"Anomaly Rectification" - Key Lore Art (Patreon)

For a time after the destruction of the frozen world where Mercy encountered the rogue AI that called itself "Union", the Battlecarrier and its crew sailed the void without finding such horrors...until the signal was finally decoded, it was a call to peace and perfection, leading travelers coreward in the galaxy.

Past the Serpent Maelstrom, in the emptiness between the Orion Spur and Sagittarius Arm, the Mercy's Reach was approached by a fleet of non-human vessels. To the human crew's surprise, the beings of the fleet hailed the Battlecarrier in their own tongue. Calling themselves AON, it was learned that the surviving civilizations in the region had formed a coalition against the ravenous machines the humans had previously encountered.

Known as the Centauri Federation, the AI hives were long ago driven from the Orion Spur in a millennia long  conflict across the stars, effectively trapping them in a dense region of space that was thereafter quarantined. The machines however, in recent times, were noted to be breaking away more frequently and becoming bolder with their call to the void and new settlers.

Having proven their ability against the Centauri, the Heroes of Mercy  were thus commissioned by the Allied Orion Navy to patrol the Machine Federation's Space. Now more than a millennia since the old galactic empires  dared venture into the Quarantine Zone, Mercy's Reach finds the ruin of  the AI to be worse than predicted. Already have human settlers ventured far beyond known space, only to fall prey to the lurking horrors...