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The CAV Galaxy : Psyros Commerce |
Mercenaries | Psyros
Guardians and Sentinels
During the dark days of the desperate Vela Wars (2176 -- 2183) between the Rach and the Terrans, the Terrans embarked on a defensive program designed to help stave off Rach advances against them. The original systems were complete self-sufficient unmanned defense systems called Guardians and Sentinels. Guardians were large open-space or solar-system weapons platforms; Sentinels were smaller planetary and system orbital weapons platforms. The creator of these scientific marvels was a man named Louis Spalding. Spalding was Earth's leading scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and was charged by Earth's United Federal Forces to harness AI's for warfare. To this point AI robotics had been employed only in very limited industrial applications, primarily for remote mining operations and the harvesting of gases from a planet's atmosphere. AI's had never been trusted in military applications, as too many opponents of the idea had long prophesied that a weapon-based AI would be a disaster waiting to happen. Construction The Titan Project, as it was dubbed, was given the highest priority for assets and manpower, and Spalding's designs were to be as simple and robust as possible. Spalding and his team quickly set about their task with determination and haste, soon constructing twelve proof-of-concept Guardians that were to be sent into the contested Vela (12) system for a trial by fire. The Guardians were programmed to attack any enemy forces encountered and to maintain the attacks until destroyed. Later Guardians would have a sense of self-preservation embedded into their program coding that would allow them to withdraw from a conflict long enough to make critical repairs before returning to battle. The twelve Guardians performed amazingly well, destroying twenty-one Rach ships and an orbital shipyard before being destroyed themselves. United Federal Forces, ecstatic with the small victory, issued contracts to several companies for the wide-scale construction of 150 Guardians and 225 Sentinels. Spalding became a hero overnight as his Guardians and Sentinels were to become the saviors of the Earth. Soon Guardians and Sentinels were deployed throughout most of the remote areas of space likely to be traversed by Rach fleets bound for Earth and in the orbits of just about any planet capable of sustaining military operations in an attempt to deny the Rach any forward operating bases. Service Although constantly haunted by rushed program code, flawed engineering, and neglected maintenance, Guardians and Sentinels served their masters well for over 50 years, but as part of the peace agreement that ended the Imperial Wars (2221 -- 2229) the Terrans agreed to deactivate and scrap their Guardian and Sentinel platforms. Psychotic Robots The identity of the individual who coined the phrase Psyros has been lost to history, but the identity of the individual infamously credited with creating what has become the cancer of the galaxy is well known. In 2230 the enterprising salvager Marcus "The Tick" Kirkpatrick located the deactivated Guardian Slammer 113 in deep space. His plan was simple: activate the basic power grid, program the platform to disassemble itself, and haul it all away as salvage. Intercepted distress transmissions from Kirkpatrick indicate that the Guardian interpreted his failed attempt to salvage it as an attack and it in turn disassembled and assimilated Kirkpatrick's salvage ship the Star Queen. Although it is unknown how the exact transformation of Slammer 113 into a Psyro came about, it is widely believed that the answer lies in the radically advanced propulsion, computer, and scanner systems present aboard most salvage vessels like the Star Queen at the time of the salvage attempt. When the Terran rescue cutter UFF Youngblood arrived on the scene nothing remained except several of the Star Queen's empty escape pods. The rescue was originally logged as "All destroyed, no survivors." It would be several months before the real fate of Slammer 113 would be discovered. First Contact Terran Titan Project destruction records from the time show that late in 2232 several offline Guardian and Sentinel platforms were unable to be located for destruction by the UFF salvage vessels sent to dispatch them. At the time this was not considered unusual, as the vastness of space could easily swallow one up. It was the UFF Rover, commanded by Captain Jason Dep, that made what is now considered the first contact with the Psyros. The Rover was a deep-space salvage vessel dispatched to destroy the Guardian Slugger 4, but upon arrival it encountered something totally unexpected. Video and scanner logs of the Rover confirm that upon reaching the coordinates of Slugger 4 the signature of a vessel twenty times the size of Slugger 4 was located. Anticipating an encounter with rogue salvagers, the Rover went to battle stations and closed in on the vessel. What was discovered was not a clandestine salvage operation but rather what is believed to be the first Psyro hive. Based on analysis of the Rover data, a section of, and in six cases the entire structure of, seventeen Guardians, four Sentinels, and eleven different spacecraft were identified as components of the huge craft. At the time of the of the Rover's arrival on the scene several drones were in the process of adding Slugger 4 to the hive. The Rover maintained its distance and Captain Dep chose not to interfere with the hive's assimilation of Slugger 4 while he waited for further instructions. When the hive began to leave, however, he decided to pursue. He matched course and speed for several hours, but debris left in the wake of the moving hive eventually became so thick that safe pursuit was no longer possible. Dep broke off the chase, turning his attention to scanning and analysis of the debris field itself, which now spanned several hundred thousand kilometers. Within hours several UFF vessels began to arrive on the scene and, once briefed, began to search the debris field for information and clues as to what had happened. When the battle carrier UFF Colossus arrived it dispatched several scout ships in an attempt to locate the hive but found that the debris field ended at the point where the Rover had broken off pursuit. The scout ships did, however, locate a large section of the UFF Banner's Bridge, a frigate out of Starport Revel that had been declared overdue the past week and for which search and rescue operations were still being conducted. Investigators dispatched to the Banner's Bridge wreckage quickly discovered and extracted a single survivor who had been kept alive in a sealed compartment for study by the hive. The survivor, Legionnaire Richard Carpenter, had been the subject of several experiments and suffered from severe dehydration and blood loss. He is the only known survivor of Psyro captivity, and his dark story has led to countless theories and debates attempting to understand exactly what the Psyro are and are becoming. Despite attempts by the UFF to keep the whole affair secret, word of the incident soon spread across the galaxy, and any event that could not quickly be explained was blamed on the phantom Psyros.
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