| abstract
| - In the waning days of the Angevin Crusade, there were, at times, more Imperial assets available than ideal systems for continued expansion. On some occasions, the fleet was badly dispersed and some groups became uncertain about the prioritisation of remaining targets. The repeated successes enjoyed by St. Drusus and communications breakdowns led to situations where fleets arrived in systems that had already been conquered. At other times, poor strategic estimates sent entire armies to worlds that were later deprioritised. Some of the advance craft remained dutifully in these systems until they met with disaster, or were lost due to insufficient supplies as they waited patiently for contact from the fleet. Others returned to their launch site, where they were executed for treason for daring to abandon their assigned posts. The Lycurgos star fort is one example of a station that remained in the unexplored regions of the Periphery, waiting patiently for the advance of a crusade that had already ended. Dozens of Imperial Navy vessels had towed the enormous Ramilles-class star fort to the Helena II system, with the expectation that the crusade would eventually make use of it. Early plans intended for the system to be a critical junction for the next step in the crusade’s expansion. Instead, the crusade petered out. The vessels that had towed the station into place were reassigned to other vital missions. Soon, there were insufficient craft in the subsector to undertake the challenge of moving the fort, and its relocation remained on the Imperial Navy’s roll of unassigned tasks for decades. All the while, other higher-priority tasks that required fewer craft were assigned to duty rosters for immediate resolution. Many of the station’s crew were reassigned to other locations. Eventually, an Administratum scribe removed Lycurgos from its listings of active facilities, assuming that its continued presence was nothing more than an ongoing typographic error. An enormous and powerful piece of Imperial infrastructure was functionally discarded. Without any support or supplies, the star fort’s crew simply grew old and died during the centuries of isolation. The command staff maintained a skeleton crew by strictly rationing the remaining supplies, though by the time the station’s commander decided that an attempt should be made to return Lycurgos to the more civilised worlds of the Calixis Sector, there were not enough functioning vessels in the system to transport it. Instead, the enormous star fort attempted to hold station in orbit around Helena II, for centuries. There it remained, with barely enough power to maintain but a fraction of its atmosphere and a subset of its systems, drawing what resources it could from the nearby habitable planet. When humanity once more began active expansion into the Periphery sub-sector, explorers rediscovered Lycurgos. By that point, only a few of the station’s servitors remained operational. These tireless automatons had continued to perform their last orders, keeping the station’s essential systems functional, scavenging whatever equipment they could to do so.
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)