Union
Background
In the latter half of the 22nd century the people of Earth had colonized the planets of the Solar System and finally turned their gaze to the stars and the hopes, dreams and disasters they knew awaited them there.
Undaunted by hundreds of failed attempts at FTL travel, the scientists and engineers of Earth worked tirelessly for a century. When the breakthough came, few realized it.
The Japanese Shogun X-06 quietly fell through it’s orbit about Mars for what appeared to be it’s 27,321st time. It exploded in a shock of white light and radio static. When the light dimmed, there was nothing left of the multi-billion dollar craft.
Inquiries were made, reports filed and life on Mars returned to normal. Unknown to the general populace of the System, however was the fact that Shogun had not exploded. It had been translated into another space altogether, a new realm of spatial coordinates that was “smaller” and “tighter” than Realspace. This “NullSpace,” as it was referred to, allowed travel times between the stars at an amazingly accelerated rate. It reappeared an hour later near Neptune. Neptune was nearly three billion miles away at the time. It worked to Japan's favor that noone was watching Neptune at that time. The ship was registered anew as the Miyagi, and few knew of its existance.
With the other nations lagging behind, Japan launched several ships to Alpha Centauri in the next few years.
Using red-shifted EM and lasercom transmissions, the AC Colony hid itself from the aging radio telescopes of the System. It is now known that someone was listening, as two decades of espionage and trickery paid off as the North American and European Unions both unveiled Nullspace drives of designs surprisingly similar to the current Japanese drive. It has been suggested more than once that the Japanese Colony was the result of a vast “black experiment” that may have had its beginnings in the late 2150s or even earlier. Whatever its genesis, the AC Colony was self-reliant and prosperous by the time the rest of the world caught up with it. Comet-assisted Generation ships had been launched from Earth in the wave of panic generated by Object 1244. A rogue asteriod the size of Montana and a vast swarm of debris were predicted to strike Europe and Asia in October of the year 2200. The same comet-diverting technology that boosted the Sleepers out of the System was used to move the asteroid.
While Earth suffered major damage in the event, the largest fragments were lifted into orbits that would eventually bring them into contact with Jupiter. The main rock simply vanished in a white flash similar to the Shogun.
Historians use the Object 1244 Panic as evidence of the scope of the Shogun Conspiracy. Despite the governments of the world uniting to divert the asteroid, and using NullSpace drives to do it, it was another 16 years before the stars were open to colonization.
Once the rest of the System was made fully aware of the potiential of Nullspace, several Sleepers were converted and launched, arriving well ahead of the STL ships launched nearly 20 years earlier.
Moving in cometary orbits, and consuming the comets they are riding on, most Sleepers still had not arrived in their target systems as of 2300. Once the craft are contacted and have had their drives converted, they are boosted on to their targets. Some craft have suffered damage to their radio beacons and are the subjects of dedicated Sleeper Searches that continue to this day.
New sciences such as psionics (apparently Nullspace affects unborn children in very strange ways), cultural engineering and terraforming altered human thinking. Nothing Humanity had ever faced could have prepared them for the truth about Space. Over the next few decades, Nullspace colony ships spread throughout the Sirius Supercluster, seeding the area with transplanted human life. Estimates on the number of habitiable planets were off by a large degree, and humanity was amazed to find dozens of garden worlds ripe for the picking.
In most cases, the new worlds were green and growing, occupying nearly circular orbits and holding the standard atmospheric envelope. While this was initially a bit of a shock, especially to anyone who knew anything about planetary physics, it was looked at as the natural way of things. After the first 73 worlds were colonized, the supply of garden worlds grew thin. Alpha Centauri, Earth, Nemesis and fifty other gardens were known. Suddenly, at about 300 lightyears, the new worlds began to take on new characteristics. From 2290 to 2350 only 3 new garden worlds were discovered. The struggle for control of these worlds is complicated by the Kaa, a race of reptiles that covet the exact same characteristic as humans.
Other races also require the same planets, and while this is considered a strange paradigm (news like this always creates conspiracy theories and new religions) it is accepted that something had a hand in the spread of habitable worlds across the Supercluster. The most influential of the new religions is the Universal Church. It postulated that the Standard is God’s Will. That there may be some evidence of God’s existence out among the stars was a shock to every race that ever stepped out into the Galaxy. More shocking still was the discovery of humans on other worlds. Worlds colonized over 12,000 years ago…
Back on Earth, technology raced forward, with nanoscale engineering, cloning, bio-tech and a hundred other arts far deadlier to mankind’s future than the Bomb had ever been.
In 2499, the renegade cyborg Jonathan “Prophet” Taylor nearly destroyed Earth in a bloody revolution that cost the lives of millions. The Universal Church gained in popularity as a result; Science Itself would be brought to heel. It grew powerful, and along with several other religious and military groups, declared the Intervention.
The Intervention was created to slow the development of new technologies, and to ensure that each new technology was used properly.
This new spurred a new wave of colonization, spreading humanity ever thinner out across the stars. Now, on nearly 10,000 worlds, Humanity is the apparent Master of the Galaxy.