Travel between worlds had started to slow down as more and more spatial anomalies started to appear and disrupt the paths they used to travel between the stars. The many disruption allowed for pirates and raiding parties to pop up which caused for the creation of a new force to be created. It was a previously unused branch of the navy that hadn’t ever seen battle since its inception hundreds of years ago that was rebranded to basically become space police. They had the ships, crew, and supplies to do it but they struggled at first. While they were trained, they lacked experience. They didn’t have guidelines of the dos and don’ts for ship combat with weak vessels and civilian vessels. A very bad incident happened and caused the death of several thousand humans, 3 Magi, and 8 Drakkins which sparked a massive backlash from not only civilians in human colonies but also from civilians in Maouin colonies. This led to a massive convention to be made that would outline the rules, regulations, and the guidelines the newly made space cops were supposed to follow, like the rules of engagement when dealing with smugglers or raiders.
These changes did not have much of an effect on Vegis and the others. They were already back at the southern labs. There were more aggressive mutants in the labs so they added more security in the underground. Vegis got to know some of them through the clones and would hang out with them when work was done. Mac and the others got along with them well but Jess didn’t like how loud they were at times. Jonsa had to take an early break from work since a raiding party killed a family member of his and his parents begged him to come back home. This happened to several other staff members since space travel now had active threats now. Most of the people who left came back in a month but some had to resign since their home life had deteriorated too much. About 5 percent of the staff had to take time off so they had to take it slow during this period.
Reports would come in every now and then from the rest of the world about spatial anomalies. There seemed to be a large concentration of them near stars with rocky planets. Almost no anomalies have been detected near rogue planets and systems with a majority of gas planets have noticeably less anomalies near them. The Sol and Maouin system were unique with no extra anomalies and hive control systems seemed to have an obscene amount of anomalies around them. The only thing that allowed the hive to travel to other worlds were the Maouin gates they bought for the purposes of reverse engineering. They managed to make rudimentary copies of them and spread them all across their worlds but the many spatial distortions broke the connections between them. This made it harder for the hive to feed their worlds.
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While these events didn’t directly affect Vegis very much, it did start to harm the economy. The price of imported goods slowly started to rise as it got harder to move things between systems. Many xeno flora and fauna are exported from the Hive since their incredible understanding and control of biology made them great farmers of strange plants and peculiar animals. When Vegis’s group left the southern labs, a small accident happened near the edge of their system that spiraled out of control and forced a system wide lockdown. Somehow, one of the spatial anomalies dragged a piece of a hive world, corrupting it, and spitting it out near an oort cloud object in a system near the one Vegis was in. Another anomaly compressed the space between the systems and the affected planetesimal got sucked into the anomaly and smashed into a small satellite that floated through the area. The corrupted Hive members gained the ability to assimilate metals and rocks so the wreck was a massive windfall for them.
The Elder who was living near Vegis’s home had a squad of guards and scientists to the area and noticed that there were multiple meteors, comets, and planetesimals in the vicinity affected by the changed Hive. Pulling some strings and favors, the elder was able to get a direct call with a major node of the Hive and asked about this new strange Hive that popped nearby. This alarmed the Hive and they alerted the Sol and Maouin governments to activate a lock down for the Vatten Eau system. Several ships from the home systems were sent with strong decontamination gear and even contain planetary size barrier generators. Several Hive ships were sent to see if they could still connect to this new branch. When they arrive, they grouped as many of the affected objects into a large planetoid just under the size of Lua. The attempts of the Hive to control the new strain of their existence failed and was named by the Hive as Corruption.
This caused delays in shipping and transportation which caused Vegis and his group to use proper boats to get between continents and islands. Any aircraft was told to land and no one but a very select few were allowed to move across planets and stations. The boat ride Vegis took to the north was longer than if they were allowed to use the EPV. When they got there, a much stronger security detail was put in place as a small sample of the Corruption was placed here and in the southern labs. The shields were constantly on now in case something happened and new equipment was being installed to contain anything that might break out.
