The Aftermath

After the War of Stars, the Jovian system was officially quarantined for 13 years. All major settlements within Jupiter's gravity well suffered catastrophic failure within days or weeks of the Battle of Ganymede, as the massive debris field from Ganymede's orbit slowly spread over the moons, killing billions with deadly shrapnel and radioactive debris. The last official Interplanetary Governance Council vessel left the system 8 days after the battle, limping away on a leaking fusion drive. After that day, it would be 11 years before government vessels returned to the system. Small holdout groups scattered throughout Jupiter's small moons emerged months or years after the disaster, to find their homes and orbits saturated by deadly, dispersing debris. They had been completely abandoned by their government, and their neighbors were either corpses in the cold void, or had fled long ago. Confronted by these harsh realities, the few survivors of the Jovian apocalypse eked out small lives for themselves across the radiation fields of Ganymede, the scrap yards of Callisto, or the robot breeding grounds on Europa.

The long-wanted ICG returned to the Jovian system in 399, after 90% of the debris had crashed into the moons or fallen into Jupiters atmosphere. The remaining shrapnel would be cleared out with spaceship bases lasers, targeted by advanced computers. The Solar System was extremely surprised to find a population of nearly 200 million people inside Jupiter's gravity well, surviving inside the hulks of lost ships. These locals didn't take to kindly to government interference, and violence sparked from small clashes over arms or supply depots. These small incidents rose into scandal and total war after ICG representatives discovered that the The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes of Malta and of Space had broken the mandatory quarantine to deliver supplies to Jupiter's rebels. In fact, small ships from the Kings of Space Malta had been infiltrating Jupiter for years, ever since the end of the War of Stars. The Order of the Knights of Space Malta had established a foothold among the Jovian natives' earning their loyalty with death-defying maneuvers through the Kessler syndrome. Regardless of bonds like 'loyalty' and 'friendship' the Kings of Space Malta and the Jovian natives were outgunned from the start. They had no way to defend themselves from ICG warships.

In 399, 5 months after the ICG's official return to the Jovian system, neither side of the budding conflict had made any headway. The ICG had deported some 300 thousand inhabitants from Ganymede's surface, and officially intended to do the same to the rest of Jupiter's residents. The Knights of Space Malta had succeeded in bringing in knights and spacecraft from across the Solar System, and were holed up on many of Jupiter's 78 moons. This relative equilibrium shifted when an unknown individual, commonly known as 'husky' leaked the position of a cache on Ganymede's surface to the ICG navy. The leaked data highlighted a previously unsurvey region of Io's north pole, where a recent disturbance of the ice betrayed more sinister activity. The data claimed that several of Queen Emma Kubler's Self Replicating Robots had crash-landed on the surface sometime after the war, and had been saved intact after Io's liquid methane oceans flooded their fusion drives. This proved to be the perfect bait to summon the ICG forces in.

Immediately after the data leak, a small group of Space Malta vessels detached themselves from their disguised perch on the prow of a Hermian warship, and set their fastest possible route towards Io's pole. The ICG scrambled to intercept the enemy vessels, sending several dozen warship's towards Io's pole. A tense few hours passed as forces from across the system converged on Jupiter's small moon. On January 4th 400 PA, Grand Master Halloway of the Knights of Space Malta hailed Admiral Charles Cunningham of the ICG Armada, and asked him for parley. The two leaders met on the surface of Io, and spent some hours discussing the current state affairs. Their exact conversation will never be known. After 3 hours on the surface of Io, Grand Master Halloway's small orbit-hopper spacecraft lifted off from the surface and its pilot stated his intention to return to orbit. They would never arrive. A massive explosion rocked the icy moon, as some sort of fusion bomb detonated from below the ice sheet. The massive fireball destroyed both the Admiral and the Grand Master's spacecraft, shattering their orbital escorts into flaming shrapnel. The Solar System was shocked as casualty reports arrived. Over 7,000 ground forces and pilots were killed in the blast, and Io's ice sheets had cracked all the way across the planet. Three of the five ground bases on Io were destroyed by the radical changes. As of now, no one knows what caused the disaster, or why the ICG admiral and Grandmaster Halloway were baited onto the surface. In an unexpected rash of cooperation after the disaster, the Interplanetary Governance Council reconsidered their intentions to displace the civilian's from Jupiter, and agreed to release control of the area to the Knights of Space Malta. The Maltese also agreed to take responsibility for the area, war-torn and full of hostile Stahlpest though it was.

To this day, no explanations have surfaced as to where the 'Ionian explosion' came from, or what caused it. A dramatic increase in Stahlpest activity in the days after suggests that the fallen forces of the War of Stars may have had some involvement in the disaster. To this day the Jovian system is a restricted access zone, administered by the Knights of Space Malta.