that they are to be shot on sight when able. We have begun rearming our pilots, prepping for large and small scale fleet ops in the future. We have begun planning scouting forays, seeking out their own POSes and income sources. We know their leadership, we know their strengths and we know their activity levels.
When the time is right, we will unleash our wrath upon them in a battle so furious we will shatter them into dust only to scatter them to the winds.
Soon.
Sooon...