The Galactic History

The early days of mankind’s expansion into the galaxy saw slow but steady growth. The most aggressive and entrepreneurial corporations used ion drives and sleeper ships to push out from the planet of their birth and into the neighbouring stars. Colonies were established and fortunes were made and lost. These were chaotic times, when apparently legal claims to newly discovered resources often weren’t worth the datachips they were recorded on. The distances being travelled, and the time it took to do so, meant ownership of a colony world could have changed hands several times before prospective settlers emerged from their cryo-tubes. Might also made right, more often than not, when you were lightyears away from the next settlement.

Having the right paperwork, all properly signed and witnessed, meant absolutely nothing if a stronger corporation came in with assault marines and vaporised all your documents and your witnesses to boot. And so the most vicious corporations grew and prospered, carving out niches for themselves in the new economy in ways that even Darwin and Keynes could not have foreseen. Greed ruled supreme and more than a few corporations - and all their employees - were wiped out in the struggle to secure a foothold in the new order. The prosperity that accompanied the settling of the worlds that today more or less make up the Core came at a great price. It seems likely that this state of affairs could not have lasted forever; the corporations had not escaped Old Earth merely to destroy each other on distant planets, and yet it seemed this outcome of the whole venture was a distinct possibility. Eventually, matters would get out of hand. Before that could be allowed to happen, someone would have to take the reins of the rapidly growing interstellar empire, steering it onwards, with at least some degree of cooperation, towards ever greater challenges.

The original ‘group of seven’ were the heads of major corporations, chosen by a consensus of their peers, as a kind of formal coordinating committee. The seven would be responsible for settling disputes between rival companies and for negotiating terms with alien groups when their interests conflicted with that of mankind. In the event those negotiations failed, the seven would be able to recommend and facilitate the formation of military coalitions, drawing from all the corporations, to meet and destroy the new threat. They would not have to wait long before getting the opportunity to do exactly that.

The Alliance Europeenne Occidentale, or AEO, was the first company to reach the Pollux system, home of an alien race with whom no human had had prior contact. The Mojat were no more technologically advanced than mankind was at that time - they had not even achieved interstellar space travel yet. The AEO, officially at least, wanted nothing more than to establish friendly trading relations with their newly discovered galactic neighbours. A delegation was duly dispatched to meet with the Mojat but not one of them is believed to have lived for more than twenty-four hours after landing on the Mojat home world. The ‘why’ of their fate is to this day unclear. The ‘what’ was clearly established from transmissions received from the delegates’ subdermal bio-monitors: roughly half the team were dead within an hour of landing and half the remainder died at some point over the next day. As if this were not horrific enough, the last few AEO delegates appeared to have suffered prolonged exposure to some kind of painful stimulus before they too succumbed to however they were being treated. The delegation, it appeared, had been betrayed: ambushed, hunted down, and tortured to death.

The ‘Pollux Betrayal’ had a galvanising effect on humanity. As was their remit, the group of seven quickly drew up plans for a joint military expedition, one using the combined private security forces of as many corporations as could be reached. Factories were retooled and shipping rerouted, creating and mobilising a vast amount of armour and firepower. Even Old Earth was brought, temporarily, back into the fold, as mankind united to defeat the alien threat. A massive conscription effort added hundreds of thousands of troops to the existing militaries of mankind. It is fair to say however that almost all the conscripts from Earth were more than happy to join up if it meant a chance to get off their dying planet. The task force, at the time the most powerful in the history of mankind, laid siege to the Mojat within months.

Official histories of the attack on the alien home world show an almost one-sided affair. The Mojat were completely overwhelmed, their own tiny starfleet blasted into dust within hours and their planetary defences obliterated shortly thereafter. There were so many human ships in the Pollux system, some said you were more likely to collide with a friendly vessel than be hit by anything the Mojat threw at you. No more humans ever set foot on the planet’s surface - they didn’t need to. A sustained bombardment of the beleaguered world completely wiped out all life on its surface and, eventually, cracked its mantle. The planet was rendered sterile, wracked with a fire that burned for centuries.

The mystery of why the Mojat chose to massacre the AEO delegation remains, to this day, unsolved. No records of their decision-making process survived amongst the smouldering ruin of a planet they left behind. What was made very clear by what happened to their race though was the strength a united humanity was able to muster when provoked. That, and the lengths the human race would go to to protect its interests. Pollux was a statement as much as a reaction. It put the rest of the galaxy on notice - the corporations were a force to be reckoned with.

The unity of purpose that made the eradication of the Mojat such a success was not to last for long. Once the war was over, old rivalries surged again to the fore. The New World Wars that followed were fought between corporate enemies that were now even more well-armed than they ever had been before. During this dark time even the group of seven found themselves under attack. The wars raged for decades, with colony fighting against colony, until, after nearly a century of bloodshed and destruction, the group of seven were finally able to restore some form of order.

Even before the Mojat, the corporations had encountered more than a few alien races since leaving Old Earth, but corporate intelligence suggested there was worse yet to be found. Dwarfs, a stout race of engineers that called themselves ‘the Forge Fathers’, were known to command the stars to the galactic north. They were clearly mankind’s superior in technology if not height. And there were rumours of an even more powerful empire, one of tall, slender aliens with vast armies of mechanoids, holding the stars to the west. To the group of seven, one truth was blindingly obvious: mankind did not yet have the power or discipline necessary to meet dangers such as these.

The galaxy was far too dangerous a place in which to allow a fractured and fractious mankind to travel. A new structure, the seven reasoned, was needed. A co-operative one, one that did not stifle its members yet still bound them together, allowing each to benefit financially from the security their collective strength gave. Many were quickly brought into the fold, others took longer to convince. But the seven were ruthless in their quest to end the wars and bring every other corporation to heel.

Eventually the last rogue corporations were hunted down and new treaties and pacts were signed and notarised. As the last guns were silenced, the Council of Seven and the Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere was formally established.

A golden era followed as the corporations, no longer held back by infighting and suspicion, were able to truly embrace their destiny amongst the stars. The creation of the McKinley drive, a machine that allowed starships to travel at faster than lightspeed further accelerated the GCPS’s growth. Over the following centuries the GCPS expanded relentlessly, adding three more Spheres to the Core worlds, developing numerous novel technologies, and incorporating or destroying every new alien race it discovered along the way.

During the GCPS’s Fourth Sphere of Expansion though, even with the Council’s firm guidance, peace between the corporations was becoming strained at best. Many of them seemed to think they could only continue to thrive at the expense of the others. The Council’s powers, though authoritative, were still limited. They could adjudicate disputes brought before them, but there was often little they could do to prevent them arising in the first place. Collectively the GCPS was practically unstoppable, but the Seven foresaw it might not take much to drive a fatal wedge between them all. Acting with characteristic decisiveness, they wasted little time in attempting to remedy this deficiency.

Their solution was one filled with manipulation and machination. A conflict was created, one that would force the corporations to work together and realise the larger existential danger the rest of the galaxy posed. The group of seven chose the Marauders, alien mercenaries that had been employed for many years to augment certain corporate troops, as their fall-guys. Seemingly without warning, Marauder units rose up against their human employers and laid waste to entire planets. The Mandrake Rebellion, as it came to be known, was only intended to demonstrate the inadequacy of the corporate military structure as it stood. To persuade the heads of all the corporations that their alliances must be made stronger and permanent. Instead it nearly toppled the entire GCPS, stretching its collective defences almost to the breaking point.

In time, the war against the so-called “orcs” was finally won though. By deploying the prototypes of what would soon become the most powerful warriors in humanity’s history, the Seven were victorious and the rebels crushed. These events, and others like them, provided the Seven with the impetus and the political capital to achieve something they could never have bought with anything else: absolute power.

Nearly one and a half centuries on, today’s Seven and how they function are quite different to the founding members, as is the galaxy they face and the GCPS they lead. But the wounds caused by Mandrake have not all completely healed. Neither have all the legends and monsters of that time completely gone away either.

There can be few organs of the corporate machine with as much influence as the Eco-Threat Counteration Unit. Its power is rivalled only by the Office of Market Intelligence. The reports generated from its vast headquarters in the Core - and its numerous though often far better hidden stations across the Five Spheres - can quite literally start or avoid wars. This is because ETCU’s primary tasking is the analysis and monitoring of every alien species the GCPS encounters. New races are surveilled - in secret if possible - while ETCU evaluates their technological capability, cultural mores, and likely response to overtures by the Council.

Does the new race have anything of value to the GCPS? Are they likely or able to resist incorporation? Should the Council dispatch diplomats or warships to make their introductions? The answers to questions like these have obvious, far-reaching consequences, thus the ETCU is given almost limitless funding and time to do its job. But even after a new species has been conquered or incorporated ETCU’s work is not done. After all, more than one so-called ‘ally’ has turned traitor after being brought into the fold in times past, so the Council watches its friends just as closely as it does its enemies. A supervising ETCU Grade-3 agent may often make the evaluation that it is more costeffective to annihilate a new race on discovery than it might be to repair the damage done by turncoats.

As has been noted, the GCPS is vast. There are enormous distances between even the closest colonised systems and there are countless worlds upon which no corporate foot has ever trod. As it continues its endless mission to exploit every corner of the territory it claims as its own however, the great variety of life in the universe means that the GCPS continues to uncover new races and civilisations within its borders to this day.

Contrary to what certain ‘casters on the pirate nets would have you believe though, the GCPS does not exterminate every alien race it encounters. Only the ones that resist. Indeed, its preferred protocol on discovering an intelligent species within its borders is incorporation. Sentient, compliant races are typically initially offered Preferred-level membership when they first join, progressing in status as they increase their contribution to the GCPS’s wealth and strength. Successfully incorporated races include the Teratons, Ada-Lorana, and Chovar, all of whom occupy unique and valued positions across the Five Spheres.

History, they say, is written by the victors, and in no case is this more true than in the case of the Mandrake Rebellion. It helps, of course, that in the GCPS the study of history is not exactly encouraged. But for those that can be bothered to tear themselves away from the latest entertainment show on the CorpsNet, a sanitised, Council- approved version of the story is available.

According to corporate records, in the year 850AE, greedy orc warlords, hungry for power and envious of the success of humankind, rebelled against their GCPS officers and went on an interplanetary rampage. Marauder troops had been a part of the corporate military for a very long time and then, at some point, they decided they wanted more. Millions were slaughtered by the merciless orc horde and entire star systems occupied or laid to waste by the green tide.

Defeating them took an unprecedented amount of cooperation by the corporations and led to the development of the Ichiban project - the precursors to today’s Enforcer corps. And, again, according to corporate records, the masterstroke that put an end to the rebellion occurred at Nihil Rex when the bulk of the orc army was obliterated thanks to superior corporate manoeuvring. The star that still shines there serves as a reminder to all of the GCPS’s strength and power - or a warning against testing its resolve.

Naturally, there are others alive today who tell a different tale, would have you believe the corporations - or the Council themselves - were to blame for what happened in the Mandrake sector. But those losers aren’t bringing you new seasons of OverDrive, are they, so who cares?

The GCPS might have collapsed early in its existence if it were not for the discipline imposed by the first Council of Seven and all those that have followed it. But by bringing order to the corporations, open warfare between rivals is usually restricted to one or two star systems and never allowed to interfere with the GCPS and its profits at large. The Council is rightly pleased with its ability to hold so many would-be enemies in check for so long. There are races in the galaxy to whom mankind is but a child though and the antics of the GCPS similarly immature.

One such is the race of dwarfs known as the Forge Fathers.

The Forge Fathers are an ancient race - according to their legends they are nothing less than the oldest of all that now live. Whether this is true or not is perhaps moot, but they are certainly amongst the most powerful.

Excelling in engineering and craftsmen beyond compare, the Forge Fathers are often found travelling and living aboard vast Ward ships. Each one is a colossal starship, flagged to a single Forge Father clan, and populated by thousands of dwarfs. Within the Ward ship are countless foundries and workshops, each of them alive with the sound of ringing hammers and bubbling molten metal. There are also barracks and hangars and vast stores of raw materials and consumables. Many Forge Fathers would happily live their entire lives aboard their clan’s Ward ship, filling their days crafting and creating, training and tooling, though all of them spend at least part of their lives as warriors. Their most impressive creations are the Forge Stars, gargantuan mega-constructions, designed to harness the power of entire suns. The average GCPS citizen is far more likely to meet a dwarf on the field of battle than ever see the wonders that lie within the Star Realm though.

Spitzenner was the site of the first recorded contact between man and dwarf, in the year 353AE, during the third expansion phase of the GCPS. Corporate settlers had taken possession of what had seemed to them to be an unoccupied world to the galactic north of Old Earth and were eking out a new life on a hard planet. Unbeknownst to them, Spitzenner had already been claimed by one of the most powerful Forge Father clans. When the Strikhammr clan’s Ward ship, along with its attendant fleet of warships and auxiliary vessels, arrived in-system, armed conflict was not far behind. Friction between the GCPS and the Star Realm was almost inevitable - if it hadn’t happened on Spitzenner it would probably have happened on some other nearby world. This is because the Forge Fathers have in fact already laid claim to every single usable resource in the known galaxy. It has simply never seemed necessary to them to let anybody else know.

Dwarfs are a long-lived race, and a patient one. Their engineers are quite content to spend countless cycles painstakingly draining every iota of worth out of each world they come to. So their progress across the galaxy is, by most races’ standards, very, very slow. It had so far also been inexorable. Over the aeons of its own expansion, the Forge Father civilisation had never once been stopped by any of the races they had yet encountered. When they met the GCPS, the Forge Lords were genuinely and unpleasantly surprised to find themselves faced with an enemy almost as stubborn and convinced of its claim to the galaxy’s wealth as they were.

The extermination of the human colonists on Spitzenner began the War of the Short Front. Numerous clans and just as many corporations were dragged into the fight as more colonies were found by the dwarfs on worlds they believed to be their own. The cost to both sides in lives and resources was enormous. Fleets were reduced to drifting hulks and armies were annihilated. Planets were rendered uninhabitable as vast amounts of munitions were expended. So devastating was the war that eventually certain Forge Lords concluded something previously unthinkable might now be the only way to end such a costly conflict. These Lords set forth their plans to take the unprecedented step of unleashing the nuclear firepower of the Forge Stars themselves. First they would utterly annihilate each and every world the GCPS had colonised within the borders of the Star Realm. Then they would turn those same fires on every other planet humans had claimed. It would not be a quick operation, but, as has been mentioned, this is no reason for a Forge Father to not commit to a well-planned course of action. However long it took though, the result would likely have been that humanity would, eventually, be literally burned out of existence.

Thankfully, other Forge Lords advanced a far less violent way to solve the conflict of interests and end the war. Rather than excising their foe completely and, along the way, wasting all the resources that would have been atomised along with them, the Forge Lords decided to speak to them in the only language both sides seemed to understand: commerce.

Today the Forge Fathers are the GCPS’s most important trading partner. Not all the Forge Lords take part and there are still many conflicts ongoing in that part of space. The GCPS continues to nibble at worlds the dwarfs claim for their own, and vice versa. But both sides tend to tolerate this. The Forge Lords, for their part, value the GCPS and its armed forces as allies who, at the very least, are busy taking care of enemies far away in the galaxy, long before those same enemies become a problem for the dwarfs. But, it is the GCPS who arguably have the better part of the bargain. For it is the Forge Fathers themselves who have supplied much of the technology that has made the GCPS the equal of practically anything else in the galaxy. Most vitally of all, they supply the Council of Seven’s private army, the Enforcer Corps, with its armour.

Trade with the Forge Fathers is vital to the continuing success and profit of the GCPS. Without their armaments, the Enforcer Corps would likely be a shadow of its current self. And, without the Enforcers, the Council of Seven would have no way to prevent the GCPS being eaten alive by its enemies, both within and without. So, the Forge Fathers are one of the few races known to exist that ETCU are officially prohibited from monitoring or studying.

Corporate starships are expressly forbidden from crossing into recognised Forge Father space and ETCU may not board or monitor any dwarf ship in the Five Spheres belonging to clans the Council has designated as ‘partners’. To their credit, there is no publicly available, verified record anywhere of ETCU researchers ever contravening these regulations. This is not to say that ETCU never has, of course. Only, and most importantly, that it can never be proved, in any legally enforceable way, that they are responsible for the unexplained disappearance of any dwarf traders, rogue Ward ships, or small mining expeditions in isolated systems at any point in the last few hundred years. The galaxy is a big place and people and starships go missing all the time.

The Council of Seven defends its treasures zealously and there are few who would claim it is wrong to do so. The past has, after all, shown all of humankind the folly in not seizing the initiative - and anything else of worth - and then holding onto it with an iron grip. Perhaps its most valuable possession of them all though is knowledge. Understanding of how the universe really turns and who holds the handle, the true scale of danger and malevolence that exists within the Five Spheres and beyond, has the power to perhaps topple the entire GCPS. For that reason, information across the Five Spheres is policed, controlled, and guarded with great diligence.

One of the greatest threats to whatever peace can be found in the galaxy is the Plague. So great did the Council of Seven view the danger of contagion to be that an entirely new way of administering information and the GCPS itself had to be created to contain it.

The Plague’s origin is undetermined and its precise biology is difficult to pin down. The bio-contaminant that is spread by the infected via bite, scratch, or pustulent explosion, is neither virus nor bacteria, but something more minacious than either. What is known is that when a new outbreak occurs, it is almost always preceded by the discovery of an alien artefact. Sometimes they are buried deep beneath a newly colonised world’s surface. Sometimes they are found amidst the ruins of long-dead alien civilisations. But always, shortly after being uncovered, these monolithic death-traps open, releasing the Plague into the atmosphere and beginning a new cycle of death and destruction.

The first recorded artefact was discovered on Adriana, a well-developed world along the frontier of corporate space. Madness followed its unearthing, an entire planet’s population literally ripping itself apart as they were transformed into monsters by the contaminant. The chaos was only stopped by the fire from Enforcer Wyverns sent to investigate the crazed communications the planet was sending out to the rest of the GCPS. Since then the CorpsNet is monitored for any mention of certain keywords, anything that might hint at the potential discovery of a new source of the Plague.

This is because the Council has faced the Plague before and seen the damage it can do if left unchecked.

Around the GCPS’s western border lies a region of space known to corporate navigators as the Death Arc. Travel here is expressly forbidden - standard NavComps do not even register any celestial bodies being there at all - and the Arc is guarded by a special division of the Enforcer corps known as the Long Patrol. Before the inception of the corps though, corporations did dare to ignore the orders of the Council and travel to the worlds within the Arc. Among them was House Grace, at the time one of the oldest corporations in the GCPS. The prime officer of the company chafed at being told where he could and could not go while also being part of a reportedly free society.

To Cadmeyer Grace, only the markets could tell corporations what their limits were and, as far as he was concerned, those limits were nowhere near being reached. Grace sent three fleets of colonial explorers into the Arc, navigating around the Marauders who were guarding it at that time, with the possible intent of setting up his own rival to the GCPS. Contact with the fleets was lost some time between their departure and Cadmeyer’s arrest and trial for treason.

But it was not the last that was ever heard of them. Some of Grace’s ships did come back, more than a century later, but their crews were no longer human. A fleet of Plague vessels, their crews hideously malformed and under the thrall of even greater monsters, struck out at the GCPS. Since they had left corporate space the Marauders had been replaced by the Enforcers and the Plague fleet easily broke through their thin line. They subsequently burned a path deep into the GCPS and were able to lay waste to the better part of the entire Parris sector before they were stopped.

The Plague are unique amongst all the enemies of the Council of Seven in that they are the only one whose armies grow larger as they conquer more territories. The Plague’s ranks are swelled, literally, by those they have not killed outright, but instead infected with their own strain of madness. The bio-contaminant at the heart of the Plague is incredibly contagious and capable of infecting almost all known sentient species. Parris taught the Council that even a single case of infection can rapidly lead to an entire world being lost. And, once one world is lost, whole systems can be threatened. To meet the existential threat the Plague appears to pose, the Council enacted the Containment Protocols. These measures are intended to prevent, at all costs, the spread of the biological infection as well as that of panic. The GCPS is, it has been noted, built on commerce first and foremost, and it is difficult for anyone to sell the latest luxury fashions and exotically scented soaps when people are worried their neighbours are going to try to eat them. The goals of the Containment Protocols therefore are to confine, as soon as possible, any world infected by the Plague as well as any knowledge of what has happened there.

The first anyone in the affected system might know of a Containment Protocol being imposed could be the loss of data in their ship’s NavComp. NaviCorp is wholly owned by the Council and operates a network of navigational relays across the Five Spheres. In normal times, these relays feed the NavComp computers aboard travelling starships all the data necessary for them to safely slide at speeds faster than light between and around stars. But, when the order is given for a full-scale containment, an infected planet is immediately cut out of NaviCorp’s publicly distributed database, meaning no ship can leave or enter the system. To prevent alien races - or enterprising homebrew navigators - from using their own interstellar means of transport, so-called Deadzones are subsequently blockaded by warships. Usually these are Enforcer starships, though, as outbreaks become more common, private military forces are being called upon more often to hold the lines. Once the Protocol is in place, the planet under containment is likely to stay that way for several decades - long enough, at least, for the infected to die out.

Despite the best efforts of the Long Patrol, there have been several successful breakouts from the Death Arc and from Artefact-afflicted worlds closer to the Core. At least three large Plague fleets, all of them consisting of a mix of captured and infected military and commercial vessels, are known to currently be moving across corporate space. They are difficult to track - none of their ships are using standard NavComp equipment and how they are finding their way between stars at all is yet another mystery to vex ETCU investigators. Thankfully, their attacks on civilised worlds are infrequent and sporadic: none have, yet, made serious attempts to do anything like the damage they did to Parris in 891AE. It can only be a matter of time though before they reveal their true purpose in the galaxy and it can only be hoped the GCPS and its allies are able to stop them when they do.

The history of warfare has taught the leaders of the Enforcer Corps many lessons. Not least of which is that the better prepared a military force is, the better the chance they have of victory. The role of the Pathfinder division is to help the Enforcer Corps - and the GCPS at large - be as prepared as it can be. The corps hides its numbers, strength, and movements almost religiously - Enforcers are typically not permitted to remove their helmets outside their bases for just this reason - but the fact is they are a limited resource. The Council does not wish to waste them. So it is the job of the Pathfinders to respond first to any possible security threats to the GCPS, to evaluate that threat, to act against it if necessary and to call on the rest of the Corps when a larger intervention is needed.

Pathfinder duty is even more dangerous than that of a typical Enforcer. They are often alone or operating in pairs or small units. By definition they are looking for trouble all across the galaxy and they often find it. Thus the move from the Strike Teams to the Pathfinder division is not an easy one. The failure rate in the conversion course is high and often results in the death of the applicant. Those that make it are, by far, some of the most deadly people in the galaxy.

Pathfinders that have identified a threat requiring the intervention of the larger corps will often remain on-site, transitioning to a support role. Many are excellent snipers, using EP-54 monocycles to move around the battlefield or deploying their D.O.G drones and Tag rifles to mark targets for termination by other, more heavily armed units.

There are those that also have a strong interest in stopping the Plague, though for their own reasons, not out of any love for the GCPS. Hunter clades of Asterians covertly travel throughout the Five Spheres, using their own technology to evade detection while they track down the Plague fleets. If this was all they did, the Council might be happy enough to let them play their game. But it is not. Sometimes, it seems, the Clades act pre-emptively, attacking corporate sites that stand in Plague’s path, perhaps in an attempt to deny them more recruits. There have also been at least two cases of attacks where the Asterians’ objective seemed instead to be to remove something from a planet’s surface before the corporate colonists could discover it.

One such was New Gallimech. A garrison of Cro-Tek marines were besieged by phalanxes of Asterian constructs, the alien constructs appearing without warning just beyond the marines’ perimeter. As Cyphers probed their defences, the garrison’s walls were pounded for a full local day by fission beams mounted on Phanta-class gunships. Soon after the siege began, the garrison began receiving distress calls from miners at a dig ten kilometres to their southwest. More Asterians had been spotted and the miners were ill-equipped to defend themselves. The marines were unable to leave their base in response though. Every time one of their Hornets appeared above the garrison’s wall it was instantly vaporised by unseen anti-vehicle weapons.

A Mule convoy met a similar fate, its lead vehicles being quickly knocked out by sniper drones, leaving half the transports stranded outside the base walls. Eventually the marines stopped trying to break out and resigned themselves to concentrating their efforts on staying alive within their walls. And, eventually, the distress calls stopped coming.

Early on the third day of the siege, the Asterian guns stopped firing. No signal the marines were aware of had been given - the alien gunships simply left, vanishing as quickly as they had appeared. Scouts soon reported there were no more Asterians anywhere near the base - the siege was over. Their constructs and war machines were not all the Asterians took with them though.

A second Mule convoy was organised, accompanied by what was left of the marines’ Hornets, and dispatched to the mines. Cresting the last ridge along the way, the first Hornet pilots to reach the dig site could barely believe their eyes and their superiors back in the garrison couldn’t believe what they were being told: the mine was gone. Where there had once been an extensive operation to recover ore laced with precious metals, there was now nothing but a colossal hole in the ground. It looked, to quote the marine pilot who discovered it, ‘like somebody just scooped up the whole place and carried it away’. The hole measured nearly a kilometre across and nearly a kilometre down. The miners, all their equipment, and anything they might have dug out of the Gallimech ground was gone.

As a strategy, Containment Protocols are not without merit. The Council of Seven is well served by its intelligence agents, particularly its Forward Observers, and therefore well placed to evaluate threats to both the GCPS and the galaxy at large. The Containment Protocols are blunt, brutal instruments of state, but their usefulness is undeniable. Countless lives have doubtlessly been saved by cutting off those who are most likely to be infected and least likely to be saved. So effective are the Protocols believed to be, they have also been approved for several other types of incursion into corporate space. The Protocols are not infallible though - particularly when other powerful agents are actively working to subvert them.

At Exham IV, a 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.

Enforcer Strike teams were sent to secure the system, and the very valuable space station, but were hard pressed to complete their mission. 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.

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.

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. They began to mine its assets, even as the Enforcers were digging out the Veer-myn. To the Veer-myn, this was an unmissable opportunity. 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 Veermyn for their own nefarious ends.

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 Veermyn 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.

As the GCPS approaches its one-thousand year anniversary, much of the Core is understandably preoccupied with preparations for its accompanying celebrations. Rumours abound of extravagant displays of opulence, grand gestures, pardons of some of the Council’s greatest prisoners, perhaps the allocation of new Exploitable Assets. Imaginations are running wild. In a hidden corner of the GCPS though, there are some whose ambitions for the coming millennium are less grand though no less significant. A cadre of outcasts, nonhumans who have been alienated from the rest of the Five Spheres, are about to put into action plans that are nearly a century in the making. Soon the whole GCPS will know their names - and the meaning of the name Mahu’Oran.

It is an understatement to say Chief Mahúar is a legend amongst Gorans today. Leader of the Marauders of the Mandrake Rebellion, his name is engraved on the barrels of a hundred thousand guntracks and the hearts of ten times as many warriors. Only Mahúar had the sheer strength of will required to bind the fractious tribes of Gora and forge them into a fighting force that threatened the galaxy.

Even the prototype Enforcers the Council pushed into battle were not truly enough to stop them. Indeed, if it had not been for the events of Mandrake Rebellion, the orcs might well be the dominant force in the galaxy today.

They were defeated though and Gora is now a heavily policed world. Enforcers of the feared Black Company patrol the sector, making sure the native population never gets out of control. Controlled numbers of Gorans are allowed to leave their home world each year, but only to travel to pre-approved employment as adjuncts to corporate militaries or menial labourers. Occasionally, small groups of them slip through the net, travelling unregulated routes to find the roving bands of their kind that ply their trade as mercenaries. Those few free, ungoverned Marauders are of little concern to the Council though. Their natural enmity towards each other works in the Council’s favour, after all. It keeps them separate, makes them even work against each other. At least, it did until now.

Far out in the southern stretches of the Fourth Sphere lies a region of space barely noticed, let alone exploited by the GCPS. The Orphic sector can only be reached by ships brave enough to traverse the Cerberus Maw. A ring of three neutron stars, each one a super-dense mass of radioactive fire, the Maw’s gravitic presence makes travel to any of the planets between it using a McKinley drive a dangerously complex procedure. Their frequencies and profiles fluctuate over time too, sometimes unpredictably. More than a few ships were lost to this phenomenon early in the sector’s history.

Despite these stellar complications, the frontier-colony specialist Cabot Group did push through the Maw and, in 953AE, even started to build settlements on some of the worlds within it. They bought licenses to settle on a system of five planets, all of them orbiting a sun that appeared far more stable than those of the Maw itself, and began recruiting colonists. Cabot made no secret of the fact that life on the sites it had leased would be hard. But its nononsense presentation of the dangers of living on the edge of the GCPS probably only helped it attract a certain kind of customer.

These were rough and ready types, willing to roll up their sleeves and pitch in in return for owning a slice of a pristine planet as far from the pampered elites of the Core and their rulers as possible. Tough as they were though, Cabot had never fully researched what living so close to the radiation coming from the Maw might do to its colonists. Within a decade, the majority of them were dead of Cabot’s Syndrome - a range of cancers and mutations with no apparent cure. Those that survived left the Maw and their prefabricated Shensig settlements far behind and launched legal actions which quickly ruined Cabot. In the records of Administration Central, the Orphic sector has been marked as ‘Delta Grade Material’ - not worth the trouble and expense any corporation might have to go to to profit from it. It is a rare cast-off from the GCPS’s register. An ideal place then for a people who have likewise been written off by the corporations.

It is on one of the five Cabot worlds that an orc commander, one Marshal Tung, has built his base.

For the Marauders, the radiation that drove off the humans that tried to settle in the sector poses no threat - their green skin evolved as protection from the radiation of their original homeworld’s own sun. Add to that a world, complete with ready-made accommodation and plentiful abandoned supplies, almost entirely out of view of the Council and its agents, and Cabot III is ideally suited to Tung’s purposes.

To the GCPS at large, Tung is an orc commander of some distinction. For more than twenty G-standard years, he has led the Predators, a Marauder company with a reputation for deadly hit and run raids throughout the Fringe. Sometimes the Predators were employed by the corporations, sometimes they fought against them. They fought Asterians too, and Forge Fathers and rebels and pirates alike. Occasionally they were even sent to fight the Plague.

The Predator’s reputation grew with every successful contract they completed. Like all orcs, Tung’s commandos could be relied upon to deliver bloodthirsty violence that turned into winning results and they did just that on their last deployment. But it was not just strength in numbers they brought to the table when they were recruited to bolster the marines besieged on Rhada. The colonel of the marines Tung had relieved in that last campaign reported that the Predators had achieved victory through an uncanny tactical competence. It was as if their commander could predict the enemy’s moves almost faster than they did. Marshall Tung, the colonel went on to say, also had an unparalleled hold on the loyalty of all the other chiefs in his company. True, Tung was bigger than many of the other senior Marauder commanders beneath him, and clearly he was possessed of the same love of violence as they were. But there was something more to their relationship than that.

What that marine colonel did not know, what in fact no human in the Five Spheres then knew, was that ‘Tung’ is only a nom de guerre. The real name of the massive orc that had so impressed him is Mahu’Oran. Marshal Tung is the grandson of none other than Mahúar himself.

Over the many years he spent working alongside and for the corporations, Tung was building more than just a reputation. For a start, Tung’s Predators, though large, is only a fraction of the Marauders Tung commands. As well as them, commanders from Storm Force, the Outriders, and the Nomads have also brought their warriors - and their hardware - to Tung’s banners. Some of these alliances between former rival outfits were made possible by Tung’s heritage, others he forged through charisma, cunning, and charm. Where those all failed, he simply beat his rivals into submission.

Because Tung’s vision is not just to lord it over a few other orcs on a backwater world. His dream is to unite all the Marauders from across the galaxy on a new home world, free from corporate interference. From a place like that, they could conquer the galaxy...

Following the Mandrake Rebellion, the Council had demurred exterminating every Goran, recognising that the Marauders might yet prove useful to their future plans for expansion. Instead they chose to devote an entire battalion of the Enforcer Corps to monitoring and containing what was left of them.

This is the Black Company, one of the most highly resourced divisions within the corps. The Marauders were allowed to live, even to leave Gora and to seek work where they chose - within certain limits. When a warband of Marauders grew large enough to pose a threat to normal corporate operations or threaten a sector’s internal security, or struck against a corporate target without a proper contract, the Black Company would act.

No protocol was placed off limits. Numerous orc commanders have found their outfits targeted mid-slide, their ships blown out of the sky, their operating bases raided or lasered from orbit, their strike teams gunned down in ambushes. The Black Company have done all of this and much more, all according to the Will of the Council and always while leaving few witnesses to tell the tale. For more than a hundred G-standard years, the Black company has successfully guarded the GCPS against the green menace. Until now they have taken great pride in doing so successfully.

The Missing Link

One such Enforcer is Commander Link Mantenna. Mantenna is a glowering savage of a human, a man with the appearance of being born for nothing else but warfare. Recruited into the Enforcer corps in AE985 from a prison barge, Mantenna has excelled as an Enforcer. His natural size and strength were both enhanced by the Program, but although Mantenna has never hesitated to unleash his own brand of lethal brutality against a Marauder he has a stern respect for his enemies born out of hard years fighting them.

He first saw service on Pilgrim, where his Strike Team was tasked with eliminating a group of Marauders that had branched out from their normal work as hired muscle and formed an ad hoc crime syndicate. The targets were using the cave systems beneath New Coronado City to move large quantities of illicit chemicals into the city without detection by local security services. Following a lightning attack on the orc compound, Mantenna was the sole survivor of the subsequent massacre in the caves beneath it. More Marauders than anticipated had escaped into the subterranean network but, despite the Company’s significant losses, the mission was considered a success. It was the making of Mantenna too; he was promoted for his actions on Pilgrim and went on to lead an exemplary career in the Black Company. His experience on that operation taught him two valuable lessons though: never to underestimate the fighting strength of a Marauder, and never to rely too heavily on corporate intelligence when engaging one.

Orcs prize a warrior spirit highly. Those that possess a certain kind of fearless aggression are said to have ‘madd’ur’ak’, a gift from Da’grak, the Spirit of Death. One such group of death-defying warriors are the Skyscrapers. For these elite orcs, the thrill of combat is simply not enough. For them, battle is best approached at speeds faster than sound. Using jetpacks, some of which are heirlooms that date back to the Mandrake Rebellion, these orcs might deploy from Vulture dropships just inside a planet’s atmosphere, screaming down onto their enemy’s position in a blaze of fiery fury. Sometimes, the age of their kit and the sheer danger associated with their deployments means some Skyscrapers inevitably will not survive the journey. There is always another orc ready to take up a ‘pack when a place in a chalk becomes available though. How better to prove yourself to every other Marauder?

While Tung’s plans were carried out in utmost secrecy, being discovered eventually was always inevitable. Pathfinder units, investigating reports of unmarked Marauder ships transiting corporate space towards the Maw, quickly established how big the problem building beyond it might be. Using their own covert methods, a Pathfinder surveillance unit was sent to the Fawcet worlds and, when word of what Tung had built there reached the ears of the Council of Seven, their reaction was dramatic and immediate. The Black Company was ordered into immediate action and, three days later, Enforcement Patrol Group ‘Hammer’ was en route to the Orphic sector.

The Wyverns of EPG Hammer were used to going where they willed, without objection and, usually, without detection. Nevertheless, they ought to have been better prepared for what awaited them in the Orphic sector. There were after all only a few locations they could have safely slid into beyond the Maw that would not send them straight into the gravity well of one of the super-dense stars.

They were fired upon almost as soon as they slowed from faster-than-light travel and two of the three ships in the group were quickly crippled, their engines set ablaze by lasers and missiles. A fleet of Marauder warships had the drop on their foes and the battle in space quickly became like shooting Pusk in a barrel. As the Wyverns struggled to manoeuvre and began to return fire, the power core of one of the damaged ships detonated, destroying it instantly.

On the bridge of the group’s command ship, the truth was inescapable - the first brief battle was lost. If something were not done soon, all the Enforcer ships would be wrecked. EPG Hammer’s commanding officer had seen the reports of launches from the destroyed Wyvern, but she had no way to help whoever had been aboard those Accusers. Faced with imminent destruction, there was no choice but to order a quick withdrawal, to get her embattled Wyverns away from the system as quickly as their faltering engines would convey them.

A mere fraction of the Enforcers sent to rein in the rogue Marauders of Cabot III actually reached the surface. As what remained of the EPG’s starships struggled to reach a safe distance from the orc blockade, Commander Mantenna took stock of what had made it down with him. The good news was his Accusers were well equipped, having been fully prepped for the mass assault that had been planned. The bad news was he only had limited numbers of any particular piece of kit.

Mantenna knew that reinforcements would eventually reach them - there was just no way of knowing for exactly how long he and his operatives would be cut off. Not that it mattered. Even on their own, the mission of Mantenna and the EPG Hammer Enforcers has not changed: they must prevent Cabot III becoming the new home of the Marauders. A hard task, to be sure. And with limited access to resources, Mantenna knew he would have to fight smart. To survive, they would need to secure whatever resources they could from what already exists on the planet. They would need to raid Marauder outposts, kill as many enemies as they could while avoiding large-scale engagements for as long as possible, and gather as much intelligence on the rebellious orcs as they could find along the way.

If they didn’t know it already, the Marauders would soon be aware there were Enforcers on their self-proclaimed home world and Mantenna and his Hammers would be hunted every step of the way. But, Mantenna thought as he pulled back the priming lever on his Genling 45, it wasn’t as if he was trapped on an isolated alien world with an army of hostile Marauders to take care of - they were trapped on Cabot III with him.

As Mantenna briefed his operators on the tasks ahead of them, Marshal Tung, the great Mahu’Oran, was reflecting on how his own destiny may have changed in the last few hours. Having won the first battle in the skies above his planet, Tung knew he had just sent the rulers of the GCPS an unequivocal message - don’t come here. But, even though the Council’s first foray into the Cabot system was now reported to be running away with its tail between its legs, he also knew more would come after them. It was in their nature to rise to a challenge from a rival, just as it was his. When they did come back, Tung knew his Marauders would be waiting for them again.

Until then, he had to deal with a far more present and just as clear danger - the Enforcers that had already landed on Cabot III. Goblin spotters had tracked them, though they could not be sure how many of the smoke trails they saw streaming across the bright sky were dropships and how many were wreckage. Maybe all of them were harmless pieces of debris from the battle, they had said. But Tung was not fooled. It did not matter if it was a single Accuser or a hundred. Even one Enforcer, if they were left alive, could kill him and end his uprising before it had even properly started.

As the marshal, and as the chief of all the Marauders in the sector, it would be up to him alone to finish what the fleet had begun. While the bulk of his troops had to be kept ready to repel the next invasion attempt when it came, Tung himself would take charge of hunting down those already on his world.