plot for a plugin (long)
The main plot for a tc I've been working on. Feedback would be good to get.
First draft, not finished, subject to change, incomplete, etc.
Starseed Master Narrative
As the first few centuries of the second millennium drew to a close, humanity had stepped out of the cradle of Earth and colonized the solar system. Mars was terraformed, self-contained living habitats were scattered across moons and planets, and the resources of the solar system were slowly extracted and reshaped. As technology improved, the population boomed, and humanity expanded to fill even the less hospitable environments. Eyes turned to the stars, and astronomers identified several extra-solar planets that would be ideal for colonization. Technology, however, lagged behind the dreams of men. No means of faster than light travel had been discovered, nor was there any reliable method of putting colonists in stasis for the long voyage across the vastness of space. A massive generational star ship was chosen as the best method to colonize other stars. Humanity came together and built the huge Odyssey spacecraft, and the great great grandparents of the future colonists got on board and began the long voyage. Decades passed, and the Odyssey communicated with the home system over a growing distance and delay. The delay grew to years between transmission and reception, and the messages from the Odyssey grew less frequent and more strange. Transmissions from Odyssey continued to make less and less sense to those listening from Sol, and then they stopped altogether. All the data was exampined, and the only conclusion seemed to be that society had broken down and the ship, isolated from the rest of humanity, had destroyed itself. The first mission to the stars had failed.
Shaken from the tragedy of the Odyssey , a radical new approach was conceived, the Seedship. Instead of generations of humans, a ship need only have the frozen genetic material necessary to create humans once it reached its destination. Technologically, this idea was perfectly feasible. The sticking point was that the created humans would have no adults to raise them, and would be dependent on the automated systems of the ship. This idea led debate into an entirely new area. Since no parents would be around the created children colonists, they, and the society they would found, would be a total tabla rasa. Whoever designed the seedship would have complete control over what type of culture to produce. Since the beginning of civilization, philosophers and polticians had debated the form of the perfect society. Now, the seedship would provide an opportunity to create one, without interference from currently existing cultures.
A rush ensued, as each faction of humanity tried to send a ship bearing their ideal order to a habitable planet orbiting a foreign star before one of their rivals.
Many years passed, and many seedships were launched into the void. Many had been designed to more or less duplicate the free, democratic cultures that most of humanity lived under. Others were the results of efforts of groups of varying radical ideologies.
One notable seedship produced during this time was the Gaia. This ship was the largest ever built, and was a multiple colony mission. Gaia was aimed at a group of stars that included several likely planets for colonization. Once it achieved its full acceleration, the Gaia would split up and send out sub ships to each of these systems. Gaia produced a heated controversy after the decision was made to include only female colonists. The production of artificial sperm from female stem cells had made men, strictly speaking, unnecessary for reproduction, and it was thought that an all female society would be more stable. Critics responded that artificial wombs and eggs had made women just as obsolete as men, and challenged the studies suggesting greater stability, but the Gaia project had solid funding and support from several powerful feminist organizations, and went on to launch despite the protests.
After long years of almost unbearable suspense, the first seedships reached their destinations, and began to send messages about their status to those who had launched them so many years ago. The results were varied. Some of the new pockets of humanity thrived, some self-destructed like the tragic Odyssey.
All this time, scientists had been diligently chipping away at the FTL problem, until a new discovery suddenly changed everything. Well, maybe not everything, but a lot. An area of space-time very different than our normal universe had been discovered. This was dubbed ‘hyperspace,’ and a way to utilize it for interstellar travel was soon developed. Called the ‘Skim Drive,’ the new device allowed a ship to partially enter hyperspace, reducing its mass in normal space. This allowed for greatly increased acceleration and speed, and compensated for the increase in mass at relativistic velocities. While not faster than light, the skim drive made ships able to much more closely approach it.
Skim drives opened up the possibility of sending seedships to much more distant stars, and a new wave of colony ships were launched. Also around this time the older colonies began to achieve levels of sophistication which allowed them to produce their own interstellar colony ships, equipped with skim drives once the design specs transmitted from Sol were received.
Humanity had spread to the stars, but without efficient means of communication and travel over the vast interstellar distances each colony world was largely a being unto itself.
Then, the unexpected happened. All at once, in several systems, ships of alien design appeared seemingly out of nowhere and approached the humans living there. The aliens called themselves the Khyim, and had apparently been observing humanity for some time, at least long enough to learn their language by listening to broadcasts. The Khyim told a strange story and offered humanity a deal. The Khyim’s home world was very far away in the direction of the galactic core, or ‘galactic north.’ They had achieved space flight some time ago and had explored the area of galaxy near their world and had created a prosperous network of colonies. They had never encountered any other intelligent species, until advanced alien ships entered their space without warning from the direction of the galactic core and began to lay waste to the ships and planets of the Khyim. The invaders made no attempts at communication, and responded to all Khyim attempts with assault. Though quite advanced by human standards, the Khyim were unable to do anything but slow the invaders, who they named simply “The Desolation” because of their practice of strip-mining and then burning captured Khyim worlds. It seemed clear that the Khyim would be wiped out soon, unless drastic action was taken. Though the Desolation was more advanced in most ways, the Khyim had a better understanding of hyperspace physics. A theoretical proposal had the possibility of saving the Khyim race. Their scientists franticly constructed a giant hyperspace device in their home system, while they evacuated as many of their colonists as they could. With the Desolation literally at their doorstep, the Khyim finished construction of the device and activated it. It was basically a giant version of the Khyim FTL hyper jump drive, but produced enough power to open a ‘gate’ through hyperspace allowing nearly instant travel to a very distant point. The destination was effectively random, but the Khyim reasoned that anywhere far away from the Desolation was better than annihilation. Their massive fleet, containing almost all surviving members of their race, went through the gate, and a heroic rear guard group destroyed it behind them.
The other end of the Khyim rabbit hole turned out to be near human space and after some exploration they encountered ancient human electromagnetic broadcasts and made their way to the source of these transmissions. After a time spent evaluating the new species, they initiated contact and proposed a deal. They would give humanity the secrets of their advanced technology, including their hyperspace FTL drives, and humanity would in return allow them to settle worlds to the galactic west of human space, provide them with some of the resources they needed to reestablish themselves, and, if the Desolation ever came again, humanity and the Khyim would stand and fight them together. For humanity, this was an offer they couldn’t refuse - the FTL drive alone was more than enough to composite for what the Khyim were asking, and if the Desolation was half as genocidal as the Khyim claimed, humanity was in just as much danger as the Khyim. For their part, the Khyim believed that the Desolation might be able to discover where the Khyim had run to by examining the hyperspace disturbances their gate had created. They reasoned that even if humanity proved unreliable after being given Khyim technology, a more advanced humanity would be capable of inflicting more damage on the Desolation, which might at least buy the Khyim time to escape again.
The Khyim think differently than humans. Khyim society is much more harmonious than that of humans, they settle disagreements by debating until everyone agrees. They assumed that the various human colony worlds would respond to the introduction FTL travel as Khyim would; establish a central forum which would coordinate the integration of the far flung colonies into a unified humanity. Because of this misunderstanding of human nature, they transmitted information on their hyper jump drives to every single human colony they found. The results shocked the aliens; the newly connected systems were almost instantly at each other’s throats. Wildly different cultures produced by the ideological programming of seedships, compounded with centuries of isolation had not equipped them to deal with people so different from themselves. Arguments sprung up over the rights to newly accessible resources, trade arrangements, and doctrinal differences. Soon, these disagreements escalated to a number of chaotic battles now known as the Contact Wars.
Out of this strife, two major islands of stability emerged. The first was centered on the Sol system. Most of the colonies near Earth were settled by relatively moderate ideologies, and many of these had maintained contact with each other and the home world. The Sol government itself was a stabilizing factor, as they had a much greater economic and military capacity than the colonies, and used this power to maintain peace in the systems near Earth. Soon, an alliance grew between Sol and the inner colonies, the beginning of what would later become the DRE (Democratic Republic of Earth). The other area of stability was the group of colonies established by the mothership Gaia. Since they were all settled by the same ship, there were few cultural differences. And, because the Gaia colonies were clustered close to one another they had been in frequent communication with each other. Women were elected as delegates for an assembly on the planet Gaia which drafted the constitution for the newly established group of all female worlds, which was dubbed the Gynarchy. These two stable groups found themselves with common interests; defending themselves against the more aggressive colonies, stopping the wars between the colonies, establishing a unified front for dealing with the Khyim, and coordinating a defense of human space against the possible coming of the Desolation or other unknown threats. So, representatives from each government met on Ceres in the Sol system and signed a pact of formal Alliance, called the Haupt-Rothman treaty after the two most senior diplomats from each side. The organization created is officially “The Human Alliance of Free Stars,” but is usually just called The Alliance, and is now the dominant power in human affairs. The newly formed Alliance met with representatives from the Khyim, who had withdrawn from human space when the Contact Wars had begun. They explained what had happened to the confused aliens, and offered a treaty of formal agreement to the Khyim's initial offer as the representatives of the largest bloc of humanity. The signing of this treaty, the Spica Pact, took place on a specially constructed station in the Spica system, on the boarder between human and Khyim space, and directly in the path that the Desolation would have to take if they came from the direction of the old Khyim worlds. Thus the Khyim and the Alliance are sometimes referred to as the “Spica Pact” when acting together.
To the south of Sol, the region around the constellation Pyxis was home to a number of colonies established by the second wave of seedships using skim drives. Many of these colonies were sent out by fringe groups, and their social structures are more radical than earlier colonies. The Contact Wars were particularly fierce in the Pyxis, because of the participants’ diverse beliefs, the relative proximity of the Pyxis worlds to each other, and heavy competition for scarce resources. Well after the Alliance had stabilized the galactic north, the Pyxis was still in a state of almost constant conflict. The Pyxis had attained a sort of balance of power as a result of the different principalities (as the Pyxis colonies came to be known) uniting against any one principality that grew too powerful. This all ended after a previously little known group from further south called the Ascendancy launched a massive all out invasion of Pyxis space, begining what came to be known as the Australis War. Though the Pyxis colonies all had respectable military might, the Ascendancy was able to exploit their division and eliminate the principalities one by one. Threatened with destruction, the remaining Pyxis colonies hastily formed a Pyxis Confederation to battle the invaders. The Confederation’s first official act was to request military aid and membership in the Alliance. The Alliance had been monitoring the Australis conflict with growing alarm and were only too happy to help defeat the violent, xenophobic Ascendancy and soon the Alliance had a third member. The combined might of the Pyxis was formidable, especially with assistance from the Alliance, and the new Confederation beat the Ascendancy back in a series of bloody battles. The Ascendants were finally evicted from Pyxis territory and a cease fire was agreed to by the two weary govenments. After the victory, old rivalries began to strain the fabric of the Confederation, but so far it has managed to stay intact.
As the Australis war come to a close, Khyim and Alliance long range scouting missions far to the north reported sightings of ships matching the Khyim’s description of Desolation cruisers. Frantic activity followed, as fortifications were erected and fleets and armies were mobilized. The strategy worked out by the Khyim and human military commanders was to hold a number of sytems that the Desolation would have to move through to reach inhabited systems. This was called the Ma’ii Line, after the Khyim admiral who proposed it. The idea was to keep the Desolation from employing their scorched earth tactics, witch would cripple the military infrastructure of Spica Pact, as had happened to the Khyim during their first encounter with the Desolation. Just as predicted, the Desolation ships come through the Spica system, where the combined fleets of the Khyim and the Alliance were waiting. Just as the Khyim had said, they made no attempts at communication, ignored all hails from Spica Pact forces, and attacked without hesitation. Fierce combat ensued, the now famous Battle of Spica. Though tested to their limits, the combined fleets of humanity and the Khyim were victorious. A great celebration across most of known space followed; the fearful Desolation so long dreaded had come, and had been defeated. The Khyim’s reaction was much more subdued. The Desolation fleet had consisted of only 13 cruisers, and had nearly destroyed the most advanced force that both races were capable of fielding even when outnumbered nearly 5 to 1. When the Khyim told their allies that the Desolation fleet sent to take the Khyim home system Quon had numbered in the thousands, and that the cruisers seen at Spica were one of the Desolation’s lightest capital ships, Fleet Control’s celebration quickly died.
It has some spelling issues, I'll point them out as soon as I've had some sleep.
spell check had a field day on this one) ways?