SPACE-A-GADES

Without a new expansive frontier, there is no such thing as freedom.

It is the driving energy expanding outwards. An explosion across the next medium we are yet to understand. Another plunge into the unknown. Enlightenment beckoning from beyond the next barrier. The "New World" and then the "West." The depths of the Earth's oceans, our shared moon, and the edges of our solar system. Finally, a step beyond the gravity well of our sun.

We punched colony ships through the loose matter of Sol System's Oort cloud. The ship builders, the now dead Legion, had unified Earth. Their crusaders provided an end to the Third World War. A conflict that had begun only five years before. The survivors crept gathered what they could and crept into the largest frontier humanity has ever known. The first ship, "New Light," found its namesake shortly after. A new star never held so close by humanity.

In this expanse, we found the arcane secrets of the rapturous Void. We harnessed what we found and rode it beyond the speed of light. The discovery tore the Frontier open before us. Natural law sidestepped by the marriage of arcane scientific progress and anomalous material. The Milky Way offered us the sanctuary of exploration as our homeworld burned. The final victim of the growing wildfire known as the First Solar War. A conflict that tore through the system on a scale humanity had never before witnessed. It sparked an exodus. It was end of Earth's long winded death at humanity's hands.

Those that stayed with the mother as it died, shared her fate. The Legion pushed the Holy Star extremists into a corner and they struck out like beasts on the edge of oblivion. The Sol Holocaust shook our ancient skies through the nuclear cleansing of Earth and her siblings. Dirty bombs, pocket nukes, and ancient 100 megaton bombs fell as hail upon wheat.

But the majority of humankind had already escaped to the stars. Billions managed to flee before that holy unholy fire. Some dipped into the slipstream of Planck space to form new societies among the colonies. Others touched off to drifted in the reverent Void between. Then the colonies grew, unified, and corporatized. It was the birth of the Syndicate. The space borne, instead, banded together into clans. They elected Jarls and forged a new society the likes of which unseen since Cnut the Great. A group that came to be known as the Outcast clans. Entities autonomous from the hand of the Syndicate, but bound by the resources necessary for human life.

Yet, we were not content. The caressing fingers of war again held our minds. A conflict born over the same anomalous material that led us into Planck space. Items only recovered ever so rarely across this wide new Frontier. The First Syndicate-Outcast war coming to a flechette's edge on Ursula-12. A world now known as The Meat Grinder. Humanity's dream of freedom stalled in violent, dusty, stagnation. Many did not wish to fight, but the war found them nonetheless. The poet was handed a rifle and sent to die.

In this wake, the original Space-A-Gades were forged. Career outlaws and military deserters who wanted something more than to die for someone else's cause. They were men and women born into generations of war. Each seeking to disappear again into the Frontier. To taste that promised freedom once trickle dripped on clear Earth nights. To feel the light of virgin sun against uncovered skin. To be free in the Void, once again.