About a hundred years from now, after the human race has discovered the secret of traveling through hyperspace as a means to traverse vast interstellar distances in a short time, a small war erupts between two unremarkable worlds unaffiliated with any of the major galactic powers. A colony belonging to a third, disinterested species unfortunately lies on a direct line between the combatants. The colony does not survive the conflict. When the Galactic Conference, the local interstellar alliance, refuses to exact revenge, this third species, the Gillig, seals itself off from galactic society and are unheard of for the next ten years.

Then, one day, a massive fleet of unknown origin appears and commences to commit genocide on the winners of the war, followed by the losers. It is soon determined that the Gillig are behind the devastation. Other civilizations start choosing up sides and fighting among themselves, using the fact of the GalCon’s distraction to try to get a leg up on their traditional rivals. This serves only to increase the strain on GalCon’s enforcement arm, the Galactic Navy, or GalNav.

After wasting years settling these side issues, GalNav is able to concentrate on seeking out and destroying the Gillig death fleet. The battles are many and bloody, but the GalNav always manages, just barely and at great cost, to force the Gillig to retreat. Finally, GalNav and its allies push the enemy fleet all the way back to its home solar system. They collect the bulk of their forces and hyperjump en masse into the Gillig system for the climactic final battle.

Only one ship is known to have made it out of that battle intact, a supply boat belonging to one of the allied races. It carried not only its own crew but the survivors of one of GalNav’s battlecruisers, who had abandoned ship. According to their statements, the Gillig had been waiting for the attacking fleet with a fleet of their own, so massive as to make the assault force that drove two intelligent species to extinction vanish into insignificance. They fought bravely and valiantly, but ultimately there was no chance of victory. It was only due to the quick thinking of the GalNav battlecruiser’s captain that they were able to survive and escape, by sacrificing his own ship. Every other ship in the GalNav armada was destroyed.

(I change verb tense here. Watch your step.)

People waited for the Gillig to re-emerge from their system and continue to rain death from the skies, but it never happened. Eventually, someone sent a scout ship into the Gillig home system and discovered it had been burnt to a cinder. Planets, encased in melted slag that once had been a defensive shell, were burnt black and lifeless. Misshapen blobs of refined metal floated aimlessly throughout the system. These were eventually identified as the ships of the Gillig fleet. Gas giants were aflame. Somehow, in some way no one could explain, Gillig civilization had effectively been erased, burned out of existence.

The Gillig colonies didn’t fare very well afterward. Two of them were claimed as spoils of war and made into "protectorates" of different governments, effectively slave labor planets. One, not having self-sufficient space travel capabilities, simply forgot to remind anyone they existed after the war and dropped out of memory, never to be heard from again. When conquerors arrived to lay claim to the fourth and final colony planet and decide what was to be done with it, it was discovered to be in ruins. Cities burned. Rain forests were razed. Oceans were poisoned. The Gillig explained that they were ashamed of the actions of their species, and had decided as a group to kill themselves in a communal act of contrition. After much deliberation, the Gillig colonists were evacuated from their dying planet. They became refugees, people without a home, wandering the length and breadth of the galaxy, shunned and spat upon wherever they went and doomed to eke out the most degrading and humiliating existence imaginable.

That’s how they distributed the spoilsport virus.

The plague struck about a year later. Billions upon billions died. Those who survived the initial infection found themselves surrounded by the dead. Secondary infections were, excuse the pun, epidemic. Planets began declaring themselves quarantine zones and shot down any ship trying to enter their space. It took a long time for anyone to notice the Gillig seemed to be immune. Roughly 75 percent of the population of the galaxy died before a cure could be found. Between the plague and the loss of the authority of the GalCon with the destruction of its enforcement arm, the galaxy descended into a dark age of isolationism, paranoia, and fear from which it has only recently begun to emerge.

Now, 800 years after the dark age began, our story begins.