The space lanes were quiet in Empire. “Ten more jumps Aura, thank God for that.” I urged the massive hull of the bestower into alignment with the next in a what seemed like a never ending series of gates, gave the command to power up the warp engines, and turned my attention back to the GalNet news. Recruitment was going slowly but generally well, and the normally quiet corp com was buzzing with activity, though nothing that needed my attention. I manifested a neural intention to monitor the channels in the background and continued to peruse the news as the industrial, laden with the last of my necessary personal effects pushed into warp.

“So, the combat hanger is empty at the Aice branch.” It was our very new but very friendly branch manager for the Aice office.

The word combat catching my intention filter, I brought the corp com into my attention buffer and rambled out a reply, “no problem, I’ll put an order for additional munitions when I get settled,” and moved the channel back into the periphery.

“Okay. Vinum stole everything from combat. He sent me a message that said LOL.”

I closed my connection to GalNet and put full attention on the corp channel, “Seriously? Why? There was nothing in there but some useless loot from the two rank three missions we flew yesterday and a couple thousand rounds of Iridium S.” I’d taken the newer members, who were mostly miners fresh out of the academy, to see what a decent rank combat mission looked like. As none of them had the ability to salvage, I took care of the salvage and let the Aice people take the loot to begin stocking their combat hangar. There was nothing of value in the hangar, even if they sold it all in a trade hub the return would barely buy net enough isk to afford an unfit Tristan.

“Yeah, I don’t know, but it’s all gone and Vinum is in the process of dropping corp.”

I shook my head, it barely qualified as theft, as the rules were that anything not locked down in the combat hangar was free to anyone with access. Still it was a breach of security, and especially for the sake of our new branch manager, it needed to be taken seriously.

“Okay, I’ll handle it. We’ll keep an eye on him and let any other corps he joins know he’s an opportunist,” I shook my head again, “we were going to buy him a mining barge for God’s sake, he could have at least waited for that before running off.”

“It’s not a problem, it was a trust test and he failed. Anything useful was locked down in General or in one of the secure hangars.”

I smiled. We had picked the right person for branch manager. I brought the R&D department com into focus, “Hi guys, we need another couple thousand rounds of iridium for the Aice branch when you have some time.”

“Wow,” came a delayed response, they were obviously busy over there, “for a bunch of miners they burn through ammo pretty fast.”

“Yeah, something like that,” I smiled.

“Okay, we’ll have someone ship some over when we get a free moment.”

I closed the com and focused back on my ship, 5 jumps to go before arriving at my new temporary home in Pimebeka. New Eden was full of con-men, scammers and opportunists, that was a given. I had just assumed that they were a bit more patient… and ambitious. He’d probably fade into the background, as so many of these small time thieves do, or end up scraping out a living in low-sec shooting haulers and tourists. To each their own.

And Vinum if you ever need some more free ammo, we are happy to oblige.