As time passed and the number of Grand Alliance victories mounted, the human races and their alien allies began to believe that, although there had never been any offer of peace by the Naplian Empire, the war had run its course. An armistice, even a unilateral decision by the victorious Grand Alliance to end hostilities, would be in the best interests of all.
In August of 3275, a Lotharian fleet brought the allied directive to cease combat preparations to a Gedi task force in the Palatrian star system. The response of the Gedi commander was immediate and violent. Gedi warships opened fire on the small Lotharian squadron within moments of receiving the transmission and soon forced their surrender and subsequent harvest. Within a few weeks, nearly all cybernetic forces within the theater of operations had turned on their biological masters. An estimated three quarters of the cybernetic forces engaged in the invasion of Naplia turned about and began to assault Grand Alliance star systems.
The attack sent shockwaves through the human alliance. The processing of aliens had been remorseless. They were, after all, aliens. The allied worlds had not given a thought to the processing of humans since the desperate days of the Naplian invasion of the Inner Rim. Now the full horror of what they had unleashed came home to them. The cyborgs, knowing that the cessation of hostilities meant that there would be no processing “material” to maintain and increase their numbers turned upon their makers as the logical source of new material. They brought death and destruction down upon the humans and their alien allies throughout known space.
Those who could, fled from the advancing cybers. The Phantatwain, an alien race of the Grand Alliance, went so far as to develop great jump engines that they fitted to their worlds to turn them into mobile platforms and flee from the cybernetic horror. The technology for Nomad Worlds or “Platforms” as they came to be known was a closely guarded secret held only by a relatively few empires. It gave them a marked advantage over most of the allied races in the struggle to engage or avoid the cybers. The war raged on for a thousand years, moving outward to regions so distant that no name exists for them in the Terran records.
Left in the wake of the cybernetic tragedy is the galaxy in which we live. The ruins of ancient empires lie strewn across the stars. Only isolated planets in backwater star systems remain. Will these few survivors have the strength and determination to return to their rightful place among the stars? Time will tell…
