The Assault
Earth 3 enters the campaign under pressure from a force that does not separate soldier, government, corporation, and descendant. Vek'Thar formations descend in biological waves—scouts, drones, armored organisms, and command castes acting as organs of one military lineage. The attack looks sudden only from the human side.
Carter's first battles establish the scale of the invasion, but the enemy's movement reveals a second purpose. Some formations press population centers while others search, scan, and listen below the ordinary noise of the planet.
The Debt of the Burning Brood
Generations earlier, a human extraction expedition entered Kharaxi space seeking Thryx, a living material central to Kharaxi construction and medicine. The expedition destroyed a Vek'Thar nursery complex during the operation. Humanity buried the record. Vek'Thar did the opposite: it reorganized memory, biology, and military development around the loss.
Kharaxi Broodline logic treats human civilization as one extended ancestral body. Earth 3 therefore inherits the crime whether its present population knows the name of the dead nursery or not.
The Silent Queen
Deep scans detect a machine signature whose scale and network behavior resemble a dormant queen to Kharaxi senses. The signal is not Kharaxi and not native to Earth 3. It is a distant trace of the Machine Core's planetary system—an echo strong enough to pull Vek'Thar across the final distance.
The Pursuit Begins
Carter's defense does not end when the first assault breaks. Surviving organisms withdraw along a route toward the buried signal's source. The S.S. Freedom follows, carrying the conflict from Earth 3 into orbit and eventually toward the frozen machine-planet.
