Introduction

DISTANT VISTA

distant (dis.tant) adj: Separate or apart in space. Far removed; remote.

vista (vis.ta) adj: a scene before the viewer, a land-scape…

AN INTRODUCTION...

Within the black void of real-space spin thousands of planets. Some are airless balls of rock and Ice. Others, whose orbits take them too close to the stars which give other worlds light and life, are turned into scorched plains of Lava and basalt. And some, some sustain life. Of the tiny percentage that do, an even smaller percentage support sentient life. Life that looks up at the vast inky blackness, studded with twinkling lights, and asks itself “I wonder what’s out there?”.

The year is 3759AD , but that is by the reckoning of a planet long since devoid of life. Humanity has reached out and found the stars, and found that it was not alone in the vastness of space. Hundreds of other races forge their own destinies across the skies, rising and falling, trading, stealing, warring and dying in their own ways.

Hulking warships of Pax Humanis and the vessels of those who oppose Gabriel’s Crusade and the Sapiens new Order, clash in systems clear across the whole of recorded space. Free traders and Voight Merchants cruise through the trade lanes, flitting across the darkness, keeping the goods and credits flowing from planet to planet.  Pirates, junkers and scavengers skulk in the deserted nebula and roid-fields, avoiding patrols and bushwhacking cargo convoys and passenger vessels. And hunting them are the Mercenaries and fee-seekers who trade in the capture or deaths of others.

            There is profit to be made from each planet across the void. Raw materials, terraforming opportunities, mining and settlements – vast intersystem corporations and companies vie with each other and the ever widening grip of Pax Humanis, and the battle lines it’s expansions inevitably causes. Frontiers exist on hundreds of worlds, scouts and surveyors pressing out ever further to get away from the crush of sentient life. Always looking for that big score. And when those that follow them settle and begin to reap the rewards of a new life of opportunity, the criminal organisations will be close behind.

 From the most stable and controlled of Pax worlds, through the lax and integrated planets of the hominids, and the chaotic free worlds, even to the frontier, the systems that sit at the very edge of known space. Everywhere life can, it does. And where life does, it struggles to survive, and, for preference, turn a little profit.  But with profit, there is always risk.

Only those who cross space itself realise how fragile a thing life is. How easily a mechanical failure can spell disaster, or how the choice of trade lane or star-route can be the difference between arriving at your destination and ending your days at the mercy of pirates, slavers or worse. Even the most hardened of spacers pale at the mention of Fold space and what it can do to a ship, or the idea of pilot error sending a vessel careening into a grav-reflection within GK space. So why travel at all. Why brave the horrors of an uncaring universe and the all too familiar seeds of war that blossom across so much of chart-space? Bravado? The chance to make money? The opportunity to escape ones enemies? Or is it for freedom? Because only those who have gone beyond the horizon of their birth world can truly say they have found freedom, of a sort. Only those who risk the black can answer that question. “I wonder what’s out there?”