The Dead Worlds

The Dead Worlds

Examples of a Dead World

Occupying Species:
Rindhalu and Maxolhx before their destruction

Notable Features:
Worlds destroyed in the Elder AI war and the Rindhalu/Maxolhx war.

*The Dead Worlds* are planets formerly inhabited by the Rindhalu and Maxolhx before the latter started a war between the species by launching a sneak attack. The Maxolhx struck hard against critical spider facilities in the first wave, then the spiders hit back. Because both sides were using Elder weapons, the devastation to the impacted worlds was massive.
After this first phase the Elder Sentinels detected someone was using Elder weapons, and woke from their slumber to crush both sides. The majority of the Dead Worlds were rendered uninhabitable by Sentinels, rather than the two original combatants.
In some cases, all the Sentinels did was make the already radioactive rubble bounce around, but they stuck to their programming. The Sentinels were relentlessly thorough about hunting down and punishing the perpetrators on both sides.

Location
The Maxolhx concentrated their initial attack on the critical inner worlds of the Rindhalu, and then the spiders retaliated against the closest Maxolhx star systems, therefore the Dead Worlds are in a relatively compact area of the Norma Arm. The Norma Arm is also called the Cygnus Arm.
The number of dead worlds are unknown, but there are "a lot of them".

During *Armagedon* both species monitor the dead worlds in their own territory to deter their enemies and lesser species from looting technology. When the crew of the Flying Dutchman raids the Slingshot system they have to subvert an old but highly sophisticated sensor network of stealth satellites and space stations.
Species caught by the Maxolhx are severely punished. There were such infiltration attempts many years ago, that the Maxolhx detected. The resulting punishment was harsh enough that no one has tried to approach one of the Dead Worlds in the past eighty thousand years. Because of that, the Maxolhx have become complacent, and allowed the sensor network here to gradually fade in priority for maintenance and updates.

From Armageddon: Instead of being nicely circular, the low point of its orbit was only two million miles farther from that star than Mercury was to our Sun. After racing past the star, it coasted outward farther than the orbit of Jupiter, and did it all over again. The surface of Slingshot alternately froze solid, melted as it arced inward, and briefly baked as it came too close to the star. The close approach to the star would have stripped away much of the planet’s atmosphere, except the star itself had been badly damaged in the conflict. Originally a yellow dwarf like our Sun, Slingshot’s star had a significant portion of its own mass blown out into space, so now it was smaller and cooler than it should have been. The surface of Slingshot had been bombarded from space in the first wave of the Maxolhx attack, but the real devastation was caused by the Sentinels. They had disrupted the star, causing it to swallow the innermost planet, and creating a focused gravity wave that tore the system’s largest gas giant in half. The edges of the passing gravity wave also flipped Slingshot like a wobbling top, increasing the tilt of its axis to an extreme twenty-nine degrees.

* Dead Worlds 1
* Dead Worlds 2
* Dead Worlds 3