The Grey Chronicles Part One: New Declaration of An Old War

Chapter 22: Thieves Behind the Veil of a Mass Grave.

The Stardemon, outer Apostle system, May of 8096 AL.

The space around them was filled with debris, the wreckage of thousands of vessels, the graveyard for millions of souls. They picked their way through the maze that had come to be known as the steel boneyard. The Apostle system was on the far end of the Stonehaaryn/Machinae space border, where the Colonial Wars had started. A Stonehaaryn ship attacked a group of Machinae civilians attempting to colonize Apostle Five, whose outer atmosphere was only forty million kilometers from Stonehaaryn space. When the Stonehaaryn column saw the Machinae colonists, a single frigate captain inexplicably panicked and destroyed two civilian ships. He sent out a transmission stating that he would destroy any ship trying to colonize the Apostle system. The captain was executed the next day, but the damage was already done; the statement had been taken by the Jarls as a declaration of war. Machinae warships began filing along the border, and the Stonehaaryns were forced to do the same or suffer innumerable civilian casualties; the Jarls were out for blood, they demanded revenge.

The space between Apostle Four and Five was the site of the first and one of the largest space battles in history; twenty thousand ships were destroyed, both Machinae and Stonehaaryn. The death toll had soared above thirty million in eleven days, but eventually the overwhelming armada of nearly twenty thousand Machinae vessels drove back the Stonehaaryn ships and took the entire system. The Stonehaaryns responded by capturing the Hermes system, and the mass of warships in Apostle spread out to all of the outer Machinae colonies. For the next millennium they fought like this, pushing back the Stonehaaryns and capturing each star system in order. Any planets they could not capture were "glassed," bombed until all that remained of the surface was a glassy silver and black rock and melted sand. Nothing survived.

It was a brutal, bloody war. Over the course of sixteen hundred years, twenty-seven and a half billion on either side were killed and a further sixty billion were wounded. The Machinae flag flew over eighty percent of the known universe, they had full control of nearly every essential resource except for the tungsten mines in the Satus Pyrotus system. Satus Pyrotus was the nearest star system to Garnavaan, the capital system for the Coalition and home to over fourteen billion civilians. Most Machinae had long ago lost any sense of mercy or pity for Stonehaaryn women and children, they were baying for blood, any blood.

Seth, foreseeing the death of billions of innocent civilians, pleaded with Salem to control the Jarls and halt the slaughter. Salem ordered his fleets to halt at the border of the Satus Pyrotus system to avoid unnecessary death and accepted Seth's offer to parlay, he'd been looking for an opportunity to end the war for centuries. Seth had planned to board the Machinae flagship, the Dawn Pillar, to negotiate their surrender, but other members of the Stonehaaryn hierarchy didn't agree with Seth's proposition for surrender; the Clades corporation, one of the larger conglomerates in the Coalition, produced weapons and armor for the Coalition. The war had made them hundreds of billions of orbs, to ensure their continued growth the chairman went behind the Coalition's back and prepared a nasty surprise for the Machinae. The chairman of Clades was the vice president of the Coalition, he used his political ties to ensure Seth was late to arrive at the peace summit with one of the M. Fleet admirals and went in his stead claiming to be their representative. He left a bomb on his shuttle while he was aboard the Machinae flagship for the peace summit, then he released a biochemical weapon; the parasite spores.

The spores were made from the Stonehaaryn medicine necrotussin, which was produced using parasitic organisms in Stonehaaryn blood that gave them regenerative abilities. The organisms were controlled by a protein in their white blood cells which calmed them, but without the protein they would take control of the host's brain, mutate their body, and kill everything in sight. Necrotussin as a medicine consisted of two simultaneous injections; one of the organisms, and one of the proteins to calm them. The parasite spores were highly concentrated necrotussin organisms in a gaseous form, introduced without the control proteins; the effects were horrific.