History

 

     The discovery of faster-than light travel, heralded as one of the most significant events in humanity’s history, had turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment at first. The problem was that while it was astonishingly fast – often a light year in a day depending on spacial structure - it wasn’t fast enough. Humanity could reach a few hundred thousand stars within a couple of years’ travel time, but the initial incredible rush of wonder and exploration settled down after a couple of generations. Three potentially inhabitable worlds were found over the next couple of decades, all fairly close to Earth, but the next thirty years of finding little but barren rocks and gas giants cooled public enthusiasm for exploration. Focus shifted to building new societies on the inhabitable planets, with all the usual squabbling over new lands that humans have shown throughout history. Travelling decades to search for new worlds beyond the known boundaries held little interest for most.

 

     Everything suddenly changed when an apparently stable, persistent wormhole terminus was found near Ross 154, less than ten light years from Earth. After much effort, probes successfully travelled through the wormhole and returned with data showing not only an inhabitable world, but more wormhole termini at the other end. Ships eventually followed and it was found that sixteen different wormholes terminated in the same system. The system contained a planet that was not only inhabitable but actually Earth-like. A new frontier had suddenly opened, and it was a magnificent one, full of the most incredible promise and wonder.

The early explorers also made humanity’s first contact with an intelligent alien species. Life had been found on several worlds, but never sentient life, let alone technologically advanced sentient life. A small explorer craft discovered an enormous flotilla of vessels of strange and advanced design a few light years from the wormhole termini, and was promptly destroyed. Humanity never found out what they called themselves; the media gave them the dramatic nickname “The Swarm” in the absence of anything else. They appeared to be a nomadic society, one that carried everything it needed for its existence with it. For all humanity knew, it was their entire species in one huge swarm, and, to humanity’s sorrow, it was an aggressive and brutal race.

 

     The Swarm traced the explorer back to the wormhole from which it had come, then through the wormhole and on to Earth itself. It attacked without warning or communication, and refused to respond to any attempt to contact it. Only humanity’s own belligerence saved it that day; had humanity not been ready to war with itself over this new frontier then there would have been nothing capable of resisting. As it was, some forty per cent of the human species died in the first fourteen hours after the aliens arrived; another fifteen per cent in the next three days.

 

     The Four Day War ended in humanity’s favour thanks to the brilliant actions of the Fleet Commander of one of Earth’s factions, Admiral Adam Mason. He rallied the survivors of the initial attacks, convinced or coerced the remainder of Earth and its colonies’ armed forces to follow him and in a series of brilliant counter-strokes utterly obliterated the aliens. No surrender was requested; none was offered. Intentional genocide was met with unavoidable genocide.

 

     With half of the Earth’s surface smashed into rubble, Adam Mason was forced to establish a military government immediately after the war’s ending. A solid believer in democracy and the rights of man, Mason always regarded this as a temporary emergency measure until the situation stabilised. Unfortunately, as so often happens, nothing is more permanent than an emergency temporary measure – Mason felt he had to keep firm and coherent guidance for many years, and then he eventually picked a successor to take over after his death, as the squabbling greedy factions seeking political power for their own profit left him fearing for the future. In less than two generations, the Empire was born.

 

     Over the next three centuries Humanity colonised the wormhole junction system, the space around it, and explored the other wormholes one by one. Wormhole travel took a large amount of energy and was never a completely safe procedure, and it was discovered that some wormholes were much safer to travel than others. Each wormhole exit seemed to have a number of inhabitable worlds nearby, and much theorising was done as to why this should be, up to and including the suggestion that some long-gone race had “seeded” the nearby systems, but no solid answer was found. Each wormhole exit was referred to as a “sector” of space; some had higher densities of surrounding stars and more inhabitable worlds within easy travel distance and were therefore judged “larger” than others.

Eventually the Imperial capital was moved from Earth to the junction world, and Earth slowly faded into obscurity, despite being the cradle of mankind. Just as on Earth the continent of Africa, despite being the birthplace of the species, had held little or no loyalty from those born elsewhere, Earth itself became marginalised in spite of its enormous population and high resource base, as it had one of the smallest number of nearby inhabitable worlds. The new world of Capitol boomed.

Some humans left the Empire to travel through previously unexplored wormholes. Some set up new societies elsewhere; one by one they were absorbed by the ever expanding Empire, unable to compete with the incredible resources the Empire could bring to bear. This gave the Empire a great deal of local diversity. Only a few human polities were able to stand on their own, generally left alone due to political wrangling at the heart of the Empire or because their conquest would be just a little too expensive to undertake immediately. A few intelligent alien species were discovered as well, and despite humanity’s caution and scepticism, they were either absorbed or left in their own regions of space with only an “acceptable” amount of border conflict. With no wormhole junctions of their own and with the same velocity limits on FTL travel that humans had to deal with, their own states never grew large enough to threaten the Empire as a whole.

 

     Finally, the last of the wormholes was explored and exploited. Sector Seventeen was colonised and colloquially named The Albion Fringe.