Exham IV was a busy and lucrative hub for the corporations to base themselves and fell dark due to a Containment Protocol in 989AE
About
Exham IV is well-known in the Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere. Even among the hundreds of thousands of inhabited systems throughout GCPS space, Exham is one of a handful every schoolchild can name. In itself, Exham was responsible for the expansion into the Perseus Arm. Discovered on the cusp of what would become known as the third wave of human expansion, the rocky inner planets of the Exham star were the fuse that would see Mi-Gan become one of the richest corporations within the Sphere.
In its formative years, Exham collided with another system, swallowing the errant star whole while their planets collided in an apocalyptical display of pure inertia. At least one exoplanet smashed into Exham IV’s surface, infusing its mantle with the dense concentration of the precious ore of two worlds, and giving the planet an almost solid outer shell of asteroids.
There Exham IV remained for billions of years. Cultivating and erasing complex ecosystems like millions of planets galaxy wide, it grew dormant and content, until a SanMar long range scout ship anchored itself over the world and tagged it as Category D planet fit for immediate exploitation, with a footnote for massive mineral potential. What followed was a bidding war in the most factual sense only possible within the GCPS. Conglomerate-busting bribes, persuasion teams, and even out-and-out warfare were used in the days before the almost instantaneous tendering system of today. In the end, a young and hungry Mi-Gan emerged with the sole lease to exploit Exham IV and its vast potential wealth. And exploit it they did.
The Exploitation
Tunnelers the size of ocean liners were rapidly constructed and plunged into the planet’s skin. Manpower was shipped to the new colony in the tens of thousands, lured with the promise of a more comfortable life, only to find even the meagre health and safety guidelines of Mi-Gan bypassed for the sake of its bottom line. Settlements spread quickly from the initial survey sites, swelling out across Exham’s iron-red soil like an affliction. Within decades entire landmasses crowded with low grade housing, quickly running to slums of ultra-high concentration, until the worker’s ancestral memories harkened back to the uncramped apartments of Sao Paolo and Neu Berlin as some kind of spacious utopia.
These accommodations were built directly over the mines Mi-Gan’s worker population laboured in, keeping manpower transit to a minimum. The scant air-quality regulations were conveniently lost under a sea of yield projections. Beneath the surface, seam after seam of ore was cleaned out; rhodium, iridium, palladium, iron, francium. All were chased and hunted down until the mantle was a honeycomb, more stagnant tunnel air than solid rock. As each mine ran dry the pitheads shifted, taking the machines and people with them. Entire cities were abandoned, left to moulder in an ever growing industro-urban sprawl until not a scrap of the original ruddy earth could be seen. In a final indignity the seas were boiled away, exposing even more land, while the water was broken down into its component elements and sold when the pan-galactic resource market gave acceptable dividends. Not even the groundwater was spared as Exham’s earth was sucked dry, leaving the wind to blow oxidised red dust over every building, vehicle and smelting plant.
From then on the importance of Exham may have been consigned to a footnote in history, a textbook example of how to leverage maximum profit for minimum outlay, were it not for an unforeseeable turn. As humans moved on to leave their footprint on ever more distant planets, Exham’s location became a natural stepping stone onto the ever-expanding boundaries of GCPS space. Within days McKinley drives could take the military and executives to stars so distant as to be unknown a generation ago, but the bulk haulers which were the lifeblood of interstellar commerce needed fuel and supplies on their outward journeys. Journeys which took them within hauling distance of Exham.
Above Exham, Priory Station was refitted; docking ports were added, habitation blocks restructured, faux-grav drives installed, and storage hangers expansive enough to refit stargoing vessels constructed. Its size mirrored its growing importance, until at 1.4 x 109 kg mass it officially became the largest man-made object in Sphere skies. Exham became the primary hub for any voyage to third stage space, until all a flight officer had to say was, “We’re going to Priory” for someone to know they were in for a long journey.
Over time, Priory Station’s importance to Mi-Gan’s bottom line waxed as that of the planet below waned. Every day it arced over Exham’s sky, insultingly visible to those on the surface. Teasingly close, but unreachable for workers stuck on the planet-slum for their whole lives. To Mi-Gan these people did not register. They had the most lucrative and busiest port in the GCPS; a constant and unlimited credit supply to buy themselves a seat on the Council of Seven.
The Catastrophe
Until Exham IV’s orbit was knocked outward from its sun. The culprit was a rogue planet. If Mi-Gan had not been headstrong, so focused on the winning the contract they might have completed their due diligence. They might have cross-referenced long term star charts, might have identified the nomad gas giant designated MJ-6674cK, noted its long term circuit around the galactic sector, and how its passage could take it through the Exham system, across Exham’s IV’s path and pull its orbit a sliver away from system centre.
Within a decade Exham IV slipped 0.3au away from its star. Barely a scratch in the galactic map, but enough to see what would have been an ice age had most of the surface water not been ionised. Exham went into deep freeze. Away from the equatorial band daytime temperatures scarcely broke into the positive. Shifting weather systems battered the surface, driving blizzards of frigid air between abandoned apartment buildings, coating everything in Exham’s red dust. The population fell. Deaths were in the millions from the official citizens. Among the poor souls cramped in the tunnels and decommissioned cities, the labour surplus as demand dropped, the numbers were so high as to be deemed not worth counting.
Entire manufacturing centres were shut down as fuel stocks ran low. Engines began misfiring in glacial temperatures, accidents saw operations drawn inwards to centralised hubs, leaving even further stretches of Exham hollow and empty, filled with nothing but frozen dust and the wind’s howl. And the sound of scurrying. It was as the remaining citizens gathered around the controlled profit centres; the remaining smelting plants and the sole spaceport to Priory Station; that the bleeding sickness struck. It came without warning, coursing through a tightly packed populace huddling three families to an apartment.
Mi-Gan moved quickly to protect their investment. Security cordons were thrown up around the last spaceport and immediately began repelling the riots of the sick and the desperate trying to get off-planet. The medicos on Priory Station set every expert they had to studying the sickness. The results found that it used a select agent similar the Lujo Virus of Old Earth, granting the highly contagious sickness a mortality rate of 80%, but only among the grown and healthy. Children, the aged and the frail shrugged off the virus, while other sufferers would quickly go into haemorrhagic shock, and drown in blood as their lung tissue broke down. But for all their effort, the experts on board Priory could find no hint of a cure other than to let the sickness run its course, and Mi-Gan made the decision to compartmentalise the data to avoid panic spreading to the Station.
The Reconnaissance
However, the concentrated use of the word ‘virus’ on Mi-Gan’s comm bands triggered the latent subroutines of the Council of Seven’s defence forces. When the words were cross referenced against the stress levels in the speaker’s voice an alert was sent to Corporation Central, tagged Magenta level critical. The closest Enforcer Task Force was alerted and a Recon Unit dispatched with Grounding and Containment protocols on hold pending investigation. By the time the Recon Unit, ID designate P12-6-12, arrived at Exham two cycles later another 150,000 people had fallen to the bleeding sickness. 6-12 arrived on a planet virtually abandoned but for the concentric bands circling the remaining spaceport. Millions frantic to leave the planet crowded into areas designed for thousands, held out by the equally desperate ring of Mi-Gan Marine Corps. To all purposes Exham was derelict, a planet waiting for its remaining inhabitants to die.
For 6-12, a veteran recon trooper with two decades of successful missions behind her, those empty industrial streets held similarities to previous missions which were too apparent to ignore. Virus pandemics were not uncommon in the GCPS, but the abrupt nature of the outbreak on Exham; its lethality, the unnecessary foulness of the deaths; bore the hallmarks of missions she had been on before. The city above ground was nigh-on deserted. Only the hopeless and mentally deficient walked between the derelict manufacturing plants and heavy machinery, and even then, the blasts of frozen wind desiccating the air finishing off the job the bleeding sickness began.
Knowing she would find nothing among the abandoned heavy machinery, 6-12 descended below street level to the sewers, and immediately her suspicions were confirmed. Holes had been knocked upward from the extinct mining tunnels, too frequent and too ragged to be the result of erosion. Through those holes and into the tunnels beyond, even more evidence to support her suspicions; dirt disturbed by the passage of clawed feet, discarded bones gnawed upon by over-large incisors, and thin scratches along the walls; too purposeful to be anything but deliberate, and disturbingly similar to those she’d seen light years away, below the surface of other planets.
The circumstances built up until the chance of coincidence was negligible. Following protocol, 6-12 left a vigilance control system to trigger if she did not return and moved towards the remaining spaceport. 6-12’s suspicions were confirmed with ominous speed. The shafts delved by Mi-Gan’s tunnelers had been excavated to the limit of structural integrity. They criss-crossed in intersections wider than highways, and disappeared kilometres underground until it could almost be called a city. And among the cavernous shafts creatures had indeed made their homes. There were Veer-myn beneath Exham IV.
The Infestation
6-12 worked her way closer to the spaceport, and at a convergence of four tunnels hollowed out into a vast cavern she found reason enough to order an immediate Containment Protocol; more Veer-myn than she had encountered in any operation, a seething mass of thousands. Enough so the tunnel’s floor and lower walls were lost beneath their writhing bodies. The situation had become clear; Exham with its ultrahigh population had bred a Veer-myn colony of prodigious size. A colony which could perhaps have gone unnoticed forever in the swathes of empty cities, until the unforeseen onset of an ice age. It was then a choice of freeze or escape, and the Veer-myn had recognised the potential of Priory Station and acted upon it. Viral outbreaks had long been documented as tools of the Veermyn, and the bleeding sickness could only have been a first strike on the Mi-Gan troopers already struggling with a dying population in open revolt.
The chance of such a potently virulent disease reaching Priory Station and spreading through the core worlds was alone enough for 6-12 to order an immediate Containment Protocol, but the sheer size of the Veer-myn brood was a danger in itself. If the brood splintered, confirming the elimination of all Veer-myn on Exham may be impossible. To increase the chance of mission success she would have to tag the Brood Mother; the dominant female around which broods were centred. 6-12 knew that would mean she would never leave those tunnels. Loading her rifle with tracer darts, she tagged the Brood Mother. The effect was instantaneous; the entire colony was roused at their Mother’s keening wail and, drawing on the brood’s group perception, focused on 6-12. In her last act she released a drone cloud to record the discovery and return to the vigilance control system.
She ran out of ammunition before she ran out of targets.
The Containment Protocol
P12-6-12’s drone cloud executed their final order, and 6-12’s last recorded moments were returned to the VCS and the files transmitted. A Grounding Protocol was triggered. Instantly, nav data to and from Priory Station was severed. All traffic stopped, and shuttles in transit between the surface and the Station found themselves unexpectedly under manual controls. Unable to compensate many crashed, some into the station, some in the forest of asteroids around Exham, and some into the cities.
On Exham, having noticed the break in nav transmissions, a horde of Veer-myn erupted from beneath the surface. The Marine battalions guarding the spaceport were unprepared. Already reeling from the sudden loss of communications, they found themselves swamped from below as hundreds of Veer-myn Night-Crawlers sought to take control of the remaining launch facilities. Meanwhile on Priory Station, access hatches and air ducts burst open, and the Veer-myn smuggled up in ones and twos over months poured through, swamping Mi-Gan’s unprepared guards and sending the hundreds of visitors into panic.
When the Grounding protocol was executed P12-6-12’s task force was already en-route, standard operating procedure to backup first contact recon units. The Drakon class vessel Terminal Intervention arrived with a full strike company of Enforcers. It ignored the panicked activity and impotent comms from Priory Station, and instead dispatched its drop ship, loaded with the Intervention’s full troop compliment. Their mission; to confirm the possible threat vector identified by P12-6-12, and exterminate if necessary.
The Enforcers’ insertion went to plan until the drop ship entered the asteroid field making up Exham’s outer orbit. Centuries of traffic around Priory Station had left the entire field in a constant state of excitement, with rocks the size of hab blocks in a perpetual uncoordinated dance. The Enforcer pilot was more than capable of navigating the almost solid shell of asteroids, and managed to do just that, until an unexplained explosion ripped through the ship’s hull, destroying its gyroscope and sending it uncontrolled through the asteroids. The fuselage was shredded and most of the troop compliment killed, punctured by dozens of hyper fast rocks. It was a testament to the pilot’s skill that any managed to survive the crash landing on Exham’s surface. The ship’s distress call was relayed through the now-crewless Drakon and then direct to Corporation Central, where, as per procedure when an Enforcer ship is shot down, a Containment Protocol was activated.
Exham IV to all intents and purposes winked out of existence. On the ground, the remaining Enforcers were left in arctic conditions with limited supplies and no chance of immediate support. Their mission, however, remains. If the Veer-myn were able to take the remaining spaceport and reach Priory Station they could spread their bleeding sickness throughout Second Sphere space, infecting billions. The Enforcers must eliminate the Veer-myn threat before they can reach the station and be lost among the stars of the GCPS.
Interested Factions
The crisis on Exham IV has brought death, disease and terror to both the unemployed ex-mining families living in the planet’s abandoned shanty-towns and derelict mine workings, as well as the travelling Executive-class businessmen caught on board Priory Station. It also brings opportunity for those brave, desperate, or foolhardy enough to seize it.
As is often the case, amidst the chaos of a planetary population attempting to evacuate before the Containment Protocols sealed their fate, other more predatory outfits were moving in the opposite direction. A well-developed planet, filled with corporate tech, gear, and other saleable commodities is a tempting prospect to all manner of Rebs, Marauders, and outlaw corporations. Even Plague-infected Strike Teams could find useful and much-needed munitions and supplies on such a relatively undefended world. And where the Plague go, so do hunter Clades from Asteria.
The Veer-myn
As the planetary movement caused chaos, bringing the planet to the edge of destruction and sparking panic amongst all its inhabitants, corporate and otherwise, the local colony of Veer-myn in particular saw the writing on the wall early on and made best efforts to flee the surface via the orbiting Priory Station. This of course only made it that much harder for everyone else to leave. The Veer-myn mega-colony and their outbreak are the reason for the Containment Protocol.
The Piper lives on the outskirts of the colonies on Exham IV. His affinity for the lesser vermin makes the other Veer-myn nervous. But the coming calamity on Exham has made for strange bedfellows – while not a natural leader, the Piper has been forced by the invasion of his home to lead those who would ordinarily shun him into a desperate defence of the colony.
The Enforcers
The Enforcers deployed known as ThunderHeads are the Council's response to Recon 6-12's Grounding Protocol. The twelfth division of the Perseun task forces is officially designated P12 in the Council of Seven’s records. Anyone with the requisite security clearance would be hard pressed to find another with a more accomplished history. It is P12 under Captain Kellman Morrow which has applied the Council’s peace in the wedge of unincorporated systems along the GCPS’s coreward border for 24 years. When Draugheime III was invaded by the Marauder forces of selfstyled Chief Skodde, it was P12 that responded and turned them back with only a 0.44% drop in local corporate production and an acceptable 31.2% civilian casualty rate.
When an Almar Inc. star caravan destined for newly terraformed worlds was assaulted and stolen by insurgents, it was P12 that located the responsible base world and recovered the shipment, annihilating the local rebel cell so utterly that six years later the Council Protection Agency still registers no insurgent activity in the sector. They have a reputation for lethal efficiency that has permeated the ordinarily complete secrecy around Council military, and are one of the few Enforcer task forces which have been christened on GCPS infotainment nets. To the Council they are P12, but to anyone who knows their reputation they are ‘The ThunderHeads’.
The uprising on Exham is an embarrassment to Captain Morrow. Never mind that the prediction of Veer-myn outbreaks is beyond even the best supercomputers in the Sphere, nor that never had a Veer-myn infestation been prevented and barely ever contained; this one happened in the ‘Head’s sector, and that would not stand. The crash landing on Exham left the question of honour as moot. Morrow must improvise if he is to salvage the mission, let alone pride. His surviving units must operate without Peacekeeper or heavy support in conditions far beyond anything they have fought in before. But they are the ThunderHeads. And if any force can tear a victory from such a mountain of odds, it is them.
P12 are accompanied by Forward Observer N7 from the Forward Observer Corps.
The Forge Fathers
When the Mi-Gan Corporation first landed on Exham IV and began to exploit its mineral wealth the Star Realm was insulted twice over. Firstly, the Forge Fathers had long ago earmarked the planet for full and complete coring and secondly, what the humans called ‘mineral exploitation’ was offensively incomplete compared to what the Forge Fathers could do with Exham. While Mi-Gan thought they were utilising the planet’s resources to the fullest, they were being wasteful in a way only a short-lived species could.
The Star Realm watched as Mi-Gan missed the choicest seams, prematurely moved operations leaving thousands of tonnes of ore untouched, and most insultingly, remained blissfully unaware of the galactic region’s densest concentrations of osmium - right beneath their noses. But the Forge Fathers are rich in the most valuable commodity in the galaxy, one so priceless the humans fail to appreciate they don’t have; time. When the shortest lifespan of a dwarf is measured in centuries, the plans of the Forge Fathers take on the kind of long term view impossible to humans.
The Forge Fathers could have taken Exham IV by force, but chose instead to persuade the humans to leave of their own accord. For a race who’s Forge-Stars can rob a sun of its energy, finding a rogue planet with a trajectory through Exham’s region and influencing its course so its transit would intersect Exham’s own; far enough to leave each planet untouched, close enough to nudge Exham’s orbit; it was simply of a matter of applying existing engineering. Exham’s modified orbit would be nothing short of catastrophic for the human inhabitants, and either they would leave or they would die. It may take 20 years, it may take 60, but they would leave. All the Forge Fathers had to do was wait.
A Quiet War
The Forge Fathers watched from a distance as Exham sank into chaos. As the inhabitants fell upon themselves and their own troops in desperation, it became possible the dwarves could take Exham sooner than expected. In response, a Clan Formation of Steel Warriors and Brokkrs were posted in a neighbouring system just in case. When it came, the bleeding sickness was not surprising. Humans are filthy creatures, and their frail constitution is nothing against a dwarf’s. The outbreak was not unexpected. The Veer-myn, however, were.
The Forge Fathers know of the Veer-myn. Like many star faring races, the Forge Fathers have found the foul creatures nesting in their colonies and ships, and long since decided the pests deserved the bare minimum of attention. Their diseases were too weak to find a hold in the robust dwarven metabolism, even assuming they could penetrate their sealed armour. In return the Forge Fathers find the Veer-myn too expensive to deal with. The amount of time and energy needed to properly eradicate a nest is almost always more profitably spent elsewhere. Best to leave poison traps to keep their numbers low until operations have finished.
That a nest of such magnitude had been allowed to grow beneath their own homes confirmed the Dwarf’s prejudices of the humans, but it was still an eventuality the clan elders had not planned for. The sudden drop in communications from the surface meant an Enforcer task force may only be days away, perhaps hours, and if they found the infestation too large to be contained the human Council might enact a more permanent solution. The Forge Fathers had witnessed what happens when a planet suffers the Council’s Steenkamp Plan, and if they chose to sanction its application Exham would be a no-go area for thousands of years.
Therefore the nearby Clan Formation was ordered into action. Before covertly landing on Exham they peppered the planet’s meteor bands with mines to take out the Enforcer ships, delaying any reports back to the human Council. If the Clan Formation could eradicate the Veermyn, or at least kill the Brood Mother, before more Enforcers arrived they might still be able to win Exham without a war.
Leading the first assault was none other than Bjarn Starnafall, a firm believer in the benefits of an unannounced, overwhelming strike. As the spokesman and face of the Hammerfist Drop Armour line, he has negotiated a cut-rate deal with the supplier to outfit his closest armsmen with the heavy, atmospheric resistant armour – and they come in very handy when plummeting into the heart of a Deadzone to plunder its riches, like a fist of an angry god.
The Rebs
Wherever there is disaffection within the GCPS you find the roots of Rebellion, and on Exham there is a lot of disaffection. Mi-Gan treats their workers as any other commodity, spending less capital on them then they do on their machinery. The watch word of the foremen on the fledgling colony was “life is cheap, machines are not,” an in-joke at the expense of workers’ lives. Little did Mi-Gan know they had given a rallying cry the insurgency already germinating onplanet.
The Rebs have had assets on Exham IV for a long time. Its vast population of low grade workers has always been a ripe source of discontented men and women more than ready to take up arms against Mi-Gan, and it only took some slight suggestive re-education to spill the resentment against one corporation into outright ideological hostility against the GCPS as a whole. Since the orbital slip the Rebs’ activities on Exham has increased. The progressively draconian treatment of the citizens compounded by the changing climate alone could have pushed the planet to out-and-out revolt. The bitterness and suffering of an entire population cast off and left to choose between starving and freezing would inevitably boil over into an uprising against its corporate masters.
Only, the Rebellion did not want that. At least not unless it was under their control.
Insurgency
It is not widely reported by the tightly controlled infotainment nets, but riot and revolts are a common occurrence throughout the Sphere. Where workers are treated like property they rise up, only to be ruthlessly put down. And that won’t do for the Rebs. When Exham rises up the Rebs want it to stay risen. Exham is well known, if it were to throw off the shackles of corporatocracy it would be impossible for the Council to hide. Exham would become a beacon for rebellion throughout the galaxy, and Priory Station would be the vector to spread the word of revolution.
Exham’s potential to the cause needed a special hand to guide its upheaval, and the Rebel command in the Perseus arm believed it could choose no better than Adrienne Nikolovski. It was perhaps the success at the Homunculus Nebula which gave her the idea that the Rebs high command was not thinking big enough about Exham. That, yes, they could take the planet, but so what? They could not hold it. The destruction of Priory Station on the other hand…?
If the legendary Priory could be destroyed it would do more than just hurt the GCPS’s revenue stream. The safe little planets in the inner spheres would know fear. In the core worlds, where war was just another sport to cheer on from the infotainment channels, they would know none of them were safe. And the loss of so many lives on the station was a price she was more than willing to pay. Over the course of years she followed the official plan, recruiting men and women from Exham on the pretence of liberating the planet, while troops she trusted infiltrated Priory, gathering intelligence and preparing for the day the GCPS would change forever.
The infestation on Exham, while a surprise, did nothing but move the timetable forward. Adrienne’s private army have thrown off their shrouds and revealed themselves. While her trusted troops will rush to complete their true mission on Priory, on the surface, the recruited Rebs are determined to take back Exham, though they might just let the Veer-myn clean out the last of the Mi-Gan troopers first.
Adrienne is nothing if not practical…
The Marauders
The Mandrake Rebellion, or the ‘Mandrake Betrayal’ as Sphere textbooks have to refer to it by law, saw the end of GCPS militarisation of the Orc race. After the initial uprising battalion after battalion of Orc troops were systematically wiped out by corporation forces, often before they were even aware of their peoples’ revolt, and usually from orbit with no warning. However the rebellion might be called, within five years the resulting war was officially concluded in GCPS records. By then, the ultra-secret Enforcer program had already begun, and GCPS citizens were tacitly being encouraged to think of Marauders as dangerous pirates instead of the soldiers once responsible for their safety.
For some, however, the war never ended. In the century and a half since the Mandrake Rebellion most surviving Marauders have been content to slip into the roles of mercenaries for hire, or ply the inter-system trade lanes on the hunt for undefended caravans. Some, however, were not. Some want more. Whether it be their own planet or colony, these Marauders, unsatisfied with the miniscule payments for winning others’ wars, want to be strong enough to wage their own. Inside the Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere this is easier said than done.
The GCPS sprawls across thousands of systems and each inhabitable plot of land is already logged and notionally owned. The Corporations guard their property jealously, and the Council will do everything in its power to keep the current status quo, lending entire planets dedicated to arming its vast military complex to this aim if need be. In addition, the Corporations are undeniably cunning. Their intelligence networks are everywhere, and as could be expected the Council of Seven is aware of many of the antagonistic Marauder groups.
These warbands are allowed small victories; a destroyed frigate here, an overrun outpost there; until they gather enough followers to become a possible threat. Then the Council destroy them, as thoroughly and ruthlessly as they did their grandparents in the Betrayal. However, this constant harvesting leads to a Darwinian motion within the surviving Marauders, until only the most cunning and most dangerous Orcs remain. One such Orc is Chief Mawlukah, and he was on Exham IV when the Containment Protocol came down.
The Enemy Within
Mawlukah has decided he wants more. He wants his own little empire, and he has decided Exham IV and its prized Priory Station is the perfect place to begin. Mawlukah is not stupid. He has seen firsthand the obscene capacity of the GCPS military, and knows there is no one who could defend an entire station if they decide to take it back. Which is why he will use the human’s biggest weakness against them; greed. Priory Station is too important to too many corporations to lose. If he can take control and threaten its destruction, he will be more than willing to allow the human ships to carry on using it. For a price, of course.
The mission stages took months of preparation. Mawlukah smuggled his troops into jobs as deck hands and security at space ports on Exham and also directly on board the station, confident in the human’s opinion that all Marauders look alike. As the mission’s go time approached Mawlukah himself arrived on Exham, taking up temporary residence at the planet’s primary spaceport in the guise of a mercenary captain looking for work. When the signal was sent his troops would overthrow the human guards and take the station and the only way to access it from the surface, and Mawlukah was there on the ground to oversee the whole operation.
All was ready and just waiting for the signal. And then the Containment Protocol came down.
Mawlukah was not ready for all comms and navigational data to switch off, and certainly not for the furry little monsters suddenly pouring through windows of abandoned buildings and from beneath the street, but he had been in enough Deadzones to know what would happen next, and his plan would not survive contact with the Enforcers. If Priory Station was to be his he would have to work quickly.
The Asterians
The severing of transmissions around the planet the humans call Exham attracted the Asterian's humanfocused AI’s attention, but nothing more. The burst of imagery from their Recon Unit’s final transmission, however, was enough to jolt it into action. The AI‘s infiltration into the Mi-Gan’s communication network was seamless as it was invisible. It sequestered the results from the bleeding sickness examined by the human technicians, and before the results could be fully translated the AI was already searching for the Clade closest to Exham star, Clade Sekauteu.
The Clades, of course, are aware of the Veer-myn, even if they know them by a different name. The creatures have tried to insinuate their way onto the underside of Asterian civilisation as they have with every other culture advanced enough to reach the stars. But where Asterians trap and relocate the furred creatures, the humans treat them as a minor impediment to expansion; to ignore when possible, or ineptly attempt to exterminate when not. The Clades watched as the Veer-myn blossomed beneath the human’s profligate society, thriving off the refuse thrown away half-used and forgotten, and witnessed as the inevitable diseases and infections which grew with the nests seeped out and took their toll in human lives.
But all creatures have their place. And perhaps the Veer-myn’s is to limit the pace of human expanse through disease. Except that the sickness the AI found on Priory Station was something new. What the Maligni on Exham had created was not simply a disease, it was a biological agent so virulent, so evolved as to be pan-species; a self-developing bioweapon which could re-write its own genetic code to adapt to any potential host. Humans, Sphyr, Grogan, Judwan, Dwarf… Asterian.
Through complex mathematical models the AI mapped how the bleeding sickness could reach across the stars, riddling the galactic arm as a virus would infect every living body, until system after system would be left dead and empty and the galactic balance devastated. The complete and thorough annihilation of all faster-than light craft from Exham was suddenly of the utmost importance, and the rare use of military force was deemed a necessity and Clade Sekauteu was summoned.
Bearing a noble history reaching almost to the birth Asteria’s star empire, Clade Sekauteu may not be the largest Clade, nor one with a martial reputation, but Sekauteu, and its current Master Overseer Suu Thein, is known for doing what has to be done, no matter how distasteful. A summons to battle from an AI is an action of last resort, and Master Suu Thein will follow his directives to the letter. This is not a matter of honour for Sekauteu, but of balance, and therefore of infinitely more importance. As fate would want it, a veteran Shuuvatar named Nem-Rath was with the Clade.
Sekauteu must cut Exham off from the rest of galaxy far more comprehensively than the half measures of the humans and their Containment Protocols. It must be excised from space as a surgeon would cut out a cancer, and then left for the galaxy to heal.
The Plague and/or Mazon Labs
Officially, there have been no signs of a Plague outbreak on Exham IV. Unofficially, however, Exham IV’s warren of abandoned mining tunnels served by a network of gray-market scrap metal shipping to Priory Station makes the perfect cover for a covert research base; perhaps, unknown to most, the Plague escaped its confinement during the chaos caused by the Bleeding Sickness epidemic, or one of the planet’s many wildcat ore scavengers disturbed a Plague Artifact partially embedded in millennia-old bedrock.
The Outcome
Eventually the Enforcers were successful in their task, saving Priory Station and eradicating every Veer-myn they could find on Exham IV. Unbeknownst to their commanders though, they did not completely wipe out the colony. Content to let the Forge Fathers stay on a planet that would be off the grid and maps for at least 30 years, the Enforcers eventually pulled out, called away to investigate reports of a Nameless fleet sighted in deep space outside the Perestian system.
In a disruption to interstellar travel for several years, the huge task of moving Priory Station away from Exham IV and to an orbit around Exham III was undertaken by its owners the Mi-Gan corporation in a process that would take nearly five years. Exham IV was a dead planet and no longer existed on official maps – useless to travel and as a major waypoint and vast source of income for Mi-Gan, ensuring the station was back up and running as quickly as possible was of critical importance – for their bottom line. The station population was reduced to minimal levels and Enforcer teams and GCPS commandos scoured its corridors to ensure no trace of the Veer-myn that had plagued its original home.
All this suited the Forge Fathers completely. Thanks to an under-the-table deal between the Council and its allies in the Star Realm, Forge Father ships had arrived in orbit above Exham IV. With the humans gone, they began the construction work that would see them finally gain access to the rich seams of osmium they knew the humans had overlooked. Using their own locator beacons, cargo ships and mining haulers began to appear in system with increasing frequency, returning to their Forge Star with the valuable materials harvested from an apparently dead world.
Secreting themselves aboard ore containers, brethren from several nests, some of them clutching bundles of cargo far more valuable than mere rocks, were able to reach the orbiting Forge Father ships. Amongst them were Technorati who used their advanced technological skills to defeat the security grids that typically keep Forge Father ships free from infestation. Some of these Veer-myn subsequently launched an assault on a Forge Star, locking its controlling clan in an interminable war to resecure its almost-holy power and prevent it being used by the Veer-myn for their own nefarious ends.
In the G-Standard year 997AE, Bjokk-lor, an M-Class ore hauler appeared at its waypoint as scheduled but then failed to respond as it approached the Forge Star known as Star Feeder. All hails were unanswered and two Forge Father strike cruisers moved to intercept. They were not fast enough. Caught unawares, the hauler gained speed and rammed into the docking ring of the massive Forge Star, disintegrating in an impact that rocked the super structure and temporarily knocked out the gravity boosters. The impact was the trigger that sparked the uprising.
The Fate of a Forge Star
In their arrogance, the Forge Fathers hadn’t considered the creatures that had given them the opportunity to mine the planet in the first place – they had simply forgotten about them. In the years that followed, the foul vermin had bred and swelled to unimaginable numbers within the depths of Star Feeder and now, with the signal impact still ringing in the ears of the dwarfs, they erupted into the corridors, smelting halls and great forge chambers that the Forge Fathers considered both sacrosanct, and entirely impregnable.
Such information will never be known to outsiders. In fact, it is not spoken about openly even within Forge Father circles. If word even got the Council, the Enforcers would return and Exham IV would be annihilated. The planet’s riches are too great to allow that, and so, two years on from the outbreak, within the bowels of Star Feeder, the battle to recapture it still rages. The dwarfs are too stubborn to abandon or destroy the Forge Star and so continue to pour resources into its recapture and sterilisation. The Veer-myn continue to breed at an incredible rate.
The other major concern is that not all ships leaving Exham IV were destined for Star Feeder. Some were routed to other systems, as payment or exchange for goods or services between Clans. Just what else was lurking on those vessels had yet to be discovered. Where else the war could spread was not yet known. That changed.
Perhaps as important as the potential destruction of entire worlds though, is what happened to the ragged bundles that were smuggled off Exham IV. Each one was borne to safety by none other than a Malignus, accompanied by small coteries of Night Crawlers and Brood Guards. Their mission was even more vital than that of the Veer-myn who had taken the Forge Star. For these Veer-myn each carried with them a juvenile female to a different part of the Star Realm. Before long a handful of new colonies were formed, the young females quickly reaching maturity and beginning the process of birthing scores of new offspring. Forge Father operations, usually run with clockwork timing and laser-like precision, have been delayed and derailed all across the Star Realm. Most of the new colonies can be found relatively close to the Realm’s borders with the GCPS though.
Gallery
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Exham IV Map
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Exham IV Planet
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Exham IV Planet Only
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