STORY    |   Race: P.O.M   |   Race: Hyperion   |   Race: Jucati

The Jucati (Sub-Race)

Though the Jucati are an advanced race, a cunning species which has mastered interstellar travel and visited many worlds, their history is like that of a ravenous plague rather than a civilisation. Twenty thousand years ago the Jucati appeared on their first known planet. Where they came from none can say, for surely not even the most twisted of ecosystems would have evolved such a species. But within a week of being sighted they were the dominant life-form on their world. Dozens of queens brought forth hundreds of thousands of Jucati warriors each day, infesting the planet. Their birth rates were like those of insects, but without short life-cycles or predators to keep their overwhelming numbers in check and spare the planet from destruction at their hands. They swept across the continents, devouring all before them. The galaxy looked on in horror, and each species breathed a sigh of relief that the Jucati were trapped on that single doomed world. Though their savage hunger had spurred them on to gluttonous genocide, the Jucati were not mindless. They knew that their species would soon drain their world and face starvation. Millions of them placed themselves in a state of extended hibernation, lying dormant for years on end that their food supply might sustain their race for as long as possible. Meanwhile those who remained active, feasting upon the last pockets of life to ensure their survival, harvested the planet for useful materials. With these resources they sent probes out into the system, and began to construct ships capable of surviving the vacuum of space. To the dismay of their galactic neighbours, the Jucati escaped extinction and instead began to settle on other worlds, starting the cycle anew. As they spread, gaining new resources and infecting new worlds, they became more cunning in their infestations. Some planets were turned into farm worlds – sufficient numbers of their native species left alive that they might breed and rebuild their populations for later harvesting. Thus the Jucati hoped to have a perpetual food supply. But their numbers continued to grow at an exponential rate, and their need for sustenance eventually exceeded their available supplies once more. It was clear that they had to keep expanding and taking new planets if they were to survive. Intelligent life-forms whose systems were threatened by the Jucati massed their forces in an effort to drive them away, but they may as well have attempted to turn back the tides of an ocean. With their nightmarish birth-rates the Jucati could sustain losses in the millions and replace them effortlessly. Meanwhile their enemies fell by the myriad, overrun as they fought in vain to preserve their homeworlds. Entire species either died out or were forced into a mass exodus, sent fleeing through the stars as behind them the Jucati stripped their planets until the worlds which had cradled their civilisations were turned into barren husks. It was obvious that the Jucati were an existential threat to all life-forms in their vicinity, and only one race was powerful enough to deal with them. The Mor’Rossan, guardians and overseers of the galaxy, convened a great council, and ruled that the Jucati should be exterminated. Attack fleets cut through the interstellar darkness, converging on the area of space infested by the Jucati. The indomitable Mor’Rossan forces rarely had cause to go to war, but when they took the field they did so with overwhelming might. Mass bombardments blanketed continents with flame and smoke, wiping out millions of Jucati and heralding large-scale invasions designed to ensure a complete purge. The Mor’Rossan were determined to cleanse the worlds of the plague which had ruined them. But though they killed countless Jucati on each planet, leaving enough corpses to smother their oceans, they were unable to eradicate them. With their birth-rates and ability to remain in hibernation deep within the bowels of a planet, the Jucati seemed immortal. The Mor’Rossan might leave a world, believing their task to be complete, only to find that a queen had awoken in their wake, spawned thousands and thousands more Jucati underground, and brought about the re-colonisation of the entire planet. Where military might failed, the Mor’Rossan’s science eventually prevailed. Their best thinkers gathered, and plotted the genocide of the Jucati race. Many ideas emerged from their minds, stratagems for achieving death and destruction on a scale never before contemplated. In the end one particular plan won out. The Mor’Rossan decided that if the Jucati were a plague, they would be destroyed by an even greater plague. A disease was engineered, one made possible when a heroic Mor’Rossan assault squad managed to capture a live queen so that appropriate tests could be carried out. It was designed to infect the queens, and contaminate them on a genetic level. Each generation of Jucati they spawned would receive a faulty genetic structure, and experience rapid degeneration of their cells. The disease was introduced to every Jucati-infested world, distributed to have complete species-wide coverage. One by one the Jucati colonies fell silent, and the Mor’Rossan gave a grim smile as they witnessed the race slip into oblivion. As a result of this action, in a lonely system far from the heartland of interstellar politics, a young race known as the Hyperions won their first interspecies war when their strange enemies mysteriously died out. It was thousands of years later, on a world garrisoned by that same Hyperion race, that the Jucati were seen again. At first they went unrecognised, for they had changed a great deal over the millennia. Their bodies were now biomechanical, and strange technology was fused with their flesh to render them even more bizarre and repulsive. But the Hyperions soon made the connection upon consulting their ancient archives, and knew that they were embroiled in a new war with an old enemy. For their part, the Jucati found the galaxy to have changed during their slumber. Though the Hyperions were familiar, a new power had since stepped onto the galactic stage. The humans – a species previous unknown to the Jucati, trapped as they had been on their little, distant ball of rock – now ruled a powerful empire. As the Jucati fought with the Hyperions at one end of the Hyperion Empire, the Protectorate of Man beset them at the other. And to the amazement of the Jucati, the Hyperions withdrew from their theatre of war in favour of bolstering their defences against the humans. To a species which had once been the terror of the galaxy, this was surprising indeed. The Jucati began to observe, and learn about the conflict which appeared to dominate galactic life. They soon determined that mankind was the greatest threat to them other than the Mor’Rossan – who now seemed conspicuously absent from interstellar affairs. Hence when the Hyperions cried out for aid against the human race, seeking allies in their desperate struggle, the Jucati decided to answer them. The Protectorate of Man had to be stopped.