Mortalidad por Edad

Much like their weapons and armour, the ships of the Enforcer Corps represent a level of efficiency and lethality an order of magnitude larger than those used by corporate fleets. Equipped with advanced scanning arrays, passive and active ship to ship countermeasures and a full array of tactical ordnance, each class utilised by the Enforcers is more than capable of taking on bigger and heavier ships and winning.

These craft are manufactured under terms of absolute exclusivity by the yards of the Xian Seng Corporation. Having risen to fame for its superior luxury cruisers, which are still seen as a status symbol by the richest of the super-elite, Xian Seng suddenly ceased trading to private consumers around the same time that the Enforcer programme went live. The corporation had always been dogged by whispers of experimental technology derived from unincorporated aliens, but while it is certainly true that they manufactured ships light years ahead of their competitors, nothing concrete was ever proved. Regardless, Xian Seng was clearly deemed fit to serve the purposes of the Council, which is now their only client.

Xian Seng manufacture two main classes of starship for the Enforcers, and most of what is known about them is based on limited observation and hearsay. The XSM-85 Wyvern is a heavier ship, designed for mass deployment of Enforcers into areas of heavy fighting, and it is rare to see more than one of these beasts in any given deployment zone.

Equipped with extensive flight hangars and troop decks, a single Wyvern can deploy enough Enforcers, support weapons and vehicles to assault an entire continent. It also mounts fearsome ordnance capability, with an internal stockpile of warheads extensive and varied enough to deal with any situation. The mere arrival of a Wyvern in-system is often enough to provoke enemy forces to surrender.

While the Wyvern is only seen in the direst

circumstances, the XSM-76 Drakon is a much more commonly-used ship. It is the main deployment craft used by the Enforcers, one of the smallest military craft fitted with a McKinley Drive. They are typically used as rapid reaction ships, and most blockades around quarantined planets are initially made up of these ships. Minimally crewed, Drakons still represent a real threat to any foolish enough to try and breach the cordon. Although there are some variants, most are fitted with an internal shuttle bay housing an XSM-762 Stallion dropship that can carry a full patrol force of thirty Enforcers plus supporting equipment. The Stallion is essential in the deployment of Recon troopers to a planet’s surface prior to the verification of a Containment Protocol, and its silhouette has become associated with coming danger.

38 - NEXUS PSI

To the galactic north-east of the GCPS lies the Death Arc, a region of space that is considered by some to be one of the greatest mysteries of the galaxy. It was first explored by long-range scout ships from the Canco Corporation, who discovered a world whose verdant forests hid the ruins of a widespread urban culture. The scouts duly noted this, conducted a brief survey and moved on. At the time, little was thought of the deceased population. Intelligent life is common in the galaxy, but many species fail to make the transition to a hi-tech society without destroying themselves through war or environmental collapse. The planet-sized graves of those failed peoples dot the stars.

What the Canco scouts had found, however, was not a lone tomb, but the first headstone in a cemetery. As they went onwards, the scouts found world after world where desiccated bones littered the crumbling streets and towering buildings stood like lonely

monoliths, cracked with age and webbed with plant life. There were no signs of remainging intelligent life on any of the worlds. Unnerved and out of range of their nearest hub, the scouts turned back. The Death Arc was labelled as Unexploited and left alone.

Time moved on. The Co-Prosperity Sphere continued its glorious expansion, and eventually the Frontier expanded to meet the edge of the Death Arc. Records of Canco’s expedition were dug out of the archives and re-examined. These worlds harboured a wealth of exploitable assets, so it was no surprise when licensing was opened and bids flooded in.

As Exploration Fleets made their way across the Death Arc, more detailed studies of the fallen civilisations began to filter back to Corporation Central. The reports were all similar: damage to the fabric of the civilisations’ infrastructure was not commensurate with large-scale warfare, save in two exceptions where atomic weapons had been deployed, but there were widespread indications of large-scale civil unrest, followed by societal collapse. Each planet’s population showed a sharp drop in number, which precipitated a rapid decline in technological aptitude. The last few survivors appeared to have been living at sub-metalworking levels before dying out altogether. Some of the civilisations in question had no contact with other worlds, while others appeared to be parts of thriving multi-system states with ties to other similar civilisations. All had met the same fate.

As coincidence, cosmic phenomena and interstellar war were ruled out, the similarity of the worlds’ ends seemed to point to one thing only: disease. Some kind of terrifying, interplanetary pandemic. Epidemiological techniques revealed that the supposed contagion had apparently spread from somewhere deeper within the Death Arc. Even more disturbingly, teams of

archeobiologists uncovered evidence that the contagion might not be as dead as they first thought; it appeared that it had died out several times, only to come back hundreds, if not thousands of years later.

STAGE 2As

STAGE 1A

After a tense debate on Corporation Central, a verdict was reached. The resurgence of a contagion as brutal as the one that had devastated the Death Arc, one that could apparently travel between planets, was considered to be too high a risk to allow further exploration. For the first time in its history, the Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere made the decision not to expand. The Death Arc would be its first permanent border, held firmly by a blockade of Enforcer ships.

That decision might have gone down in history as one that saved the GCPS, had the contagion been confined to the Death Arc.