By Brad Cook

An asteroid belt in the Amarr System seemed as good a place as any to meet my contact — while she was nervous about being seen as a traitor to the Empire, she knew, as I did, that a pair of ships parked near a nondescript asteroid would draw little attention. “A chat during a break from mining for ore,” others would assume as they went about their business. We hid in plain sight.

“For we are retribution incarnate/His Angels of Vengeance.” The words appeared on my screen. Devoid of any spoken nuance, I was unsure of her point. “That’s from the Scriptures,” she continued. “Book of Reclaiming 4:45. I’ve been thinking a lot about those verses, after what happened recently.”

I assumed she was referring to the sudden return of Heir Jamyl Sarum and the mysterious super weapon that allowed Sarum to somehow decimate a third of an invading Minmatar fleet. Sarum quickly assumed her rightful title as Empress of the Amarr Empire, declaring, in essence, that you were either with her or against her. My contact, a Tash-Murkonite Amarrian, desribed the shocking reversal of that battle when Sarum arrived, and how she hoped that those who tried to ruin the Amarr Empire in the Empress’ absence would be held accountable.

But there was more to her story: “After the battle, I was on a routine trading run when I encountered a craft belonging to the Sanctuary, a Sisters of EVE corporation. The captain in command explained that he was investigating a strange energy signature emanating from the EVE gate. It matched an energy spike that appeared when Sarum used her super weapon. He was sneaking into Amarr territory to see if he could learn more. I only heard from him once after that: he was excited by what he had uncovered, and the trail was taking him somewhere into deep space. Further attempts to contact him went unanswered.”

A Shift in the Balance of Power

It was that mystery which unnerved my contact and made her wonder if the Scriptures were mere apocrypha: religious writings with suspect origins. Her faith shaken — which could call into question her allegiance to the Empire, if anyone found out — she decided to search for that Sanctuary captain. On her third day out, she came across something that made her realize Sarum’s super weapon could be just the start of enormous changes in the universe.

“Space itself shimmered,” she recalled. “I had never seen anything like it. I know now it was a wormhole, but at the time, I thought it was the key to unraveling the entire mystery. It turned out to be a key, but it was one that unlocked new reasons to be terrified of deep space.”

On the other side of that wormhole, she was confronted by a formidable sight: starcraft that seemed insect-like in appearance, with pitch-black hulls. They quickly attacked, some of them attempting to lock onto her ship with vampire-like technology that would have drained her ship’s capacitor and left her helpless, had she not fled the area.

She continued: “I returned later with as many members of my corporation as we could fit through the wormhole, which according to our scanners wasn’t going to last more than another day or two. We fought those ships and destroyed several of them. The technology that we harvested from those wrecks was unlike anything we had ever seen, but we plan to reverse engineer it and use the resulting components in our production process.

“This is going to change the balance of power everywhere,” she added.

Connecting the Dots

Her fear of being discovered finally got the best of her, and my contact left, quickly accelerating to warp speed. Her story, however, was enough for me to make some sense of other recent events in the EVE Online universe: catastrophic loss of life as starships, space stations, and even an entire planet were destroyed by turbulence in the fabric of space-time. According to a breaking report from Sisters of EVE, those disturbances were the result of wormholes forming throughout the known universe.

Why this is happening now, no one knows. But those pilots, such as my Amarrian interviewee, who dare venture through those wormholes have encountered ships similar to the ones she came across. These mysterious craft are believed to belong to the Sleepers, an ancient race descended from the humans who populated New Eden thousands of years ago. They vanished for reasons unknown — whether they can even still be considered human remains another unanswered question.

I fired up the engines of my Vengeance class assault ship and decided it was time to see if I could find a connection between Empress Sarum’s abrupt return — mysterious super weapon in tow — and the sudden appearance of these wormholes that have allowed us to access unknown areas of space guarded by vicious new foes. I had a feeling more surprises are in store.

Shimmer, Shimmer Deep in Space. Ships patrol near a wormhole.

Enhanced Visuals. Little details are even more impressive, thanks to Premium Graphics.

Just Visiting. A starship enters a facility.

The Sleepers Awake. Some of the enemies you’ll find on the other side of a wormhole.

If you liked these games, check out:

• Homeworld 2
• Vendetta Online
• X3: Reunion

System Requirements:

• Mac OS X version 10.5.6
• 1.8GHz Intel Core Duo processor (2GHz or higher recommended)
• 1GB of RAM (2GB recommended)
• 128MB video RAM (ATI X1600, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, or higher video card)
• 6GB hard disk space
• 56K Internet connection (broadband recommended)