Into the Black

Guards arrived to take me from the tube, and a nurse from their medical wing came to make sure I got cleaned up. Since this area was less likely to have devices actively checking my Psy usage, I risked a couple hits of Mindread to glean the surface thoughts of my ‘creators’. What I found out was illuminating.

First, I was a ‘guest’ of the Terran Empire. From the game information I’d read, they were basically the Roman Empire meets Manifest Destiny with a healthy dose of human supremacy for flavor. When humans first went about colonizing space, Earth was in charge of it all, until people started moving to other solar systems. The kind of people you get to go on generation ships, like you did with the first colonies, weren’t exactly ‘follow orders from lightyears away’ types.

Following the first of the Breakaway Wars, where a lot of people died so that various groups could tell Earth to go fuck themselves, the United Nations was disbanded, and the Terran Empire was born. It was only when humans started running into aliens that they stopped fighting each other. Well, they didn’t fight each other as much.

There were six main factions in the game, and only five of them were allowed for players. The Terran Empire was human controlled, and militaristic, and more than a little totalitarian. Oh, and something like 99% of nonhumans in the Empire were slaves. Needless to say, it was not a great place to be if you didn’t have power. I expected that there would be some players who would love being here, if only to try and fight their way to the top.

The Confederation of Allied Planets was a multiracial group, led primarily by the Knelfi, a race of skilled Psy manipulators who looked a lot like elves from old fantasy games. Other small groups, like the avian Vrok and the aquatic Iserb both made their homes in the Confederation. More than a few human worlds had joined, as well. The Confederation wasn’t inherently militaristic, but they kept a sizeable fleet, primarily to use against pirates and to keep Terran aggression down.

The Ihm Imperium was another warlike place, but it had less focus on totalitarianism or the like, and more on a caste system and a lot of warrior’s pride. You’d be hard pressed to find better or more honorable warriors than the lizard-like Ihm. Of course, their warrior caste’s obsession with honor and glory meant that sometimes they lost battles because of pride. But still, they were the one group that the Terran Empire walked softly around, especially since the Confederation was on the other side of the Empire frokm the Imperium.

The Consortium was a faction that only had a few planets controlled by it, but had influence in pretty much every system in the game. They were a merchant and trading guild, ran primarily by the Gauz, a heavy-gravity world race that could be compared to Dwarves. At any rate, they boasted some of the finest craftsmen, and their merchants could basically go anywhere they liked. Their mercenaries were less well liked, but they were at least respected. Mostly.

The Free Worlds Alliance formed the last player faction, and the only other one with a significant human presence. This faction was basically a loose alliance of individual planets that pooled resources for defense, but generally just wanted to be left alone. Since each system (sometimes each planet in a system) was basically the equivalent of an independent city-state, this left a lot of room for potential profit, freedom, and abuse. This was the wild west of the game, or at least as close as it got in Known Space.

The last faction wasn’t really a political group at all. It was the X’thari Raiders, from the Beta mission. They were basically nomadical space pirates that preyed on anyone they could. Fortunately, X’thari usually moved only in groups of one to three ships, mostly frigates. Good for hunting shipping or lone military vessels, but not enough to take on capital ships. The eight-ship cruiser formation in the Beta was a rare thing. Every so often you would see a Hive attack, usually about fifty ships. That needed a fleet to counter. The worst, though, was when something caused a Swarm. Hundreds of ships, all destroying anything in their path. The last one to form caused the Imperium, Confederation, and even the Empire to join forces to wipe them out, and the battle had been far from bloodless on their side.

The second key piece of information I discovered was that, as expected, I was in a top-secret lab used for projects that were patently illegal, even in the Empire. Like creating Chimeras. Seemed that there had been Chimeras used in the Breakaway Wars, and things had been… bad. One planet had been overrun by Chimeras and had to be put down. As in, slag the place from orbit and then salt the earth so nothing will grow there again. You know, the normal kind of thing that gets people to agree to interstellar arms treaties.

However, I learned that not only was I still in the Empire, but I was actually on Luna. This lab was in a black section of a military base here, which was used as the Academy for naval recruits. This was both good and bad for me. Being on the moon meant that it was much easier to track everyone that came and went, so I’d have to figure a way to break out of the high security section of the base, and somehow get on a ship heading out of the most secured sector of Terran space.

The third, and most important piece of information I learned is that no one really knew what I would be capable of, certainly not so soon. They expected to have to spend months training me to be ‘combat effective’. The people I could read didn’t know what I’d be doing, but with what I was capable of, assassinations, swapping myself for an official, or causing general mayhem all seemed to be high on the list of possible missions.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

After I was washed, the nurse dressed me in a simple black skinsuit with some boots, and a pair of red bracers that fit over my forearms. They adjusted to fit my body, and I was surprised by the prompts I got.