Moving Day

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- Douglas Adams

I wasn't the only one who had noticed just how blobby our local space was becoming.  It didn't help that we were competing with a couple other well known Pirate organizations for what few scraps were left over.  Space is big though, and one of the advantages to Piracy is that you're not really tied down to anywhere in particular.  The leadership of the Blood Money Cartel had already scouted out some new regions of space that looked promising, and after a couple days spent looking them over, official movement orders came down the pipe.  As a sure sign this was a good idea, a 50 man fleet decided to park itself in our old home system for over an hour on moving day.  I tried getting a fight out of them on local, but to no avail.  I think they were French.  Primarily because they wouldn't fight me, but also because most of their bios and Corp descriptions were in French.  Come to think of it, maybe that was the primary reason.

But, before I could start reaping the benefits of our new home, I had to do a couple of stupid things on my own. The first was on my first trip to this new region, when I really didn't know the layout yet.  I was hot on the heels of a Rifter I had found ratting in a belt when I jumped into highsec.  Now, I wasn't yet an outlaw, but the NPC Navy didn't take too kindly to my -4.7 sec status.  I was a little slow to react, and quickly limped back the way I'd came in a pod.  Clearly not getting enough of being destroyed by NPCs in Highsec, when the official movement orders came I decided to do it again.

Since our well-oiled logistics machine was moving all our ships via Carriers and Freighters, all I had to worry about was the one ship I hadn't contracted to someone else, so that I had something to fly until it all got contracted back.  Clearly this responsibility was too much for me.  Going the lowsec route, the trip was over 50 jumps away, but you could cut through highsec to shorten it down to 15 or so.  Several other members had done so in frigates because of their align time being so fast, and I had decided to try it myself.  I was missing one vital piece of information in this plan, which was to avoid the CONCORD systems in highsec at all costs.  It seems that if you get aggressed by the CONCORD Navy in highsec, you can walk away with a GCC.  I can't imagine this is anything except a bug, but it's well known (by people who aren't me) and generally just worked around.  So as I repeated the same steps I had for the last dozen or so jumps I noticed mid-warp that there was a GCC countdown at the top of my screen.  As soon as I came out of warp I was omgwtfbbqpwned by CONCORD.

Having no other ships, my flight status was officially GROUNDED.  I logged for the day, my head held low.