“Break break! I’ve found them. They’re all at this Customs Office.” Foolishly our targets were gathering at large celestial object, one that we could warp to without using scan probes and revealing our presence. Our hidden scouts gain visual and move into position.

“Fleet jump the hole, jump the hole, jump the hole.” My ship resonates with the evanescent wormhole, translating me, my crew, and the organized bag of matter fashioned into turrets, tracking computers, and navigation systems into the destination system. “Hold your cloak, hold your cloak.”

After a few seconds waiting for the remainder of the fleet shortcut space-time, we’re instructed to warp to our scout. Synchronously thrusters blaze into action, and the fleet warps in unison, pouncing on the unsuspecting opposition.

Our motley arrangement of cruisers tackles as many of the battleships as possible, preventing their warp drives from activating. We force them to fight, with the hope that they bring in their carriers as support. We have our own on standby.

Alas, they choose not to escalate, and after exploding their ships, we also destroy their escape pods, throwing each pilot’s consciousness into a new clone in a station somewhere.

We leave their system and begin the coordinated collapse of the wormhole that connected us to their home. Using several large ships, we move large quantities of mass through the wormhole, unstablizing it, and eventually collapsing it. We locate the new wormhole, send scouts through, and collapse again if the new system is empty.

After 20 minutes we open the wormhole to the same exact system that the battleship fleet was in. The chances of this are remarkibly low, and it appears that our unfortunate foes have not learned to keep watch for new, incoming wormholes. Our scouts quickly discover that they are slowly collapsing a different wormhole in rather expensive ships.

With the scout in position, we jump through the tear in space-time and warp to our targets. They only have a handful of pilots available since we podded many of the others, and once again we slaughter them, pods and all.

We’ve created a very interesting situation: many of this corporation’s pilots are stranded in known space, unable to get back into their home system. We know they have carriers, and we are interested in acquiring some new ones. Our ‘diplomat’ opens communication with the corporation CEO and offers to not invade the system, destroying all their starbases, and pillaging whatever ships and loot survive the assault in return for one of their carriers, specifically an Archon.

Yes, this is a ransom.